What's a White Mage to Merit!

[Olorin401]

Part 1 - The Basics

All right! You've got your White Mage up to 75 and you're feeling pretty darn good with that Scroll of Reraise 3 burning a hole in your Greedalox-sack, knowing that almost every time you die for now on you'll lose less EXP than a level 10 bloodport.

So now you've got a few big decisions to make.. Where do you plug in those wonderfully juicy merit points that you're going to be accumulating? And what should you avoid changing that might have a negative impact on other jobs you're working on?!

There are several merit areas that are going to be common, and expected by other players. The rest a subjective to the race of your character (which plays an important role in your strengths and weaknesses) and whether you want to balance your character or flood your strongest features. Let's start with basics:


HP or MP? : This one is more determined by your race than anything else. If you're a Taru, the choice is definitely HP since the boost will be helpful even when you change jobs. For Galka and Elvaan, MP is the way to go since neither is particularly blessed. Hume and Mithra players can get away with a balanced approach, so the decision then falls to whether you play mage-type jobs more often or not.


Basic Attributes: Mind is the White Mage's most important static trait - it determines the potency of your Cures, Stoneskin, Banish, and Dia, and lays a foundation for Paralyze, Slow and Silence.

Your race and choices of sub-job determine which is next important - for Elvaan the best choices are Intelligence (for extra magic resistance!) and Agility; for Galka definetly Agility; and Mithra players should go with Vitality.

Tarutaru players are somewhat tricky. Your bodies are geared opposite to the needs of a White Mage, including having the lowest base Mind trait of the five races, AND your Vitality isn't much better. The only exception is your insane pool of MP, and you can use this to your advantage by casting more Cures instead of more potent cures. My personal suggestion would be to pop a few points into Vitality. If you decide to level Red Mage or Monk, revisit this since Mind affects some of your Enfeebling Magic, Chakra and Chi Blast.


Other Modifiers: Personally I would leave all of these alone, except for Spell Interruption Rate and Enemy Critical Rate. Changing your Emnity has the adverse affect of locking you into a certain group of jobs (either melee or mage). This can be corrected by meriting in the opposite direction, which is a major waste of merit points. Critical Hit Rate isn't very important to a White Mage in most situations (because you won't usually be beating stuff up), but reducing enemy critical rate can make a difference in whether you live or die (since I've noticed that White Mages tend to get hit REAL hard when we do get hate).

Coming soon - Part 2 (Skill Modifiers and White Mage Exclusive Traits)

[FatCharlie]

Good job so far. I like the points you make concerning Tarutarus.

[Mog]

HP or MP? : This one is more determined by your race than anything else. If you're a Taru, the choice is definetly HP since the boost will be helpful even when you change jobs. For Galka and Elvaan, MP is the way to go since neither is particularly blessed. Hume and Mithra players can get away with a balanced approach, so the decision then falls to whether you play mage-type jobs more often or not.

I'd have to disagree. Despite having less mp, I'd rather funnel my merits into MP rather than HP. 10 HP will almost never, if ever be the difference between dying and staying alive with being a tarutaru.

[Nazo]

I'm not sure I agree with quite a few of these points, what good is putting my merits into Vit as a Tarutaru whm? I very rarely get hit anyway and I doubt a point or two is going to save my hide on the occasions I do. Similarly as Mog says, HP isn't going to do me much good as a whm either, even as a Taru.
I appreciate that you haven't got to them yet but I'd say if you're wanting to improve your whm the more specific merits such as cure cast time and regen potency should be your first priority rather than going for stats which are going to have a minor effect at best.

[Olorin401]

I'd have to disagree. Despite having less mp, I'd rather funnel my merits into MP rather than HP. 10 HP will almost never, if ever be the difference between dying and staying alive with being a tarutaru.

Maybe I'm a bit biased because I'm Elvaan - we need the MP a lot more than Tarus do!

[FatCharlie]

I'd have to disagree. Despite having less mp, I'd rather funnel my merits into MP rather than HP. 10 HP will almost never, if ever be the difference between dying and staying alive with being a tarutaru.

Similarly as Mog says, HP isn't going to do me much good as a whm either, even as a Taru.

I don't know, I've seen a lot of Tarus who have 1 HP when weakend, and die again in Dynamis and Sky. Granted, based on merits alone the HP bonus possibly won't save your life. But combined with +HP/+MP gear the HP merits can add a lot. Maybe I've been around some bad Taru WHMs, but I can't begin to count the times I've seen Taru WHMs with 550-650 HP get one shotted by AoE. Currently I have 853HP/1159MP, and I seem to die a lot less than other Taru WHMs. What good is 1200+ MP if you can't stay alive? And what good is Devotion when you're giving out less than 200 MP? Personally, I'm trying for a build of 1000HP/1200MP so my goals and opinions are different than the typical Taru WHM. I will probably end up putting 6 merits into HP and 2 into MP.

but I'd say if you're wanting to improve your whm the more specific merits such as cure cast time and regen potency should be your first priority rather than going for stats which are going to have a minor effect at best.

Very True. Those two are probably the most important categories to merit.
All other non-WHM specific merits I think depend fully on whether or not you plan to level any other jobs. How many people truly only level one job on their character? Very Few! If you plan on DD, VIT can help quite a bit, as well as STR. Right now the only other job I'm levelling is RDM so I'm leaving these other merits alone for now until I see what my final stats are. Even then I may not go crazy on them, just in case I decide to level a DD job.

[lionx]

The OP did say about affecting other jobs, and therefore HP would probably be the best to merit imo, not only does it help WHM but for every other job out there too, HP encompasses all, while MP does not in terms for Tarautaru deficiencies...and i would merit STR, every job thats a melee including tanks benefit from STR right away. At least thats what i would do.

[Lasareth]

[...]Granted, based on merits alone the HP bonus possibly won't save your life. But combined with +HP/+MP gear the HP merits can add a lot.

40HP from merits is 40HP. If you're stacking hp equipment, it's THAT equipment that's saving your life, not the 40hp from merits (unless you survive with less than 41 HP). So this statement isn't too logical imo.

I don't know, do whms use stoneskin these days? Figuratively speaking, that should contribute more than just a few hps worth of survival to your whm. Then again, in dynamis most of the time weakened white mages sit back away from aoe because they know that they can potentially be one-shotted...

I can't say MP meriting is better than hp, or that hp is better than MP, it's really all too situational. If you're talking endgame though, 80 mp will do a whole lot more for you in the first few minutes of a long fight than hp will do.

The OP did say about affecting other jobs, and therefore HP would probably be the best to merit imo, not only does it help WHM but for every other job out there too, HP encompasses all, while MP does not in terms for Tarautaru deficiencies...and i would merit STR, every job thats a melee including tanks benefit from STR right away. At least thats what i would do.

Well , no, I can't really agree with that. That's like saying it's not worth meriting enfeebling skill for a RDM because it doesn't benefit Ninjas, and to merit evasion instead because both use it. This is the WHM forum (last I checked) and what we want here is white mage-specific discussion of merit points. I personally don't care what the monk next door is meriting or whether my merits will affect him. As a career whm I want what will optimize my performance, whether it be STR for meleeing on whm, MND for maximizing cure 5, stoneskin, and slow, or int for when you're taking an AOE spell in the face.

General merits are really for specialized playstyles, as others have said. What players who don't focus on specific jobs wants in merits are group 1 and group 2 merits, which do the most for those jobs. So I'm looking forward to what the OP says about our Job specific merits and whether it accurately reflects endgame white mage play or not.

[Tirrock]

I have to agree with all the people saying that a pure WHM should probably merit MND, regardless of race. VIT/DEF is pretty broken and not as effective as it probably should be, especially against HNM. And although AGI would help a WHM evade more, you still won't see WHM evading Tough or higher monsters very often, unless they've been flashed.

HP vs MP - For a WHM-only player, I'd lean towards MP unless they're taru and having a hard time getting tamas ring and/or bomb queen ring. In my experiences (as mithra), 4 seemed to be the magic number for MP. It helps at lower levels where you don't really have refresh unless you craft it yourself. At 50, when the 5th MP merit would kick in, you're only one level away from dark staff.

For group 1 merits, to me regen, cure cast time, and barspell are the winners. Cure cast time/barspell if you're doing large events often. Regen if you prefer to merit on WHM. (Or if you don't have problems with keeping people alive and don't need cure cast time.) Divine seal terrible either. Banish effect seems kind of silly though.

Group 2 merits for WHM seem pretty simple to me. Not only does DEF not do a whole lot, but 5 DEF won't really make an impact, so protectra V is out, as far as I'm concerned. Shell provides a direct magic damage down, so it's pretty handy. Devotion is awesome, especially for races that have higher HP totals. Martyr isn't terrible...but I don't think I'd ever upgrade it more than once. It's pretty good as an instant cure that you can use while running.

The good thing about merits is that it allows customization though. Maybe you have a static merit party that exps in KRT still. (I know I prefer KRT over the thickets...slower exp, but more fun for me.) Banish merits could be useful then. I can think of a lot of special situations where merits I don't think are too good would suddenly be much more attractive.

[Mog]

I don't know, I've seen a lot of Tarus who have 1 HP when weakend, and die again in Dynamis and Sky. Granted, based on merits alone the HP bonus possibly won't save your life. But combined with +HP/+MP gear the HP merits can add a lot. Maybe I've been around some bad Taru WHMs, but I can't begin to count the times I've seen Taru WHMs with 550-650 HP get one shotted by AoE. Currently I have 853HP/1159MP, and I seem to die a lot less than other Taru WHMs. What good is 1200+ MP if you can't stay alive? And what good is Devotion when you're giving out less than 200 MP? Personally, I'm trying for a build of 1000HP/1200MP so my goals and opinions are different than the typical Taru WHM. I will probably end up putting 6 merits into HP and 2 into MP.

If that's the case, I can always use HP gear to prevent deaths. Based on merits alone though ( with all other factors constant ) , 10-80 health isn't going to mean the difference between life or death for me, as I would probably die anyways from being a tarutaru.

[Taskmage]

Except on my rdm, I consider max mp to be irrelevant compared to hMP, which you can't affect with merits anyway. I won't say getting knocked down to <80 hit points happens often but it has happened, whereas anytime I've found myself wishing for more mp, I was really wishing I had gotten to sit an extra tick instead. So .. full merits in either have their strengths and weaknesses.

If I remember our conversation correctly, Fynlar chose to go 4/4 on hp/mp merits so as to have the greatest advantage in level capped situations where every point really counts, which is an interesting viewpoint to consider.

[Amele]

for whitemage job merits: I like cure speed, regen, barspells, devotion, martyr, and shell V.
personally, I picked regen, cure speed, devotion and shell V.