WHM melds for a casual-ish player?

Hi :D So…I’m a bard main. I play casual stuff (I’ve poked at savage a bit this expansion, but only O1s and O2s. Cleared both, haven’t tried anything harder yet) and I’m not aiming to be hardcore at all. I am trying my best to be a good bard, though :) Just don't have the time to really do hardcore stuff because I play EU times but on a NA server :( But I’ve started playing a lot of WHM lately, partly because I get faster queues but mostly because it’s super fun :P My friend is a main noct AST and she wants me to co heal extremes and such with her now (I’m not an amazing WHM but we play great together at least) so I got my WHM a full eureka set. It looks amazing, but…what do I meld on a WHM? I just melded a bunch of DET materia on the weapon now because I had a bunch of those from lockboxes and it felt as if it was not a horrible thing to do at least :P

I know I don’t technically have to have perfect melds for casual stuff or current extremes (current being Lakshmi, susano and byakko for me, haven’t poked at shinyru yet) but it’s fun to at least pretend to aim for hardcore stuff ;)

Just go with Crit and Det. Add in Piety if you ever think you need the extra MP.

Definitely Crit>Det>SS>>>>>>>>>>>PIE

Honestly SS isn't that bad, but it sure makes those times you don't immediately notice your Lucids coming off CD more punishing.

Don't bother with direct hit. A full DH meld is only 0.6% more dps than normal melds.

When in doubt, Crit/Det is always good. You can add PIE if you find MP to be an issue, but using Assize, Lucid, and Thin Air more often tends to solve that. You can also add some VIT on the right side if you find you need it to survive stuff, but that tends to not be an issue outside of high end content.

Go full crit on whatever you can, SS on anything you can't. Crit will work wonders on jobs like SCH and AST while SS will also work to boost the damage from SCH dots and WHM HoTs.

Ty :) I'll convince my bard to share some of the CRIT materias I have. I've not found MP an issue yet (unless people keep dying over and over and over again to stupid things and I have to ress constantly...) but I've not healed anything that hard yet.

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Originally Posted by Zaddi

Ty :) I'll convince my bard to share some of the CRIT materias I have. I've not found MP an issue yet (unless people keep dying over and over and over again to stupid things and I have to ress constantly...) but I've not healed anything that hard yet.

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You won't have any issues with MP until you start doing savage. There's a lot of AoE damage there, and quite a learning curve when it comes to telling whether damage needs to be healed now or it can wait. If you have a steady co-healer, you can easily blow past this worry by alternating oGCDs, but if you PuG....well it's not so easy.

Disclaimer: Substats generally won't make or break your performance as a WHM. Weapon damage and MND come first.

Somewhat soapbox-y and maybe an unpopular opinion from a career WHM raider:

VIT > PIE as needed > SPS > DET = CRIT

• Don't be that healer with Direct Hit melds. Direct Hit does nothing for your healing output and is only a very nominal damage improvement anyway. Even if your cohealer is handling more of the actual healing burden, at least choose something that impacts your healing AND damage output (spell speed, determination, critical hit).

• VIT VI meld your jewelry- all of it. If you mess up a mechanic and die, odds are that your party is going to wipe, or at best, you'll be stressing out your cohealer. Even if you are reliable and consistent at mechanics, you'll probably be amazed at how often that extra HP can bail you out. You can get clipped by a beam in O7S or stumble through Trine in O8S as examples this tier. Per Yoshi P - "I think players’ overall run will go more smoothly if they try melding grade V vitality materia to their accessories."

• ABC! Always be casting! Are you not casting Stone IV or keeping your dots up during healing downtime because your MP is too low? You may need to meld more Piety. Managing Thin Air, Assize, and Lucid Dreaming well should all come first, as well as refresh from a MCH or BRD, but there may come a time when you feel the sting of not enough MP. Personally that didn't occur for me until the last third of O8S, but don't be afraid to add more Piety if you find yourself consistently low in a fight.

• Finally, between Determination, Spell Speed, and Critical Hit, I tend to favor a balanced setup, leaning a bit more towards Spell Speed. Determination is consistent and improves baseline damage/healing much like MND, but is also fairly weak. Critical Hit offers more potent healing and damage than Det, but critical heals are usually wasted anyway. Spell Speed gives a modifier to Aero II, Aero III, Regen, Medica 2, and Asylum, but more importantly, SPS lowers your GCD. You can easily shave a tenth of a second or more off of your GCD, which can be the difference between clutching out a heal before a tankbuster.. or not! Some may argue that you'll always be precasting for upcoming damage, so GCD doesn't matter, but breathing room isn't a bad thing, especially during progression. Side note, with a faster GCD, you may feel you need more Piety to keep up.

Your mileage may vary, but the above should set you (and by extension your group!) up for success in clearing and farming high-end content. If your goal is maximizing personal damage output in a like-minded group that doesn't make mistakes, that's another matter.

End soap box. :cool:

I do want to say one thing. It's worth at least unlocking the possibility of getting DHs on a healer by just melding a single VI materia to there gear. It's not mandatory or anything at all, but when a DH crit happens, it's pretty nice.

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Originally Posted by CaeliaCat

[*]Don't be that healer with Direct Hit melds. Direct Hit does nothing for your healing output and is only a very nominal damage improvement anyway. Even if your cohealer is handling more of the actual healing burden, at least choose something that impacts your healing AND damage output (spell speed, determination, critical hit).

Finally, between Determination, Spell Speed, and Critical Hit, I tend to favor a balanced setup, leaning a bit more towards Spell Speed. Determination is consistent and improves baseline damage/healing much like MND, but is also fairly weak. Critical Hit offers more potent healing and damage than Det, but critical heals are usually wasted anyway.

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First, yes. Direct hit is only a minor dps increase. But it still is. And frankly, you don't need more healing after prog. If you've learned the fight you should know when damage is coming and how much you need to heal. Should you meld it? Probably not, because most players don't speedkill, and that's where dhit is most relevant. But that doesn't mean direct hit is worthless.

Second, crit isn't so much about landing that sick crit tetra or cure2, as it is about the crit stones/aeros/HoTs.

Practically speaking it doesn't matter (both melding and *why* one meld is better). You can meld whatever you want. You only need *enough* gear to pass checks.

As for the why, you aren't looking at stuff like crit healing and such. You're looking at dps. And we already have the tier% gains for crit/det/dhr, so it's already solved in that respect. So opinion of crit vs det doesn't matter compared to the raw numbers.

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Originally Posted by CaeliaCat

[*]VIT VI meld your jewelry- all of it. If you mess up a mechanic and die, odds are that your party is going to wipe, or at best, you'll be stressing out your cohealer. Even if you are reliable and consistent at mechanics, you'll probably be amazed at how often that extra HP can bail you out. You can get clipped by a beam in O7S or stumble through Trine in O8S as examples this tier. Per Yoshi P - "I think players’ overall run will go more smoothly if they try melding grade V vitality materia to their accessories."

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This. Most in prog should be melding vit, even as entry level as O5S. Healer misses you with Assize? Head On and you get targeted for Winds? That Vit helps. Eating an extra stone or pain in 6? The burn in 7? Vit is so unused for how good it is. Most look at vit, and think it doesnt increase numbers. But dying is 0 dps.

Wow, thanks for all the advice! I'm trying my best to learn it all! Like I said, I'm a casual player but I do like to at least try harder stuff (even if I won't manage to clear it). I've melded some crits and det now at least, need to open more lockboxes to get more materia before I meld more (and my bard also wants the crit materias...). I'm still a total newbie when it comes to anything harder than normal dungeons and trials, I've only played the game for little more than a year (started playing when HW was almost done with patches, I think? January last year). But WHM is fun to play and if all the DPS spots in a party are full so I can't go as my bard, it would be nice to have a healer I feel comfortable with :)

I actually put 5 Strength VI on my WHM Anemos weapon.

Sadly nobody has noticed, or called me out on it yet. :(

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Originally Posted by Ing-Dono

I actually put 5 Strength VI on my WHM Anemos weapon.

Sadly nobody has noticed, or called me out on it yet. :(

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Why would they? If stuff is being cleared there's no reason to inspect your melds.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

I do want to say one thing. It's worth at least unlocking the possibility of getting DHs on a healer by just melding a single VI materia to there gear. It's not mandatory or anything at all, but when a DH crit happens, it's pretty nice.

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Not really. It will almost never happen without a BRD giving you Battle Voice anyway, and the total DPS increase from one meld is a rounding error. You're better off putting more crit there, since that scales increasingly well the more of it you have.

As a non-Savage player, I try to keep Crit and Det pretty even and SS a close third. In a combination of mendacity/Eureka gear I've got crit and det floating around 1800 and spell speed around 1400. I have powerful heals that I can get out quickly and I don't notice a negative effect from not focusing on piety, since we have so many skills that help us keep our MP up. The nice thing about the Eureka gear is that you might take a small hit on primary stats but those 5 materia slots allow you to really get big gains on your secondary stats.

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Originally Posted by CaeliaCat

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Finally, between Determination, Spell Speed, and Critical Hit, I tend to favor a balanced setup, leaning a bit more towards Spell Speed.

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Forgive me if I'm wrong here, but from what I can remember, SS and crit gives you more returns the more you have, so this is quite the opposite of what is recommended. Crit also only took over det this tier, so I doubt we're at the level of recommending both crit and SS yet. You should do one or the other and then fill with det.