SCH endgame/gear/stat cap Qs

[Kyana]

{Congratulations!}

While I'm not joining all endgame content as WHM or SCH I think there are some basic tips.


1. I'd say it's pretty much personal preference what you get first.
You will have to run dungeons for marks to get darklight or AF2 anyways, so you can replace most of your gear with the dropped ilvl55 (Wanderers Palace) or ilvl60 (Amdapor Keep) equipment.
Once you have enough marks to get a piece of darklight, just replace gear you couldn't replace with dungeon drops yet.
You should save 300 tomestones of mythology and 900 tomestones of philosophy for the relic quest.
You could also buy the crafted ilvl70 gear or let someone craft it for you. Some of the pieces will serve you well for a long time.

2. There are no caps as far as I know, just caps for melds on equipment. But there is a point where putting more points into a stat doesn't make much sense anymore.
For a healer mind, vitality and piety are the 3 most important stats. You should try to get a good ammount of vitality to have enough life for endgame content and make your life a bit easier. A dead healer has 0 healing potential ^^
For Titan hard mode for example it's good to be around 3500HP with group buff and food.
Secondary stats are a bit tricky. Most say put everything in crit, others go for more determination. My opinion is, that at a certain point adding more crit will have little to no effect, making other secondary stats more important.

3. You should level all the classes which offer you cross class abilities. That would be Conjurer for Stoneskin and Cleric Stance or Thaumaturge for Swiftcast for example.

4. I look at Schoolar more as a supporter than a main healer. It lacks the healing potential for that job. But that is ok.
Endgame content requires 8 players in general and the best setup for healing, in my opinion, is a WHM+SCH.
WHM does the big heals and group heals while SCH makes the life of the WHM easier and less MP intensive. Your pet is pretty decent as healer too and can be even more effective if you micromanage its abilities in certain situations.
Solo healing 4-man dungeons is no problem for a SCH.
Also don't forget that as SCH you will not run out of MP as easy as a WHM.

[YuiSasaki]

*snip*
For a healer mind, vitality and piety are the 3 most important stats. You should try to get a good ammount of vitality to have enough life for endgame content and make your life a bit easier. A dead healer has 0 healing potential*snip*

This is neither completely wrong nor true.
Yes, as heal you need Mind.
No, as a SCH you need neither Piety nor Vitality. The only fight i could imagine where you could need to have lots of HP as a heal is Twintania (Coil T5), but until you arrive there, well lets say it will take some time :>.

[HiliteOrin]

Grats on 50! To answer your questions:

1) Others have answered this in-depth, but in general try and get some sort of weapon upgrade (i.e. Ifrit book, Garuda book, etc.) so you'll have a decent weapon to use for Titan HM. Save up tomestones and get some Darklight gear (or get HQ Vanya made and melded if you are in a position to do so).

2) As others said, no caps really though there are apparently some diminishing returns...but I don't know if it's that significant. You'll be mostly aiming for Crit gear as a SCH (as opposed to spell speed and determination).

3) If you're looking to play SCH, I don't see why it's necessary to level another job to 50. Though as an Arcanist base class, you can also work on gearing up your SMN after your SCH gear is in place. This will give you an extremely viable DPS option for running content as SMN is highly desirable in endgame including Coil. As others mentioned, get cross-class abilities but prioritize Swiftcast as it's the most important. The only other cross-class that SCH can really make use of is stoneskin, but I would do that only if you have finished other things. Stoneskin is mostly useless for SCH, and even the situations in which you can use it it is not actually a requirement.

4) Both healers are essentially equally viable for all endgame content, at least in any sense that is worth talking about. The best healing duo is SCH+WHM by far, and both bring their own strengths to the table and synergize very well in 8-man content. SCH and WHM heal in different ways, but neither is truly better than the other for all situations, and both are required to perform equally-demanding healing roles in Coil.

Have fun!

[Asdamine]

I took the liberty of checking your gear on lodestone. My immediate advice would be to update all your accessories and belt from the market board to lv50 as soon as you read this. It doesn't matter which ones as long as you focus on healing items. It will only cost you a few thousand gil but you can easily recover them after you convert those items to materia upon gear replacement at a later stage. Your weapon as well, just to last a couple of rounds in WP for your WP gear and initial darklight farming.

Other than that, follow darksword's advice from above.

[YuiSasaki]

1. You could build yourself a Vanya Robe / Helm (via Weaver - totals for about 400k) and buy the rest of Tomestones of Philosophy
2. Crit has no cap as far as i know.
3. WHM to lv 34 (for Stoneskin) & THM to lv 26 (for Swiftcast)
4. Not sure about Coil (most difficult raid out atm), but i've seen a SCH solo healing Titan which is quite hard - in other words: Yes, SCH is a full-fledged healer.

[Sanare_Anahita]

Continued--
4) MND is nice, you don't need to rely on determination. Why? because 1 mnd = 5.44444444444444(into infinity) determination. If you're going to argue math, I'd prefer you take it up with the people I acquired the math from ( http://valk.dancing-mad.com/calculat...ng-calculator/ )
5) After MND, I stack spell speed, on personal choice. Some people I know may be perfect at ALWAYS hitting their heals at the right time, and never missing a prediction on pre-curing, but I don't like to take a chance in case I mess up. Only human, etc.

[Sanare_Anahita]

(STUPID CHARACTER LIMIT!) third post ---
6) SCH is a mitigation healer. What does that mean? Even if the people are at full HP, you can throw out a Succor or an Adloquium if you know that a move is coming. Learning to pre-cure, pre-heal, is important. Knowing when to use steady and manually control your pet (rouse->Whispering Dawn <3), or when to let your pet follow it's AI, is something you get to choose to learn, but pre-healing is not. The biggest hurdle I've noticed a lot of healers facing in endgame content, and one I've seen in Titan, is the fact that no one seems to want to predict the monster's attacks and actions. Most mobs have a pretty rote sense of acting out, a pattern, and if you can begin to recognise that, you'll be a-okay on Scholar, no matter the target.

[Sanare_Anahita]

FINAL POST!

On the topic of vitality...
I have a set of HQ astral melded with Vitality in prep for Coil, but the people I run with are not quite there yet. Because I gather and craft in an almost ritualistically insane fashion, along with running a tonne of WP with my little people, I have decided to do this, but it may not be the path you choose. If so, the person I consider my mentor told me I could 'suck it up and deal with it' when the time comes. Up to and until Coil, however, it's not an issue. As long as you can strafe your happy self out of red circles, you'll be A-Okay. If you can't move, then you may have to decide to stack in more vitality. That's not a choice anyone can make for you, because we don't know how well you dance.

[Thaliss]

FINAL POST!

Just for information to post more than 1000 characters and not burn your daily post count you can edit a post

To the OP, solo healing? in instances of 4 you are the healer and you can do all of them. Some good tests were doing Brayflox before leeches and Aurum Vale.

(...)
4. I look at Schoolar more as a supporter than a main healer. It lacks the healing potential for that job. But that is ok.
Endgame content requires 8 players in general and the best setup for healing, in my opinion, is a WHM+SCH.
WHM does the big heals and group heals while SCH makes the life of the WHM easier and less MP intensive. Your pet is pretty decent as healer too and can be even more effective if you micromanage its abilities in certain situations.
(...)

What you mean Main healer? Healing Tanks or Full group? Because focus on tank SCH will do it easier than WHM.
The perfect team is having both healer, that's how we run it anyways, I don't see anyone being "main" healer as we do it as a team we share the burden.

The trouble is that people only notice the amount of heal and not the prevention.
But as someone said "I don't know what you do but I notice when you don't"

[KomoChameleon]

As I main Scholar it is a very busy role to play because you have a lot of things to manage, whereas WHM is a bit more straight forward. But let me tell you that SCH is a main healer, not support. I have solo healed Titan, and am regularly finishing Coil T4, and healing on SCH is definitely as good as WHM if played correctly.