Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

I agree with that. Assize' shorter cooldown is awesome. Lillies are nothing particularly great, but they're not really in the way and even shorter Assize cooldown doesn't hurt. Benison can stop significant damage when you need it, and has its uses.

PI is simply nonsense. It's theoretically an AoE heal that almost never does AoE healing. As a tank heal, it's worse than what we already had. The mechanics of it are clunky, obtrusive, and actively against the whole point of having job gauges in the first place.

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Originally Posted by Ceroes

Yoshi p wants us to use cure 1/2 clearly... They wont even listen to people when they say we don't want another stone attack and so many people want a water/holy attack... They haven't shown even once that they care what the WHM mains want regardless of whether they are casual or not. anyone who's casual will want a variety of skills, and a better healing system.

They'll use every excuse they can get to ignore WHM opinions. I mean remember if you watched the letter from the producer Yoshi P said we just need to calm down because things have changed since the demo we saw... yet nothings really changed and all the skills are pretty much the same... He literally blew our concerns off I think that shows his attitude towards WHM players...

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Isn't this the absolute truth. They completely do not want healers dps'ing. My dps time has gone down til nil in the new dungeons. Think it's safe to through something out? Two hits, tanks almost dead. Even running the lower dungeons through roulettes there's a hard shift towards tanks taking way more damage, having harder times keeping hate because dps aren't taking lower enmity skills, and healers having to just keep healing.

It is BORING. Smashing Cure I/II for procs to get lowered cast times? My god, who though this was a good idea?

The lily system is a joke. Cure II x 3, Assize, Cure II x 3 save it for the next CD. God forbid you accidentally use Asylum or Tetra and waste it. DB is meh. It really is. I've asked my SO who tanks when I've used it, if it's doing anything, and the answer was "meh, kinda?" Yeah... wonderful skill.

It's an absolute nightmare having another healer in the group. Trying to get lillies? Forget about it. It's a fight of who heals first and quickest because overheals don't count. Did Lakshmi last night and I had to fight to get any lillies because the other healer (a WHM ) was doing the same. Another "what were you thinking" horrible design.

On another matter... why the hell are RDM's at level ~63 able to cure for 8000ish and crit for 11-12k? I have one in my FC showing me these numbers and hearing from others the same. Hell, they even healed during one of the bosses in the new dungeons they were running when the healer died. Seems somewhat overpowered to me. But then again, SE isn't known for balancing their jobs. Remember my fellow FFXI's... RDM's replaced WHM's....

Ok so another person who's 70 and doing ex primals etc...

My take on WHM:

Has just as good burst healing as before but with infinite mana. Seriously, the combination of lilies, Thin air, lucid dream, assize, and weirdly confession stacks is insane. Absolutely no need to meld piety if you play it well.

All of the above come with caveats though.

First off confession stacks are clunky and gimmicky. At best they'll help you top someone off or save a bit of mana. If you double whm you don't know which stacks are yours, even when you're single whm you don't know how much time is left which is ridiculous.
Stacks should proc 100% on crit heals (in addition to the baseline 20%) and last at least 90s to carry us through from one boss mechanic to another. I feel this would scale well with gear but more on that later. And possibly stacks from different WHM should be combined into the same and both WHM should be able to consume them (we already have shared mechanics with LBs this could be similar). But in hindsight all of these suggestions are kinda pointless because of what I'm going to say next.


Appart from all that here's basically where WHM stands:

Today it's a monster healer, it can pull even the laziest of groups through content. Especially double whm scenarios.
But that's only true for now, WHM DOES NOT scale well with gear and content.
As gear increases and players get more familiar with encounters we will use less Cures, use less mana, and have no raid utility. All the good aspects of lilies, or even confession stacks if they ever fix them will become irrelevant in almost everything but the upmost high end content. And even then... This will make all the other healers shine in comparison.

Basically white mage feels like a pair of training wheels. Really good to have in the beginning but quickly you'll even forget you ever needed them.

Ok lvl. 70 AST here currently levelling WHM lvl. 66
A raid utlitity suggestion

The biggest thing about WHM is the lack of raid utility when progression content is done and clears are easy to come by. Thin Air is a huge tool in the WHM arsenal but what if that became the raid utility. I suggest that the WHM can place Thin Air on someone else while still procuring the effects as well. In a raid setting being able to give the other healer 12 seconds of no mp costs would be huge and other healers would be grateful for it. Other classes could benefit it from, paladin now having a few large mp spenders that are calculated on how much mp you have. Summoners could do large amounts of a rotation and still be fine. it's a simple fix that would make them raid worthy and have raid utility.

I feel like the development team might be a little out of touch with the playstyle of WHM as of late. Ideally you don't want to be spamming Cure or Cure II and only rarely selectively using them for tankbusters, and even then you have things like Tetra and Benediction. In dungeon runs I can go the entire dungeon without seeing three lilies. This is because WHM relies so heavily on Regen. A great change to make lilies practical would be to change Regen ticks to have a 5-20% chance of creating a lily. Or if you really wanted to double down on fixing WHM you could make cleric stance into a passive trait for WHM only that heals nearby allies for 10-20% of damage dealt. Its rather useless as it stands now in role skills.

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Originally Posted by LazarusRising

...raid worthy...

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Welp.

/10char

Hit 70 so I could see for myself, and it's just uninspiring. Without touching on balance with the other two healers, WHM in a vacuum has exactly the strengths and the problems everyone in this thread warned about. The strength of the healing kit is great, and the MP problems have been solved. The loss of a bunch of skills makes the job seem stripped (though role actions all being available synced softens this, I can't speak for a newbie WHM who doesn't have the slots unlocked). Lilies are ignorable because you cannot revolve your playstyle around them if you want any form of efficiency. Thin Air is great. Confessions are a snooze. Having 3 fewer skills than everyone else doesn't bode well for future design.

I'll have to mention this one even though it's not WHM-specific: all three healers have some definite clunk in DPSing. Now, I enjoyed using Cleric Stance, but I don't particularly care that it's gone. I think the "challenge" it added to the classes was fake difficulty at best, and would welcome a cooler mechanic. That being said? Cleric Stance was an off-GCD that frequently wove into casting. Now that it's gone, that gap it used to fill gets filled with nothing more often than not. [Regen -> Cleric -> Whatever damage spell I needed to use] had a heck of a lot more flow to it than [Regen....stand there...Aero 2 -> hope that an off global is up because otherwise stand there]... clunky. Also, I hope this goes away with gear levels, but man can I feel the healer overall damage nerfs. I don't know how Astros or Scholars can even stand soloing the main quest, because even as the highest single target damage healer I find killing field mobs a freaking chore. Just spamming and spamming and spamming Stone 4 (nice hideous animation, Square) and they won't DIE already.

I think healers this expansion have some really bizarre decisions surrounding their kits that smells less like design and more like their kits were tossed into some mathematical viability model while development time was spent on the DPS classes.

And don't think I didn't notice the Blood Price extender thrown DK's way, thanks a bunch for worsening THAT anti-synergy with Holy.

I didn't hit lvl 70 as my whm because I get kicked but SE, did you realize...
That whms let people die now because they try to spam cure 1/2 to get lillies for their skills and don't use regen? It was in The Aetheromechanical research facility or whatever, i got tethered by the boss and was the only one attacking it, so i got constant damage. I died because the WHM was busy trying to get Lillies on the tank, i wouldn't have died if they would have casted Medica 2 and regen. Or even a Medica. Or EVEN a cure 1 in my direction but nope, busy with generating Lillies on minimal damage on the tank and tunnelvisioning everything else.
They did medica 2 like... 2 times afterwards though.

Thanks for making a system that should "help" but make the healer focus on spamming cure 1/2 when you lose MINIMAL hp and then they're busy with aoe damage... with healing it with Cure1/2 for an off cooldown, use it and keep spamming.
"if i heal a lot with cure 2 i can use assize more, that's enough as an aoe heal. My Regens would work against me getting lillies"


I don't like this new world order where Whms don't regen when everybody gets damage...

Over 300 pages of hysteria...

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Originally Posted by Cheremia

I don't like this new world order where Whms don't regen when everybody gets damage...

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As much as I don't like the Lilies, it wasn't because of this mechanic... You just met a very bad whm. ^^;
We don't need to force Lilies procs, especially since it's not a vital mechanic (barely a little bonus). So there is still no reason to not use our regens, especially if we are dps'ing in the same time.