Quote Originally Posted by Ritsugamesh View Post
Secondly, you are smarter to use Fists of Earth over Fists of Wind in the Ifrit fight as it is his massive elemental weakness and you gain boosted defence which will actually do something to help your survivability.

Feel free to throw it on and see your damage output sky-rocket

With all this said though, when you factor in worthwhile skills etc, it's actually just smarter to PGL it and have sentinel, self-cures for emergency purposes during jump phases etc and general survivability over the MNK.
Ifrit's elemental weakness is Wind. Study the elemental wheel of FFXIV.

Defense does nothing to reduce damage on any of the attacks you take from Ifrit as a DD. Everything is magic-based and only your fire resistance stat will help. The only physical attack he has is his swipe which hits only the tank. This is why players are able to do santa/reindeer/naked Ifrit runs. Defense means nothing.

FoW grants a massive reduction to WS cooldowns as well as a bonus to movement speed when Temple Boots are equipped.

When you factor in the massive boon of FoW, it's not beneficial at all to use PGL over MNK especially when the Ifrit strategy when using jobs is to bring down all of the infernal nails to greatly diminish Hellfire's potency rather than use Sentinel to survive it.