Like Piety for healers, Tenacity is a tank’s role specific statistic. You’ll gain it by equipping gear, or powering up pieces of gear with Tenacity Materia. You can see how much Tenacity a piece of gear offers you in the item’s window. All jobs in XIV have an optimal stat priority. These stat priorities are your way of knowing which stats are the most important for you – and there’s a ton of resources available to read into your job’s best options, so it’s well worth researching early on. Tenacity, despite being exclusive to tanks, is at the bottom of the list for all of them!
Is Tenacity Worth It?
Much like Piety, Tenacity is useful, but not really the best choice to focus on stat-wise. Tenacity is essentially a weaker version of Determination, a stat which increases damage and healing dealt with the added bonus of damage mitigation. Determination is available to all roles, and is generally pretty low down on the priority list for tanks. 25 points of Determination will increase DPS by 0.1%, and getting the same increase from Tenacity takes 33 points. These numbers might not sound like an awful lot at these small increments, but they do quickly add up. So why shouldn’t we focus on Tenacity? It’s not useless by any means, and taking less damage is always a good thing, right? Well, it’s basically because every time you pick Tenacity over something else, you’re sacrificing a stat that would improve your class in a more significant way. Tanks have plenty of ways to mitigate incoming damage through skills. These all have cooldowns (recharge time), but learning the encounter and knowing when exactly you should use these skills is a vital tanking practice anyway. By leaving Tenacity at the bottom of your stat priorities and stacking other stats, you’ll see a much more important boost to your damage output. XIV tends to be a very DPS-focused game. Both tank and healer roles will be expected to deal optimal damage alongside their other traditional responsibilities. I main Gunbreaker, and as such, my recommended priority is as follows: Strength > Skill Speed > Direct Hit > Determination > Tenacity. As you can see, Determination and Tenacity are both at the bottom of the list, meaning they should be passed over in favor of the skills before them. Strength, Skill Speed, and Direct Hit are all skills which impact my DPS output. Those stats simply count for more in encounters. While having some extra help with damage mitigation can be great, it’s just not significant enough to merit focusing on it. Determination and Tenacity should be considered useful bonuses more than anything. In my experience, it’s better to rely on your cooldowns to manage damage taken. When it comes to gear and Materia, mitigation should be the last stat you think about.
