An Integration of Former and Current Ideas for WHM

I'll preface this with saying that I'm not a fan of WHM. I've never been, so I am no expert on the job.

That said, I as still a healer main, and it's not like there aren't things which appeal to me in WHM.

WHM has always been seen as the primary healer, the one who did the bulk of the healing work ever since ARR, but between the excessive homogenization (why is WHM a better shield healer than SCH, the preeminent and OG shield healer?) and the oversimplification, I had thought that there was a way to both make WHM accessible to new healers while keeping them fun and viable for endgame raids.

That idea was something which I had mentioned here before, but that was as the GCD healer.

The idea is that WHM's core abilities are all GCD abilities. Rather than rely on a whole bunch of oGCDs and use GCD spells as backup and DPS, GCD spells become the core of WHM's healing and offense.

The heals would need a bit of a potency boost of course to balance out the fact that most of their oGCD heals would have to be stripped out or converted to GCDs. In turn, I think every one of WHM's GCD heals should provide lilies, the main WHM mechanic which I find to be one of the brightest bits of WHM's current kit. Of course, automatic lily generation would have to be stopped for this sake.

But unlike as it is now, lilies won't be used to fuel WHM's oGCD heals. Instead, you stock them up, and once you get three or five of them, they are converted automatically to single blood lily. That blood lily can be used as it is now, though I suppose that afflatus misery's potency would have to be balanced so that it's potency would equal the number of GCD heals you do get a blood lily times the potency of Glare.

Even if you use almost all your GCDs healing, there would be no potency loss on offence.

There would have to be more changes to make long periods without significant healing to be more interesting.

Perhaps for the sake of returning to WHM's lore roots, WHM could lose its two existing attack spells and gain three different attack spells of differing elements? One water, one wind, and one earth. In addition, there could be a final spell tied to each of the three: commune with nature.

Commune with nature could be a spell which generates a random buff, one corresponding to the three elements WHM governs. The buff will increase the potency of the next attack spell of the corresponding element. In addition, the attack spells could all be instant casts to give some additional mobility.

Anyways, this is my proposition for making WHM interesting again. A new skill set which would be easy on new healers, while giving space for veterans to stretch into. It might not be the most complex, but combined with the usual oGCD heal buffs (will need more than just one 20% buff every 120s) and some raid utility skills, I think it would make for a healer with both a solid identity and an enjoyable play style.

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Originally Posted by Dearche

and some raid utility skills

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Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. I wish. That's a good one.

Shadowbringers showed us that the devs' vision for WHM is "the boring simple healer that clips a lot with no utility". And they'd rather destroy AST and SCH to balance them numerically with that vision. They haven't changed their minds since Stormblood, when we proved them conclusively wrong there. Let's just say there's a looooot of inertia against digging WHM out of the boring grave, but I also think it's the best option for rescuing SCH and AST from it too. If WHM's horrible design dragged the other two down, it stands to reason that designing it well can be the road to restoring them.

I don't hate most of these ideas, but good luck getting the healer design team to think of WHM as anything beyond "but it has Cure and Stone right? Perfect. Design finished."

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. I wish. That's a good one.

Shadowbringers showed us that the devs' vision for WHM is "the boring simple healer that clips a lot with no utility". And they'd rather destroy AST and SCH to balance them numerically with that vision. They haven't changed their minds since Stormblood, when we proved them conclusively wrong there. Let's just say there's a looooot of inertia against digging WHM out of the boring grave, but I also think it's the best option for rescuing SCH and AST from it too. If WHM's horrible design dragged the other two down, it stands to reason that designing it well can be the road to restoring them.

I don't hate most of these ideas, but good luck getting the healer design team to think of WHM as anything beyond "but it has Cure and Stone right? Perfect. Design finished."

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And that's really the thing in general, isn't it? They vehemently demand that healing should play in a very specific way without really thinking about whether or not that actually fits into the way content is designed in this game (spoiler alert, it doesn't), and they continue to fight our way of playing healer in every conceivable manner without actually touching the reason why we play that way. I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

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To be honest, I can't help but feel that this might actually be the real sentiment within the ones in charge of designing jobs. Either that, or that they believe that the best way to make people play a role that's less popular is to make it as easy as possible to get into, which means making them as braindead as possible. Not realizing that making gameplay overly simplistic is how the entire genre of JRPGs almost got wiped out until less than a decade ago. At least in the west.

It's ridiculous that the rest of the FF franchise is going the other way by making things like gameplay mastery an important aspect of the series, yet XIV is trying to do the opposite for every role except DPS.

That aside though, while I don't actually expect these changes to be implemented, or even seen by the dev team (since I doubt they look at any thread here that doesn't have like 10k views or something), the idea behind these changes was to create a WHM that had as low of a skill floor as possible, while not being boring for veteran players to play. In fact, I think with stripping out so many oGCD skills, it's actually simpler than the current WHM, yet loses none of the flexibility.

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Then again, it could just be an oversight, as SCH had its potency for broil 2 raised just so they could nerf energy drain and get people to stop doing the ruin 2+energy drain combo in place of using aetherflow for healing. Seriously, if that's not a malicious nerf on player expression, I don't know what is.

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Originally Posted by Dearche

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

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Oh, my chortling about WHM and raid utility isn't because I don't think Square wants healers in general to have utility. It's because WHMs have been begging Square to give them something to do during downtime for years. Some form of raid utility would have killed two birds with one stone: given WHM something to manage, while also bringing them up to AST and SCH's level. Back in Stormblood it felt like garbage playing WHM compared to the other two. You did less damage, your heals weren't really any stronger than theirs, you had nothing to do in downtime except refresh your dots and spam Stone, and if your party needed you to do anything other than heal them up or stare at them while spamming Stone, you were SOL. Lethal AOE damage going out? Can't help you, I have no AOE shields and no damage reduction. And no debuffs to reduce boss outgoing damage. Party's struggling with a tight DPS check? Oh well, I don't have anything to help you with that. Need to Esuna multiple people quickly? Don't look at me, I'm not Selene. As a WHM, there was no scenario you were uniquely useful in outside spamming Cure 3. Conversely, there were TONS of scenarios where the other two healers were invaluable, but you had no equivalent ability to help. Offensive utility was just the tip of the iceberg there; WHM just had effectively nothing unique going for it.

Shadowbringers healer design by all appearances is the healer design dev saying "yeah we see WHMs have been begging for utility for literal years now, I'm gonna go with no. But we have to balance this out with two really strong, flexible healers. What to do....oh I know! Let's blow up their flexibility instead."

At this point, just give us a dps rotation, move all healing into ogcd skills, and then add job flair where you actually have to pay attention to the gauges. I don't think they will ever be able to make healing fun with how the game plays. Any instance not max level strips you of huge utility compared to other classes, plus you barely even need healing anyway at those levels. Raids from primal to Savage are already scripted to the point you just memorize when big damage is coming and pop your ogcds anyway.

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Originally Posted by Dearche

The idea is that WHM's core abilities are all GCD abilities. Rather than rely on a whole bunch of oGCDs and use GCD spells as backup and DPS, GCD spells become the core of WHM's healing and offense.

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Isn't that how it is now? The Afflatus spells are already GCDs.

If a job had no oGCDs, it's CPM (casts per minute) would be very low, because it would have nothing to weave. You'd just be doing one action every 2.5 seconds, which might get a bit boring. WHM already has the lowest CPM of the three healers.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

Isn't that how it is now? The Afflatus spells are already GCDs.

If a job had no oGCDs, it's CPM (casts per minute) would be very low, because it would have nothing to weave. You'd just be doing one action every 2.5 seconds, which might get a bit boring. WHM already has the lowest CPM of the three healers.

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Well, this was an older iteration of healer ideas I've had, but my idea for WHM is that GCD healing is the core of it's design.

To make it work though, WHM would need two things. First, instant casts so that they could keep their GCDs going during movement intensive mechanics. Say, if there was a spell 'Quick Cure' which was like a 200 potency cure, but instant cast.

Second, is to make WHM's DPS not suffer due to all the GCD healing. So maybe it's main offensive abilities are oGCDs. Of course, throwing an oGCD every GCD is painful even if the cast times are short enough to allow weaving, so maybe you can only use one oGCD attack every 3+ GCDs? To make it combo with the healing image of WHM, and the lily system already in place, maybe make it so every GCD heal will generate a lily instead of being on a timer, and when you get 3, they convert into a blood lily, which could be used for Afflatus Misery like now?

Of course, Afflatus Misery would need a higher potency so that simply doing the current DPS spam wouldn't be better. 1200 potency Misery would probably make playing WHM feel very nice indeed.

Though, this alone wouldn't entirely fix WHM, it would be a good start.

I would like if they kept WHM identity has a GCD healer, Maybe a Green DPS.

Making presence of mind into a passive, so the white mage can cast his spell faster than other healer to compensate the lack of oGCDs heal.

Remove assize and Tetragrammaton, and oGCDs heal linked to Lillies.

Then, the system of lilies can be changed to interact with the GCDs heal according to the situation. Having a max of 3 lilies for each type, generated every 30 second.

Blue Lillies, a tool for mobility . Something like an oGCD attack that turn the next GCD Heal into a mana free instant cast spell.

Red Lillies, are used for keeping damage up while healing. Something like, an oGCD that add a damaging effect to your next GCDs heal.

When one type of lilies is full, the other type grow twice has fast, so players can adapt. Sitting on red lillies for fight that require more mobility or the opposite for more DPS.

Purple Lillies replace the old red lillies and are used to cast Afflatus of misery.

For even better mobility, add a spell that make it so moving does not cancel casting for 15 seconds.

Anyways, the goal is to make lillies interact with the already existing spell instead of creating entirely new spell to use them. Tetragrammaton and Afflatus Solace are basically Cure II in the form of mana free oGCDs

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Originally Posted by Dearche

To make it work though, WHM would need two things. First, instant casts so that they could keep their GCDs going during movement intensive mechanics. Say, if there was a spell 'Quick Cure' which was like a 200 potency cure, but instant cast.

Second, is to make WHM's DPS not suffer due to all the GCD healing.

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These seem to be the issues that SE attempted to address with the revamped Lily system in Shadowbringers. WHM got two new instant-cast GCD heals, Afflatus Solace and Rapture, and a big damage spell, Misery, that "refunds" some of the DPS lost due to GCD healing. I'd say this solution has been fairly successful. I know some people still complain about WHM's lack of mobility, but the job is at least more viable than in Stormblood.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

These seem to be the issues that SE attempted to address with the revamped Lily system in Shadowbringers. WHM got two new instant-cast GCD heals, Afflatus Solace and Rapture, and a big damage spell, Misery, that "refunds" some of the DPS lost due to GCD healing. I'd say this solution has been fairly successful. I know some people still complain about WHM's lack of mobility, but the job is at least more viable than in Stormblood.

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The main issue is that while the current Lily system is quite successful, that's on the level of taking something terrible and making it less than good. It's an improvement, but we're still in the negatives.

The two big issues with the lily system is that you only get one lily every 30 seconds, if you want to use a lily for movement, you need either a blood lily up, or someone hurt to heal, and the system's pretty much useless if you're on a big movement mechanic that lasts more than one or two GCDs. This last one especially happens quite often, though the other two is only a little bit less common of an issue.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could just generate blood lilies through some alternative means, like an instant cast GCD "quick prayer" that simply gives you a third of a blood lily or something.

I've been thinking a little bit about the lily system, how to create a safe healer that has a high skill ceiling but also a high skill floor, and also taking inspiration from things that we like from Bozja to come up with my own interpretation of what WHM could look like including this new "Divine Benison II." I have absolutely no hope that anything like this will be utilized, but here's a basic rundown of the concept:

GCD Healing:
As it stands, WHM's GCD healing has a bit of repetition that renders some spells entirely unnecessary in the later stages of the game. I think simplicity here is key to making each spell feel important while also contributing to what WHM wants to do, so here the idea: All cure spells consume lilies, increasing their potency by 100, and nourish the blood lily when a lily is consumed. Between levels 50 and 60, they also upgrade to flowering cure spells that will additionally generate a lily if no lily is consumed. This will create an interesting relationship with a new DPS action I'll talk about later.
- Cure -> Flowering Cure (450 Potency)(Instant Cast): Cure becomes your instant GCD heal the cost of lower potency.
- Cure II -> Flowering Cure II (700 Potency)(2 second Cast): The same as it is now.
- Cure III -> Flowering Cure III (350 Potency)(2 second Cast): Cure III and Medica merge, costing 1000 MP but retain Cure III's unique ability to target distant allies. This would make WHM's AoE healing a little more unique.
- Raise (No Change)

OGCD Healing:
OGCD as it stands is not the WHM's strongest asset, and that's perfectly fine. There are some subtle adjustments here though that are worth mentioning...
- Benediction (No Change)
- Regen (45 second recast): Regen gets moved off the GCD which allows it to be weaved onto allies rather than fighting your DPS.
- Regen II (45 second recast): Medica II gets converted into Regen II, your AoE OGCD heal that you'll be using frequently, again, now no longer fighting your DPS.
- Assize (No Change)
- Divine Benison -> Divine Benison II (250/350 potency barrier): The barrier gets weakened here in exchange for having 2 charges and also generating an extra lily for the WHM when the barrier is broken. Additionally, the recast for Divine Benison I/II will be reset when using Water/Banish spells (more on that later), so you'll be able to take advantage of more frequent, weaker barriers that will supply you with more lilies.
Tetragrammaton and Asylum are cut in this concept, which may seem like a huge downer, but the idea is to encourage more dependency on GCD healing and how you interact with it to maintain your DPS contributions. We talk about wanting more healing uptime for the healer role, and one of the things that may need to happen is the trimming of OGCD healing in order to achieve that.

GCD DPS:
This is where a lot of the messiness comes into play for WHM. The fight for the highest potency drowns out the desire to actually use GCD healing and also causes a demand for mobility that the job currently doesn't support very well. I think foiling the BLM's lack of mobility does make sense for WHM, but it needs tools that feel good to use rather than just burning lilies to weave instead of actually needing them for healing. So let's work on that...
- Stone/Glare (No change): Stone/Glare will stay the default DPS button, but we'll be integrating more things to diversify the WHM's options when not healing.
- Aero/Dia (No change)
- Water/Banish (400 Potency when fully upgraded)(400 MP Cost)(Instant Cast)(15 second recast)(holds 3 charges when fully upgraded): This replaces Fluid Aura and upgrades naturally until it transforms into Banish at the same time that Stone and Aero change into Glare and Dia respectively. Basically, Water/Banish will give you more diversity in your casts and will also function as more efficient weave tools. Since you have charges, you don't need to burn them all at once and can hold onto Water/Banish for when you need to weave or want to reset the cooldown of your Benisons, as that's another thing that this spell offers.
Holy/Holy II (Gets upgraded at level 82. There seems to be a common trend in enhancing AoE actions, so it seems like a safe bet)
- Misery/Flowering Misery (500/900 Potency): Renamed from Afflatus Misery. We get a new, weaker Misery at level 30 now. One minor issue with a lot of jobs is how early levels can feel very flat and don't always teach you about your job. Having a weaker Misery will allow new players to start learning how to take advantage of lilies and also make WHM gameplay more entertaining much earlier.
- Flowering Holy (250 Potency)(2000 MP Cost)(2 second cast)(2.5 second recast): A separate action from regular Holy. The MP cost is very high, and this is because Flowering Holy requires a lily to be used and nourishes the blood lily. 3 Flowering Holys + Flowering Misery = 1650 potency in contrast to the 1200 from 4 Glares It's here to give WHM players an option to deal with excess lilies and try to maximize damage potential, but you have to be cautious with your MP and can't just spam it. I'd ultimately need to test the numbers in a built to actually find an appropriate balance between potency and MP cost, but the idea I think has a lot of potential.
- Eschaton (300 Potency)(4000 MP Cost)(instant cast)(60 second recast): Taking inspiration from Lost Seraph Strike, this action grants the WHM 15 seconds of 50% healing potency reduction and 25% DPS increase. Again, I'm really uncertain about the numbers here since they probably can't afford to be as strong as Lost Seraph Strike, but a lot of players have taken a liking to this action, myself included, and it especially feels natural for the WHM.
In general, WHM currently lacks any meaningful reason to use Thin Air, and I think some of these new options gives WHM players a lot to think about when using Thin Air and how to get the most out of the tools while balancing their MP and their lilies.

Other Actions:
- Thin Air (No Change)
- Plenary Indulgence (Reworked): Now simply grants 3 lilies on a 90 second recast (must be used in combat). Something I'd like to add as a QoL improvement to the lilies is that the natural 30 second generation of lilies will also be counting while the WHM has 3 lilies, much like how the BLM's Polyglots work. As long as you use your 3rd lily before the 30 seconds are up, you'll get another lily back. If you don't use a lily before then, the timer just resets at no gain. This removes any ugly dead seconds that would otherwise be generated by a max-out-your-lilies button.
- Germinate (New): Fully nourishes the Blood Lily on a 120 second timer (must be used in combat). This allows the WHM to start with a Blood Lily and use a free Flowering Misery every 2 minutes.
- Temperance: Temperance stays mostly the same but gets a new aspect added to the buff. Now, it also allows the WHM to move while casting for the duration of the effect, giving Temperance more opportunities to feel good to use while feeling a bit different to a 'WHM Triplecast'
- Refresh (GCD Action)(2 second cast)(2.5 second recast): A GCD action that restores 10% of your MP. Since this iteration of WHM has some heavy MP costs, we probably would need to have some sort of safety net button to retain the 'low skill floor' identity that WHM has to have. It's very inefficient of course since you have to cast this, but for a struggling WHM, it's there to protect them. You could argue that it's probably not necessary if you're managing your resources correctly, but it doesn't really hurt to have the option even if you yourself never end up needing it.
I ended up dropping Presence of Mind as well. It's a nice DPS boost, but there are a lot of additional sources of damage in this concept that I think cover the benefits PoM offered and then some.

I'm sure a lot of these ideas would need to be tasted in a prototyping build, but I think this captures a lot of the things people want to see with WHM and would capture the identity that both the developers and the community see in the WHM, but maybe I'm off the mark.

I have been thinking about how to make the healers in this game more interactive for a while and the og post inspired me so i decided to write out what my ideal changed to WM would be . I tried to keep the feel of WM intact while adding some Black Mage flavor to the class since WM and BM are sort of the yin and yang of magic in ffxiv.

1. I would increase the maximum amount of lilies to 5. (The importance of this will be explained below)

2. Like the og poster's idea, I would also alter or remove all extraneous instant/ogcd heals from the kit, leaving only Afflatus Solus and Afflatus Rapture. To compensate for this change as well as to thematically connect WM to BM, WM will be given the spell Triplecast.

3. I would remove all of the current single target damage spells, replacing them with a 3 spell combo. The combo will not be interrupted by other spell casts in between. Examples of the spells are below (the potencies are probably off but that would need testing):
Earth (2.3s cast) - Deal 250 potency earth damage.
Water (2.3s cast) = Deal 250 potency ice damage. (Combo:Earth): Grants a nearby ally with the most missing health a heal over time effect. Cure Potency:150 Duration:6s
Light's Radiance (2.3s cast) = Deal 250 potency unaspected damage. (Combo:Water): Deal an additional 150 potency and gain 1 lily.
(each spell has a lower cast time to allow for ogcd weaving which is important for the next section)

4. Now for the most interesting part. Like the og poster, in my idea, Lilies will now be gained from casting any gcd healing spell. (excluding the water spell from the damage combo). In addition to Afflatus Solus and Rapture, I would add two new instant cast ogcd damage spells (1 single target and 1 aoe) as lily spenders. (The potency of these spells would most likely need to be lowered to compensate for higher availability of lilies). Finally, Afflatus Misery would be altered to require 5 blood lily charges to activate but , most importantly, the blood lily would ONLY gain charges from casting the damaging lily spells and NOT from the healing lily spells.

With these changes, White Mage would work much more similarly to a black mage. It would still have the low skill floor for new player since they will still have access to a multitude of gcd and ogcd heals while heavily rewarding experienced player who plans out their gcds by giving them significantly more damage as well as more access to those juicy Afflatus Misery procs. Other skills in the WM tool kit would most likely need to be altered as well but this is the overall framework I would like to see.

I remember the idea I had prior to shadowbringers for Lilies was to essentially turn them into a greased lightning effect that could be spent on powerful OGCD abilities, where the idea was to make WHM's flow a trade off of reducing their cast time (but not the gcd, to enable weaving) for said abilities. The TL;DR was this

Casting Cure spells generated a Lily. Casting Stone spells would generate Lilies but at a slower rate (essentially creating stacks that where consumed to generate lilies every 3 times Stone spells where cast)

Aero ticks would generate a Lily when they crit (with an internal cooldown) Regen had an X% chance and Medica II had a Y% chance to generate lilys when they successfully healed. (with its own internal cooldown as well)

Lilies stacked up to 3 times, each stack reducing the cast time of their Cure/Medica/Stone/Holy spells by .25 seconds. Capping at -1 second. GCD is not effected by this, thus meaning every spells had Malefic cast time.

Finally I had 3 OGCDs that consumed the Lillies.
Salvation: Single Target Heal + Regen refresh.
Plenury Indulgence: Reworked into the AoE version of this "Salvation" effect.
Tornado: DPS dump + Aero refresh on the target.

And ofc, a cooldown that instantly filled the lily guage, iirc i made it 45 seconds.

The whole idea was that as you kept actively using your gcds you would gain stacks that would essentially give you the weaving space needed to use your OGCds and then you would spend the lilies to either heal as needed or to refresh your Aero dot. Granted I'm aware that in this model most WHM's would likely dump the lilies on Tornado 90% of the time in this model, but that's just a matter of tuning, even if it means removing the damage on Tornado and renaming it to something less badass.