Question in regards to end game gear (Healers)

Hi,
I had a few questions in regards to end game gear. As a healer I have researched / been told that the stat break down in terms of tier is Critical Hit > Determination > Piety > Spell Speed.
Basically I would want to stack as much Critical Hit as possible and get as little Spell Speed as possible. I have looked through some of the end game gear and I noticed that many of the Lost Allegan (and others) pieces have spell speed as one of the stats and no crit.

For example:
Ala Mhigan Body is 310 iLvl with 240 Critical Hit and 168 Spell Speed
Genta Body is 320 iLvl with 244 Critical Hit and 171 Spell Speed
Augmented Lost Allegan Body is 340 iLvl with 253 Piety and 177 Spell Speed

Does this mean to maximize my stats I should go with Genta rather than Lost Allegan? Does the 244 Critical Hit make up for the 20 iLvls?

I also wanted to ask what is the minimum iLvl average I need to be able to do anything and everything for endgame?

Generally speaking, the higher the ilvl the better. The amount of MND you gain from jumping those ilvl tiers don't make up for the difference of changes from a weak secondary stat to a strong secondary stat. There are a few exceptions but they tend to be few and far in between and only in jumps of 10 ilvls - never 20 ilvls.

In terms of secondary stat optimization, that's generally up to preference of each healer too and not as set in stone as it is for DPS and tanks. Crit will be the "most bang for your buck" stat come the next tier, but I do believe the current tier Determination is better up to a certain a point which we have difficulties reach with the current gear scores.

Also stats are very synergistic in nature and thus you kind of want at least a bit of everything for optimal effect. Faster casts from Spell Speed means you get to use the increased benefit of Determination more often while still having more opportunities to Critical too.

Overall you could probably just focus on ilvl and still be incredibly successful. It's when you're trying to optimize for that last 5-10% that you might want to really start digging into secondary stat builds.

[edit] Just to add, Piety is a stat that's also mostly about personal preference. You want enough Piety to make you feel comfortable with the content you're participating in. Once you continue to grow even more comfortable, you will most likely start to peel Piety away from Materia and/or gear and focus on more directly impacting secondaries.

I also think, to a certain extent at least, secondaries vary with each healing class.

Like SpS for instance. On SCH it isn't huge, the biggest part of their healing comes from abilities. On WHM? It can be handy, they use more spells. Peity on WHM is essentially useless because of their insane MP regen but you might see benefit from some of it on the other two healers because they aren't as MP efficient overall.

I don't think there will ever be an end-all set of stat weights for "healers" sadly. Even if someome can crunch the numbers for them individually I don't think they'll match up saying universally x is the best stat y is the worst, the ways they heal are too varied.

Healer substat optimization is a bit tricky.

If you're looking at damage output and ONLY damage it goes like Direct Hit > Det >= Crit > Spell Speed. The thing with DH is, you need a fairly huge investment to make it worth it (full Heaven's Eye VI melds, all slots) and it doesn't affect your healing output, unlike Crit and Det. Crit/Det are more or less equal - I think Det slighly outweights Crit as of now, but that's because healers can't get a good amount of Crit in this patch - Crit will very likely be the best stat when ilvl goes beyond 340. I'm personally not a fan of Spell Speed at all, the returns are too weak and most pieces that are Spell Speed centered aren't bis.

I believe the goal of every healer shoul be to minimize Piety melds as much as possible - and also shoot for gear that have no/low Piety, reason being that it only acts as a MP cushion, bringing no benefit to either your damage or healing.

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

Also stats are very synergistic in nature and thus you kind of want at least a bit of everything for optimal effect. Faster casts from Spell Speed means you get to use the increased benefit of Determination more often while still having more opportunities to Critical too.


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That's not how it works in this game. For ss to even be marginally effective you need tons of it. and its still not going to do much for damage or healing so you should just just avoid that all together when possible and stack crit, because unlike what ppl are saying here crit does surpass det at this tier when you have a high enough amount.

Op doesn't have options if they don't have access to genji so basically just get as much 340 as you can with augmented lost allagan. You had the right idea op but u don't sacrifice mind for substats generally, (rare exceptions that dont apply to you currently)

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Originally Posted by Estelle9lives

I believe the goal of every healer shoul be to minimize Piety melds as much as possible - and also shoot for gear that have no/low Piety, reason being that it only acts as a MP cushion, bringing no benefit to either your damage or healing.

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So I looked through of the higher iLvl pieces of gear i.e. Genji and Lost Allegan and there seems to be a lot of piety. Should I forego some of these pieces for lower ilvl pieces that do not have piety?

No absolutely not

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Originally Posted by JCT

So I looked through of the higher iLvl pieces of gear i.e. Genji and Lost Allegan and there seems to be a lot of piety. Should I forego some of these pieces for lower ilvl pieces that do not have piety?

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Never! You'll get so much more out of the Mind increase than from not having Piety. Also, how much Piety you need largely depends on your group, and also on your other healer. The more raising you need to do, the more MP you'll need, specially if you don't have a RDM. The more shielding or AoE healing you do to help out your co-healer, the more MP you'll use too. The more healing you do with AF, the less MP returns you'll see from Energy Drain, etc, etc.

Piety is a stat for which you need to find an appropriate, personal comfort level. My personal MP milestone on SCH is 18k ish, but Halone knows that when I play AST I need a little bit more than that, particularly because the group I play AST with is much less experienced, co-healer included, so I need to do a lot more raising, shielding and active healing.

That said, even though Spell Speed is the worst stat right now, it's not necessarily bad either. Something that I personally like about SpS is that it allows for quicker stutter-stepping (moving before the spell cast ends without interrupting it), and it gives you a subjectively larger window to move without interruption.

For example, for this tier I stacked Crit as much as I could, but in lieu of keeping my three healers and tank geared up, I ended up taking a couple pieces from Omega Savage with SpS+Pie in them even if they're not theoretical BiS. In that case, the MND increase was worth more, tbh.

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Originally Posted by JCT

So I looked through of the higher iLvl pieces of gear i.e. Genji and Lost Allegan and there seems to be a lot of piety. Should I forego some of these pieces for lower ilvl pieces that do not have piety?

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Generally speaking you'll see more of everything as your gear goes up in iLvl because the higher budget means more stats in general. You'll also see different pieces in a given set of gear have Piety than in other sets.

Mind is your most important stat. If it has more Mind, you probably want it. If it has a lot more mind, you almost certainly want it. As you get more pieces, the Piety will tend to level out. Unless you're trying to min/max for progression content, that simple rule will always work. For materia, you likely never need to use Piety.

You can use a site like this to help compare: http://ffxiv.ariyala.com/WHM

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Originally Posted by JCT

So I looked through of the higher iLvl pieces of gear i.e. Genji and Lost Allegan and there seems to be a lot of piety. Should I forego some of these pieces for lower ilvl pieces that do not have piety?

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There is one niche case I'd consider dropping ilvls in the current healer gear list and that would be taking an Allagan Ring and Augmented Allagan Ring over Genji Ring and Augmented Allagan Ring.

Genji Ring is Piety > Spell Speed secondaries while Allagan Ring is Determination > Critical secondaries.

Spell Speed would be the lowest of the three secondaries for total boosts and Piety means nothing if you're comfortable with your MP pool. Determination and Critical would give you more overall benefit in this case despite the loss of Mind.

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

There is one niche case I'd consider dropping ilvls in the current healer gear list and that would be taking an Allagan Ring and Augmented Allagan Ring over Genji Ring and Augmented Allagan Ring.

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So Augmented Lost Allagan and just Lost Allagan can both be used at once?

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Originally Posted by JCT

So Augmented Lost Allagan and just Lost Allagan can both be used at once?

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Yes; Augmented version is a unique "ID" and counts as a different item.

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Originally Posted by ChiiSoSeriouz

That's not how it works in this game. For ss to even be marginally effective you need tons of it. and its still not going to do much for damage or healing so you should just just avoid that all together when possible and stack crit, because unlike what ppl are saying here crit does surpass det at this tier when you have a high enough amount.

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I don't want to debate the semantics of SpS ATM since SpS itself is a fairly large topic of contention due to gains in GCD being difficult to calculate because of the difficulty in simulating fights effectively to understand exactly just what SpS will do for a character. It is certainly something I'd like to revisit later when I get some more time to go through the math.

In terms of stacking Crit, I was curious so here I go. Make any corrections to any errors you find in my logic because I want to be sure I'm accurate for my own curiosity.

This is the absolute highest Crit value a WHM can gain in the current gear tier - a bonus 2,020 Crit for a total of 2,384 critical.

This is table of how stacking a singular stat affects a player's overall effective damage.

+2,020 Crit leads to an effective damage multiplier of 1.138296. Since +0 Crit has a base of 1.02, this leads to an effective increase of 1.138296/1.02 = 11.588%

+2,020 Det leads to an effective damage multiplier of 1.121. Since +0 Det has a base of 1.00, this leads to an effective increase of 12.1%.

Based on the above Crit doesn't actually exceed Determination when super stacking a singular stack. Again, correct me if I'm wrong in my math and/or logic because I want to be sure I'm reading those tables accurately and understand what they represent.

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Originally Posted by JCT

So Augmented Lost Allagan and just Lost Allagan can both be used at once?

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Just to add to Cynfael's comment and ensuring that the information is explicitly clear, this is specific to the Ring slots since you can have two Rings equipped. You can't equip an Augmented Allagan and non-Augmented Allagan piece of equipment in any other slot.

Last thing I want is someone spending their weekly items on slots that can't have both types equipped. ^^;

Are we still talking about healing stats? or are we going into damage now x.x...I just want to make sure I am following the conversation correctly.

From what I understand playing as my Scholar critical hit becomes important because of the skill Adloquium which benefits greatly from the crit. I just got my WHM to 70 as well so it would be good to take a look into the secondary stats for that job as well. Another question is I know that each of the jobs play slightly differently which could affect which stats you would want to focus on, but is it drastic in change? or does it just reflect around Crit and Det again? (Not overlooking Piety or Spell Speed, but it just seems the other two is everyones focus).

I don't think any of the healers ever want piety or spell speed if possible; the former because you shouldn't ever run out of MP if you manage your cooldowns and keep deaths to a minimum and the latter because while it increases your healing per second, it doesn't increase your heal efficiency, (Whereas crit/det do both), plus there are only very specific skill speed thresholds that produce a noticeable benefit for all classes in general (Usually by allowing you to fit an extra GCD into a window where a buff/debuff is active).

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

while it increases your healing per second, it doesn't increase your heal efficiency, (Whereas crit/det do both)

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Technically it does, though not nearly to the same degree. SpS increases the potency of your HoTs.

I forgot about that side effect.

I guess that would make the stat particularly bad for SCH, though,

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Originally Posted by KageTokage

I forgot about that side effect.

I guess that would make the stat particularly bad for SCH, though,

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Doesn't Eos base her stats off yours, and therefore gets the benefit?

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Originally Posted by JCT

Are we still talking about healing stats? or are we going into damage now x.x...I just want to make sure I am following the conversation correctly.

From what I understand playing as my Scholar critical hit becomes important because of the skill Adloquium which benefits greatly from the crit. I just got my WHM to 70 as well so it would be good to take a look into the secondary stats for that job as well. Another question is I know that each of the jobs play slightly differently which could affect which stats you would want to focus on, but is it drastic in change? or does it just reflect around Crit and Det again? (Not overlooking Piety or Spell Speed, but it just seems the other two is everyones focus).

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Secondary stats would affect healing spells in the same manner as their damage equivalents, though I don't know for certain if the magnitude is the same. IE if 100 det increases your damage by 1%, if the same number of det would increase your healing by the same 1%. I know Critical Hit Rate has the same affect on both healing and damage as I did a test for it back in late HW and I don't see any reason why Det and Spell Speed don't have the same effect either unless someone speaks otherwise.

In terms of secondaries, certain kits benefit more from certain stats than others though it's usually up to each individual to determine what they would prefer to stack for their healer's. Asa you mentioned, Adlo gains a benefit for critting so Crit is preferred over other secondaries on SCH. In contrast, if you want to focus more on damage for SCH, melding Direct Hit or focusing gear / Materia more on Spell Speed can have its benefits as SCH has access to 4 DoTs which does affect the DoT potency.

As someone else has mentioned, Piety isn't of that great effect to WHM as they have an already great MP pool though Piety can have benefits for SCH and AST. If you really want to min-max healers, you can have different gear sets for different healers once you start to get more and more gear and build around that though most players probably use the same gear set for every healer.

At the end of the day, Determination and Critical will generally give you the most bang for your buck as a healer with a splash of Piety if you feel you need a better MP pool to help with your healing, but you won't see any massive detriment if you focused your secondaries somewhere else either.

Piety does do something contrary to popular belief. Aetherflow for SCH and Assize for WHM both restore 10% of your total MP so the larger your MP pool the more return you get from these spells. Your Piety also affects the rate at which your MP replenishes itself during battle. Right now it seems impossible to run out of MP with how how much Piety is forced on you across all healer gear so running completely dry at any item tier is a sign that your are playing inefficiently or everyone else in the party is eating every AOE ever and enjoying the Resurrection animation a bit too much.

But 1 Piety= ~3.3 MP. A Piety VI Materia gives 40, or 132MP. Assize will then give 13MP more. Unless you're going to stack up a lot of it, those numbers are effectively doing nothing when a 600MP spell is on the cheap end.

I stack Crit/Det with some SpS. that is, however, how i've always melded by WHM gear, even back in HW.

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

+2,020 Crit leads to an effective damage multiplier of 1.138296. Since +0 Crit has a base of 1.02, this leads to an effective increase of 1.138296/1.02 = 11.588%

+2,020 Det leads to an effective damage multiplier of 1.121. Since +0 Det has a base of 1.00, this leads to an effective increase of 12.1%.

Based on the above Crit doesn't actually exceed Determination when super stacking a singular stack. Again, correct me if I'm wrong in my math and/or logic because I want to be sure I'm reading those tables accurately and understand what they represent.

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IMO the more important factor is that even if crit were better for damage, crit is far more likely to result in overhealing to no benefit. That said, for SCH crit is far more useful than for the other two and a crit on Adloquium is both less likely to result in overhealing than on the others and will give significant benefit even if it does.

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Originally Posted by Lunali

IMO the more important factor is that even if crit were better for damage, crit is far more likely to result in overhealing to no benefit. That said, for SCH crit is far more useful than for the other two and a crit on Adloquium is both less likely to result in overhealing than on the others and will give significant benefit even if it does.

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Crit regens or overheal because of crit isn't always a bad thing. GCDs saved on healing is really the end-goal. Crit is a way better benefit than SpS on all healer jobs.

Not only the crit damage factor, it can save MP, maybe even save Plantary stacks like on ExDeath Savage where every ounce of your healing you put out kind of matters.

You never depend on crits but there will be instances where you usually on stacks for follow-up healing or the SCH using Indom to help something and you'll notice and just return to doing damage.

SpS is probably the best on SCH, dps wise, because of the weight of their dot damage. It's still garbage and only affects whispering dawn.

From a healing perspective (with DPS within reason) :

Crit > Det > DH > Piety = SpS

Avoid SpS and piety if you can get a standard comp.

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Originally Posted by technole

Crit regens or overheal because of crit isn't always a bad thing. GCDs saved on healing is really the end-goal. Crit is a way better benefit than SpS on all healer jobs.

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I was comparing it to determination in this instance, not spell speed. The person I replied to had compared the relative increase from determination vs crit, finding that determination was better even without considering overhealing.

I'm surprised no one has said this yet (or maybe I missed it) But there are no more stat weights. So it's not always Crit > Det > SS.

The formulas I've looked at all have certain caps and synergies where you will want to have a certain amount of crit and det in order to get the most out of your stats. This as opposed to stacking all crit or all det which yields worst results.

Also it is not always true that higher ilvls are better. It depends a lot on your current overall stats. There are plenty of instances in which a 320 item of gear is better than a 340 one. And what might be true for one person might not be true for another (geared or melded differently). The bonus in MND definitely does not outweigh some secondary stats. `

So the bottom line being. If you want to get the best out of your melds and gear. You need to calculate the gain from each item of gear or meld you can get in comparison to the previous item/meld you had. All this with your current stats in mind.

There are excel sheets out there that do a decent job of this. For instance : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets...it?usp=sharing

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Originally Posted by EaMett

Also it is not always true that higher ilvls are better. It depends a lot on your current overall stats. There are plenty of instances in which a 320 item of gear is better than a 340 one. And what might be true for one person might not be true for another (geared or melded differently). The bonus in MND definitely does not outweigh some secondary stats.

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While that can certainly be true of a 330 item, I'm having a hard time coming up with any 340 item where the increase in Mind doesn't outweigh any secondary stat changes over the 320 item (barring pentamelded crafting stuff).

Eventually, the primary stat boost always wins out.

With my current whm gear upgrading my 320 genta chest piece to a 340 augmented lost Allagan chest piece yields a net loss in both healing and dps output. And that is hardly the only case. You can use the aforementioned spreadsheet to find quite a few other scenarios.

Again that doesn't mean that it won't be a good chest piece for someone geared differently. But with my current stats it's a loss and the 320 item is better than the 340.

There are no more fixed stat weights. Thinking that MND always weighs x times more than another stat is incorrect as x will change depending on your current stats. In the case I mentioned above, the 31 extra MND points do not outweigh switching the 244 Crit for 253 Spell Speed. Most likely because those crit points help me reach a cap. It's on a case by case basis.

I'll willingly plead guilty to not being all that into min maxing my gear to the extent that my DPS peers do, but some quick math has me thinking that dropping 20 ilvl on your chest piece is going to cost you pretty much 100HP per cure cast no? If I was in that situation, I'd likely be shuffling melds or pieces elsewhere to make it work, as that's not a trade I'd be able to stomach.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

I'll willingly plead guilty to not being all that into min maxing my gear to the extent that my DPS peers do, but some quick math has me thinking that dropping 20 ilvl on your chest piece is going to cost you pretty much 100HP per cure cast no? If I was in that situation, I'd likely be shuffling melds or pieces elsewhere to make it work, as that's not a trade I'd be able to stomach.

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No in my case the chest piece is a reduction of ~.20% on both healing/hots and damage/dots compared to the Genta 320 chest. I decided to humor the idea and check if remelding entirely would help make the 340 piece better than the 320 and couldn't make it work (there's no place on my gear to make up for the loss of 244 crit since all my pieces are more or less capped in crit already).
Now I'm not claiming a 320 item of gear is better than all 340, in this case the Genji 340 chest is superior. It's just that the 340 Allagan chest isn't.
And I've had similar experiences with quite a few other pieces as well.

PS: you do get added VIT and PIE so it's up to the player's discretion whether or not that outweighs the slight hit in performance + the 825 creation + twine. But for me it doesn't.

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Originally Posted by Sebazy

I'll willingly plead guilty to not being all that into min maxing my gear to the extent that my DPS peers do, but some quick math has me thinking that dropping 20 ilvl on your chest piece is going to cost you pretty much 100HP per cure cast no? If I was in that situation, I'd likely be shuffling melds or pieces elsewhere to make it work, as that's not a trade I'd be able to stomach.

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I agree with this, because in 95% of the cases ilvl wins on the left side. That said, he isn't wrong that in theory (!) according to the sheet the 320 genta is better than the tomes 340 chest gear.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

With my current whm gear upgrading my 320 genta chest piece to a 340 augmented lost Allagan chest piece yields a net loss in both healing and dps output. And that is hardly the only case. You can use the aforementioned spreadsheet to find quite a few other scenarios.

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The calculator completely ignores piety as far as i know and this is an issue, because as an healer you also have to watch out for piety.

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Again that doesn't mean that it won't be a good chest piece for someone geared differently. But with my current stats it's a loss and the 320 item is better than the 340.

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I used your set and the sheet to calculate different sets and while your set is in theory better than the same version with an chest swap to the 340 tomes gear, i'd recommend to still switching the chest. You will lose dmg in the chest, but overall gain piety and with that you can switch out the genji 340 ring and go with the 2x tomes (one 340, one 330) combo. This will then be superior healing and dmg wise to your set according to the sheet and you have more piety to boot. Aditionally you have an easier time doing progress, since you have more vitality aswell.

Yeah I did mention piety and vit as things to take into account.

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Originally Posted by era1Ne

you can switch out the genji 340 ring and go with the 2x tomes (one 340, one 330) combo.

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Actually that's a good catch. The 330 Allagan ring is better than the 340 genji. Slight oversight on my part.
The chest is still inferior though. I also have absolutely no use for piety at this stage which makes the chest piece unattractive to say the least. Even the HP bump is pretty insignificant.
If I need more HP and/or piety for whatever reason I would swap my pentameld 320 bracelet for a 340 one rather than fool around with my chest piece.

It's worth noting that optimization is also very subjective. You might want to optimize for dps, or for healing while disregarding dps, or for your party comp etc. These will all yield different results. But my original point was that regardless of what you decide to do, it is absolutely possible that a 320 item could be better than a 340 one. That the extra MND does not always outweigh the secondary stats.
It's then up to the player's discretion to decide whether or not Vit/Pie are worth the hit to their stats.