Help me decide on gear please

[Ahmed]

Hello
I leeched my way up to level 90, only used WHM as a subjob so I'm kinda lost.
I don't want to buy gear that I would stop using after getting level 90.
Also, AF pieces..

What's worth getting? (other than AF3+2 cause I'm currently working on those, plus trials Staff)

(I don't have any gear for WHM, not even past AFs)

[Aleste]

It all depends on how serious you intend to take whitemage...

Generally you'd go:

Light staff, Nobles tunic, Blessed hands/legs/feet
AF3+1(2) head and legs
(Suryas +2), Augur Mitts (or serpentes hands/feet set), Orison cape/earring, medicine ring
AF3+1(2) body
Switch medicine ring for Roundel earring/ (Fylgia Torque+1 or augmented zenith pumps)

Then start on your situationally useful gear:

Additional refresh gear (owleyes, refresh hairpin, stearc subligar, moonshade earring)
Barspell enhancing gear (Relic pants)
Regen enhancing gear (Relic body)

And then start building gearsets (resting gear, enfeebling, enhancing, divine) that you find useful.

[Jerbob]

Agreement with Aleste's list here, especially on the Empyrean head and legs items - I think those are generally regarded to be the best pieces. If you're lucky with trophy augmentation you can try to get the elusive Refresh+1 Cure Potency+14% WHM/SMN body piece too. I'd like to put in a good word for Cure Clogs - they may be pricy and they're annoying to camp from Bonnacon in Uleguerand Range, but having lots of cure casting time reduction is always nice and I find these really noticable.

Depending on how far you want to take WHM, gearsets for all your magic skills (except healing, ironically) are definitely worthwhile. WHM isn't just about healing, and being able to land or fully strengthen these spells when no-one else has them is important.

Enhancing: Relic pantaloons, Blessed Briault or preferably Orison Bliaud +1/2, Enhancing Torque/earring and Beneficus club, all excellent for barspells. You need quite a lot of skill for small increases in potency, though. The Briault/Bliaud and Beneficus add MBD to barspells and are very good to have.

Enfeebling: Dark/Earth/Ice/Wind staves (preferably HQ) for landing Sleep/Slow/Paralyse/Silence reliably, AF body too if necessary. WHM doesn't have a high rank in Enfeebling Magic, but if there's no-one else to cast these then it's important for us to land stuff on resistant mobs. I see you have RDM90 in your signature so you probably are already fully aware of this!

Divine: AF legs, Augur's Jaseran (no skill but light magic accuracy and lots of MND), Apollo's Staff - all good for Repose.

It's also worthwhile having some haste gear for spells like flash, haste itself, esuna, raise and so on. The Blessed set is dripping with haste bonuses and other equipment like the Capricorn Staff can enhance this further. Most spells that benefit from haste don't have variable potency like Cure and enfeebles so conserve MP can be slotted in here too.

If you plan on playing outside of Abyssea, and depending on who you play with, I recommend putting some effort into making a max MP set and a really good hMP set. Be certain to swap out the MP gear for potency gear as you use up the "gear MP" and you could be looking at boosting your effective MP pool by 400-500MP. Even if you've not got capped cure potency in your max MP gear, you're getting FREE cures that you wouldn't otherwise have. That's relevant in situations where you're not getting much support. Maximising your MP recovered whilst healing is important when you're really busy and only going to get a tick of two of hMP at best. Like I said, though, this is somewhat irrelevant if you only intend on WHMing inside Abyssea.

Max MP: Blessed Briault/Pluviale, Healing/Dryad Staff, Bifrost/Serket rings, Zenith Mitts/Tide Gages, hairpins, Graiai Earrings etc. Swap it out when it's used up!

hMP: Dark Staff/Numen Staff, Mirror Tiara, Vita Cape, Eidolon Pendant, Avocat Pigaches, Austerity Belt, Nisse/Menhit Slacks etc, and each tick of gear refresh is approximately worth 4hMP.

At any rate, Aleste's list comes before mine in terms of general utility, but with WHM I think a lot of people forget any spell that isn't Cure, and it's important to fully consider all our spells.

[Babekeke]

Assuming that you actually capped everything on RDM, you still have gimped Healing magic and divine magic, so until you cap those, it doesn't really matter what you wear, you're still gimped.

[Quedari]

Assuming that you actually capped everything on RDM, you still have gimped Healing magic and divine magic, so until you cap those, it doesn't really matter what you wear, you're still gimped.

I spy an anti-leecher! If you aren't going to help him gear correctly, regardless of how he got to 90 and what his magic skill levels are, don't bother posting. I've seen some level 90s that I WISH would ask for gear help, and I remember pre-Abyssea level 75s that didn't know how to gear either. Asking for advice and then USING that advice say to me that this person wants to play their new job correctly, regardless of how they got 90. But this isn't a thread about leech/anti-leech, so back to the original subject.

Assuming you didn't leech RDM as well and you had capped RDM skills at 75, your healing shouldn't be all that bad and probably won't take too long to cap. If your divine is severely under cap, I recommend casting at least flash (and banishes, if time and mp permit) on every single mob you fight. Just keep in mind that when gearing for cure, cure potency+ will usually get you further than +mnd and +healing magic. Aleste and Jerbob covered pretty much everything else.

[Economizer]

Okay, first off, I know it isn't gear, but:

Assuming you didn't leech RDM as well and you had capped RDM skills at 75, your healing shouldn't be all that bad and probably won't take too long to cap. If your divine is severely under cap, I recommend casting at least flash (and banishes, if time and mp permit) on every single mob you fight.

Yeah, sure, you could focus on capping your skills. Alternatively, just level /SCH for a sub, use Light Arts, and then you won't have to focus on leveling your skills - you can do it in the background as you do things.

That said, you are a terrible White Mage if you don't work on Staff and Club. Ideally these should be capped, but they should both be at least high enough for access to every weapon skill. Quest your WSNM WS. You don't have to be a glorious melee White Mage, but you are gimp until you can use every non-H2H blunt WS.

For Easy to get Gear:

Okay, for gear, you'll mainly want three things - Cure Potency and Haste. You can also probably do builds for mACC, or certain magic skills and other stuff if you really desire, but Repose generally sticks if your skill is half decent, and if something is so hard to enfeeble that stacking Mind and Light Arts for B+ Enfeebling isn't working, you generally want a Red Mage or can't enfeeble it.

Even when curing I recommend wearing some Haste gear for recast timers - since White Mage doesn't have massive fast cast or recast reduction on their gear.

For Haste, a W turban, Blessed Hands, Pants, Boots, and a Swift Belt should get you 19% Haste. This isn't capped, but it does give you a massive reduction to recasts while being easy to obtain.

For curing in, you'll want to cap cure potency at 50% and then start stacking Mind. Mind rings and blessed gear is a good way to do this until you can get more of the AF3. A Noble's Tunic and a Light Staff will get you a long way, as will the 1% cure potency neck piece from getting your job emote.

You will want to cap out Cure Potency by getting your Noble's Tunic (10%) or the HQ or Augmented pieces (8-15%) AF3+2 hat (10%), the AF3 cape (3%), the AF3 earring (2%), Augur's Mitts (4%), a Surya's Staff +2 (22%, seriously, if you don't have this, you are just lazy). There are other, harder ways to get capped cure potency, mostly involving blowing a lot of gil, but unless you plan on using some of it for your Red Mage as well, it probably isn't worth blowing the gil on. I also recommend against the Serpentine set or Cure Clogs in most cases, because for much cheaper, you can just use the Blessed Pumps, and benefit from stronger cures and noticeably faster recasts without a quarter of the effort. Don't forget your AF3 pants - they are what make a White Mage the most MP efficient cure caster in the game currently.

For other sets, like Enhancing Magic, mACC, MAB, Refresh, Accuracy, STR/MND, it will take a bit more work to set out on, so unless you are serious about being a career White Mage, or you have hybrid job pieces for another job you play more, all of this is much more optional to being a decent White Mage. With a half decent Haste set and a capped cure potency set (even if you don't use the AF3 body) you will get great results.

[Kam]

Cure Cast time is most important for cures, Feet-15% are 600k and neck is 1M for 10%

[Economizer]

Cure Cast time is most important for cures, Feet-15% are 600k and neck is 1M for 10%

This is incredibly wrong. If it was true, then the 5% extra cast time reduction from Fast Cast (from subbing Red Mage) you get over Light Arts (from subbing Scholar) would be more important then the recast advantage you get from Light Arts, or the MP cost reduction you get from Light Arts.

Cure Potency, MP cost reduction, Mind, and recast reduction are all usually more important then cast time reduction gear, since cure spells take no more then 2.5 seconds to cast, you can merit 20% off this, AF3+2 pants can give 12% reduction and you can get 10-15% off this further by subbing either Scholar or Red Mage. Between all these you can get over 40% off your cast times, which is more then enough in most cases.

Most of the time, you have a bigger issue with waiting for your recast timers on Cure IV/V then you do with casting the spell itself, and there is a lot of gear you are better off prioritizing before you even think about getting expensive items like Cure Clogs. Anyone telling you to prioritize cure cast time over other stuff is probably trying to sell you the fifth set of Cure Clogs they have farmed this week.

[Alkimi]

Problem is with a good cure potency build there's really not much room for haste gear. You could probably sacrifice the MND on waist/feet and get up to 9% haste there but it would cost you a few gil (N.Sash/Blessed+1).

Always have haste on yourself (Something a lot of WHMs don't do for some reason) and you should be fine on recasts.

Cure casting time gear is always worth having though, I use Marduk body/AF3 neck/AF3 pants/cure clogs which gives me -67% cure casting time. Any more and I'd probably risk gear not being equipped properly mid-cast when the cure goes off. Your own reaction times probably matter more.

[Sevvy]

Big Thing not mentioned is create a macro where you can take advantage of Cure Clogs and Emp Feet +2. The Clogs only need to be on at the beginning of cast to get the benefit of -15% cure cast time and if you have the Emp Feet on at the end of cast for the MND bonuses.