WHM DPS needs to stay this high.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Unfortunately, the devs seem utterly determine to maintain White Mage's identity as the selfish healer.

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Why is that a bad thing when they are currently top healer?

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Originally Posted by Ftail

Why is that a bad thing when they are currently top healer?

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It's a bad thing for two major reasons, I think.

Firstly it's very difficult to balance. Raid buffs like chain stratagem, card, divination usually have a consistent expected dps contribution in top level play. Sure you could give white mage the personal dps to make up for not having these buffs, and they would be a competitive healer. In casual play, though, the dps contributions of the aforementioned raid buff amount to a lot less, thus the white mage personal dps advantage in that settings actually becomes very overpowered. Currently though, I'd argue that even in top level play whm personal dps alone is far ahead of a scholar's or astrologian's combined personal dps and raid buff contribution.

Secondly, there is this stigma in the community surrounding selfish classes, and it's really unhealthy for the game. As much as a few white mages around here would like people to believe, they were nowhere near as bad off in stormblood as some people say. In fact, out of the 3 final raid fights and 2 ultimate fights, 4 of these fights included a white mage in the world first group. Neo exdeath, god kefka, ucob, and uwu all were cleared first with a white mage. Only on final omega was the world first group one with an ast/sch comp. Despite this, the community had it set as the norm that whm was bad because the speedrun groups never used one. I don't think that there is a way to balance whm with personal dps alone while simultaneously removing this stigma surrounding them. Clearly right now white mage is the favored healer, but look how far ahead of the other healers in terms of raid contribution they needed to be for this to be the case.

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Originally Posted by Ftail

What is your estimation for its DPS contribution?

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Originally Posted by BunnyChain

If we take a very rough average of 50% extra damage from a crit, at 100k rDPS burst damage average in an opener and assuming CS straight up adds +10% crit rate, it amounts to +700 rDPS from Chain Strategem at 4 uses in a fight.

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Literally on the first page. As an interesting side note, the numbers taken from this parse had the WHM and SCH separated by 1400 DPS; and the WHM doing about 10% total damage, so you could futher reduce it by 70 DPS that WHM gains from CS.

I'm not going to go in-depth because we all know this can all turn on a dime with the upcoming patch(es) and the cycle continues.

I had an Amaurot earlier where our one first-time bonus was a DRG doing 8.6k DPS. This could have been gear or general lack of experience/awareness due to it being their first time, yet I was pushing out 11-14k as a WHM.

It has been said before that a WHM with total freedom could give a Dancer a run for their money. That was likely an exaggeration (and was something I heard during the early-access portion where everything is new and shiny rather than being dissected in full), plus I'm not one for hear-say in general, but I genuinely hope that is how things actually go for WHM. I'm very happy with the actual Healing buttons right now and have always been a "Cleric-Stance-On" minded Healer. Given our 'utility' involves +Healing Asylum, HoTs for days and one relatively long CD'd AoE mitigation button, if you butcher our damage or normalize all Healers to having similar, we will once again fall back into the trap of being the least desirable due to the others having wanted utility buttons without sacrifice to raw healing/damage (safely assuming AST/SCH gets buffs, that is).

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Originally Posted by RopeDrink

It has been said before that a WHM with total freedom could give a Dancer a run for their money. That was likely an exaggeration (and was something I heard during the early-access portion where everything is new and shiny rather than being dissected in full), plus I'm not one for hear-say in general, but I genuinely hope that is how things actually go for WHM.

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I would be careful about saying stuff like this, because you don't want them catching it. AoE aside where it's fine for healers to excel, the majority of DPS jobs are way too complicated and involved to have their output be anywhere close to that achieved by 2-button spam. Some of them have incredibly intricate rotations and/or mechanics, and it simply wouldn't be appropriate for a healer to rival that with a kit as uninvolved as a healer's tend to be, as the DPS options have always been fairly free with no rotation to speak of.

If it's actually an issue, and I doubt it is, then the only thing that will result from it is smack from the nerf bat.

I have played MMORPGs for decades of all shapes and sizes and presently play all roles in FFXIV, so you don't need to describe DPS to me, nor should you take my post as an indication that I want a Healer to be level with them in terms of DPS. That Dancer comment, as said, was an over-exaggeration stated by a random I encountered during early-access, yet the essence of it I can get behind.

My point was I do believe White Mage should be below them (but above tanks) - respectable damage to compensate for the lack of providing what other Healers do (ie. lack of utility compared to AST/SCH), which seems like the only option when Square incessantly adhere to this notion of having one "Pure Healer", which is a dead concept if other Healers provide the exact same damage potential at no detriment to healing power. If they nerf WHM damage, or buff others to be equal to it, then we end up in the exact same old trap we always have - our 'selling point' being something everyone else provides (except they provide other things too, while we don't).

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Originally Posted by Lagomorph

In casual play, though, the dps contributions of the aforementioned raid buff amount to a lot less, thus the white mage personal dps advantage in that settings actually becomes very overpowered. Currently though, I'd argue that even in top level play whm personal dps alone is far ahead of a scholar's or astrologian's combined personal dps and raid buff contribution.

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I assume by casual play you mean dungeons and EX-Primals? As in, piss-easy content? The notion that the game should be balanced around this is idiotic, sorry. Such content is completely irrelevant since it's so easy everyone can do it with every job in very good time.

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As much as a few white mages around here would like people to believe, they were nowhere near as bad off in stormblood as some people say. In fact, out of the 3 final raid fights and 2 ultimate fights, 4 of these fights included a white mage in the world first group. Neo exdeath, god kefka, ucob, and uwu all were cleared first with a white mage. Only on final omega was the world first group one with an ast/sch comp.

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Let me translate. Out of a 6 month content cycle (3 if you mash Savage and Ultimate together), WHM was used by high-end groups for a grand total of, what? 2-3 weeks each tier maybe? And then shelved for AST, at least for the first two tiers, and immediately for the third.

Silly me thinking there is any problem with this at all! It was in the best spot possible since forever and very loved by everyone, how could I not have seen that?/s

WHM should go unchanged, their dps should be what they bring. SCH could use some minor tweaks, I think they should unnerf stratagem, or reduce its cooldown a bit, its too weak for a 2 minute cooldown. AST needs help, badly.

SCH might even be fine the way it is (fun issues aside), the answer we need is not to nerf anything but to buff ast out of the hole its in.

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Originally Posted by Yuyuka3

I assume by casual play you mean dungeons and EX-Primals? As in, piss-easy content? The notion that the game should be balanced around this is idiotic, sorry. Such content is completely irrelevant since it's so easy everyone can do it with every job in very good time.



Let me translate. Out of a 6 month content cycle (3 if you mash Savage and Ultimate together), WHM was used by high-end groups for a grand total of, what? 2-3 weeks each tier maybe? And then shelved for AST, at least for the first two tiers, and immediately for the third.

Silly me thinking there is any problem with this at all! It was in the best spot possible since forever and very loved by everyone, how could I not have seen that?/s

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No, casual players does not mean bad players. I've known some players who play the game casually (2 raid nights a week) who always manage to get the final fight of a raid tier down. The point here is, these players often do not put much time into optimizing their cooldown alignment, resulting in less dps from chain strategem and cards/divination.

Further, let's look at some statistics from a website that I probably shouldn't say the name of here. These are the total times the 3 healers were used. Hopefully these tables don't get too malformed from the formatting.


____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Deltascape:___16274 __14749___13558
Sigmascape:__18696___20578___15315
Alphascape:___11258__16409___11885

Is there a problem with balance here? Sure, there definitely is. Is it as bad as people (like you) make it sound? Not even close. And actually, look at deltascape and sigmascape, where white mage was being used more than astro. And in alphascape, where white mage was used a comparable amount to astro. But wait, I have some more numbers from that same website:

____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Shb trials:___62857____50329___23838

It's almost like the balance problem here is far worse than it was in stormblood, with white mage being way more overpowered right now than ast/sch ever were.

Let’s be realistic; they’ll buff Broil and Malefic, super buff some SCH/AST oGCDs for more DPS uptime than White Mage then call it there. Either that or they’ll add huge damage potencies to an oGCD like Earthly Star or Energy Drain when it returns next patch

Whether that fixes the problem or not is irrelevant lol, because the devs have an entirely different idea of what healers should be than what the players want.

I’d say that it’d be cool if Scholar and Astrologian got adjustments in other areas to compensate for the DPS difference, like utility or reductions on cooldowns or whatever, but I know nobody cares for that so that so I’ll just leave it as an aside rather than try and think up something detailed.

Fun fact about the healer DPS, if you look into the last extension, on extremes, WHM was first dps with a little margin, SCH was 2sd and AST was last, each more or less 5-10% appart.
Then if you look at savages parses (75th percentiles/95th percentiles), sch is first, followed by WHM then AST. (and on some tier, WHM is last)
WHM and AST suffer the most from healing with GCD, since they don't have as much OGCD than SCH, and lose about 10-15% dps for WHM, and nearly up to 20% for AST, while SCH loses at most 2-3%.
If you apply the stormblood dps loss from extremes to savage to the actual numbers we have on extremes, we would have:
WHM at 5550 dps, SCH at 5145 dps, AST at 3662 dps
Which makes SCh raid dps, added to his personnal dps, above WHM's dps, and AST at an abysmal position.
That said, WHM won ways to heal while maintaining dps (afflatus), and at the end of SB, AST got his main dps skill cast time reduce to weave, so there may be a little impact on the dps loss there, but still, taking the numbers without context isnt usefull.

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Originally Posted by Lagomorph

No, casual players does not mean bad players. I\'ve known some players who play the game casually (2 raid nights a week) who always manage to get the final fight of a raid tier down. The point here is, these players often do not put much time into optimizing their cooldown alignment, resulting in less dps from chain strategem and cards/divination.

Further, let\'s look at some statistics from a website that I probably shouldn\'t say the name of here. These are the total times the 3 healers were used. Hopefully these tables don\'t get too malformed from the formatting.


____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Deltascape:___16274 __14749___13558
Sigmascape:__18696___20578___15315
Alphascape:___11258__16409___11885

Is there a problem with balance here? Sure, there definitely is. Is it as bad as people (like you) make it sound? Not even close. And actually, look at deltascape and sigmascape, where white mage was being used more than astro. And in alphascape, where white mage was used a comparable amount to astro. But wait, I have some more numbers from that same website:

____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Shb trials:___62857____50329___23838

It\'s almost like the balance problem here is far worse than it was in stormblood, with white mage being way more overpowered right now than ast/sch ever were.

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Where the frick did I equate casual players with bad???
At least don\'t put words I never said into my mouth, okay? I asked what you mean by casual play, since many mean EX trials and dungeons by that, so I assumed it\'s that. This content doesn\'t need any balancing at all. I never, at any point in my comment, said casuals are necessarily bad players at all. You also have a funny way defining casuals since what you do is include basically everyone who isn\'t HC, maybe sHC. You are basically erasing the middle.

Also, no clue if you even realize that, but we are talking about completely different things right there. I talk about high end use, you talk about overall use. In my eyes, that\'s a bad metric, since as you said, not everyone cares about optimization, but that implies that no job got any issues since people played them all in Savage and even Ultimate. Yet, even MC or SC statics periodically try to play "meta", which excluded certain jobs from use though it wouldn\'t even matter to said groups at all. It also doesn\'t reflect the shift in high end usage numbers I was talking about, both in Savage and Ultimate. That does NOT mean that optimization matters to nobody, and it does NOT mean that WHMs weren\'t harrassed to play AST; that happened, even though I\'m sure you won\'t believe me or give me the same old, tired "just play with people who aren\'t di**s, then" bs. That is something that shouldn\'t happen to anyone, and it happened quite often to the point that this argument cannot be counted anymore.

Also, the margin between WHM DPS and SCH/AST DPS is smaller at the 75 percentile than at the 99th. I explain that by WHM getting more padding and likely buffs having higher turn outs due to the better potency. But in normal play, WHM won\'t be padded so heavily, so what\'s even the point at looking at that? However, this kinda shows to me that your comment that WHM is far better at lower percentiles is dead wrong. Every healer can heal every current fight just fine, and the difference seems to be actually lower at the lower percentiles than at high end. The only difference is damage contribution either way. Btw, I would have liked it far, far more had they just given WHM a rDPS buff instead of turning them into a green DPS. That way, they wouldn\'t have needed such a drastic DPS increase. But I\'m also convinced that the difference will melt away anyway in Savage since while pDPS will get lower with having to heal more for everyone, rDPS increases provided by SCH/AST will get more important, giving them an edge. WHM is the least mobile job eight now, worse than even BLM, and they will feel movement and having to heal far more than the others.

Last, I admitted before that AST right now isn\'t really in a good position. It needs a few tweaks to it to put it in line with the others. I\'m just afraid they will overdo it again and buff them too strong, as they often do, putting us back in the last spot again.

Btw, comparing EX primals to Savage raids is like comparing apples to oranges, as the numbers difference should tell you already...

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Originally Posted by Yuyuka3

Where the frick did I equate casual players with bad???
At least don\'t put words I never said into my mouth, okay? I asked what you mean by casual play, since many mean EX trials and dungeons by that, so I assumed it\'s that. This content doesn\'t need any balancing at all. I never, at any point in my comment, said casuals are necessarily bad players at all. You also have a funny way defining casuals since what you do is include basically everyone who isn\'t HC, maybe sHC. You are basically erasing the middle.

Also, no clue if you even realize that, but we are talking about completely different things right there. I talk about high end use, you talk about overall use. In my eyes, that\'s a bad metric, since as you said, not everyone cares about optimization, but that implies that no job got any issues since people played them all in Savage and even Ultimate. Yet, even MC or SC statics periodically try to play "meta", which excluded certain jobs from use though it wouldn\'t even matter to said groups at all. It also doesn\'t reflect the shift in high end usage numbers I was talking about, both in Savage and Ultimate. That does NOT mean that optimization matters to nobody, and it does NOT mean that WHMs weren\'t harrassed to play AST; that happened, even though I\'m sure you won\'t believe me or give me the same old, tired "just play with people who aren\'t di**s, then" bs. That is something that shouldn\'t happen to anyone, and it happened quite often to the point that this argument cannot be counted anymore.

Also, the margin between WHM DPS and SCH/AST DPS is smaller at the 75 percentile than at the 99th. I explain that by WHM getting more padding and likely buffs having higher turn outs due to the better potency. But in normal play, WHM won\'t be padded so heavily, so what\'s even the point at looking at that? However, this kinda shows to me that your comment that WHM is far better at lower percentiles is dead wrong. Every healer can heal every current fight just fine, and the difference seems to be actually lower at the lower percentiles than at high end. The only difference is damage contribution either way. Btw, I would have liked it far, far more had they just given WHM a rDPS buff instead of turning them into a green DPS. That way, they wouldn\'t have needed such a drastic DPS increase. But I\'m also convinced that the difference will melt away anyway in Savage since while pDPS will get lower with having to heal more for everyone, rDPS increases provided by SCH/AST will get more important, giving them an edge. WHM is the least mobile job eight now, worse than even BLM, and they will feel movement and having to heal far more than the others.

Last, I admitted before that AST right now isn\'t really in a good position. It needs a few tweaks to it to put it in line with the others. I\'m just afraid they will overdo it again and buff them too strong, as they often do, putting us back in the last spot again.

Btw, comparing EX primals to Savage raids is like comparing apples to oranges, as the numbers difference should tell you already...

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1. You equated casual players to bad players when you suggested that all casual players do is "piss-easy content." If this was not your intention, then I apologize, but you sure did a good job of making it seem that way.

2. Saying that certain content doesn't need balancing is just a bad excuse to let some classes go unchecked. Right now, I consider myself a scholar main. Of course, I'll advocate for my class getting some QoL changes that are much needed. Do we need to do more damage? I don't really think so, I think we're in a fine spot damage-wise. But here's the sad part, even though I've mained scholar exclusively for years and years, I'm healing dungeons pretty much only on white mage right now. Why? Because white mages feels infinitely better to use in dungeons. There is not even any contest. Right now I pretty much never want to do another dungeon on scholar until some changes come in. In EX primals this is a lesser problem, because I still can get some enjoyment out of scholar there, but my point about dungeons still stands.

3. I think classes should be balanced in both a high-end setting and in a casual setting. As I said earlier, if you leave white mage's identity as the "selfish" healer, then balancing them in high-end groups will result in them being overpowered in a casual setting. This doesn't mean balancing the classes so a 75th percentile scholar will contribute about the same amount as a 75th percentile white mage. This is about class's maximum potential in any given setting. Suppose you're a very experienced scholar, your raid contribution will be very different when you're running with an optimized group vs running with a pug group. Now supposed you're a very experience white mage, your performance would largely remain consistent regardless of what group you're in. Now you can argue that pugs will make you heal more and thus lower your dps, and while that is true, that applies to both healers so I think that point is largely irrelevant here.

4. White mages being pressured into playing ast last expansion is a very valid point, and one that I don't really have a counter to. It's a genuine problem in this game, and it's really unfortunate that the speedrun meta is held in such high regard by playerbase when in most cases party comp doesn't really matter at all.

5. I disagree that white mage is the least mobile job. I find using my lilies for movement to work pretty nicely, because they is so little healing required right now that they're often going to waste anyways. If I have no lillies, then I can just clip dia, because it does have 120 base potency after all. I only need 3 ticks of dia for it to be equal to glare, so if I clip dia at 20s or less then I did at least as much damage as a glare.

6. You're right, savage and ex primals are very different. I disagree that having the healing requirement go up would lower white mage personal dps though, because they have lillies that you kind of want to spend on healing, but you seldom have a good opportunity to right now. Also, as I said earlier, balancing a class solely on raids and leaving them go unchecked in all other content is still unacceptable. Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I'd like to have fun using my favorite class in dungeons again instead of just using the class that is just magnitudes better.

7. Being worried about SE over buffing ast is a very valid concern. I've come to believe that there is no way to balance white mage against ast without giving them some form of utility. I believe this after seeing how poorly healers were balanced throughout heavensward and stormblood. So long as SE is stubborn in its intent to keep white mage as the "selfish" healer, we won't have balance. At least that's the way I see it. I would love nothing more than to be proven wrong on this point.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Let’s be realistic; they’ll buff Broil and Malefic, super buff some SCH/AST oGCDs for more DPS uptime than White Mage then call it there. Either that or they’ll add huge damage potencies to an oGCD like Earthly Star or Energy Drain when it returns next patch

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This only they will nerf WHM as well to overcompensate. AST and SCH mains everywhere can rejoice. Source: my dad is Square Enix.

I do wonder though: How much rDPS does an AST give throughout an entire raid? Because that’s the mechanic that determines AST’s value. They should be throwing AST some better healing potencies next patch, but if they make Sleeve Draw more fluent when Lightspeed is on CD even when using Essential Dignity Charges it’ll be a big fix to oGCD bloat.

If they nerf who dmg why bring why? In healing intense fights when loses a lot more than the other two in terms of dmg. That’s why their dps is so high. If healing goes up for savage then when will lose more dps than a school or say because their dps is interrupted more than someone who presses stratagem or fairy pact or someone who press divination. Because they aren’t using 3 Gcds to glare.

Total Rdps right now is not balanced between three healers. Until it is you will keep seeing request to buff AST or nerf WHM.

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Originally Posted by fantasticm

This only they will nerf WHM as well to overcompensate. AST and SCH mains everywhere can rejoice. Source: my dad is Square Enix.

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If they do this, they will have seriously misunderstood the complaints of the AST and SCHs. So they will probably do it. But I doubt many people would be rejoicing.

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Originally Posted by fantasticm

This only they will nerf WHM as well to overcompensate. AST and SCH mains everywhere can rejoice. Source: my dad is Square Enix.

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This has happened pretty much every expansion. So SCH and AST is underpowered for the very beginning of the expansion. If I were to make some guesses, by this savage patch, they'll probably nerf Assize back while simultaneously buffing AST and SCH DPS, healing and utility and WHM is suddenly right back on the bench for the next 2 years.

I do hope that when this happens, people remember that what SCH and AST feels like right now is what WHM has felt like for years; underwhelming spells, design flaws and overall a weak job.

And it's a pattern they need to stop with healers. If one or two of them are ahead, only buff the one(s) that are under-tuned/underpowered.

For some odd reason they keep nerfing the strong jobs while simultaneously buffing the weak which all it does is completely tip the scales in the opposite direction instead of balancing them.

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Originally Posted by Exiled_Tonberry

This has happened pretty much every expansion. So SCH and AST is underpowered for the very beginning of the expansion. If I were to make some guesses, by this savage patch, they'll probably nerf Assize back while simultaneously buffing AST and SCH DPS, healing and utility and WHM is suddenly right back on the bench for the next 2 years.

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Oh absolutely, I completely agree with you. It was inevitable even before 5.0 hit. You are far more optimistic than I, though. Assize will almost certainly be nerfed, but Thin Air, Afflatus Misery, Temperance, and even Presence of Mind might see cutbacks on top of that. Glare and Dia's potencies will likely be rolled back as well, whether or not they adjust Broil and Malefic (they will probably do both, let's be honest).

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I do hope that when this happens, people remember that what SCH and AST feels like right now is what WHM has felt like for years; underwhelming spells, design flaws and overall a weak job.

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That's very optimistic, lol.