White Mage Guide - Final Fantasy XIV - FFXIV - SaltedXIV (2024)

The white mage class (WHM) is deceptively one of the most beginner friendly and yet uniquely obtuse healer jobs in the game. You’ll see this guide split into two primary sections, a basics overview to get you up and running, and (soon™) an advanced topics section that will delve into some of the nuances that make the class a challenge to play at the highest tier. I’ll say it now, as you’ll see me say it a million times: White Mage is incredibly and heavily subjective to a significant number of factors that affect what’s “best” to do. I’ll attempt to explain some of the more advanced theories in the advanced topics guide, and provide some situational examples to hopefully help articulate the nuance.

Before getting too far in, because White Mage is often a player’s first healer, this guide will be walking through some of the basics of healing in this game. I strongly encourage you to read Zyrk’s Bullsh*t Guide of the Principles of healing, but I’ll attempt to cover some of the topics discussed there, to aid those whom are loath to read two long text guides! Even if you think you’re familiar with some gameplay basics, it never hurts to have a refresher!

First and Foremost

Your job in Final Fantasy XIV is to deal as much damage as possible, while keeping everyone alive. This is not a “pure healer” game; while Yoshi P has said we have high potent “pure” (raw) heals, this does not mean our job is only to heal. You’ll be doing yourself a service to forget everything you know about World of Warcraft’s or [insert other MMO you’ve played for 50 years] healing principles! XIV is it’s own game, and it operates differently.

Knowing this, then, our job becomes how to heal as efficiently as possible, and in so doing we allocate our remaining resources to deal as much damage as possible. Executing this principle successfully and you’ll have offered the most potential support to your group.

Healing efficiently as possible can be best achieved by not only mastering your own kit but collaborating with your co-healer in 8-man content as much as possible. Even when you two can’t speak to each other, there can be general understandings of which heals should be applied first.

Gameplay Basics

GCDs and oGCDs

It may seem weird to dive into this before talking about actual healing, but understanding how GCDs work is the very first lesson in this game. Truthfully, a lack of understanding on this topic is also the number one issue I see among healers looking to improve!

Hang around inThe Balanceor any FFXIV gameplay community long enough and you’ll hear the acronyms GCD and oGCD thrown around frequently. The game often (but not always) delineates GCDs as spells (or weaponskills, on melee classes), and oGCDs as abilities.

Rolling Your GCD & Weaving

The number one rule of EVERY class in the game is to ALWAYS. BE. CASTING.

Always.

More specifically, this concept is referring to making sure you’re always casting a GCD skill. Any time spent where your GCD’s cooldown isn’t “rolling” around is opportunity wasted, and that’s bad. But if you’re always using a GCD, how do you fit oGCDs in? This is where weaving comes in.

White mages at level 80 have the following instant GCDs:

Dia
Regen
Afflatus Solace
Afflatus Rapture
Afflatus Misery

If you hover over each of the above, you’ll notice they all have a base recast time of 2.50s, but are “instant” to cast.

Meanwhile, we have the following abilities as oGCDs:

To use them properly, we need to “weave” with the instant GCDs listed above.

“Instant” skills in the game are a bit of a misnomer. Even though they’re listed as instant, they all have an animation lock a bit under one second. What this means is when you try to use an oGCD like Assize between two casted GCDs like Glare, the second Glare’s cast ends up being delayed by that animation lock. This adds up significantly over the course of an encounter. Alternatively, if you use an instant GCD like Dia to weave Assize under, your next Glare (or other GCD) cast won’t be delayed at all. That’s proper weaving!

Sticking an oGCD between two casted GCDs is something you’ll often hear referred to as “clipping your GCD.” These clips will add up over the course of a fight and result in less casts overall. You also cannot weave more than two oGCDs during one instant GCD cast without running into issues.

The Advanced Topics section in this guide will elaborate a bit more on the nuances of weaving and clipping your GCD.

Don’t Drop Casts to Panic Heal!

It’s common among healers to panic during scary mechanics and to freeze, as we’re afraid if we cast a damage skill, we’ll miss a needed heal and a party member will die. Frankly, this very very rarely happens. It’s common for both healers from other games, or first time healers, to subscribe to this notion. Relax and take a deep breath! The damage pacing in this game is quite slow and very predictable, and nothing comes out so fast or so unexpectedly to one shot a player. If you’re trying to learn a new mechanic you’ve never seen, while staring at your screen trying to observe, you can mindlessly cast your filler spell (Glare at level 80!) the whole time.

The best way to monitor your GCD and oGCD use are with commonly used tools likeACTandFFlogs. Check out the section for more information on those!

Snapshotting

As a subset of GCDs and oGCDs, there’s another set of acronyms worth mentioning here: HoTs and DoTs.

With most DoTs and HoTs in the game, the potency of them “snapshots” on application. This means any buffs or debuffs that might affect their respective potency are calculated at the time of use of the skill.

As an example, say Temperance, which has a 20% healing up attribute, is on you and your party. This means that a Regen or Medica II cast after Temperance is used will increase in potency by 20%. By contrast, if you used Medica II first and then Temperance, the Medica II HoT already ticking on the party would not be buffed. Regen works the same way.

DoTs work essentially the same way, where any damage up buffs on a target, or damage down debuffs on you, will affect your Dia DoT if any of those buffs or debuffs are applied before your Dia is cast, and they have no affect if the buffs or debuffs are applied after its cast.

But here’s how they work.

Standard healing up buffs, so in our case Temperance’s 20% up buff, only affect GCD heals, not oGCD ones. Why? Not entirely sure, but I sure wish SE would make the tool tips clearer on this point. It’s been this way since at least A Realm Reborn.

There’s two notable types of healing up buffs in the game. The most common for healers to have is written as increases healing magic potency . Skills with this phrasing buff the heals cast by the player with the buff on them, thus buffs theiroutgoing healing. However, it buffsGCD heals only, and it does not affect oGCD heals. For a White Mage you can be affected by the healing up component from Temperance (your buff bar will have two temperance buffs, one for the mitigation, and one for the healing buff), or from a Scholar in your party whose had their fairy cast either form of Illumination (see the list below).

Healer actions with this effect:

Temperance(WHM)
Neutral Sect (AST)
Fey Illumination / Seraphic Illumination (SCH | applies to the whole party)
Dissipation (SCH)

The other type is written as HP recovery via healing actions . Skills with this phrasing increase the amount of incoming heals on the target with this buff and the increase is applied to ALL heals (GCD and oGCD).Meaning, if one of these buffs is on a target, any heal from any player or source is buffed. These buff actions all come from non-healer roles with the exception of Asylum, so it’s helpful to know how they function when you see their buffs applied.

Actions with this effect:

Asylum (WHM | Players must be inside the bubble to receive requisite buff)
Mantra (MNK | AoE buff)
Nature's Minne (BRD | Single Target)
Thrill of Battle (WAR | Personal)
Improvisation (DNC | AoE buff)

Unlike the first set, the buff from these skills affect the potency of oGCDs too, meaning as long as your target has the buff from Asylum, oGCD heals like Tetragrammaton will have 10% more potency.

Potency and Variance

Potency is a uniform way for the game to refer to the amount of healing or damage we’ll do relative to our other skills. Glare, for example, has a potency of 300 whereas Dia has a total listed potency of 720. While these numbers are constant and allow for comparisons between skills, it’s worth noting that there’s a 5% variance on damage and healing amounts when actually calculated by the game. This applies to damage hitting us and our party, too. So, Glare will always have 300 potency, but you may see its “swing” from the encounter be +/- 5% in damage amounts.

While not incredibly important for our damage hitting buttons, there are some cases where this variance could make or break the difference between someone living or dying. For example, if an enemy averaged a 10,000 auto-attack hit on our tank, that would mean the hit could be anywhere between 9,500 and 10,500. Similarly an AOE could go out on the party and if our planned heals only leave them with a tiny sliver of HP, it’s possible someone could get an unlucky roll and die to this variance. It’s important to heal our parties efficiently, but you don’t want to play so risky as to be within this variance that someone might die!

Why Macros are Bad

You will not see a list of recommended macros in this guide. To understand why let’s elaborate a bit on the rolling your GCD section from before.

Skill Queuing

You’ll likely have noticed, either consciously or subconsciously, that this game functions with a simple skill queuing system. This means that when you push your next action a bit before you last one has finished casting, the game will immediately “queue” that button and execute it immediately upon the cast finish. So if I’m casting Glare and press Cure III about 80% through of Glare’s cast bar, the game will immediately start casting Cure III as soon as Glare has finished, without me having to press the button again.

Notably, actions within a macro cannot be queued. Which means that when you try to cast a macroed GCD after another GCD, the game will not queue it, and you will have a delay before the cast fires even if you’re spam pressing the button. Take a look at this video to see what I mean:

Over the course of a fight that delay will add up and equate to a significant amount of casts lost.

So, in short, don’t macro GCDs. If you find yourself struggling with targeting, there’s a Targeting Tips section near the end of the guide.

oGCD skills do still suffer from the same input issues as GCDs when macroed, however if you’re properly weaving then the input delay could potentially be absorbed within the GCD recast time. Because you should still be targeting properly for GCD heals, I personally wouldn’t recommend macroing oGCDs either. That said, I’ve explained the “what goes on” in the Advanced Skill Queuing section, which will let you know if you can get away with it.

Server Ticks

To round out the gameplay section, we’ll talk about what is colloquially known as “Server Ticks.” It’s a bit of a misnomer as the ticks aren’t related to the server so much as they are to when the entity/map is generated, however the populace uses server ticks to refer to this, so I will as well.

All DoT’s and HoTs will “tick” on the server tick, your natural passive HP and MP regeneration will tick on the server tick, Lucid Dreaming will restore mana on this tick, and some buffs will run their checks on this tick. It occurs every three seconds, no matter what, so it doesn’t coincide with your GCD recast time at all.

Calculating Tick Potency

Since HoTs and Dots tick every three seconds, we can use this to calculate the potency!

Let’s take Dia’s tooltip:

Dia

The duration is listed as 30 seconds. Since we know it’ll tick every three seconds, we’ll get 10 total ticks out of the dot (30s / 3s).
Since the potency per tick is 60p, we know the total dot tick potency is 600p (60p * 10 ticks)
Finally, since Dia has initial hit damage potency of 120p, we add that in to get 720p total (600p + 120p).

Ground Target Initial Ticks

Back in Stormblood, ground target HoTs and DoTs were adjusted to immediately apply their effects on action use. This doesn’t impact when the remaining server ticks happen, instead this results in most ground targeted actions gaining an additional tick. If you drop an Asylum on yourself you’ll notice the flying text for the heal immediately, and then your proper server tick will happen for the remainder of the HoT. This means we can evaluate the potency of ground target heals (in this case Asylum’s) with one extra tick.

There is a very small chance you’ll miss out on the additional tick if your asylum is dropped with a certain alignment with the server tick, but it’s rare enough to not worry about.

It’s also worth noting as an aside that Astrologian’s Collective Unconscious bubble doesn’t get the extra tick.

Healing 101

Now that we have some gameplay basics out of the way, let’s dive into the good stuff!

From here on out I’ll be making a certain distinction between the actions we have; there are GCDs and oGCDs as you know, but I’ll refer to Afflatus skills independently for the remainder of this guide. From a technical standpoint all Afflatus skills are standard GCDs. However, unlike most of our GCDs, they have no mp cost and are resource locked to our lily generation. They’re like a weird GCD + oGCD love child and a bloody mess of one!

It’s also worth throwing out there that truly aren’t oh-sh*t buttons in this game. You should be maximizing all of the tools in your kit as frequently and as effectively as possible, enabling you to play more optimally; don’t sit on a button “just in case” – that’s not how it works, and it’s poor play all around. Damage doesn’t come out fast enough in this game to warrant an emergency heal mindset, if a DPS ate some damage they were supposed to dodge, you will have time to Cure II them. You do not need to save something like Tetragrammaton for these kinds of spots! Plan out your Tetras and use them frequently, and if someone needs a spot heal for standing in something avoidable, that’s when you can use your GCD heals, not vice versa!

Knowing Your Heal Priorities

With some subjective variance to account for, in a general sense you’ll want to use oGCD heals before GCD ones in order to master healing effectively. When I say “cost of a heal” I don’t just mean how much MP it takes to cast. All heals have multiple costs to consider:

• MP Cost
• Damage lost to casting a heal
• Cooldown on the ability
• Resources needed to cast it, which in this case for WHM I’m referring to stored lily stacks.

As a rule of thumb, you’ll reach for your Afflatus heals the most often, but that’s unfortunately a bit subjective as I’ll elaborate below.

MP Cost of Heals

White Mages have the most leniency compared to the other two healers in that with skills like Assize and Thin Air, when used in conjunction with Lucid Dreaming, we have the best mana efficiency of the healer role. That said, you will still run out of mana if you’re unnecessarily repeatedly casting high mana cost skills like Cure III, Medica, and Medica II. Be mindful of the cost in high damage fights!

Damage Lost/Opportunity Cost per Heal

To any healer aiming to play well, this is the most important cost to consider; “How much damage am I losing to use this?” And in a sense the question you should be asking is, “Which of my options will cover the healing needed with the least damage lost.”

GCD Heal Damage Tradeoff Cost

GCD heals like Cure III and Medica II mean you’re using a GCD to cast them. With your goal in every encounter to execute as many in-combat GCDs as possible, then any GCD you’ve used on a heal means it’s a GCD not spent on casting Glare or reapplying Dia. Which in turn means you’re losing at least 300 potency every time you reach for a GCD heal. Make sure these are absolutely necessary before casting them!

oGCD Heal Damage Costs

oGCD heals have the ability to be weaved with instant cast GCDs like Dia, so your most effective “zero cost” use of them is to weave it with said instant GCDs, and you aim to do this as much as possible. However, that’s not always realistic to do. For cases where you’ve used an oGCD between two casted GCDs, you get a hard clip like we discussed earlier. For the sake of this section of the guide which is aimed at a more introductory overview, you can roughly assume the cost of hard clipping any GCD cast with an oGCD is about 100 potency lost. This is explained in more detail in the section of the guide if you’re interested.

You’ll notice even if you end up clipping an oGCD heal, you still have less damage lost than you would for a GCD heal, so keep that in mind as well!

Afflatus Heal Damage Cost

This is where things get a bit more complicated and subjective! There’s enough about these skills to warrant their own section, so I go quite a bit more in-depth farther down in this guide. However, to simplify the damage cost of using Afflatus for healing, each Afflatus heal (either Afflatus Solace or Afflatus Rapture) will cost you a loss of 300 potency each at the time of use. They are still GCDs which take the place of a Glare cast, so they’re subject to the same GCD heal concerns mentioned above. But what about then using Afflatus Misery? It then offsets this cost by dealing 900 potency when used, however it is also a GCD meaning you are still out an additional fourth glare cast.

Let’s put it more simply, comparing to a situation where you’d instead straight cast Glares:

1 Afflatus heal used = 300p lost
2 Afflatus heals used = 600p lost
3 Afflatus Heals used = 900p lost
3 Afflatus Heals used + 1 Misery cast = 300p lost (that’s (-300*4) + 900)

When using Afflatus heals make sure you never finish an encounter with only twoor three used but no Misery cast. For the sake of using only one Afflatus heal, and not resolving the final Misery cast, the damage lost for using just one is the same as if you didn’t use the afflatus heal and instead used a regular GCD heal. (Meaning when you don’t use misery, Solace and Rapture become just “regular” GCD heals with the full 300p loss from not casting a Glare.) That said, it’s also the same potential loss as using all three lily heals and then the Misery hit (still down 300p)—although there’s other benefits here that we’ll discuss later in the Afflatus section where calling a full Misery set 300p lost isn’t wholly accurate. Another scenario to keep in mind is that It is also okay to use two Afflatus Heals properly (to heal) and then needlessly blow the third near the end of a fight, provided you also and then cast the Misery. This would avoid the 600p lost for only using 2 Afflatus heals, and instead get you back to the standard 300p lost.

The difficulty comes in weighing the cost of these against our other options: GCD heals or Clipping oGCD heals (weaving oGCD heals essentially comes with no cost!).

For some more practical examples (all assume Misery is used unless otherwise stated):

• Using three Afflatus Raptures is much better than using three Medica Casts but nets the same amount of outgoing healing.
  • Damage loss: -300p for Raptures vs. -900p for Medicas

• Using a single Afflatus Solace when the other two healing lilies won’t be touched is worse than hard clipping a Tetragrammaton, again for the same healing potency done.
  • Damage loss: -300p vs. -100p

A more advanced example:

• Using Afflatus Solace for a needed single target heal, and then using the remaining two lilies to double weave and/or move, even if the heal is completely wasted, is better than hard clipping those oGCDs or dropping casts while moving.
  • Damage loss:
    -300p for Solace vs.
    -400p for hard clipping four casts (-100p per clip * 4 oGCDs) vs.
    -600p for dropping two whole GCDs by not casting while moving

In truth the best uses of Afflatus skills will be trying to get them to multitask as much as possible!

Cooldown on the Ability

Ability’s cooldowns are another important cost to consider, especially when you’re trying to be more optimal in a fight and are planning your strategy with your team. Ideally you want to get as many uses of your low-cost tools as possible to offset the need to use your high-cost ones, like GCD heals. Let’s take another example: if there’s a very heavy hitting raid AOE coming out at a certain point in a fight, you’ll likely want to save Temperance for it. Let’s say the hit happens about four and a half minutes in. Even if there’s no other major-hard hitting AOE before that 4:30 mark in the fight, you can still get two more uses of Temperance before that point, which could help with either smaller raid damage hits, or even just tank auto damage. This is clearly better use of the skill than sitting on it until the big hit, but at the same time you wouldn’t want to use the skill at 3:30 because you won’t have it up in time for the scary spot!

Resource Cost

Resources needed intrinsically applies to a White Mage’s Afflatus heals— we can’t use them if we don’t have any healing lilies generated. There’s less of an opportunity cost here as much as a more traditional resource lockout.

For all of the above considerations, do your best to make sure the cost of the heal is worth it! I.e., You don’t need to cast a Cure III when the party is sitting at 80% of their health. Make sure the heal used fits the heal demand needed!

White Mage Heals: A Breakdown

Since this may be the first guide you’re reading, this section provides an overview of the healing actions we have. That said, please read your tooltips. They’re embedded or listed throughout the website for your convenience, just hover over the skill name, or tap if you’re on a touch device. Data for the tooltips is provided by the community created XIVAPI.

Healing Gauge

Your healing gauge will only begin to fill when you enter combat and will freeze when you’re out of combat. Every 30s of being in combat, one “black” (they’re blue but YoshiP called them black) healing lily will be added to your gauge, up to a maximum of three. If you have three unused black healing lilies, the gauge will stop filling.

Using a black healing lily with either Solace or Rapture will “nourish the blood lily” and generate what I’ll call a stack of blood. Build three stacks of blood and you’ll be able to execute Afflatus Misery and get a return on some of the damage lost by casting Afflatus heals.

While you can’t generate more than three black healing lilies at a time, once converted to blood they no longer count as black lilies, so it’s possible to have both three stacks of blood and three stacks of unused black healing lilies at the same time.

Pre-casting & Heal Delay

Now that we’ve talked about all our heals, let’s talk about what actually happens when we cast them. You’ll notice that heals aren’t always as immediate as you want them to be; this can be both to your detriment and to your advantage! When a boss has a cast bar for an incoming AOE attack, you can start pre-casting your heal before the damage goes out, and time it to land just after the damage hits. This is especially important if another hit comes shortly thereafter. If you wait until after the damage hits to start casting, you’ll have less time to recover before the second hit; if you precast the heal for the first hit, you’ll have much more time to prepare for the second!

Heals tend to roll out sequentially across party members, starting with the closest first, and it’s most noticeable with heals or skills that apply a buff, which can often take longer than a regular heal to register. Keep this in mind when pre-casting, as it’s very possible to cast a heal that hits on one or two party members earlier than the damage, leaving them lacking health for an incoming hit, and/or the opposite is true, where the heal hits a handful of party members too late to save them from the incoming damage.

Plenary Indulgence is a notable example of a buff that can take a bit to apply to all party members. It’s possible, especially when connections are wonky, to use Plenary and then a GCD immediately after, and have party members not get the extra 200p heal because the buff wasn’t yet applied before the heal hit.

Mitigation

Planning mitigation appropriately is one of the most important things you can do to optimize your group’s gameplay. That said, as a White Mage your only AOE mitigation you can help with is Temperance. Coordinate with your party to spread out your mitigation resources to get the best use of them all.

Over Healing

Over healing means any healing done beyond what was necessary to survive. If my tank needs 5,000 hp and I heal for 10,000, I’ve done 5,000 overheal or 50%. Part of healing efficiently is knowing how to properly avoid overheal while also not being scared of it. Since the majority of a White Mage’s kit comes from raw “pure” heals and HoTs, our overheal amount naturally tends to drift higher than, say, a Scholar who doesn’t have a GCD-based hot, and has more mitigation tools in their kit. (Shields don’t count towards overheal!) That said, you want to avoid healing needlessly when it’s not needed. If you’re casting heals that are mostly overheal, you could’ve likely used those resources on doing damage instead. It’s important to aim for efficiency while still keeping your party alive.

If you’re looking at FFLogs and trying to gauge your performance based on your HPS percentile, don’t. HPS is an absolutely garbage metric of healer skill in this game. Your goal in FFXIV is not to maximize effective healing done, which is what HPS measures, but is rather to deal as much damage as possible, while keeping the party alive. You want efficient heals, which aren’t always the most “effective” looking ones. This means healing efficiently (but still safely!) in order to maximize your damage output. HPS doesn’t gauge this performance metric at all. In many cases low HPS rankings are better than high ones, but in truth this also isn’t always the case.

HPS can also vary widely by factors like:

• Party comp and use of party mitigation tools
• Tank comp and use of tank mitigation
• Healer comp and efficient or inefficient use of repsective toolkits
• And many more reasons.

To articulate an example, you could have a White Mage repeatedly cast Medica as soon as damage goes out before any other heals or HoTs from their co-healer could happen. They could even do so in such a way that their Medica casts don’t result in overheal. This means in FFLogs their HPS would be quite high, and their overheal quite low. At first glance that looks nice, but in reality it’s absolutely poor play. Letting passive heals or HoTs like Medica II and Whispering Dawn may have resulted in less HPS and more overheal, but would have been much more efficient tools to use to let both healers DPS more.

Analyzing healing logs are quite comprehensive and intensive; it requires a full picture overview of both what the healers did, but also what the party contributed, so try checking the [Damage], [Casts], and [Healing] tab in depth to get an even better idea.

Working with Your Co-healer

Co-healer synergy is intrinsically valuable and important to foster if you’re in a pre-formed group. Even when running with a pick-up group (PuG) it’s still important to understand the kits of your co-healer and how you can best work with them to maximize your potential. Some priorities will shift a bit per co-healer pairing, so class-specific helpful notes are in the sections below. As a general recommendation I strongly recommend leveling all three healers to 80 to at least have a cursory familiarity with their kit, it’ll help your own White Mage gameplay a ton!

Communication is Key!

Work with your co-healer as much as you can to plan and coordinate how you’re healing a fight. You don’t want to both apply AOE HoTs at the same time when having both does way more healing than what’s needed, and then not have either resource when one would work.

Each co-healer pair is going to be different, and how best to communicate, plan, and strategize will vary greatly from group to group and person to person, but as long as you’re both on board with the same goal of playing well, you’ll do just fine! You can try using some spreadsheets of fights to map you and your party’s resources, or you could try verbally communicated over a voice chat program what you’re using and where. The most important thing to do is discuss how each person would work best and come to a mutual agreement on how to cooperate!

Playing with a Scholar

Unlike your kit which boasts big GCD heals, Scholar’s oomph comes mainly from potent oGCD tools they have both from their fairy and from their Aetherflow stacks. However, as most of these cool tools are oGCDs, they have to use them by weaving with a skill, Ruin II, that does less damage than their spammable cast, Broil III. They can also use their Aetherflow stacks for a small damage and mp restore on an Energy Drain, rather than on a big heal. So while Broil III does less damage than your Glare (290p vs. 300p), a Ruin II plus two Energy Drains will be 360p of damage. In working with a Scholar, you’ll want to balance utilizing their big oGCD cooldowns when needed, using your Afflatus heals as much as you can to offset their burden of wanting to use Energy Drain for damage. You’d lose 300p for three afflatus heals and a Misery cast, vs. them losing 300p plus any loss from using Ruin IIs over Broils if they used three aetherflow stacks on heals instead of energy drain. Keep this in mind!

Their fairy pet, named Lily, not to be confused with your lilies, will also continuously cast embrace on any party member who’s health bar isn’t full. This is extremely valuable in offsetting the single target heal burden in the party, especially on tanks. Don’t be overzealous on single target heals with the fairy has your back! She has two “skins,” Eos and Selene, that are nothing but visual differences.

The difficulty in synergy here is the game of “who loses the least damage by healing what and with what and where” and can be difficult to flesh out, especially if communication is lacking. Work in tandem to find the best tool to fit a mechanic!

Playing with an Astrologian

Astrologian has a blend of strong oGCD heals and GCD heals (and buffs) to round out their healing kit. Notably, unlike Scholar or White Mage, Astrologian’s spammable damage skill, Malefic IV has a cast that’s shorter than their recast by enough that it allows them to freely weave one oGCD every time. (It’s okay to be jealous!) This means their oGCDs have zero cost to apply when weaved after said Malefic or any other instant they have, and since those casts are extremely frequent, those tools should generally speaking take priority in usage over your GCD heals or your oGCDs that you cannot freely weave. Plus since Malefic’s damage potency is quite a bit less than Glare’s, they still take GCD healing priority in a lot of use cases. Ast’s have a really handy skill in Earthly Star that when fully charged will do a ton of AOE healing. Try to pay attention to when this is placed down, as it’ll pop soon and you don’t want to waste healing resources when Earthly Star is about to cover it.

Another quick note to be aware of is Astrologian’s struggles with mp. Unlike White Mage or Scholar, AST doesn’t have nearly as many mp recovery tools, nor is their kit as mp efficient. Be mindful of your partner’s mp and try to cover their back when things go awry!

This biggest debate when an Astrologian is paired with a White Mage is whether the Astrologian should use {!Diurnal Sect} or {!Nocturnal Sect}. Diurnal makes some of their GCD heals into HoTs, and Nocturnal makes those same GCDs into shields. From a potency comparison standpoint, Diurnal does more healing, and is the more efficient choice whenever the shielding from Nocturnal isn’t required. So, definitely encourage an Astro buddy to try out Diurnal when you’re with them on White Mage. Later floors of a Savage Tier (and Ultimate tier fights) will still potentially need the shields from Nocturnal Sect, especially while progressing through the fight, so keep that in mind and don’t always default ot Diurnal. And as a last point, when in Duty Finder content or Party Finder content, you may find Nocturnal Sect’s shields help keep inexperienced players alive more readily than Diurnals HoTs, even if the latter is more efficient. So play whatever you think fits the situation best!

Fluid Aura

{!action:Fluid Aura; embed}

Tinctures (Pots)

Not technically an ability, but rather a consumable item, I figured I’d list these here as an FYI. Previous expansions they were various tiers of “Potions” of Mind, so they were colloquially called pots (and still are) however in Shadowbringers we now have Tinctures.

Tinctures function a bit like an oGCD in that you have to weave them effectively to apply them, however unlike proper oGCDs, the animation lock on tinctures (and potions) is significantly longer, and you can only single weave a Tincture without clipping, you can’t use another oGCD in the weave window.

Afflatus and You

Welcome to the most subjective and fantastic and annoying part of learning to play White Mage. So far, I’ve covered a bit about what each Afflatus skill does and how to heal with them when you need to heal, but in this section, we’ll cover the additional uses and purposes of the entire Afflatus mechanic.

Generally you’ll want to consider the Afflatus mechanic as a full set of 4 GCDs; three lily heals that turn into the one blood lily. Once you’ve used your first lily heal in a set, you’ll essentially be committing to resolve the full set of 4 GCDs. In most situations you don’t want to execute some number of lily heals without using Afflatus Misery but the topics below will go more in depth.

It’s a DPS Loss?

In a vacuum/dummy fight scenario, resolving the Afflatus mechanic is a loss over straight casting of glares:

 Glare | Glare | Glare | Glare = 4 GCDs for 1200pRapture | Rapture | Rapture | Misery = 4 GCDs for 900p

But we don’t play White Mage in a vacuum nor on a dummy (other than to practice).

Afflatus skills all come with additional benefits that we’ll go into below!

Overcapping Lilies

You have two types of lilies tracked in your job gauge, there’s a “Healing Lily” Gauge (these have also been referred to as black lilies), and a Blood Lily gauge that tracks how far along you are on your way to a fully nourished the blood lily.

For your healing lily gauge, or black healing lilies, it is absolutely okay to sit on a full set of three of these if you don’t need an afflatus or solace cast for anything. Since resolving the lily mechanic with Misery is still a loss over straight casting Glares, this isn’t intrinsically bad to do, although you may want to ask if you truly didn’t need a Lily skill in the last 90s, as they’re generally your go-to heal buttons.

For your blood lily gauge, it’s okay to sit on a full blood proc’d Misery cast and not use it for a while, in fact it may even be more optimal for you to hold the Misery until you need to weave something, until you need it to move, or even to align with raid buffs. However, it is not okay to use any black healing lily skills (solace nor rapture) when you’re capped on blood stacks. Doing this will result in a flat extra 300p lost and be no different than if you cast any old generic GCD heal, and at that point your regular GCD heals would probably be more efficient. Avoid doing this! If you find you need your healing lilies, then use the Misery you’re sitting on first and then use the lily heals immediately after.

All or Nothing

The entire Afflatus mechanic of three “black” lily heals and a Misery cast both is, and isn’t, an all or nothing mechanic. This is where we start to get pretty subjective in our uses, and it may be best articulated with some scenarios to help demonstrate the points.

Using One Lily Heal is the Same as Using All Four Afflatus Skills

This is both a yes and no example. From a purely damage potency standpoint, using only one Afflatus heal (either Solace or Rapture), is the same potency lost as using three Afflatus Heals and a Misery. Both are a net loss of 300p.

On the one hand, however, you get other benefits from using the other two lily heals in the set, even if you don’t need the heal, that don’t directly correlate to potency gained. Namely, being able to double weave with them, and being able to move with them, are both decent boons.

So, you may be in the use case where an encounter is ending in less than 90s (thus won’t generate enough lilies for a full set), you’ve already used Tetra and Benediction, and the tank really needs a single target heal. In this case, your options are Cure II or Solace. Both will lose you 300p, but Solace will also let you double weave and move (so you could get something like a benison too, or you could pre-position for the next AOE without dropping casts). Thus, in this case even though you don’t get the Misery off, there’s still a use-case where it’s okay to use one without resolving the whole set. It’s a bit niche, but hopefully articulates some of the subjectivity.

Contrasting that, if you were in a similar scenario at the end of single-encounter instance, but DID have enough time to generate two more healing lilies but didn’t need the heals from them, you may still want to “blow” them needlessly so you can weave effectively or move. You lose essentially nothing more potency wise doing this other than what you already lost when you committed to that first Solace or Rapture cast. However you may end up “gaining” by creating movement and weave windows that you’d’ otherwise clip or drop cast to execute.

(There’s also very smol caster tax benefits!)

Fight Duration

In single-fight encounters, keep an eye on the boss’s HP and try to guess at the kill time as it correlates with your Lily gauge. If you won’t be able to generate a Misery before the fight ends, you’ll most likely want to avoid using any healing lilies after your last Misery. Any used would be no different than GCD healing. Granted if you need to GCD heal anyways, then it’s a toss-up — decide what’s most efficient to use. Considering the healing potency on Rapture, you’re likely more efficient to GCD heal with Cure III or Medica II. And, when it comes to Solace you’re in the same boat as you are with Cure II where, generally, you shouldn’t be in a situation where you even need to cast this. Regen would be a better single target heal GCD option if you have time for the HoT.

Heal Prioritizing

It may seem weird to have this in the DPS section, but ultimately managing your heals better and more efficiently is the past way to execute more DPS!

Usually you can safely assume using an Afflatus heal is going to be better than a GCD heal, provided the potency alone is enough. I.e. if one Rapture is too short and you end up doing a Rapture and a Cure III, whereas one Cure III is sufficient on its own, you haven’t really saved yourself much of anything with that Rapture cast.

As far as comparing to oGCD heals, freely weaved oGCD heals are still your first go to, but your afflatus heals may be what you end up wanting to weave under, so that point is a bit moot. When comparing to hard clipped oGCD heals, you’ll really want to get a full picture of the rest of the afflatus mechanic before deciding the worth. As stated before, a single clip of tetra is less potency lost than committing to a single lily or to the full afflatus mechanic, but if you end up using the rest of your healing lilies usefully, you will likely come out ahead.

So in truth, generally you cannot and should not consider each lily heal in a one-off scenario. Consider the weight and use of resolving the whole mechanic before committing to using it. That said, you’ll generally be using it effectively without having to think too much about it! Don’t try to oversimplify how much an afflatus action is “worth.” Trying to simplify this does more harm than benefit. It isnot some arbitrary value of “divide by 4 GCDs and use that value” because you can’t consider a single lily by itself, you need to look at all four Afflatus GCDs in a set. Are you saving weaves that would be clips? Are you saving movement you’d lose damage otherwise trying to execute? Don’t try to 1 lily GCD to 1 co-healer GCD compare, it fundamentally doesn’t work this way.

Downtime Lilies

Probably the most fun part of Afflatus healing lilies is downtime lilies! In single encounter battles when there’s downtime where the boss is untargetable, blowing the lilies (whether they effectively heal or not) will most likely give you a gain over using them in combat. It’s even more common in dungeon-type content where combat frequently stops and starts! In standard combat, each lily heal used is 300p lost until misery is cast: so you lose 1200p (300p per each potential glare lost) overall for the mechanic, and gain 900p back. However, when used in downtime there’s no comparison to a lost Glare because no Glare could be cast at that time. So, each used during downtime is another 300p back in your pocket!

There is essentially no detriment to using downtime lilies. The “worst case” scenario would be using an Afflatus heal during downtime only to realize back during active combat you still need that heal. However, in that case, you’d just cast a standard non-Afflatus GCD heal and be back at the same damage potency loss where you would’ve been otherwise (unless you blew multiple lilies and then needed multiple GCD heals). If anything, you still come out on the more efficient end as you’re likely using either Medica II or Cure III: a much more healing potent GCD heal for the same amount of damage potency loss you would’ve had, had you saved and used Rapture in that spot.

Fights with Adds

In single-fight instances (meaning instances where you’re in combat for the duration until completed, like Raids and Trials, and unlike dungeons), when there’s adds it’s important to try and save a Misery cast for use on any set of additional (adds) monsters that your Misery can hit two or more of them. Even if this means blowing afflatus heals on nothing else useful, you get a significant amount of potency on the second enemy (675p plus the original 900p) to make this a significant gain!

Dungeon Lilies

Dungeon lilies operate significantly different than everything articulated above, specifically because you will frequently enter and leave combat and because of dungeon “mob” packs or “trash” as it’s colloquially known – large packs of multiple targets. While pacing will vary per dungeon, you’ll want to try and get as many Miseries as you can on packs of dungeon trash as it will be a huge and significant amount of AOE damage that will speed the dungeon along faster. Ideally you still want to try and dump lily heals during downtime, for example between pulls of trash or before pulling the boss. But even using these during active combat as long as you get the Misery on an AOE pack is still a large gain.

Downtime lilies are still applicable here, and anything used outside of combat is still a significant gain over being in combat while using!

Additionally, it’s possible to get two Miseries off on one pack, and this is both fun as well as worth doing on very large trash packs. To do this you need to spend three lily heals to fully charge your blood gauge, either during downtime or during earlier bosses of the dungeon, and then let three more black lily heal stacks generate. On the large pack, use the already stored Misery, then dump your three healing lilies, and use Misery again! You’re a DPS class now!

When should you actually use these Afflatuses?

The healing aspect of the Afflatus mechanic is still likely the most important part to prioritize over other benefits. That said, for a simple and easy-to-remember rule of thumb” for lilies, try to get them to do two of the following three things:

1. needed effective healing
2. weaving oGCDs (bonus points for double weaving!)
3. movement

Which doesn’t mean “don’t use lilies if you don’t meet two of these” (especially if one is the heal!) – but do try to get it to do double (or even triple!) duty. As you might’ve gathered, proper optimal lily use can be highly subjective from a variety of variables. What will actual be optimal in any given moment will likely come down to encounter specific rotations, and/or subjective scenarios based on your party and their gameplay. Which is why it’s hard to have one catch all “always do this” answer.

Misery and Raid Buff Alignment

Aligning Misery for raid buffs won’t be an inherent gain if you’re attempt to blow lily heals needlessly to generate Misery for a burst window. For example, a 10% up buff will only net you an additional 90p, which doesn’t offset the 300p lost by straight casting Glares. You’d need something silly like over 33% damage up buffs to gain back that damage.

That said if you’re naturally actively using lily heals for other gains, whether easily quantified or not, and can align Misery with raid buffs, absolutely do so. If used continuously enough without capping, Misery has the potential to line up with three minute and six-minute raid burst windows. But because Misery itself doesn’t have a cooldown timer, it’s possible to say, use one during two-minute buff three-minute buff windows, which are key spots when your party members have damage increasing buffs out for the party.

Most savage tier fights will have enough of a healing requirement that you can easily hit these windows! But also make sure to consider if the raid buff benefits out weigh other opportunity costs. For an example, say your only raid buff in a situation was a trick attack (5%); you could gain 45p for Misery under trick, or you could hold the Misery for a bit longer, miss Trick Attack, but weave Assize effectively without clipping. You’ve essentially traded 45p in raid buffs bonuses for roughly 100p not lost to clipping. Again, it’s very subjective to fight and comp and situation (and the nuances of clipping), but try to be actively thinking on it!

Moving Around

One of the bigger challenges White Mages face is trying to move around during a fight to properly handle mechanics. What are the best ways to do so?

By crying audibly…

Okay, really, you do have SOME tools to try and use to make moving (and weaving!) less awful on WHM, even when the party doesn’t need a heal. There’s a bit of a priority system you can follow, but as always, it’s heavily subjective to the fight and the situation!

1. The best thing you can do is plan ahead. If you know you need to be in a certain spot 10s from now, but have to refresh Dia now, move early!
2. Slidecasting is your best friend!
   Sometimes also called Stutter-stepping, Slidecasting is the act of moving your character a bit before a cast finishes, without having the cast cancel on you. You can’t move very far or very long, but if you have enough time or only need to move a small distance, this can be your best tool.
   You can start moving roughly 80% of the way through your cast bar. One quick tip to help you see when you can move: stick an emote action somewhere on a visible bar. When it lights up, that’s about when you can start slide casting.
3. For long movements, try chaining combinations of things, i.e., Afflatus Rapture > Afflatus Misery + Swiftcast > Glare etc.
4. A pure overheal-afflatus if you’ve already used one, OR if you’ll end up using at least one more for movement/weaving/healing. Essentially, you’ve already committed or will commit to executing a full Afflatus set.
5. Dia with <6s left — but this one comes with extra costs of misaligning with Assize, which has its own additional potential potency lost. However, fight downtime can help correct misalignment and make it more optimal to do so.
6. A little more subjective, but I’d put Regen here in the priority, or a non-Misery’d Solace if you’re near the end of the fight (meaning one you’ll never resolve the Misery cast for). Basically, for both, an instant cast single target heal that loses 300p but does effective healing.
7. Blow an Afflatus heal when you have not yet committed a set. The difference between this and #3 on the list is that this point is specifically for committing to a brand-new Afflatus set, vs. #3 being in the middle of an already committed to one (i.e. 1 or two blood stacks in) — or one you were going to commit to anyways. Granted, this point especially will vary in its priority position a lot based on where you are in a fight. Earlier in the encounter you’ll likely have no issues committing to resolving your Misery cast. Toward the end of the fight you really have to consider if you will resolve it. That latter scenario is essentially what this priority slot is describing. Are you forcing a Misery and in so doing losing more damage than you would with your other options?
8. If it’s a short movement (this one is super incredibly subjective) – drop cast. You do kind of have to know how long you’ll drop the cast for to know if this is worth (i.e. if your movement is quicker than than a hard clip’s animation lock duration). The use case for this is generally something where you start moving by slidecasting and keep moving a little bit longer.
9. Swiftcast + Casted GCD (like Glare)
   This DOES hardclip with Swiftcast, so make sure the time you need to move warrants this. You will still be able to weave two more actions under the swiftcasted Glare, so there could be a tradeoff.
10. Dia if >6s left on it – this is pretty gross and a last resort because you misalign with everything. It can be optimal in niche situations. Essentially if you’re going to completely not cast anything, using this is better than nothing.

Avoiding Clips

Maintaining solid uptime as a White Mage also includes the struggle of avoiding hard clipping oGCDs between GCDs. There’s some overlap with the priority order listed in the Moving Around section above, as the only tools a White Mage can use to properly weave skills without clipping are instant cast GCDs like Regen, Dia, Afflatus Solace, Afflatus Rapture, or Afflatus Misery. You can also weave after a swift casted GCD skill like Glare, although the Swiftcast use would have to be weaved with the GCD before to avoid the clip.

In some cases, it’s better to just hard clip the oGCD than it is to force something to weave. For example, using a Regen when the party member isn’t going to take much damage is essentially a waste. You’d be trading what would’ve been -100p lost for hard clipping for the loss of 300p from not casting a glare. The Weaving section toward the beginning of the guide goes a bit more in depth, but it’s important to remember that a hard GCD clip basically means 100p lost.

The best thing you can do is plan ahead.

Weaving Healing-Oriented oGCDs

To elaborate a bit, some of our healing oGCDs like Asylum and Temperance apply a buff and have a duration for their effect. That means these types of skills can be applied a bit earlier and gives us some flexibility with how to use them.

Additionally, since Afflatus heals are instant cast GCDs, sometimes your best option for healing oGCDs is to heal a bit first with Rapture or Solace and then weave the oGCD skill. For a high damage phase for example, you may want to Afflatus Rapture the first hit, drop Asylum and weave Plenary Indulgence, and continue to heal with another skill after that’s now buffed by these oGCDs.

Weaving Damage-Oriented oGCDs

Your two big damage-oriented oGCDs are Presence of Mind and Assize.

Weaving Presence of Mind

As mentioned earlier, Presence of Mind’s two-and-a-half-minute cool down naturally synergizes with nothing from the rest of your party. Because of this, ideally try to weave it when it’s up rather than clipping to apply since you’re not going for alignment. It should still align with Dia if you didn’t drift your DoT too much, and if you ARE going for raid buff Alignment, you should still have a Dia set up to weave this with.

Weaving Assize

Probably the most challenging weave to handle; every other Assize, should naturally line up with Dia. For the ones that don’t you have a few options:

• Weave it with an Afflatus skill (Solace, Rapture, or Misery)
  On the one hand, doing so when you don’t need this to heal, double weave, or move is a bit of a toss-up and heavily fight and lily subjective.
  On the other, saving Misery casts for Assize alignment can help significantly over the course of a fight if you’re struggling with other resources to weave Assize with.
• Weave it with a needed and useful Regen
• Hard clip Glare with it

Personal opinion: it feels gross and wrong, but hard clipping it is a perfectly viable option in some cases. Ideally, avoid this by using an Afflatus skill, but try and make that Afflatus doing double duty by weaving something else you need with it, or pre-positioning for a mechanic.

The White Mage opener is relatively simple and straight-forward to execute, but there’s a few things to note for all of the variations.

Generally, try to weave Assize in the first GCD “slot” of your instant GCD. Because White Mage can’t maintain perfect GCD alignment as our cast time varies due to Presence of Mind, having Assize earlier in the GCD helps reduce the potential need to drift in subsequent uses of the skill.

There’s two considerations to make when executing Presence of Mind: 1) how bad is your latency, and 2) what is your GCD speed?

1. On decent connections with a pretty standard GCD (e.g. 2.41 is plenty comfortable) you can snap 8 GCDs under the effect of PoM only if you execute PoM in the second weave slot. Using it as your first weave at this GCD will not let its buff last long enough to snapshot the 8th GCD’s cast.
   Tl;dr: If your connection is okay-ish and your GCD is normal-ish, make sure to slot PoM as the second weave.
2. If you’re running a very slow GCD (2.43+) and/or your latency is very poor it eitherwon’t matter if you use PoM in the first or second slot. OR if your latency is so bad, it’s possible that using it in the second weave slot will make it so your very next GCD cast doesn’t snapshot the buff application and casts its normal full length. (If you’ve ever been lagging so much that you hit swiftcast and then the game still had you full cast your next action, this is the same issue).
   Tl;dr:If your connection is really poor, swap Presence of Mind into the first oGCD slot of its GCD below, rather than the second.

Denotes the start of combat, actions executed before should be done pre-pull.

The math for this is subjective and situational. Whether this wins will depend on comp, raid buffs, boss uptime, and player execution. Use the GCD planner to check the numbers before using this opener — it’s meant for speed/optimization kills.

Theory is to overwrite snap Dia at the tail end of opener raid buffs which will then keep its alignment with other minute-multiple buffs thereafter. The 3rd application of Dia should then be around the 51/52s mark, so you only hold your 2nd Assize for about 7s.
RISKY note: if you know your kill time won’t lose you an assize you could consider holding the first for 21s and weaving with 2nd dia, getting the assize under these raid buffs.

Opener below is shown with the DRG modefication above, but this doesn’t have to be used.

Overwrite this Diawhen there’s about 9s remaining on its duration, at the end of the raid buff window. Glare until the next natural Dia application 30s later and then weave

with this third dia.

All stats in Final Fantasy XIV operate off of tiers, not weights. Adding more of a certain stat won’t gain any new effect until a new tier is reached. This is why we can’t state 1 point of one stat is equal to some amount of points of another stat. How much a single stat point is worth is entirely relative to how much in total of both the stat in question you have, and how much you have of the of the stat you’re comparing against.

This guide provides a general overview of the importance of each stat as it relates to White Mage, however for a more comprehensive understanding, a dedicated page on this site will be written at some point in the future (and linked here!).

The weapon damage (magic damage) on your weapon far outweighs all your other stats, both primary secondary. Notable the magic damage ALSO increases your healing output – it’s notjust for damage.

Almost always, take the weapon with the highest weapon damage.
(exceptions covered below in the substats section.)

The quick and dirty substat priority is involvesgrabbing piety to comfort and then:

Affects the amount of physical and magical damage dealt, as well as HP restored. The more you have, the higher the frequency with which your hits will be critical and the higher the potency of those critical hits. This affects both standard potency actions, and over time effects.

As a healer, we still end up spending spendingmost of our time doing damage. Crit should be the substat your prioritize over other substats. It scales better than the other substats because it scales quadradically. It has the most damage return AND heals can critical hit as well. While you’ll likely never adjust your healing rotation as the result of a critical heal, it can still be a comfortable bonus when your heals crit, more than the other substats can reward you.

Affects MP regeneration. Regeneration rate is determined by piety. Only applicable when in battle and role is Healer.

Piety is simultaneously the most important stat as a healer, and the least important. You need MP to cast and do anything at all, so if you run out you’re dead in the water. But at the same time, having excessive MP is useless to you, if the extra piety you garner goes unused, you could’ve dumped those stats into something more useful. Thankfully, White Mage has fantastic MP economy thanks to skills like Thin Air, Assize, and of course Lucid Dreaming. Plus our afflatus heals all cost 0 MP.

But how much is enough? Needingenoughis my arbitrary way of saying how much a player needs depends on the player. I can’t give you one magic “right” value. New players, players who run in PuG groups, players who are over reliant on GCD heals, players who don’t use their mp tools often enough will all need more mp. Alternatively a speed runner can likely get away running with 0 piety on their gear depending on the fight. Give some of the recommended sets in the gear planner linked below a try and adjust accordingly.

If you find yourself nevergoing out of mana in a fight, maybe try dropping some. Constantly going out? grab more. Don’t be afraid to adjust to suit your needs. Avoiding piety ISN’T the “how to get more damage” answer, better play is.

The latest up to date recommended White Mage best-in-slot (BiS) sets will always be posted on the main White Mage page of this site.

For a full list of gearsets from this tier, previous tiers, and current expansion ultimates, use the Gear Planner spreadsheet. Previous tiers and ultimate sets can be found in the tabs at the base. Duplicate the sheet to try adding your own custom sets to see how they compare! Instructions can be found on the Read Me tab.

Looking for gearsets for level synced content like UCoB or UWU?

Most current expansion gear pieces end up BiS when synced down, or nearly close!

Level sync on gear works by using the “stat caps” as if the gear was actually of the item level designated by the sync. So, an i500 piece in UCoB will act like an i345 piece. The con to this is that any melds are completely ignored. However, the pro is that both substats will sync to the “cap” of the weapon for a stat, and not the amount the weapon would’ve had with its normal high/low split. The cap is the maximum amount of a stat a weapon can have. You’ll notice when you meld, the “high” stat on a piece won’t let you meld any more to it, but you can add more of the “low” stat, up to the amount the high stat is sitting at. That cap is what’s used when a piece sync’s down.

To use an example, the i345 Bonewicca Soother’s Chestpiece has the substats of 260 Crit and 182 det. This means the cap for an i345 body piece is 260. When you take an i500 body piece, like the Augmented Crystarium Robe of Healing which has the stats of 320 Crit and 457 Det, into UCoB that piece will act like it hasboth 260 crit and 260 det. Again, a level synced gear piece ignores melds. So if you were going to compare the 345 top WITH melds, you’d have 522 total substats (260 + 182 + 40 + 40) and the i500 piece would sync to 520 (260*2). Which is nearly identical, and generally current tier pieces are signficantly easier to get than pieces from last expansion, especially the dungeon acquired ones!

For UCoB: gear with an ilvl of 418 and higher will have both substats capped
For UWU: gear with an ilvl of 470 and higher will have both substats capped
For TEA: syncing gear will notcap all subtats, and will still ignore melds. Use at-ilvl gear.

For min-maxing stats and gear options, give the Gear Sync Calculator a try: