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