So your giving Summoner Akh morn but your not giving White mage any new water spells.

[GunsBlazing]

Holy isn't the end all and be all of WHM damage. Its not only cosumes more MP then any other attack, but it only really makes up for that with atleast 3 enemies being hit by it...and since apparently we will only want to fight 1-2 enemies at a time in Heavensward, it won't be quite as good. The new attacks will probably be good for this, or for quick AoEs that don't consume quite as much mana (I'm assuming the new Aero is an AoE, thats what it looks like atleast.)

We only want to fight one or two enemies in heavensward ALONE, is what they were referring to. They said that in response to the question someone posed about the current state of the game, how there are no monsters out there that pose any real threat to players. He responded by saying that two of those field mobs would give you a hell of a fight, if you managed to survive. That's also likely not going to last long, either. We'll outgear those monsters by the time the first content patch post-expansion hits, and we'll be fighting 5 of them at once again. In dungeons, you'll have a party of four and a tank to soak up the damage. Not to mention that WHM holy spam gives you 7 seconds of AOE stun total to mitigate damage while you're holy nuking. All you need to do is cast regen, start holying, and for 7 seconds that regen is more than enough to keep your tank alive. Anything after that, you have to watch. Keep holying til your tanks at about 40%, then drop cleric stance, cure 2, put up another regen, and holy some more. SE has tried to make dungeons difficult to speed run by adding bigger and stronger mobs to the fray in the areas you can pull multiple groups in, and to this date, it has never stopped people from pulling big enough groups to merit AOE DPSing them down. Examples; The goobbues in Snowcloak, the Morbols in AK Hard, the Dullahans in AK normal and even the corrupted sprites in pharos... All of these were monsters that SE thought would be too strong for us to AOE down, and thus prevent speed runs, and every time, we have still AOE'd them down. Holy is still casted in every single one of these situations, as well, assuming your WHM knows how to properly play their job. It'll still be used in HW, no matter how much SE tries to prevent big pulls from happening.

Obviously you don't holy on one or two targets, nobody other than you even mentioned such a notion. I specifically mentioned holy being the strongest AOE in the game, and it is. Get a blm, have them do their aoe rotation for 30 seconds on a dummy, and have a whm do nothing but cast holy. The WHM does more damage in the end. Yeah, whm will eventually run out of MP, but no AOE pull in any dungeon that exists today lives long enough to burn all your MP when you're holy spamming, unless you're doing it without cleric stance on.

[Dualblade]

snip

Atla was pretty much saying we don't need any more DPS skills for WHM because Holy, which I should have quoted him since I ment to be in reply to him. Of course in parties even with the new skills Holy is the way to go (Unless Aero 3 is an AoE, in which case it might be put in once in there sometimes), and eventually we are going to outgear these mobs...but not for a bit, and the new attack skills will probably be needed. As well I would say that Snowcloak and AK Hard aren't good examples, simply because for the most part people were outgearing it by the time those came out period. Pharos and AK Normal I can't say though since I'm not sure if we did outgear those (I think we did for Pharos? If I remember part of the problem was we outgear'd it enough to do lots of damage, but not enough to do with the tons of adds that spawned during bosses cause of it.)

And again, I was talking about overworld AKA solo. Dungeons, Holy is king for WHM.

According to the link from the Detailed Heavensward thread, Aero III is an AoE, so I could see it being used in between Holy's. And apparently Assize not only does AoE damage, but also heals nearby party members...can't complain about that!