Healers and gearing up for end game

[MelvinK]

OP, when you are deciding which DL pieces to upgrade please prioritize your main pieces. It might tempted you to upgrade accessories since we don't get much upgrades in accessories department(I remember I have a lowly 20+ rings still at lvl50) but please bear in mind you need certain HP to survive titan hardmode and coil (especially turn 2 and turn 4) and you don't get HP from accessories. End of the day, please do not exclude vitality gain factor when you are deciding.

[Lalone]

a group of 3 or 4 friends and I did AK several times completely drunk and we still did it easily still, I might add that I had 1 or 2 pieces of Darklight gear and Jade Crook staff as I was spirit binding to convert to Quicktongue III. So essentially as long as you have the skill you can easily heal this in the 45/50 AF gear with any 45+ weapon.

[Nailkita]

OP, when you are deciding which DL pieces to upgrade please prioritize your main pieces. It might tempted you to upgrade accessories since we don't get much upgrades in accessories department(I remember I have a lowly 20+ rings still at lvl50) but please bear in mind you need certain HP to survive titan hardmode and coil (especially turn 2 and turn 4) and you don't get HP from accessories. End of the day, please do not exclude vitality gain factor when you are deciding.

While focusing on the non accessories you can on most worlds buy tourquise rings, neck and braclets all for around 5k a piece, maybe a bit more for HQ. They give you about 6 mind and 9-10 spell speed per, and are great cheap pieces to get you by.

[Lalone]

aren't he tourmaline better for piety?

[ventlus]

if you got the money, and your farming philosphy anyways id just jump into the vanya set hq its much better then darklight. why you need the money is if the crafter charges a fee (which he most likely will do) and the materia stacking. 5 materia meld on a piece of gear is amazing tho. I have the vanya hat of healing hq with 5 materia and it took me like 100k worth of materia to get final result and that was with pretty cheap materia. So if i wasn't in coil id just get the full crafted set and 5 slot with materia. but i am, so i'm not upgrading certain things right away cause item level 90 crap beats the crafted hq set :<

just do full darklight if your broke, and your not progressing through coil to much.

[Urthdigger]

I really wouldn't recommend Vanya for someone just starting to gear up for endgame, as it likely means they're new and didn't come in with a bunch of legacy money (So they can't just straight up purchase one), and it actually takes MORE philosophy stones to buy all the materials than it would be to get an equivalent piece of darklight gear, nor are they likely to have 100k worth of materia to slot in either, so at best they'd be getting a roughly equivalent piece if it's HQed.

It's basically like telling someone starting out to just focus on Relic +1 and relic armor. Yeah it's the better option, but they need stuff to use in the meantime.