White Mage just might be okay

[Menae]

your total percentages are wrong.... freecure 15% and lily 20% and confession 20% are all mutually exclusive procs.... so you can't add the rates and say you'll get 55% of something happening. None of them impact the rate of the other so you're left with basically at least 15% of the time something will happen (and multiple things can happen too!);

The phrase you are looking for is independent, not mutually exclusive. Mutually exclusive means if one procs, the others cannot. Independent means that whether or not one procs doesn't affect the chances of another one proccing. We also don't know for sure that they are independent, although I certainly agree that it's by far the most likely way that they work.

Let me explain why your window has to be within 30-60 sec for confession and lily. All your skills that are affected by lilies are on a 60 sec recast. Typically, unless content demands specific utility usage, you'll be sitting on Tetragram and blowing Assize exactly when its up! Again if content doesn't demand sitting on utilities u can blow benison off every 60 sec as well. So basically every 60 sec you'll be attempting to get lilies and crits to reduce the recast on your next cd. Now let's consider what are the rates of success.

No, because I don't always use all my oGCDs at once. I either plan their use ahead of time (in which case lilies do not help me since I can't take advantage of the CD reduction), I use them as needed (in which case I can't count on using lilies for a specific ability since I might have used them a few seconds before), or I blow them on CD, which isn't a great idea for healers since you don't always have the right conditions to make a given ability useful. I won't be able to just say, "Hey, I just used Assize, let me cast 10 cures over the next 60 seconds and have a 90% chance of getting at least one lily for my NEXT assize," because sometime in that 60 seconds I'm going to use an oGCD and reset my lily count. I not only need to proc lilies, but I need to proc lilies immediately before the CD I want to reduce. It's not the end of the world if you don't need to hold oGCDs for a particular mechanic and don't care which one you reduce CD for, but in that case you likely also aren't getting more than one stack between oGCD usages, and the whole lily system kind of falls flat.

But we dont like the measly 4% for one lily; we want 2 lilies minimum (10% reduction)!! Well the chances of getting at least 2 procs within 5 attempts is.... 26% (hmmm...we can't really do anything with 26%.... )

A 10% CD reduction on a skill over a ten minute fight gives exactly one extra use over that ten minutes if you use that ability on CD. Meaning that if we get lucky and get that 26% chance on every single set of 5 cures, and we cast exactly 5 cures between EACH of our Asylums, Assizes, Divine Benisons, and Tetragrammatons, and we use them all on CD, we gain an extra Asylum, Assize, Divine Benison, and Tetra over that ten minute fight. The odds of this happening are .26^31 (since you aren't casting anything before the first set), which is 7.31 e-19. These are literally worse odds than me buying a Powerball lottery ticket, winning the lottery, and then buying another lottery ticket for the next drawing and winning that too. You are more likely to be struck by lightning three times in one year. What I'm saying is that this very very very very very very very very very very very likely will never happen.

Benison having a longer recast time than DRK's shield; is something noticeable!! However DRK doesn't replenish 50 gauge in 15 sec....unless Drk is hitting multiple targets with Salt of the Earth! Also DRK can use their gauge for dps...so why would they even utilize the shield unless the mitigation was mandated due to content. And if the shield is mandated on a tank then 60 sec recast Benison at 15% max hp is better than 10sec recast DRK cover which takes away from your dps potential.

I don't know what DRK has to do with this, but know that the level 70 shield costs mana and gives gauge to the DRK. It doesn't cost gauge to use. It's a DPS gain to use it on CD even if it blocks zero damage.

I think when the game releases they'll have the lil reduction rates raised. Or they'll raise the lil proc rates; or they'll include more skill that can proc a lil.

They need to if they want us to use the lily system in any meaningful way.

Imagine a sequence that mandated a full 60 sec of dedicated cures (fausts at progression lvl gear pretty much acomplished this; but remember faust fights lasted 2min max). Next we'll imagine a sequence that requires 30 sec of dedicated cures.

the chances of getting at least 2 lilies in 60 sec (assuming a fast gcd of 2.0 sec) is 98.9%!!! and the chances of getting 3 in the same time frame is 95.6%!!! however keep in mind that you just cast 30 f*#king cures....................... this is some faust exclusive shit going on here.... but you're extremely likely to get 2+ lilies which means the 1 cd you use next will have 10-20% reduction (6-12 sec). In this same scenario we can imagine your crit rate is at least 10% which means in 30 cast you're likely to get 3 crits--each of which will reduce all your cds by 5 sec....we're unsure if the reduction stacks "does 3 crits = 15 sec reduction? or once you get one crit you only get the 5 sec reduction and can't accumulate anymore reduction until the CD is reused? So in the worst case that crits don't stack 5 sec flat reductions, you have a high chance of getting 11-17 sec off your next CD?!!!

Scenario 3

Imagine now a 30 sec curing window with the same 2.0 sec gcd. 30 sec is still a very long time to have to be mandated to be casting cures, but we can spread those 15 gcds over the span of 1 min and still gain the same effects! The chance of getting at least 2 lilies in a spam of 15 gcds is 83%!! and the chance of getting at least 3 is 60%!!

The point I'm trying to get you to see is how heavily dependent this WHM system is on solo gcd healing.... you need spend 15-30 gcds within a 60 sec window to reliably get 60%+ chances of reducing your next cd by 10-20% (18-28% reduction if you assume a crit proc)!! Again if they make CONTENT that forces all the healer compositions to manage a 15-30 dedicated healing sequence within a 60 sec window, WHM WILL WIN, SINCE NOBODY WILL DO IT BETTER!!!

And this is my point. You said yourself that 30 seconds of healbombing is an enormous length of time to spend on GCD heals, and our reward for doing so is a 5 in 6 chance to cut 6 seconds off of a single ability's cooldown. That's not very much. How much is not very much? If you get 3 lilies for every oGCD, which is even worse odds than the statistically-will-never-happen-chances I've shown for two lilies? You will gain an extra 2 Assizes, 2 Tetras, 2 Benisons, and 1 Asylum over a 10 minute fight. Calling the shield an 800 potency heal (which on a tank seems ballparky-right), and assuming you heal the entire raid and a single boss for every tick of Assize and four people (2 tanks+2 melee) for every tick of Asylum with no overhealing, that's an extra 4800+1400+1600+2800 = 8600 healing potency and 600 damage potency over 10 minutes.

Or you could be an AST and only hit a single tank and the boss with your new ground thing every 60 seconds and get 9000 healing potency and 2000 damage potency over that 10 minutes. You know, that works too.

[Fernosaur]

Or you could be an AST and only hit a single tank and the boss with your new ground thing every 60 seconds and get 9000 healing potency and 2000 damage potency over that 10 minutes. You know, that works too.

I'm internally screaming so hard. My RAGE over Astrologian's mere existence is intense right now.

[Gemina]

I'm internally screaming so hard. My RAGE over Astrologian's mere existence is intense right now.

You mean the galaxy, explosive thingy? 10 seconds to get the 900 potency AoE cure, right? WHM be all like.. Medica, Divine Benison, Assize! Pretty much all done in the time it takes to cast Medica, and more damage. "Y'all good?... Sweeeet!" Do enjoy those cool effects though ASTs. I won't argue that AST remains the most visually impressive, and formidable healer in all content.

[Urthdigger]

You mean the galaxy, explosive thingy? 10 seconds to get the 900 potency AoE cure, right? WHM be all like.. Medica, Divine Benison, Assize! Pretty much all done in the time it takes to cast Medica, and more damage. "Y'all good?... Sweeeet!" Do enjoy those cool effects though ASTs. I won't argue that AST remains the most visually impressive, and formidable healer in all content.

Right, because AST *totally* can't cast anything else while waiting for their pet to charge up. Nope, not at all, they just hit /hildy while they wait.

[DreamWeaver]

The funniest sad thing about this Lily mechanic is:

Oh you need to cast 15-ish Cures to get 3 stack of lilies for a 20% reduction for a single skill?
Here.... I drew this shitty ass Spear card that I have no use for, you can have it, have fun!!

/hidly

P/S: For those that that don't know what the Spear Card does, it is a 15 second buff that reduces ALL oGCD skills you use by 20% during its duration, and it is considered THE most useless card an AST can draw.

/hildy

[eagledorf]

I've been thinking about this a bit and I do suspect SE is going to throw WHM a bone with their now-superior AoE.

1. Tanks got an AoE Provoke
2. Every tank now has an AoE attack that doesn't generate extra hate

It wouldn't surprise me if a sustained AoE stage with extremely heavy damage and AoE tank swaps came to force WHM into being good. An encounter like that would actually work really well with a lot of the new skills, but balancing around that would be forcing us into a Procrustean bed and still doesn't fix that the lily mechanic is...lame?

[Belhi]

The issue isn't that WHM cant clear content. It is that they are inferior to the other healers. WHM dps isn't going to be enough to make up for the damage benefits that the other two healers bring. Take 10% of 4 dps and 2 tanks damage over 1 minute and see how well that stacks against the damage output of the WHM who isn't even going to be procing Lillies or SotL2 unless they are casting heals instead.

You mean the galaxy, explosive thingy? 10 seconds to get the 900 potency AoE cure, right? WHM be all like.. Medica, Divine Benison, Assize! Pretty much all done in the time it takes to cast Medica, and more damage. "Y'all good?... Sweeeet!" Do enjoy those cool effects though ASTs. I won't argue that AST remains the most visually impressive, and formidable healer in all content.

The immediate healing potency of the new AST Earthly Star is still twice that of Assize. Helios is on par with Medica or maybe a tiny bit stronger. Divine Benison is a pretty weak shield. Aspected Benific will almost certainly be on par and with no 1 minute CD.

Frankly comparing the two sets of spells AST actually would put out about 300 Pot more heals.

[javid]

snip.

you got me on that mutually exclusive!! Good catch. I fixed that. And your observation is also pausible, we dont KNOOOOOWWW if they are independent or if they are setup like dodge/parry/block (which are mutually exclusive). Once we get our hands on it we'll be able to test if we can get 2 or all 3 of them at the same time or not.

But your middle point that you plan out all your skills ignored the generalization of how you'd typically use Assize and Holy Bension. I first stipulated IF content doesn't dictate a scripted usage of your cds, then you'll be spamming assize (dps) and spamming bension (15% shield, potentially a healing gcd reduction). But even if you're sitting on the 3 of the 4 cds affected by lilies, you could still consider the 60 sec window for that one CD you already blew. Either or the odds aren't favorable for the lily system for a short 6min fight--but most fights even during speed clears are beyond 6min fights.....still negligible, the odds are just ugly for the lilies.

However for confessions though, it's not so gloomy, since any proc of confession grants you a free cure 1 that must be consumed within 30 sec of its proc. So in a 5 cure spam (5*2.0-2.5sec GCDs= 10-15sec of cure gcds) you got 67% chance you'll get a free cure 1 (400 potency) oGCD in the form of a PI. Which would come in handy in faust like battles.

Lastly the utility of the lily system doesn't have to result in additional cd usages in a X-long fight. It simple has to allow for a noticeably sooner usage of CDs. Example, nobody is purposely fishing for Spear cards on ast, but if you get one and use it, you will notice the 20% reduction on your next cd usage-which doesn't result to an additional usage over the entire fight. My guess however is the reduction will be bumped up to start at 10% for 1 lilies, 15% for 2 lilies, and 25% for 3 lilies. Either that or they make regens also proc along side cures.---although adding regen will encourage bad healing efficiency since ppl will start lighting up the whole damn party with regens to ensure they get 3 lilies ASAP!!

one final note!!! You can proc your lilies pre pull, most setups on raids take about 40sec-1min+, as soon as you whm get in the instance start casting cures on MT, let the OT protect everybody, by the time MT pulls you'll likely have a confession and/or a few lilies setup for the pull...but that's only the pull though.

[Gemina]

Right, because AST *totally* can't cast anything else while waiting for their pet to charge up. Nope, not at all, they just hit /hildy while they wait.

You clearly missed the point. Try again.

[Fernosaur]

You mean the galaxy, explosive thingy? 10 seconds to get the 900 potency AoE cure, right? WHM be all like.. Medica, Divine Benison, Assize! Pretty much all done in the time it takes to cast Medica, and more damage. "Y'all good?... Sweeeet!" Do enjoy those cool effects though ASTs. I won't argue that AST remains the most visually impressive, and formidable healer in all content.

I mean... the fact that they have better MP efficiency per cast (though Thin Air+PoM makes this debatable), higher healing potencies in their basic toolkit, a more powerful single-target regen, raid utility that blows every other job in the game out of the water, better mitigation even under Diurnal Sect, a shorter recast on their main oGCD healing ability plus the possibility of gaining an additional oGCD healing ability every 30 seconds, and a reliable prepared heal that can cure up to almost twice as much as Cure III every minute without spending MP. In exchange for... marginally inferior personal DPS, I suppose.

Seriously, I get that you're trying to stay optimistic for WHM, but not everything about AST has to do with Earthly Star. Earthly Star is more like the salt on the open wound.

Yes, WHM has good tools, like Assize, Asylum and Tetragrammaton. Even Plenary Indulgence might prove to be a good asset. I'm not denying that. WHM is a powerful healer with good personal DPS. And that's it. It is still a fact that WHM is vastly overshadowed by an overpowered AST, and this is the problem. Is there even a remote possibility that we agree on this? Otherwise I'll just ask that you stop replying to me entirely cause it's getting tiresome to be met with literally nothing but dismissive comments that provide absolutely nothing to the debate at hand.