[Stormblood] [Dragoon Rotation] COME ON AND SLAM

[SunnyHirose]

Edit: I also glanced at your savage gear build and it seems viable, but I'm wary stacking that much crit currently given the small returns.

How about this... save your own copy of this and start plugging your desired gearsets' stats into cells B3:F3. I wish I could say I have the lowdown on damage formulas, because then it would be an okay approximation of DPS, but for now it is a Frankenstein'd mix of theory and logged damage scaled to STR. The guess at BiS is just that, a guess.

Either way, the reports of Critical Hit's demise are greatly exaggerated.

For Vit, I think that was only for 12S really as you would take unavoidable damage and, at first, it was damn near impossible to survive. It does help, but I'm not sure of any fight in 1-4s of Omega where we have similar.

As I hint in that section, it's a looooong history... buckle up

Last week, Angered used at least some VIT melds for their clear of savage Deltascape; they even talked about the merits of surviving longer--you won't see VIT melds discussed much in that thread; it's practically a given at this point, so it's not really apropos (they do mention Tenacity because it's new, and it's a bit analogous for tanks, really). Elysium also melded VIT this tier. To the best of my knowledge, VIT melds played a crucial role in almost every high-difficulty raid clear or progression towards it in this game, especially notable in Lucrezia's clears of SCoB savage and FCoB (Collision also did it, an obvious sign in early FCoB clears is monks having ~6000HP). The biggest exception may be savage Manipulator, and even then one could argue the accessory-melding situation for Gordias (60 iLvls below the drops, G5 melds straight up impossible) has never been seen before or since.

(Lucrezia also did a VIT melded i55 T5 and a no-meld T7 savage for kicks, though. They also had healers with tank accs for this Ravana, which was extremely fast pre-Gordias.)

Other MMORPGs have also seen progression raiders stacking HP to their benefit. It is also apparent in single-player RPGs with parallels to FFXIV raiding, such as FFXIII's adamantoise farming.

I truly believe that some of the highest skilled players in the world benefit from leeway when facing severe punishment for the slightest of errors with no strategy guide whatsoever to consult if something goes wrong. That is, I strongly disagree with the notion that they're doing this strictly to survive HP checks, or you wouldn't see the first-boss victory screenshots with inflated HP; it also has other benefits in terms of healer triage and "standing in the fire". Naturally, at times when my belief is the more useful alternative, it follows that what people who are less skilled need is more leeway, not 1.2-1.3% more DPS. At least till they've seen the enrage on the roughest DPS check available, anyway.

In terms of Fermi-esque fuzzy napkin math:
- VIT melds have a roughly double digit chance of being tested on any given pull in progression. 10% at lowest, let's say; most people make mistakes with crucial mechanics more often than one in ten pulls, so we'll up that to 15%. For a bad goon, we can guess about 2/3 of those will still be fatal. But it's still a payoff on 5% of pulls. So between 4 DPS, going from 85%^4 = 52.2% "problem free" attempts to 90%^4 = 65.6% is pretty massive actually.
- Generously round up the benefit of a full DPS meld on accessories to 2% (it's less than that). If we didn't know about the checks, we could estimate its benefit at ~2% of the time. Okay, but that's not really fair. If this is the entire wiggle room on an important DPS check, it will pay off nearly every time it's tried. However, think about how often it really comes down to that. It's not 0%, but it's close, and you can tell when it's coming, too. The obvious one is an enrage. So, you need to be wondering whether buying a ~2% sooner clear is worth it, and that has to be purchased within the raid's uptime, too, not the raid's actual timer. With 10min. uptime and no problem errors from anybody, you're getting yourself about 12 "extra" seconds, assuming you are perfect. How often is success hinging on ~12-15 seconds of pure damage?
- Mess with the numbers until you're satisfied, but I think with reasonable guesses, you generally find these two are not in the same ballpark, at least until you're hitting a very different level with regards to what mechanics can be ignored. Usually that level is "farm", usually the tuning is such that the raid drops themselves get you there. This is the reasoning behind my recommendation.

Full G6 VIT melds are a little weak off the bat (+7.5% HP on DRG, compare to FCoB where you could get that from overmelding VIT on just two or three accessories IIRC), and how much extra HP they contribute will stay at 125 VIT, so as a percentage of unmelded HP it will only decrease as the expansion continues. Let's cross that bridge when we get there, though.

Most people will probably never benefit from more VIT in Expert roulette or raids that are on farm, it's true. In raid progression or PUGs for anything with a chance of wiping, I think VIT is the better compromise by a long shot.

edit: Case in point. Many of those responses are from legit raiders at multiple levels of skill.