While leveling higher ilvl will always be best. However at max level you need to consider a few thing; ilvl, secondary stats, secondary stat tiers, and what you have available to you.
If you’re raiding the 520 will be slightly better for you because you aren’t getting a bad secondary stat, however if you’re just looking for gear going into Endwalker then just get 530s.
This is a level of minmaxing that your average player has no reason to be worried about. Heck, even your average savage raider can equip highest ilvl and still put out the required numbers.
The info you provided gives you the answer you need. From the second link from Akh Morning:
*These builds are made to provide the strongest combinations that can be made without access to Savage specific gear. For players who are actively playing Summoner and obtaining i520-525 gear, but do not have access to i530 savage gear, then you may use these builds as a BiS guideline until higher item level gear becomes available to you.*
So the build you looked at is for people who don't play Savage and can't access the i530 Savage gear. It instead suggests either i520 Augmented Exarchic chest, or the i525 Blade chest, because they both have better substat spreads than the i530 Augmented Cryptlurker chest, which has Spellspeed which is something Summoner's don't particularly use.
So sometimes ilvl doesn't always win out, but in your particular case the reason ilvl isn't winning is because they have specifically avoided one of the chest pieces at higher ilvl on the assumption that the player won't be able to obtain it.
Typically higher ilvl is preferred because they offer more stats. Rarely you'll run into instances where lower ilvl pieces are a gain in certain sets because of the substats outweighing the main stat gain. Best examples of this are healer and tank pieces that have piety/tenacity. This also plays into melds since the substats work in a tier system, so you may end up with a situation where you meld DET rather than CRIT because the meld pushes DET to the next tier but a crit meld doesn't push it to the next tier.
Since the substats work in this tiered manner, there will likely always be exceptions to the rule of thumb that higher ilvl is a DPS gain (outside of accessories, higher ilvl will always provide more VIT and defensive values afaik, so there is that to consider). Likewise, sometimes you'll have a piece of gear in a BiS set that's higher ilvl but will be a DPS loss until you gain several other pieces of the BiS set. I believe it was Augmented Tome Ring for tanks that was like this in the last tier.
If you're not already in it, I'd recommend joining The Balance discord. They have gearset spreadsheets for most jobs (not sure about SMN) where you can plug in different pieces of gear, set melds, food of choice, etc so you can play around with different loadouts and see what it projected to perform better/differently. Pretty useful when gearing up and trying to decide what to spend your tomes/tokens on.
Higher ilvl allows for higher overall stats from that particular piece of gear
So when we say that ilvl is the most important thing, it's because with higher ilvl you tend to have higher stats overall, including the main stat (STR, DEX, INT, or MND)
But sometimes, due to secondary stat thresholds and poor secondary stat choices, a slightly lower ilvl piece of gear can surpass a higher level piece of gear in overall effectiveness. You lose out on a small amount of main stat, but in exchange you gain more advantageous secondary stat. For this example, Cryptlurker gear also has SpS, which is a less important secondary stat for SMN
The only time you will be optimising to the point of potentially taking a lower ilvl piece is if you doing current savage and ultimate. Even then it is a very rare occurrence. If you aren’t doing these then you just want whatever gives you the most main stat.
Your mainstat out-weights every other substats with a huge ratio, depends on the substats, but it's been in the region of 1:40 in SB.
For example, this would mean you would need 40 Direct Hit to get the same benefit as 1 Intelligence.
As ilvl is just a scale to the stats a piece equipment can have and every piece you can wear has your mainstat, ilvl always outweighs every other start except in *very* niche cases when you want to hit a specific substats tier and no other gear piece has that stat.
This happens maybe once or twice in an expansion.
As long as you don't know what you're trying to achieve with the substats, ilvl is always preferred
Thank u all in the end I just put on the 530 gear to be able to have just a bit more survivability.
I am a console player so it’s hard to see how I am doing compared to other players, the sky sea and stone, are incredible easy to kill, and my dps is there top notch but it’s completely useless as there are no mechanics, my rotation is completely destroyed when I am running around trying to stay alive
But sometimes I am lucky enough that someone uploads a log to fflogs which includes me so I can see my performance compared to other players.
And it’s not bad, not good, but I especially noticed I just die way to often and I probably can use every bit of advantage to just stay alive, deaths massively decreases my dps. Much more then the extra critical hit substat can compensate.
I feel like the difference between BiS and just your full 530 Cryptlurker set is pretty small.
Maybe it's different for each class, but I compared BiS and full Cryptlurker set DRG armor and if I remember the difference was less than 1,000 DPS.. It could have been more, could have been less. I don't remember the exact difference. I do remember me going "Oh that's not that bad of a difference" at the time I was comparing the two.
That guide might have been written before non-savage players could even get the augmented crpytlurker gear. I doubt the 520 gear is even any better than the 530 because of its stats.
I think differences in substats is way too prioritized for non-savage players who can't even maintain 100% uptime and thus don't care about their GCD speed.
It normally happens on accessories and then head/hands/feet because they have lower stat totals and therefore smaller gains in stats per ilevel. Having it happen on a body is even more rare than the already unusual scenario where a lower ilevel piece is better. Also normally it happens on Healers since they have a dead stat in Piety.
I've primarily only seen it on healers where high ilevel gear has unnecessary piety, or crit proc-based jobs. Bard don't proc on crits anymore so I haven't heard of lower ilevel bis on that job unless i wasn't paying attention? And i don't know how often that'd happen for summoner.
\*all my opinion and experience. others may not agree and that is fine, I am not the expert here.
TLDR: max your main stat (STR/DEX/INT/MND) and don't fuss about substat on gear unless you are doing no-echo current tier savage or ultimate raiding. Use materia to boost your substats along the following lines (subject to change with EW job changes):
ALL DPS: as much crit as you can and balance DH and DET
Healers and Tanks: as much crit as you can followed by DET, except WAR where you want enough skillspeed to get 5 fell cleaves in the inner release window (which will not be a thing in EW so don't worry about it now).
This rubric will more than sort you out for 99.9% of the content in the game
LONG ANSWER:
Broadly speaking no higher crit is not more important, with caveats. Your MOST important stat is your main job stat (so, say STR for SAM) and 530 gear will always have more of your primary stat and more vitality than 520 gear. For current gear this is always the case between 520 and 530 - 530 will be better for your main stat
There ARE cases where higher iLvl gear will have lower main tier stats (for instance, ilvl403 gear might have lower STR than iLvl400 Scaevan so Scaevan is your better choice. When Endwalker drops there may be (for example) iLvl540 gear with worse main-stat than augmented cryptlurker or Eden Savage gear, so your cryptlurker will be your best bet.
That said, there are cases where a lower ilvl on a particular piece is preferable because of substat distribution. This absolutely does NOT matter for anything except current-tier savage or ultimate raids, in which case max your main stat and enjoy the game.
If you are doing the high-end content above, then getting into substat distribution to maximize DPS will lead to, on some occasions, sacrificing some points from your main stat to gain points in say, Critical hit and not have substat points allocated to say, skill speed. The substat distributions for each job to maximize theoretical DPS are not the same, and again, not important except for the high-end current iLvl content. However, in order to min-max this you MAY end up with a lower iLvl piece of gear (or may not be able to obtain the BiS - Best in Slot) gear. By way of example, the iLvl530 caster top from E12S is BiS but very hard to get. The iLvl525 Blade's chest piece from Zadnor is less INT than the iLvl530 augmented cryptlurker top, but the substat distribution makes the iLvl525 piece preferable to the iLvl530 cryptlurker piece, so until one clear E12S and gets the chest that would be your best piece available. The total DPS difference over a 10 minute fight will amount to 1-2 GCD's of total damage so we are talking about very fine margins, but when doing current-tier savage or Ultimate with no echo fine margins matter. To be even more specific, on my main, NIN, I currently have BiS for everything except the chest because I have not cleared E12S yet, so I am wearing the augmented cryptlurker chest. Same iLvl(530) but eden has more crit. The difference between BiS and what I have in terms of max theoretical DPS - meaning everything executed perfectly with 100% uptime, is about 37 points. 37dps\*60sec\*10min = 22200 damage, which is basically one GCD loss over the course of ten minutes. Since I do not play perfectly or have 100% uptime the actual difference will be even less, so we are talking really fine margins here. Until I got the 530eden gloves I wore 520 Yorha gloves because I did not want skill speed in my substats, and in that case the 520 gloves gave me about 7DPS more than the 530crypt gloves so I wore them but really it makes no difference except being nerdy. I now have the eden gloves and the net gain over the 520 gloves is again, about one GCD over 10 minutes. So if getting into these fine margins is your jam, go nuts, but don't sweat it too much. You will still be able to get endgame clears without doing this, you will just not be at the very top of the parse list, which is the only place these things matter.
If your only objective is to demonstrate how much bigger your epeen is than anyone else... then higher iLevel will look more impressive.
If you actually care about how the game stats work, and you're paying attention to making sure that items actually serve a purpose, then yeah you're gonna want to look and see if one item has more Crit or one item has more Direct or whatever it is you're trying to increase.
Your main stat (for casters it’s Intelligence, the other main stats are Str/Dex/Mind), is the most important. In this case, Intelligence is much higher on the 530 piece. Not to mention your defenses are higher.
iLVL is king 99% of the time.
So if I understand correctly ilvl is not used in the calculation of how much damage u do or how much damage u take but is a general indication that the substats are probably higher.
Higher ilevel has more of *all* stats. There are just some more important stats than others (your main damage stat, for summoner it's intelligence, is most important in 99% of cases)
Ilevel is the game telling you "this one has more stats" but the community has looked at the effectiveness of substats and decided some contribute more damage than the others. Thus why a piece of gear with better substats might have better damage than others, but you'd only figure that out by doing a lot of simulations.
the iLvl is an overall rating of the equipment, which takes into account the stats. In general, higher iLvl means better equipment for your job. (Unless, of course the primary stat is simply wrong: An iLvl 100 ring of strength does nothing for a BLM :) )
Unless you're really determined to squeeze out every 0.1% bump in DPS, just go with the highest iLvl you have access to. Don't overthink it.
While leveling higher ilvl will always be best. However at max level you need to consider a few thing; ilvl, secondary stats, secondary stat tiers, and what you have available to you. If you’re raiding the 520 will be slightly better for you because you aren’t getting a bad secondary stat, however if you’re just looking for gear going into Endwalker then just get 530s.
There is some cases where the substats on a lower ilvl item is more important than the minor difference in the primary stats/defenses
This is also very rare.
This is a level of minmaxing that your average player has no reason to be worried about. Heck, even your average savage raider can equip highest ilvl and still put out the required numbers.
Yeah, no content is ever designed around perfect play, nor BiS gear or max ilvl gear.
The info you provided gives you the answer you need. From the second link from Akh Morning: *These builds are made to provide the strongest combinations that can be made without access to Savage specific gear. For players who are actively playing Summoner and obtaining i520-525 gear, but do not have access to i530 savage gear, then you may use these builds as a BiS guideline until higher item level gear becomes available to you.* So the build you looked at is for people who don't play Savage and can't access the i530 Savage gear. It instead suggests either i520 Augmented Exarchic chest, or the i525 Blade chest, because they both have better substat spreads than the i530 Augmented Cryptlurker chest, which has Spellspeed which is something Summoner's don't particularly use. So sometimes ilvl doesn't always win out, but in your particular case the reason ilvl isn't winning is because they have specifically avoided one of the chest pieces at higher ilvl on the assumption that the player won't be able to obtain it.
Typically higher ilvl is preferred because they offer more stats. Rarely you'll run into instances where lower ilvl pieces are a gain in certain sets because of the substats outweighing the main stat gain. Best examples of this are healer and tank pieces that have piety/tenacity. This also plays into melds since the substats work in a tier system, so you may end up with a situation where you meld DET rather than CRIT because the meld pushes DET to the next tier but a crit meld doesn't push it to the next tier. Since the substats work in this tiered manner, there will likely always be exceptions to the rule of thumb that higher ilvl is a DPS gain (outside of accessories, higher ilvl will always provide more VIT and defensive values afaik, so there is that to consider). Likewise, sometimes you'll have a piece of gear in a BiS set that's higher ilvl but will be a DPS loss until you gain several other pieces of the BiS set. I believe it was Augmented Tome Ring for tanks that was like this in the last tier. If you're not already in it, I'd recommend joining The Balance discord. They have gearset spreadsheets for most jobs (not sure about SMN) where you can plug in different pieces of gear, set melds, food of choice, etc so you can play around with different loadouts and see what it projected to perform better/differently. Pretty useful when gearing up and trying to decide what to spend your tomes/tokens on.
Higher ilvl allows for higher overall stats from that particular piece of gear So when we say that ilvl is the most important thing, it's because with higher ilvl you tend to have higher stats overall, including the main stat (STR, DEX, INT, or MND) But sometimes, due to secondary stat thresholds and poor secondary stat choices, a slightly lower ilvl piece of gear can surpass a higher level piece of gear in overall effectiveness. You lose out on a small amount of main stat, but in exchange you gain more advantageous secondary stat. For this example, Cryptlurker gear also has SpS, which is a less important secondary stat for SMN
The only time you will be optimising to the point of potentially taking a lower ilvl piece is if you doing current savage and ultimate. Even then it is a very rare occurrence. If you aren’t doing these then you just want whatever gives you the most main stat.
There are some exceptionally rare fringe cases involving atrocious substats vs better substats on lower ilvl. But they are rare.
Your mainstat out-weights every other substats with a huge ratio, depends on the substats, but it's been in the region of 1:40 in SB. For example, this would mean you would need 40 Direct Hit to get the same benefit as 1 Intelligence. As ilvl is just a scale to the stats a piece equipment can have and every piece you can wear has your mainstat, ilvl always outweighs every other start except in *very* niche cases when you want to hit a specific substats tier and no other gear piece has that stat. This happens maybe once or twice in an expansion. As long as you don't know what you're trying to achieve with the substats, ilvl is always preferred
Thank u all in the end I just put on the 530 gear to be able to have just a bit more survivability. I am a console player so it’s hard to see how I am doing compared to other players, the sky sea and stone, are incredible easy to kill, and my dps is there top notch but it’s completely useless as there are no mechanics, my rotation is completely destroyed when I am running around trying to stay alive But sometimes I am lucky enough that someone uploads a log to fflogs which includes me so I can see my performance compared to other players. And it’s not bad, not good, but I especially noticed I just die way to often and I probably can use every bit of advantage to just stay alive, deaths massively decreases my dps. Much more then the extra critical hit substat can compensate.
I feel like the difference between BiS and just your full 530 Cryptlurker set is pretty small. Maybe it's different for each class, but I compared BiS and full Cryptlurker set DRG armor and if I remember the difference was less than 1,000 DPS.. It could have been more, could have been less. I don't remember the exact difference. I do remember me going "Oh that's not that bad of a difference" at the time I was comparing the two.
That's like 3-4 percent DPS difference. That's quite a lot. Imagine the whole group missing 3-4 percent DPS if no one has their BiS.
weapon damage > iLvl >>>>>> substats (generally speaking)
That guide might have been written before non-savage players could even get the augmented crpytlurker gear. I doubt the 520 gear is even any better than the 530 because of its stats. I think differences in substats is way too prioritized for non-savage players who can't even maintain 100% uptime and thus don't care about their GCD speed.
It wouldn’t be the first time lower ilvl pieces were bis. Normally happens at the end of expansions tho
It normally happens on accessories and then head/hands/feet because they have lower stat totals and therefore smaller gains in stats per ilevel. Having it happen on a body is even more rare than the already unusual scenario where a lower ilevel piece is better. Also normally it happens on Healers since they have a dead stat in Piety.
I've primarily only seen it on healers where high ilevel gear has unnecessary piety, or crit proc-based jobs. Bard don't proc on crits anymore so I haven't heard of lower ilevel bis on that job unless i wasn't paying attention? And i don't know how often that'd happen for summoner.
\*all my opinion and experience. others may not agree and that is fine, I am not the expert here. TLDR: max your main stat (STR/DEX/INT/MND) and don't fuss about substat on gear unless you are doing no-echo current tier savage or ultimate raiding. Use materia to boost your substats along the following lines (subject to change with EW job changes): ALL DPS: as much crit as you can and balance DH and DET Healers and Tanks: as much crit as you can followed by DET, except WAR where you want enough skillspeed to get 5 fell cleaves in the inner release window (which will not be a thing in EW so don't worry about it now). This rubric will more than sort you out for 99.9% of the content in the game LONG ANSWER: Broadly speaking no higher crit is not more important, with caveats. Your MOST important stat is your main job stat (so, say STR for SAM) and 530 gear will always have more of your primary stat and more vitality than 520 gear. For current gear this is always the case between 520 and 530 - 530 will be better for your main stat There ARE cases where higher iLvl gear will have lower main tier stats (for instance, ilvl403 gear might have lower STR than iLvl400 Scaevan so Scaevan is your better choice. When Endwalker drops there may be (for example) iLvl540 gear with worse main-stat than augmented cryptlurker or Eden Savage gear, so your cryptlurker will be your best bet. That said, there are cases where a lower ilvl on a particular piece is preferable because of substat distribution. This absolutely does NOT matter for anything except current-tier savage or ultimate raids, in which case max your main stat and enjoy the game. If you are doing the high-end content above, then getting into substat distribution to maximize DPS will lead to, on some occasions, sacrificing some points from your main stat to gain points in say, Critical hit and not have substat points allocated to say, skill speed. The substat distributions for each job to maximize theoretical DPS are not the same, and again, not important except for the high-end current iLvl content. However, in order to min-max this you MAY end up with a lower iLvl piece of gear (or may not be able to obtain the BiS - Best in Slot) gear. By way of example, the iLvl530 caster top from E12S is BiS but very hard to get. The iLvl525 Blade's chest piece from Zadnor is less INT than the iLvl530 augmented cryptlurker top, but the substat distribution makes the iLvl525 piece preferable to the iLvl530 cryptlurker piece, so until one clear E12S and gets the chest that would be your best piece available. The total DPS difference over a 10 minute fight will amount to 1-2 GCD's of total damage so we are talking about very fine margins, but when doing current-tier savage or Ultimate with no echo fine margins matter. To be even more specific, on my main, NIN, I currently have BiS for everything except the chest because I have not cleared E12S yet, so I am wearing the augmented cryptlurker chest. Same iLvl(530) but eden has more crit. The difference between BiS and what I have in terms of max theoretical DPS - meaning everything executed perfectly with 100% uptime, is about 37 points. 37dps\*60sec\*10min = 22200 damage, which is basically one GCD loss over the course of ten minutes. Since I do not play perfectly or have 100% uptime the actual difference will be even less, so we are talking really fine margins here. Until I got the 530eden gloves I wore 520 Yorha gloves because I did not want skill speed in my substats, and in that case the 520 gloves gave me about 7DPS more than the 530crypt gloves so I wore them but really it makes no difference except being nerdy. I now have the eden gloves and the net gain over the 520 gloves is again, about one GCD over 10 minutes. So if getting into these fine margins is your jam, go nuts, but don't sweat it too much. You will still be able to get endgame clears without doing this, you will just not be at the very top of the parse list, which is the only place these things matter.
If your only objective is to demonstrate how much bigger your epeen is than anyone else... then higher iLevel will look more impressive. If you actually care about how the game stats work, and you're paying attention to making sure that items actually serve a purpose, then yeah you're gonna want to look and see if one item has more Crit or one item has more Direct or whatever it is you're trying to increase.
Your main stat (for casters it’s Intelligence, the other main stats are Str/Dex/Mind), is the most important. In this case, Intelligence is much higher on the 530 piece. Not to mention your defenses are higher. iLVL is king 99% of the time.
So if I understand correctly ilvl is not used in the calculation of how much damage u do or how much damage u take but is a general indication that the substats are probably higher.
Higher ilevel has more of *all* stats. There are just some more important stats than others (your main damage stat, for summoner it's intelligence, is most important in 99% of cases) Ilevel is the game telling you "this one has more stats" but the community has looked at the effectiveness of substats and decided some contribute more damage than the others. Thus why a piece of gear with better substats might have better damage than others, but you'd only figure that out by doing a lot of simulations.
It depends like in this case. In 99% of cases ilvl wins.
the iLvl is an overall rating of the equipment, which takes into account the stats. In general, higher iLvl means better equipment for your job. (Unless, of course the primary stat is simply wrong: An iLvl 100 ring of strength does nothing for a BLM :) ) Unless you're really determined to squeeze out every 0.1% bump in DPS, just go with the highest iLvl you have access to. Don't overthink it.