At what point should I hang out in bastok?Follow

SCH doesn't really offer anything magical until level 70. And you will want RDM leveled as a sub for stoneskin and phalanx and blink. (I'd say WHM, but it only wins out on party support, and you sounded completely uninterested in that)

If you want to be a good SMN you should level WHM to 37.
/SCH is a situational Sub at 70+.

As for hanging out in Bastok, SMN burns do get Syncee's starting around 11-12 so you could fit that role and help the party. You would want to get in with a group to do it.
I would personally rather level as Support/Backup healer then spend days and days leveling SMN skill when I got to lv75.

You might as well just save yourself some time and quit SMN, then.

Post 66 it is suggested you also get THF and SAM subs to be "complete". It is in no way required, but it is like being PLD and having DNC unlocked. It gives you a lot of new ways to play.

Honestly Al, I have never seen a quality SMN burn on our server, and I've done it with a lot of different people. The one time we actually got decent exp, I think we got up to like chain 15-20 at best, and the exp payout wasn't even worth the time it took to get to the actual burning.

Consider these time wasting factors: Actually getting everyone to Bastok, going over strategy, waiting for pullers(s) to collect mobs, getting party to camp safely, properly burning through the mobs. In a good run (for me, not in general) all that took like an hour.

Now consider other possibities that will waste even more time: Waiting for a second party to show up to Bastok because leader decided last minute that he wants his friend who just logged in to get in on it so now you need a whole extra set of people, waiting for leader to explain strat 3 times while people ask dumb questions, pullers(s) dying because they picked a bad job to pull on and have no way of healing and the party is taking too long to get to the mob killing, low level party members getting aggro and dying, members going afk/DCing randomly, people not listening in general, people showing up without yag drinks etc., inexperienced leaders who don't know how to properly burn.

The best burn I ever had took over 2 hours from start to finish and I only ended up with maybe a couple thousand more exp than when I started. I know you don't like dealing with time wasting BS, which seems to be pretty much every SMN burn pickup party on our server. So unless you know a group of people who actually know what they're doing, I'd suggest going another route and avoiding all the irritation.

Again, this is just my personal experience so no offense to anyone on Bismarck who may have actually found/started a pickup SMN burn that worked.

Best burn I was in lasted about 6 hours including resetting 2-hours finding syncees etc. I forget how many runs, but all runs had some form of corsair's roll and all bar 1 or 2 had consistant chains upto 90~120(somewhere around ~35k). The others were more like ~c60/~c20/~c20/ramuh time due to poor timing etc.

I did level 35-52 in that ~6 hour stint which equates to aproximately 19k/hr. Not to shabby for a pickup I think.