Can someone explain weapon stats?

[Judge_Xero]

Such as weapon damage/magic damage, auto-attack, delay, etc.

I've looked this up but all I've found were old threads still speculating on what all this means.

I'm particularly interested as to why, for a given ilvl, ranged weapons (BRD/MCH) are some 4-6 (can't recall atm) weapon damage lower than the other melee classes.

As others have said WD/MD > Main Stat > Secondaries

To elaborate on a few things as well:
1. Lower WD on BRD/MCH Weapons does not cause them to have lower damage compared to their melee counterparts. The game is balanced around those stats regardless through the class Potency/s Rotations. How it does work though is it makes 1 point of WD better for BRD/MCH than it does for Melee.

i.e. 45 to 46 > 51 to 52

You can go here http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/ and look at the BiS Solver and compare the Melee WD values to BRD/MCH and you will notice that BRD/MCH is slightly higher **

** WD/MD values are compared to the value of 1 Main Stat

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Auto Attack:

Auto Attacks are based on a 100 Potency Attack value which is then broken down by the Delay value.

The base is 100 Potency on 3 Second intervals. So how that works is:

100 Potency/3 seconds * Delay (in this example we'll use a 2 Second Delay) = 66.67 Potency every 2 seconds.

100 Potency/3 * Delay (3.5 Delay) = 116.667 Potency every 3.5s

- Auto Attacks are not effected by Skill/Spell Speed or Increase Action Damage Traits.

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SPD and CRT have exponential gains. Basically they start out low but become better by stacking more.

DET has linear gains. It starts out strong and is always X points is X gain.

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Because of how stats work for each class there is no set X Stat is best.

Look at BLM - No Auto Attack damage and no Off-GCD damage skills, unlimited resources (MP) - Spell Speed is the best overall stat for BLM and only gets increasingly better from the 1st point.

MCH - No Auto Attack with Gauss Barrel on, but - Between the Turret (Turrets are not effected by Skill Speed) and the number of oGCD Damage skills that MCH has, it's average damage is made up of only 60% that would be effected by Skill Speed. That makes Skill Speed pretty bad for MCH even without Auto Attacks. So you would prioritize DET>CRT until CRT reaches +400 and then it's CRT>DET

[Alberel]

To put it in it's simplest form: ignore stats and just go by ilvl. If something is higher ilvl it will be a bigger upgrade for you, regardless of if it has optimal stats or not. The only time to worry about stats is when comparing secondaries on equipment of the same ilvl, and even then it makes a very minor difference (think 1%).

This is why there is a lot of moaning about how boring the itemization in this game is. The stats are almost completely pointless...