Concerns about WHM in Endwalker

Hello.

Some of my fellow healer friends and I have noticed that WHM has a couple of problems going into EW. One is its MP regeneration being reduced significantly by the new Thin Air - which I'll illustrate by comparing WHM's MP regeneration to the other healers'. The other, bigger issue, which persists from ShB and only gets further exacerbated by the Thin Air change, is that WHM loses damage potency by healing with the Lily mechanic.

I'll first analyze the MP regeneration part (some math involved, unfortunately) by comparing WHM's MP regen to the other healers. This will be viewed through the lens of an optimized setting, where these issues become most apparent. I will also be ignoring Lucid Dreaming, as well as the base MP tick, as they are constant across the board.
After that, I will cover the Lily mechanic, how it ties into the MP issue as well as its own problems, then offer some possible solutions.

Boring part for nerds

WHM
1 Thin Air every 60s. It will apply to a glare - 400MP/min
Assize every 45s. 500MP each - 666.6MP/min

1 Lily stack every 30s, it also corresponds to 1/3 of a Misery. Each of these will replace 1 glare, so - 1066.6MP/min.

Total without Lilies - 1066.6MP/min
Total with Lilies - 2133.2MP/min

SCH
Aetherflow every 60s, restoring 2000MP - 2000MP/min

Total - 2000MP/min

AST
Draw every 30s, restoring 500MP - 1000MP/min
I won't go too deep into explaining how Astrodyne math works out, but overall, it restores ~1250MP/min in an optimized setting.

Total - ~2250MP/min

SGE
1 Adder's Gall every 20s, restoring 500MP - 1500MP/min
Rizomata every 90s, restoring 500MP - 333.3MP/min

Total - 1833.3MP/min

Boring part over.

Cont. in next post

Less boring part

Evidently, each healer's MP regeneration is roughly equivalent. There's some variance but it's all within reason; these are all numbers you can work with.

However.
Using Lilies is a potency loss. 3 Lilies + a Misery are 4 GCDs, worth 900 potency. Comparing this to 4x Glare III, you're losing more than a Glare's worth of potency overall. This is fine at present, since WHM's movement options are very limited, but with 1.5s casts, WHM will no longer need to rely so heavily on Lilies to move around. Since they're also a loss, and not DPS neutral, they will likely lean more heavily on the oGCD kit to heal, making Lilies somewhat obsolete (barring very long movements that Swiftcast couldn't cover).
If you took a look at the boring part, you're aware of the implications of this. WHM has little in the way of regenerating MP (or negating MP loss), since the new Thin Air applies to 2 GCDs every 2 minutes, rather than the current 5. This is fine when you're using Lilies, and your MP is comparable to everyone else's. But if you're not, your MP regeneration is much worse, meaning you'd have to change your gear or play suboptimally to keep up, neither of which is a desirable outcome.

There's another less-than-ideal consequence to this. As-is, the best possible thing for a WHM to do is to spam Glare. Meaning, many players will default to this and simply not heal because it's "not what they should be doing". Whether they're correct in saying this is heavily dependent on context, but, one way or another, this point of view is completely justified by the way the class is designed.

The way I see it, making the class this linear simply makes it uninteresting on some level. If you want to play the optimal way, you have no choice between healing and pressing Glare. You just press Glare. And, more broadly, it means WHM's would be less fun to coheal with, as you already know they can help a very limited amount before they start losing potency.

Some possible solutions

1) Make Misery damage-neutral. 4x Glare's worth of potency, instead of the current 900 (1200 would also obviously be acceptable and is perhaps a nicer number). This immediately and completely solves the problem and it becomes a non-issue. Perhaps Rapture's healing potency would have to be reduced in turn, I'm not sure.
2) Make Misery an off-global. This would mean that you'd only be spending 3 GCDs on Lilies before using your Misery, and as such, the point of comparison is 3x Glare's potency, in which case it compares much more favorably. This is a solution that works, but I feel they would be less likely to implement, as they generally make these big finisher moves GCDs.
3) Bring back old Thin Air. This is more of a band-aid fix, and only addresses the MP regeneration part. WHM would still lose potency by healing and the other issues stemming from this persist.

Thank you for reading.

Not a healer main but....if that is an issue...why not simply add an "energy drain-ish" spell that consumes one lily to get MPs back and deal some damage? (maybe with a 90s CD to prevent people from using it instead of the healing spells all the time)

Also..are WHM main never using medica/medica 2? I think Thin Air should mitigate the MP consumption on those rather than glare...And that's probably how the devs envisioned it when balancing it out.

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Originally Posted by Garnix

Not a healer main but....if that is an issue...why not simply adding an "energy drain-ish" spell that consumes one lily to get MPs back and deal some damage? (maybe with a 90s CD to prevent people from using it instead of the healing spells all the time)

Also..are WHM main never using medica/medica 2? I think Thin Air should mitigate the MP consumption on those rather than glare...And that's probably how the devs envisioned it when balancing it out.

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The current Thin Air has multiple potential usage, but they're mostly used during heavy MP cost windows. One of the most recognized is free double raise, followed by brute forcing against back to back heavy raidwide with Cure IIIs (and maybe Medica II too), and finally pairing it with Lucid Dreaming to regain large amount of MP should the need arise.

WHMs has some useful toolkits to use that's just way more efficient until they have to fall back and use Medica II; it doesn't get too many uses. Regular Medica is one of the worst of all healing spell they have, perhaps close enough to Cure I in term of uselessness. The only time regular Medica get their use is when the WHM is absolutely out of lilies, abilities, MP, and/or Medica II HoT is still ticking its duration, which is fairly unusual to happen.

With the coming of Lilybell, I imagine if this is the 'answer' to their gutted Cure III brute forcing capability, considering the ability is also more powerful against back to back raidwides.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

The current Thin Air has multiple potential usage, but they're mostly used during heavy MP cost windows. One of the most recognized is free double raise, followed by brute forcing against back to back heavy raidwide with Cure IIIs (and maybe Medica II too), and finally pairing it with Lucid Dreaming to regain large amount of MP should the need arise.

WHMs has some useful toolkits to use that's just way more efficient until they have to fall back and use Medica II; it doesn't get too many uses. Regular Medica is one of the worst of all healing spell they have, perhaps close enough to Cure I in term of uselessness. The only time regular Medica get their use is when the WHM is absolutely out of lilies, abilities, MP, and/or Medica II HoT is still ticking its duration, which is fairly unusual to happen.

With the coming of Lilybell, I imagine if this is the 'answer' to their gutted Cure III brute forcing capability, considering the ability is also more powerful against back to back raidwides.

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not to mention the thin air + lucid dreaming made dying in progging raids much more recoverable making whm the starting/progg healer friendly then the others which is a huge plus. with that gone ast,his direct competition,is much more friendlier and mp friendly then whm can be with the new thin air change

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Originally Posted by Garnix

Not a healer main but....if that is an issue...why not simply add an "energy drain-ish" spell that consumes one lily to get MPs back and deal some damage? (maybe with a 90s CD to prevent people from using it instead of the healing spells all the time)

Also..are WHM main never using medica/medica 2? I think Thin Air should mitigate the MP consumption on those rather than glare...And that's probably how the devs envisioned it when balancing it out.

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The lilies effectively upgrade Cure II and Medica to be instant cast and cost no MP.

Adding a damage dealing, MP restoring lily would be, at best, awkward, because the lilies themselves are meant to be MP positive by saving you from spending MP on CureII/Medica, and then refund some of their damage via Misery.

As for spending Thin Air on Medica or Medica II, there's never a reason to spend it on Medica because Afflatus Rapture is exactly a 0 MP Medica so if you really really need it (you probably don't) you can use Rapture instead of Thin Air + Medica. You could spend Thin Air on Medica II, but if you're sitting on an unused Thin Air just to wait for the opportunity to use it on Medica II, you might never use it because healers have so many oGCD AOE heals that Medica II is often nothing but overheal.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

The lilies effectively upgrade Cure II and Medica to be instant cast and cost no MP.

Adding a damage dealing, MP restoring lily would be, at best, awkward, because the lilies themselves are meant to be MP positive by saving you from spending MP on CureII/Medica, and then refund some of their damage via Misery.

As for spending Thin Air on Medica or Medica II, there's never a reason to spend it on Medica because Afflatus Rapture is exactly a 0 MP Medica so if you really really need it (you probably don't) you can use Rapture instead of Thin Air + Medica. You could spend Thin Air on Medica II, but if you're sitting on an unused Thin Air just to wait for the opportunity to use it on Medica II, you might never use it because healers have so many oGCD AOE heals that Medica II is often nothing but overheal.

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It's also worthy of note that using a Thin Air on a Medica II isn't an MP gain by itself. Thin Air is always 0 MP either way, so as long as you're not using expensive heals outside of it, you can't milk extra mana from it by using more expensive things inside of it.

As far as oGCD heals go whm doesn’t have the capabilities that other jobs do. We have Tetra with a single charge on a 1 minute cooldown, Assize which should be used on cooldown for damage and mp regain, benediction on a 3 minute cooldown, and asylum on a 90 second cooldown. WHM doesn’t have the oGCD staying power that sch does (lustrate, excog, soil, indom, the fairy and it’s skills are all ogcd) or ast (2 charges of Essential Dignity, celestial intersection, celestial opposition, collective unconscious, earthly star, and even lady of crowns again come endwalker). As a WHM you frequently have to rely on your cohealers oGCDs in order to avoid GCD healing yourself.

Don't forget PoM, especially on a shorter cooldown now, will affect WHM's mana consumption due to extra Glare casts.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Don't forget PoM, especially on a shorter cooldown now, will affect WHM's mana consumption due to extra Glare casts.

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^ This. PoM getting a cooldown reduction is going to put it in the raid buff window—an important oversight because it encourages all WHMs worth their salt not to drop a single Glare now that it aligns with things like Divination, Tech Step and Battle Litany.

The only option that makes sense to me so far is to keep the ShB Thin Air.

It would be very nice to see Lilies + Misery become DPS Neutral. I'm still doubtful it'll happen though, it's unlikely to see Misery be DPS Neutral unless they make SCH's Ruin II also have to be DPS neutral since they both serve a similar purpose.

With both Glare and Broil being 1.5 sec cast time, lilies and Ruin II are going to be used mainly for being instant cast - 2 weave slots + mobility. Both still pay a DPS cost for using it.

At least, in the case for lilies, it's still healing while repaying DPS back at no cost to MP.... whereas using Energy drain for Ruin II is no longer a DPS gain anymore because Broil also grants a free weave 1.5 sec cast time, so having to use aetherflow healing with Ruin II is a lot more expensive than before.

I will have to play WHM in Endwalker to tell for sure, but I'm not too concerned with having less MP overall. Even currently in ShB, using Lucid Dreaming + Assize on cooldown is generally enough to be MP positive even with spamming Glare. You go MP negative if you have a very low piety build, so BiS would just include some piety gear to bump your required piety up a bit with Thin Air and PoM's change. If anything, having a slightly higher piety requirement on gear is better; if you ever get synced down to Lv 50 content and below, you're no longer abnormally MP hungry. Plus, the new Thin Air would then no longer feel like you have "too much MP" - which was the original reason why people went low piety builds in the first place, since Thin Air supplemented their lack of MP by giving free MP cost entirely. If anything, it'll just put a different skillcap on managing MP economy.

WHM will not be clipping anymore, which mean more Glare and MP usage.

Overall, it looks like they nerfed healer mp regen

Yeah, I'm kinda worried in Endwalker. I am thinking I might change over to Paladin and give it a shot. Sage looks cool and it could be fun for a while, but I think once the newness and the laser novelty wears off, it's not going to be a whole lot different. Another big concern I have is... does SE consider having a level 90 character "enjoying the content on that character"? It seemed to imply that in the Jesse Cox interview, so I'm wondering if I should even level my healers...

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Originally Posted by Reiryuu

Sage looks cool and it could be fun for a while, but I think once the newness and the laser novelty wears off, it's not going to be a whole lot different.

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I agree... at 70%.
I think it will still have this "little something" more as a fully acknoledge healer meant to deal damage to heal.
And within its toolkit, it looks like it has the potential to be a bit more flexible than sch for example.

So mostly yes, but a bit of i'm positively hopeful

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Originally Posted by KDSilver

WHM will not be clipping anymore, which mean more Glare and MP usage.

Overall, it looks like they nerfed healer mp regen

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Everytime I read this in healer discussions, I dread of that possibility the job devs are trying to make the ‘wait for mp regen’-game a thing for healer, slowly but surely.

I hope not.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Everytime I read this in healer discussions, I dread of that possibility the job devs are trying to make the ‘wait for mp regen’-game a thing for healer, slowly but surely.

I hope not.

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That was WHM in 2.X and 3.X =p

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Everytime I read this in healer discussions, I dread of that possibility the job devs are trying to make the ‘wait for mp regen’-game a thing for healer, slowly but surely.

I hope not.

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Well when I heard Yoshi P talking... it looked like they expect us so put ourself downtime in our gameplay.
I don't know...

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

It would be very nice to see Lilies + Misery become DPS Neutral. I'm still doubtful it'll happen though, it's unlikely to see Misery be DPS Neutral unless they make SCH's Ruin II also have to be DPS neutral since they both serve a similar purpose.

With both Glare and Broil being 1.5 sec cast time, lilies and Ruin II are going to be used mainly for being instant cast - 2 weave slots + mobility. Both still pay a DPS cost for using it.

At least, in the case for lilies, it's still healing while repaying DPS back at no cost to MP.... whereas using Energy drain for Ruin II is no longer a DPS gain anymore because Broil also grants a free weave 1.5 sec cast time, so having to use aetherflow healing with Ruin II is a lot more expensive than before.

I will have to play WHM in Endwalker to tell for sure, but I'm not too concerned with having less MP overall. Even currently in ShB, using Lucid Dreaming + Assize on cooldown is generally enough to be MP positive even with spamming Glare. You go MP negative if you have a very low piety build, so BiS would just include some piety gear to bump your required piety up a bit with Thin Air and PoM's change. If anything, having a slightly higher piety requirement on gear is better; if you ever get synced down to Lv 50 content and below, you're no longer abnormally MP hungry. Plus, the new Thin Air would then no longer feel like you have "too much MP" - which was the original reason why people went low piety builds in the first place, since Thin Air supplemented their lack of MP by giving free MP cost entirely. If anything, it'll just put a different skillcap on managing MP economy.

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The issue I see personally is that WHM specifically is disadvantaged compared to the rest. I'm sure adding some piety to your BiS list will make it 'fine', but if only WHM has to do that, it's not really the most fair thing ever. Regardless of anyone's personal feelings of how healers look right now, if 3/4 jobs can do something and 1/4 can't, it's a big disadvantage compared to the rest.
I do agree that making lilies DPS neutral makes SCH look somewhat silly, but I'd argue SGE existing and Addersgall heals costing 0 DPS, while every Aetherflow heal is a loss of 100 potency makes SCH look very silly already, so not much is lost I feel.

On another, slightly unrelated note - synced piety works the same as level 80 piety, the number is just different. The base tick is always 200MP every 3s, and your amount of piety determines how much more you have in addition to that. Depending on your level, the formula is different, but 1000 piety at level 80 will always behave like 1000 piety at level 80, regardless of what level you get synced to and what number you see on the stat screen.

I'd also mention how disappointed I am that Piety as a stat is untouched. It didn't even get the Tenacity treatment. I'm really not looking forward to another expansion where healers that need it must take a 0 dps stat, while healers that don't are stuck trying to avoid it like the plague and SE shove thousands of it on every set.

Stats in general are problematic, SkS/SpS is a stat classes either want 0 of or have to hit a precise number, Tenacity is heavily avoided, Crit is always king because it double dips and Piety is absolutely worthless if you don't use all your mana in a fight, yet they didn't even look at any of them?

Dumb question but...since everyone who tested the media tour says potencies are still subject to change, did that only apply to damage dealing abilities, or are we just assuming healer potencies stay the same because their tooltips are largely still the same? maybe the stat squish will affect them somehow too?

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Dumb question but...since everyone who tested the media tour says potencies are still subject to change, did that only apply to damage dealing abilities, or are we just assuming healer potencies stay the same because their tooltips are largely still the same? maybe the stat squish will affect them somehow too?

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everything subject to change so can healing potencies but given the track record, you can expect all healing potencies will be identical

right now the 2 fixes i see that can help whm stay the same are:

1) keep thin air as it is or have it a proper mana recovery tool - i prefer the first option obviously

2) make lilybell the new level 90 capstone skill be able to put it's stacks on a party member as well instead of just yourself cause if you need to get hit in order for it to work then it is stupid that it will be on whm the caster itself, i mean what you expect him to do run to an aoe like a bafoon to trigger lilybell and if he dies then what was the point for lilybell?
not to mention, raid wide aoe strikes continuously for 15s does not happen on all dungeons and trials and only on a select few fight have that for that long mostly in savage and ultimates and even then only during 1/2 moments there. basically nice idea, very very bad implementation making the skill completely useless for a high cd level 90 capstone skill

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Originally Posted by mobradovic00

I do agree that making lilies DPS neutral makes SCH look somewhat silly, but I'd argue SGE existing and Addersgall heals costing 0 DPS, while every Aetherflow heal is a loss of 100 potency makes SCH look very silly already, so not much is lost I feel.

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Addersgall heals cost 0 DPS, but Sage also has no Addersgall DPS dump, so you'd still burn 'sage lustrate' to get MP back if you overcap since it's directly tied into your MP management. Some people dislike that. On the reverse, if you remove SCH's Energy drain to bring SCH in-line with Sage and make Aetherflow heals "cost 0 DPS", people will dislike it more because their aetherflow heals are not getting value if healing isn't necessary. That, and less complexity.

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Originally Posted by mobradovic00

The issue I see personally is that WHM specifically is disadvantaged compared to the rest. I'm sure adding some piety to your BiS list will make it 'fine', but if only WHM has to do that, it's not really the most fair thing ever. Regardless of anyone's personal feelings of how healers look right now, if 3/4 jobs can do something and 1/4 can't, it's a big disadvantage compared to the rest.

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But WHM was always the advantageous healer in piety than the rest because they never needed more piety as a result of Thin Air. AST and SCH were usually the ones to meld piety since they didn't have that kind of MP negation for encounters. SCH's MP economy was entirely contingent on how much extra damage is taken and spent for Aetherflow heals instead of Energy Drain to restore MP, and AST naturally ran out of MP if they had to do anything outside of Malefic over the course of a fight before the 5.3 skill adjustments, so it's generally a lot more common for AST and SCH to add gear with piety to overcome these differences.

If anything, with the Endwalker changes, SCH, Sage, and AST's MP are standardized to account for both DPS and GCD healing whereas for WHM, their MP regen is brought to the same line as the other healers to account for DPS and Thin Air was adjusted to account for more the MP expensive GCD healing. The MP changes pretty much evened out the MP economy with a normal piety build for all 4 healers, but still allow all 4 healers approach MP economy differently instead of homogenizing it. Now, you just add more piety than usual if you really need it for GCD healing.
The main issue is really just how the Lily system fits into this. People always see lilies as DPS loss, but most will use it for weaving oGCDs or heavy movement instead of clipping their DoT, so we still use the healing component of the lilies in the end if needed. However, now that Glare can be used for weaving, they don't want to use the lily system at all for the same reason we don't want to use Ruin II. The only problem is that the lily system is most likely integral to managing the WHM's healing MP economy so we save as much MP for DPS GCDs instead. Spending GCDs on free-MP healing spells still affect your overall MP economy in the end because GCDs not consuming MP over the course of the fight translates to having more MP for future GCD spells. Just 3 Afflatus heals and 1 Afflatus misery = 4 GCDs of no MP whereas spending 4 GCDs on Glares consumes 1600 MP. That difference alone is an additional 1600MP every 90 seconds.

However, this makes the lily system really applies to the average player, not so much for highly optimized settings where you want to get as much DPS as possible and have less overheal usage by coordinating with your co-healer. This problem, again, is because the lily system results in a net DPS loss vs Glare, so the extra MP that you could've gotten from just using lilies over the course of the fight is lowered in an optimized environment. Making Afflatus Misery DPS Neutral to Glare will immediately remove this problem, but making Afflatus Misery DPS Neutral has its own problems too.

Of course, if SCH gets a trait to change Ruin II by gaining 1 stack of Ruination to make using Ruin II DPS Neutral via using Aetherflow heals, then there's no longer a problem. If that ever happens though, I'm pretty sure Energy Drain will be removed to adjust for it.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

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doesn't it just sums it up that whm is no longer the prog friendly healer anymore?
one of whm strong suits was his mana management was the easiest of the 3 healers with thin air, now when shit its the fan you basically have nothing cause despite everything you said those lilies were already the first thing to go when u needed a cure/medica spams and when u actually need to dip on gcd heals frequently cause people get hit, you have nothing cause the other healers have ogcd heals that cost nothing which they can throw and whm has none other then lilybell that you can only count if ur hit so you go oom.
sch has all his fairy ogcd and aetherflow stacks, ast has loads of ogcds to help heals but whm has none of those free ogcd other then bene and tetra(asylum like sacred soil dont count for cause its regen not raw heal)

my point is the other healers have loads of mana free cast and skills that they burn long before they burn their own mana pool, whm has none of those and the lilies regenerate 30 per one so unlike the platora of ogcd the other healers have to pull from, whm has basically 3 gcd for aoe spams before dipping to his mana pool.

IMHO it's going to hinge heavily on the content, if we see another E12S part 1, chances are WHM will be suffering. If it's more like E8S with huge swathes of downtime everywhere, it's not going to be a problem.

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Originally Posted by CrimsonGunner

doesn't it just sums it up that whm is no longer the prog friendly healer anymore?
one of whm strong suits was his mana management was the easiest of the 3 healers with thin air, now when shit its the fan you basically have nothing cause despite everything you said those lilies were already the first thing to go when u needed a cure/medica spams and when u actually need to dip on gcd heals frequently cause people get hit, you have nothing cause the other healers have ogcd heals that cost nothing which they can throw and whm has none other then lilybell that you can only count if ur hit so you go oom.
sch has all his fairy ogcd and aetherflow stacks, ast has loads of ogcds to help heals but whm has none of those free ogcd other then bene and tetra(asylum like sacred soil dont count for cause its regen not raw heal)

my point is the other healers have loads of mana free cast and skills that they burn long before they burn their own mana pool, whm has none of those and the lilies regenerate 30 per one so unlike the platora of ogcd the other healers have to pull from, whm has basically 3 gcd for aoe spams before dipping to his mana pool.

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This is heavily dependent on content design. WHM's still pretty prog friendly to me, if "Prog" strats still mean very safe and designed to be 'foolproof' and simple, even at the cost of DPS. It's just not "Prog King" with unlimited MP for fixing errors or healing huge hits in a row at no cost. I'd say it's still pretty competitive as a prog healer. Your counter-part to progging in the pure-healer slot is AST - but AST's toolkit is very reliant on predicting damage ahead of time.

In terms of emergency & unplanned healing for AST, Microcosmos isn't effective if you use it after people mess up on a mechanic since it has to be activated beforehand... and doesn't work if they actually died to the next mechanic before the AST manually triggers the heal. Earthly Star won't reach it's max potency until after 10 seconds, (and while it takes 10 secs to reach full potential for 720 aoe heal, the new dps adjustment might make it worth using on cooldown over healing, which is somewhat similar to Assize). AST relies on your time and regens from Collective Unconscious, Celestial Opposition, and Aspected Helios. The problem is... if you have time for HoTs to tick, you're probably not in a spot where things have gone to hell.

In terms of emergency & unplanned healing, WHM has stronger flexibility in upfront heals on-demand with their toolkit, especially with Confession, Asylum's trait, and Temperance lasting a set amount of time - your GCD heals can be heavily beefed up as a result and work as direct healing. This includes lilies being affected by their enhanced healing trait. Although it's not by much, if it's a really urgent situation and you need as much healing throughput within 2-3 GCDs, WHM does this really well.

If you compare their GCD healing buff synergies, AST's heals are have less flexibility in immediate potency for everything other than Neutral Sect. Synastry only works with 1 target, so it heals a maximum of 2 people. Horoscope helios is a one-use skill every 60 seconds, but you're going to clip if you try to trigger Horoscope outside of Lightspeed if you want to continually heal with a second use of Helios right after Aspected Helios. After all, Horoscope Helios is meant to be used in a delayed form but can be activated earlier if necessary.


In terms of lasting MP? AST's Astrodyne definitely makes it stronger in prog - doubly so because their MP cost for all spells are cheaper.

In terms of accessible Burst MP? With 2 charges on Thin Air, it's basically a variable -secondary- MP bar. It's actually a pretty neat way to look at it in that perspective. While other healers restore MP faster, WHM holds a secondary MP bar in reserve.


I will say AST looks a lot more powerful overall simply from design kit and gameplay, but WHM is no means weak for prog. Each has their advantages. Of course, nothing is yet set in stone until we experience it in Endwalker to be sure of anything being changed.

... but if MP on WHM really becomes an issue, there's a lot of different quick band-aid solutions while keeping the Thin Air charge system.
-They could add extra MP regen when using thin air.
-Make each charge of thin air work for the next 2 spells instead of the next spell (a.k.a. old thin air but more flexible).
-Lower the charge time of Thin Air greatly (~30 to ~45 seconds per charge).
-Lower the charge time slightly but increase the number of charges to 3 (creates greater flexibility in holding a "reserve MP pool").

I had an idea involving Thin Air: Move it to the Lily system with a condition. With the way Thin Air works now would make it in direct competition with heals, and that's my current problem with SCH. I don't want WHM to suffer that. Instead, Thin Air only works on Regen, Cure 3, and Medica 2. Now, these skills functionally exist on the Lily system without actually needing new skills. Solace and Rapture will still have benefits of being instant cast, but now you can use healing skills you were about to use anyway as a part of your Lily kit. Lilies during downtime is less dumped in Solace and are instead just a part of what you were going to do.

Additionally, moving Misery to oGCD as well as putting a 10-15% MP recovery effect on top will help with the problems of it not being DPS neutral.

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Originally Posted by AnotherPerson

... but if MP on WHM really becomes an issue, there's a lot of different quick band-aid solutions while keeping the Thin Air charge system.
-They could add extra MP regen when using thin air.
-Make each charge of thin air work for the next 2 spells instead of the next spell (a.k.a. old thin air but more flexible).
-Lower the charge time of Thin Air greatly (~30 to ~45 seconds per charge).
-Lower the charge time slightly but increase the number of charges to 3 (creates greater flexibility in holding a "reserve MP pool").

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Adding another change they could do that would be easy, bump Assize MP regen back up to the 10% it was in HW and SB.

One thing I didn't initially realise was that, while new Thin Air is easier to spread out (for raises and such), using it on a Swiftcast raise is actually less convenient than one might initially think. You either have to use a Lily/Regen/Dot refresh for it, or clip one of the weaves. Since both Swiftcast and new Thin Air only apply to 1 GCD,
Glare -> Swiftcast -> Glare -> Thin Air doesn't work, as it consumes the swift before the raise, and
Glare -> Thin Air -> Glare -> Swiftcast also doesn't work, as it consumes the Thin Air before the raise.

I really question the rationale behind this change because it's really difficult to justify. I don't get it.