How gearing up works in FFXIV.

hey a little over animal balance and do you know which one of these gears is better well you should buy the end of the video because we're going to be talking about the gearing system in Final Fantasy 14. the main reason I want to cover this is because the gear system in ff14 is pretty unique and pretty smart too it's simple enough that someone who doesn't want to deal with it can just ignore it for the most part but if you really want to get the most out of your character there's a lot to unpack here if you really want to this will mainly focus on Modern gearing and ff14 so while there are some weird gear like way lower leveled this will mainly showcase how gearing Works in Final Fantasy 14 now now to start each character in ff14 has five armor slots five accessory slots and a slot for their main and offhand weapon currently the only battle class that uses an offhand weapon is Paladin and this is for their Shields additionally two accessory slots are both rings and they use the same set of gear you can usually wear two of the same ring unless that gear is marked as unique then you can only ever hold one of it but only rings have this Oddity because in every other case you wouldn't need more than one of an item now the first thing that you'll probably notice all ff14 gear has is an item level this is a general guide to how strong that gear is and the great part about the ff14 gearing system is that if you really don't care about anything else as long as you're using items with the highest item level available to you you'll be completely fine running through the game of course it's an MMO and it's an RPG so if you want to get nerdy and look deeper into the gear we can start to talk about stats and sub stats but first let's have a look at defense and Magic defense and this is mainly because you really don't have to as far as the player is concerned your defense is not something that you can really control and the amount of defense that you have is largely decided on which class you choose to play and you just ignore the stat for the most part weapon damage on the other hand is really important in the sense that it almost always trumps any other kind of advantage that the weapon might give unless the sub stats are really really bad for your class weapon attack noted by the weapon is basically a straight up percentage increase to your damage with one point being worth roughly one percent more damage so what are stats and sub stats well if you look at the attributes tab on your character window you can see that there's five main attributes and these are your main stats Vitality first of all is something that everyone gets and it's super important since it's what dictates how much HP you have and by like a lot a level 90 character with a no gear on has about 3 000 HP and this goes up to about 60 000 on an untanged character simply because gear just gives so much Vitality this along with the classes main stat which is strength for tanks and melee classes dexterity for physical ranged and ninja intelligence for Mages and mind for healers because they need to mind their business and adjust these are the main stats and they will also come with each new set of gear that you get for your class and they are essentially just another percentage multiplier to your damage and or healing assuming that you're on the correct class now under those two stats of gear is where the sub stats live and this is how two Gears of the same item level can vary each gear has two sub stats and the first sub stat generally has more points reserved for it than the second one and in no particular order the sub stats are critical hit which dictates both the chance and extra damage dealt with a critical hit this is generally the strongest substat for most classes since it boosts both the chance and damage boost for your Critical Hits and the Damage bonus for crits can get quite high in and of itself determination which is just another percentage damage increase Direct Hit rate which makes you more likely to score a direct hit which unlike crit is always a 25 damage increase you can critical and direct hit on the same attack and this is generally referred to as a direct crit skill speed which lowers the recast time for skills marked as weapon skills this also has the additional effect of raising the damage that damage over time effects do essentially by the same amount that determination would spell speed is essentially the same substat but for skills marked as spells and also reduces their cast time as well the separation is important for classes like Red Mage which have both spells and weapon skills as each substance only works for the one that they have listed finally there's two more sub stats and they are role specific tenacity for tanks is a substat which gives them a minor damage bonus as well as damage mitigation and also raises the amount of healing that they receive this may seem like a really loaded stat but generally the damage bonus is less than the tank could have by stacking offensive stats like crit and Direct Hit and finally piety for healers which serves to increase your MP regeneration while in combat this can be a great stat for healers who are new or parties as they progress through content for the first time as more MP means more resources but generally since this isn't a damage that healers don't like to take more than what they really need and if you're surprised at the fact that tanks and healers are just as focused on damage as DPS classes are well clearly you're very new to MMOs but we're not quite done yet as we need to talk about Materia generally each ff14 gear will have two sockets on it and these slots are for Materia but it isn't always the case some gear has as little as one socket and some gear can even go up to five this will allow us to put in Materia to grant us some additional substance starting with the Materia level 5 and Up Materia with an odd number generally has the lower stats and the even numbered material are rare but give higher stat bonuses technically you can put any Materia into any open slot but each gear also has individual maximum stats that's allowed to have for example the maximum stat that this ring can have is 130 of each value so even though I could put another critical hit material into it it wouldn't do much good as I'd only benefit from three of that crit because that's all the ring is allowed to have these values are generally higher on bigger pieces of gear like armors but will also raise with item level now the real difference between even and odd of Materia is that odd material can be used for over melding which is just as close as ff14 gets to an awful enhancement refine system that you'll find on basically every other MMO one of the perks of being a crafter in ff14 is the ability to meld Materia into your own gear without the need for an NPC Crafters also get Advanced material melting which essentially allows us to put Materia into slots that don't necessarily exist there are some rules for this however bull even numbered Materia can be put into the first Advanced Materia socket but afterwards only the smaller odd number Materia can be used and the chance for doing this is quite low and can get very costly now generally gear that you get from the latest and greatest raids will not allow for advanced melding but crafted gear that can still be best in some cases does allow for advanced melding and can be an absolute money sink if you're trying to pentamelt each slot lastly on the topic of Materia some very rare gear can also have up to five completely open material slots which allows for five fully powered even numbered material to be inserted now this is generally reserved for Relic weapons but now that I've put this in the script it turns out that the new Manderville weapons have come out and they only have two material slots another item that often has five open material slots is ornate versions of crafted gear which is super rare and basically requires you to win the wondrous Trails Lottery to obtain it because of these sub stats and the general damage priority that everyone puts on themselves there are some cases where an item with a lower item level may be preferable for your class and this is usually down to certain classes wanting to stay at a certain skill or spell speed or tanks and healers just avoiding their non-damage based stats but for the most part this is super sweaty stuff that the average player will almost never ever encounter but let's review do you know which one of these gears is better now well they have the same item level so that's no help their strength and vitality is the same as we would expect from two gears at the same item level but look at the sub stats one of them gives Direct Hit and critical and the other gives determination and Direct Hit while crit is by far the best stat so in this case it's very clear to see that the armor with critical hit rate is the best option but this isn't always as clear-cut if you want to learn more about gearing or just find whatever is the best setup for what you happen to be playing the great part about ff14 is that if you want to do something nerdy it's very likely that someone has already done it for you and you just need to find the resource if you join the balance Discord or check etro.gg you'll easily have a rundown of what is already mathematically proven to be the best gear that you can wear for the purpose of damage and these sets are generally early separated by whichever speed dictates the class and some classes do like skill speed and it makes the rotation much nicer and player preference as well if you're playing with high ping you might want to avoid a high speed build as it gives less wiggle room for weaving in abilities something else I'd like to talk about is how gear progression Works in ff14 since catching up is in Courage and generally becomes easier to get as time goes on the way that this is accomplished is with tomestones Tome stones are generally the currency that you obtain and spend on a weekly basis usually there's three in rotation at any given time so addicts are always around and are essentially used for anything older than two or three patches ago then you have your uncapped home Stones which are generally used for the last tier finally the weekly caps home which could only get a certain amount every week is used to purchase the best gear a given patch has to offer without going into Savage difficulty content Savage Raiders will get a bit of a head start on gear progression as Savage tier comes out with its own armor as well as augmentation items for the Tome gear generally The Savage gear will be the same level as the newly augmented Tome gear allowing Raiders to pick and choose from two viable choices of top of the line gear now on top of a weekly cap the way that Savage raids drop gear is pretty nonsense for the first couple of weeks this is two I assume but for time for the devs to work on the next update as these dumb restrictions are removed once the patch is essentially over allowing you to get these gears as soon as your static can clear the fight and any weekly per player lock on content is removed this also means that if you want to get gear way down the line for fashion it's not going to take you eight weeks like it would when the patch first dropped not to mention that the fight will be easier too because you'll have access to better gear and you'll also be potentially a higher level as well overall I think this gearing system is cool and I wanted to share it mostly because once you get a certain gear there isn't five different upgrade systems for you to maximize it it's as complicated as it needs to be and there's even guardrails for people who don't want to dig that deep the downside is that stats actual impacts on your gameplay can be rather limited but I feel like this allows the devs to make more interesting fights and keeps the class balance relatively in check which I know is something that a lot of MMOs with much more complicated gearing systems seem to struggle with now that's all for today but if you have any questions you leave them down in the comments below I hope this video was informative or at very least entertaining and a special thanks to my patreon supporters who allow me to make videos like this though mid-roll ads for as little as a dollar a month thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: Munbalance

Views: 29,378

Keywords: FFXIV, FF14, Final Fantasy 14, Final Fantasy XIV, Gearing, Equipment, item level, crit, determination, direct, spell speed, skill speed, best in slot, BiS

Id: Yc56uGVK71Y

Length: 12min 40sec (760 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022