Starter healer... WHM?

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Also, AST is the worst healing class imo for levelling dungeons...So the fact that ast has cheaper heals and mobility in levelling dungeons is completely inconsequential.

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Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

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A diurnal ast who is using only ogcds can't heal significantly more than you if you are using lilies which you need to use for movement before and after mechanics anyway. In three minutes time they can end up healing less if you utilize your tools.

You can use benison each time you reapply dia if you want so much to get that whopping 4500 shield potency. However, it will not change the fact that it is excessive and not needed outside tankbusters. Things that are not needed have no value. As you've stated yourself, strong gcd healing, the one thing whm excels at, has no value in savage because it is not needed.

Misaligning dia with assize is not that big of a deal, just improvise. Actually, there is no way you won't misalign dia with assize from the very beginning if you are resetting your dot at the last tick which occurs at the last 2 seconds.

Succor's shield is weak. 205 prevented damage is not huge. For me huge is something like 70-90% mitigation. Idk, we are thinking on different wavelengths.

The healer class with the strongest rDPS on e9s is whm. So it is possible to deal more damage than AST and SCH. Even if they are better equipped for the encounter.

A single good kill on whatever savage boss I hopped into means that I am good enough to be able to make a single good kill with good dps and an adequate amount of healing when I don't get murdered. Yes, it doesn't make me an expert and I never said it did, it was in your head.
Also, there is something I don't understand. How is seeing all mechanics of a boss a good thing? All of the bosses enrage after the last one. A good party will not get to that point. A bad party will.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

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Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

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Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

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Misaligning dia with assize is not that big of a deal, just improvise.

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By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

To answer the original question instead of just sparring over whether AST or WHM is better, WHM has basically no nuance to it as long as you plan on just running expert roulette and you don't care about eking out every drop of efficiency out of your job. AST is harder to wrap your head around at first, but if you run both through expert you'll eventually someday find yourself wondering "Why the hell does this ridiculous AST job have a six-HUNDRED potency off-GCD heal on a THIRTY second cooldown, and why do I never have to stop blasting to use it? Why do I have to hard clip Holy to use Assize unless I want to dot one of the things in this group or blow a lily on the tank that's barely taking damage? Who designed this stupid WHM job and why does its kit feel like it wasn't created by someone who knows how this game's combat system flows?"

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

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I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Usually, if you really want to move or weave more than one ogcd you can just reapply your dot.

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Dps loss. A pretty chunky one at that. And you lose more than 180 potency at 3 dot ticks remaining as it costs you Glare casts over a fight.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Sch loses 90 potency every time they use Ruin II to weave their heals or move. You would have to use ED to make up for the lost potency which is going to result in you healing less. It's quite noticeable for your co-healer.

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Even using every single AF for ED puts you above WHM in terms of dps neutral healing.
Which is one of the reasons why AST/ SCH is simply stronger and has the benefit of requiring less special adjustments for a healer

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Ast is not an exception. They can lose rDPS when their party's dps is bad even if they played perfectly.

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Which is completely besides the point because their healing is and remains dps neutral, no matter how bad that SAM over there screws up his rotation when you had just given him a card.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Whm has the strongest AoE damage from all healers and there is no point arguing about it. Misery + Assize = 675 +400 = 1075 AoE potency on every mob pack except the first one and that's aside from the Holy spam which stuns targets.

Whm also has the strongest ST healing spell in the game - bene. Aside from that, if you really want to heal someone you can dish out 1900 cure potency on a target in less than 2.5s.

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Dps ST & aoe neutral healing, which is something like using Aszlum during a natural Dia refresh. Not aoe damage. Don't jump to conclusions.
It's not about "really wanting something", it's about how much you can do until you start suffering a dps loss. And that's where WHM falls behind, like it or not.
Of the 1900 cure potency, only 1200 is dps neutral if used during a Dia refresh. 1900 is already a dps loss.
This is not about how much you can do if you yolo your dps - it's about that WHM falls short when it comes to dps neutral healing, which is a direct result of the poor amount of free weaving slots and the lack of mobility compared to the other two healers.
And how much dps neutral healing a healer offers is escpecially important as long as you don't outgear content like crazy - going into fights with the party near/ full BiS doesn't make WHMs weaknesses disappear, they're just less obvious.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

That's 4,290 without counting Asylum's regen. When you add it becomes 5,460 total for 24 secs and by using only 4 gcds. Obviously, in no part of the game is such fat heal needed. I just wanted to show that WHM is the straightforward healing powerhouse. The other two jobs can't achieve the same in the span of 24 seconds by using only 4 gcds to heal even if they use all of their ogcds.

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A heal powerhouse is not definied by "if everything aligns perfectly, you stack everything you get, lock yourself out of dps completely, have 10s of glory nobody will ever need and then be completely drained of resources" in FFXIV.
The true healing powerhouse is AST because they have by far the highest dps neutral healing and very strong GCD healing via Synastry and Neutral, something you exclusively use for GCDs heals and is thus always ready in case you are forced to stop dpsing. Unlike e.g. Asylum which gets regulary used throughout a fight. Followed by SCH, which has immense oGCD healing potency, although a lot of it is tied to a dps loss. So 2nd place for the fairy friends.
This discussions are best done in reality, not on paper. It's about as useful as saying that WHM slaps a dummy harder than SCH or AST.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

The healer class with the strongest rDPS on e9s is whm. So it is possible to deal more damage than AST and SCH. Even if they are better equipped for the encounter.

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It's not.
WHM gets out-dpsed at all percentiles by both other healers on all bosses.
But the metric you really want to look at is "Healer Combined Damage" because healers don't function in a vacuum. They have a pool of resources that get used by two different players. If WHM was ahead at e9s (which it's not), AST/ SCH is still the better comp in terms of rDPS which is what really counts at the end of the day.
And the differences were far more extreme early tier when not everyone and their cat farmed Promise in near/ full BiS. Right now you have the luxury of overgeared people that have done the content for months. That sugarcoats the weaknesses it has but content wasn't balanced around outgearing it.

This is not about insulting your chosen healer class, it's about bringing weaknesses to the attention of the players and devs that the other two healers don't have or only have to a much lesser extend.
The statistics say that a lot of people play WHM. So everything is fine, right? And if you encounter a problem the other two don't encounter or only to a much lesser extend, you can just do this suboptimal thing the others don't have to do in order to achieve the same, so no problems at all, right? After all you have options.
"WHM is fine, l2p" isn't going to help here.

WHM is crazy good in level 80 dungeons with a half-decent tank because you can dump lilies between pulls and just fire away. It still needs to clip oGCDs while aoeing if Misery is not available and is very immobile during aoeing. Does it make a big difference? No, because the content is faceroll.
But it means that WHM still has these issues even in the easiest and perhaps most tailored-to-WHM content that exists in the entire game.

WHM is not garbage but is has issues that absolutely need to get adressed. Sugarcoating them won't help anyone.

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Originally Posted by Imora

I'm guilty of this because I've tried adlo spam and it doesn't help when the tanks getting trucked. I just can't keep up. Lustrate seems to hit like a wet noodle too.

Need to make up my damn mind.

But thanks for the tips. I usually saved WD for aoe damage ><

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But to stay on topic:
Physick heals with a higher potency but Adlo has a shield attached to it. So even if the HP doesn't go up as far, it barely goes down at the same time which makes Adlo spam overall better.
It's generally best to use WD early into the pull when damage on tank his highest, slap the ground and Lustrate until the tank starts dropping, use Fey Illumination if available and then Adlo as much as neccessary while squeezing more ground slaps in until everything is dead.
Front loading the pull with regens and dps makes it much easier to handle because you signifcantly extend the time until you need to GCD heal at lower levels. By the time you're forced to Adlo, some mobs should already be dead.
None of the skills have crazy high healing on it's own, it's about cycling through everything and combining it for maximum benefit.

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Originally Posted by IceBlueNinja

Very fair and true and the third paragraph is my fav part. May I ask about something? A friend of mine does old exs such as arr for fun no echo ilvl mini and i guess the bis for that. he state ifrit is very intense with heals but the comp is whm/ sch. I ask why not ast/sch this was probably before we got the nice mp rework and draw now gives mp back. Cause I think it was one of those reasons but or something about ast kit not good for it. am thinking cards and div is there aspected helios is there and ed and what not and medic 2 is too expensive and whm themself suffer mp issue under heavens ward things. Would a Di ast not be more viable now even in old exes like arr ones than whm?

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Better late than never:
I believe the main issue is that WHM got stripped of several things with each expansion. You once had more dots for more mobility, Largesse was a huge heal buff that is now part of Temperance, BRD had refresh. I haven't played any old ex recently, so this is all theory.
The basic toolkit of both AST and WHM is the same, but AST has less MP issues from Draw and lower MP costs, more mobility and two GCDs to complement it, ED and Synastry. WHM could have higher rDPS as the diffence between their fillers is bigger at lower levels and AST can't use Div during opener for the lack of Sleeve Draw. But AST has an easier time keeping dps up and doesn't suffer from the same MP issues as WHM does pre-HW.
So I think AST should be better here aswell but I'd have to try it myself.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Also, there is something I don't understand. How is seeing all mechanics of a boss a good thing? All of the bosses enrage after the last one. A good party will not get to that point. A bad party will.

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Basically skipping high movement/heal mechanics like Pitch Bog II and having a well coordinated group that makes no mistakes and lines up mitigation well is going to result in far better dps. Obviously, getting orange still means you're decent but if you're claiming Dia misalignment is fine (it's rough) and Benison doesn't matter there's more to learn. If WHM had infinite weave we'd use Benison on cd, it's free and may save other resources. But we don't so we dump it on the AST who can CI and ED constantly and use it only whenever a window opens that needs nothing else. Which is why AST is so valuable.

The top e9s rdps kill for WHM has high crit Assize/Misery padding on adds.

Succor in itself is bad, but a 205 shield is good when you pair it with other heals. In the same way 300 potency for a Rapture is "weak", but paired with mitigation and your co-heals oGCD's, it equals enough healing to avoid GCD hardcasts being necessary. It adds up. In a group that doesn't bother with all those 10%'s, you start to notice your resources being stretched or your normal heal plan didn't cut it and you're unsure why.

Curious on your source for a Diurnal AST with all oGCD's healing less than a WHM using all their lilies. Most top kills have AST significantly ahead.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content.

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Definitely, WHM's are damage machines in lv80 dungeons, no doubt. But dungeons are so ridiculously easy having that as a strength doesn't really mean much.

The issue isn't that WHM isn't good enough for any of the content in the game. It's "fine". It's just that none of it's strengths, like dungeons or overheal Cure III combos matter. Everything that does matter other healers can do better except WHM comes with multiple weaknesses the other healers don't have.

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Originally Posted by IceBlueNinja

Would a Di ast not be more viable now even in old exes like arr ones than whm?

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Definitely. Diurnal AST is miles easier on mana at lv50, having the 8% mp from cards and similar but cheaper GCD heals, while WHM doesn't get Solace or Thin Air until later. ED is generally more useful than Bene too, due to a shorter cooldown meaning you have it on demand more often. It's also far more mobile, WHM doesn't even have lilies to move while AST has full access to Lightspeed and 1.5 sec Malefic.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

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It's playable, but it's got a lot of clunky weaknesses in its design that are compounded by the fact that those weaknesses relate to core competencies with the combat system. And on top of *that*, the other two healers don't have these weaknesses. We're ironically in the same design space as we were in Stormblood, except AST and SCH had their gameplay and skill ceilings pancaked down. The reason we're still here is that the ceilings weren't the problem; AST and SCH are better than WHM because they're fundamentally designed in ways that complement how the combat system works. Because their "weaknesses" are fake news because encounter design never puts any pressure on those weaknesses.

I don't know why my brain is going to generic RPG mechanics instead of just FFXIV, but imagine a single player RPG with classes laid out in front of you. AST and SCH are classes that have "downsides" like "This class takes a hefty 50% penalty to all gold drops! But as an upside, all shop items are free". or "This class is hobbled and can only move at 1/4 speed. But as an upside, they can short range teleport at will". or "this class suffers from a -5 to social rolls. Also there is only one single difficult social check in the game that matters to a sidequest". Meanwhile WHM's are more like "You have a 20% penalty to strength, but a 10% walking speed bonus out of combat".

I don't make headway with Adlo.

Hm. Just got to 50 today. I want to get AST to 50 too. Really fighting to play it but the struggle bus keeps picking me up.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Curious on your source for a Diurnal AST with all oGCD's healing less than a WHM using all their lilies. Most top kills have AST significantly ahead.

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Theoretically speaking, every three minutes whm gains 6 lilies = 1800 aoe heal. You have plenary on 1 min cd, so what you can do is use two lilies each time you use plenary so that's extra 400 per minute, 1200 for 3 mins. You can cast assize 4 times in 3 mins so that's 1600 aoe heal and you get to use Asylum twice, it has 900 base potency but I guess the hp recovery buff also applies to it as well. In any case, 1800 from asylum. In three minutes, whm's cure potential is 6400 without any medicas and hp recovery buffs.

Diurnal ast has 700 from CO, 500 from CU, 720 from star and 200 from Horoscope. That's 2120 every minute. 6360 in three minutes. The difference is that they can heal that amount for free. WHM loses on potency every time they use a lily. So most whms just opt out to heal significantly less in order to avoid losing dps.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

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FWIW in dungeons at high levels AST is stupidly powerful because they can change sects between pulls and their shields stack.

Go Nocturnal
>Aspected Benific (Shield), Crit is possible
>Celestial Opposition (Shield)
>Swap to Diurnal
> Celestial Intersection (Shield)
> Put down Earthly Star

Proceed to Gravity Spam now that your tank is shielded for half of their total HP.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

FWIW in dungeons at high levels AST is stupidly powerful because they can change sects between pulls and their shields stack.

Go Nocturnal
>Aspected Benific (Shield), Crit is possible
>Celestial Opposition (Shield)
>Swap to Diurnal
> Celestial Intersection (Shield)
> Put down Earthly Star

Proceed to Gravity Spam now that your tank is shielded for half of their total HP.

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Yes say it again please xd then again my sig shows it too.

@OP: for controller targetting, while my lazy self just macros my three whole offensive spells to <t> and then <tt> so the only retargetting i ever really need to do is up/down on the d-pad to swap between party members, that's not necessarily for everyone (yeah yeah it's weird and doesnt work for maximum optimal rotations, oh nooooo). still keeps the option to specifically target and attack stuff as well.

for less lazy folks i recommend binding something like R3 to target-of-target (and getting very acquainted with the controller targetting scheme's finer points), to more easily allow you to swap between healing and offense, at least.

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Originally Posted by Deceptus

FWIW in dungeons at high levels AST is stupidly powerful because they can change sects between pulls and their shields stack.

Go Nocturnal
>Aspected Benific (Shield), Crit is possible
>Celestial Opposition (Shield)
>Swap to Diurnal
> Celestial Intersection (Shield)
> Put down Earthly Star

Proceed to Gravity Spam now that your tank is shielded for half of their total HP.

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You will most likely end up losing dmg potency if you switch sects and apply aspected benefic for shields. You could have been using dot on the mobs before the tank has gathered them all in one place. Before the gravity spam comes, most of the mobs should already have dot applied on them.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

You will most likely end up losing dmg potency if you switch sects and apply aspected benefic for shields. You could have been using dot on the mobs before the tank has gathered them all in one place. Before the gravity spam comes, most of the mobs should already have dot applied on them.

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What..? You can’t switch sect in middle of encounter. What Deceptus wrote was more like a prepull shielding, something that SCH can also do similarly with their Adlo & WHM with their Divine Benison -before pulling begins-. They have no potencies to lose because there's simply nothing to target at that point. After that the AST can switch to Diurnal and begin Combust'ing as the tank begins their wall pull.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

What..? You can’t switch sect in middle of encounter. What Deceptus wrote was more like a prepull shielding, something that SCH can also do similarly with their Adlo & WHM with their Divine Benison -before pulling begins-. They have no potencies to lose because there's simply nothing to target at that point. After that the AST can switch to Diurnal and begin Combust'ing as the tank begins their wall pull.

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Yes, you can't which is why I said: "most probably". You won't have time to switch between sects always. For example, in paglth'an there are less than 2-3 secs between the first and the second wall to wall pull.

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Originally Posted by SpiralMask

@OP: for controller targetting, while my lazy self just macros my three whole offensive spells to <t> and then <tt> so the only retargetting i ever really need to do is up/down on the d-pad to swap between party members, that's not necessarily for everyone (yeah yeah it's weird and doesnt work for maximum optimal rotations, oh nooooo). still keeps the option to specifically target and attack stuff as well.

for less lazy folks i recommend binding something like R3 to target-of-target (and getting very acquainted with the controller targetting scheme's finer points), to more easily allow you to swap between healing and offense, at least.

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Yeah i use those macros too. I just have issues with the d pad because i only ever press down, and overshoot my target lol

I'll get it eventually.

AST at 50 now too.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

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I went through the patch notes from Shb because I saw that whm's percentile in top 50 was a lot higher in the first shb raid tier. Ast actually used to be clunky when it spammed its AoE in dungeons. It had a longer cast time so using cards or ogcd while AoE was not an option unless you want to be whm 2.0. Healing while dealing damage on mob packs was possible only if they used lightspeed. There weren't always as fluid as there are now.

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

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Nearly all of those clears had the WHM's partner doing the lion's share of the healing work. Because those WHMs wouldn't have done nearly that much damage if they had to use their clunky healing kits that require stopping their damage output to use them.

Also, why does that matter? Glare could be 5000 potency for all I care. Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is still awful design. Having basically no weaving space is awful design. Clipping your GCD is awful design. Having basically nothing to manage is awful design. Being an immobile turret with your only fluid movement options being a DoT refresh or a possibly unnecessary heal is clunk as hell. Having a high personal damage output potential doesn't mean a job is designed well.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Nearly all of those clears had the WHM's partner doing the lion's share of the healing work. Because those WHMs wouldn't have done nearly that much damage if they had to use their clunky healing kits that require stopping their damage output to use them.

Also, why does that matter? Glare could be 5000 potency for all I care. Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is still awful design. Having basically no weaving space is awful design. Clipping your GCD is awful design. Having basically nothing to manage is awful design. Being an immobile turret with your only fluid movement options being a DoT refresh or a possibly unnecessary heal is clunk as hell. Having a high personal damage output potential doesn't mean a job is designed well.

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How it doesn't matter? Ultimate is harder than savage and you guys say the class is a disaster because the top parties for the current savage tier don't have many whm-s. The second party for the epic of Alexandar has a whm and a sch, both having nearly the same amount of hps and both having nearly the same amount of rdps. So it is possible, to have high rdps and do your share of the healing.

Whm's weaving space are the lilies, they are just limited. Unlike sch who has on gcd instant attack spell or ast who has lower cast time on malefic to make room for an ogcd. If whms get more lilies per minute they are going to weave more. Glare has higher potency to make up for the loss of dps from using a lily, this is called balancing a class. Imagine if misery had 1200 potency and you get a lily once every 10-15 secs. You will have a class with the perfect neutral healing and weaving space. They will have a lot of movement and literally no resources to manage because lilies consume no mp and come for free, just like ast's ogcd heals, unfair right? These two small changes don't really change what whm is. They are just making it extremely easy to play whm efficiently.

Also once upon a time, good mana management was a requirement to play ast. AspHelious had 1100mp cost, combust was 500, benefic II - 900 and cards gave no mp when drawn. Combust dealt significantly less damage prior to 5.1, malefic dealt slightly less damage too. So that class had its drawbacks, but these drawbacks were removed to make it easier to play. For eden's gate the top 50 almost never had an ast in their party. So I guess in Endwalker we might see whm becoming a lot easier to play efficiently as well.

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Originally Posted by Imora

So I want to level a healer on top of my growing list of jobs. I'm *really* interested in AST, but I'm on a controller and the constant target switching and general busyness is just overwhelming.

I have SCH at 37 but I hear that's just as bad.

So I'm guessing go WHM? I haven't the slightest clue how lilies work, and I'm not used to NOT hardcasting heals(last played a healer in 3.1, had all 3 at 60 and was pretty good at AST but now? Urrgh) so I'm like...

What do? Suggestions?

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I'm a 100% controller player. I play all 3 jobs even thou I main SCH. I have done all content in this game, from guildhest to all ultimates, and I can guarantee you that you can perform optimally in a controller with any of the healers. It all comes down to build muscle memory, practice and comfort. The controller will not hinder you in any way if you choose to play with it.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

SCH's ogcds feel underwhelming that's why they are not played often.

Compared to diurnal ast who has :
Earthly Star - 720
Celestial Opposition - 700
Collective unconscious - 500
Horoscope - 200
In total - 2120 raid-wide healing potency every minute for free without any resource management. We can even leave out Horoscope and you still acquire 1920 cure potency by pressing 3 buttons while spamming malefic.

Per-minute Sch has:
Aetherflow - 3 aether stacks, needed for heals
Whispering Dawn - 537
Indomitability - 400
Sacred Soil - 500
Fey Blessing - 224
The last aether charge can be used for ED but since we are discussing how much sch can heal per minute we will use it on sacred soil again (it has 30s cd) for the extra 500 cure potency.
So in total, you can get 2,161 raid-wide cure potency from a sch per minute without any gcd heals. Just a little bit more than an ast but you have to press more buttons.

Sch also has on 2 min cooldown summon seraph which can execute Consolation two times for 768 potency in total (shields included). However, when it comes to gcd aoe healing sch can't even hope to compete with whm and ast. But that's not that big of a deal because gcd healing should be avoided whenever possible. Even in savage where healing can get intense, you won't need to use gcd if everyone is using their mitigation tools and playing properly at least that's my experience so far. Unfortunately, that happens only in log runs.

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Just a correction, soil is 600 potency. You forgot the insta tick you get when placing it.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

I went through the patch notes from Shb because I saw that whm's percentile in top 50 was a lot higher in the first shb raid tier. Ast actually used to be clunky when it spammed its AoE in dungeons. It had a longer cast time so using cards or ogcd while AoE was not an option unless you want to be whm 2.0. Healing while dealing damage on mob packs was possible only if they used lightspeed. There weren't always as fluid as there are now.

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

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WHM is the more "comfy" healer and the most popular one. 1 specific encounter is also not a good example. Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit. When you try speed runs (which is arguably the hardest "content" in the game since you have to heal as little as possible to deal as much damage as possible) you will see whm have a very minor participation. For E12s p2, for example, only 10% of the top 50 groups had WHMs. Which is to be expected since ast + sch have much more free heals, better raid dps etc. In ultimate where the majority just want to survive until the end, WHMs gcds are very attractive.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

How it doesn't matter? Ultimate is harder than savage and you guys say the class is a disaster because the top parties for the current savage tier don't have many whm-s. The second party for the epic of Alexandar has a whm and a sch, both having nearly the same amount of hps and both having nearly the same amount of rdps. So it is possible, to have high rdps and do your share of the healing.

Glare has higher potency to make up for the loss of dps from using a lily, this is called balancing a class.

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What? No. That's backward. Glare's higher potency means there's a greater opportunity cost when WHM uses a GCD heal. Lilies mitigate most of that loss, but not all of it. WHM's ONLY damage neutral weave space is Dia (unless you Swiftcast your next Glare as one of those weaves). SCH has this problem as well, but its lossy weaving is at least on demand.

The job is designed in a way that punishes you for being skilled at playing it. I don't think it's just my personal opinion that RPG classes should be designed to get more fun the more you improve with playing them. I don't know how many ways I can explain that WHM's design forces a skilled player to fight off its weaknesses instead of playing to strengths.

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Originally Posted by Sighearth

Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit.

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This doesn't make sense to me. Don't ultimates have enrage timer? I haven't done any so I don't know. How is speed clearing ultimate not about optimization if speed clearing savage is? Also isn't the content that tests a healer's ability to heal the best type of content to draw a conclusion from? If speed clearing ultimate is not the type of content where you are pushed to the limit which content is? When ogcds are not enough whm is prefered even for speed runs for ultimate clears. Whm is the healer job with the highest participation for the fastest ultimate clears. Savage is easy when it comes to healing which is why whm is not needed for speed clearing so I can't in any way consider that savage is pushing healer classes to the limit.

Also, ast was buffed, before 5.1 it was doing significantly less damage, despite it losing no dps from healing. So the gap between the healer's rdps is not really a matter of design. It's about balancing the classes, ast's buffs scale exponentially as the stats of your party members become stronger and stronger. For the last raid from eden's gate (titan) the top asts got roughly around 1,8k rdps from cards and divination. In e12s p2 they get more than twice - 3,8kdps. If you compare them to their real dps output you will see that for titan cards and divination boosted the best ast's own dps by 23% while in e12s p2 they boost it by 32%. That's 9% increase in rdps without any big changes being made to the cards and divination. Only sleeve draw was changed from giving three random cards, to securing that you have 3 different seals aligned for your opener. Imo that change was a nerf because you get two cards less every three mins, which you could have turned into lord/lady of crowns, and you are only achieving what rng could have done for you. In any case, from e4s to e12s Ast received 9% boost to rdps from cards and divination despite them doing the exact same thing and not receiving a direct buff. Ast has good scaling.

The only utility spell that whm has for damage increase is Presence of mind. That ability doesn't scale at all. It is a flat, linear personal buff whose efficiency is diminished by having higher spell speed which is a stat you need to deal more dps. That buff grants you roughly 2 extra casts of glare in all cases. That's 600 extra fixed potency that scales only with your personal stats. I guess this is why in the epic of alexandar ast has lower rdps than whm despite having access to the same kit as they do in e12s p2. The stats are lower so the gap in scaling is not noticeable.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

What? No. That's backward. Glare's higher potency means there's a greater opportunity cost when WHM uses a GCD heal. Lilies mitigate most of that loss, but not all of it. WHM's ONLY damage neutral weave space is Dia (unless you Swiftcast your next Glare as one of those weaves). SCH has this problem as well, but its lossy weaving is at least on demand.

The job is designed in a way that punishes you for being skilled at playing it. I don't think it's just my personal opinion that RPG classes should be designed to get more fun the more you improve with playing them. I don't know how many ways I can explain that WHM's design forces a skilled player to fight off its weaknesses instead of playing to strengths.

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So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

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I'll put it this way. With the exception of Black Mage, all DPS and all tanks can double weave after basically every single (or every other, in Red Mage's case) GCD. They never have to clip anything, or lose any damage from using their oGCDs. Does having infinite weave space make them all play the same way? Black Mage has no raid buffs, but does significantly more damage than Red Mage to make up for it (we'll ignore Summoner and its...interesting balancing issues). Does this make Black Mage overpowered?

White Mage can very well remain the "GCD healer". But development work has to acknowledge that, in this game, GCD heals *are* in a vacuum strictly weaker choices than oGCD heals. They just are. They're generally not instant, they're not free, and they take time away from your damage rotation that oGCDs don't. If WHM is going to remain a GCD healer, all of those factors need to go into the design of things like procs that mitigate those downsides. Maybe all GCD heals give blood lily charges. That's one of the most boring ways to do it, but it's better than nothing. GCD healing isn't just a "different" way to heal than oGCD healing. Unless you specifically design it to skirt those factors, it's a directly inferior method of healing, just due to the way FFXIV's combat system works. Compound that annoying weakness with the fact that WHM has no party buffs outside Temperance (a level 40 ability that was nerfed, stolen off into the role system, then deleted and given a damage reduction component and sold back as a capstone ability), has no secondary system of note to manage, and has no real movement tools outside blowing healing spells or a single DoT refresh, it's a barebones clippy Glarebot for the sake of being a barebones clippy Glarebot.

WHM can have an identity without needing to clip, remain immobile, etc. Unfortunately, the development team has decided that WHM's identity is trapped in an extremely limited design space, because "being fun to play after getting good at it" or "having any tools outside vanilla heals" is apparently SCH and AST's exclusive shared identity.

Its a complete different mindset. The speedrun community for savage is way bigger and more interested in doing savages than ultimates. Ultimate is not so much for speedrun because the way less people try that. And how my phrase doesnt make sense? You absolutely dont need to push the jobs to the limit to get a clear. You barely need to know the basics of your job to get a clear. All ultimates dps checks are a complete joke. Combine that and only a few caring about ultimate speedrun you dont have nowhere near the fierce competition that is savage speed run. Also, for speedrun you need to farm RNG most of the time, and with ultimates that sucks due to the duration of the fight

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Originally Posted by Sighearth

And how my phrase doesnt make sense? You absolutely don't need to push the jobs to the limit to get a clear. You barely need to know the basics of your job to get a clear.

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Okay, I didn't know that. I was left with the impression that ultimate > savage. There was one dude who came into my e12s loot party and said that savage is just hard casual content and that ultimates is the place where it gets tough so I just assumed that ultimates are harder than savage.

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Originally Posted by Roeshel

Okay, I didn't know that. I was left with the impression that ultimate > savage. There was one dude who came into my e12s loot party and said that savage is just hard casual content and that ultimates is the place where it gets tough so I just assumed that ultimates are harder than savage.

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Yeah that guy wasn't quite correct. As far as I'm aware, Ultimate is largely about perfect mechanic execution and has fewer hard DPS checks. Still have some, mind you, but they're not as much of a focus.

I'm thinking SCH.

I honestly prefer the spell graphics from AST but i like the mechanics of SCH. The cute fairy helps.

I don't plan to do ultimates or even savage. Requires me to find a static, and i can't really play past 8 pm in the evenings so it's pretty much out unless i play with Australians(which i do in wow. 11 am raid start is fabulous).

Thanks for the help! The thread has some good discussion going on, too. :D I've learned a lot.

I love AST, SCH and WHM on Controller. While it does take some getting used to for AST and SCH in particular with all of the micro managing you have to do, it does add a feeling of added depth to the jobs. Make sure you are taking advantage of the D-pad for targeting. Up and Down for party members, left and right for enemies. You also change your targeting option in the Character menu.