9 flavours of holy

Wanted to throw out my thoughts towards the new white mage animations introduced in SHB. I will not make this more complex then it needs to be.

I dislike that they are moving towards everything being a big blob of light, often circular. I really liked the mixup between Aero, Stone and Holy and was hoping for some water effects to imbue our healing but instead the only skill on my bar right now that isn't some flashy blob of light is Fluid Aura.

Hopefully we'll get spell glamours much like the egi glamours for white mage that'll let us get back the stone 4 and aero II animations because I don't see myself playing a priest with 9 different flavours of Holy.

In general I feel like the SCH and WHM animations look really lacklustre to how much love the AST animations keep getting, just a bit dissapointed. Wings are pretty cool tho but also again diminished because by the time you get them, you're already filling the entire screen with white.

When they were talking about the WHMs animations on the live letter, and they said something to the effect "it looks like you aren't throwing rocks anymore", I was rather surprised that people thought that WHM wasn't "holy enough" to be a WHM.

Guess the concept of the nature healer might not have resonated as well as it did for me...

Blood Lilly is the only diverse DPS tool visually WHM has at end game and it's just weird to me. I honestly can't tell the difference between the DoT and Nuke spell. And Glare seems like a flashier version of Sch Broil. The fact all three skills are so similiar annoys me. It's just another subtle way you see the healers weren't given much attention. We got our DPS kits pruned and visually they look like afterthoughts. Art of War looks horrible for an AoE that you get stuck with from level 45 to the end of the game too. We also lose so many animations to traits as healers. I wish our Nuke spells at least used a combo system where you used each spell you learned in succession so that spamming them got stronger each time as they progressed from Stone to Glare. It would make fitting more cast tightly together stunning visually and numerically. Healers left me really bitter this expansion.

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Originally Posted by Irenia

When they were talking about the WHMs animations on the live letter, and they said something to the effect "it looks like you aren't throwing rocks anymore", I was rather surprised that people thought that WHM wasn't "holy enough" to be a WHM.

Guess the concept of the nature healer might not have resonated as well as it did for me...

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My very real suspicion is that they moved the visuals of WHM from stone to holy and SCH from merton(fire) to tech in order to create visual distinction for an elemental-themed Geomancer, but that's just my guess.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

I wish our Nuke spells at least used a combo system where you used each spell you learned in succession so that spamming them got stronger each time as they progressed from Stone to Glare. It would make fitting more cast tightly together stunning visually and numerically.

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No thanks, rather just press one skill that does a fixed amount than have to hit 5 different skills in succession to get the same result.

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Originally Posted by ErryK

No thanks, rather just press one skill that does a fixed amount than have to hit 5 different skills in succession to get the same result.

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It could still be a single button combo instead of five different ones like PvP combos but the visuals are the biggest aspect for me. Stone 2, 3, and 4 are all gorgeous spells that get banished to oblivion. The build up of Broil is impressive too. I wanna be able to see all of that in a battle. I made the suggestion once before but having the lower tiered spells get their cast time and recast time reduced by .5 seconds each time you learn a higher tier spell would be a much better Mastery Trait in my opinion. So in effect learning Stone 2 would allow you to cast plain Stone in 2 seconds flat. Stone 3 would allow Stone 2 to get reduced to 2 seconds and Stone to 1.5 and the reductions to lower tiers keep happening as you learn new spells until Stone is instant. This way we don't lose our visuals and feel like we are truly mastering the magic we have been casting all along.

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Originally Posted by NobleWinter

It could still be a single button combo instead of five different ones like PvP combos but the visuals are the biggest aspect for me. Stone 2, 3, and 4 are all gorgeous spells that get banished to oblivion. The build up of Broil is impressive too. I wanna be able to see all of that in a battle. I made the suggestion once before but having the lower tiered spells get their cast time and recast time reduced by .5 seconds each time you learn a higher tier spell would be a much better Mastery Trait in my opinion. So in effect learning Stone 2 would allow you to cast plain Stone in 2 seconds flat. Stone 3 would allow Stone 2 to get reduced to 2 seconds and Stone to 1.5 and the reductions to lower tiers keep happening as you learn new spells until Stone is instant. This way we don't lose our visuals and feel like we are truly mastering the magic we have been casting all along.

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Sounds very complicated (as in, implementation wise) and like ErryK said just rotating through the spells would be nice but it just does the same and there is an even easier fix then spell glamours: Have the mastery skills also bump the previous spell by 20 potency (which is pretty much what it does anyway). Now you can choose between Stone I - IV or Glare. do the same for Aero.

Stone Mastery IV
Increases the potency of all previous stone skills to 300.