We may get changes to cleric stance and esuna

[Ama_Hamada]

Cleric Stance and Esuna are so hard, i know.

Personally, i think they're shooting for more QoL changes, Cleric stance switching is more annoying than it needs to be (sometimes not responsive at all), and I wouldn't be mad if Esuna wasn't on the GCD. Though i will say that with heavensward, a lot of our more fun rotations became more of a juggle for maintaining some sort of buff, and they became unnecessarily complex because of that juggle, which was really punishing on people who simply are unable to multitask efficiently.

I have always preferred rotations that were based more on reacting to a given situations rather than following a cycle, and it's why i gravitated towards healers in this game, despite a long history of DPSing in other games.

ogcd esuna as a sch will be nice to stop the annoying war macros.

[Atlaworks]

Yeah I know the WHM one feels a bit stronger than the others, but let's be honest, they need some love right now.

HOLY

I may be just tad bias, and apologies for it, but this is like the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever. And I'm pretty okay with the holy spammers taking a backseat until 4.0. Besides, we won't know how 4.0 shakes up class balance- but in terms of role skills, I don't think the traits really need to be altered, other than "bonus to X" being the role skill instead of "Leeches" or whatever it is now. The presence alone is indicative of difference between classes.

[Serilda]

I would imagine that role skills can still be affected by traits, but who knows? SCH has a better Esuna too (in that they can use Selene to augment theirs) and AST can make theirs super fast, so it's going to be fun to balance everything. Especially as most of the key healer role skills directly pull from WHM's pool.

One tiny change to Cleric Stance (which surely can't keep that name as a true 'role' skill anyway) should be making it more obvious how you use it in groups. Nearly every new CNJ has that moment where they mistakenly put it on in a party to heal because 'cleric' sounds like a healer buff to anyone not used to D&D, and then everyone dies because their healing sucks. That's just annoying, and nothing to do with skill ceilings at endgame. It's not even easy to check the tooltip if you aren't using a mouse. Clunky, messy design.

Not making people on pads resort to macros to physically squash everything into their interface doesn't mean dumbing down the battle system - on the contrary, they can potentially make fights require more varied play without destroying half of the playerbase who cannot physically reach all of the abillities. Merging useless old abilities which should never have been separate in the first place also has no effect on player skill, just on time spent moving junk around out of combat.

[Meui]

Wouldn't be upset if, say, each healer got a different trait to make Esuna behave differently.

SCH - Adds a Barrier around the target absorbing damage equal to the duration of the debuff x Y%.
AST - Adds a random Card Effect to the target for half the duration of the removed debuff.
WHM - Esuna now affects the entire Party, but is subject to the Global Cooldown.

One reason I feel this might be bad is I'd assume this would override any current card buff the target may already have.

[Atlaworks]

One tiny change to Cleric Stance (which surely can't keep that name as a true 'role' skill anyway) should be making it more obvious how you use it in groups. Nearly every new CNJ has that moment where they mistakenly put it on in a party to heal because 'cleric' sounds like a healer buff to anyone not used to D&D, and then everyone dies because their healing sucks. That's just annoying, and nothing to do with skill ceilings at endgame. It's not even easy to check the tooltip if you aren't using a mouse. Clunky, messy design.

Really I don't know why we don't have a healer that has Ampador City Hard's boss design of a "Reversal" buff that makes cures hurt stuff. Otherwise, "KILL MODE" for Cleric Stance doesn't sound very healery either, which might've been the reason for it's name in the first place. Though really, we could spitball good Cleric Stance rename ideas all day.

Merging useless old abilities which should never have been separate in the first place also has no effect on player skill, just on time spent moving junk around out of combat.

Really looking forward to Rend Mind and Dismantle being one skill. Like, a lot. I hate those two being both separate and on the same shared 90 second cooldown.

[Vexander]

One reason I feel this might be bad is I'd assume this would override any current card buff the target may already have.

Good point. Hadn't really considered that, and I would hope that WOULDN'T be the case. If anything make it so card buffs don't overlap. So if the entire party has Balance and you Esuna the tank, they could have Spire/Ewer/Spear/Arrow/Bole as a second card effect. I mean, the effect wouldn't realistically last very long since most debuffs you remove are anywhere from 5 seconds (pacification on warriors) to 30 seconds or so. It'd be kind of like having two ASTs in the same group; their card effects don't overlap unless they're the same card, no? You can have, say, Balance and Arrow/Spear at the same time.

HOLY

I may be just tad bias, and apologies for it, but this is like the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever. And I'm pretty okay with the holy spammers taking a backseat until 4.0. Besides, we won't know how 4.0 shakes up class balance- but in terms of role skills, I don't think the traits really need to be altered, other than "bonus to X" being the role skill instead of "Leeches" or whatever it is now. The presence alone is indicative of difference between classes.

Don't you think its a bit satirical to say this is the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever, when before Heavensward you only HAD White Mage and Scholar, and Scholar was desired for its DPS as well? Honestly, WHM wasn't bumped from the meta until AST came along and was buffed to compete with the other two. Once it could compete, WHM became irrelevant.

[Atlaworks]

Don't you think its a bit satirical to say this is the first time WHM hasn't been meta in forever, when before Heavensward you only HAD White Mage and Scholar, and Scholar was desired for its DPS as well? Honestly, WHM wasn't bumped from the meta until AST came along and was buffed to compete with the other two. Once it could compete, WHM became irrelevant.

Not really. WHM was more prevalent than SCH in four-mans due to holy spam all the way from 2.0 to 3.4 or so really. In 8-mans, ideal party comp for healers is always gonna be "One with big numbers" and "One with shield thingies". And AST being in the meta was laughable for the first half of Heavensward.

[Serilda]

Really I don't know why we don't have a healer that has Ampador City Hard's boss design of a "Reversal" buff that makes cures hurt stuff. Otherwise, "KILL MODE" for Cleric Stance doesn't sound very healery either, which might've been the reason for it's name in the first place. Though really, we could spitball good Cleric Stance rename ideas all day.

I think the 'Japanese' name (Crusade Stance) is slightly clearer but pretty much anything that doesn't rely on people counterintuitively associating 'cleric' with 'harbinger of destruction' would work. Or for the ultimate in obviousness, have it toggle two different stances with clear aims as that's an easy mechanic for anyone to understand, like mutually exclusive, uh, Retribution (DPS) and Absolution (healing) stances with suitably obvious icons. I know it's been used before with other jobs (and with healers themselves via AST), but maybe that's because it's a good system.

Getting something like Reverse or even Reflect would be awesome.

[Vexander]

Call me a White Mage fanboy at this point, but I would prefer it if White Mage had Crusader Stance and AST/SCH continued with the MND/INT swap version. I feel like both of those classes DPS well enough as is, they don't need their heals transformed into DPS spells.

[Skyrior]

WHMs don't need any buffs other than one or two raid buff utilities and better mana regeneration. I'm worried they'll overbuff WHM.

Currently WHM already has the best single AND multi-target DPS. It already has the most potent raw healing. It has the best burst DPS and healing. AST and SCH can't even come close to WHM in terms of DPS **if we ignore mana**.

So why is WHM slightly less valued in the meta? It doesn't bring good raid utility and have some issues with its mana. Fix both and WHM will already be overpowered.

Cure3 alone makes WHM a strong candidate in A11S/A12S.