What Does Protect Actually Do?

[Brynhild]

So I sputtered in horror when I learned that Protect is going away, then I realized I have no idea what it does even though I dutifully cast it at the beginning of every duty. Tooltip says "Increases the physical and magic defense of target and all party members nearby target". Ok, cool. By how much, and how?

[griffinborn]

it protecc

[MrThinker]

If I remember correctly, it literally increased both the defense and magical defense stat numbers of your char for the duration of protect. I forgot by how much though.

[Canadane]

If I remember correctly, it literally increased both the defense and magical defense stat numbers of your char for the duration of protect. I forgot by how much though.

I believe it is a 15% increase in the value of def and mdef.
How much that actually mitigates, I don't know.

[Brynhild]

Ok, so I tested it out. My Defense went from 133 to 152. Good to know. Learn something new every day.

[MrThinker]

I believe it is a 15% increase in the value of def and mdef.
How much that actually mitigates, I don't know.

Less than 15% of the incoming damage more than likely. I remember the problem with WAR's old Foresight ability was that it:

1) increased physical defense, and only physical, which made it useless against magical attacks, and

2) a 20% increase in defense did not translate into a 20% reduction in damage taken, like Rampart and Shadowskin does/did

[Risvertasashi]

If I remember right, it's around 8% effective mitigation?

[MPNZ]

The spell protect is basically just reduces any damage the players recieve by a set percent and reducing the amount of time players spend healing that can then be spent casting a number of spells like revive, esuna, or gravity. Oh, and also it stacks with shields, and it's only really necessary for big pulls, heavy-instant-aoe fights, BLM, and yazmat

[NobleWinter]

All classes have different base amounts of Physical and Magical Defense so the amount of usefulness from Protect changes accordingly. Tanks have the highest defense stats overall so they get the most benefit from Protect as you would expect but losing the spell definitely won't hurt anyone. The natural defense of every class will be tweaked slightly and no one will be able to complain about not having protect. It was just useless busy work anyway.

[Seraphor]

If I remember right, it's around 8% effective mitigation?

Because it scales with the individuals existing defence stat, it can actually range between about 4% and 8%, maybe less.
If you're undergeared it has less effect.