White Mage just might be okay

[Sebazy]

I mean if all you want to do is expert roulette and story quest, yeah 4.0 WHM will be able to get the job done. With hopefully not too much abuse from DF players.

What? Progression raiding is what I play this game for (as well as every other MMO I've stuck with since Everquest). I'll be busy working on Omega Savage with my static right from the word go, we are still keeping our healing options firmly open until we see the final potency values and such as well as critically, the actual content we are going to be up against.

As far as the HPS side of things goes, whilst I suspect the Lily system is going to be pretty trashy irrespective of what you're doing, don't underestimate how well PI is going to scale in situations where a WHM is actually spam curing one or both tanks. It'll be usable almost on CD in these situations and will significantly outstrip AST's current potency advantage. Lady cards will be tasty but they suffer the same RNG upon RNG death as Lily II and aren't likely to be dependable for sustained HPS.

And before you play the 'but muh 900 potency Earthly Star' card, I'll be very very surprised if that ability goes live with it's current potency values. I also wouldn't be that surprised to see all 3 healers baseline cure/cureII values get adjusted slightly as well. Despite how close to launch we are, the tooltips we've seen have been incredibly rough around the edges in places. It's kind of unnerving how much tuning Yoshida's team still needs to do.

[Risvertasashi]

What? Progression raiding is what I play this game for (as well as every other MMO I've stuck with since Everquest). I'll be busy working on Omega Savage with my static right from the word go, we are still keeping our healing options firmly open until we see the final potency values and such as well as critically, the actual content we are going to be up against.

You are fortunate to have a static. Fortunately I do too, and yeah, they'll let me take WHM if I really want to, even if everything we've seen so far remains unadjusted. I'll be holding off on my decision on which healer to level first until the dataminers get a crack at the actual patch. And you are right that PI could be useful in situations where there's damage on both tanks (a la T11, Faust, etc), but that still seems pretty niche... just like cure III, really.

Now as to your last paragraph. That is exactly why we are giving feedback, and want to keep doing so. If it's at all possible, we really do not want what we saw to go live. Because if it does go live, even if you already have a static that's willing to let you play whatever, any time you want to PF something as WHM will be very miserable and it may take half a year or longer for SE to move on a serious adjustment.

Even as of 3.4, quite a few static recruitment PFs have locked out WHM, as well as PFs for getting actual content done via pugging. So it's not like we're talking purely theoreticals here.