We talk about lillies a lot but...

So White Mage is a powerhouse healer and I've come to terms with the fact that they create lilies to help them heal even more frequently with their special abilities. It does make sense that a powerhouse healer would be able to shorten their cool downs even if it isn't altogether very useful in our extremely choreographed fights. Still Lily generation bothers me and I've seen all the suggestions for tying it to DPS spells etc but it still seems awkward. It would be nice if lilies were generated by cumulative cast time as well as with basic cure spells. So if you are struggling to keep your tank alive with Cure 2 you get a ton of lillies but also for every 20 seconds you spend casting spells you get a lily too. This is any spell DPS or Healing. This way an active White Mage gets rewarded in any group and means that you don't lose your lily trait in a strong group where cure spells aren't as necessary. I think adding cumulative cast time as a way to generate a Lily would be a much more rewarding trait for Secret of the Lilies 2.

Honestly... I think lillies should be able to be used to make a partywide benediction since full parties like to spread out all over the place.

In general, the lilies simply need to do something else other than reduce CD timers.
This is the most underwhelming mechanic I can think of in this game. Now that Bension is taken off of lilies it feels even more useless.

Why not something like increase the potency of your next ogcd heal by 50 per lily or something? This would at least strengthen the idea of WHM being the "big numbers" healer.
Of course, this brings up the issue of this not effecting healers who like to DPS more than heal, which is why so many people want lilies to also be gained by DPS. It's so counterintuitive to WHMs strengths. It has the most personal DPS of the healers, yet their main mechanic only effects their heals. That's like if your fairy gauge didn't build if you used Energy Drain instead of lustrate or Excog.

Lilies don't work because you often have to go out of your way to get significant numbers of them, and when you do, what they do doesn't matter a whole lot (thus there's no reason to put in effort to get them). Ideally you'd want to fix both of those, but then you're looking at a job rework because of the knock off effects having a suddenly useful gauge would create.

If I were trying to do a simple change, I'd flip it around. OGCDs grant lilies, and lilies boost the potency of your next GCD heal. A 20% more powerful Regen would be a-okay with me.

And then do something about Secret of the Lily II because lol.

Turbo charging Assize via Lilies was pure <3 in 4.0's dungeons. Frankly it doesn't really work well anywhere else though.

I suspect I get more value out of PI in raid content than I do Lilies TBH. Personally, I'd love to see them offer a potency bump as well as some means of generating them that doesn't involve Cure/Cure II.

So I just took a look at the log for the whm that solo healed UCoB, and the results are pretty underwhelming in relation to lilies. Assylum he got 0 time savings on, Assize he got a whopping 1 quick usage (1.4 seconds early), tetra 0, and DB the one skill he got the most extra out of amounted to 0.5 extra casts (2 casts at sub 1 second time savings, 4 casts ranging between 1.1 and 5.8 seconds time savings). He did this with 88 casts of cure I/II. It really comes down to the fact that you plan out your usage of asylum/assize in top tier content but your cure spells are mostly used to level off unexpected damge (crits, mechanic failures etc.) so you can't plan extra usage around them while remaining efficient.

The problem with lilies is twofold.

1) No matter how good the healing mechanic behind them is, you will most likely never cure just to get one. The trade off of a gcd for whatever healing ability is not worth it given that WHM can already power through any healing check with it's current toolkit.

2) The cooldown reduction is just stupid given how choreographed the fights are. I simply can't remember the last time I even glanced at my lilies since the change to DB.


From that we can infer that 2) has to change no matter what. The scenario are:

You either make 2) an extra healing ability. In which case you need to change 1) and how lilies are generated. Maybe reward dot uptime, or give you a lilly when DB absorbs a tank buster, etc. etc. I'm sure there are plenty of ways people can think of here.
The extra healing ability should probably be the possibility to use a lily in order to transform your hots on players into giving their full potency out upon use of the skill. This would be a good addition to the whm toolkit.

Or the other option is that you don't change 1) but you make those wasted cure gcds worthwhile. Reward lilies with skills that reduce cast time for x time. Or any other haste skill that affects dps beyond just assize. Maybe even a potency buff for your heals + DPS

There is only one Lily worth anything in FFXIV, and that is the Scholar's Lily, XD.

Random napkin thoughts since I'm at work but got inspired:

Secret of Lilies - Allow to generate lillies off any single target healing spell or ability at varying percentages (Regen tick = 5%, Tetra = 40%, Benediction = 100%, etc etc), Lilies generate a passive effect based on number generated (either +healing potency or -enmity generated), still consumed when using abilities, give the WHM back x% MP = to number of lilies consumed
Secret of Lilies II - Allow to generate lillies off any AoE healing spell or ability (Medica II = 10%, Medica Tick = 2%, Assize = 15%, etc etc).
Plenary Indulgence - Remove confessions and confession requirements, consumes all lilies upon use, has a base potency of 100 and gains 150 potency per lily consumed (WHM will still gain the x% MP from consuming Lilies via Secret of Lilies)

[edit] I know the symptoms of why the lilies are ineffective have been talked to death, figured I'd in another 2cents to the discussion for other ideas to fix the system as just randomly thought this up.