When is an i100 item better than an i110? - I.E. ST Hands

[SeraviEdalborez]

The only reason bad tanks run out of TP in T8 is they do 2 shield lobs or something on dreads when solo tanking. Any more than 1 is hugely excessive.

[SwordCoheir]

The only reason bad tanks run out of TP in T8 is they do 2 shield lobs or something on dreads when solo tanking. Any more than 1 is hugely excessive.

I have to agree, you have to be pretty wasteful of your TP resources to be running out of TP during T8 on either job. Even if you have a full skill speed set going for you, between all the brainjacks and mines you're getting each instance should net your at least 1-3 ticks of time that you're not using tp.

[Alistaire]

Ive got i100's in my BiS said no one ever.

That's kind of extreme. I came in here thinking this would be about healing hands. (for sch of course)

Scylla's: 21 MND, 23 crit, 12 pie
Weathered: 21 MND, 11 det 23 speed
Unweathered: 24 MND, 12 det 25 speed
High Allagan: 24 MND, 18 speed 19 pie

22 VIT on 100's, 25 on 110's

Casting belt is a contender as well, acc notwithstanding.

Scylla's: 16 INT 17 crit 9 det
Weathered: 16 INT 17 acc 12 crit
Unweathered: 18 INT 19 acc 13 crit
High Allagan: 18 INT 13 det 13 speed

loss of 3 vit sticking with i100.

edit: of course I agree with the replies about this being absurd for tanks, defense is about as important in this game as it was unimportant in ffxi.

[Zdenka]

First, by the time a tank is low on TP so are other players. During t8 I run out of TP about the same time as our MNK. But that also accounts for tomahawk/lobbing twice per dread. That is also the most TP consuming fight in the game and I require one song.

I've ran out of TP as OT on turn's 6, 8, and 9. (WAR generally burns a lot of TP when you take Inner Beast out of the equation). In Turn 9 I have ran out of TP when the first divebombs occur, using Overpower 1x only to pick up and tank the Ghost.

WAR doesn't have Invigorate to supplement their TP supply, and when you aren't doing anything besides blowing through GCD's WAR only has about a 3 minute window before it runs out.

100 is better than 110 when its Weathered Gloam Ring/Crafted Ring Vs Noct Ring

And unless Defense on gear miraculously works different than Foresight. It should be the higher average ilvl reducing damage intake... Right when 2.2 released I was tanking T6-9 and Leviathan with ilvl 90 and I was getting literally crushed, suffering up to 5-10% of incoming attacks as Crits so I slotted Awareness and popped that all the time. As soon as I bought Noct Lorica and jumped to ilvl 94 I noticed that I only only on average took 1-2.5% of attacks as crits (well still 3.5-4.0% on T9) and noticed many attacks such as those from Leviathan were doing nearly 10% less... I still have Awareness but I never really pop it anymore as I don't see myself getting crit often anymore at all. Pretty sure its not defense causing the damage to be reduced, but just some ilvl check the bosses do much like how in WoW crushing blows went away when you were <3 levels within a mobs level. It's my theory anyways X.x;;

[Zolentus]

It absolutely is not situationally better. According to your own words. Job #1 is to survive Job #2 is to dps

Why on earth would you add DPS to the slots in which your most efficient survival stats come from, IE the chest piece with Defense, Vitality, and parry.

I'm posting from work so I don't have all the numbers in front of me. However, I began to draw some estimates on the viability of specific thresholds that would offer some alternatives to the standard "stack VIT and STR" priority formula.

Having come from a long line of MMORPGs, I would like to clarify that the situation alluded to is the "Survivability Threshold", the point where you or your team's total damage mitigation and recovery exceeds what is necessary to confront particular damage-intake scenarios. While there is a master formula for this, it's so complex I don't think anyone has ever put it on paper due to how obtuse it is and how it does not account for all variables, so a margin of error must be estimated and planned for.

Instead, we must simply accept that there is a point where your team achieves an optimized range of "good enough" damage control for a particular challenge and additional actions or investment in this area suffers exponentially depreciated returns. The point where this occurs is debatable and depends on the content being run and the skill of both the Tank and his healer accompaniment.

That said, the idea behind a Tank building towards Damage while maintaining high-tier mitigation does depend in opportunity cost. This is most easily measured by iLevel and tertiary mitigation stat sacrifices (Parry and certain tiers of Dexterity -- 209, 241 and 273+- if I recall) in exchange for damage output modifiers (STR and Determination for baseline, Crit for variable opportunity burst, and skill speed for an opportunity multiplier).

First, let's observe the following standards:

* Strength and Determination are incremental modifiers.
* Crit's effectiveness operates as an increasing exponent the more it is stacked.
* Skill Speed only affects global cooldown abilities and not AA, but serves as a multiplier for Crit's effectiveness and aggro management in GCD.

So when all is said and done, we want to hit a comfortable optimized range embracing concepts of DPS, burst opportunity, and application speed while sacrificing as little survivability as possible. To do this, we must first examine some basic mathematical concepts in FFXIV's combat system.

* The default combat timer for active skills is 2.5 seconds.
* The standard crit value is somewhere around 5.33% (source: valk.dancing-mad.com/)
* Skill Speed awards -.01 sec per 9 points (this is a tiered value).
* Crit awards 1% roughly 14-15 points (this is an incremental value).
* (I don't have the details in front of me, so correct me if I'm wrong here.) Weapon Damage serves as a multiplier to the baseline effectiveness of the value of Strength and Determination.

Now, we have to assume situational deviation for certain scenarios, so a sustained formula is not always feasible. This is why burst is important when you are designing a build for a variety of situations (foes that die fast, enemies with invulnerability or phases where you must stop attacking to dodge, etc). So the question is: what is an effective goal for Crit and Skill Speed if I invest in those values, and how can I reach those without sacrificing too much Vitality or Strength?

With Crit, we want to reach a value where opportunities to crit on our strongest attacks become predictable, increasing our burst opportunity and aggro output. I don't remember the precise calculation, but it was somewhere around 18%. This puts us at around a minimum of 523 Crit for this optimization (20% is around 552).

Skill Speed is a bit harder to run with. You could follow the same theory as Warriors to get an extra attack while your damage buff is active, but something noticeably more sustained would be around 10% (1 extra GCD attack every 25 seconds) which is around +225 Skill Speed (556?). To get 2 extra attacks during FoF (30 seconds), you would need +322ish, which is not achievable with current iLevels/configurations even with considerable sacrifices.

Mumbo-jumbo aside, the following theorycraft gets close to these values. (Running off of memory here, feel free to comment on optimizations.)

Main: i110 Novus Curtana (SS/Crit)
Sub: i110 Novus Holy Shield (SS/Crit)

Head: i110 Coil (Acc/SS)
Body: i110 Coil (Crit/Acc)
Hands: i110 Soldiery (Acc/SS)
Waist: HQ i90 Wolfram - crafted Par/SS (slotted 2 Crit IV, 2 Det IV, 1 Acc)
Legs: i100 ST Phlegethon (SS/Par)
Boots: HQ i90 Wolfram --forgot the baseline stats, similar slotting/config to belt--

Accessories: HQ i90 Crafted STR/SS (slotted 2 VIT IV, 2 Crit IV, 1 Acc/Det IV)

Food: Steamed Catfish

Long story short: on paper, this met virtually all the standard optimized multipliers while maintaining high enough survivability and HP for most content in the game (2nd Coil potentially aside) and sacrificing little strength. However, due to the amount of crafted materials, 2 coil drops and Novus requirements, I find this build and those like it highly unfeasible -- especially given S-E's addiction to iLevel increases every 2 updates (as we are now due), which immediately nullifies the investment.

If S-E ever stops increasing gear levels and introduces other advancement systems in its place, then theorycrafting like this may hold water. Until that time, I also recommend most of the advice mentioned elsewhere in this thread because maximized iLevels are harder to outdate than tertiary stat benefits when new gear and the challenges to obtain it arrives, since VIT and STR are the dominant stats and strictly tied to iLevel.

EDIT: Forgot to mention STR tiers for Block/Parry -- 404/405, 445, 471...

[dspguy]

The game makes the choice very simple.
If at accuracy cap, equip higher iLvl piece. Done.

[Zkieve]

Would never trade defensive stats over dps !

For the times when u need to be doing more dps than tanking the healer can outdps u ,
so less healing they need to do overall more damage your party can do.

[MythToken]

I would like to somewhat clarify my earlier statements in this thread. I may have been a bit to extreme in my discussion and got a little carried away. So I apologize for anyone I may have offended.

The i100 ST chest piece is better than the i110 chest piece for DPS. It just is hands down.
It is also infinitely easier to obtain at this current time than going for sands or HA gear.
So if you were going for an all DPS tank then this would be your choice.

I think though that the title of this thread is misleading("when is i100 better than i110) and that the general concept of BiS is flawed.

Best in Slot, Better are very relative terms and depending on what you are intending to do the pieces in question can fluxuate.

If we analyze a piece against another piece and only look at those two pieces instead of looking at all the gear the player has as a whole, I think we can really mislead ourselves, using math and numbers in a vacuum.

but the idea of i100 being "better" than i110 isn't really sound logic. i100 has by definition less stats than i110. While we may not agree about which stats are worth more than others, this is fact.

So in short anyone who is a new player or trying to figure out BiS i would say stick with the higher ilvl, because it really is better. If you are clearing t9 and are in an elite FC, then you probably don't need any of this info, so this thread really isn't for you.

[PenutButter]

The only times a sub-ilv110 can be the better choice is when you're already acc cap and the ilv110 is giving you acc that you don't need. Even then though, the difference hardly matters, you're trading 3 str for 30-40 2ndary stats. This is more from a DPS point of view though since tanks gains a VIT and STR upgrade from the ilv110 and tanks need a lot of accuracy anyways.

The only other instance is when your left side is already good enough so you're going to be rolling in melded ilv90 crafted accessories because the few extra VIT from pure tank accessories are utterly useless (outside of Savage Coil cuz I haven't done that yet). I say 7500 HP for PLD and 9000 HP for WAR is more than enough but you can certainly go even less if you really want.

[Sessurea]

My friends soldiery 110 bard glove ( secondary stats being speed + acc ) got beaten by ST hands ( which have crit + det ). The extra 3 dex on the soldiery glove is pretty much the same as the 16 det on the ST glove. ( he compared non crit heavy shots, both gloves created the same figures ), and with the ST glove having crit, it just wins hands down. Such a shame a drop from a faceroll dungeon beats a 110 soldiery glove, which tbh takes a lot to make imo. ( tomes+750 seals )