What’s a good marauder stats build? What are useful warrior stats? Marauder / Warrior materia? If any of these questions brought you here, you came to the right place. Whether its by stat allocation, gear or materia: knowing what stats your Marauder or Warrior need should never be far from mind!
Marauder (MRD) & Warrior (WAR) Stats
What are the marauder or warrior stat weights?
VIT > STR > Parry > Critical Chance > Determination > DEX
*These may vary slightly from patch to patch, or by personal preference. Following the recommendation above will always give you a good MRD & WAR build.
Marauder (MRD) & Warrior (WAR) Primary Stats Allocation
What stats should I add as a marauder or warrior?
Vitality – Increases total HP. Many skills of MRD/WAR scale of total HP, and this also makes you a better tank. Really, it doesn’t get any simpler than that.
STR – Hit harder, Parry for more, and generate more threat. Marauders that make the case STR>VIT have a bit of logic in it because so many of the Warrior skills scale off damage. Don’t get sucked in to thinking you’re DPS though.
Dexterity – Increases Parry Chance. While you might not ever need to allocate a third primary stat, this is the only remotely useful one.
Maruko’s Note: VIT or STR, how much should you get of each? Marauders will be throwing this argument around until the sun goes down. While you really want STR, VIT is ALWAYS IMPORTANT. As far as stat allocation goes, just focus on VIT because you can always customize your materia later on if you find you need more STR (unlikely).
Marauder (MRD) & Warrior (WAR) Secondary Stats
What are good secondary stats for marauder and warrior, and why?
Parry > Critical Chance > Determination
While you can’t allocate this directly, these will be heavily considered when picking gear upgrades and slotting materia.
Parry – Marauders have an extremely thin HP pool. They have alot of HP but no mitigation. Adding Parry somehow counters this weakness.
Critical Chance – Serves to increase damage, threat and shields generated from Storms Path.
Determination – Generic stat when you have nothing else to put into that serves to increase damage and threat. *If you somehow want more damage and threat, value crit and determination over parry.
Marauder (MRD) & Warrior (WAR) Materia
This is directly related to the first section. As you may know, all gear has a limit for each stat it can have, the higher its Item Level, the higher amount of stats it can hold. So the idea is to max out (or get close to maxing out) the left most, and work your way right. Again: VIT > STR > Parry > Critical Chance > Determination > DEX
Materia Name
VIT: Vitality
STR: Strength
Parry: Battledance
Critical Strike: Savage Aim
Determination: Savage Might
DEX: Dexterity
See Also: Materia Guide | Melding Guide Summary:
- Overall MRD WAR stat importance: VIT > STR > DEX > Parry > Determination > Skill Speed
- MRD WAR Stat allocation: VIT> STR > DEX
- Secondary stats for MRD WAR: Parry > Critical Strike > Determination
- Reference links: Marauder FAQ, Warrior FAQ
Follow us on Facebook for more FFXIV updates!
Have a question about MRD WAR? Chime in on the comments or in our Marauder / Warrior Forums.
There isn’t one guide so far that has shown numbers. Nobody seems to know how much parry “absorption” you get with each point of strength. And how much parry chance do you get with each point of dexterity? Until I see these numbers, I can’t really tell whether the people who say “go for strength” are better than those saying “go for vit”.
Right now I’m running full strength and my parry amount is about 25%-28%. Having pure Vit is always the safer choice.
You may want to double check that shield bit. I just tested Storms Path on a random mob through combo and there’s no shield being generated. At all. Unless I am missing something from my years of tanking + being level 50 and geared, there are no shields.
I’m working on a theoretical mitigation build with warrior. VIT is just handed to the MRD/WAR like its free candy, as a very very LONG time raid healer I’ve always hated HP tanks because the damage they take is massive and always results in over healing or spam healing. Now I do understand and agree with the need of high HP for the MRD/WAR I’m not disputing that, it does need to be high. But I believe the MRD/WAR can get their HP reasonably high while still building heavily in to DEX for parry/evasion. The concept is like the old WoW druid avoidance tank. His HP was ridiculously high and the bastard could parry and dodge like no other. The old school warrior tank was pure block and armor mitigation. I kind of see this in FFxiv with the paladin and warrior job differences. The paladin wants to mitigate where as most warriors are just soaking all that damage with a huge HP pool. But when you’re running progression content reducing the damage you take has always made healing the tank an easier task. I know this because I am an end-game raid healer spanning more MMOs than I care to count.
Now admittedly I am not tank, I just decided when I started playing FFxiv that I wanted to change things up and I stopped healing for once in my entire MMO life. So I’m not saying I’ve figured out an amazing concept build. I’m just saying I want to test this out and see if I can come up with a more viable option, because my first character was a scholar and I got him to about level 40 before the urge to just stop healing hit me and the difference in healing for warriors and paladins was night and day. Warriors need CONSTANT attention which was just plain annoying for a scholar healer. I’m certain there is a better way to build the warrior so that he isn’t losing such a huge chunk of his health every single time he gets hit.
Now of course raid healing is much much MUCH different from PUG dungeon healing. But my thought process still stands, parry is a beautiful thing in this game working similarly to the way block did in WoW. When damage comes in from an enemy it provokes a roll check to first be dodged entirely. If the attacks makes it through the dodge chance then another roll check to be parried is then initiated to shave off some of the damage, if parried then move to defense mitigation with the remainder of damage if not parried then all damage moves to mitigation. DEX is stacking all of those defenses with just one stat! At the very least it warrants being tried and tested before being completely dismissed. And I don’t mean build a MRD/WAR to level 30 and use your bonus attribute points to allocate to DEX and then decide it sucks… It needs to be thoroughly tested and weighed against raw HP tanks soaking damage.
There needs to be a line drawn between VIT and DEX for this to work to finesse a build to balance between HP and avoidance/mitigation. Perhaps blindly throwing all available stats in to DEX would be catastrophic. I’ll post later with what I find. It will take me a while to do this however since I’m currently having fun with Dragoon. This game gives me such bad ADD :D
Jaster, your theory of stacking dex is indeed, at least with simple calculation, catastrophic as you say. Strength, while not increasing avoidance, does still help with overall “survivability’ thru parry value, lifesteal and shield generation. TBH while there are many nice discussions we can have with your post, I truly feel as it is tuned now, there’s no point trying to make warrior a pseudo pally thru dex /parry rate. Let them do what they do, tank adds.
where do you see mar need hp to do more damage…?
They “Scale” off HP with defiance and such. and through Damage, with shields and lifesteal. HP does not translate directly to damage.
It is true that HP modifies some dmg however Jaster’s point is very very valid and in way is his thought process “Catastrophic”. As gear scales and encounters occur, Warriors will need to adjust values with Dex and STR, (Parry Rating & Parry Value).
Anytime a tank can mitigate dmg ESP. Spike dmg. this helps the healer have a steady heal rotation without OOMing and makes for better over-all survivability.
Remember a tank does not do his job alone but is dependent on a solid healer.
HP/VIT does not increase damage anymore. It used to back in 1.0. There are many theories floating around for what DEX and STR tiers you need to reach but in my opinion, its too much of a hassle to get. You need to reach about 405 STR and 246 DEX. I also think that crafted gear is directly inferior to ilvl 90 gear in some aspects.
This also makes me wonder what the train of thinking was by the devs. If they wanted tanks to parry often, why not give them Keen Flurry?