Merit Help

I'm finally closing in on my first lvl 75 job (yeah i know you can pretty much do that in 1 or 2 days now).

Im Elvaan pld and ready to look at doing merits. I'm going to level my whm up next.

Given this info and my lack of elvaan mp, what would you suggest i put my efforts into meriting to help both jobs?

Thanking you kindly

Stop leveling PLD and level WHM. Then level MNK. Then lol at the people who have less useful jobs.

What you will/should merit usually comes down to play style and what events you plan to do. And the jobs you have or plan to level will factor into it as well. For me I chose to go with kind of a middle of the road path towards meriting pld.

Hp - 4
Mp - 4

If pld is going to be your main you should probably go 8/8 sword and 4/4 shield under combat skills. (keep in mind this severly limits you later if you level a DD job)

Healing magic skill 8/8 is not bad if your only/main jobs will be pld and whm.

Because you want to level whm I would not do Enmity increase or decrease but instead do spell interrupt rate down 4/4 and enemy critical hit rate down 4/4.

Group 1 Pld:
Sentinel recast 5/5 (probably the only one that is a given in the group)
From there I did 3 into shield bash recast a 2 into rampart. People will argue one way or the other on these but that set up fit my events and play style.

Group 2 Pld:
5/5 guardian (another one that is probably a given for any serious pld)
Then I split the remaining 5 as 2 in chivalry, 2 in iron will, and 1 into fealty.
Again a very middle of the road path. Many people will tell you 5/5 chivalry or w/e else but I highly recommend 1 upgrade into fealty it really can be handy at times.

Group 1 merits in PLD: 5/5 shield bash, 5/5 sentinel recast
Group 2 merits in PLD: 5/5 Guardian 4/5 chivalry 1 fealty
Can't go wrong.
Trolls will be trolls.

Play with this website before you go wasting merits on healing skill.

http://members.shaw.ca/pizza_steve/cure/Cure_Calculator.html

Example: 100mnd/100vit/280Healing cures4 does 398. Now add 100 healing skill and you get 402. Now if you add over 9000 healing skill you start seeing some pretty good numbers right around 813hp.

He might have said it in a trolly way, but it's still true.

Well, a couple general points...

First, don't bother focusing on merits until you hit the actual level cap. You may well wind up with a few extra here and there that you don't need for limit breaks, but given that you're likely XP'ing in Abyssea, little you can merit will make much of a difference overall. Snagging Abyssites and Atmas will do more for you there, and outside of Abyssea, sheer level difference will make a big difference.

Second, focus on cheaper categories first. For example, meriting base stats is best left for later/last. Combat and Magic skills, on the other hand, are comparably cheap.

As for what to merit, it'd depend some on what other jobs (or job types) you think you might go with at some point. There's not a whole lot that's really useful to both PLD and WHM that wouldn't be relatively niche - other than HP/MP. So either look at much broader plans - or just level things for each job.

healing magic skill effects cursna success amirite?

Also worth considering: Merits are insanely easy to get now. It used to take a real amount of time to ditch something you'd previously upgraded and put the points into something else. Deciding what to merit was really important because it meant a major time investment if you felt like you'd screwed up later and wanted to change it. This is no longer true; I would recommend picking something, going for it, and if you don't like it later, change it.

When you can pick up 20 merits in an afternoon, it's just not worth stressing over whether you're doing the precisely optimal thing for all of your future jobs right now.

Hellz yeah! Half emnity increase, half decrease. "for the lulz"

I did similar to this, only instead of 5/5 shield bash I did rampart instead. From what I've seen people tend to be pretty evenly split on which one they spend their merits on.

As for guardian, I wouldn't recommend it. It looks good at a glance, but what most people don't realize is that it has no effect on VE. Sure, you lose -95% less CE during sentinel, but you're taking so little damage to begin with that the effect is very small.

8/8 MP (since you're Elvaan)
5/5 MND (will do far more than 8/8 healing magic)
Sword 8/8
Club 8/8
Shield 4/4
Enhancing 8/8
Enfeebling 8/8
Crit hit rate 4/4
Spell Int % 4/4

Group 1 merits in PLD: 2/5 Cover 3/5 Rampart Recast, 5/5 Sentinel Recast
Group 2 merits in PLD: 5/5 Guardian 3/5 Iron Will 1/5 Chivalry 1/5 Fealty

Group 1 merits in WHM: 5/5 Cure Cast 5/5 Barspell
Group 2 merits in WHM: 2/5 Martyr 2/5 Devotion 1/5 Pro V 5/5 Shell V