what to use as Ring 2 as War?

[Gamemako]

Even if you are OTing, I just don't see much of a benefit personally.

Increased damage and reduced healing load are the obvious ones. eHP is always a minimum-value consideration. Returns diminish at a quickly-accelerating rate as you get above the minimum required level. Bringing 600 VIT to Sastasha wouldn't do any good when a SCH fairy out-heals every bit of damage the dungeon offers in the first place. For any content where the additional 25 VIT is not necessary, the increased damage, recovery, and parry offer superior advantages.

[Leiron]

Increased damage and reduced healing load are the obvious ones. eHP is always a minimum-value consideration. Returns diminish at a quickly-accelerating rate as you get above the minimum required level. Bringing 600 VIT to Sastasha wouldn't do any good when a SCH fairy out-heals every bit of damage the dungeon offers in the first place. For any content where the additional 25 VIT is not necessary, the increased damage, recovery, and parry offer superior advantages.

Yes deminishing returns need to be considered, but you also need to consider the base in which you are working.
If you have 8000 health and increase it by 400, thats only 5%.
If your inner beast hits for 1100, and you increase it to 1210, which is 10%.
Sure the 10% is larger proportionally, but realistically speaking, increasing your health by 5% provides a better investment.

It also decreases healing load, because your healers have more time to heal you, and can spend that time DPSing.
Parry is very much luck based, and the overall mitigation it offers overall, is poor.

Sure one can say strictly in terms of speed running you'll complete the contently slightly faster, but it doesn't mean its worth spending millions of gil on an item you would only use in content you over gear anyway.
IMO, you'd be better off swapping your entire gear over a single ring if you really wanted to rush content or see how much hp you can sacrifice for DPS.

[Gamemako]

It also decreases healing load, because your healers have more time to heal you, and can spend that time DPSing.

I think this is a key mistake. VIT does not reduce healing load except for a minimal increase to regen (40% of the amount increased per minute). You do not get back anything from a static HP pool -- the healer has to put just as much HP back in whether you have 5000 or 10000 HP. The amount healed is dependent upon enemy damage, not player HP. By contrast, higher mitigation (e.g. higher parry) reduces total healing load by making a portion of that healing requirement disappear. That means that using Gryphonskin will require less healing time and MP on average even before considering faster clear times. Normal combat is always subject to RNG. This isn't really important to discuss at all: barring the small portion of the time you have Awareness, you can always have enemies randomly crit the heck out of you and make your healer turn around and spamheal to undo it.

//EDIT: I'm not saying one way or the other what the person should take. As far as ilvl70 stuff goes, HQ Gryphonskin is the obvious winner, but when you look at ilvl90 stuff, you have to determine whether you can even afford to lose that HP, and I just don't really have any reasonable way of modeling that as it depends on specific encounters.

[Paikis]

400hp is basically a rounding error when you already have 8000hp. Your healers will overheal more than that amount on a regular basis. The only time that extra hp is worth having is if you survive with less than 400hp.

[Leiron]

400hp is basically a rounding error when you already have 8000hp. Your healers will overheal more than that amount on a regular basis. The only time that extra hp is worth having is if you survive with less than 400hp.

Bad logic, since Titan kills you with Mountain buster by only 500, then having 4.6k as a Paladin tank is acceptable.
More health is always better for tanking, simply because the strength does not increase the healing by IB significantly enought o beat out the 450 hp gained.
Parry is entirely luck based, and consistency is important.
Furthermore, having more HP means less overhealing, because you have a bigger gallon to fill.

Having 900 HP > getting 200 more HP from IB, and parrying 1% more often, which only works on physical abilities anyway.

[Gamemako]

2 gyrphonskin rings are better in every way than one each of Fending/Striking. If you want to stack Vit, use Hero/Allagan fending rings, for every other situation, double Gryphonskin rings is the only way to go.

Yeah, doesn't make any sense to go with +13 STR and +15 VIT when you could have +18 STR and +20 VIT from Gryphonskin, lol. You'd consider Allagan Ring of Fending at the cost of everything else, just because VIT happens to be a bit essential right now.

More health is always better for tanking, simply because the strength does not increase the healing by IB significantly enought o beat out the 450 hp gained.

I don't see that your support for the statement "more health is always better for tanking" has anything to do with that statement. You have not justified why you would want 450 HP over superior mitigation.

[Leiron]

I don't see that your support for the statement "more health is always better for tanking" has anything to do with that statement. You have not justified why you would want 450 HP over superior mitigation.

You are suggesting that parry, which is chance based, is at all comparable to true mitigation i.e. shield oath.
It really is not comparable due to the nature of parry.

Parry in itself is not constant, so the actual mitigation will be less than what one would expect.
At best with a 20% chance of parrying an attack and mitigation 25% of the attack, you're creating a mitigation of 15%.
That's a best case scenario.
It also cannot be controlled, you cannot determine when you'll parry a hood swing or a weak hit for 200.

If the boss hits for 1k over a period of 10 seconds and you parry twice, you mitigate the damage down to 850.
That looks good right?
But bosses don't hit for uniform.
What if the boss hits like this

10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,10,910.
What if you parry two of the tens?
Well you go from 850, and instead move up to 996.
Now you only mitigated a mere .004%

Furthermore, Parry works ONLY on physical abilities.
Vitality works on both elemental AND physical abilities.

Stacking vitality absolutely affords absolute greater survivability, stacking dex does not.
It makes no sense to tell someone "Use a gryphonskin ring over a fending ring" then say in the next breath that "allocating for anything but vitality as a tank is wrong."
Attacks that typically kill a tank are hard hitting abilities that typically cannot be blocked/parried.
The bosses in Turn 2 do not use a single physical abilities, so your increase in parry does absolutely nothing.
Vitality also directly affects the mitigation of abilities such as Thrill of Battle, and also means your healers have a greater cushion to heal you when you take a hit.

It is also chance based.
If you are busy tanking Caduceus with a gryphon skin wing and say "well I MIGHT parry his hood swing and survive 1200 health" w but what if you don't?
If you don't, you die.
If you went with vitality you'd survive with 450, but your heals can top you off, or you can pop an IB afterwards or a second IB even if infuriate is up.

It is better to go with vitality over a dex, you cannot control parry, you cannot will parry into blocking the one physical hit that can kill you.

[themitey1]

Leiron, I think you're missing the point of what other people are saying. Extra VIT is only better when you need more HP. If you never go < 400 HP, getting 400 HP is worse than a small chance to mitigate damage. 400 HP has 0 chance to do ANYTHING for you at that point. I rather parry 1 out of 5 attacks than none at all and never dropping below 400 hp. If you need HP, get VIT. If you don't need any more HP, get DPS accessories. It's pretty simple.

Furthermore, I think it's safe to say with min-maxing all your gear, you wouldn't need the extra HP and thus, get DPS accessories.

Here's some more information:

http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...zation-for-WAR.

[Gamemako]

You are suggesting that parry, which is chance based, is at all comparable to true mitigation i.e. shield oath.
It really is not comparable due to the nature of parry.

Every single moment in the game is RNG. Every attack an enemy delivers is between 0% (dodged) and 150% (critical) of its base value. This is unavoidable. Attempting to discount RNG is a non-starter.

Parry in itself is not constant, so the actual mitigation will be less than what one would expect.

Your math here is off. A 20% chance to reduce by 25% is a 5% total reduction (0.2*0.25=0.05). As I said, Gryphonskin is going to be an additional 1-2% of physical damage mitigated. You could compare Ninjiitsu's roughly 24% chance of 24% reduction to a 28% chance of 25% reduction, which is a change of 5.76% of all physical damage reduced to 7.00% of all physical damage reduced. This is not large, but far from nonexistent.

Furthermore, it does not matter at all that it's a random effect. You have just as high a chance of blocking the big attack as any other attack. You are suggesting a scaling problem that simply doesn't exist.

Furthermore, Parry works ONLY on physical abilities.
Vitality works on both elemental AND physical abilities.

Once again, Vitality does not appreciably affect mitigation. You take 500 damage with 1 VIT or with 999 VIT, and it's still 500 damage. You get back 40% of HP per minute in passive regen and effectively an additional 10% per minute from ToB. At 450 HP gained, it's 225 HP/min. 3 Inner Beast over 1 minute at 1300 average (360 STR + Bravura) and a 10% increase in damage will give you back 390 HP/min, and at an incoming damage rate of, say, 750 DPS, you reduce an additional 558 damage per minute from the greater parry rate. You don't need a Ph.D in mathematics to figure out that 948 > 225.

It makes no sense to tell someone "Use a gryphonskin ring over a fending ring" then say in the next breath that "allocating for anything but vitality as a tank is wrong."

First, I said neither of these -- in fact, I very deliberately stated the following:

//EDIT: I'm not saying one way or the other what the person should take. As far as ilvl70 stuff goes, HQ Gryphonskin is the obvious winner, but when you look at ilvl90 stuff, you have to determine whether you can even afford to lose that HP, and I just don't really have any reasonable way of modeling that as it depends on specific encounters.

Second, you don't even have a point to argue here, and it's tiring. You're actually arguing "with 789 VIT, you still need 2 more to survive a hit from Caduceus!" You don't believe that, but you're saying it because you don't have anything at all to say about excess eHP. Stop that shit. Don't argue nothing for the sake of arguing.

I've read it and the end conclusion of the OP was that the Rose Ring (tank) was better than gryphon skin (dps) because you'll hit the caps anyway and not be able to go high enough to the next cap.
In essence it then falls down between parry/s.speed in which case the parry wins, so you'd still be stacking vitality since the rose ring comes with it anyway.

Last I checked, there were more than a few errors in that thread (e.g. DEX tier suggested when none was ever found). Rose Gold and Gryphonskin will both end up with identical VIT and parry. Rose Gold has it natively, and Gryphonskin will meld it. There is no reason to consider differences in STR, VIT, and parry between the two because these stats will be identical. Gryphonskin gives you DEX and a set secondary while Rose Gold gives you any secondary of your choosing.

I disagree with that conclusion because it works under somewhat inaccurate pretense, which is that the impact of the accessory is greater than the impact of the vitality and is better for speed runs, and that it impacts the DPS of the tank enough to create a significant difference.
Even if a Tank's DPS is increased by 10% the difference in kill times is very low because of how ltank DPS works.

You have underestimated tank DPS, which is around 50-60% of dedicated DPS damage when in tank mode compared to a full-damage-stacked DPS. Depending on party size and healer DPS opportunities, STR-melded accessories will add 1-3% to party DPS. Any DPS switching from ilvl70 to ilvl90 gear will move only 2-5% of party DPS.

str/dex/parry do

Only parry/block strength has known tiering effects.

At that point though, you stop being a tank because your vit is too low.

False dilemma.

The fastest speed runs involve utilizing heavy vit tanks

You mean heavy-VIT PLD? Yeah...

Edit: On another note and I do not intend to derail the discussion, but is there only one parser for FFXIV? I was planning to experiment with Marauder.

Only two I know of are LogRep and FFXIV-app.

[Judge_Xero]

Whats the conclusion here, should we have 1 tanking ring on and then get a ilvl90 dps ring as the other for the Str? or stick with the DL tanking ring?

Also what would you wera, the AK Tank ring, or the Allagan Ring of Striking (i think thats what its called)?

I would say 1 Allagan Ring of Striking and 1 of Fending

I plan to have around 425 STR with Bravura + 1 and 445 VIT for ~ 7k HP. I already do around 1350 self heals with 400 STR and Bravura. I hope to get to an even 1500 with normal hits.