WHM Desperately Needs An Overhaul

My own wish list would be something like (Glare potency may need adjustment):

Afflatus Solace unlocked at lv30. PoM can be unlocked later.
Afflatus Misery and Rapture unlocked at lv50.

Afflatus Misery now costs only 2 Blood lily charges. 550 potency, later increasing to 900 with the trait upgrades to Stone.

Tetra unlocked at lv15 and gains a trait for 2 charges at lv60.

Asylum has a 60 sec cd and 15 sec duration.

Thin Air removed entirely and becomes a trait:
"Casting a spell with a mana cost of 500 or less grants Thin Air, reducing the mana cost of spells by 1% (duration 15 sec, stacks up to 8 times). At 8 stacks gain Pure Air. Your next spell with a cost of 800 or more will have no cast time and cost 0 mana. Removes Pure Air".

Dia/Aero II:
Same effect.
15% chance with each tick that you'll gain Approaching Storms.

Tornado
Instant GCD
Can only be cast while you have Approaching Storms.
40 potency DoT. Duration 30 seconds.
While both Dia and Tornado are active: 10% chance per tick to activate Banish.

Banish:
Instant ability. Up to 2 stacks.
150 damage potency.

Afflatus Radiance
Lv52 Cost: 1 Lily
Cure potency: 150 to self and all nearby allies.
Duration 15 seconds. Range 20y

Afflatus Divinity
Lv76 Cost: 2 Lilies. Recast time 120s.
Cure potency: 1000 to self and all nearby allies
Range 25y

Nature's Blessing:
Instant ability.
Recast: 90s.
Grants 1 lily and Approaching Storm.

Assize has 2 charges.

Holy, Medica, Cure II and Cure III have a 1.5 sec cast time.

Freecure is deleted. MP cost of Cure II and Medica become 700 and 800.

Lilybell cooldown reduced to 2 minutes. Duration 20 seconds. Heal potency reduced to 300 per tick/150 per stack on expiration. The WHM may manually detonate all stacks.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

snip.

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Couple of concerns.

1) You're locking a bit of WHM's Damage behind RNG mechanics which may further reduce WHM's damage.

2)In the case of perfect RNG when both Dia/Tornado do proc repeatedly, Banish only holding 2 stacks falling into a similar pitfall of overcapping as MNK's Chakra System.

3) Divinity in conjunction with Misery only requiring only 2 Lilies results in WHM using Lilies solely for your 2 minute burst Window. You'd burn 1 lily in 30 seconds and save the remaining 3 in order to get 2 Misery's into your burst Window by using 1 more lily to trigger Misery and then burn Divinity to get a 2nd Misery.

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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Nah not really. WHM is still good to go for at least 3 expansions that's how little tools it has.
SCH and AST on the other hand keep tripping over themselves.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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That's actually incredibly simple to solve for WHM.

Rework Cleric Stance to function as a Eukrasia for Afflatus Spells, so all our base skills (Cure 2, Medica and Holy) turn into their Afflatus Equivalent spells. This allows them to add Afflatus Medica 2, Cure 3 and a ST Misery that overrides Glare as new spells without worrying about Button Bloat. You effectively trade 3 spells for 1 and can add more spells as needed.

I honestly don't think a Eukrasia mechanic is necessary, or even a good idea. I think it'd be more useful to simply have Cure 2 and Medica 1 turn into the Afflatus heals, like Red Mage's melee combo, since there's zero situations in which you'd wanna use the versions with cast times when you have lillies available. I'd enjoy a lily equivalent to Regen, though.

My issue with simply turning Cure 2/Medica into their Afflatus forms is during scenarios when you want to hold Misery to align with Raid Buffs. If you need to heal with your GCD and have a Lily, you essentially burn a lily at pure loss at both the Lily and any potential potency that Misery would refund. Niche scenario sure but still 1 that kind of sucks to be in since Misery is already enough of a DPS loss that losing out on raid buffs on top of it all just feels bad.

Personally I’d rather have charges on Misery and maybe an extra Lily charge than to straight buff the potency. Making it cost 2 heals instead of three and allowing it to align on raid buffs accomplishes a lot in that direction and is ultimately what I’d prefer. The other suggestions just allow you to pick between 1m and 2m alignment fairly trivially.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Couple of concerns.

1) You're locking a bit of WHM's Damage behind RNG mechanics which may further reduce WHM's damage.

2)In the case of perfect RNG when both Dia/Tornado do proc repeatedly, Banish only holding 2 stacks falling into a similar pitfall of overcapping as MNK's Chakra System.

3) Divinity in conjunction with Misery only requiring only 2 Lilies results in WHM using Lilies solely for your 2 minute burst Window. You'd burn 1 lily in 30 seconds and save the remaining 3 in order to get 2 Misery's into your burst Window by using 1 more lily to trigger Misery and then burn Divinity to get a 2nd Misery.

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

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Perhaps, although BLM does have Thunder procs. The idea behind it is you guarantee getting Dia + Tornado rolling with Nature's Blessing and it's very likely Tornado will proc again before its duration expires. Thus you maintain 2 DoT's which generate an oGCD dps filler. An oGCD filler for WHM would fit nicely with their abundance of weave windows.

Obviously there's room for tweaking, you could make Tornado a straight up regular DoT, bump the proc chance of Tornado and/or Banish and let Banish stack higher.

I liked the idea of Divinity because it gives WHM the "big heal" identity it doesn't actually have right now and consuming double resources into one GCD is a unique idea for a focused burst.

Misery at 900 is still a 30 loss, so bursting with it isn't a crazy gain. But being honest I don't like Misery in the first place. It's a problematic ability and designs the class into a corner where we're limited on so many things because "we'd be forced to blow lilies for Misery at x point if they gave us that". Even dps neutral lilies, you'd always want to go into a 2 min burst window with Misery active. Not to mention downtime lilies. While Misery exists in its current form, it'll never be optimal to just use lilies as heals.

I mentioned the idea before of making Afflatus heals simply "drain" 310 potency in damage from the nearest enemy target, with Misery being a 310 aoe with no falloff, which fixes basically everything and no one liked the idea. For some reason WHM's are fixated on that big nuke despite the fact it's forcing the class to remain worse than it should be. But if I was to write a true wishlist, that would be a definite change over the 2 lily Misery idea.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

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Pretty much every forum rework is, including those recent videos that people praise so much.

It's worthwhile to discuss and we can come up with some nice ideas (some of yours are good and I like Rein's list too, although I'd never buff Medica II or Regen potency), but ultimately we aren't game designers. Nor are the current devs qualified because none of them main healer. This is why the development team needs a dedicated healer developer so badly, someone who can really test, refine, communicate with the team, listen to feedback and focus on what actually feels good to play.

As much as I enjoyed the videos, I didn't agree with everything in them myself. I just enjoyed their insight and used them as a reference for my own suggestions and trying to incorporate some of their suggestions into my own, such as Diacloud.

It did, however, try to temper my suggestions to avoid adding new skills to stem arguments of button bloat, which is something else we would need to consider with our own suggestions. While I did add several skills in terms of abilities, the majority of them upgrade via the trait system and don't actively contribute to button bloat and the 1 skill that I did add (AoE Aero/Dia) was cancelled out by Cure upgrading into Cure 2 thus removing that skill from the total number of skills we have currently available. I knew my Cleric Stance Idea would be lambasted and I have an equally controversial suggestion for SCH I'm working on, but I still felt that it was a worthwhile suggestion to make to further alleviate potential button bloat issues that may arise.

So in regards to your suggestions, how would you adjust WHM's toolkit to include your suggestions without contributing to Button Bloat?