Discussing tank stat priority in FC, confusion.

[Jahaudant]

I'll just repost this here.



STR Tiers and Block/Parry Damage Mitigation


Each STR tier for parry provides an additional 1% damage reduction on attacks parried, and each STR tier for block provides an additional 1% damage reduction on blocked attacks.

Parry tiers are 243, 283, 324, 363 and 405, while block tiers are 270, 337, 404 and 445 meaning that at any given time, depending on your gear, you may need up to 32 STR to hit your next parry tier, and up to 67 STR to hit your next block tier. Unfortunately both of these numbers are higher than the maximum amount of STR you can apply via optional stats, and block tier gaps particularly are very wide. Luckily though, with full Darklight your base STR should fall somewhere around 305-320 which is a good spot to hit the next tier for both parry and block with a respec in to STR. Great! 1% more damage reduction on blocks and parries is the shit! Not really...

Block and Parry Rates


The best shield in the game has a block rate of roughly 16%, and with full end game gear with parry on every piece you are looking at a parry rate of roughly 20% giving you a 36% chance to trigger mitigation 1% higher than you would have without your STR spec bumping you in to the next tier. This effectively means that over any given extended fight you have roughly 0.37% extra average damage mitigation per physical attack you receive.

Even if we assume you have the "Super Shield of Win" with a block rate of 100%, giving you a permanent 1% additional damage reduction, Can you tell me how much of an EHP increase that extra 1% reduction on blocks would give a PLD with 5000 HP (roughly what you should have with a full STR build and full darklight). Hint: It's not 450 (or 480 in a party), and thus not better than 30 VIT - and the "Super Shield of Win" does not even exist.

With the mitigation argument blown away we can look for a brief moment at the argument made for STR helping to maintain hate on a monster. There aren't figures anywhere that can give us a detailed breakdown of how much we can increase our enmity generation potential via increasing our STR however, we don't need these numbers to decide if additional STR over VIT is worth it as answering this simple question is enough:

"Is holding hate a problem?"

The answer is no.