Healer Melding 5.0: What materia should be used?

Over the years I have heard mixed answers to this question. Some say Crit, other swear by Pie. But with this new expansion and stats varying slightly, I find myself not really sure how to build my WHM/AST/SCH.

Any suggestions on what materia I should be using?

I would say the usual Crit/Det for SCH, and possibly WHM. AST, Piety seems to be looking pretty good considering their MP problems.

My rule of thumb would be piety until you're comfortable healing on that healer, and then either DET or CRIT. I'd lean more towards DET at this gear tier and aim more for Crit in future gear tiers when we can stack Crit out the wazoo. Crit is an exponential stat and gets better the more you stack it but you need quite a bit to get to the necessary breakpoint it needs to exceed DET's linear growth.

I've read that you'd want at least 2,500 Crit before thinking of doing a Crit build but I have no evidence to support that value.

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

I've read that you'd want at least 2,500 Crit before thinking of doing a Crit build but I have no evidence to support that value.

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I've also read this, and people say you need this amount by gear alone (without melds) before you want to start melding crit. So assuming current (or future) gear can you get to 2500 crit by itself, you'd want to slap in as much crit as you can afterwards, otherwise its best to meld Det.

I personally prefer a balance between Crit/Det myself and have found it helped me more so in the previous savage tiers. If I remember correctly, with food I had exactly 2200 Crit/Det, or maybe it was 2100. I also had enough piety for an 18k+ Mana pool. I main Astro so extra mana always helped me with my mana issues. I never felt that going overboard on Crit was the right idea (on AST anyway), because typically it meant losing more Det than I was willing to part with.

According to the stat weights though, if you wanted say a 25% crit rate, you would need roughly 3680 Crit (estimated 15.63% damage increase). Where as to get a 20% crit rate, you would need roughly 2475 Crit (estimated 9.35% damage increase).

Det works a little differently, with just 2500 det you're getting 10% increased damage/healing across the board. But let's say you wanted to boost that by 5%, you would need to get your det to 3750.

An even mix, I'd say would be roughly 2500 det with 2610 Crit for an estimated 10% damage increase from both. Of course you could favor Crit a bit more, hopefully to bring your crit rate up some, but for me that trade off would be how much would I lose from Det to make this more viable. If I lose over 2.5% damage/healing from Det to only gain maybe 1% of crit rate, considering I started at 20% crit rate, for me it wouldn't be worth it.

Now let's say you want to add piety to the mix to give yourself a bit more mana regen during combat. Looking at the numbers you need roughly 2540 to get an extra 100 mana out of your ticks. To get 125 extra mana back you would need 3090 piety, and to get 150 you would need 3640 piety. Needless to say, piety is probably the worst scaling stat we could ask for.

Of course all of this gets thrown out the window when you look at current gear options. Assuming you go with all 440 gear and your 450 weapon, melding nothing but Crit in every slot where possible and Det where it's not, you can reach a grand total of:

2222 Crit on Astro
2526 Crit on Scholar
2536 Crit on White Mage

(SCH and WHM weapon come with Crit, no food added)

Determination values are roughly in the 1500-1700 range, and Piety actually goes from 2300-2500. Again assuming you melded nothing but Crit where possible.

We'll see what options we get as we get into the next raid tier though.

Some SCHs mentioned piety didn't help them, but I'm curious about that myself. Does anyone else feel this way? I'm going to try it out soon, anyway.

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Originally Posted by RyuDragnier

I would say the usual Crit/Det for SCH, and possibly WHM. AST, Piety seems to be looking pretty good considering their MP problems.

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Eh, AST is going the crit/det build as well it seems. As long as my group doesn't ROYALLY mess up, I find very little issue with mana and keeping up DPS.

It's only when say, 3 people die at once and I have to rez them all does it hurt - but then it's really not the melding issue lol.

Piety only if you're really uncomfortable with the class. Just smash lucid on CD

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Originally Posted by Xiun

Eh, AST is going the crit/det build as well it seems. As long as my group doesn't ROYALLY mess up, I find very little issue with mana and keeping up DPS.

It's only when say, 3 people die at once and I have to rez them all does it hurt - but then it's really not the melding issue lol.

Piety only if you're really uncomfortable with the class. Just smash lucid on CD

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This has been my experience with AST. I've only had to stop casting because of MP issues three times this expansion, and all of them were because I needed to chain raise 3-4 people. Dropping 4-6 Malefics restored enough MP to keep going until my next Lucid. I'll be melding full Det this tier.

I used to have over 2000 mana at one time and it gave me the luxury of not having to use it efficiently. But as of late, MP has been limited to 10k. And I find with good gear, I have more than enough Piety to support 10K MP without the need of adding any Piety Materia. Unless someone can point to some advantage like MP regen or something that has changed that i'm unaware of, I would say there's no real use for Piety materia unless your gear isn't that good enough to support the 10K cap.

I've found Crit/Determination to be great melds for healer. Although I'm using Direct hit on my AST since my static is comfortable with the fights. Trust in your regen and OGCD's to heal your party and you won't have to meld Piety.

I just put crit whenever possible. If capped I go for det.
I dont think piety is needed at all.