Sage Melding, Stat Priority, and Consumables — Dawntrail 7.1

Outside of best-in-slot (BiS) sets, Sage has a general stat priority system. While you are gearing up and working toward a specific best-in-slot, this priority list should guide you toward choosing the best gear and melds along the way. Due to the high priority placed on Magic Damage and Mind, the highest item level piece is usually the best choice while leveling.

Note: This priority system was created with progression raiding in mind because that is when pre-BiS priorities are most relevant.

1. Magic Damage;
   • Found only on weapons, often called Weapon Damage.
2. Mind;
3. Piety to comfort;
   • You only need enough to keep from running out of MP. Any more than that is essentially useless, but you will be using more MP during progression.
4. Spell Speed to the desired GCD tier;
   • This only applies if you have a specific reason to be aiming for a certain GCD speed (usually for DoT timer alignment, if at all).
5. Critical Hit;
6. Determination;
7. Direct Hit;
   • Direct Hit contributes very slightly more to your DPS than Determination, but it does not affect healing at all. The damage difference is inconsequential, and the healing difference is significantly larger.
8. Spell Speed;
   • Spell Speed does not make Sage's Eukrasian spells faster, and having a faster GCD causes you to spend MP more quickly. This makes Spell Speed a very low priority for Sage.
9. Piety.
   • Having more Piety than you generally need can provide an even larger safety net, to a certain point. It is not completely useless, but it does provide the least tangible benefit.

Magic Damage is found only on your weapon. It has the largest effect on your damage and healing, by far. Rarely, a weapon with one less Magic Damage may be slightly better than one with the higher Magic Damage. This may happen if the higher-level weapon has undesired Piety, while the lower-level weapon has no Piety.

Mind is the primary stat (or "main stat") for healers. It scales both our damage and our healing. It is many times less valuable than Magic Damage but many times more valuable than secondary stats.

Like with Magic Damage, it is sometimes possible for a lower item level piece with less Mind to be better than a higher item level piece. This is often the case if the higher item level piece has undesired Piety and the lower item level piece has none.

Due to its strong scaling and the fact that it affects everything we do, Critical Hit is our top priority for secondary stats.

Critical Hit increases your chance to crit and the multiplier applied on a crit. Everything can crit, including damage, healing, damage-over-time effects, and healing-over-time effects.

Because it scales both crit chance and crit multiplier, as you gain more Critical Hit, its scaling is quadratic. Put simply, it scales better as you get more of it, meaning each point is worth more than the previous point.

Determination is a very "average" secondary stat. It simply increases all your damage and healing by a certain percentage. Its scaling is linear, which means that it scales worse than Critical Hit in large quantities.

Direct Hit provides a chance to score "direct hits," which are like mini-crits. A direct hit deals 25% bonus damage. A single attack can simultaneously be a direct hit and a critical hit, and the damage modifiers are multiplicative.

The direct hit multiplier does not change (as far as healers are concerned), so its scaling is linear, like Determination. However, unlike Determination, it does not affect healing at all because heals cannot be direct hits. The difference varies depending on the exact gearsets, but it is always very small. As an example, one comparison saw a difference of 8 DPS (out of 3.5k) in exchange for 2.5% healing.

In well-practiced and coordinated play, that 2.5% healing does not make any real difference, so the Direct Hit is often given a higher priority than Determination for BiS.

Spell Speed has two effects: the main effect is that it decreases your cast time and global recast time (increases GCD speed). The second effect is that it increases the strength of your damage- and healing-over-time effects by a percentage, similar to the effect of Determination.

Spell Speed scales worse for Sage than other healers because Eukrasian spells are unaffected by it. Eukrasia always has a 1-second recast, and the modified spells like Eukrasian Dosis III always have a 1.5-second recast. This means that at least two casts per minute are not affected by Spell Speed, which significantly reduces the stat's effectiveness.

You might reasonably place Spell Speed ahead of Direct Hit for progression because it increases the frequency of Kardia heals and scales the potency of Kerachole and Physis II. Both stats have their downsides, but you will probably not have enough of either stat for the difference between them to be relevant.

Piety is the only secondary stat (or "substat") that does not affect damage in any way, and healers are the only role with access to it. Because it does not scale your damage or healing, it offers absolutely no benefit beyond the amount you need to achieve your goal without running out of MP.

If you do not have enough MP to do your job, Piety is by far the most important stat for you to acquire until you solve that problem. But, aside from meeting that requirement, it is essentially useless.

The amount of Piety you need can vary wildly based on many factors, such as your party composition, your group's familiarity with the encounter, the amount of healing required, etc.

If you are learning an encounter, you probably want more Piety so you have a buffer for casting Egeiro or extra GCD heals for safety. Additional Piety can also help you recover if you die, since you will be raised with very little MP.

The unique nature of Piety makes it impossible to create a definitive best-in-slot (BiS) gearset that we can genuinely recommend to all players because different players may have very different needs. Therefore, our approach is to create many sets that are optimized around varying degrees of MP longevity.

Consumables are divided into two categories: meals (food) and medicines (potions). In high-end content, such as savage raids, you are usually expected to come prepared with the appropriate consumables, especially while you are learning the fight. The bonuses provided by these items can often be the difference between life and death.

With Mind being the primary stat for healers, the appropriate stat-increasing potion is the highest tier Mind potion available. Currently, that would be a High Quality (HQ) Grade 7 Tincture of Mind. These potions temporarily increase your Mind stat, which provides a small boost to your damage (and healing) for the duration of the effect.

These are used in high-end content to boost damage during large raid burst windows, most commonly in the opener and the six-minute burst. This is when the boost is most effective, as it is stacked with many other raid buffs.

It is easy to go through a large number of stat potions very quickly if you are using them on every pull. Therefore, it is often not recommended to use them until your group has seen most or all of the encounter and you have a chance of clearing the fight.

The exception to this is that you may want to use them if your group is struggling with a DPS check that is preventing you from progressing. In that situation, you may want to use stat potions specifically for that DPS check to make sure you can get past it and continue learning and practicing later portions of the encounter.

Ethers can be used to instantly restore a large amount of MP. It is always a good idea to have some in case of an emergency, such as dying and being raised with low MP or needing to raise multiple party members. The highest tier Ether available is currently a High Quality (HQ) Super-Ether, which restores 1800 MP.

They are especially useful during progression because mistakes and deaths are guaranteed. Ethers can allow you to recover from situations that would otherwise lead to a wipe. Even if you are only delaying the wipe, it allows your group to see more of the encounter and get more practice.

Ethers share a cooldown with all other "medicines," such as Mind potions and healing potions. If you think you will need to use an Ether, you may want to avoid using another Mind potion after the opener. The damage lost from not using another Mind potion is nothing compared to the damage you lose if you run out of MP and cannot cast spells.

The largest benefit provided by food is simply the extra Vitality, which increases your max HP to help you survive hard-hitting attacks. Each food will also increase two secondary stats by a percentage, up to a listed cap.

Make sure you choose a food that you can fully benefit from by hitting the listed cap on every stat. For example, if the food says it increases Direct Hit by 10%, up to 50, you would only get the entire 50 Direct Hit if you previously had 500 Direct Hit. If you have no Direct Hit melds, your base Direct Hit at level 90 is only 400, so the food would only give you 40 Direct Hit.

This would generally make it a worse choice than any other food that you could get the full benefit from (except Piety food, which is completely worthless if you do not need the Piety).

The specific food you should use will be listed in the gearset you choose from the best-in-slot page. Before you have the full best-in-slot, you can instead choose the highest level food that follows the stat priority given above.