Frontline Healer: Vitality or Piety?

So lately I have been doing PvP as a sch, since there is a serious lack of healers(for obvious reasons). But someone has to do it? Instead of complaining about not having a healer.

My question is which type of build works better?

Currently I have my sch specialized in vitality, in both bonus attributes and accessories. I have high survivability, being able to survive Braver on several occasions, but its difficult to actually heal my party. The enemy just ignores me when they can't kill me, and goes after the dps first.

On the flip side, I have no problems keeping my allies alive with a piety build... but I die easily.

Edit: I meant mind, I know piety gives MP lol.

Vitality build.

It works wonders for me as a WHM. For you as a SCH, I'm sure it'll be even easier. Typically speaking, I'd say that out of 20 skirmishes, I run out of MP once (that is: I run out of MP and none of my MP restore cooldowns are up.) We're talking cases where the teams are locked in battle for over 2 minutes and it's Cure IIs and Medicas IIs all day long. If you run out of MP in those situations, nobody can blame you.

For a healer, you should use tank accessories. Your own life is much more worth then any other class in your group. So its better to let an DPS/Tank die first (Well that sounds a bit silly^^).

As a whitemage, i would not use my upgrade points for even more attribute buffs, because it makes more sense to upgrade the skills before everything else. I dont know wich skills a scholar does have in pvp so i cant really judge on that.

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Originally Posted by Sanghelios

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All of my PvP points are focused on skills, what I meant by bonus attributes is the +30 points you can choose on any stat.

So is there really nothing I can do when a dps is getting focused? My heals are weak and lustrate can only sustain their health; it does not break-even the damage dealt by a full party.

Ah, didnt understand you then. Yeah, the 30 points can be spend on vit aswell. For me, i didnt noticed an major drop of my healing power with tank acc. Besides that, there is actually nothing you can do if a dps gets focused from the whole group. His health can drop down like crazy and its already hard to heal him up if you have 3 healers in your group. But as i said, you are not loosing that much healing power as you might think of. If you cant hold him up with tank gear, you werent able to hold him up with healer gear anyway. He might just lived one second longer.

But what you can do is just ask your group for 3 healer if you are in A/C. Best setup is normally 1 Tank, 3 Healer (Try to avoid only Whitemages as healer in your group after 2.4, because Medica 2 and Regen doesnt stack anymore) and 4 DPS for A/C and 1/2/5 for B. As you noticed, the overall problem is that most group are running around with one or no healer at all, wich only leads to no-flags and free kills. This solo healing or even double healing just makes your job even harder. If you get focused, you can only hope that the other healer can help you. With 3 healers its by far better.

But you can force your group to switch to healer some kind of. Start casting stoneskin and protect (Wich doesnt work in pvp anyway) after there are only 30-40 seconds left for the gate to open. I did it already multiple times and i did see some people are getting nervous and switching to healer.

Title should be 'Vitality or Mind?

I'm almost always in my Mind set (capped determination and spell speed) as WHM for higher heals/regen ticks and I just kite/use walls when I need to. I sometimes switch to VIT after the 2nd or 3rd 'rush' because I know the enemy team has a Limit Break ready to go. Piety is pretty useless...I never run out of MP thanks to Shroud and Mana Draw.

If you have a second healer who has 5k+ hp you can go with other stats. If you get the privilege of 3 healer set that is also ok. If its just 2 of you and the other guy isn't even at 4k go all vit. Also if you have over 5k in hp you can make a bunch of dps look silly pounding you.

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Originally Posted by Stormrider

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Yeah that seems to be working for me so far. As I said in OP, as long as stoneskin and/or adlo is up I can survive LB1. Lustrate is very powerful when used on myself and I can pretty much negate any burst damage from an enemy. But when they just zerg the DPS, there isn't much I can do, but I realize that is because I am the only healer. I just try to have swiftcast reserved for a res, and if they zerg down another dps I'm forced to run away because 2 DPS dead means enemy healers are not dieing. Solo healing is very frustrating in the aspect that I cannot save my teammate from a full-on attack; it's like why am I even rolling a healer?

I think Lustrate is independent of your own stats as it restores a certain percentage of targets HP? Mind is the attribute that counts towards healing vs Piety like mentioned above- Piety impacts MP which SCH's barely run out of. I use accessories with VIT and DET or CRIT as SCH and found that swapping back to healing accessories had a reduction to healing potency that was less impactful than giving up all that extra HP. I can't even count the times I went into Attunement with < 500 HP left when it came back off cooldown, but that extra 10 secs of frustrating the 8 people trying to kill me (while half my party was who knows where trying to pad their personal kill count) was worth it.

Also, are you using Rouse when off cooldown in battle, and making sure fairy doesn't have status ailments preventing healing effectiveness? And spamming Succor doesn't heal much either, if you've just put up the AOE galvanize shield that way, doing it again right is essentially just a weak AOE heal. Try testing out the different healing spells on yourself somewhere in PVE and you can see the relative amounts of HP they restore.