Understanding the Disciple of War'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 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 War 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 tanking 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'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.

The tank jobs, including Paladin, Dark Knight, Gunbreaker, and Warrior use Strength as their primary attribute. Strength increases the amount of damage reduction applied when blocking or parrying attacks, and increases the damage dealt by their physical attacks.

On the DPS side of things, Strength increases the damage dealt by the physical attacks of Dragoon, Monk, Samurai, and Reaper, while Dexterity increases the damage dealt by ranged physical attacks for Dancer, Machinist, and Bard, and the damage dealt by Ninja.

Intellect and Mind are only relevant to the Disciple of Magic jobs, giving no benefit to any of the Disciple of War jobs.

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.

Given the usefulness of many of the secondary attributes, the focus of which attribute will be best for your chosen job can vary greatly throughout the list of jobs, not only based on your role, but also the job itself.

There are also role-specific secondary attributes that have no impact on jobs that do not belong to the same role, such as Tenacity for tanks. As a DPS, despite the tooltip of Tenacity showing a boost to damage dealt, you cannot gain any benefit from the attribute, as it is locked to tanks.

It is also worth noting that, in FFXIV, the way secondary attributes are increased can be somewhat disorienting at first; in order to see any actual benefit after the increase of a stat, you will need to have increased it enough to move into the next "range" of the stat.

For example, when you have no gear on at Level 80, you will have 380 Critical Hit. If you were to increase your Crit by 16, you would see no increase in your damage output, because you are still within the same range of the stat. If you were to increase it by 17, however, you would see a 0.1% increase in both the critical strike rate, as well as the damage bonus granted on each crit.

The Critical Hit secondary attribute has two main effects:

• It increases the chance for you to land a Critical Hit. With the base Crit level of 380, you have a 5% chance to crit.
• It also increases the damage bonus of Critical Hits. With the base Crit level of 380, 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 is applied by Dancers to themselves and their dance partner, increasing both player's Critical Hit Rate and Direct Hit Rate by 20% for 20 seconds.
• Battle Litany is applied by Dragoons, increasing the Critical Hit Rate of themselves and all party members within 15y by 10% for 20 seconds.
• Chain Stratagem is a debuff that is applied to a single-target, increasing the rate at which the enemy takes critical hits by 10%.

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 Inner Release, which 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%, despite having an attribute value of 380.

As a Disciple of War, Determination provides a flat percentage-based increase to all damage that you deal. Despite this fairly simple, wide-reaching increase, the value of Determination can vary wildly between different jobs when looking at melding priorities.

Skill Speed, similar to the Disciple of Magic's Spell Speed secondary attribute, is a powerful secondary attribute with varying levels of effectiveness and desirability among Final Fantasy XIV's different Disciple of War jobs.

Skill 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 most of your job's actions.
2. It adds additional damage or healing to each "tick" of your DoT or HoT effects.

The first part is fairly simple, in that it essentially just allows you to cast abilities sooner, due to the reduction in the GCD. The second effect is, however, a "replacement" for the shortening of the duration of DoT or HoT effects.

Rather than causing them to "tick" faster and then forcing breakpoints in Skill Speed to ensure that you do not waste your stat budget between breakpoints, there is simply an amount of damage or healing added to each tick. This means that, outside of the usual "range" of stats in FFXIV, you will not be wasting your budget by taking some Skill Speed on your gear.

Instead, the amount of Skill Speed that is now recommended for most classes is simply a "comfortable" amount, as it can also depend on your own personal ping, to avoid causing issues with weaving.

Tank jobs benefit from an additional, role-specific attribute: Tenacity. Tenacity increases the amount of physical and magical damage dealt, the amount of HP restored by spells, and reduces the amount of damage taken.