White Mage Redesign [Fast Paced 16]

Fast Paced 16-button Concepts

This series is an attempt to condense all FFXIV jobs into 16 buttons (although some buttons may map to more than one action) and focus on making most of the 16 buttons feel unique from each other and require thought. I’m not really concerned with how likely the devs would implement this. It’s moreso for me to theorycraft a fun job that I would play. Note that role actions are not included in the 16-button limit.

Design Philosophy

1. All jobs must have cooldowns within 60 seconds, with rare exceptions.

Quick cycling of the cooldowns lowers the filler phase of each job and increases the “excitement” phases executed in an encounter.

2. Jobs should not cycle exactly every 60 seconds.

We don’t want every minute of each job to have the exact same button executions. This allows the jobs to feel more organic and not like rehearsing a short script again and again. Each minute on the job should feel sufficiently different from the last.

3. Depth for optimization but simplicity for casual players

All jobs should feel easy to pick up for casual players. Reducing most jobs to 16 buttons should help tremendously on this front. There shouldn't be too many failure states in the job to help new players adjust to the job well. The skill ceiling for all jobs should be very high but not done so in a way that players feel pressured to pursue optimization if they don't want to.

4. Identity and distinctiveness

All jobs should feel different from each other, not just in their art style but more importantly in their playstyle.

WHITE MAGE

Elementalist, Holy Magic

The job identity for White Mage would involve using the conjurer elements of Wind, Water, Earth to great effect, using holy magicks, and unearthing the old Amdapori arts that they wielded against Mhach.
White Mage will be the most straightforward healer, where the interactions between different buttons are easy to understand and require little preparation.

GCD healing is very strong across all healers in this series to give new healers a way out of a pickle. However, oGCD healing is weaker, requiring some thought and coordination in order to reduce as many GCDs as possible, to allow for a sense of achievement when pursuing healing efficiency optimization. WHM's healing specialty includes easy, strong Regens on Cure II and a very powerful Cure III, with a strong 60s Lilybell. It lacks strong shielding capabilities, though it has a bit of on-demand mitigation.

The optimization tricks of this design are primarily on usage of Water IV and usages of the Amdapori skills.

Water IV is both a movement tool and a potency gain when the WHM will take damage in the near future. This rewards WHMs who are proactively using Water IV in anticipation of damage. The choice between using Amdapori Attunements on either Banish III or Reverse is also pretty nuanced. Using Banishes is most helpful on coordinated burst phases especially in conjunction with Elementalism. However it also boosts the power of Holy Bolt, a combo action after Reverse. Knowing when to use Banish III and when to start exploiting the accumulated Weakness to Holy stacks to use Holy Bolt would be a key skill for WHM optimization.

Finally there are some fun things you can do with WHM. Transferral allows you to give a tank a hefty Stoneskin pretty regularly, or to transfer an Aquaveil onto someone taking damage if the WHM themselves are not. The follow-up action Transposition is a tool that players can use in many creative ways.

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ok but we play healer to heal we like the big green number stop saying we need more DPS...

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Originally Posted by Nero-Voidstails

ok but we play healer to heal we like the big green number stop saying we need more DPS...

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You DPS 90% of the time, and having less DPS buttons doesn't change that fact. It just means it's boring when you spend the entire fight smashing 11111111 as Glare bot. Adding more DPS skills wouldn't make you DPS more often either, it just would make what you already do less mindless.

We really, really don't need more healing buttons either, we hardly use all the bloat we already have.

I feel like not adding any long recast on Holy can make people just spamm it instead to generate amdapori stacks and spamm Banish and other spenders of those stacks... which sounds like an oversight? I'm also not sure how I feel about the longer a fight goes the more the target gets holy vuln stacks, which while it certainly partakes into giving the job an identity of ramping up, could still cause serious balancing issues.

But, overall I do like it since it looks very unique, tries to incorporate every flavor of whm/elementalist we've had, and seems to get inspiration from the pvp model.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I feel like not adding any long recast on Holy can make people just spamm it instead to generate amdapori stacks and spamm Banish and other spenders of those stacks... which sounds like an oversight? I'm also not sure how I feel about the longer a fight goes the more the target gets holy vuln stacks, which while it certainly partakes into giving the job an identity of ramping up, could still cause serious balancing issues.

But, overall I do like it since it looks very unique, tries to incorporate every flavor of whm/elementalist we've had, and seems to get inspiration from the pvp model.

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Thanks for your feedback. It's a 10% chance, so you get 1 Amdapori stack per 25s on average, which is slightly less than the recharge time of Glare (30s), but you're also losing a lot of potency. There might be people spamming Holy to gamble for stacks but it would be a net loss.

The reason I put it in Holy is because I want people to also enjoy some stack management in dungeon trash pulls; having engaging gameplay even in dungeons is very important for me.

You're completely right about the potential balance issue caused by ramping up. Over an 9-min long fight Holy Bolt will reach 1100 potency. Perhaps the ramp up could be capped at 5 stacks? There's also the issue of Holy Bolt being pointless on short fights or on dungeon trash pulls (since they die so fast), so I have to think about that. The idea is to make the choice between Banish or Reverse->Holy Bolt a bit more nuanced and fight-dependent, so that every fight feels like you would be making a different decision, but there's probably a more elegant way to go about doing that.

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Originally Posted by HighlanderClone

Thanks for your feedback. It's a 10% chance, so you get 1 Amdapori stack per 25s on average, which is slightly less than the recharge time of Glare (30s), but you're also losing a lot of potency. There might be people spamming Holy to gamble for stacks but it would be a net loss.

The reason I put it in Holy is because I want people to also enjoy some stack management in dungeon trash pulls; having engaging gameplay even in dungeons is very important for me.

You're completely right about the potential balance issue caused by ramping up. Over an 9-min long fight Holy Bolt will reach 1100 potency. Perhaps the ramp up could be capped at 5 stacks? There's also the issue of Holy Bolt being pointless on short fights or on dungeon trash pulls (since they die so fast), so I have to think about that. The idea is to make the choice between Banish or Reverse->Holy Bolt a bit more nuanced and fight-dependent, so that every fight feels like you would be making a different decision, but there's probably a more elegant way to go about doing that.

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I missed the 10%, nevermind me then.

I'm not completely sold on Reverse, it sounds just a little weird to me with the attached healing. I like constraints around various tools but this sounds like pushing it a little too far? But perhaps with the frequency of the skill being available it could see some potential plays idk.

I'm also not completely convinced about Transposition, like it's interesting but it sounds absolutely wild, and probably used completely badly by randoms which would just be introducing an immensely frustrating ability in the game for party members, a lot like fluid aura and the likes used to be in dungeons back then, but even worse because you'd be messing with actual players.

The water spells however gave me an idea, I like the counter effect on the aquaveil shield, but what if transposition instead is an actual aetherial manipulation, but not quite? Call it ageless river or whatever works, generates a link to the target player for a certain duration, and anybody walking over that path would get a sprint like speed? Can still keep the exchanging of beneficial effects.

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Originally Posted by Valence

I missed the 10%, nevermind me then.

I'm not completely sold on Reverse, it sounds just a little weird to me with the attached healing. I like constraints around various tools but this sounds like pushing it a little too far? But perhaps with the frequency of the skill being available it could see some potential plays idk.

I'm also not completely convinced about Transposition, like it's interesting but it sounds absolutely wild, and probably used completely badly by randoms which would just be introducing an immensely frustrating ability in the game for party members, a lot like fluid aura and the likes used to be in dungeons back then, but even worse because you'd be messing with actual players.

The water spells however gave me an idea, I like the counter effect on the aquaveil shield, but what if transposition instead is an actual aetherial manipulation, but not quite? Call it ageless river or whatever works, generates a link to the target player for a certain duration, and anybody walking over that path would get a sprint like speed? Can still keep the exchanging of beneficial effects.

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Maybe Reverse could be worked into something closer to the inspiration, which was Kuribu, by just giving the player a Reversed Cure II, Reversed Cure III and cut the rest. I have to think about how to make Reverse not just feel like another ability that just gives you more damage in that case.

I really like the Ageless River idea! We definitely need more abilities like that that has a "spatial" component that aren't just bubbles or direct targeting.