Should WHM get a personal damage buff?

Also it really doesn't address the issue. You're basically just giving WHM more healing power through mitigation. Not really what is currently needed.

I love the idea of Shell being an actual WHM ability but I would rather rename Divine Benison as Shell. Protect would be neat if it was a group buff that still lasted 30 minutes but only reduced the damage from the next incoming attack by 5 percent and had a cool down around 120 Sec or so. It could be applied before raid wide damage and used between pulls in dungeons. It wouldn't be strictly necessary but nice to work into your play style and could still be a role action for everyone. It would also mean Protect wasn't a permanent icon in the Party List taking up space for no reason.

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

5 minute duration and 10 second CD? So basically free mitigation forever?

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As opposed to the 30m duration, 3s cooldown it currently is?
It's actually a reduction in duration, making it a little more 'hands on' so it's only fair that it gets a very slight buff, for all those who might not notice it dropping off.

Because they're mutually exclusive, you either have Protect OR Shell, you can only mitigate half of all damage, on average, making it an effective 5% damage mitigation.
Compared to current Protect which is roughly 3% of all damage (more if you're overgeared, less if you're undergeared, maybe a 2%-6% range because you're not going to be THAT undergeared) that's not much of a difference.
In addition, you could just stick out a Protect and not bother with Shell, if you weren't playing optimally, and if you happened to be fighting enemies who deal a lot of Magical damage, then your effective mitigation drops below that 5%.

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Originally Posted by EaMett

Also it really doesn't address the issue. You're basically just giving WHM more healing power through mitigation. Not really what is currently needed.

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What is "needed" and what do you personally want?

The comment I was replying to was that WHM is too simple a job and is basically healing for dummies. This would give WHM a unique mechanic to keep on top of at all times, and ogcd to weave between spells. But not so mandatory that you couldn't just throw out one Protect every 5m, just like AST's cards are 'somewhat' optional (at least you can get away with not playing them optimally) and you can get away with just leaving Eos on autopilot.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

As opposed to a 30m duration it currently is?

No, because they're mutually exclusive, you can only mitigate half of all damage, on average.

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Protect doesn't reduce Physical and Magical damage received 10%. It increases Defense and Magic Defense by 15% which equates to like ~3% reduction. You are asking for free mitigation that lasts 5 minutes with a 10 second cooldown. Everyone would literally just keep Protect up until Shell is needed for AoE/Tank Buster and than instantly change back to Protect. It fixes nothing and just grants more mitigation for free.

Why would it last 5 minutes and only have a 10 second CD? It would function the same if the CD didn't even exist.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

As opposed to the 30m duration, 3s cooldown it currently is?
It's actually a reduction in duration, making it a little more 'hands on' so it's only fair that it gets a very slight buff, for all those who might not notice it dropping off.

Because they're mutually exclusive, you either have Protect OR Shell, you can only mitigate half of all damage, on average, making it an effective 5% damage mitigation.
Compared to current Protect which is roughly 3% of all damage (more if you're overgeared, less if you're undergeared, maybe a 2%-6% range because you're not going to be THAT undergeared) that's not much of a difference.
In addition, you could just stick out a Protect and not bother with Shell, if you weren't playing optimally, and if you happened to be fighting enemies who deal a lot of Magical damage, then your effective mitigation drops below that 5%.

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

Why would it last 5 minutes and only have a 10 second CD? It would function the same if the CD didn't even exist.

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So that you can just use it and leave it if you're not playing optimally, but otherwise it's a 10s CD skill that you dance between based on the incoming damage.

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Originally Posted by VanilleFang

It fixes nothing and just grants more mitigation for free.

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It fixes the "WHM is healing for dummies" issue.
It doesn't effect the floor too much but it raises the ceiling enough.

Further edit:
In addition, you're never going to hit that full 10% mitigation no matter how optimally you pay, because you're never going to hit all physical damage with Protect or all Magical damage with Shell, that 10s window is still a significant amount of time.

I mean, it's not like the idea can't be fine-tuned:


Protect
Becomes a WHM exclusive spell again.
Instant cast AoE 8% Physical Damage reduction on a 5m duration and 10s cooldown. Overrides Shell. Shares a cooldown with Shell.

Shell
Becomes a WHM exclusive spell again.
Instant cast AoE 8% Magical Damage reduction on a 5m duration and 10s cooldown. Overrides Protect. Shares a cooldown with Protect.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

What is "needed" and what do you personally want?

The comment I was replying to was that WHM is too simple a job and is basically healing for dummies. This would give WHM a unique mechanic to keep on top of at all times, and ogcd to weave between spells. But not so mandatory that you couldn't just throw out one Protect every 5m, just like AST's cards are 'somewhat' optional (at least you can get away with not playing them optimally) and you can get away with just leaving Eos on autopilot.

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Well I personally don't care that much. WHM needs a bit more dps though for 8 man content. Maybe an aero 2 potency buff or something? I also would like to see some mechanic surrounding the gauge. Maybe convert your hots to gauge points for example would be nice. And the gauge would allow you to use some nice potency dps skill.

That Protect / Shell change would certainly drop the skill floor. 8% pseudo permanent mitigation means the healer would have to heal 8% less of the time, period. It would also make WHM way too desirable in progression content, even more so than it already is right now.

I agree with a Protect change, but I don't agree with this particular suggestion because it wouldn't change the dynamic of the protect spell very much but make the impact of it far too great for how easy it is to use.

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Originally Posted by Ghishlain

That Protect / Shell change would certainly drop the skill floor. 8% pseudo permanent mitigation means the healer would have to heal 8% less of the time, period.

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I've already explained why this is NOT the case above.
It would exchange the ~3% mitigation of our current Protect skill, for a ~4% mitigation, that can perhaps be extended towards that 8% (but not completely) with optimal play and anticipation of enemy attacks and their damage types.

This means that, at most, WHM's other skills, OR the mitigation of SCH/AST only needs to be nerfed/buffed by a couple of percent. Something any additional skills in 5.0 are likely to do anyway.

edit:
I'm actually going to go ahead and delete this, because it seems the methodology was extremely questionable and so I don't think any good is likely to come of the content.

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Originally Posted by Seraphor

I've already explained why this is NOT the case above.
It would exchange the ~3% mitigation of our current Protect skill, for a ~4% mitigation, that can perhaps be extended towards that 8% (but not completely) with optimal play and anticipation of enemy attacks and their damage types.

This means that, at most, WHM's other skills, OR the mitigation of SCH/AST only needs to be nerfed/buffed by a couple of percent. Something any additional skills in 5.0 are likely to do anyway.

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Your logic is faulty because you're assuming there's exactly a 50% split between physical and magical damage that occur in equal quantities and duration at all times. This isn't the case.

For dungeon content you can basically keep Protect up full time and most likely gain the full 8% effective mitigation on your group without skipping a beat since there are generally very few party busters and almost everything in the dungeon will be physical in nature.

For raid content, you can basically keep Shell up full time and gain a near the full 8% mitigation on your raid for the entire fight. Yes, you'd gain some mileage by swapping between Protect and Shell for tank busters but your current iteration Shell up will essentially net you approximately 687,000 eHP worth of mitigation for your raid on God Kefka. Protect on an MT level would only give you about 108,000 eHP worth of mitigation on the same fight. This means Shell's effective party mitigation by full timing it would be close 6.9% and Protect would net you 1.1% total mitigation of the damage done.

Sure, you could play smartly to gain those increases but you can still basically fire and forget Shell OR Protect and not miss a beat and with your current values, they're more effective than the current mitigation values of Proshell.

WHM could still have the missing Bravery and Faith spells for dmg buffs i hope

No it doesn't

The devs would die of old age before every class can be meta
And with job changing not everything needs to be balanced evenly
Itd be great. But its pretty easy to pick up sch or ast

You might even like it more

Or just find a chill group thats good and not ocd about the same shit every raiders bitching online

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Originally Posted by vVAstrAVv

No it doesn't

The devs would die of old age before every class can be meta
And with job changing not everything needs to be balanced evenly
Itd be great. But its pretty easy to pick up sch or ast

You might even like it more

Or just find a chill group thats good and not ocd about the same shit every raiders bitching online

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I'm aware this is necro AF but I can't help it... says the WAR main >.>

There is a certain oddity to coming back to this thread after so long. Perhaps a bit of irony, too. SE buffed AST so it does more damage than WHM on average, and so here we are... with WHM being dead last on both raid utility and damage output.

Hope the 4.4 raids require Ultimate levels of healing or something.

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

There is a certain oddity to coming back to this thread after so long. Perhaps a bit of irony, too. SE buffed AST so it does more damage than WHM on average, and so here we are... with WHM being dead last on both raid utility and damage output.

Hope the 4.4 raids require Ultimate levels of healing or something.

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I tell myself WHM buffs are coming.

It's like the Dragons in GoT. When they get here it will be epic.

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

snip

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I cant help they made war more fun than the other tanks this expac :p
Id stay a drk if i could stand its problems

I remember reading this thread months ago... Goddamn.

On topic: WHM could do with a significant damage buff. No real reason not to give one.

SCH is too good atm. No amount of paltry shield buffs to Noct is going to make people take AST over them. They are the guaranteed healer slot. I honestly feel that next expansion we should see Critlo removed and AST should get some cooldowns to be able to stance dance, and WHM should get an AoE version of DB so SE can weaken shields and allow them to stack if they're from different players. Maybe give WHMs access to Shellga to compete with Fey Covenant too.

Been a while since I've popped into this thread. Jesus.

Ever since the buffs, I'm starting to believe we're going to run WHM into the ground to the point it might not exist. A developer can't entirely base a job's performance on just healing alone; which is WHM's only niche. Outside of that, we're basically back at 3.4 Heavensward with AST destroying WHM; but not as badly as that time thankfully. If WHM got a personal damage buff NOW? I don't think it'd help any measure of competing with AST. If they really want WHM to compete for that spot, they need to look at what they did to AST and check out WHM in terms of the Casting GCD.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

but not as badly as that time thankfully. If WHM got a personal damage buff NOW? I don't think it'd help any measure of competing with AST.

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The only way we're going to get out of this loop is if AST is reworked.

But SE has said on more than one occasion: an AST rework is just not going to happen.

So... might as well ask for *some* advantages to at least mitigate WHM's situation. I'd rather have Balance and Chain Stratagem and so on made into role actions personally, but I doubt SE will do it. Of course they don't really seem to be open to doing much of anything at all for white mage after the benison change so... IDK.

https://78.media.tumblr.com/0ad34f77...wevo1_1280.png

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Originally Posted by MoroMurasaki

I tell myself WHM buffs are coming.

It's like the Dragons in GoT. When they get here it will be epic.

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Spoilers...

Killed in vain and ill-reasoned strategies and then used against you?

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

The only way we're going to get out of this loop is if AST is reworked.

But SE has said on more than one occasion: an AST rework is just not going to happen.

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If they really think they’re going to rework AST, that’d be a nightmare for development. If anything, WHM is overdue for it. They screwed up this expansion with AST getting buffed, but I think at this point we’re in the same spot as DRKs trying to say that we need fixes to our job because our mechanics/flow is really bad(Lilies/Dark Arts spam). If anything, I have to wonder how they attempt to balance job difficulty with performance.

Unless this would throw the balance out of whack: I think they should add a shielding property to Asylum.
Have a damage reduction of 10-20% or something whilst inside the shield as well as the heal - extend the cooldown if needed.

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Originally Posted by Ilyrian

Unless this would throw the balance out of whack: I think they should add a shielding property to Asylum.
Have a damage reduction of 10-20% or something whilst inside the shield as well as the heal - extend the cooldown if needed.

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That’s actually not bad. It’s already on a 90s CD isn’t it? You’d be trying to homogenize the Healers that way though and it doesn’t necessarily make WHM better aside from finally being some type of utility that’s Raid-wide.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

That’s actually not bad. It’s already on a 90s CD isn’t it? You’d be trying to homogenize the Healers that way though and it doesn’t necessarily make WHM better aside from finally being some type of utility that’s Raid-wide.

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I think the problem with aiming for better in these situations always makes someone the loser.
By giving WHM a useful raid wide shield that isn't on demand like the other two, it goes someway to close the gap imo.
Or maybe a raid wide mana restore, or an aoe res? How cool would an aoe res be?! Overpowered, perhaps, but awesome >.<

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

If they really think they’re going to rework AST, that’d be a nightmare for development. If anything, WHM is overdue for it. They screwed up this expansion with AST getting buffed, but I think at this point we’re in the same spot as DRKs trying to say that we need fixes to our job because our mechanics/flow is really bad(Lilies/Dark Arts spam). If anything, I have to wonder how they attempt to balance job difficulty with performance.

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Lilies are more simply irrelevant (outside of pvp anyways). A rework of lilies wouldn't really address the fundamental issue:
At 3.0, AST's tradeoff for very high utility was lower performing heals, but functionally just reskins of existing healing spells. This turned out to be a pretty bad idea for a game with highly scripted encounters. So now all healers accomplish pretty much the same healing.

This means the ways to differentiate themselves are things like.. well, utility again. Buffs. Damage. MP management. And so on.

Now the big exception here is Scholar. Noct AST has been a joke since the class launched because... well, take Fey Union. Even in savage content, you can ignore the tank or DPS prey targets with this, allowing both healers to DPS. SCH also retains a very powerful party HoT on a 60s CD, while Noct AST has to give up its party HoT for a harder to use, higher-cooldown channeled one. And no one really has an answer to 3 instant tankheals on a 45s CD (or 6 on a 30s CD, depending) for furthering reducing the need of GCD healing.

So you have 2 healers that are nearly identical in the healing they can do. What's the logical conclusion when one outclasses the other in secondary capabilities?

SE has said one of them is never going to get a rework to differentiate their healing abilities. They've said this to the community more than once, in fact, with how often it comes up.

SE has said the other should be a pure healer, without these ancillary abilities that might differentiate it from an otherwise highly parallel healing kit.

So... here we are.

If something doesn't break the cycle, 5.0 will just be another encore. WHM healing will get tuned up or the others tuned down. Some difficult encounter will result in buffs to level out the healing again. But other healers (just possibly 3 now instead of 2) will have utility/damage/etc on top of that....

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Originally Posted by Risvertasashi

Lilies are more simply irrelevant (outside of pvp anyways). A rework of lilies wouldn't really address the fundamental issue

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Has anyone taken the time to figure out any significant breakpoints for ability usage via max Lilies, over the context of a real fight (say... Alphascape v3 Savage)?

I imagine there has to be a point at which those Lilies would provide significant advantage, but I'd also guess that we're not there yet. And while the direct heals Lilies require do force the pure healer aesthetic, ensuring that the WHM does all the direct ST healing that would require only a single healer's contributions at a time, its generators still may be too infrequently useful.

It feels like there are still a ton of underlying systems or mechanics that can be used to increase WHM's contribution over time, and during critical junctures, without taking away from it being a pure healer, i.e. without the slightest semblance of RDPS raid buffs. That could be baked into the healing, the damage, or both.

A simple version: the throughput of your Water, Earth, and Wind spells contribute a secondary stat/effect (alternatively, contribute that just towards the other elements). Water contributes... Determination, or perhaps a capped cleave effect. Stone contributes Critical Strike, or perhaps you return Stoneskin in place of DB and it empowers that. Wind contributes Attack Speed or Casting Speed, or trims up to such-and-such % cast time off the next such-and-such casts. Aero now instantly consumes any existing instance of its effect for one-third its remaining ticks' damage when replacing/refreshing it, increasing the direct damage from 50 to 'up to 150'. Stone III damage increased to 230, up from 210 (+10 over previous level), to be more in line with other damage increases, and Stone IV damage increased to 260.

Allowing Aero II to consume any previous ticks already on a target and unleash them as damage upon the renewed application would be awesome. Whm would finally have a reliable spell for weaving that made sense.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

Allowing Aero II to consume any previous ticks already on a target and unleash them as damage upon the renewed application would be awesome. Whm would finally have a reliable spell for weaving that made sense.

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This would turn Stone IV into a rarely used spell, though. Aero II would have a potential potency of 350 if you caught it at full-ticks. In the end I think this would be a potentially huge (like maybe too huge) boon to WHM dps because instead of the SCH/SMN setup of the weavable filler spell being a lower potency WHM would have the opposite.

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, it's early so I very much could be

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

Allowing Aero II to consume any previous ticks already on a target and unleash them as damage upon the renewed application would be awesome. Whm would finally have a reliable spell for weaving that made sense.

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That would make every other cast deal 700 potency, though... Given that healers have a native 30% output bonus, that would be an effective 910, notably stronger than the effective 864 of Midare Setsugekka (w/o Kaiten)... And at minimum it would still deal far more damage than Stone IV. It would be an overbuff that reduces WHM dps to a single button.

Perhaps just a portion or <square root of remaining ticks> value and a slightly higher direct damage value would be enough?

Just give them an instant cast so they don't feel awful about having to clip Stone or use Aero early for a weave.

Aftershock
Instant
Spell
Effect: Deals Earth elemental potency of 70. Each use of Stone spells add 40 potency to this spell, up to 230.

This is scalable via traits so you can introduce it early. Effectively every upgrade to Stone adds another 'stack' for Aftershock.

It's a weaker GCD than stone so you primarily build it up to have an instant cast when you need it: For movement, for weaving, etc, that doesn't require cutting off potential ticks for Aero.

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Originally Posted by Kabooa

Just give them an instant cast so they don't feel awful about having to clip Stone or use Aero early for a weave.

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It's an interesting idea for QoL, but WHM needs more than QoL right now.

"Aero now instantly consumes any existing instance of its effect for one-third its remaining ticks' damage when replacing/refreshing it, increasing the direct damage from 50 to 'up to 150'."

I was referring to this suggestion from Shurrikhan before but was unclear about it. I thought it was awesome. I didn't mean to imply a whole new ability of my own making. Oops...

You could just make Stone IV instant cast and call it a day :p

It's not like it would be outrageous for Balance, just give them marginally better uptime in general and much better uptime on movement heavy fights.

As for the rest of WHM, i still stand by slicing significant amounts of recast off of their oGCDs. It seems silly with the amount of tools it gives, but honestly those don't matter when you're already not using GCD heals most the time anyways and the job still doesn't have a raid buff.

One idea I had in mind to help WHM specifically is to give them Divine Seal again. But it also applies an Overheal buff to the entire raid for the same duration. While Overheal is active the WHM's healing spells are able to generate shields based on how much they overheal when they overheal a player. This would have a cap, which is 10% of that player's max HP. The shield would fall off when Overheal does. I specifically wanted to avoid making it work the way Thrill and Troubadour do because then the other healer can also benefit from it. It's a WHM-way of going about mitigation while also providing them more throughput. I'd probably nerf the cooldown to be 90s like Largesse but let Lilies reduce it by a flat number per-lily if added.

I'd like a similar thing on AST that temporarily swapped your stance while granting the same heal bonus that Largesse currently does. Not the overheal effect I proposed for Divine Seal though, just the stance swap and healing bonus. Then give them an emergency Tactics style cooldown to also swap stances for the next Aspected spell. Allow both to stack so you could get an empowered spell in your own stance if you wanted. I'd also like to see the healing bonuses from the sects removed and Noct shields nerfed to match SCH's potencies in order to really sell that they're supposed to be weaker or equivalent to SCH's. That would keep WHM as the premiere throughput healer too, even on single target Cure I/II spam.

For Scholar they should allow fairy abilities to be spells again so they benefit from Rouse. If they need a potency nerf to compensate (Only Whispering Dawn would, really) then so be it. Maybe boost Fey Union/Embrace too, and any fey abilities they add next expansion. Nerf their Succor shields to their original ARR levels and remove critlo so their shields and Noct's can be equalized at a weaker level that lets WHM be more competitive with Divine Seal. Give SCH a 60s cd buff that gives them 100% crit rate for their next spell, Healing, or damage. Specifically 100% crit rate, so it can be snapshotted by their DoTs. That's intended to be a way to help with their personal throughput when needed and still give them an edge over Noct without also giving players critlo-deploy cheese on the level it is at currently. It's part of why Noct is so lopsided yet still bad to begin with. Their shields are good, even better than SCH due to their reliability, but everything else is complete garbage by comparison.

If the above happened for WHM/AST, remove Largesse as a role action.

Consider allowing shields from different players to stack too. That includes Divine Benison and the Overheal effects from my Divine Seal proposal. Mostly for 24mans/pugging.


That would give WHM and AST some options they actually need when paired together too. It won't solve the "SCH is king" issue but it helps the WHM/AST pairing get more access to mitigation and regens while helping SCH stay ahead in their unique way.

Also, how would you feel if Secret of the Lily gave your Stone spell a combo effect? Specifically comboing with itself to generate a lily. Meaning as long as you're casting them repeatedly you get reliable Lily stacks, but constant switching between Stone and other spells would hamper your generation, as your first stone spell would never generate a Lily. Would that work for WHM?

The main problem with WHM is: the hp-pools are way to small.
It only takes 1-2 cast to fill them completly. And when all healers are designt to be able to clear all content (which is good - or else no one would play said healers), then you will have situation were "big green numbers" are just to big to be of any use.
Therefore other strenghts like support or dmg-output become more importent.

For WHM this means: they are good for progress and highend-content but become lagging as soon as people get used to the mechanics and wont need as much healing.
So asking for buffs is understandable, but still a bad idea.

When you have a class, you need to give them strenghts and weaknesses.
WHM steaght are big green numbers and weaknesses the lag of mitigation and support.

so if you realy want WHM-buffs then ask yourself: what nerfs are you willing to accept in return?
Because until now i only read about the buff you want, but not what you are willing to give up for it...:confused:

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Originally Posted by Cerenessus

The main problem with WHM is: the hp-pools are way to small.
It only takes 1-2 cast to fill them completly. And when all healers are designt to be able to clear all content (which is good - or else no one would play said healers), then you will have situation were "big green numbers" are just to big to be of any use.

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The other problem is the misconception that WHM's numbers are bigger. In a number of cases, AST's are bigger. But it's a bit of a moot point anyways because they're all huge, and they're all big enough to clear content that makes party HP yo-yo.

I do not think WHM needs nerfs, because its numbers - green and red alike - already aren't bigger and in a number of cases are smaller. This is precisely why many of us feel WHM is not balanced: There are many weaknesses and WHM simply gets nothing in return for those weaknesses.

And, well, it's not just us. SCH+AST is the go to comp because others have made this assessment as well. You're taking along a big liability for no tangible benefit. WHM does less DPS, same healing, creates enmity problems, and reduces the raid's DPS output. Only reason to take one is "I need to clear this content now and I can't find an AST."

There is a threat about prot somewhere with the idea about removing it, because it is boring.
One Idea was to chance it to a WHM-cd that give a 10% dmg-reduction to all party members so WHM would have more mitigation.

Now the problem: all 3 healers have one field-effekt-skill:
asylum a placeable hot with a considerable but vailable cd where you have to stack to get most out of it
sacred soil 10% reduction with short cd that costs 1 atherflow also you stack
and cu hot+10% redution that leave AST unable to move.

all 3 skills have their pro´s and con`s but now give WHM new-prot:
10% redution same as sarced soil and cu but you dont have to stack, are free to move and have almost no cost in using it.
so how to you balance it?
the only way to justify giving WHM such a skill, would be to remove asylum and give it a longer cd when cu.

so again: what are you willing to sacrifice to justify giving WHM more mitigation in order not to make SCH or Noct-AST obsolete?
how do you want to make sure AST´s cards - their class identity - wont lose against a new WHM raidbuff cd?

dont missunderstand me, healers arent perfectly balanced - except SCH because he has to be.
but how do you want to make sure, that by buffing WHM , giving him more dmg, mitigation, support,... to simply make him a better and easier SCH/AST...

for me the only way would be to nerf WHM heals to SCH or AST levels (or massivly increasing hp-pools) but then again you could just play AST and thats not the the point of having classes in the first place...