Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[Xylas]

I was using a bit of hyperbole to make a point. I'm going to focus entirely on AST for now but most of it applies to sch too. As long as AST can buff the party and heal the content there's going to be no reason to pick a whm who can't do a part of that. Even if you reduce the most ironically named card(balance) AST is still just a whm with buffs and out of balance. Hence remove all their buffs.

Of course there are other interesting ways you could balance this. Whms traditionally have been able to inflict moderate damage in FF games.

In your honest opinion, do you believe that White Mages will be turned down and people will wait for other healers because of this? Or that people will not play White Mage in 4.0? I'm not being snarky, I'm actually curious of what you think.

[Yorumi]

In your honest opinion, do you believe that White Mages will be turned down and people will wait for other healers because of this? Or that people will not play White Mage in 4.0? I'm not being snarky, I'm actually curious of what you think.

There's a lot to look at really. Anything below the current ilevel ex primals is trivial content and balancing classes kind of doesn't matter. Maybe the normal mode 8-man raid matters as I remember people having trouble with alex normal at times. So in that sense people will play it regardless for that content. For content where balance starts to matter, yeah you'll start seeing party finders and shouts saying no whm. If this were a game where you couldn't switch jobs at will you'd probably see a lot fewer whms. Since people can effectively have a "raid" healer and a "casual" healer on one character it keeps numbers up.

You could in theory tune the balance card so low that most people wouldn't care to exclude whms, though I'd never suggest that cause it just turns AST into a recolored whm and that's dumb. I mean just personally I didn't seriously play whm or pld due to their lack of desirability.

No offense but you can not look to a single player game and use it's concept of a character to use in an mmo.

I'm using those games to show the conceptual design behind classes. Single player games still adhere to some balance, though obviously they can get away with far more imbalance than mmos(ie I'd never suggest a whm actually have the dps power of a blm). An AST cannot have healing nearly equal to a whm and buffs something has to give. If you nerf buffs to the point of not having them why have them at all? I was mostly just exploring alternative ways they could balance classes, they can give whm some sort of buff spells to equal up to AST buffs, or the could use my alternate or some of the alternate I havn't conceived of. The idea behind nerfing healing was to force AST to spent most of their time healing, leaving little time for personal dps, the compensation for that is their buffs and their dps contribution is what the party does thanks to their buffs. Whm would then be more balanced because their powerful healing would mean they could spend more time dpsing(something not out of place for whms traditionally) and thus their damage contribution is direct.

Essentially AST and SCH has healing + utility, whm has healing. That means to balance things we either have to give whm utility, or nerf one or both aspects of AST and SCH.

[Xylas]

There's a lot to look at really. Anything below the current ilevel ex primals is trivial content and balancing classes kind of doesn't matter. Maybe the normal mode 8-man raid matters as I remember people having trouble with alex normal at times. So in that sense people will play it regardless for that content. For content where balance starts to matter, yeah you'll start seeing party finders and shouts saying no whm. If this were a game where you couldn't switch jobs at will you'd probably see a lot fewer whms. Since people can effectively have a "raid" healer and a "casual" healer on one character it keeps numbers up.

Do we have any speculation on what that shiny buff was that she threw on the black mage? Or what that watery looking effect was? Seemed to be another buff, but looked like it was a self buff.

[Feidam]

Do we have any speculation on what that shiny buff was that she threw on the black mage? Or what that watery looking effect was? Seemed to be another buff, but looked like it was a self buff.

We do not. Which is why this whole premise of nerfing and or buffing the whm at this point is premature. No one has seen the changes or played with the changes. They heard a buzz word/phrase and and viola.

[Xylas]

We do not. Which is why this whole premise of nerfing and or buffing the whm at this point is premature. No one has seen the changes or played with the changes. They heard a buzz word/phrase and and viola.

I've heard some speculation that it may be barriers(like sch and noct AST). Don't get me wrong I'm not writing off the class until we see the final build.

I don't know about the blue one (maybe a self buff to enhance spell power of some kind), but the white/rainbow one seems like it'll be a haste or something that boosts damage IMO. Why else put it on a black mage? Unless he was only there to showcase the pull and leylines teleport.

[Yorumi]

I don't know about the blue one (maybe a self buff to enhance spell power of some kind), but the white/rainbow one seems like it'll be a haste or something that boosts damage IMO. Why else put it on a black mage? Unless he was only there to showcase the pull and leylines teleport.

I don't know that we can read too much into the classes of the targets. Remember they wern't doing anything close to proper rotations so it's unknown just how much we were supposed to get from all that. That said I doubt it's haste. I would just expect a more traditional clock effect for haste. All the effects that look like they could be buffs though produce a notable bubble on the target which is generally more associated with barriers. We'll see when it comes out but what stands out to me about it is the bubble effects, ie barriers, nothing is really screaming damage buff to me.

[Feidam]

I don't know that we can read too much into the classes of the targets. Remember they wern't doing anything close to proper rotations so it's unknown just how much we were supposed to get from all that. That said I doubt it's haste. I would just expect a more traditional clock effect for haste. All the effects that look like they could be buffs though produce a notable bubble on the target which is generally more associated with barriers. We'll see when it comes out but what stands out to me about it is the bubble effects, ie barriers, nothing is really screaming damage buff to me.

In the benchmench there was a buff like skill shown that looked like it proc'd when the pally was attacked. Had a holy-ish efftect. i could be whm have a damage shield that reflects lashes out and damages the attacker I suppose. Granted that is pure conjecture.

[Yorumi]

Do we have any speculation on what that shiny buff was that she threw on the black mage? Or what that watery looking effect was? Seemed to be another buff, but looked like it was a self buff.

I've heard some speculation that it may be barriers(like sch and noct AST). Don't get me wrong I'm not writing off the class until we see the final build. It's entirely possible they have given whms something good. It just seems like they should have more clearly presented it. The AST video spent all this time throwing cards and other buff/debuff things around. You could miss that fact with AST, with whm it's like "Um maybe that one spell does something that could help...maybe".

We do not. Which is why this whole premise of nerfing and or buffing the whm at this point is premature. No one has seen the changes or played with the changes. They heard a buzz word/phrase and and viola.

No we're a group of intelligent people engaging in informed speculation regarding what we saw and the theories behind classes.

[Feidam]

No we're a group of intelligent people engaging in informed speculation regarding what we saw and the theories behind classes.

You can not have informed speculation based on the info we have seen. The speculation is actually based on what is currently in the game. All we have seen of the healers is the role list and some animations. Nothing more. You can conjecture what those skills are based on the animation but without any numbers/effects all you have is a visual graphic and a potential name. The theory of the whitemage i.e. pure healer is what has set this whole thing off with players thinking it means heals only since the developers have yet to expound on even that in regards to storm blood.

[Yorumi]

You can not have informed speculation based on the info we have seen. The speculation is actually based on what is currently in the game. All we have seen of the healers is the role list and some animations. Nothing more. You can conjecture what those skills are based on the animation but without any numbers/effects all you have is a visual graphic and a potential name. The theory of the whitemage i.e. pure healer is what has set this whole thing off with players thinking it means heals only since the developers have yet to expound on even that in regards to storm blood.

We can have informed speculation cause they showed buffs happening on AST why hide it from whm? If we literally had every fact it wouldn't be speculation but we're informed enough to know of the pure healer comment as well as nothing looking like the whm is doing a lot of buffing. Thus the speculation "if whm doesn't have utility and AST and SCH do then nothing is likely to change."


That said what possibly could pure healer mean in context of this game that isn't a mistranslation? If a whm heals and buffs then how is AST not a "pure healer"? If that's the case why single out whm? Does it mean they don't get a pet like sch? Well ok but no one expected that and it's about equal to saying whm won't be getting fire 4. Um yeah why even bother saying that? Maybe it means whm heals won't have additional effects...oh wait medica II and assize, so it's a nerf?

I can't think of a context where "pure healer" has any real meaning beyond "we're not giving utility to whm".