Hm, wherever was it found that Skill Speed had a "Hard" cap? What stat besides Accuracy flat out stops doing what it's supposed to be doing beyond a certain number?

As for gear sets, I've too noticed that it's significantly more difficult, if not flat out impossible, to wholly avoid an unwanted secondary stat.

Dragoons and Monks get flooded with Skill Speed whether they want to or not. Dragoons in particular get severely punished with incredibly low Accuracy if they attempt to stack Determination, their currently accepted best stat. Fixing the accuracy issue while trying to avoid loss of Det seems to raise Crit above all else. Perhaps the Dragoon is intended to be a "Big Crit" class, not unlike the Black Mage.

For Monks, all three of their stats end up pretty balanced even if you try to just stack one, with Determination being slightly above the others. This could be a sign that they should be using all three. Determination is probably more effective on a Monk than any other class because it affects auto-attacks more powerfully than everything else, and nobody auto-attacks more quickly/often than a monk. Conversely, a slightly lower Crit Rate is offset by Internal Release and a Monk's sheer volume of attacks providing many opportunities to crit. I personally think that Skill Speed is a great thing to have... to a point. One needs to find that sweet spot where they're fast enough to destroy stuff but not so fast that TP always runs out.

Bards are actually pretty okay, as it's hard not to hit the Accuracy cap and their gear choices allow for stacking both Crit and Det at the same time. Extra good because they're accepted to be of approximately equal weight to each other for bards and the best two stats to stack. This allows them to deal higher damage while proccing Bloodletter more often, thus getting the most damage possible out of the class.

Black Mage gear seems to be favoring an approximately equal spread of Crit and Spell Speed if pursuing the Accuracy cap. Again, these are exactly the two stats the community thinks is most valuable. Coincidence? Perhaps SE wants Black Mages to dole out Big Crits like a turret.

Summoner gear seems to be favoring Crit this tier, although I've heard talk of Determination being better. Crit is a good choice, though. Crits from a pet increase the Summoner's spell speed for a time, and dots bring ample opportunities to crit constantly throughout a fight. Perhaps they're meant to have a similar "death from a thousands cut" like Monk, but they don't have Internal Release to allow for a lower Crit Rate number.

The Tanks are losing Parry this tier. This could be because HP pools are getting large enough that a little extra mitigation doesn't matter as much. Is it time for Tanks to experiment with the other secondaries and try to do more damage instead of just being sponges?

Healers have always had more flexibility in their gear than other classes, due to the relative lack of worrying about an accuracy cap. In this tier, it's easy for White Mages to concentrate on Det, Piety, and some Spell Speed, whereas the Scholar can easily focus on Crit. These seem to be in line with what the community is trying to do with the classes.


In conclusion, it is looking like SE has their idea of what each class is good at and therefore what stats they should be focusing on. In some cases, the playerbase agrees with this. In others, they do not.