Thank you SE: WHM is fine where it’s at.

Let's just agree to disagree on this one, lol.

Its really just, it SOUNDS like Leylines in Enochian form.
And the more i think about it, the more it's just: Always use on benison, no questions asked. Since it makes your lillies go faster so you have just use pom more. And i guess just spam the lilly heals more to get misery more. And you'll just sit on MORE lillies then.

The ONLY option play would be if benison would make lillies generate slower but people wouldn't care since PoM-stance would do more dps. Since Misery in itself is worth 3 glares, you get back what you heal in a way.



And no i don't have any ideas honestly, i would just rather check stuff like the extra effects of asylum/wings (lets be honest MORE heal is redundant) and fluid.

You COULD make Fluid aura an global-Lilly-skill. A weak one but if you want to kill PoM that bad, then you could make it so that using Fluid gives you the buff. It doesn't need to give misery.
An offensive weaving option instead of always overwriting your own Dia or overhealing because you don't have time to cast.

Not gonna pretend like thats any good idea. Also i'm not saying i don't know what you mean but i personally don't mind that much that lillies are passive... guess it's just me.
I know the struggle of everything going perfectly or well enough and you just "okay how much can i overheal to get a misery" basically... I see Incoclasm as literal lilly heal, same for ELevi. So i'd honestly just take something offensive over anything passive because whats the point of that if its also redundant if it goes well enough...

There's no debate here. We are brainstorming ideas, so there is no need to agree to disagree. I am not saying WHM MUST be this way. All I am saying is that current WHM might be playable and fun, but it and the other healers have glaring issues, and I don't want a satisfying Misery cast to allow them to be swept under the rug.

As I learn to play other jobs; the jobs that get more attention from the devs. It becomes painfully clear why those jobs are so much more fun to play than healers. And it isn't just because they are DPS jobs dealing damage. It's because they have interactive kits that feel rewarding. There is true consequence to not using their resources correctly, and you can tell that more time, effort, and brain power was put into their design. I want the same for healers, and I want to stop feeling like our kits were slapped together during crunch time because all that matters is that we can meet the healing requirement while being able to assist with damage. This can't continue. It sucks.

Is my idea just Leylines/Enochian for WHM? Maybe it is. And I will gladly take it over what we currently have. I would even take their simple Thundercloud mechanic over what we currently have. At least that makes me pay attention to what's going on in my kit instead of mindlessly playing whack-a-mole and ST spam.

You're right, i'm just used to people looking for a fight because of disagreement...

On that note, it might also become more interesting if the Wings and Asylum had different effects too. Like i said, just more healing is... whm can heal enough.

A reason for people to stay in asylum would be nice, if it buffs something something. It doesn't need to be much, just... something.

And if you work around fluid aura somehow becoming an actual part of WHM like it was once. It was fun to weave it in when it still did damage. It didn't matter how much it was, it was something. So i would rather make that useful first and if its somehow related to lillies, would be fine.
I'd take more ideas around fluid aura than on benison since that skill is fine as it is. It could even be somehow be upgraded to flood or something since people really want that, still.
But i'm not that good with coming up with that stuff myself.

Making Asylum buff something (offensively) would just make it so it's used on CD even if it overheals 100%. It would be like Assize. And WHM would have another oGCD heal less. So it could only be a healing or defense buff or something similar.

I'm currently not doing any savage raids, and I don't know how much of the Afflatus heals are used in speedruns or other optimized play. But are they really not used at all? Are Asylum, Temperance and relying on your co-healer enough for every raid-wide AoE? I only did Ruby Weapon ex and Memoria Miseria ex with pug groups and while I didn't have to use GCD heals all the time, only oGCDs definitely weren't enough. So only because you don't need them in perfect play doesn't exactly invalidate them like Cure 1 or Benefic 1.

Personally, I would like to have lily spell that's an AoE shield without healing attached to it. Maybe with a 90s CD. SCH and AST both have AoE shields and regen. And Temperance isn't a shield. Now the lily heals are all on the GCD and a shield on the GCD wouldn't be all that useful, so oGCD would be better. But even if it's on the GCD you could use it when the boss isn't targetable before a raid-wide AoE instead of mindlessly spamming Afflatus Solace/Rapture during downtime.

Playability wise, every healer is technically "Fine".

Problem is, they're not fun. They're boring. You are punished for playing your job well with a $#!T dps rotation. There's minimal (mostly non-existent) buffing/debuffing.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

I'm currently not doing any savage raids, and I don't know how much of the Afflatus heals are used in speedruns or other optimized play. But are they really not used at all?

Personally, I would like to have lily spell that's an AoE shield without healing attached to it. Maybe with a 90s CD. SCH and AST both have AoE shields and regen. And Temperance isn't a shield. Now the lily heals are all on the GCD and a shield on the GCD wouldn't be all that useful, so oGCD would be better. But even if it's on the GCD you could use it when the boss isn't targetable before a raid-wide AoE instead of mindlessly spamming Afflatus Solace/Rapture during downtime.

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I don't prog savage either. I have taken my WHM through everything up to Memoria, including Shiva Unreal. They are used, but it isn't necessarily that. If that were truly the case, I would have approached it from a different angle. The issue is the threshold it takes to get through before the Afflatus skills become viable. A lot of jobs bring all kinds of support that eases the pressure off of healers. While this opens up big windows to DPS, it also allows the lily gauge to cap, and so you have to over heal on purpose to prevent it from doing so, and allow for the Misery cast window to open every 90s.

The drawback to a lily dump skill, is that I know how the devs think, and what will happen is it will not nourish the blood lily. As soon as a skill is released that does something other than heal as well as generate the blood lily, it will make the afflatus heals obsolete. That is not a theory; that is the cold hard truth. Since a lily dump skill will result in less Misery casts, I tried to compensate by adding a sustainable haste buff for WHM that also increases the rate in which lilies generate; but I also tied it to the new lily skill ;p

In theory, this would actually make the new lily skill not a dump skill at all, but an entirely new mechanic for WHM. As for Benison being on the GCD, the reason for that is because as a lily skill, it will no longer be bound by the 30s CD. If it is going to be a dump skill, it needs to be on demand and can't be bound by a long CD. You could use up all your lilies on x3 shields if you wanted, but you likely would never do that unless just messing around. I haven't put a whole lot of thought into an AoE Benison, but I don't think that would fly. You are right, Temperance is not a shield. It is a straight defense increase that lasts for its entire duration, while a shield is basically additional HP added to the current. It's not one over the other, but the fact that the WHM would be able to stack them.

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Originally Posted by Limonia

I'm currently not doing any savage raids, and I don't know how much of the Afflatus heals are used in speedruns or other optimized play. But are they really not used at all? Are Asylum, Temperance and relying on your co-healer enough for every raid-wide AoE?

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They are definitely used, yes. Afflatus Rapture is often our highest source of healing.

In optimized speed runs you can get away with using them less, keeping them for movement and weave windows or burning them all in downtime when the boss isn't targetable. This generally requires having an AST co-healer since they can take the bulk of aoe healing with oGcd's at 0 dps loss.
For normal players in progression or not doing high-end speed runs for logs, lily heals are your go-to before any regular GcD heal.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

While this opens up big windows to DPS, it also allows the lily gauge to cap, and so you have to over heal on purpose to prevent it from doing so, and allow for the Misery cast window to open every 90s.

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Overhealing to keep Misery going every 90 sec is actually sub-optimal. Lily heals and Misery are a small dps loss compared to straight Glares, the reason we use them is because it's a much smaller dps loss than other GcD heals. Each lily heal is worth about 225 potency.
This means it's fine to let the lily guage cap if you didn't need the heals and there's no intermission to use them in. You don't lose anything. Whether that's fun, from a gameplay perspective, is another matter but for optimization you can cap them safely at no loss.

Part of me likes WHM's current situation, with the lack of weaving windows but heavy raw healing encouraging an interesting kind of optimisation that makes positioning and pre-movement and even bigger focus than it is on BLM, but I'd say I have a few issues after spending a fair bit of time on the class in Savage.

1) Slidecasting is... rough sometimes. It's mostly fine, but even on my usual very low ping it can feel somewhat inconsistent and it feels bad to get a cast cancelled at 0.3 seconds and then manage to pull one off at 0.4 seconds right after. Perhaps this one is just me, so it's the least important issue.
2) The lack of weaving windows is a little harsh. Dia being 45 seconds sounds nice on paper since we have to worry about DoT upkeep less, but it's our only weave window outside of a swiftcast (and guess where the only place we can weave that is) that isn't a DPS loss. Thankfully Afflatus isn't such a huge DPS loss that it ever feels like a problem, but I think at least one more DPS neutral weave window would make the class feel less insufferably rigid considering the sheer amount of oGCDs that should ideally be used more or less on cooldown.
3) Speaking of those cooldowns, some of them are a little weird. Lucid, Benison and Assize all line up nicely in Dia windows... assuming you use them on cooldown. If you miss one then things get really bad. Then you have PoM which basically doesn't align with anything but should also be used on cooldown? It feels like one missed weave on an important skill cascades to an unreasonable degree because of the rigidity.
4) This one's come up a lot but please, Hydaelyn, give us another DPS button that isn't Glare or Dia. There's so little healing required outside of Ultimates and the only thing that WHM can do when we're not healing is spam one button and wait to press the other one once every minute or so.

Giving a slightly more involved DPS system that ties Lillies to damage and involves at least one other instant cast would probably solve a lot of this. My personal idea is this: give us a three step combo that has a Lily charge on the third hit. Five of these gives us a Lily, and every time we get a Lily we get one instant cast spell - let's call it Glare II. The numbers aren't set in stone, but you get the idea; this gives us a little bit more to keep track of, offers some choice and priority of when to use the instant cast spells and lines up a little bit better with some of the more awkward oGCDs.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Overhealing to keep Misery going every 90 sec is actually sub-optimal. Lily heals and Misery are a small dps loss compared to straight Glares, the reason we use them is because it's a much smaller dps loss than other GcD heals. Each lily heal is worth about 225 potency.
This means it's fine to let the lily guage cap if you didn't need the heals and there's no intermission to use them in. You don't lose anything. Whether that's fun, from a gameplay perspective, is another matter but for optimization you can cap them safely at no loss.

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I never said it was optimal. What you pointed out here is in my opening OP in this thread. Welcome to the conversation though. :)

I always just thought I was bad at slide casting. I never considered that whether or not my spell cast registers would be completely out of my control even if I consistently move at the same interval every time. This also brings me to an important question. Are healers, and by extension all casters, supposed to be slide casting in the first place? Square has to know we use this technique for optimization but it definitely isn't recommended anywhere in game. Just what is the ideal playstyle for a healer to Square? Is constantly clipping the intention? I wish we had footage of healers being played the way they expected us to so we could see what the design intention is now. This mystery of healer philosophy is why I switched to Ninja. I know what is expected and it's fun to do it. Healing is nothing but gray area. You might get kicked for using rescue. Repose is questionable at best in most content. Over healing seems like what our kits are made for but you're judged by your dps. Just what is going on?

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

but it definitely isn't recommended anywhere in game.

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For that to matter, there'd have to be more than the barest basics recommended in-game at all.

Whether slide casting is an intended mechanic or not is wholly irrelevant. It's not prevented and sees significant rewards when done.

It'd be great if they embraced that and made it more consistent. It'd be ironic, perhaps, as the whole mechanic was likely born of the same netcode mess that makes it inconsistent now, but it'd be an improvement nonetheless.

I'm not sure why you think slide casting is irrelevant to a question about Square's playstyle philosophy? A lot of us want more weaving windows and intuitive play that allows us to always be casting but what if they don't even want us to always be casting? Have you noticed that healers are the only role that don't get movement tools? We are expected to walk or run everywhere while tanks and dps get dashes, disengages, and teleports. Even stationary casters like BLM get tons of mobility options. Clearly slide casting is optimal but I'm more interested in what they expect from a healer because this dictates what skills we get in the future. Seeing how Scholar got pruned for this expansion makes me really worried about their design intentions. I personally don't find this current expansion fun to heal at all.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I'm not sure why you think slide casting is irrelevant to a question about Square's playstyle philosophy?

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Where did I say it was? I specifically said,

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Whether slide casting is an intended mechanic or not is wholly irrelevant.

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No part of what I said precludes healers getting "dashes, disengages, and teleports".

Though, I'm not sure why you're writing it off as solely a healer issue. Summoner and Machinist gets none of those skills either and Bard's is a pathetic joke, which has been the standard across non-melee until RDM and DNC were each formed as outliers.

The tank role began with none and has only seen one particular type of movement skill added ever since, and only one per expansion across the entire role. Originally, BLM was the only caster (healer or offensive) with a movement skill, and precisely to compensate for it being especially immobile, while the rest were left with only a capacity that was vitally important at the time, Sprint (which consumed all TP, meaning only casters could effectively use Sprint mid-combat). Caster's uniquely viable Sprint, atop melee's greater need for mobility, is why melee have gotten mobility skills while casters of any sort traditionally have had none (AM being compensation for being the most casterly of casters and RDM being sold as its own utility-overladen hybrid).

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I personally don't find this current expansion fun to heal at all.

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Then, by all means suggest improvements. I'd be the first to agree that healers aren't fun right now.

But it has nothing to do with the content of my post, i.e. to whether slide-casting is an intended mechanic, which is itself, again, irrelevant so long as it works. Slidecasting takes up no necessary allotment for mobility capacity among casters; the devs are free to give casters as much or as little as they like. Since StB, Caster's primary mobility advantage has been removed, with design instead going the way of more frequent instant-casts and thereby reduced "caster costs" rather than compensation, but that doesn't have to remain the case with future expansions. Ask away.

On slidecasting, I have a vague memory of yoshi-p stating that it was a QOL feature to combat lag before they could fix the netcode. that's why its not any stronger

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

On slidecasting, I have a vague memory of yoshi-p stating that it was a QOL feature to combat lag before they could fix the netcode. that's why its not any stronger

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This is really cool if it truly was intentional. Ever since RDM released with dualcast built in and ease of movement as a result I wondered when, if ever, they would try to make healers more mobile. BLM with Triple Cast and Teleports and SMN now with Instant everything show that casters with mobility built into their rotation without penalty is clearly possible. Ruin 2 on Scholar is great but I would much rather have Decoy Tactics to swap places with my fairy. Fluid Aura should send the WHM hurtling toward their target encased in water that explodes with AoE damage on impact. Let Astro get some Time Magic back in the form of a teleport too. Still not sure why all time aspects were removed and I I definitely dont like it. Slidecasting is great but being forced to rely on a mechanic like that feels more like a punishment from underwhelming design.

The ONLY thing I think that needs improved is on the Blood Lilly movement.

What I mean by that:

Currently if you have 3 blooms, it stops trying to get more. It shouldn't. It should keep going, just like the BLM Enochian Gauge keeps going if they have 2 nodes of Polygot.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

The ONLY thing I think that needs improved is on the Blood Lilly movement.

What I mean by that:

Currently if you have 3 blooms, it stops trying to get more. It shouldn't. It should keep going, just like the BLM Enochian Gauge keeps going if they have 2 nodes of Polygot.

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Note, though, that the BLM is unique in that regard.

You cannot stack more than 1/3 consumable Repertoire on Bard, despite that being those minimum and minimum optimal amounts for consumption, respectively.
You cannot stack more than 3 Seals, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 5 chakra, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 Meditation stacks (for Shoha), the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 eyes, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 2 Aethertrail, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 Aetherflow, the minimum amount that can be generated at a time.

Aside from BLM, the only systems that allows for overflow are the granular (usually centigrade) job gauges and bonus charges on specific abilities.

Lily isn't being uniquely or unfairly isolated. It merely hasn't gotten the unique benefits of another job that effectively had few if any other ways to build obviously upon its StB gameplay additions.

:: I'm not saying it wouldn't be doable or eventually deserved. By all means, let us bank another 2 lilies' progress towards the next Misery. But it's not like WHM is being unfairly left out from obvious systems. With this, it'd be one of two jobs in the whole game to see these benefits. And, moreover, it still wouldn't get much out of it, just by nature of the minimum "wasteful" casts required to charge an Afflatus Misery.

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Originally Posted by Shurrikhan

Note, though, that the BLM is unique in that regard.

You cannot stack more than 1/3 consumable Repertoire on Bard, despite that being those minimum and minimum optimal amounts for consumption, respectively.
You cannot stack more than 3 Seals, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 5 chakra, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 Meditation stacks (for Shoha), the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 eyes, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 2 Aethertrail, the minimum amount to make use of them.
You cannot stack more than 3 Aetherflow, the minimum amount that can be generated at a time. .

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You can't compare any of these. BLM and WHM use a time based gauge. They get their resources based on time. Which is the basis of my argument as to why they should behave similarly.

BRD is RNG based, it's not like those Repetoire stacks build up over time, they just pop. Same with Monk Chakra, Sam Shoha, etc etc. They all use resources to get resources.

It's not like BLM use Blizzard 4 and get a Plolygot as a result. If that were the case, then you could compare them.

its currently the healer in the best place but i would not call it in a good place while there are good ideas in new whm like lillies and attempts to fix some of the weaving issues but at theres the issue of still just mashing 1 dps button and while i do think whm should probably be the vanilla and simplistic healer i dont think it should be as simple as you spam glare most of the time pld despite being the vanilla tank nowadays has gained a lot more than it old one combo while whm has just regressed and gotten less dps buttons

Your enjoyment of the healers in this game is going to depend immensely on 1) Your skill level 2) The content you run. The current healers are simple enough that they reduce the anxiety of running content that is above your skill level. The flip side to this is that they make content on your level boring.

In other words, if you heal every now and then for fun, or if you haven't been healing for long, or if you don't try to optimize healer gameplay, then you'll be of the opinion that healers are fine overall. If you, however, do the things above and get better then you'll find the role boring. Sadly, everyone who cares to actually heal as their main role will get there with time.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

You can't compare any of these. BLM and WHM use a time based gauge. They get their resources based on time. Which is the basis of my argument as to why they should behave similarly.

BRD is RNG based, it's not like those Repertoire stacks build up over time, they just pop. Same with Monk Chakra, Sam Shoha, etc etc. They all use resources to get resources.

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You use Lily skills to feed your Blood Lily, and time itself is a resource.

It takes time to build an Iajutsu, which in turn feeds Shoha (available, identically to Misery, after 3 stacks of its generator). Repertoire and Chakra's RNG procs require time to proc, such that Bard's averages a particular amount of seconds per Repertoire generated in single-target combat and Monk (outside of Brotherhood) averages a certain number of GCDs per Chakra generated (as you have no viable rotational choices with a further direct effect on Chakra generation).

The only difference here that could be at all pivotal is that Polyglot and Lilies can build over in-combat downtime (i.e. boss jumps) while the others cannot. But how much of a fight in spent in boss jumps? Is that enough to make those systems fundamentally different in your typical fight?

I'm fine with the Blood Lily indicator disappearing after 2 stacks, with Misery simply being readied and resetting them to 0, so that you can hold effectively 5 charges, but it's neither necessarily deserved, needed, or even helpful. Our biggest problem remains the potency cost of using heals if you can't generate 3 stacks before, say, the end of the fight. Our potency-refunds only come in 3s. Being able to bank 5 of them won't change that.

I really like the idea of giving WHM some sort of Enochian counterpart. Let WHM retain their Stone, Aero and Water spells, but once they enter this Enochian state, their Damage spells become light based. They would get a bonus to lily generation and healing potency while in this state which would have to be mantained by casting damage spells.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I'm happy with WHM for the most part, though there are definitely a few areas I hope will get improved in 6.0 (Yes, that means you, Fluid Aura. No, being utterly useless is not a redeeming quality).

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Make Fluid Aura an interrupt; a globe of water to the face would make it hard to keep talking.

This suggestion is absolutely in no way inspired by or related to my frustration that people constantly forget to interrupt the mobs in Puppets' Bunker, and sometimes forget to interrupt the adds in E7S.

[Pushing Daisies narrator voice: The healer's suggestion was, in fact, inspired by precisely those situations which she had just described.]

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Make Fluid Aura an interrupt; a globe of water to the face would make it hard to keep talking.

This suggestion is absolutely in no way inspired by or related to my frustration that people constantly forget to interrupt the mobs in Puppets' Bunker, and sometimes forget to interrupt the adds in E7S.

[Pushing Daisies narrator voice: The healer's suggestion was, in fact, inspired by precisely those situations which she had just described.]

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That'd be useful at least, but honestly, there's gotta be some way to push that "Aura" aspect out, right? Every localization but German goes out of its way to mention that aura.

In 1.x, our Artifact chest-piece/coat was literally a (water, iirc) spirit, which could reshape protectively whilst augmenting our power. I assumed at first that's where the "Fluid Aura" bit was coming from. It'd be interesting to see more of its power stem from that concept, especially since all our healing spells are considered basically water-line in this game.

For the meantime, though, by all means: an interrupt, or a push-back and bind that interrupts when either other effect is not possible.

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Originally Posted by Packetdancer

Make Fluid Aura an interrupt

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If they don't want the skill to have damage or knowback like before, this is a good suggestion.
It looks niche, but still has some uses.

I mean, Selene used to have a Silence (even if it was extremely underused due to needing Selene in the first place and the fairy unresponsivness)