Sage Melding, Stat Priority, and Consumables - Dawntrail 7.0 (2024)

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

Note: This priority system was created with progression raidingin 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 thatis essentially useless, but you will be using more MP duringprogression.
4. Spell Speed to the desired GCD tier;
   • This only applies if you have a specific reason to be aiming for acertain 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 thanDetermination, but it does not affect healing at all. The damage differenceis inconsequential, and the healing difference is significantly larger.
8. Spell Speed;
   • Spell Speed does not make Sage's Eukrasian spells faster, and having afaster GCD causes you to spend MP more quickly. This makes Spell Speed avery low priority for Sage.
9. Piety.
   • Having more Piety than you generally need can provide an even largersafety net, to a certain point. It is not completely useless, but it doesprovide the least tangible benefit.

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

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

Like with Magic Damage, it is sometimes possible for a lower item levelpiece with less Mind to be better than a higher item level piece. This is oftenthe case if the higher item level piece has undesired Piety and the lower itemlevel 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 ona crit. Everything can crit, including damage, healing, damage-over-timeeffects, and healing-over-time effects.

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

Determination is a very "average" secondary stat. It simply increasesall 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 likemini-crits. A direct hit deals 25% bonus damage. A single attack cansimultaneously be a direct hit and a critical hit, and the damage modifiers aremultiplicative.

The direct hit multiplier does not change (as far as healers areconcerned), so its scaling is linear, like Determination. However, unlikeDetermination, it does not affect healing at all because heals cannot bedirect hits. The difference varies depending on the exact gearsets, but it isalways 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 makeany real difference, so the Direct Hit is often given a higher priority thanDetermination for BiS.

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

Spell Speed scales worse for Sage than other healers because Eukrasianspells are unaffected by it. Eukrasia always has a 1-secondrecast, and the modified spells like Eukrasian Dosis III alwayshave a 1.5-second recast. This means that at least two casts per minute are notaffected by Spell Speed, which significantly reduces the stat'seffectiveness.

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

Piety is the only secondary stat (or "substat") that does not affectdamage in any way, and healers are the only role with access to it. Because itdoes not scale your damage or healing, it offers absolutely no benefit beyondthe 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 mostimportant stat for you to acquire until you solve that problem. But, aside frommeeting that requirement, it is essentially useless.

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

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

The unique nature of Piety makes it impossible to create a definitivebest-in-slot (BiS) gearset that we can genuinely recommend to all playersbecause different players may have very different needs. Therefore, ourapproach is to create many sets that are optimized around varying degrees of MPlongevity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The largest benefit provided by food is simply the extra Vitality, whichincreases your max HP to help you survive hard-hitting attacks. Each food willalso 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 hittingthe listed cap on every stat. For example, if the food says it increases DirectHit by 10%, up to 50, you would only get the entire 50 Direct Hit if youpreviously had 500 Direct Hit. If you have no Direct Hit melds, your baseDirect Hit at level 90 is only 400, so the food would only give you 40 DirectHit.

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

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