how much spellspeed do i want for blm?

[Nemekh]

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I really don't want to dig into this right now having not slept with the patch night in mind. But this is misinformation with regards to crit vs, especially with regards to the farce that was Stormblood era misinformation thanks to the likes of Omono and that one reddit thread that was a thorn in my side, that it took 14! months for the community as a whole to recover from that DH is king and crit is bad until x nonsense. It really has not helped that certain notable YouTubers decided to revive the statements in their 5.x era videos. It undoes so much of our hard work each time.

You need to look at absolute damage resultants for max damage potential. Do I really have to make a big disclaimer in bold on my website about it D: there's a reason why so many BiSes prioritise the stats in the manner they do, and early enough in the expansion instead of requiring gear from the end raid tiers. It was the same in Deltascape having Crit biased BiSes that I made for RDM and SMN back then which I still have listed on akhmorning.com in the historical gear sets page.

This expansion I am getting so tired of people stating the likes of "Crit's worthless until you get 3200" over and over. Enough with history repeating needlessly.

Anyway, with regards to BLM their high crit set is very competitive, but the max speed set enables some edge case rotation considerations that slower sets cannot, but those are concerns for people speedrunning more than the typical player. Go with what's comfy enough for you OP, however, if you want dedicated sets that have already been built to aim for here are what we list at The Balance:

"Fast/Min Crit BiS" (Mathematical Best)

"High Crit BiS" (Comparable w/ Crit Comp)

"SMN/RDM-Friendly BiS" (can use the SMN/RDM BiS w/o swapping melds)

Relative Gear Comparison sheet

[Zerathor]

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the relative damage spread sheet for gear does not account for rotational variances possible due to sps.

It seems like dh does have more weight than crit to a certain value, but it doesn't take until 3k+ to see crit overtaking dh. More like 1.6k ish, and depending on party composition, which is easily obtainable.

Though for blm of all classes, the difference in substats performance is relatively negligible, and you can go for whatever sps you find comfy and likely not see a massive change in outcome comparing against other max ilvl sets. +/- like... 100 dps.

Personally I enjoy higher sps for removing more RNG from your clears and making it much more reliable of an outcome. With crit, it either feels amazing and all of that 30% crit was on xeno, despair and f4, or terrible with every crit being on your f1s, b3s, f3s, and b4s. And your output can swing anywhere between those 2 scenarios. And my luck is kinda horrible.

[Nemekh]

The sheet's not a sim, but it tries to give a fair model to how stats impact dps given the pps model of blm. Furst would be better to go over the nuances behind it as it's not one I've worked on directly beyond all my early sub stat work for the game in general. Something like Yunalesca's BLM AI which came up with the megumin rotation is more along the lines of something that can better account for rotational variances. However, for the intents and purposes of seeing what gear options are stronger, especially without changing the GCD value, the sheet more than serves its purpose as a gear comparison tool.

Yes, DH can be better and more impactful earlier on, although being a linear function it does suffer from relative diminishing returns just as Det does. This is DH vs Crit that will always be correct, the full range and when it's within more realistic bounds. Translate those to points with a 3300 level mod and Lv. 80 values. Can solve with the surface diagram or just solve by plugging the numbers in and working it out that way.

The problem is when people use the data and calcs incorrectly to come up with those conclusions. The goal isn't about getting the best mileage out of your points, yes that matters, but what ultimately matters is what combination is achieving the greatest total damage possible. Speed muddies the water, but if all that's being looked at is Crit, DH and Det for DPS jobs? That's really easy to resolve.

[Zerathor]

It is easy to resolve ignoring speed. However blm being the only job (except maybe sam?) that can use speed well, it kind of forces it to be a factor. The gear this tier made it almost too easy to stack sps up and it scales so well, but most of that gear seemed to favor pairing it with dh than crit.

[FurstBlumier]

The sheet doesn't account for rotational gimmicks at certain speed values, and the min crit set still outperforms the crit set on average. That being said, while having a slightly lower average, people still like the crit set because the variance is higher. So if you go for a lot of runs in a fight you can fish for "the god run" more easily with the crit set.

The rotational gimmicks you can pull off with high enough sps are usually not that easy to do in actual fights without putting yourself at risk to drop eno.

In any case "crit outscales dh at X" is just an inherently flawed thought. You don't look to outperform a single stat, you try to maximize your total expected damage. That means you try to find the maximum of a 4d manifold which is bound by the total amount of substats. The problem is that gear choices dictate a major part of the substats and as such we aren't just looking at a circle around 0 with radius Σ(substats). Finding this maximum is non-trivial and we bruteforce a solution for gearsets by going through a huge part of the about 20^9*10^3 permutations in gear and melds. You could also just settle for an analytical solution since the problem is just an optmization problem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_multiplier) but once again gear based substats and tiering makes this non trivial.

In any case, instead of blindly following magic numbers you are way better off just using the tools the community already created.