Healers and Spell Speed/Piety

Had a minor epiphany on another use for using spell speed. Summed up, faster casting means a better chance of getting off a spell before being forced to move out of an aoe instead of stopping a cast early. Can give the possibility of getting off that one extra heal if it is needed.

I remember having this discussion in the balance at some point. I don't know if things have changed since but what came from it was that, in a vacuum, Spell speed was one of the (the?) better stats you could pile up as healer for DPS. The catch being MP usage and also translating this to real world situations where dps downtime due to mechanics may be inevitable and really harm your spell speed build (imagine your extra spell speed getting you 90% of a gcd ahead and then the boss goes untargetable, you lost most of your advantage). Spell speed also comes with caveats in that not every point is equal and there are certain caps that need to be met.
Also spell speed doesn't do much for your healing, unlike crit.

Generally speaking if you're going for a green dps build you're more likely to go crit/DH because it's more flexible and works well regardless of the encounter.

For WHM, with their good MP management tools and higher potencies it does become more viable to go spell speed than it is for other healers.

My healer isn't 80 yet, but I've been seeing lvl 80 healer stack piety materia. Why is that? I don't think mp regen is really an issue.

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Originally Posted by Magnedeus

My healer isn't 80 yet, but I've been seeing lvl 80 healer stack piety materia. Why is that? I don't think mp regen is really an issue.

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For Whm and Sch mp isn't an issue unless you or your party start messing things up a fair amount, Ast however lost its secondary mp restore and solely relies around Lucid dreaming and ethers for mp, so a death in the group is more costly to Ast than whm or sch is, Piety helps mitigate this slightly for Ast so it is beneficial to stack it if you need to.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Magnedeus

My healer isn't 80 yet, but I've been seeing lvl 80 healer stack piety materia. Why is that? I don't think mp regen is really an issue.

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Piety is great to have for progression. Currently a fair amount of groups are running TEA and have relatively high piety builds for that (2k-ish piety give or take some depending on your class).