Understanding the Disciple of Magic's Attributes in FFXIV

As in many MMOs, and role-playing games in general, each character in Final Fantasy XIV features a variety of different stats, called Attributes, that offer benefits based on the character's selected job. While all characters have the same list of attributes in the character window, some attributes are beneficial only to specific roles. In this guide, we detail the effects and benefits of primary and secondary attributes relevant to characters playing Disciple of Magic jobs.

Characters in Final Fantasy XIV have five primary attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Vitality, Intelligence, and Mind. The values of your character's primary attributes are determined by specific details about your character, such as your current job, level, or race, and are affected by the item level of your equipped items. Gear that can be equipped by your job, whether in a damage or healing role, will always feature only the primary attributes which are beneficial to that job.

Primary Attributes cannot be increased through use of materia, nor is it possible to acquire gear that provides a disproportionate increase in one primary attribute at the expense of another. For example, you may find a piece of gear that features one secondary attribute but not another. However, as mentioned above, pieces of gear usable by your respective job will always feature both of that job (and role's) primary attributes.

All jobs, irrespective of role, make use of Vitality to increase their maximum HP pool. As such, Vitality is present on every piece of gear usable by Disciples of Magic or Disciples of War.

All damage-dealing (DPS) Disciple of Magic jobs use Intellect as their primary attribute to increase the potency of their spells and cause them to deal more damage. This includes Black Mage, Summoner, Red Mage, and the Limited Job Blue Mage.

All healing jobs, meanwhile, use Mind as their equivalent primary attribute, which increases the potency of both healing magic and attack magic. If you are a White Mage, Scholar, Astrologian, or Sage, this single attribute benefits your healing spells along with your damaging spells.

The Strength and Dexterity stats benefit to Disciple of War jobs exclusively.

Now that we have covered the primary attributes, we will discuss Final Fantasy XIV's secondary attributes. This is where making conscious itemization and gearing decisions can come into play. The benefits of secondary attributes can vary greatly depending on the job selected as well as your desired playstyle.

Unlike primary attributes, secondary attributes can be increased through the use of melded materia. However, every item has a maximum limit to each secondary attribute that it can provide. This means you may see diminishing returns when melding a specific secondary attribute, such as Critical Hit, if you attempt to exceed the item's maximum through use of materia. The game will notify you, within the materia melding interface, if you will get less benefit than expected from a materia you are planning to meld, whether its due to gear level or exceeding an attribute's cap.

The Critical Hit secondary attribute has two main effects:

• It increases the chance for you to land a Critical Hit. With 0 additional Critical Hit, you have a 5% chance to crit.
• It also increases the damage bonus of Critical Hits. With 0 additional Critical Hit, a critical hit deals 40% more damage than a regular hit.

There are numerous spells which can raise Critical Hit rate, increasing your character's chance to land a critical hit. These buffs do not increase critical hit damage:

• Devilment, applied by Dancers to themselves and their dance partner, increases critical hit rate by 20%.
• Battle Litany, applied by Dragoons to their entire group, increases critical hit rate by 10%.
• Chain Stratagem, applied by Scholars to everybody nearby at time of cast, increases critical hit rate by 10%.

Spell Speed is likely the most impactful attribute for Disciples of Magic due to its effects to speed up and even change spell rotations, which has huge implications for certain jobs.

Spell Speed has two primary effects:

1. It reduces the duration of the default Global Cooldown (GCD), a 2.5 second base cooldown which is shared across all of your job's Actions
2. It adds additional damage or healing to each "tick" of your damage-over-time or healing-over-time effects.

Simply put, the higher your Spell Speed stat, the sooner you can cast additional spells, and the more damage or healing your over-time spells will deal. Because each job has many unique Actions, some with their own specific cooldowns, there is typically an amount of Spell Speed that is considered "optimal" for the job or role. This value may be based on how comfortable it makes the class feel to play, or based on desired mana efficiency or damage output.

Direct hits function similarly to critical hits. When a damage event is determined to be a direct hit, the attack will simply deal 25% more damage. Unlike the Critical Hit attribute, Direct Hit Rate affects only how frequently a direct hits occurs.

While this does not sound like a very impressive benefit, it is important to note that direct hits can critical hit, and vice versa. The Warrior job, for example, has multiple Job Actions that will cause attacks to deal critical direct hits. Characters without any Direct Hit Rate from gear, materia, or temporary effects will have a chance to direct hit of 0%.

Determination provides a flat percentage-based increase to all damage and healing that you do. Due to its wide-ranging effect and the fact that it benefits everybody, it is tuned to be rather weak, and tends to be low in priority compared to other secondary attributes.

While it is not an attribute you should prioritize on most jobs, your character will still benefit from Determination's work alongside other secondary stats. After all, a flat increase to your damage dealt essentially also raises your character's maximum damage capability, which ultimately contributes to higher critical hits!

Healer jobs benefit from an additional, role-specific attribute: Piety. It simply increases the amount of MP regenerated during battle. The Mana resource is capped at 10k, and individual Actions all have percentage-based Mana costs. As MP recovery tends to be something you tweak up to a point where you feel comfortable in the content you are doing, you will rarely, if ever, prioritize this stat. Mana efficiency issues are generally better addressed by making changes and optimizations to your spell rotations and overall playstyle.