CRIT RATE vs DET vs TENACITY vs DIRECT HIT

[Baci]

Tenacity increases damage you deal and healing you do as well as reduces damage you take. It does not increase healing you receive.

This x1000. There are still so many people who think it increases healing received due to bad wording from SE

[BluexBird]

Right now, Tenacity isn't going to save you most of the time. If you end up dying, you were probably going to die with or without the extra Tenacity you chose not to take (via melds or substitute equipment). So if you're thinking about going for Tenacity because it's gonna make you "live longer", you're just fooling yourself. Here's an example - the only situation Tenacity will ever save you is if you needed an extra 4k-6k HP to live through an attack. Ask yourself how often that happens and then consider if you actually need it or not. Tenacity does also increase your damage by an amount, I think somewhat compared to Determination, so that's something to take into account as well.

Determination gives you a fixed damage increase, though I'm not sure how much it scales compared to Tenacity. The difference doesn't seem to be considerable, though.

Critical Rate used to be the biggest damage modifier, but they did something to the rates and how much damage you do, making it not as big a priority to get any more of it than what you're already getting from your items.

Then we get to Direct Hit, which tanks are only able to get via melds. But the thing about Direct Hit is that, unlike Critical Hit, if you don't have ANY Direct Hit melds in your equipment, you will NEVER land a Direct Hit! Which is ridiculous. In order enable Direct Hits, you NEED to put in melds. And the more you put, the higher your chances, since it scales linearly. And when you DO land a Direct Hit, you will deal 25% more damage. That's HUGE! Especially if you land one with one of your heavy attacks.

Now on average (as in, if you compared every single fight you ever do), the difference between melding Direct Hit or Tenacity won't be the big. But if you are trying to go for high parses, then Direct Hit is GOD TIER and a MUST HAVE because it will allow you to get lucky parses where you happened to land lots of Direct Hit attacks. And since doing the highest potential damage is all people seem to care about, that is why they tell you to go for Direct Hit.

In other words, if you're going for high parses, get Direct Hit. Otherwise, I don't think it really matters what you get in terms of damage, so you might as well just go for Tenacity.

[Wyndam]

Whatever you do, just don't leave the materia slots empty! At one point Tenacity materia was 1/10th the price of Direct Hit on Malboro. So I started slotting Tenacity, selling Direct Hit if I got it, and now I'm in a position where I can consider putting good materia on even my alt classes.

I'm more of the opinion that 1.3% (the last estimated difference between DH and Ten melds I saw) tank DPS is going to get lost in the noise. When I'm doing 3k DPS and my DPS are each doing 4500, is an extra 39 DPS really going to make much difference? No. Maybe if threat becomes an issue. But threat is solved in much the same manner as mitigation, through properly play and cooldown management. The extra mitigation from Ten gets lost too. The problem is if you keep making that choice over and over again or just leave stats out altogether and that 1.3% becomes something bigger.

[Fodemhouse]

Lets say I would complete all slots I can with materia...
That will be the order in terms of priority right ?
STR > Direct hit > Tenacity > Determination

[Wyndam]

Lets say I would complete all slots I can with materia...
That will be the order in terms of priority right ?
STR > Direct hit > Tenacity > Determination

Unless you have a specific reason for doing otherwise, yes.

[Taika]

That will be the order in terms of priority right ?
STR > Direct hit > Tenacity > Determination

I just started playing PLD and looked what the highest ranking PLD in FFlogs had in melds: STR > DH > Crit. That's what I'm going with.

[BluexBird]

Yeah but you can only meld STR on your accessories. You can put DH in accessories if you're using crafted ones. And on your armor and weapon, you can go Direct Hit all the way with no limit. So when it comes to melds, it's just STR and DH. Dunno where the hell you're getting crit from. :I

[Aana]

Yeah but you can only meld STR on your accessories. You can put DH in accessories if you're using crafted ones. And on your armor and weapon, you can go Direct Hit all the way with no limit. So when it comes to melds, it's just STR and DH. Dunno where the hell you're getting crit from. :I

That particular pld might be min-maxing to his specific group. If they group gets enough crit buffs (battle litany, sch buff, etc) then the value of crit damage obviously goes up if you are getting inflated crit rates from your comp. If you are going for the #1 slot across all servers you can afford to minmax to that obscene degree. For the rest of use just meld Str>DH. The rest of the list is only applicable in picking body A vs body B for actual gear. But melds are absurdly straight forward right now.

[Taika]

That particular pld might be min-maxing to his specific group. If they group gets enough crit buffs (battle litany, sch buff, etc) then the value of crit damage obviously goes up if you are getting inflated crit rates from your comp. If you are going for the #1 slot across all servers you can afford to minmax to that obscene degree. For the rest of use just meld Str>DH.

Yeah good point, I didn't even think about there not being need for anything but STR and DH. So for us non-min-maxing newbies it's just STR on right side where we can, and then DH in all other slots.