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So I've been learning about being more effective with my stats with blm and the like. And I started thinking about how much crit and det I should have. Then I got concerned about how much spell speed and piety I should have as a healer.
I'm worried that if I pick my gear based on crit and det I'll accidentally make myself ineffective due to too little spell speed and and piety.
Depends on the healer.
For the 3 healers you'll prioritize Crit so you're fine there.
Det is good on secondary stat.
It changes here :
SCH doesn't need Spell Speed, and not so much piety, so you can even meld Direct Hit.
AST needs a bit more piety because its MP economy is the more delicate. Find the Max MP you're more comfortable with. No need of spell speed either.
WHM does not need much piety (it has good MP economy), and can do with Spell Speed, being a Regen healer and the slowest casting healer. But you can just avoid SpS and be fine too.
Hope this helped :)
Adding to the SCH. SCH is actually a piety dependent healer. This will depend on what your level is and what you enjoy playing the most. Dungeons? raids? in a static? pugs? you have refresh? solo heal? etc..
The rule of thumb is never to go piety (keep some piety gear you come across though) and then just add piety when you feel like MP management is an issue.
Also, and the following is true for all healers. The difference between melding Det and DH is usually about a 0.4% dps loss and 4% heal gain for Det melders (opposite for DH melders). Not sure the +0.4% dps gain from melding DH is worth it unless you're already parsing really high.
Also I believe you can run into MP issues with WHM as well. There are definitely piety dependent BiS sets out there for WHM.
In general when it comes to healing and optimizing sets and play-style the rule is this:
Slight modifications to sets for piety will usually fall within a fraction of a % of each other ( as far as dps potential goes). So negligible. The most important factor towards your dps and optimizing it is your performance as a player, your co-healer's performance and class, your party's performance, and your party composition.
The three healers are not created equally in stats and have different base CHR, PIE, DHR, DET, HP/MP, etc. This plays the biggest influence in regards to the weapons each healer uses, as they tend to provide different stat bonuses along with meld restrictions. Keep in mind that you can increase CHR and DHR to the nines, but it is still RNG for them to actually trigger. Stats like PIE, VIT, DET build on the base and are not reliant on RNG.
The issue with the latter melds though is that they will not add much if anything to your overall DPS. However, MP is your lifeblood, and you also need to stay alive. Other than one-shots, healers are often done in when their HP is too low to survive unavoidable damage, and this happens a lot when they are learning a fight. They are also crippled if the fight goes on longer than their resources will allow. Again, this is something that happens due to inexperience not only from them, but possibly their teammates as well.
So those PIE/VIT/DET builds are VERY helpful when learning a fight. After you are comfortable and can do it standing on your head, go all out CHR/DHR where they are allowed. Take advantage of materia removal if you have the means to easily reacquire lost materia, which you should if you care about optimization.
Spell speed is a stat that becomes more negligible the more proactive the healer is, and raid damage is very predictable. This is another training wheel stat for when you are learning a fight because the overall benefit from CHR/DHR builds will be greater in terms of your overall DPS and clear times so long as you can actually optimize your abilities. If you cannot, then you might be better off with builds that are not reliant on a RNG since in order to reduce the RNG factor, you MUST optimize.
As a WHM I focus on Crit > Det > SSpeed. In short, the only time I meld speed is when there's no slot for the other two, which is rare. Given 99% of content is extremely telegraphed and pre-casting isn't exactly difficult due to the long cast-times of enemy abilities, focusing on Spell Speed would only be a benefit in moments where you're on the back foot for some sporadic reason, and even in those moments most Healers have some sort of backup tool to remedy most of it, typically off the GCD, so having spell-speed is of little benefit in any half-decent group. Having said that, the only other beneficial stat would be Piety, which is even more iffy.
Crit is beneficial for both healing and damage, even if the payoff is RNG. Det is a more consistent/flat benefit for damage so is always welcome. There's no need for Piety as most have an answer for MP, or run with groups that container refresh-capable classes.