Mainly depends on how you set your exposure.
I use tone equalizer before (underneath) exposure to tame the highlights in extreme cases. 0ev is then always your highest white point, since almost nothing has been done to the data yet.
But normally I do what most others do : activate it (let it sit in the pipeline where it sits itself by default), go to the advanced tab, and then hover your mouse over parts of the image you want to make brighter or darker, and give little nudges with the scroll wheel.
I don’t care what the values are reading, I just hover and scroll without looking at the tool.
Almost always this is used to make a darker part a bit brighter if filmic crushes it too much.
If filmics output is too flat I can also use one of the tone curve presets inside TE to give some contrast. Although then I always change the 0ev part (in simple or advanced) to be back at 0, so to not change the highlights that I have set already.
I do this if the image is too flat but I don’t want to mess with local contrast too much (faces / portraits for example).