WHM Gear Question

Hello,

I recently came back to the game and I've been wondering what would be the ideal setup for my WHM from poetics/fcob gear. I came along with this set and would like some input on it.

Thanks

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/P6IA

There's plenty of previous discussion on WHM stat priority and BiS sets available on these forums.

Check these threads:

Stat priority as WHM
How will you gear your healer in 2.4
2.4 BiS

Healers are in a unique place when it comes to stat builds. Whereas DPS has the distinct notion of "every bit of DPS counts", HPS is actually rather irrelevant. The base potency of healing skills is so high that unless you're vastly undergeared, you'll be healing for enough per spell and chain casting heals is generally the wrong thing to do.

What this means is that aside from Piety, which I consider to be a Primary Stat, the Secondary Stats literally do not matter. I mean this in the sense that all content is not only completely possible if a healer had 0 Crit, Det, or Spell Speed on their gear, the absence of the stats wouldn't make the encounters much harder, if at all.

Thus, the best healer build is simply Piety(until you're comfortable) > Whatever you like best. All possible builds, aside from having too little MP, can not only do all of the game's content, but do it well.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Taika

There's plenty of previous discussion on WHM stat priority and BiS sets available on these forums.

Check these threads:

Stat priority as WHM
How will you gear your healer in 2.4
2.4 BiS

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Thank you Taika.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Donjo

chain casting heals is generally the wrong thing to do.

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What do you mean by this exactly?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

What do you mean by this exactly?

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Say there's a deathsentence coming in 5secs, as a healer the correct way to deal with it is stoneskin/ adlo the tank 0.5-1sec before it lands, and cast a big heal(cureII/lustrate) right after it. How much ur gear's max HPS is means absolutely nothing in this case, and so is 90% of the other healing in this game. Healing is all about awareness/timing/mana/buff/GCD management.
Btw my suggestion for 2 primary stats for scholar is either accuracy/crit, or crit/piety.
2 stats for whm, quoted from my static whm is, piety/crit.

Crit is not a good stat on a WHM. It is only good on SCH because of the shield proc. For WHM I would say PIE and DET, for SCH, Crit and DET or Crit and ACC.

Like dark prange said a WHM can not and should not rely on crit. It is nice when a cure 2 crits and heals the tank for 5k but as most skilled healers will tell you. You cure based on how much damage you expect the party member to take, not cure for 2k and hope for 4k.

In the event you need a lot of single target healing or you are low on mana you pop divine seal and all of your cures are now cure 2.

For WHM the priority goes Piety > Det > Spell > Crit

SCH prioritise Crit simply because their spells take advantage of crits. Adlo/Succor will place a shield that is twice as strong as the amount cured and the higher crit increases the likely hood of this happening.

Priority is simply as much Pie as you're comfortable with > Det > Crit > Spellspeed. Compared to spellspeed, crit is nice because it will increase your healing power (as individual cures and even regen ticks can crit), which in best cases leads to better MP conservation (you'll find yourself having to cast less heals than expected or be able to keep up with only cure 1s and regen instead of having to cast cure 2, for example) and it also increases your DPS. Spellspeed doesn't really have any significant advantages.

All secondary stats are really based off what you're comfortable with. Given current gear choices, at most the amount of added healing from a full Determination build will be around 50 average healing added onto your Cure 1 / Physick. If this is worth the amount of Piety / Mana you'll lose then by all means go for a full Det build. I personally have started to build my gear around Piety. Basically if it has piety on it, I'm taking it. Any secondary stat that comes with it, be it Det, Crit, or Spell speed is just a bonus at that point, but I don't rely on any of them to help with content.

Piety has proven itself time and again during progression and learning new fights. As a healer I tend to overcompensate healing for learning a new fight. As such I will go through mana like a knife through butter. However keep in mind this is my playstyle. Other healers will give their opinions based on their own healing styles. So take everything said here with a grain of salt, find what works for you, and go with it. Regardless of what other healers say, or how people may question your gear. As long as your group isn't dieing, I don't see a problem.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by firstsin

Like dark prange said a WHM can not and should not rely on crit. It is nice when a cure 2 crits and heals the tank for 5k but as most skilled healers will tell you. You cure based on how much damage you expect the party member to take, not cure for 2k and hope for 4k.
SCH prioritise Crit simply because their spells take advantage of crits. Adlo/Succor will place a shield that is twice as strong as the amount cured and the higher crit increases the likely hood of this happening.

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I play a little whm myself sometime, I think crit CureII are really strong, and can be as helpful as crit Adlo in times. Yes I'm aware that 90% of the whms dont like crit, but frankly I dont trust 95% of the whms in this game, and I trust myself and our static whm.
Also by the way, double-shielding effect only applies to Adlo, not to Succor. Maybe it's better to learn your stuff better before u come here and teach other people?

And here we go again:

Piety
The main benefit about piety is that it removes the MP issues you have and/or ease up MP management over time. Having more piety means you'll have a bigger MP pool. This leads to more starting MP as well as more natural MP regeneration over time. However, having too much piety may or may not be useless. After all: unspend MP is useless MP. Banking MP is fine, however. Just don't bank so much that you end an encounter with 3000 MP or more. This simply means you have too much piety for said encounter. You could consider throwing out some DoTs here and there, if the momentum allows it. Up to you, however.

Determination
24-25 determination equals +10 HP recovery on a 400 potency spell. It also slightly increases the damage you deal with offensive spells/abilities such as Stone, Aero and Fluid Aura. It's generally considered the bread&butter stat in combination with piety. There's no real down side on this.

Critical hit rate
Critical Hit Rate is either a hit or miss. A critical hit rate has the potential to increase the healing done by 50% if it occurs. If this happens, nice. But not something to rely on. It also ups the damage dealt by a little bit. Roughly 14 crit from your gear equals +1% crit chance.

Spell speed
This is simply garbage and here's a list why:
1) When pre-casting, having spell speed won't matter. Whether you pre-cast with 2,00 casting time or 1,80 casting time, it doesn't matter. It's called pre-casting for a reason.
2) Even when you're late with pre-casting, a 0,02 to 0,05s casting time won't make a difference. For whoever wants to prove it's uses by giving examples: It simply means you failed in the first place and having a bit of spell speed just happened to patch up for your mistake in a really, really rare occasion.
3) It takes somewhere between 20 and 22 spells before you benefit from a single spell worth of time. A white mage rarely chains that many spells in succession or is rarely needed.
4) It contributes nothing concerning MP spend vs HPS (hp recovery per second) requirement. Each encounter has a certain amount of HPS. Let's say you cast 100 cures in one encounter to meet the requirement and having spell speed allows you to cast 110 cures for the same encounter. This means 10 cures worth of pure overheal or 10 cures worth of idle time.
5) Idle time was mentioned in 4), any form of idle time destroys the whole purpose to have spell speed in the first place.
6) White Mages will always have some idle time here and there. It's to either conserve MP, simply because there's nothing to heal at that moment or it's a phase transition where nothing can be done.
7) Unlike determination and crit, it contributes nothing on a single healing spell. Although crit may or may not be complete overheal. Spike hits - or more commonly known as tank killers - are very frequent in endgame content. Odds are that crit contributes more than spell speed.

People seemed to have liked the math before, so let's run through a few things. We'll start out with 2 simple builds focused on end-game gear. We won't use the relic weapons as currently you can't upgrade your relic weapon to 135. So we'll be using the Dreadwyrm Cane with a base of 82 Magic Damage. Race wise I will be using a Lalafell - Dunesfolk (myself) for the stats. Your Mind/Piety may be slightly higher or lower then what you see, but it should only be off by a small margin.

The two builds in question will be as follows:

Determination - Going strictly for every piece of gear that adds determination with the exception of NOT using the ilvl 120 and ilvl 130 ring together (because MND is the primary stat we want, with determination being 2nd of course). So both ilvl 130 rings will be used.

Piety - All gear that has piety on it, again with the exception of the rings. 1 Pie = 8 mana (roughly rounded)

Please note this also assumes the best food used possible, as will be shown in each link at the very bottom.

Determination Build

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/P8BL

Mind - 664
Det - 333
Pie - 413
Mana - 4850+
SSpeed - 506
Crit - 428 (11.39%)

Cure 1 - 1540 (Average Heal)


Piety Build

http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/P8BO

Mind - 664
Det - 243
Pie - 530
Mana - 5790+
SSpeed - 450
Crit - 459 (13.56%)

Cure 1 - 1500 (Average Heal)


Conclusion
If you want to sacrifice a little over 900 mana, you can pump out an extra 40 HP (on average) with Cure 1. This is using the best food for both, which happens to be the same exact food, and a 4 star synth (doubtful most people are willing to spend the money to have this made). I'm not saying one build is better then the other, all I'm doing is providing the raw data. Each person will have to decide for themselves if they want more mana, or bigger heals (or a hybrid of both).