Feedback around the whm changes

I have played this game since release on the PS3 and have been an enthusiastic White Mage player!
Recent changes made me want to give the following feedback.

1.removal of stoneskin alongside the lack of offensive casts/DOTs makes solo questing/class quests longer, boring and tedious! Even taking on a single mob is now a laborious task involving having to stop to heal, whilst watching tanks and dps down multiples of the same mob and progressing through the same quest line faster. Having to spam the same cast (mainly stone 4) does little too alleviate the tedium.

2. Ok so you want healers to heal so less offensive casts. I can accept that but lets mention the new additions and changes. The removal of the cleric stance dancing is ok, benefits mean assize is now buffed and lucid dreaming now available to all classes means this is not just to the benefit of the whm, but it also makes the addition of "Thin air" an empty gesture as these other casts now maintain mp! So while other classes receive new and worthwhile moves we get an mp saving move (that I personally have only used to macro to a swiftcast raise)

3. Divine benison, well what can I say useful but not for long, I\\\\'ve never seen it last 15 seconds, this is because it\\\\'s too weak. Even on a class with let\\\\'s say 30k health that\\\\'s 4.5k negated, not even one hit from a boss (tank buster) or 3-4 hits from standard mobs, so not good on a tank against multiple adds or any kind of boss fight.

4. The lily system, another new addition, only affects 4 moves and not significantly enough to be exciting or make me want to fill the lily gauge as the effect is barely noticeable, it would be better if each consecutive lily was harder to get but came with larger reductions in recast time.

5. Role classes: everyone only gets 5 however as a healer (whm specifically) you would be stupid not to take protect, esuna, swiftcast, lucid dreaming and largesse (certainly in my opinion as a whm), so even if other role class moves were any good, say cleric stance to make solo questing a little more bearable, there is no space for it! Talking about the other role class moves, rescue, fun but unlikely to be used effectively, the larger aoes where its likely to be needed as the healer you would be moving out of them too and so is also hard to use effectively, and cleric doesn\\\\'t last long enough to be very useful. But as mentioned, no space in the role move section to use them if I wanted to.

6. Reducing divine seal to largesse which is has a reduced time of 30 seconds and is 10% less effective.

7. Plenary indulgence, finally a new move thats good, until you changed it, it was actually nice to use although didnt get quite as many confessions as i would have liked. However now that the potency has been reduced and the recast time has been up and the time the confessions are active for had been reduced this is once again a pretty useless move, 1 stack confession does the equivalent of around a quarter of a cure, to get 2 stacks or more you would have had to have used 2 medica, medica 2 or cure 3, cure 3 isnt the best as it has a small range for the extra aoe heals to be useful making it an mp waste. .

so medica or medica 2 cast 2 times means that very few people are unlikely to still need healing making plenary indulgence useless, and similar with 3 stacks having to have cast 3 times, which is when plenary indulgence actually gives a useful amount of healing at its new potency of 450, however by the time you\\\\\\\\'re likely to need the healing effect of plenary indulgence, the stacks would have dropped off, and the recast time.... lets say you have managed to use plenary indulgence usefully with a 1 minute recast time you will again be wasting stacks of confession that will drop off before you are able to recast.
All of this next to the fact you increased the scholar move excogbitation from a potency of 600-800 increasing the time it lasts to 45 seconds and reducing its cool down to 45 seconds effectively means you can have this up indefinitely if you have the aether, so next to this how can you justify reducing the plenary indulgence in all aspects!

In summary as someone who\\\\'s played white Mage since the release of the game on PS3 I am finding it hard to see any improvements in this class, I see a lot of changes (mostly for the worse) and no real worthwhile decent new moves! You have managed to turn the healers (in my opinion) from diverse, challenging and fun to play classes into tedious button spammers, in the case of White Mage for the hopes of getting lillies or confessions; both of which have no large positive affect on the class. All in all I, like many others I know as well as others among the healing community are considering changing class which could be bad for the overall class balance within the game

What do other people think?

2: The core kit buffs (particularly assize) are incredible. Thin air is an amazing ability and can save vast amounts of MP with careful use, if you're not finding a solid use for it then you're not trying hard enough frankly. Align it with PoM in dungeons to holy spam down a big pull. Use it in scruffy progression raids to get two free raises. Pocket it for big aoe phases to power through without using a drop of MP. It's arguably the best ability we got this expansion and it really redefines how aggressively a WHM can play this tier.

3: The 100% lily rate makes Divine Benison a very useful raid ability, it's also pretty potent in it's own right, a ~7.5k free instant cast bubble on a tank with a 30 second cooldown is nothing to be sniffed at when it's so easy to generate a lily now. I still feel that making it only cost one lily would be a positive change for casual content, but otherwise, it's a thumbs up from me and I need to keep pushing myself to use it more.

4: The jury is still out on the lily system itself imo. It has it's merits but currently you'll either generate more lilies than you can spend, or you'll barely generate any at all. If SE can smooth that out a bit, then it's golden. A 3 lily assize is a thing of beauty.

5: Solo questing? Drop protect, take cleric. What's the issue here?

6: meh, done to death elsewhere. The cooldown length bothers me a tad but the duration is better and we have so much HPS firepower that the potency gain nerf doesn't really notice tbh.

7: I defended 4.0 PI vigorously but even I had to admit that it was lacking in actual gameplay. It was just too inconsistent to be useful. I'm of the opinion that the ability is surprisingly tasty now, but the confession duration could perhaps do with upping a tad. Don't focus on the 3 stack values, rather think of it as a completely free 20%+ upfront boost to a medica II every minute that's completely independent of Largesse.

Regarding your closing points, I'm rather surprised by your views TBH. WHM is more fun than it's ever been imo, primarily because we have so much more MP to play with now.

You can bypass the character limit by editing your post.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

2. Ok so you want healers to heal so less offensive casts. I can accept that but lets mention the new additions and changes. The removal of the cleric stance dancing is ok, benefits mean assize is now buffed and lucid dreaming now available to all classes means this is not just to the benefit of the whm, but it also makes the addition of "Thin air" an empty gesture as these other casts now maintain mp! So while other classes receive new and worthwhile moves we get an mp saving move (that I personally have only used to macro to a swiftcast raise)

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Except Lucid Dreaming isn't a "new tool" the other healers have gotten. It's not even a new tool for WHM. It's identical to Shroud of Saints, except 2 ticks longer. Meanwhile, AST used to have Luminiferous Aether, which was a stronger version of Lucid but with enmity reduction instead of enmity drop. And SCH already has it's own MP management mechanic in the form of Aetherflow/Energy Drain, which had to be nerfed when Lucid Dreaming was made available so SCH wouldn't have truly infinite MP.

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3. Divine benison, well what can I say useful but not for long, I\\\\'ve never seen it last 15 seconds, this is because it\\\\'s too weak. Even on a class with let\\\\'s say 30k health that\\\\'s 4.5k negated, not even one hit from a boss (tank buster) or 3-4 hits from standard mobs, so not good on a tank against multiple adds or any kind of boss fight.

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If a shield ever last it's full duration, that usually means you didn't need the shield. They're not regens. A shield lasting it's full duration and timing out means you wasted part of it. Reducing the damage from a single large hit (tank busters) or acting as a buffer on trash pulls to allow you to do other things for a GCD or two is how it's supposed to work. Also, you say "even on a class with 30k HP", but I'm sitting on my SCH at the moment and have 30117HP. That's the low end. A tank is going to have closer to 50k-60k HP, and that will only increase as we get farther into the expansion.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

4. The lily system, another new addition, only affects 4 moves and not significantly enough to be exciting or make me want to fill the lily gauge as the effect is barely noticeable, it would be better if each consecutive lily was harder to get but came with larger reductions in recast time.

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...You think being able to guarantee a 20% reduction on CDs is not a noticeable effect? Are we playing the same game here? You realize that's essentially a permanent old-Spear, right?

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5. Role classes: everyone only gets 5 however as a healer (whm specifically) you would be stupid not to take protect, esuna, swiftcast, lucid dreaming and largesse (certainly in my opinion as a whm), so even if other role class moves were any good, say cleric stance to make solo questing a little more bearable, there is no space for it! Talking about the other role class moves, rescue, fun but unlikely to be used effectively, the larger aoes where its likely to be needed as the healer you would be moving out of them too and so is also hard to use effectively, and cleric doesn\\\\'t last long enough to be very useful. But as mentioned, no space in the role move section to use them if I wanted to.

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The Healer role actions are a mess, yes. I'm entirely convinced that the people in charge of that just ran out of ideas but had higher ups demanding 10 actions, so they started yanking the tools all the healers already had anyway. "Freedom of choice" and "reducing button bloat". Right.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

6. Reducing divine seal to largesse which is has a reduced time of 30 seconds and is 10% less effective.

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Healer role skills, yup.

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7. Plenary indulgence, finally a new move thats good, until you changed it, it was actually nice to use although didnt get quite as many confessions as i would have liked. However now that the potency has been reduced and the recast time has been up and the time the confessions are active for had been reduced this is once again a pretty useless move, 1 stack confession does the equivalent of around a quarter of a cure, to get 2 stacks or more you would have had to have used 2 medica, medica 2 or cure 3, cure 3 isnt the best as it has a small range for the extra aoe heals to be useful making it an mp waste. .

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Please stop complaining about literally free potency. Boss does a party-wide blast. You use 2 Medicas you heal everyone up. This costs you 3360MP, 2 GCDs, and heals for 600p. Alternatively, you could Medica > PI, which would cost you only 1680MP, a single GCD, and still heal for 450p. Stop looking at it as if the 3-stack instance was the only use case.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

2. Ok so you want healers to heal so less offensive casts. I can accept that but lets mention the new additions and changes. The removal of the cleric stance dancing is ok, benefits mean assize is now buffed and lucid dreaming now available to all classes means this is not just to the benefit of the whm, but it also makes the addition of "Thin air" an empty gesture as these other casts now maintain mp! So while other classes receive new and worthwhile moves we get an mp saving move (that I personally have only used to macro to a swiftcast raise).

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- I wouldn't make that assumption about DPS; they mostly just pruned skill trees and cut down on the total number of buttons in several cases where Jobs had multiple skills that worked basically the same. WHM DPS is stronger than ever.

- Thin Air is amazing, though it's more dramatic when you are chaining Holy casts or needing to scrape more bodies off the floor than usual.

You may have changed my opinion on Devine benison.
I never had mp management problems so having mp to play with wasn't really an issue, for me, although i see where you're coming from in regard to PI being a free 20%+ boost I feel I would have liked something different and as you said with all the extra mp we will now have (when I didn't struggle for mp before) I feel I could throw out another medica and have had a new/different spell rather than a 3 aoe heal get one free deal.
Maybe I need to look at it another way because I agree Thin air can have all those uses, but when I didn't struggle for mp before all the mp saving spells make me want something different.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

Maybe I need to look at it another way because I agree Thin air can have all those uses, but when I didn't struggle for mp before all the mp saving spells make me want something different.

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One of WHM's issues prior to 4.x was that their DPS was potentially high but ultimately unsustainable; buffs to WHM MP management effectively remove that obstacle.

If you already healed efficiently, you wouldn't see a drastic QoL improvement in that area alone, but when you factor in sustained DPS while healing, these MP management buffs demonstrate their value.

I agree with you, I would say I did heal fairly efficiently and the buff to assize and the extra 2 ticks from lucid dreaming allow for even more free mp and PI too but it seems PI seems to have been created for raid/large damage dealing bosses or another free heal for mp saving but would be nice to have had something a little more. A free medica proc would have a similar effect to PI as it now is, seems a fancy way of giving that when something a little more different would have been nice, or leaving the potency/timings a little higher would have improved the times and circumstance around which PI would have been useful making it a little more versatile.

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Originally Posted by Dj_james1986

So while other classes receive new and worthwhile moves we get an mp saving move (that I personally have only used to macro to a swiftcast raise)

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I... I'm literally shaking.