Melding for AST

[Cyrocco]

Thanks, Cyrocco. I appreciate it! I started stacking crit on because I thought that was what I remembered from a way back when I played before. But if we don't have enough options, maybe I will do direct hit and determination like you mentioned. Is spell speed not worth it? Or is it like crit where we dont' have enough to make a difference?

Spell Speed is valuable when you're absolutely always casting, but ultimately, I feel the extra casts you'd get out of building this stat wouldn't be extremely beneficial to the raid. In order for Spell Speed to be an effective stat, you'd need to stack a very large amount of it, however, this would also increase the MP drain during an active DPS window, which isn't an amazing trade-off with Astrologians current MP Refresh options. I'm going to refer to a more researched method of explanation here:



In order to stack enough Spell Speed for it to be valuable, you'd need a large amount of the the stat melded. An extremely large amount. In this graph, a total of 1964 Spell Speed is require before it sees gains over an equivalent amount of Direct Hit.

In other words, as we are now, Direct Hit offers us a similar amount of DPS for what's ultimately going to be MP-cheaper. And since healers are never really in the position where lengthy periods of chain-casting heals are required, it doesn't benefit our heals enough for it to matter more than our traditional meld options would.