Dark Knight Direct Hit

[Megguido]

So no. While changing the melds of the same gear may only make a 1~3% difference, you have to take into account the gear picked because of substats as well. Melding for damage isn't just 100 DPS difference, it can make up to thousands of damage difference. For example, changing from ilv 400 gloves and boots to eureka ilv 390 with 5 melds alone nets you 60 to 200 DPS gain, or a median of ~160. That's only 2 pieces of gear LOSING item level in favor of melds. Imagine what keeping the same item level, therefor same str and stat budget, for the better stats can contribute to. Then imagine changing the entire gear and meld choice combined can add up to.

Completely abandoning direct hit and going for tenacity over crit will definitely hit you closer to 1k of DPS if not more. It's been mathed AND tried out. When we're talking 4.x thousand DPS that goes up to near or above 6 thousand, we're definitely not talking single digit percents DPS anymore.

Going full tenacity as opposed to 0 tenacity is ~12% reduction in damage intake. But that's not necessarily 12% DPS gain. Since you lose crit, DH, det and/or sks. Items have a stat budget, so you're not getting "free tenacity", you're trading other, better for damage, stats for it.

Kinda comparing apples to oranges.

Elemental +1 gloves and boots are better than ilvl 400 gloves and boots mostly because they have more substats. 120 Crits beat 10 STR and crappy subtstats, that was mathed out yes.

Now if you want to meld full Ten instead of full Crit, you still have the same amount of substats, but not the same distribution. And this will not hit your DPS by 1k or so. A full set of melds, with 2 eureka pieces bring a total of 760 substats (not counting accs, cause they should be melded with STR).

760 Ten is +3.5% damage (linear, so doesn't matter how much Ten you already have)
760 Crit is +6.2% damage (considering you're at 1600 crit before melds, ~2360 after melds)
Hence a difference of 2.7% total damage. A decent/good tank at ilvl ~395 would deal about 5k DPS. Losing 2.7% damage drops their damage to 4,86k DPS. You lose, in theory, 140 DPS by melding full Ten instead of full Crit. Whoo.

Tl;dr: more damage is always cool and usually better than more mitigation, even if it's not that much (and more importantly, free). Basically, a couple % more damage vs a couple more % mitigation (2.7% dmg vs 3.5% mitigation in this case). Saying "IMMA TANK, ME NOT DPS, ME TOUGH" as an argument to not pick Crit is kinda retarded. On the other hand, we tend to easily overestimate Crit/Dhit, and underestimate Ten/Det/Sks. Though melding Crit is better, melding Ten or Det isn't bad either.

I didn't parse with DH. Compared to a stat that we can actually stack due to our gear having it as a secondary, I just don't see how it can be that beneficial. If you melded the whole left side with DH VI materia as a tank, you'd only be at 804 unless you're over-melding and even still, it just seems like it's not worth it...to me at least.

See DHit like Det. Both stats scale linearly and give a pretty similar damage boost. Basically, pick Det if you also play WAR (or all three tanks), or DHit if you also play PLD (or only DRK). If you want to compare your damage output with different setups, you can use this damage calculator. Plug in your in-game stats. If you can't reach the numbers calculated on a dummy, then there's something wrong with your rotation, not your gear.