5.0 White Mage changes

Is anyone else really worried about what's happening to WHM? I've mained WHM for as long as i've played this game and I'm getting seriously bummed out about the aesthetic changes. My first big problem is the wings, I just can't stand how tacky they look, they won't look good with anything that isn't a white wedding dress and not everyone wants to look like that... what happened to the more utilitarian aesthetic of the old artifact armor? Its just dresses and frills now... My problem is that these wings only play to that one aesthetic.

Lastly, white mage never really had any damage identity outside of holy, until FF14 where we got stone and aero, now that they seem to be taking it away what's going to be left of the conjurer aesthetic? To me that's the equivalent of taking away Black Mage's fire and blizzard.

Sorry if this seems a bit ranty, I needed a place to dump my stress. I don't want to lose my favorite class :(

Out of curiosity, did they say they were removing Stone and Aero?

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Originally Posted by TheUltimate3

Out of curiosity, did they say they were removing Stone and Aero?

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Not in the live letter, no. The only clue we have is the suspiciously one casted and one instant GCD holy dps looking spells in the job trailer.

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Originally Posted by TheUltimate3

Out of curiosity, did they say they were removing Stone and Aero?

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I doubt that. We should learn more when the streamers post full details soon. I'm happy about the instant heal and wish they said more about what changes there would be. I main white mage too and am worried about any changes that I might not like. I have no problem getting more healing abilities given that's why I specifically chose healing although I love to dps as well.

I didn't see them say anything about Red Mage too given I've seen a lot of talk about their taking away the ability to dualcast raise frequently by putting that on a cool down. Seems to me that would be a major change and they seemed to say there weren't any major changes unless I'm hearing/reading what they said wrong.

Yoshi P said we won't be throwing stones anymore, and in the actions video we saw a WHM casting what looks like the new "Aerora" as it had the same sound effect and animation. At best we will still have Aero 3 / Aeroga it seems. I hope to be proven wrong though...

Edit: I feel the need to elaborate that I realize old content will continue to have Aero/stone. What I'm concerned about is 5.0 and beyond.

As a WHM main myself, im not that stressed about it. We just dont know that much yet really. Im looking forward to may 29th when the media embargo drops.
I do like that they want to emphasize healing more. I personally dont care for dealing damage and yet that is like 80% i do in dungeons and raids depending on the party ofc. So im looking forward to actually do more healing and a bit less damage dealing.

I would assume it's just the next power up of stone and aero. I guess they'll still be there but in lower content where you're sync.

I'm excited by pretty dresses and what look to be detachable full-length sleeves for creative glamouring... >_>

Though if you're after some practical-looking "white mage" gear, I suggest the Lv68 Gazelleskin Coat of Healing - traditional white-and-red colour scheme on a relatively sturdy leather coat. Tanks get the same design.

I like a lot the wings and new aesthetic. It will look very weird on Roegadyns and Hrotgar, but it always been like that in terms of healers.

I for one welcome our new holy overlords!

The countryside spirit-whisperer conjurer theme never really got me. If we lose the pebbles and green farts for some sweet holy lazors I wont be crying. My condolences to those that liked them if we do lose them tho!

Stone and Aero are actually a White Mage aesthetic since the classic games, so I doubt they would replace that identity.

Wouldn't miss them if they were gone, because I don't wanna see another motherflipping rock EVER again.

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Originally Posted by Xlantaa

I like a lot the wings and new aesthetic. It will look very weird on Roegadyns and Hrotgar, but it always been like that in terms of healers.

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I'm gonna be a big buff bara cat sprouting kawaii angel wings and glitter and y'all gonna like it!

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Originally Posted by Allegor

I'm gonna be a big buff bara cat sprouting kawaii angel wings and glitter and y'all gonna like it!

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https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/i...g8RGVzR6HH4tK9

What I saw in the job action didn't worry me too much and gave me some hope back. Will have to just wait until the 29th to find out how things really are. Gear wise I want to know if the skirt we were shown is part of the top or not. If it's not then yay an actual skirt if not then oh my lord please not another underwear with mental triangles attached to them or a skirt that barely covers my arse even when standing up. While the guys get shorts or nice slacks they could wear to a wedding.

Consider that we need low-level attacks like Stone and Aero but that they may be all upgraded to other attacks by L80, making them unusable in the video.

RDMs have these attacks as well, so we won't lose them entirely.

I've been playing white mage since 2.0 and I have to say, I'm mildly concerned. I think overall a lot of the changes are going to be good but I'm nervous about the DPS aspect. I really pride myself in being a good healer who contributes a lot to the DPS while still doing my job to the fullest on the healing end as well. I like helping to speed runs along and it's always fun to spam holy and play a game of chicken on how long you can go before you need to heal the tank. (My friend tanks for me, so don't worry. I know some tanks hate that cause they don't trust random healers lol).

Anyway, I'm excited for the more instant heals. But yeah, I have to admit.... those wings are hideous. Really tacky, I'm not happy about them AT ALL. Nope, nope, nope. I even hated them with the prismatic wings consumable item you could get from weddings (I think it was?). Just looks stupid imo.

When they were talking about stone, I thought the comment was something along the lines of "you won't just be throwing larger rocks". WHM's DPS kit has a few additional items, but I took this as we won't just be sitting here hitting our stone button. I could be wrong and would need to go back to rewatch it, but maybe someone can chime in here.

With that said, I'm actually really quite excited. With the shift in focus for healers to actual healing?? YES PLEASE. Which then makes me interested to see how they're going to be adjusting battles in order to make it so that healers aren't just sitting there twiddling their thumbs.

To me the few attacks they did show had a more Dia/Banish look to them so we're now flinging light based spells. I like the wings even though I'm sure they're clip like crazy on most things. Again we'll have to wait until the 29th to see how our black lily used for a huge attack works and how often the gradual lily getting is. Along with if we get any charges on any of our skills as that was a complaint by many whms in the whole not being able to chose when to use our lilies. With what they did say when talking about all three healers they might have actually balanced them, but we won't know that until we get the first set of Eden.

I don't mind the wings, (and my WHM dresses up as a Punk Rock girl). I think they'll be fine.

The AF gear is the AF gear. It's a little more boring than I would've liked, but at least there's no fricken "Back-Fan" for clipping issues from hell. It's just Traditional WHM garb.

As for the changes to skills. It really looks like they've completely redone WHM's kit. And besides, when it comes to the CNJ aesthetic, SE did a really poor job of implementing it anyway. For a master of earthly elements it had decidedly few attack spells for it, basically one of each (if you can even call fluid aura a spell, more of a spitwad). To be completely honest about it, the CNJ skills/path lean more towards the traditional Geomancer theme, so the attack identity was stolen from another FF class anyway.

As for WHM's new spells, they're intriguing. It's a tad "Particle Effect Overload" but you could argue WHM needed the graphical overhaul.

I'll prolly post this elsewhere, but from what I was able to discern, I saw 5/6 new skills and 1 altered skill in the video.

New Hard Cast DPS Nuke - (Likely Stone replacement but with Holy visuals)
New Instacast DPS spell - (Likely an Aero replacement but with ?Nega-Holy? visuals?)
New Party Member Buff + DPS skill - Part 1 of this is the 3 rotating flowers cast on the Monk near the beginning, it costs 1 Lilly and makes the WHM Lilly "branch" start glowing. The glow gradually fills the whole branch and then the new flower on the gauge blooms letting the WHM cast Part 2 of the spell on the enemy. My bet is it Buffs the DPS, then gathers damage for a period of time from them, letting the WHM release it as a huge nuke. Fun stuff!
New Instacast AoE heal - This skill costs 1 lilly, seems counterpart to SCH Indom. Might Replace Assize?
Angel Wings - ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Altered Skill: Medica 1 - I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure we see Medica cast, but with a different visual effect on the players. It looks like the same visual effect for activating Plenary Indulgence (which is cast literally just before it). Not sure what this means...

Overall, the game is going to be massively different, WHM especially. We'll see how it plays out, but I'm kind of excited that we're going to be Healers instead of Green DPS.

Other skills shown: Medica 2, Tetragrammaton, Plenary Indulgence.

The wings could look better I'll be honest. Seems like it will work with certain glamours and ruin the look of most things. I wish there was a way to change the color of the wings, but I know the possibility of that is as likely as a real damage rotation for healers.

Anyway White Mages seems to have completely shaken off the Conjuror aesthetic and gone full Holy Mage (Holy as in the adj. not the spell), which is fine and fitting I suppose. Its still very visible so I have no qualms about it. But looking at the other healing spells shown is it just me or does every spell blend together? Like everything is just a mess of white light. Its not bad per se, but then I see what AST has going on and I can't help being really bothered.

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Originally Posted by Maka8295

My first big problem is the wings, I just can't stand how tacky they look, they won't look good with anything that isn't a white wedding dress and not everyone wants to look like that... what happened to the more utilitarian aesthetic of the old artifact armor? Its just dresses and frills now... My problem is that these wings only play to that one aesthetic.

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I love WHM, I always have...

But seriously are we being sponsored by the Sanctum of the Twelve? Bride Mage?

Like you, I also hate the tacky wings.
We should have something more like Kuribu wings imho, since they are not only already modelled, but are at least somewhat in the WHM lore.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t7ktdLuKnBM/maxresdefault.jpg

For me, it just seems like they missed the mark with everything.

WHMs wanted more elemenal aesthetics, but we got more holy aesthetics.

WHM complained about not having enough mobility, so they gave us a instacast HEAL instead of an instant cast dps spell.

WHM complained about utility. We seemingly got nothing.

And now all healers are moving towards pure healing. What does that mean for us? I didn't see any barrier effects in the job action video so I'm worried that everyone will be able to heal like WHM but we still can't use strong barriers.

I have to agree. In a bid to give WHM 'more identity' it seems like they doubled down on it's worst facets and blandest aesthetics.
No Protect or Shell, more 'Divine' stuff, more 'pure heals', it already has instant heals so we get one more instant heal? Big whoop.
And those wings... would fit much better on a SCH surely....

Unless they intend to give us Geomancer in 6.0, I'd rather they didn't lose the elements.

I kind of hope they didn’t get rid of stone and aero but if they did I hope they give it to geomancers one day. I know the whole ast questline was about how they are basically two sides of the same coin but if they are truly removing stone and aero then they could totally just give them to geomancer with some other elemental things

I do wonder what their vision is here, since it doesn't seem to be very clear at all. I personally am on board with healers being actual healers instead of the hybrid dps (I know I'm in the minority here), but that doesn't seem to be what this is. They take away a classic, staple buff and drop in some insta-cast heal that WHM didn't really need anyway. There was enough 'ono' stuff in the arsenal already without this addition...

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. This is one of the reasons I wish they weren't so against public testing servers. Some of these changes you just know are going to be massively broken and won't be used the way the developers thought they would be used. Strap in for a full year of adjustments, folks.

I kinda like the wings personally. I'll be gutted if they remove our offensive spells though, we are already very much pure heal, don't take away our little unique dps. I understand that they cannot just keep adding more and more spells though, not enough hot bar space hehe.

As usual, I seem to be late to the party. Would someone please direct me to where I can see my new wings?

That's assuming white mages get wings even if they are still in earlier content. Would you believe I'm still on the beginning quests in Stormblood?

Stoopid health. *sigh*

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Originally Posted by Zeromon

The wings could look better I'll be honest. Seems like it will work with certain glamours and ruin the look of most things. I wish there was a way to change the color of the wings, but I know the possibility of that is as likely as a real damage rotation for healers.

Anyway White Mages seems to have completely shaken off the Conjuror aesthetic and gone full Holy Mage (Holy as in the adj. not the spell), which is fine and fitting I suppose. Its still very visible so I have no qualms about it. But looking at the other healing spells shown is it just me or does every spell blend together? Like everything is just a mess of white light. Its not bad per se, but then I see what AST has going on and I can't help being really bothered.

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I agree that the spells all kind of blend together. SE is kind of in a bind since Holy/Light magic is usually presented through certain "religious themes..." (hence the Angel Wings) but they can't go showing Christian crosses and other religious symbols so it's just more large messes of White lights. Though they're leaning more heavily on Flowers now in lieu of this.

You could interpret it as, Holy/Light magic is so volatile and powerful it's hard to give it defined structures (The more structure you give it though, the more effort it takes and the more potent it is, like Holy) and using it is more of a stressful, violent channeling of its power than a simple spell conjuration...

(Kinda sounds more badass like this honestly. Like even though your face is calm while casting Holy, inside you're biting your tongue and violently channeling and packaging Light magic into the Holy spell).

I don't know, I can get behind wings and holy magick aesthetics given the back history with Amdapor. What I can't get behind is a lack of support skills for another 2-3 years. :(

I LOVE the new WHM aesthetic!

Nothing should be holier than a WHM, and I never really accepted CNJ elemental skills. I'm only happy if they removed Stone.

I can agree with some little details like the wings of light are a bit too much and the lilies shouldn't be blue, purple is anything but overall I love it.

Furthermore freeing the elementalist healer aesthetic opens the doors to Geomancer or Druid or whatever.

It seems like they heard a complaint about 'having nothing to do but throw rocks' and interpreted it as not liking the stone effect, instead of the actual complaint of not liking the lack of complexity.

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Originally Posted by Mikki

I've been playing white mage since 2.0 and I have to say, I'm mildly concerned. I think overall a lot of the changes are going to be good but I'm nervous about the DPS aspect. I really pride myself in being a good healer who contributes a lot to the DPS while still doing my job to the fullest on the healing end as well. I like helping to speed runs along and it's always fun to spam holy and play a game of chicken on how long you can go before you need to heal the tank. (My friend tanks for me, so don't worry. I know some tanks hate that cause they don't trust random healers lol).

Anyway, I'm excited for the more instant heals. But yeah, I have to admit.... those wings are hideous. Really tacky, I'm not happy about them AT ALL. Nope, nope, nope. I even hated them with the prismatic wings consumable item you could get from weddings (I think it was?). Just looks stupid imo.

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I play exactly like you. If they drop off the DPS side of WHM I think its time to move to another class. Perhaps its time to give Tanking a shot since I was BLM/BRD in 2.0 -> SCH/DRG in 3.0 - > WHM/BRD in 4.0. Thank God i've got evertything up to 70.

For me yes the wings seems cool but kinda not detailed bland looking. The lilies I'm curious how long for lilies charges if too long might as well been still using spells and prey there up certain situations. The pure healer for all job I'm curious on this statement alone are they going to add more heal check more damage if not we'll umm sorry to say my regens will still cover most situations >.>

Remove DPS? What? Did no one pay attention to when they mentioned the Black Lilies? That they give access to strong offensive spells? Holy II or something, if I remember correctly.
Can't comment on the change of aesthetic to a more divine/light look. I kind of dig it, but hope that the other elements aren't just...gone.

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Originally Posted by Auryan

Remove DPS? What? Did no one pay attention to when they mentioned the Black Lilies? That they give access to strong offensive spells? Holy II or something, if I remember correctly.
Can't comment on the change of aesthetic to a more divine/light look. I kind of dig it, but hope that the other elements aren't just...gone.

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People are skimming over a lot of other threads and posts that provide information that might quell their fears but oh well. This is how it will be for a bit. The internet misinformation train continues to roll.

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Originally Posted by Maka8295

Is anyone else really worried about what's happening to WHM? I've mained WHM for as long as i've played this game and I'm getting seriously bummed out about the aesthetic changes. My first big problem is the wings, I just can't stand how tacky they look, they won't look good with anything that isn't a white wedding dress and not everyone wants to look like that... what happened to the more utilitarian aesthetic of the old artifact armor? Its just dresses and frills now... My problem is that these wings only play to that one aesthetic.

Lastly, white mage never really had any damage identity outside of holy, until FF14 where we got stone and aero, now that they seem to be taking it away what's going to be left of the conjurer aesthetic? To me that's the equivalent of taking away Black Mage's fire and blizzard.

Sorry if this seems a bit ranty, I needed a place to dump my stress. I don't want to lose my favorite class :(

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Indeed! The wings look tacky and out of place. Why do we need to associate them with "angels" in the first place? Also, I hope they don't remove our firepower because pure healing sounds so boring and repetitive.

Pure healing is a snoozefest. I can get that experience in other MMOs. Having the option to DPS is what makes it fun. If they truly are removing offensive spells from our toolset, I can't see myself enjoying this class anymore. Unless they close the huge discrepancy in difficulty between MSQ and Savage, we are always going to have downtime.

I'm sure the healers will still have offensive spells.
The LL said they want to emphasize on healing, this doesn't mean solely focusing on healing.

Honestly, I think the wings are kinda cute? For me they were a selling point to play my WHM again but I can understand why some people would dislike them.

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Originally Posted by Sigiria

I would assume it's just the next power up of stone and aero. I guess they'll still be there but in lower content where you're sync.

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Maybe not. It is looking like all aspected/elemental damage is going away, and that includes stone. Being replaced with ... something(?).

Nowhere in the letter was anything about reducing WHM dps mentioned. Another panic over something that never happened.