Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[Erakir]

Dear lord I've been around the raiding scene since Ruins of Kunark in EQ and this is one of the worst healer 'redesigns' I've ever seen from a prominent company with a solid game already going. That's almost 20 years of MMOs. Of raiding. Mostly of healing.

I'm not going to go into details on why particularly these....horribly low proc chances on spells we try to avoid spamming is a bad idea, or how lackluster the actual effects of, well, every single one of these procs is, or how functionally none of them will do much at all to affect playstyle, aside from an extra tank heal every 15s or so. Rest assured it is...not a good system for a healer.

If Square thinks this is going to magically free up WHM time to DPS by...encouraging us to spam more direct heals...alongside other functional nerfs like Divine Seal being less frequently usable and less of a boost (While AST keeps synastry and gets to boost their healing with an ability not tied to it anymore, great idea square)...it's really not. None of the WHM spells have enough oomph to do so compared to their competition.

There's so many issues with this design compared to other jobs right now that I'm angry, I'm sad, I'm infuriated, and then sad again.

Square, I was a raider, accomplished enough to at least down A3S when it was current. Never anything amazing amazing but we were doing Heroic Lich King when it was current, server-first progression in EQ, things like that. I stopped playing shortly after Midas hit for several reasons. I came back recently just in case I wanted to play the expansion, as I really wanted to see Ivalice on top of other things, but this whole time I've watched the job I play the game for get the short end of the development stick time and time again.

I watched you design a copy/paste style healer. I was extremely worried, I've seen this happen before. I then saw Square act surprised when people started comparing their toolkits easily, deciding that one simply wasn't powerful enough. I watched you try to compensate, making basic changes to numbers rather than reworking abilities mid-expansion. Again, I was worried, as I've seen the "hybrid" creep on the "pure" just as often as I've seen the pure overshadowing the hybrid.

I was told never to worry, everything would be fine, my concerns are just cries of wanting to be overpowered and I'm just a crybaby.

Even when I quit, I kept watch. And lo and behold, pretty much exactly how many of us expected, it happened. And again, we were told "It's too late, wait for 4.0 for any real fixes."

You have now shown us these 4.0 fixes.

Not only are these changes weak, but once again you appear to have spent virtually no time on this job compared to many others, when it was one in need of a reworking. The...terrible effects and triggerings of the lilies really sorta proves this. Everything about these changes feels tacked on - even a 0mp use CD, while very powerful, does not show any real interest in spending TIME on the development of the job.

You have stuck with the pure healer decision, but appear too scared to make anything 'pure' significantly stronger in that aspect, instead offering other jobs multiple ways to stay competitive while bestowing lords of utility or other benefits to them.

I gave you another chance now, but as it is, I'm adding my voice to this list. Not only do I not intend to play WHM, but at the moment I do not intend to play Stormblood. You've already got my pre-order money, so good for you, but I'll be one more sub that will likely wane when this month expires. Who knows how I'll feel in 10 days, but I've never felt so....disdained over a redesign than this. It makes it so so so so so hard for me to want to log in right now, at all.

I was excited, all I wanted was for this job to get a good look from the developers.

But it hasn't.

Every single time we're shown these changes, we're met with "Just wait until it releases." Every new set of changes we see makes it less and less likely significant modifications will be seen. Of course, we can wait even longer and maybe all these numbers and effects are different. But it's simply not likely. The live letter made it less likely than when we knew nothing. This makes it even less likely than what we knew after the live letter.

You don't get the benefit of the doubt when hopeful eyes continue to be brushed aside. I really didn't know I felt so strongly about this job until today, but apparently I do. I'll always be happy to be proven wrong with what actual changes and mechanics go in, but I simply believe it's incredibly unlikely right now.

Stop being scared of doing anything meaningful with white mage mechanics because the job has Cure 3, please.