tank gear

[Absimiliard]

Oh, I thought penta meld tanks gear was not better than the higher ilev stuff given the loss of str and vit. Are people penta melding tank gear for this raid tier?

Pentamelding will give you your pre-savage BiS. The higher item level stuff you get from doing savage will typically trump it, but there have been a few exceptions thus far. It's what we've done for a long time, really. Not something I'd call a necessity, however - unless you go for the bleeding edge progression, in which case it may end up being something worth looking into at the start of each new tier. Doubt you'd be replacing much of a full savage set from a previous tier, but once in a while you'll find a piece here or there that can be replaced with pentamelded crafted gear.

[Juanpierre]

Public Service Announcement: If you are interested in gearing and melding and playing optimally, join The Balance discord channel. They give excellent info on stats and rotations that have been tested and shown to be optimal. I appreciate the work they do.

If you're not interested in playing optimally, please continue to meld Tenacity. I hear it's fun.

[xvshanevx]

Tenacity is a perfectly viable stat for early progression on any fight you or your party members do not understand. (I say this with the assumption that many of us suck in comparison to World First runners, daily streamers, or high frequency parse runners.)

Going with a full penta-melded set with TEN food will net you about 3300 tenacity, this equates to 9.00-9.12% damage mitigation and increased damage (http://theoryjerks.akhmorning.com/stats/ten/).

I went full penta-melded TEN build during week 1 and 2 and noticed the difference. This kept me alive in situations where I should've died. I have 1 VERY clear example with Levi's Temporal Current attack. Getting hit by it does about 120-130k damage unmitigated, but I got hit by it and lived with 1.5k health. I should've been 1 shot, but didn't and it's cause of running TEN instead of CRIT/DET.

TEN will never be in any BiS set seeing as it is sub-optimal, plus we gain defense and HP from upgrading to Savage gear, but never count it out for progression. Once you get to about 138-140k health, then TEN will be useless until Ultimate drops.

Keep in mind that we are all not week 1 clear players. so choosing the safest stats are not always the worst idea.

Public Service Announcement: If you're not interested in playing optimally, please continue to meld Tenacity. I hear it's fun.

The first and foremost thing players running EX Primals, Savages, and Ultimates should be to concerned with is to clear the fights at all costs, not to play risky. Playing "optimally" in this game requires players to be very greedy and taking chances that would other wise wipe the raid just to keep their GCDs rolling (i.e. always going to the same rock in es4 even if it is a 2-1 just to keep uptime). Playing "optimally" would be to have a TEN set for clearing the fight and a DPS set for re-clears and parses.

Edit: I also want to add that TEN here on Primal, is a very cheap Materia, so it is also cheaper to meld!

[Kabooa]

Tenacity is a perfectly viable stat for early progression on any fight you or your party members do not understand. (I say this with the assumption that many of us suck in comparison to World First runners, daily streamers, or high frequency parse runners.)

Are you absolutely sure all of us aren't just as good as them and thus emulating them is a great idea?

Hoo, I keep looking at that and the grammar alone confuses me, and I wrote the dang thing.

[xvshanevx]

Are you absolutely sure all of us aren't just as good as them and thus emulating them is a great idea?

Hoo, I keep looking at that and the grammar alone confuses me, and I wrote the dang thing.

I apologize! I didn't realize I was among the top 5% in these forums!

[Kabooa]

I apologize! I didn't realize I was among the top 5% in these forums!

Bask in my mediocrity! It has five syllables, so it must mean excellence.