PLD viable for speed runs?

[Tman]

I fiddled around with this a bit on Old Six-Arms and Gluttonous Gertrude before logging tonight. I took off my Cobalt Gauntlets and Celata (there's a reason I'm mentioning this) and my HP was about 3090 when equipping the Militia Gauntlets and Armet my HP topped around 3270 with a deviance of 180hp. Using Non crits as a basis my Spirits Within were hitting GG for around 1600 and OSA for roughly 1550 with the Militia Armet/Gauntlets equipped. W/o Spirits was hitting GG for around 1500 and OSA for 1450ish, so your maximum (current) HP amount DOES affect the damage dealt with Spirits, so having more HP = more potential damage.

However, my DD stats had a large deviance of 37 less STR and 23 less MND without my normal Cobalt Celata/Gauntlet gear. The reason this is important to note is when using spirits on OSA I noticed my numbers were far less consistent actually having some Spirits hit for 1300 and others for 1600, while numbers on GG were pretty consistent probably due to lower defense than OSA.

When I'm in my usual full DD setup (roughly 3150 HP) Spirits hit GG for roughly 2100, and OSA for 1700 with solid consistency.

So it appears while even just having a slightly larger amount of Max HP give great returns on Spirits Within, your STR/MND still appears to still have a major impact on the weaponskill calculations as well as maintaining consistent Spirits numbers on mobs with higher defense.

Did a small sample of testing on GG while waiting on hamlets and it appears to me that SW's either doesn't gain as much from max hp as I had assumed, or it caps out early.

Weapon: Giantsgall Sword +enmityx2
Shield: Thormoen's Purpose
setup 1
HP: 3839
str: 207
mnd: 235
atk: 476
Low: 1850
High: 2159
Avg 1976.58

setup 2
Hp: 3028
str: 207
mnd: 235
atk: 476
Low: 1653
High: 1813
Avg: 1712.09

I only did Phalanx>SW, 0 AA's as well as no other ws's or buffs/debuffs or outside party members. No food or potions as well
I used a stat reset to keep my numbers the same, however they are pretty low. I also had to use a dated choker for the 4atk that the cobalt cuirass gives, so unless SW is increased by magical atk potency, this was the best I could do. Again the sample size imo is a bit small, I only did 100 SW's in each stat setup on GG, have yet to do OSA. The second setup (which was me simply naked with identical stats outside of max hp) avg was creeping up, had I went to 200 I'd say the avg would have jumped up to around 1780 based on the numbers I was getting at the end. This leads me to believe 1 of 3 things, A something is going on behind scenes I don't know about, such as my low stats hindering my dps (highly possible). B max hp doesn't increase potential dmg as much as I had thought (highly doubtful). Or C max hp bonus to SW's dmg caps out early (this I believe), which would thus mean that pld's were never ment to have a huge hp pool, only adequate hp to tank.

I don't run a parser so these are all eyeballed, writen down, then avg'd out.

A quick side note, after grinding golden bazaar I have noticed an increase in SW's dmg on the cactuar after switching from hp gauntlets/boots to militia gauntlets/boots. Roughly 170 increase even though I lost a total of 131 hp and only gained a mere 10 mnd.

edit:I did notice that going from gla to pld lowered my str by 10, seems odd but I'll look around see if I missed it in the job notes/updates.

edit2: put in a few more on GG in setup 2.
new low: 1604
new high: 1908
new avg: 1749.9

didn't raise as much as I thought it would, will be doing OSA next.