WHM Healing Spreadsheet

[Slixie]

What do you think of the crafted vanya healing items?

[Syncness]

What do you think of the crafted vanya healing items?

HQ Vanya helm+chest is easily better than Darklight for a few reasons:

• First, Darklight is PIE/DET. PIE isn't that great of a stat at the moment due to the lack of real mana intensive healing, it also has poor scaling for WHM compared to SCH (due to how shroud works). Since the ilvl budget is split between PIE/DET, we have some of the budget wasted into PIE. As we can see with the Vanya set, although the helm has PIE, the rest of the budget is on CRT which is better than PIE because the essence of extra mana is that we have mana to cast an extra heal, thereby using an extra GCD where as with CRT/DET and SPSD (to some extent), we're saving a GCD/time. Essentially, Darklight Cowl has 7 PIE worth of budget that could be elsewhere.
• Second, at the cost of 1 MND, 11 DET, you gain 10 materia slots (I think of which 4 are safe). The 10 DET is easily made up from the 2 safe slots in the helm if desired and the remaining slots are up to the user. Obviously this means more stats at the realistic cost of 1 MND (IIRC was somewhere in the ballpark of 5.3 DET which is very close to CRT/SPSD).
• Third, the Vanya set allows for far greater freedom. Players aren't tied to waiting for AF2 Helm+Chest when they would be if they had Darklight. Swapping out DL for AF2+AK is also not an option since AF2Chest/Helm + AK counterpart is a downgrade for all scenarios due to the opportunity cost that comes with either the philos used on the Cowl or the Myths used on the Helm/Chest.

tl;dr - If you're loaded to afford Vanya HQ Head/Chest, get it. Poor man's option is DL. Myth AF2+AK rush isn't a good choice because the first myth should go to Wep>Ring >=Legs.