White Mage is Poorly designed compared to Scholar

[Raestloz]

What I hate when playing WHM is the total randomness of freecure and overcure.
Most of the time, I don't need them when they pop and they don't stay up long enough to be of any real use.
Now if they could stay up until needed and even be stacked up to 2 or 3 ...

Yeah, this.

What I see about White Mage and Scholars:

1. White Mage is for burst heals with threat of enmity. Evident with Cure II, Benediction, and Shroud of Saints
2. Scholar is for sustained heals. Evident with low heal potency, multiple instances of heals and sustainable flow of MP

White Mage and Black Mage are pretty much the same: they excel at what they do, but are extremely boring. White Mages are focused too much on burst heals that to keep up MP I don't do much else, and when I DO need to burst heal, MP goes down the drain. Scholars have low potency on Succor/Adloquium, but keep in mind the presence of fairy, which takes half of the potency and also half the MP cost, couple this with Aetherflow and Scholars have plenty of things to do with the "excess" MP when fight is not big. Yes, White Mage has Holy, but it pretty much costs about 12% of your MP

While I agree with the role of burst and sustain heals, I find that White Mage's skills are... lackluster.

Presence of Mind really needs some work. 3 minutes cooldown for 10s duration? I don't use it much, because with THAT cooldown, it's like Benediction: if you use it at the wrong time, you're screwed when you need it. Maybe increase the duration or lower the cooldown or change it to some kind of MP management tool, maybe have it reduce MP cost by 10 % while it's active, or change it to a defensive tool such as increased defense with it active.

We need some kind of synergy. Right now, critical heals are nice but nothing to look forward to. Adloquium criticals will always benefit the recipients: you will always receive the full benefits of the shield. Critical heals on White Mages are usually wasted by a large margin because it will usually go over the max HP limit, and when the party only has White Mage, you'll be healing even when the tank still has about 70% HP

Freecure and Overcure are not that good. Free Cure II is welcome, but since it relies on luck, it's not something I really look forward to. Cure III is bad in general, and the new Overcure makes me use it sometimes when I have enough MP to spend like water, but Cure III and Overcure really needs a complete overhaul. The situational part of Cure III is so over the top, I never used it before the new Overcure. 500 MP is just too much to spend at once with a chance of somebody not getting the cure, and getting Overcure requires you to gamble and burn your MP with Cure II.

I do think that Cure III actually needs to go altogether. I already have Medica/II, I don't need such an overly situational spell such as Cure III. I'm not saying that it doesn't have its uses, it does, but it simply is not something I look forward to like the leap of Cure to Cure II, and I cannot put it in normal rotation due to the hefty cost and the extremely small coverage area. I think the radius is less than Sacred Soil.