WHM Desperately Needs An Overhaul

Since the advent of 6.0, people have seen a few changes to WHM that have helped it in some cases; however, there are a few glaring issues that are causing WHM to underperform in both Savage and Dungeons as early as Sastasha:

Thin Air Charges - The Thin Air change to Charges wiped out 4 GCDs worth of healing that we could've done from Shadowbringers and Stormblood, ripping out a gigantic chunk of our MP management kit. WHM has not gotten any recompense in regards to MP since then, making it difficult to manage when simply casting Stone in low level dungeons, thus reinforcing a bad habit to sit there and only heal like Sylphie.

The Change to 1.5s GCD - While the change to 1.5s GCD is helpful to WHM, it is also a detriment due to their current systems in place - namely Lilies. The Lily System that WHM has forces GCD healing, causing Afflatus Misery to be a loss a majority of the time and ALWAYS a loss in Raids. One of the biggest issues right now is that WHM isn't contributing as much as it should compared to the other healers in terms of damage, especially when the other healers bring raid buffs to the table or some form of utility - WHM doesn't bring enough. Holy III also is for some ungodly reason a 2.5s GCD compared to AST's 1.5s Gravity.

Liturgy of WHM Harm - As much as I understand Liturgy is supposed to be a large heal or multi-heal akin to SGE's Panhaima ability, it's a horribly designed ability. Why? It requires you to get HIT. WHM has absolutely no agency after they hit this skill, making it too niche to use in most situations other than set and forget. A Capstone should give the player agency to be a good ability, not just a passive heal that requires the player taking detrimental damage.

These issues are among the most prominent of WHM, and needs be fixed.

We do have solutions, however:

Raise Afflatus Misery to 1240 potency. This makes Misery DPS neutral in all cases, and increases its potency to match with the likes of Glare III and ensures that you don't lose DPS because you use Lilies.

Add a detonation button to Liturgy of the Bell. This grants the player agency on WHEN to blow it up, similar to how Macrocosmos has. This means you can place it then detonate it immediately for a BIG HEAL.

Add 800 MP Recovery to Lily usage. This balances out WHM's MP Economy in long term fights, despite it requiring 30s to charge. If a WHM is handling their MP properly, they should not run out of MP.

Secondary Suggestion: Make Lilies oGCD. As much as some will say "Oh, but it's the same as SGE/SCH! We can't let them have that!", this will allow WHM's Misery to ALWAYS be a gain no matter what. This idea should be considered if Afflatus Misery potency buffs are not the way forward with design.

Lower the cooldown of the lilybell from 180 to 120 seconds. Doing this would allow Liturgy to feel more useful in terms of application, and not be limited to niche situations.

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Originally Posted by WaxSw

Giving Whm a second charge of assize should be a no brainer, enables it to work as a heal as well as a dps button and helps giving whm some AoE burst healing that is lacking in its ogcd kit.

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Other healers have some form of healing burst, while WHM surprisingly has a huge lack of it for being a Pure Healer. Assize is literally just that burst, but it's also DPS, so giving a second charge to Assize might help it.

If there are any other ideas, I'd like to hear them in this thread - they will be added to the OP provided they are substantiated and the community agrees.

Giving Whm a second charge of assize should be a no brainer, enables it to work as a heal as well as a dps button and helps giving whm some AoE burst healing that is lacking in its ogcd kit

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

there are a few glaring issues

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I see what you did there.

WHM honestly at this point, needs to be nuked and reborn like they did for ARR.

Jokes asides, WHM has had problems the moment SE decide it was going to be the "starter" healer. You'll see people say "but that's good! It needs to be easy so I don't have to think." I get that sometimes you just want to have to think but that shouldn't be at a job's detriment. Especially how braindead WHM is.

Honestly if you took out Cure 3, Benediction, and Misery, there's literally nothing unique to WHM.

Plenary is only there for Rapture (Medica 1) and occasionally Cure 3 for boosted healing and exists for that reason alone.

Asylum is just a regen bubble that has slight synergy with the healing action buff.

Benediction is a massive all-HP heal that tends to lag and ghost whole the target perishes.

Misery is the only part of their kit that shows any sign of thought and it's at a DPS loss.

But we know they won't go out of their way to rework it. So many people play it! So it must be thriving according to that metric.

So the best we can hope for is DPS neutral Misery and Assize second charge along with healthy MP changes. They seem to be dead set on WHM has a skeleton for a kit and thinks that it's kit compares to the other healers.

If people went on strike and didn't play WHM for months, the devs would quickly buff it to high heaven. I mean just look at how far they buffed AST in 5.0 l

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Originally Posted by elioaiko

WHM honestly at this point, needs to be nuked and reborn like they did for ARR.

Jokes asides, WHM has had problems the moment SE decide it was going to be the "starter" healer. You'll see people say "but that's good! It needs to be easy so I don't have to think." I get that sometimes you just want to have to think but that shouldn't be at a job's detriment. Especially how braindead WHM is.

Honestly if you took out Cure 3, Benediction, and Misery, there's literally nothing unique to WHM.

Plenary is only there for Rapture (Medica 1) and occasionally Cure 3 for boosted healing and exists for that reason alone.

Asylum is just a regen bubble that has slight synergy with the healing action buff.

Benediction is a massive all-HP heal that tends to lag and ghost whole the target perishes.

Misery is the only part of their kit that shows any sign of thought and it's at a DPS loss.

But we know they won't go out of their way to rework it. So many people play it! So it must be thriving according to that metric.

So the best we can hope for is DPS neutral Misery and Assize second charge along with healthy MP changes. They seem to be dead set on WHM has a skeleton for a kit and thinks that it's kit compares to the other healers.

If people went on strike and didn't play WHM for months, the devs would quickly buff it to high heaven. I mean just look at how far they buffed AST in 5.0 l

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They buffed AST in 5.0 because it had the same MP issues WHM had, along with problems involved in their job system: Cards. Sleeve Draw was more or less a panic play due to the fact you rolled three cards in succession, and you used Redraw so much to get it to go. It was a pain, so they had to give it QoL to make it better.

However, people at times get stuck in the nostalgia of WHM in the fact that it's one of the most iconic jobs in the Final Fantasy series. It's difficult to get people to boycott the job en masse like so.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

however, there are a few glaring issues that are causing WHM to underperform in both Savage and Dungeons as early as Sastasha

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You lost me with this ridiculous statement. Underperform? In Sastasha? At level 15-17? Really?

Savage, I might see. Post-70 dungeons, perhaps. But Sastasha?

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

You lost me with this ridiculous statement. Underperform? In Sastasha? At level 15-17? Really?

Savage, I might see. Post-70 dungeons, perhaps. But Sastasha?

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While Sastasha is going a little too far, White Mage does struggle quite noticeably even below 70. It's MP economy is absolutely dreadful at 50. Granted, none of the content is remotely hard but you will absolutely bottom on spamming Stone/Holy at 50.

These are more QoL improvements rather than an overhaul and only addresses issues well into the leveling experience rather than something that would help it as soon as Sastasha.

If you want to do an overhaul, it needs to address things from the ground up, like so
Cost and Cast Time Adjustments:

Cure 2
1k MP -> 700 MP
2s -> 1.5s

Medica
900 MP -> 700 MP
2s -> 1.5s

Medica 2
1k MP -> 900 MP
2s - 1.5s

Cure 3
1500 MP -> 1200 MP
2s -> 1.5s

Regen
500 MP -> 400 MP

Holy
2.5s -> 1.5s

Skill Adjustments:

Aero
Deals wind damage with a potency of 40.
Additional Effect: Wind damage over time
Potency: 20
Duration: 30s
Only one Aero spell-induced damage over time effect per caster can be inflicted upon a single target.

Fluid Aura - Deals Water Damage with a Potency of 200.
Additional Effect: Restore 5% of Maximum MP
Unlock at level 15.
Level 56: Enhanced Fluid Aura. Upgrades into Assize

Protect - Reduces damage taken by a party member or self by 8%
Duration: 8s
Unlock at level 20.
Level 86: Enhanced Protect. Upgrades into Aqua Veil

Stoneskin - Creates a barrier around self or target party member that absorbs damage equivalent to a heal of 300 potency.
Duration: 15s
Unlocks at level 25.
Level 66: Enhanced Stoneskin. Upgrades into Divine Benison

Afflatus Solace
Unlocks at level 30

Afflatus Rapture
Unlocks at level 30

Regen
Aeolus Additional Effect: 10% chance after each tick that the next Aero spell of any grade will add its full damage over time amount to its initial damage and cost no MP
Duration: 40s

Divine Seal - Increases healing magic potency by 10%, while reducing damage taken by self and all party members within a radius of 30 yalms by 5%.
Duration: 20s
Unlock at level 40.
Level 80: Enhanced Divine Seal. Upgrades into Temperance.

Cure 3
6y -> 15y

Graniteskin
Creates a barrier around self and nearby party members that absorbs damage equivalent to a heal of 250 potency.
Duration: 15s
Unlock at level 45.
Level 70: Enhanced Graniteskin. Upgrades into Plenary Indulgence

Aero 2
Deals wind damage with a potency of 40 to target and all enemies nearby it.
Additional Effect: Wind damage over time
Potency: 15
Duration: 30s
Only one Aero spell-induced damage over time effect per caster can be inflicted upon a single target.
Unlocks at level 46.

Medica 2
Aeolus Additional Effect: 3% chance after each tick that the next Aero spell of any grade will add its full damage over time amount to its initial damage and cost no MP
Duration: 40s

Benediction
180s CD -> 120s CD

Asylum
90s CD -> 60s CD

Assize
MP Restore 5% -> 8%

Thin Air
Next 2 actions are executed without MP cost.
Duration: 15s
Maximum Charges: 2

Tetragrammaton
Additional Effect: Grants 1 Lily

Aero 3
Deals wind damage with a potency of 50.
Additional Effect: Wind damage over time
Potency: 40
Duration: 30s
Only one Aero spell-induced damage over time effect per caster can be inflicted upon a single target.
Unlocks at level 62.

Aero 4
Deals wind damage with a potency of 50 to target and all enemies nearby it.
Additional Effect: Wind damage over time
Potency: 30
Duration: 30s
Only one Aero spell-induced damage over time effect per caster can be inflicted upon a single target.
Unlocks at level 62.

Plenary Indulgence
Shield Potency upgraded to 400

Dia 2
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 60 to target and all enemies nearby it.
Additional Effect: Unaspected damage over time
Potency: 45
Duration: 30s
Unlocks at level 72

Afflatus Misery
900 potency -> 950 potency
Additional Effect: Cleric Stance.
Cleric Stance effect: Increases attack magic potency by 5% for 15s

Liturgy of the Bell
Duration: 15 -> 30s
180s CD -> 120s CD
Upon activation, grant 5 stacks of Liturgy of the Bell and skill changes into Lily's Bloom. Upon using Lily's Bloom, expend a stack of Liturgy to release a 400 potency heal in a 30y radius.

Trait Adjustments:

Freecure
Unlocks at level 28. Upgrades Cure into Cure 2

Aero Mastery
Unlocks at level 62. Upgrades Aero and Aero 2 into Aero 3 and Aero 4

Secret of the Lilies 2
Unlocks at level 68. Restore 5% MP upon use of a Lily

Aero Mastery 2
Unlocks at level 72. Upgrades Aero 3 and Aero 4 into Dia and Dia 2

Enhanced Tetragrammaton
Allows the accumulation of charges for consecutive uses of Tetragrammaton.
Maximum Charges: 2
Unlocks at level 76.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

These are more QoL improvements rather than an overhaul and only addresses issues well into the leveling experience rather than something that would help it as soon as Sastasha.
[/HB]

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I like the direction. Some additional changes that might be nice:

Cure II - a critical will proc the spell and cost 0 mana to cast (Free Cure should be a free cure)
Protect - already a Bozja spell. To make it different - Protectra - and make it an 16 ilm spell aoe around the target
Instead of Stoneskin (Bozja again) rename to Shellra


One addition to give WHM some differentiation:

Reraise II (Bozja names again)- Self-cast only. 75% chance to reraise IF there is a living party member. You have a 10 second countdown on the reraise popup that if you choose not to reraise you will lose it and have to wait for a regular raise. A regular raise will overwrite your reraise option. This is to stop people from cheesing mechanics. Duration of spell will last from casting to knockout so always use at start of battle.

Edit: Oh...and can we get rid of Repose? Everyone forgets that we have that waste of space.

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Originally Posted by Herrisa

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Something that I was trying to do was limit button bloat as much as possible so that there wouldn't be much issue with implementation, hence why Protect, Fluid Aura, etc all upgrade into skills we currently have available. The only skill that I realistically added was an AoE DoT to the job. If people wouldn't complain about it, I would've added back Cleric Stance to function as WHM's Eukrasia, turning Cure 2/Medica into their Afflatus Equivalents while also expanding on the Lily System by reworking Misery to be the Afflatus version of Holy, adding Afflatus Versions of Medica 2 and Cure 3 as well as a single target version of Misery to act as a Glare equivalent but because all I hear with that suggestion is "Hurr durr Homogeny bad", my options to add skills that don't contribute to button bloat are extremely limited because realistically there isn't a way to include them UNLESS you add a Eukrasia button. Flat out having our skills turn into their Afflatus Versions upon gaining a lily causes conflict with skills like Glare and Holy because you end up using your Lilies outside of your control now that you HAVE to use them, which causes you to have little to no agency on when you can unleash Misery so I'm kind of stuck when it comes to including new things.

As for your suggestions.
I kind of went overboard on fixing WHM's MP economy that a free proc of Cure 2 is just not needed. I buffed Assize+Thin Air, reduced the cost of several abilities, made Lilies give MP, lowered the CD on several of our oGCDs, etc. that I severely overdid it.

Protect, Protectra, Stoneskin, Shellra. What's in a name? Ultimately they'd just turn into Aqua Veil, Divine Benison, etc. so it's whatever. I called Stoneskin 2 Graniteskin because it sounded better but since it turns into PI at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

Reraise seems....problematic for a number of reasons. No healer ability should be % based (Lady/Lord of Crowns are problematic for this reason alone) but to make it something that is actually somewhat abusable seeing as you could potentially cheese several other mechanics with it, if it works, doesn't seem like a balanced thing. I feel Reraise should be a status effect that occurs when a target is rezzed by 2 people at the same time that cancels out the weakness debuff that is standard with rezzing. That way, Healers don't feel like their MP was wasted unnecessarily by a lack of communication and the group suffers for it less.

Removing Repose is fine. They can just make it into a Duty Action like Vril on Lakshmi for the 1 quest its required in and nothing would be lost.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

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I agree with you that a lot of skills they removed should come back and be a lower version of higher level skills such as Protect, Shell, & Stoneskin. Not to mention those are classic whm skills and it hurt when they removed them.

For button bloat, having Cure upgrade to Cure II, Medica mimicking Medica II, just a weaker potency, then upgrading to Medica II when the times comes will help. My concern with mp regen is the pre lvl 52 (Assize) problem. Insert story: newbie tank + 1st room Aurum Vale + healer death = <lvl52 whm mp regen horror show. Trust me, Lucid Dreaming doesn't cut it so a better type of mp recovery besides Lucid Dreaming is needed at those levels. Spamming Cure and hoping for a Cure II proc is rough, very rough, on the mp pool.

Names are important since it will at least avoid confusion (why does this Stoneskin do this but this Stoneskin do that?), not to mention the background database stuff going on.

I played WHM on FFXI so I'm partial to Reraise and wish it was in our toolkit but, yeah, it can be problematic which is most likely why they won't let us have it. Thinking about it and reading what Plenary Indulgence in the real world is (getting people out of Purgatory by prayer) what if it was completely changed and became a 2nd Raise skill for whm which will raise a single-target without the weakness buff but on a very long cooldown? It will also remove the Confessions mechanic which seems redundant and underutilized.

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Originally Posted by Herrisa

Snip

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I suppose if Cure 3 got the radius buff I suggest to 15y, you could merge Medica and Medica 2 in a hypothetical situation but then Afflatus Rapture seems out of place. A 400 potency AoE heal with nothing to compare it to other than being a weaker Cure 3 kind of makes you question why it exists when the original skill is an AoE regen. You could just rework Afflatus Rapture to be a regen as well but I feel as though WHM has lost enough as is without trying to consolidate it even more. The reason it works for Cure is because its just a weaker Cure 2 but Medica and Medica 2 function quite differently from one another that I'm not sure you could merge them normally.

I tried to address MP issues on low level WHM as much as possible, with Lilies skills being available at 30, Fluid Aura acting as a low level Assize with the 5% MP restore, and the low level oGCDs skills of Stoneskin, Protect and Divine Seal offering some extra cushion for those types of scenarios. Believe me, I know WHM's MP issues very well, I stomached it all back in ARR and it was easier with those extra tools, even if they're not the same as they were back then.

On the topic of names, I still feel that they're all meaningless in this game. Bozja and PvP are such minor areas of the game that skills sharing a name between them all is largely inconsequential because you aren't exposed to those areas often enough to even matter and when you are exposed, it doesn't really take all that long to read the tooltip to find out how they differ from one another. It's a minor nitpick and not one that I really care enough to distinguish.

There's not much of interest in the current WHM kit, regardless, but simple fixes would require little more than...

1. A trait that reduces most MP costs. (Don't bother with Draw/Assize/Aetherflow convolution; just give us a simple passive to reduce costs.)
2. A ~5% rDPS bump. Increase Glare (III) potency by 10 and triple Dia's initial damage. (+460 ppm, up from of 8740 = +5.3%)
3. Having each Lily consumed turn into a Blood Lily, with Afflatus Misery consuming all available --i.e., 1-3-- Lilies (for no potency cost at 3 and, say, 30 lost per extra instant-cast leveraged through using prior to 3 Lilies: 600 for 1 Lily, 940 for 2 Lilies, 1280 for 3 -- equal to 4 Glares, which would now be 320 each).
4. Reducing Liturgy's CD to 120s and either turning its effect into basically Panhaima or allowing for manual, animation-iCD-less activation (likely at higher potency and just 4 stacks as not to get too spammy).

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

*schnip*

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I really like the idea of Regen triggering Thundercloud-like feature, something similar could enhance AST too.
If Square goes into the direction of rewarding shield healers for getting their shields broken (so that they actually have a reason to GCD shield heal) then a mechanic like that would incentivise Pure healers to Regen heal like they're "subrole" dictates them to. Right now the Pure & Shield healer labels mean very little.

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Originally Posted by DPZ2

Savage, I might see. Post-70 dungeons, perhaps. But Sastasha?

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Hilariously, it actually does underperform in Satasha.

Sage has Kardia, SCH has Embrace and AST has Essential Dignity. WHM has nothing extra.

Obviously Satasha is so easy it doesn't matter, but technically WHM is still the worst healer there. It really is a joke of a class right from the start.

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Originally Posted by RinaShinomiya

I really like the idea of Regen triggering Thundercloud-like feature, something similar could enhance AST too.
If Square goes into the direction of rewarding shield healers for getting their shields broken (so that they actually have a reason to GCD shield heal) then a mechanic like that would incentivise Pure healers to Regen heal like they're "subrole" dictates them to. Right now the Pure & Shield healer labels mean very little.

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I would prefer for healers to play different from one another. The whole Thundercloud proc is to make WHM more like its BLM counterpart and to enhance its own damage so it feels like a powerful healer with strong attacks as well.

As AST is my least played Healer, I'm hesitant on how to actually improve the job to be more engaging as from my past experiences with the job, all the engagement on AST has always been locked behind its card system, rather than actually having more DPS spells (It's always been a 1 Nuke, 1 DoT, 1 AoE class) It had Stella as well I suppose but that was just a weak nuke with a Heavy Debuff attached and was largely irrelevant outside niche mechanics that heavy was helpful in. In regards to its GCD heals, AST has Horoscope, Neutral Sect and I guess Synastry to give their GCD some extra utility so they don't particularly need much help in that department either.

So the only real way to enhance AST gameplay would be to change the Card system to be fun again but I'm not sure returning to the old card system would be the right direction since Balance was so polarizing that all other options just felt like a consolation prize.

I'm not really sure how to improve AST in terms of engagement, other than undo the change to Redraw to give it 3 charges again like in ShB and to reduce some button bloat by merging Play/Crown Play with Draw/Minor Arcana

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Hilariously, it actually does underperform in Satasha.

Sage has Kardia, SCH has Embrace and AST has Essential Dignity. WHM has nothing extra.

Obviously Satasha is so easy it doesn't matter, but technically WHM is still the worst healer there. It really is a joke of a class right from the start.

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"But Cure has 50 extra potency than Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis so it's fine" /s.

WHM feels like a meme at this point.

I'd pour one out for WHM but I don't think I can anymore, they nuked Fluid Aura.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

"But Cure has 50 extra potency than Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis so it's fine" /s.

WHM feels like a meme at this point.

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Damn straight. Also, I REALLY am liking the idea of Thundercloud Dia since it gives more agency to the player on where to throw it. All your rework suggestions are good, but I’ll have to wait until I get home to add them to the OP. But all aside, I noticed in the live letter Q&A that WHM is going to get some work done on it, but mostly I’m expecting band-aid potencies and MAYBE MP reductions akin to what they did with AST in 5.2.

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Originally Posted by HyperiusUltima

OP Snip.

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Don't forget to Lower the cooldown of the lilybell from 180 to 120 seconds. This skill is already situational as hell, and STILL we need to choose WHICH situations to use it because if we use it in one, we won't have it up for the other. This sucks big time.

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Originally Posted by AlexionSkyllark

Don't forget to Lower the cooldown of the lilybell from 180 to 120 seconds. This skill is already situational as hell, and STILL we need to choose WHICH situations to use it because if we use it in one, we won't have it up for the other. This sucks big time.

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Was planning to. Sadly can’t edit on mobile(SE WHY).

I am definitely not a healer main, but when I heal I use white mage. I thought I would share my thoughts about changes to strengthen white mage while also trying not to tip balance to hard. There are only two abilities I would change to bring improvement.

free cure: make Stone/Glare the ability that procs free cure. Doing some unnecessary math, since we all already know cure fishing is bad, a 15% proc means you cast cure seven time per proc, granting 3500 potency, costing 3500 MP to get one free 800 potency heal. The cure power of cure II is nearly equal for half the GCDs, 3200 for four cure II's costing 4000 MP. The situations you need heal spam is pretty much only trash pulls, and cure wont keep the tank alive. You pretty much never (or should never) cast cure once you have cure II. This will fix some of the MP problem since you get free cure for spamming glare, which you already were doing.

Lily: I want to compare lily to the other healers special resource heals.
AST has no special resource heal, it instead has cards which can be kept on CD, additionally AST heals cost a less MP. This is the least comparable to lilies but the difference is the card CD can always be ticking.
SCH using aetherflow, a 60 second CD granting three charges and restores 20% MP, you can also hold your charges and let the CD tick, letting SCH use up to six 600 potency heals on a 1 second recast in rapid succession. CDs also tick while dead, making little downtime aetherflow, but lilies and addergall reset to zero if you die.
SGE gets addersgall, which they get every 20 seconds and spend for a 600 potency heal and a 7% mp restore on a 1 second recast. This ability recharges faster, recasts faster, restores MP, and you are always generating stacks.
While WHM gets 1 lily every 30 seconds only while in combat (the timer also resets if combat ends if I'm not mistaken) for a 700 potency heal on a full GCD recast.
How I would fix this is recharge every 20 or 30 seconds (depending on how often Devs want blood lily to activate) in and out of combat like SGE and shorten the recast to 1 second to match SGE and SCH heals.

Side topic: Lots of players are saying, using the blood lily is a potency loss over glare spam. I do not think the potency of 4 GCD glare, vs 4 GCD for one blood lily is comparable. You can only blood lily once every 90 seconds when you get 3 lilies (36 GCD), and you glare/dia/heal 33 times between every blood lily. So really its a potency gain, because you will have to stop the glare spam to heal during actual play. Yes if you are just doing a DPS test, blood lily is a damage loss, but in practice you should be spending lilies anyway so I do not think it needs a potency buff or really any change, especially if lilies generate in and out of combat.

Regardless of blood lily, lilies are inferior to the special resource heals currently being used by the other healers, both in how long it takes to get your stacks, and how quick you can spend them.

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Originally Posted by BoobooDaBear

Side topic: Lots of players are saying, using the blood lily is a potency loss over glare spam. I do not think the potency of 4 GCD glare, vs 4 GCD for one blood lily is comparable. You can only blood lily once every 90 seconds when you get 3 lilies (36 GCD), and you glare/dia/heal 33 times between every blood lily. So really its a potency gain, because you will have to stop the glare spam to heal during actual play. Yes if you are just doing a DPS test, blood lily is a damage loss, but in practice you should be spending lilies anyway so I do not think it needs a potency buff or really any change, especially if lilies generate in and out of combat.

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Making Afflatus Misery always a DPS neutral action would do a lot of good for both experienced healers and casual healers. As it stands, yes, Misery is always a DPS loss. Even if you're forced to use GCD healing, you are still losing damage, which makes Misery a partial return of DPS rather than a full refund. But WHM is already the healer pressured far more than any other to GCD heal due to an overall lack of OGCD healing that's almost ubiquitously outclassed by tools every other healer has access to. In other words, they lose a lot more DPS uptime due to just not having the resources to pump out free healing like the other healers can.

Having said that, though, I think keeping WHM as a low APM job is a good thing. There are a lot of players that want something slower and easier to play, but that doesn't mean WHM needs to be boring either. It's totally within the design team's power to make WHM all about making impactful choices with the spells they choose while still allowing its tools to be forgiving.

Making Misery completely DPS neutral, without any other changes, would make quite literally everyone happy. Experienced healers would be fully encouraged to take advantage of the GCD healing for once in the history of FFXIV as you benefit from being net positive on HP while maintaining your momentum. Meanwhile, casual players benefit from a naturally raised skill floor since you're promised a certain amount of optimal DPS every 90ish seconds, though you also aren't pressured to pump out as many Miserys as you can. So even if you are optimizing, you can sit on full lilies when no healing is needed and not need to use them.

The only potential concern is encouraging pumping out Miserys during burst windows. But for casual players, that's not something they're thinking about anyway, and we could also resolve that issue very easily by just giving Misery a 20 second recast time, if it even would be a problem at a higher level of play.

What I find ironic is that it aligns perfectly with the design team's goals of healing. It almost feels like they won't do it to spite the midcore/hardcore audience even though it would also benefit the casual audience. But then again, they also heavily nerfed Thin Air. You know, to make healing "easier" and "more accessible."

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

What I find ironic is that it aligns perfectly with the design team's goals of healing. It almost feels like they won't do it to spite the midcore/hardcore audience even though it would also benefit the casual audience. But then again, they also heavily nerfed Thin Air. You know, to make healing "easier" and "more accessible."

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The great lie of this whole conversation is that there is not a middle ground where the dev teams want for healing to be easy and more accessible, cant meet the high end crowds want for healers with more coherent kits and engaging downtime options. We've literally seen hundreds of suggestions from players that do not in anyway touch the accessibility of the game for players on the lower skilled end, and are strictly designed around the idea of making the current kits for healing both just work better and provide a more engaging experience overall. And many of those ideas work perfectly fine within the dev teams current view of accessibility and low stress.

The biggest failure of the dev team post ARR is not recognizing that middle ground can't be reached. The second biggest is in thinking the current healers even appeal to a 'casual' audience. Casual players doesn't equal bad. And there are many casual players who just play it and within a few months of playing realize they are bored and try a different role.

What about changing the Lilies to OGCD and keep them in combat charge but not lose them when you die. This adds to our lacking OGCD healing and makes them useful.

Since we gained some OGCD and IMO tetra is double of that remove it to like a GNB 2 or 3 charge of Lilies on maybe a 90 second cooldown. This will add stacks to needed healing time (start of instance or on a raise to save MP) and also can be burned for a smaller burst phase if need in savage content with blood lilies.

Liturgy changed to either damage received by party and or button released heals.

I think this is a quick fix without too much reworking and can be pushed through in an update and then reworked at a later point. But this makes them very viable in content now.

I don't think WHM needs a complete rework greatly improve it.
If they changed a few things I'd be happy with it.
- Reduce Afflatus Misery potency to 3XX and turn it into oGCD.
- Blood Lilly bloom afters using one normal Lilly, or Glare contributes to Blood Lilly.
- Add 2nd stack to Assize.
- Revert change to Thin Air.
- Remove heal on damage and auto detonate from Liturgy of the Bell, have stacks build up over time (1 stack per 2 seconds), require manual detonate, and increase potency.
- Lower Holy cast time to 1.5 seconds.

There are some other weird parts to the kit, like Cure 1 and Cure 3 being mostly useless. Those don't really get in the way to using WHM, but would be nice if they got some attention too.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by aiqa

I don't think WHM needs a complete rework greatly improve it.

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I feel the opposite.

Healer design is stagnant and each healer plays so similarly to one another that it defeats the purpose of even having different classes to begin with. SCH and SGE are classified as Shield Healers but outside the 2-3 oGCD shields they provide, they're just as reactive to healing damage as WHM or AST. Other than AST's cards and SCH's fairy, there's nothing particularly unique about any of the healers so giving them some flavor again is necessary, IMO.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

I feel the opposite.

Healer design is stagnant and each healer plays so similarly to one another that it defeats the purpose of even having different classes to begin with. SCH and SGE are classified as Shield Healers but outside the 2-3 oGCD shields they provide, they're just as reactive to healing damage as WHM or AST. Other than AST's cards and SCH's fairy, there's nothing particularly unique about any of the healers so giving them some flavor again is necessary, IMO.

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This always rubbed me the wrong way back in ShB when I played SCH (although it was mostly in casual content). Maybe it's a balance thing to keep shield healers from being too strong but I never felt like I was really preventing damage with Succor/Adlo/Sacred Soil when I usually ended up following up damage with an oGCD heal anyways. The closest I got was Critlo on the tank and Deployment Tactics but that's extremely unwieldy to use mid-fight other than for stacks

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Originally Posted by baklava151

This always rubbed me the wrong way back in ShB when I played SCH (although it was mostly in casual content). Maybe it's a balance thing to keep shield healers from being too strong but I never felt like I was really preventing damage with Succor/Adlo/Sacred Soil when I usually ended up following up damage with an oGCD heal anyways. The closest I got was Critlo on the tank and Deployment Tactics but that's extremely unwieldy to use mid-fight other than for stacks

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I feel like Pet Healer is a better term for SCH myself. They have several mechanics centered around the fairy moreso then their shields. Outside of Deployment and Emergency Tactics, SCH's Shield mechanics are largely ignored and considering that several of their capstone abilities involve the Fairy, (Dissipation eats the fairy, Aetherpact tethers the fairy and Seraph upgrades the fairy.) it just feels like shield healer doesn't really fit SCH.

My personal wish list:

First and foremost, give back the good ol' Aero III

Cure II
Potency bumped to 900p
MP Cost = 800

Cure III
Potency bumped to 650p
Extend the radius to 12y
Cast time = 1.5s
MP Cost = 1300

Medica I
Cast time = 1.5s
MP Cost = 700

Medica II
Upfront heal bumped to 300p
MP Cost = 900

Regen
Potency per tick bumped to 300p

Afflatus Solace
Unlocks at lv35.

Afflatus Rapture
Unlocks at lv62. At the same level grants 5% MP restoration for using healing lilies, including Solace.

Asylum
Cooldown reduced to 60s.
Duration shortened to 18s.

Tetragrammaton
Each use reduce next lily timer by 15s.
Gains 2nd charge at lv78.

Fluid Aura
Returns at lv15 but effect changed. Functions as baby version of Aquaveil.

Divine Benison
Breaking the shield reduce next lily timer by 5s.

Assize
Gains an upgrade trait at lv68. Grants "Tornado Ready", enabling the execution of instant GCD "Tornado". Last for 30s or until Tornado is used.

Tornado **NEW**
Deals wind damage with a potency of 420p to one target and 70% less to all nearby enemies. Also inflict wind damage over time with a potency of 50p for 21s. (damage fall off also applies)
Can only be executed under the effect of "Tornado Ready". Replaces Aero III hotkey until "Tornado Ready" is spent or expires.
Radius = 6y

Afflatus Misery (Two Alternatives)
#1 Simple potency bump to 1,240p, OR;
#2 Slight bump to 930p. Each Misery cast grants 5 stacks of "Glaring Inspiration", raising next spell potency (includes healing spell) by 20% while also eliminating cast time.

Liturgy of the Bell
Duration extended to 20 seconds.
Healing waves now have different conditions of proccing and how it affects the outcome:
#1 Procs at 400p/wave if the WHM is hit. This condition nourishes blood lily at the same rate as using healing lilies.
#2 Procs at 300p/wave if the WHM detonates the waves manually by pressing the hotkey. No blood lily nourishment, but reduce next lily timer by 3s per stack.
#3 Procs at 350p*remaining stacks if the timer expires on its own. Reduce next lily timer by 5s for each remaining stacks. Also no blood lily nourishment.

Some numbers are whacky I admit (especially the additional damage spell and the lily timer reduction), but decided to just put in some ideas that's been circulating in my head.

Also I liked Silver-Strider's idea to add back Stoneskin and Divine Seal. I'd love to have more things to weave that low ;)

EDIT: I forgot to add that Freecure should've been an upgrade of Cure I to Cure II lol.

My own wish list would be something like (Glare potency may need adjustment):

Afflatus Solace unlocked at lv30. PoM can be unlocked later.
Afflatus Misery and Rapture unlocked at lv50.

Afflatus Misery now costs only 2 Blood lily charges. 550 potency, later increasing to 900 with the trait upgrades to Stone.

Tetra unlocked at lv15 and gains a trait for 2 charges at lv60.

Asylum has a 60 sec cd and 15 sec duration.

Thin Air removed entirely and becomes a trait:
"Casting a spell with a mana cost of 500 or less grants Thin Air, reducing the mana cost of spells by 1% (duration 15 sec, stacks up to 8 times). At 8 stacks gain Pure Air. Your next spell with a cost of 800 or more will have no cast time and cost 0 mana. Removes Pure Air".

Dia/Aero II:
Same effect.
15% chance with each tick that you'll gain Approaching Storms.

Tornado
Instant GCD
Can only be cast while you have Approaching Storms.
40 potency DoT. Duration 30 seconds.
While both Dia and Tornado are active: 10% chance per tick to activate Banish.

Banish:
Instant ability. Up to 2 stacks.
150 damage potency.

Afflatus Radiance
Lv52 Cost: 1 Lily
Cure potency: 150 to self and all nearby allies.
Duration 15 seconds. Range 20y

Afflatus Divinity
Lv76 Cost: 2 Lilies. Recast time 120s.
Cure potency: 1000 to self and all nearby allies
Range 25y

Nature's Blessing:
Instant ability.
Recast: 90s.
Grants 1 lily and Approaching Storm.

Assize has 2 charges.

Holy, Medica, Cure II and Cure III have a 1.5 sec cast time.

Freecure is deleted. MP cost of Cure II and Medica become 700 and 800.

Lilybell cooldown reduced to 2 minutes. Duration 20 seconds. Heal potency reduced to 300 per tick/150 per stack on expiration. The WHM may manually detonate all stacks.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

snip.

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Couple of concerns.

1) You're locking a bit of WHM's Damage behind RNG mechanics which may further reduce WHM's damage.

2)In the case of perfect RNG when both Dia/Tornado do proc repeatedly, Banish only holding 2 stacks falling into a similar pitfall of overcapping as MNK's Chakra System.

3) Divinity in conjunction with Misery only requiring only 2 Lilies results in WHM using Lilies solely for your 2 minute burst Window. You'd burn 1 lily in 30 seconds and save the remaining 3 in order to get 2 Misery's into your burst Window by using 1 more lily to trigger Misery and then burn Divinity to get a 2nd Misery.

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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Nah not really. WHM is still good to go for at least 3 expansions that's how little tools it has.
SCH and AST on the other hand keep tripping over themselves.

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Originally Posted by aiqa

When new spells are added, others need to be removed. FF14 is designed for proper controller support, and WHM is already very close to the limits for number of spells for easy controller use.

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That's actually incredibly simple to solve for WHM.

Rework Cleric Stance to function as a Eukrasia for Afflatus Spells, so all our base skills (Cure 2, Medica and Holy) turn into their Afflatus Equivalent spells. This allows them to add Afflatus Medica 2, Cure 3 and a ST Misery that overrides Glare as new spells without worrying about Button Bloat. You effectively trade 3 spells for 1 and can add more spells as needed.

I honestly don't think a Eukrasia mechanic is necessary, or even a good idea. I think it'd be more useful to simply have Cure 2 and Medica 1 turn into the Afflatus heals, like Red Mage's melee combo, since there's zero situations in which you'd wanna use the versions with cast times when you have lillies available. I'd enjoy a lily equivalent to Regen, though.

My issue with simply turning Cure 2/Medica into their Afflatus forms is during scenarios when you want to hold Misery to align with Raid Buffs. If you need to heal with your GCD and have a Lily, you essentially burn a lily at pure loss at both the Lily and any potential potency that Misery would refund. Niche scenario sure but still 1 that kind of sucks to be in since Misery is already enough of a DPS loss that losing out on raid buffs on top of it all just feels bad.

Personally I’d rather have charges on Misery and maybe an extra Lily charge than to straight buff the potency. Making it cost 2 heals instead of three and allowing it to align on raid buffs accomplishes a lot in that direction and is ultimately what I’d prefer. The other suggestions just allow you to pick between 1m and 2m alignment fairly trivially.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Couple of concerns.

1) You're locking a bit of WHM's Damage behind RNG mechanics which may further reduce WHM's damage.

2)In the case of perfect RNG when both Dia/Tornado do proc repeatedly, Banish only holding 2 stacks falling into a similar pitfall of overcapping as MNK's Chakra System.

3) Divinity in conjunction with Misery only requiring only 2 Lilies results in WHM using Lilies solely for your 2 minute burst Window. You'd burn 1 lily in 30 seconds and save the remaining 3 in order to get 2 Misery's into your burst Window by using 1 more lily to trigger Misery and then burn Divinity to get a 2nd Misery.

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

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Perhaps, although BLM does have Thunder procs. The idea behind it is you guarantee getting Dia + Tornado rolling with Nature's Blessing and it's very likely Tornado will proc again before its duration expires. Thus you maintain 2 DoT's which generate an oGCD dps filler. An oGCD filler for WHM would fit nicely with their abundance of weave windows.

Obviously there's room for tweaking, you could make Tornado a straight up regular DoT, bump the proc chance of Tornado and/or Banish and let Banish stack higher.

I liked the idea of Divinity because it gives WHM the "big heal" identity it doesn't actually have right now and consuming double resources into one GCD is a unique idea for a focused burst.

Misery at 900 is still a 30 loss, so bursting with it isn't a crazy gain. But being honest I don't like Misery in the first place. It's a problematic ability and designs the class into a corner where we're limited on so many things because "we'd be forced to blow lilies for Misery at x point if they gave us that". Even dps neutral lilies, you'd always want to go into a 2 min burst window with Misery active. Not to mention downtime lilies. While Misery exists in its current form, it'll never be optimal to just use lilies as heals.

I mentioned the idea before of making Afflatus heals simply "drain" 310 potency in damage from the nearest enemy target, with Misery being a 310 aoe with no falloff, which fixes basically everything and no one liked the idea. For some reason WHM's are fixated on that big nuke despite the fact it's forcing the class to remain worse than it should be. But if I was to write a true wishlist, that would be a definite change over the 2 lily Misery idea.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

It's a weird balance of some suggestions being potential DPS loses, while others cause abusing the system for DPS gains.

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Pretty much every forum rework is, including those recent videos that people praise so much.

It's worthwhile to discuss and we can come up with some nice ideas (some of yours are good and I like Rein's list too, although I'd never buff Medica II or Regen potency), but ultimately we aren't game designers. Nor are the current devs qualified because none of them main healer. This is why the development team needs a dedicated healer developer so badly, someone who can really test, refine, communicate with the team, listen to feedback and focus on what actually feels good to play.

As much as I enjoyed the videos, I didn't agree with everything in them myself. I just enjoyed their insight and used them as a reference for my own suggestions and trying to incorporate some of their suggestions into my own, such as Diacloud.

It did, however, try to temper my suggestions to avoid adding new skills to stem arguments of button bloat, which is something else we would need to consider with our own suggestions. While I did add several skills in terms of abilities, the majority of them upgrade via the trait system and don't actively contribute to button bloat and the 1 skill that I did add (AoE Aero/Dia) was cancelled out by Cure upgrading into Cure 2 thus removing that skill from the total number of skills we have currently available. I knew my Cleric Stance Idea would be lambasted and I have an equally controversial suggestion for SCH I'm working on, but I still felt that it was a worthwhile suggestion to make to further alleviate potential button bloat issues that may arise.

So in regards to your suggestions, how would you adjust WHM's toolkit to include your suggestions without contributing to Button Bloat?