My 8.0 White Mage

White Mage has always been my favourite job since ARR but it's gotten progressively more dull as expansions have stripped them of all its flare and fun abilities.

This is what I'd like to see to double down on its identity as the simple big heals, big damage but little utility healer, with a focus on MP management and cast times/CGD (more than the others anyway). I also want to see stances back and since turret-style gameplay is dead, I focused on making it zone-based with Asylum so it feels less like a worse version of Sacred Soil.

Button compression:

Cure => Cure II / Afflatus Solace (when a Lily is available)
Medica / Afflatus Rapture (when a Lily is available)
Holy III / Afflatus Misery (when a Blood Lily is available)
Glare III / Glare IV (with Sacred Sight stack)
Presence of Mind / Banish (follow up attack)

Removed Traits:

Freecure (how is this still a thing)

Removed Abilities:

Plenary Indulgence
Thin Air

Updated Abilities:

Aquaveil is now AoE (to make up for the loss AoE mitigation from Plenary)
Asylum now acts as a stance and it'll drain MP as long as it's up (overall MP regeneration is still positive but much less). It also automatically cancels if you step way too far from it (this is just in case you forget it in dungeons/overworld). Range is increased.

New Traits:

Enhanced Divine Benison II: gives Reflect to DB's shield, reflecting a portion of the damage absorbed to the enemies when broken.
Enhanced Asylum II: Grants an extra 200 potency cure to every party member under Asylum whenever Medica, Medica III, Cure III, or Afflatus Rapture are used.
Generosity of the Lily: Adds a Verdant Lily to your Healing Gauge every 30 seconds, up to a maximum of 2. Verdant Lilies negate the MP cost and cast times of Raise and Banish and are automatically consumed if available.
Enhanced Assize: under Asylum, cooldown is reduced to 20 seconds.
Enhanced Aetherial Shift: under Asylum, leaves a flower trail behind for 5 seconds, granting a small cure to anyone who steps on it (this is mostly for flavor but I thought it'd be fun to see)


New Abilities:

Largesse: consumes a Verdant Lily to restore 2000MP
Banish: the actual follow up to Presence of Mind, a powerful AoE light attack with a 8s cast time and 2400 MP cost. It is a spell on the GCD so you can use Swiftcast if out of Verdant Lilies. Under Asylum, the entire ground under the dome pulses with light, damaging any enemy standing on it with an extra (much weaker) attack.
Divine Seal: This is a stance. It increases the MP cost of Glare and Holy for more damage.
Reraise: an upgrade to Benediction. Grants Re-raise for 3 seconds: When HP is reduced to 0 while under the effect of Reraise, instead of becoming KO'd, full HP is restored and Reraise is consumed. If Reraise is not consumed, full HP is restored and the end of its duration. (You can make it not work on certain tankbusters not to mess with Savage/Ultimate fights.)






Regen is still boring and useless but I've got no idea how to fix that. I left out potency numbers because I'm super bad at that, but ideally WHM would be the king of both personal damage and pure healing on GCD but with little mitigation, no utility and very precarious MP balance that can snowball into OOM quick if you're not careful, especially trying to maximize both Asylum and Divine Seal uptime.

If S-E implements that, I'll really make the change for SCH.

Remove PI, now that it finally has a mit? Remove Thin Air (instead reverting it to how it were at SB)? Asylum draining MP? And get a stance?

Sorry, but I prefer seeing Seraphism ruining my glam than having to stance dance to balance mp drain while other healers have mp at will.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Moqi

Button compression:

Cure => Cure II / Afflatus Solace (when a Lily is available)
Medica / Afflatus Rapture (when a Lily is available)
Holy III / Afflatus Misery (when a Blood Lily is available)
Glare III / Glare IV (with Sacred Sight stack)

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I like the idea of Medica turning into Rapture but these other button consolidations seem a bit iffy:
- Merging Cure into Cure II into Solace might result in overcapping a Misery if you've run out of single target healing abilities, have a Misery ready, and need to quickly use a single target heal. Why not just have Cure upgrade to Solace and keep Cure II as it's own button?
- Merging Holy III/Misery removes control over your AoE, like if you're mid-pull and buffs go out but you've already spent your Misery, or if you need to move for a mechanic.
- Same issue for Glare III/Glare IV, but for single target.

If White Mage has too much manaregen (IMO it has), remove the boring default one. Keep Thin Air. Just make a trait that you get a replacement for Lucid Dreaming, Thin Air.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Conchoidal

I like the idea of Medica turning into Rapture but these other button consolidations seem a bit iffy:
- Merging Cure into Cure II into Solace might result in overcapping a Misery if you've run out of single target healing abilities, have a Misery ready, and need to quickly use a single target heal. Why not just have Cure upgrade to Solace and keep Cure II as it's own button?
- Merging Holy III/Misery removes control over your AoE, like if you're mid-pull and buffs go out but you've already spent your Misery, or if you need to move for a mechanic.
- Same issue for Glare III/Glare IV, but for single target.

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I don't raid so I trust you know more about this than me. I thought buffs were already kind of lined up (especially Glare IV every 2 min) and Holy and Cure II aren't used much, if at all in those settings, so it'd be safe to do. I'd still like it as an option I guess but as with all the other "merges" that already exist it wouldn't be mandatory. I did intend to remove some movement options (I think WHM has too many) and also reward optimazion without big downsides. I wanted some choices between movement tool/using it under raid buffs (and if you mess up and overcap, better luck next time) but I don't know how much of a loss it would be.

Quote:

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If White Mage has too much manaregen (IMO it has), remove the boring default one. Keep Thin Air. Just make a trait that you get a replacement for Lucid Dreaming, Thin Air.

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I think they do too but also I wanted to come up with a system that doesn't force you to use it, which is why Asylum would lower MP regen and with Divine Seal on top you'd go into negative. Thin Air at that point just seems kinda useless (or even now tbh, but again I don't raid. Maybe it has more uses than just free Raises). Largesse is 6k free MP every 2 minutes (assuming you keep one Lily for Banish) which is effectively the same if not better than any version of Thin Air as far as MP savings depending on how long you're keeping up your stances, but you get a bit more freedom on how/when to use it.

Instead of removing Freecure, replace it with a trait that gives all spell casts to generate a stack of Sacred Sight.
Also keep Stone as the main damage spell all the way, and have Glare 1 to 4 be it's own separate attack that uses Sacred Sight.

And add an attack that consumes Lilies to give them more use and to get to Afflatus Misery more often and more consistently.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by CaptainLagbeard

Instead of removing Freecure, replace it with a trait that gives all spell casts to generate a stack of Sacred Sight.
Also keep Stone as the main damage spell all the way, and have Glare 1 to 4 be it's own separate attack that uses Sacred Sight.

And add an attack that consumes Lilies to give them more use and to get to Afflatus Misery more often and more consistently.

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Better yet: make some heals (like Cure II) generate a lily. And make Glare spend lily to generate blood lilly (while returning with Stone 1 to 4).

Attempt is appreciated but this would not be very good in high end content. In dungeons you can really just throw out Lilies whenever, etc and it's not a concern but for Extreme, Savage, and Ultimate having GCDs automatically become Afflatus casts would be awful.

Lilies aren't just for healing but also for movement/movement while healing. Same for Afflatus Misery via Blood Lily.

If my Cure II or Cure III automatically become Afflatus actions when a Lily is available while Misery is up then I either have to move without a movement tool or waste a Lily (if healing is needed) while already having a Misery cast available.

The same principal applies for Glare IV. Presence of Mind becoming Glare IV is enough because sometimes those three casts are held for movement during mechanica as well.

Asylum is huge for not becoming critically low on MP in 10+ minute fights and Plenary (since it has mit now) is a huge tool. Aquaveil for tankbusters, Plenary for party aoe damage. Regen has niche uses in high content too.

Reraise, either as a new actions or a Benediction upgrade, does sound pretty neat.

I also fully agree with removing Freecure. In most content WHM should be using GCD heals as little as possible and Freecure is a trap that encouraged new players to use not only a GCD heal but the worst GCD heal White Mage has.

If you have Cure II unlocked in the content and you need to cast Cure I something has gone horribly wrong to have forced that decision.

In the nicest way possible this is such a nothing change to WHM full of weird changes that seem to work on the surface but kinda fall apart under inspection hidden behind a big wow button that I’m almost convinced it was ghost written by the melee designer that gets dumped the healers when the expansion roles around

Not necessarily worse, but I don't feel like this would necessarily be a net improvement either. The stance dancing (and its practical capacity bonus only in dungeons, short fights, and maybe slightly in raidbuff-heavy comps) for greater or lesser MP cost and potency doesn't seem that interesting a button use to me, and Thin Air was one of the few things we had left of real distinction. Asylum would manage some of that, but not sure how exactly I feel about its change without the relative costs and thereby-permitted use cases.

I definitely do not like the consolidation of C2 into Solace. Why bother when you could just scrap the Verdant Lilies in favor of Thin Air charges, having it grant, say, a 4s faster cast and its every consumption grant a Blood Lily, and have a uniquely wholly clippable animation time on initial activation. At worst, if we really hate the idea of hitting an extra button before each instant-heal, make that your stance, consuming Thin Air charges when available to make your certain casts instant and MP-free. 2 buttons saved, or 3 if there in replacing Plenary Indulgence with some manner if passive.

Aside / Mostly Unrelated:
Before Shadowbringers, there was a decent bit of talk of other ways to make Secrets if the Lily worthwhile. Note that this was before WHM lost all its elements save blank/holy.) It feels like what we got with ShB was about the least flexible and most button-bloated way we could get to provide compensatory damage for up to 3 (originally 2) GCDs of healing per minute atop an extra 2 instant heals per minute.