What exactly IS a White Mage?

- Increase its DPS
- Give it the same lowered recast Astro received
- Give it utility*

This could be mostly rectified by reworking lillies to give a passive cast time reduction without being consumed, in addition to applying utility to its oGCD when it is consumed. Keep the cooldown reductions, but also boost their potencies.
Lastly, a bit of a tangent, but if tgey get rid of role actions and feed them back to their originators, Protect is currently superfluous and could easily fill the gap left by Stoneskin.

To elaborate, you can either bank lilies and use tgeir passive effects to boost your DPS via cast time reduction, bringing stone in like with malefic, but with a higher potency.
Or you can cash the lilies in for a big oGCD boost.

As a tangent, if AST got a slight buff to Nocturnal aspects, and i dont been potency boost, but allowing shields from Helios and Benefic to stack with each other, allowing you to combine them for a 700 potency shield instead of overwriting a 500 with a 200, then it could potentially stand up more against SCH, without stepping on WHMs toes.
Then the WHM+AST combo would be more viable.

The issue remains Lilies need to proc off more than Cure/Cure II. We simply don't utilize GCD enough for such a design philosophy to work. Unfortunately, the devs seem incredibly stubborn in this regard given they still assume even even bother with Cure to begin with. Putting that aside, the cooldown reduction would have to be significant, but not so significant you never want to spend them. A way around all of this would be for Lilies to proc off everything, possibly including DPS abilities. Once stacked, they increase the potency of your next ability. So the min/max approach would be finding that sweet spot between how long you want to hold Lilies and when you want to unleash them. Don't know how well it would do in practice though since I suspect the mechanic could boil down to "blow Lilies on Stone V" more often than not.

You could add Aero spells to proc lilies.
Or have oGCD spells only consume one lilly instead of all of them, so those cures go further.

Honestly, I don't think lillies are salvageable until the total rework that (hopefully) 5.0 will bring. Even if they do proc off more things, it's still just fundamentally bad. If WHM had something like Aetherflow it might be better, but that's not the case.

On paper, it seems really cool to give WHMs faster access to their abilities through lilies; and perhaps it is if not tied to gcds they hardly use. However, in battle it just does not translate the same way. If they are adamant about keeping this system in place, I think it would be better to tie a CD reduction to the ability itself, and the use of the ability doesn't deplete any lilies at all. The more lilies, the greater the reduction. Along with this, they could give WHM a standout ability that does deplete all lilies and increases in potency the more lilies the WHM has accumulated, and you only need one lily to have access to the ability.

So with this revamped system, the question remains on how to acquire lilies, and what should the new ability be that increases in potency the more lilies you have? Knowing SE, with this system, the tool tip for Secret of the Lily would be "Lilies gained when performing certain actions." Leaving us to figure out how to trigger them. Ultimately, it would be things like casting regen, casting two stones in a row, casting esuna; just things we do commonly do in combat already that are not ogcds tied to the lilies.

I'm open to suggestions on the super-duper WHM ability that expends the lilies. I just keeping thinking of Mega Holy.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

On paper, it seems really cool to give WHMs faster access to their abilities through lilies; and perhaps it is if not tied to gcds they hardly use. However, in battle it just does not translate the same way.

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It just doesn't work with how this game is structured. You're always using an ability at a specific time usually. What's the point of getting Tetra back sooner when I need it for the tank buster that always happens every x minutes? Sure, I could use it to save the DPS that was too slow to move, but then I don't have it for the tank. That's why nobody cared about original Spear (the fact that its reduction was entirely negligible aside).

I am strongly in favor of Lilies augmenting WHM's damaging abilities. I do agree with Ghislain that WHM has clearly been balanced around dungeons, normal Omega, and 24 mans. It's also designed as a healer that can perform strongly in the hands of a less skilled player. I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing, but they should at least have high personal DPS to help them stand out. That would help them a lot as a true "prog" healer, because then you could have their strong triage healing while learning, but then their really good personal DPS once you've mastered mechanics.

This is all kind of talking into a vacuum ATM though because we're of course not going to see any major changes until 5.0.

I'd prefer it if WHM got lilies from Stone spells and all direct heals and primarily augmented their healing cooldowns. Secret of the Lily II should enable it for Medica and Cure III. Next expansion I'd like to see Stone get a combo with itself, that using another spell would break. Basically, spamming Stone repeatedly generates a ton of Lilies and if you can lean solely on your cooldowns you are rewarded accordingly with more of them. I don't feel Aero or Holy should generate them at all.

I think the way to improve lillies might be to have it not reduce cooldowns at all. Have it proc of Stone/Aero in some way (either perhaps every second stone or some other way that means it can proc of Stone but not at the same rate we get lillies from Cure/Cure II). Each lily then grants a bonus to critical hit chance for all abilities and is spent when you next get a critical hit (not sure what numbers would be best for this feeling powerful but not overpowered). This way lillies are still a passive ability that doesn't require being micromanaged (and thus WHM retains it's identity as the healer that doesn't have a fiddly gimmick), with the lillies doing something quite useful (making WHM just crit more than the other healers- an ability which is useful both for healing and dealing damage). Later oGCD's could be things along the lines of "spend lillies to guarantee next ability use is a critical hit", or even simply "immediately get three lillies".

If they give you lilies from stone spells, theyll be far too esasily acquired, and theyll nerf their effect.
Aero spells would be much more sensible, but simply reducing their cost to one at a time instead of expending all three at once would make them go further, and the fact that you only gain them sporadically wouldnt be so much of an issue.