N> Some math whizzes

[The Legendary Joe]

Long story short, I've been making a tanky priest for a while and was wondering, is there a point where if you don't have enough dex, Iara's 5% cast time reductions would be better than the 3 dex from zeroms?

Is cast time reduction like Iara's Multiplicative?

If so, the question would be how low would your dex have to be to make it worthwhile?

[Namine]

When you have exactly 90 total dex, including buffs and other gears but excluding that one single accessory slot, then Iara and Zerom do the same thing for cast time.

Iara is better than Zerom when your total dex (again, including buffs and other gears) is lower than 90. The moment your total dex is higher than 90, then Zerom is better.

I don't feel like typing out a page of calculations as proof, so you'll have to just trust my word on it.

EDIT: this is only true if you have no other cast reduction (or cast increase) gears like Robe of Cast. If you do, or if you have a 2nd Iara, this actually breaks apart... the equation will have 2 unknown variable (total dex excluding zerom, total cast reduction excluding Iara) and get exponentially complicated. So I did the easy case only.

[The Roger]

Im assuming that a tanky priest will have low dex, so i think Iara card is the way here.

[Namine]

The only priest build that make sense to me is ME for soloing. If you're mobbing enough stuff such that SW goes down too quickly and you won't pull off ME in time while SW is up, then you may end up with the high vit and below 90 dex situation. My own ME HP fits the criteria to use spiritual ring+Iara clip then swap to Phen clip once cast starts for a very mildly faster cast compare to my make-shift +2 dex clip...

[The Legendary Joe]

Im assuming that a tanky priest will have low dex, so i think Iara card is the way here.

I go off the assumption that the generic cookie cutter build of priest is Base 80 int/dex/vit. Nice Balance of Survivability, Heal power and Casting speed.

Outside of the oddball builds that delve into lesser used stats like str, luk and agi on priests, pretty much most of the used builds focus at least partly into dex int and vit. What kind of build it is dictates what stats you focus more on and which stats you sacrifice from. From my understanding, most ME priests for example sacrifice a lot of their vit to Focus on Dex and int, to get their ME off as fast as possible, and to get the Force of the Gods behind their ME.

My particular tanky-priest is Mostly Vit/Int with whatever's Leftover in dex, Utilizing Angelus on top of Assumptio, and higher heals due to int/meditatio. When Maxed out, the base dex will be stuck at 42. My main concern is I'm too used to playing ME priest and having reasonably fast cast, and it's assumptio/magnificat are annoyingly slow. Don't even have Swall unlocked yet, but I could think of situations where that slow cast would seriously hurt it's abilities.

[Keegan]

for my tanky priest i found a phen clip was helpful for times when you really need to get that skill off. But I do fine with my 75 dex for the most part. The one thing I find is my sp pool is a little small to support more then 3 or 4 others (although I dont have meditatio in my build)

[Plant]

My tank/lead HP build has enough for total 100 vit, 99 base dex and about ~40 int while rest into str.

Definitely a less popular variant of HP builds but I feel it's kinda good for high end dungeons where you focus on getting more skills off with high dex and low delay while trying to survive tanking mobs when leading the party. It's not a very good support priest though due to low max SP and low SP regen, even with maxed Meditatio. It's fine when you're supporting 2-3 people while leaving the rest to a back priest though.

I build my ME priest like how I build my HW. I feel that you don't have to worry about tanking mobs as ME HP if you have fast enough cast at 130+ dex, especially with low vit. Delay reduction helps too. I kited things like Celine Kimi around ME's AOE in the past but I guess Celine is considered an easy MVP since it doesn't status/instakill often. Faster SW+ME definitely helps with doing things like LoD, just need enough resist or getting gud with Numa/SW to survive Hell Judgements.

I can't handle sub-80 dex priests anymore after playing a lot with my high dex Priests though :x
I think things like sprint rings are still better for the overall cast time and delay reduction, unless you're mixing things like swapping accessories carded with iara/phen.

[Namine]

Same build here for FS HP, except I'm like 90 base dex instead of 99, but the 9 points of dex gets you like 20 points of int for more sp regen instead. The only cast time reliant spell is assumptio, which I find it acceptable to lose 9 dex but gain flexibility with sp regen in longer dungeons instead of only a slight improvement at the mvp stage.

Iara is definitely only usable by swapping with phen, and for purpose of priest, it's only good for spiritual ring combo cause it make sense for Iara to be in a clip anyway.

[Plant]

Sprint ring -> phen clip upon cast is still a worthy situational choice imo.

10% cast reduction in sprint ring vs 5% in iara card. Plus if you can kill mobs in one ME cast, you can switch back to sprint ring right before first tick of ME damage to have that reduced Heal/SW/ME downtime and then switch back to phen clip for ME damage.

But I can also see Iara clip being better if you need the double ME to kill since you don't need to swap away the clip for sprint ring as it reduces your damage output.

[The Roger]

Sprint ring -> phen clip upon cast is still a worthy situational choice imo.

but usually you are being attacked by something and your cast will be disrupted, if you doesnt time the swap perfectly =( I usually find way less stressing and more realiable to always wear a phen-like effect.