Should WHM get a personal damage buff?

[Cerenessus]

Maybe because an Diurnal AST is more or less an faster WHM with cards?

SE wanted to make WHM the "big green numbers"healer, but there is just no situation where that is needed, with the consequece of WHM and Diurnal AST being very similar.
again the solution is to refine WHM classdesign and to create content that gives you opportunities to use your strenghts, not to make the "more or less" into "exectly".
for exemple: make PI into a additional faster ticking hot to change AST into "hots but not as good as WHM, shields but not as good as SCH, but with the best raid buffs".
still there will allways be situation when one or the other job is more suited for one fight. thats the mainproblem by having classes and can only be fixed by reworking the entire battlesystem.
so you would have AST to provide raidbuffs, WHM for more free healer gcd, and SCH for the safety net mitigation
and later DNC as dps-healer

also there are problems with SCH that needs to be changed: cridadlo-dt is too strong, noncritadlo-dt too weak, more and more of SCH heal-pot loaded into lustrat, indo and fairy making physic, succor and adlo less and less effectiv
which further weakens WHM position
balancing healers is more than buffing WHM, because WHM doesnt exists alone.
give WHM his own identity not that of the other healers.

after all we will probably get a new healer in 5.0 and if this homogenization keeps up, you will have 3 other healers that are prefert to you instead of 2.

[Erakir]

I mean, Cerenessus, if I had it my way, AST would have never had a shielding sect to begin with and would have kept its reduced healing potencies along with some native shielding options too, but would have gained a sect that increased their healing output at the cost of some of the card potential/power, giving them an option in dungeons to heal - numbers or abilities of cards can always be tinkered with such that there'd be a reasonable difference in card utility 'sect' vs healer 'sect.'

Paired in a raid with a powerhouse healing WHM, go the 'card' stance since WHM has more healing covered - paired with scholar, go with healing because neither have the raw output of the WHM. Then you get into some balance issues to try and make WHM/SCH not just blow WHM/Card-AST out of the water or vice versa, since Scholar still has to be capable on its own in dungeons too. I'm not gonna say it's super easy to balance, but I'd prefer letting AST be AST instead of the sad carbon copy WHM we got - which continues to put us into this conundrum.

It sounds like more of what you say we should be asking for, a reason for WHM to be a heavy hitter when it comes to healing, etc. Hell, there's a million different ideas I could talk about for ways to improve WHM currently. I love discussing healer design and possibilities in MMOs and similar games. I've been doing it for over 15 years, there's so many neat and interesting things to be done with healing.

Believe me, as a former resto druid for years, I absolutely adore HoT healing and wish we had more interesting ones.

Thing is - We've asked for things like that in the past. Entire healing redesigns in terms of player health, player damage, all that. People were so disappointed with AST's skills being so WHMish when AST came out. Square has given us little to no reason to think a healing redesign on this level is gonna happen. We are not going to suddenly go from WotLK spam healing to Cataclysm when people's health jumped by 400-500% and heals maybe got 50% stronger because (a) Square is scared of scaring people away from healing so heals are powerful in normal content, enabling lesser skilled players to get through the normal content and (b) there's too many healers now that are fine with the DPS-centric playstyle and would throw fits if pushed more towards a 90-100% healing focus. It takes them months to adjust a potency and I've little reason to think they'll do that. I have even less reason to believe they'll do any sort of redesign on this level, much as I'd personally prefer it.

If you can't get the train conductor to get off the bumpy tracks eventually you look for ways to improve the ride you're stuck on.

So, we're left with this.

White Mage is behind NOW and people are offering short term adjustments that would help it be more competitive in the current scene. Square is slow for any significant redesigns, we have tons of stuff pointing to this. WHMs went through a worse version of this right before Stormblood came out and were told 'wait for the expansion, they'll fix you.'

And then we got Lilies. Did you see the thread raised about lilies, PI, and White Mage in general a little before this expansion came out? The one that caused Yoshi-P to have to respond? Hell was raised, and it should have been. Lilies were even more worthless at 20% proc chance and they didn't generate on pre-healing either so you actively had to play worse to get any. We still got stuck with this dilapidated system that healers don't even look at and a trait that people forget even exists because of how absolutely stupidly horrendous it is. We got some good things, too - going from bad MP management to best MP economy and (eventually) having Benison go from 'annoying as crap' to 'actually very useful.'

But here we are - White Mage is literally behind in the design that Square itself made for it (I will continue to point to Stone Sea Sky here), so in lieu of a huge change in encounters, we're left asking for Square to at least make WHM do what they designed it to do. I didn't really want to be 'the healer with the most personal damage' but they made it. At the very least, stick to it rather than let it slide out of that since the first patch of the expansion when Scholar went back to its kingly status across the board.

People are tired of seeing it happen when it's so easy to see coming from months in advance. What's worse is when two healers have such similar kits, one's strengths over the other is even easier to pinpoint and it tends to carry from fight to fight no matter what the encounter demands. There's less "Well, Class A is good for fights 1 4 and 5 with Class B having more use in 2 and 3."

By all means, do bigger redesigns at the expansion, but keep in mind during the redesign of Stormblood one of the biggest things that happened was handing out WHM skills to every healer and coincidentally nerfing the new 'divine seal' replacement that WHMs had, then there's the whole thing with AST getting their own mega burst to sort of mimic Cure 3 and/or assize. Scholars lost DoTs and joined the WHMs in Broil spamming to a lesser extent. Healers got homogenized more in stormblood. Faith in the developers to diversify playstyles in healing is low and it rightfully should be.

[Risvertasashi]

By all means, do bigger redesigns at the expansion, but keep in mind during the redesign of Stormblood one of the biggest things that happened was handing out WHM skills to every healer and coincidentally nerfing the new 'divine seal' replacement that WHMs had.

Don't forget, this happened at heavensward too - albeit to a lesser degree.

For some reason SCH and AST are allowed to have things unique and exclusive to them, and presumably that will apply to DNC too. But if WHM gets an advantage... the others will be buffed to compensate, or the skills will be distributed...

SE wanted to make WHM the "big green numbers"healer

WHM isn't even this. Please let this myth die. If you want big green numbers you can play AST, and in many cases the cardslinger's numbers will be even bigger.

[lulunami]

For some reason SCH and AST are allowed to have things unique and exclusive to them, and presumably that will apply to DNC too. But if WHM gets an advantage... the others will be buffed to compensate, or the skills will be distributed...

Paladin was treated like this throughout A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. They overrated the effectiveness of Hallowed Ground and a result, left the rest of the kit sub-par or uninteresting. White Mage is likely considered the base healer in Square-Enix's eyes so they give all the unique play-style stuff to Scholar and Astrologian. I do wonder if the designers overrate the effectiveness of Benediction.

[HyperiusUltima]

Paladin was treated like this throughout A Realm Reborn and Heavensward. They overrated the effectiveness of Hallowed Ground and a result, left the rest of the kit sub-par or uninteresting. White Mage is likely considered the base healer in Square-Enix's eyes so they give all the unique play-style stuff to Scholar and Astrologian. I do wonder if the designers overrate the effectiveness of Benediction.

They probably don't, given that Benediction is a 100% HP Heal oGCD that's on a very long cooldown. However, Essential Dignity is a better version of it in retrospect. What I'd like is for WHM to get something unique for it for once and make it fun to play; not this pansy healer we have right now that has bad design philosophy and is just simply thrown to the side in favor of the less clunky AST or even the more complicated SCH(who actually gets to eat the whole cake, compared to AST who gets a slice and WHM gets none because they didn't change anything other than giving them a gauge and SotL 2 THIS WHOLE EXPANSION.)

[Ftail]

If AST and SCH are doing 4000 DPS on a dummy then a WHM needs to be able to do 4600-4800 to balance the card RNG.

WHM already has the highest DPS on the target dummy though. The reason they are the lowest DPS in raids is because they don't have the same oGCD heals like the other 2 healers.

[Shurrikhan]

WHM already has the highest DPS on the target dummy though. The reason they are the lowest DPS in raids is because they don't have the same oGCD heals like the other 2 healers.

Moreover, having the strongest GCD heals outside of CDs and the least limited mana pool means that if someone's gotta spend a filler GCD to bring up the tank's HP, it's gonna be the WHM. That means fewer GCDs of casting Stone IV and potentially lost DoT ticks.

[SwarleyMcSwarls]

White mage is underperforming for personal dps in raid when compared to the other healers too. So i'd definitely say they could use some dps balancing; however, I don't expect any changes prior to next expansion.

[Mansion]

White mage is underperforming for personal dps in raid when compared to the other healers too. So i'd definitely say they could use some dps balancing; however, I don't expect any changes prior to next expansion.

Yep, let's face it. 4.5 is not a good spot to have a significant change to any job (and the fact that WHM has not changed for a long time virtually means they think the job is ok). Sneaking potency on Aero and Stone won't help people clear Alphascape savage with more White Mages anyway. That will not help on the last Ivalice Raid or Primal either.
I'd prefer a 1.5sec cast time on stone 4 than a higher potency actually.

[Shurrikhan]

White mage is underperforming for personal dps in raid when compared to the other healers too. So i'd definitely say they could use some dps balancing; however, I don't expect any changes prior to next expansion.

The question is why, though. Simply bumping potencies does not fix the issues behind the symptoms here.