Stat Priority as a WHM.

[Menae]

my WHM is max piety build. I logged out on my SMN cant give the exact stat calculations, but my max piety gives me around 5200-5300 MANA and i sit around ~274 ish DET. With my Det gear on i reach somewhere around ~338 DET. After spamming Cure I on myself with both different builds i only noticed a ~50 HP difference in the potency on my cures. The only thing is that instead of 5k plus mana I was sitting around 4500-4600.

I'd rather have the extra MANA than 50+ more hp on heals.
I think the max piety build is better. Especially for progression since ppl will be dying and taking avoidable damage when learning new mechanics.

Dont quote me on this following sentence, but a while back i was discussing healers with one of the officers of my old FC. He mains WHM. He really loves parsing his HPS and overhealing and all that advance healer stuff. (Lets call it FFXIV Sabermetrics lol). He told me that after doing the math (2.3 build) a max piety WHM would be able to cast 200 more cure 1's over the course of the fight than a max det. The reason being they have more natural mp regen per tick because of the larger mana pull.

the more cure 1s u can cast, the more free cure procs u get, further helping with mana conservation. So whille the lower DET means i have to cast more spells through out the fight, it also means i will be asking for ballad less often

Each piety gives you a little less than 8 mp; we'll call it 8 even for ease of mathing. Assuming you cast something right on the pull, never cap on MP, and thus never miss on regen, you will regain 400% of your MP over the course of a ten minute fight (2% per tick, times 20 ticks per minute, times 10 minutes), thus under ideal circumstances each point of piety grants you 40 MP (8 base plus 32 regen) over a ten minute fight. Cure costs 133 MP at level 50; 200 of them costs 26,600 MP. That's 665 piety worth of MP If it's a TWENTY minute fight, it's still 369 piety worth of mp.

I believe that the most piety you can get from gear in 2.4 is 278; it requires a mash up of Coil and Poetics gear (with both Poetics 130 and 120 rings). The reason I say believe is that I don't know whether you can meld more piety onto the crafted gear than the i130 stuff has; I doubt it, but I'm not sure. Using 278 piety as the mark, you can add to that 278 piety with food and party buff, but it still won't bring you to 369 piety. Even if it did, you'd have to compete against a gear set with near-zero piety to make the gap wide enough.

I have some strong reservations about your friend's math, is what I'm saying.