Suggestions to Buff/Change WHM

[BigMedic]

1. Revert med2 to 2.0 status 15 duration 100 pot regen
2. buff pom 30s duration 90s recast
3. passive lily gain every 10s
4. single target holy nuke spell with pot of 200 500 900 base on # of lily
5. spell/ability to target/self buff to recover % damage taken as hp, can be multiple hit or single
6. Thin Air to up 15s from 12s, 12 is just weird and too short

[Snat]

One thing I would like to see with Lilies (other people got into better ideas how to get them) is something you could use them on outside of resetting a cool down you are timing anyway.

Imagine having a spell like Quake which is buffed depending on the amount of Lilies you have.

[Sieben79]

Overlooked this Topic, so I'm posting my little suggestion here:

I would like it if the lilies regenerate over time. Each 10s one lily so that we have after 30 seconds three lilies. This would be disable the RNG and wouldn't affect the players playstyle.

Give us a buff (for the whm only) if we have have a certain amount of lilies for a dam% and heal% buff (1=5%, 2=10%, 3=15%) and add something special to the skills if it use up the lilies and not something cheap like CD reduce.

As for the Confession stacks: Every Spell at usage should grant a rng stack. I don't like to track down the stacks on partymembers, the stacks should be shown at the players bar. So if we have gathered a certain amount of stacks, make Plenary Indulgence availbe to use. And for the damagedealer among us add a second lvl 70 skill: Mega Holy! (use also Confession stacks)

[SaitoHikari]

Thanks, lol.

I am a game design student, so this is the kinda stuff I talk about all day with my classmates.

Oh, another design student, though in my case it'd really be just in name only.

If I may ask, I'm curious as to what you think of my own suggestions, as I personally believe the lily mechanic isn't very future-proof, though I'd be in full support of your suggestions to salvage it. Instead, I came up with an entirely new system revolving around WHM's elemental affinities (meant to stand in opposition to BLM lore-wise).

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- Solid Earth: Passive. Casting Stone spells 3 times builds Earth Blessing, which can be stacked up to 3. Earth Blessing stacks are consumed to either increase the duration of or lower the cooldown of special Earth-aspected abilities.
- Jagged Shield: Summons a shield of spires on the targeted party member or pet. The shield nullifies damage equal to 50% of the target's maximum HP at the time of casting for up to 15 seconds. When the shield is broken or the duration expires, damage equal to the shield's HP is inflicted to all enemies in a 10-yalm radius of the target (hey, a reason for Bards to use Troubadour in Mage's Ballad mode, and for Warriors to use Thrill of Battle offensively!). 90 second cooldown, but can be reduced to 80/70/55 seconds. (This and Solid Earth are learned at Lv. 42.)
- Granite Wall: Casts a shield on a single party member that becomes near impenetrable when they are about to suffer a fatal hit, preventing their HP from dropping below 1 for 5 seconds once triggered (duration can be increased to 7/9/12 seconds). 300 second cooldown with 15 second buff duration before triggering. (Yes, I did just give a targeted Holmgang to White Mages.)

- Calm Water: Passive. Casting Cure/Medica-type spells 3 times generates Water Blessing, which can be stacked up to 5. Medica II critically healing has a 10% chance to generate a stack, and a critical Holy also has a 20% chance to generate a stack too.
- Water Blessing stacks have three effects. The first is that they're obviously used to cast new abilities. The second is that holding a full stack of 5 reduces MP costs of Cure/Medica/Holy spells by 10%. The third is that each stack reduces emnity generation by 5%, for a total of 25%. (The last effect exists because I foresee the removal of Cleric Stance resulting in Assize usage leading to MASSIVE emnity generation, especially with the cooldown reduction.) Learned at Lv. 34 to replace Stoneskin's former position.
- Cure/Medica spells are currently considered to be wind-aspected due to the green aura when casting. This should be changed to blue/water-aspected (especially since Esuna is now a cross-role skill, and Esuna is the only water-aspected GCD that WHMs currently have).
- Holy also gets changed to become water-aspected. (I know this doesn't really matter, but lore.)
- Reflect: Requires and consumes 3 stacks of Water Blessing. Generates a barrier around all surrounding party members that will mitigate and then reflect 10% of magic damage taken back at the source. It will also reflect physical debuffs associated with said magic attack (things like stun/poison/lightning, obviously not vulnerability up). This will only reflect one magic attack before expiring. 15 second duration, 90 second cooldown.
- Divine Benison: Same effect, but uses 1/3/5 Water Blessing stacks for cooldown reduction rather than the Confession/Lily stuff.

- Raging Wind: Passive. Each time Aero-type spells inflict critical damage or Regen critically heals, a Wind Blessing is generated, stacking up to 15 times. Once the 15th Blessing is granted, they are automatically consumed to grant Rage of the Wind for 20 seconds, which increases critical hit chance by 10% and additionally reduces Assize's cooldown by 5 seconds once triggered. It also allows a new spell to be used.
- Assize gets changed to be wind-aspected. (I know this doesn't really matter, but lore.)
- Thin Air: Same effect as before, but cooldown can be decreased to 100 seconds if used while Rage of the Wind is up (and thus consuming the buff), 120 seconds otherwise.
- Tornado: Can only be cast while under Rage of the Wind status. Inflicts 50 potency damage to the target and all enemies surrounding them, along with inflicting Aero II's debuff. Casting immediately cancels Rage of the Wind status, allowing Wind Blessing stacks to be built up again. 30 second cooldown.

- Font of Creation: The White Mage borrows the power of the Wind, Water, and Earth elementals to summon a field of destruction and succor both. Enemies inside the field take 30 potency damage over time from the searing winds within, and the water also drops their magic resistance by 5%. The power of the earth also shields party members inside the field, reducing damage taken by 10%. Requires at least 1 stack of Wind, Water, and Earth Blessing, and using the skill will consume all stacks, though effects do not change depending on how many stacks are consumed. 15 second duration, 180 second cooldown. (Before anyone asks, the activation requirement for this ability means that Divine Benison can't be used at the same time.)

[Thomias]

I have always wanted to capture the WHM's role in working with the Elementals so here is my idea.

Commune with the Elementals:
3 second cast time
gain one lily
for each lily add a stack of refresh on self (10 for each)

Blessing of Earth:
Consumes lilies
A damage reduction spell that works like protect for party at increasing duration with the amount of lilies used so like 30 secs 60 secs 120sec

Blessing of Wind:
Consumes lilies
increases Skill and Spell speed for party at increasing duration
10 secs 12 secs 15 secs

Blessing of Water:
Consumes lilies
AOE esuna and debuff shield at increasing duration bla bla bla

i think this woudl give us back some of what we lost to the cross role (Protect and Esuna) And give us a little utility while still keeping in the feel of the WHM. Though this does not keep with the pure healer thing.

[Akiudo]

Considering it's quite apparent how the lilly system wasn't really thought through here is my idea what would work better, constructive feedback always welcome.

First things first Baseline changes to the lilly system
Either Make them timed or alternatevly

Raise the procc chance on cure, you shouldn't want to use cure, but if you do it should be usefull

Give a chance to procc on other heals, at least on casts, skills can stay excluded, say
for example 40% on cure I/II , 15% on Medica I/II, Cure III and Regen, numbers are a question for the balancing team, just want to get accros the point


About the lillys themselves this are changes i would think would work out a lot better then what we currently get

Drop the cooldown reduction crap, it simply doesn't work with fights scripted out as hard as the ones in final fantasy, and this isn't even saying anything about the fact that if i want to use it on assize but need a benediction right now it gets wasted.

Let the Lillys Strengthen things in a way that is usefull, with an adequate production of lillys (see changes to procc further above) you would have let's say a stack of three lillys a minute on average, this lillys could then enable you to do one of the following

Divine benison (think the cooldown is to high but for arguments sake let's keep the original 60 seconds)
uses up your lillys, shield the target for 10/20/30% depending on number of lillys used

Planetary Indulgence Raise the cooldown as to not make it spammable, say 60 seconds, drop the whole confessions thing, lower the potency accordingly
Uses up Lillys, 200/300/400 aoe heal depending on stacks

Third Skill with mega awesome mccool name 60 seconds cooldown
Uses up Lillys Raises Skill/Spellspeed by 1/2/3% for 30 Seconds
yes, basically fay wind whatever, would work out as a damage buff while costing lillys which could be used on the now at least decently usefull other skill so it's a trade of a comfortable and good whitemage would have to decide on making or not, but it would open up the possibility without really beeing useful, especially considering every other healer get's ways to do what a whitemage does (raising heal output, dishing out the big guns) while whitemage barely steps into the realm of the other twos strengths.

Like i said, feedback is welcome, numbers are to be ignored please as they are basically placeholders to get the idea across, this factor could be balanced in any way the devs deem fit, i just wanted to show a way that i feel lillys could be a nice addition to an existing toolkit instead of the current system that seems counterintutive to healing smart instead of simply healing often

[Gemina]

Literally the only thing I think they need to change before SB hits is the duration on confession stacks. They should last until Divine Benison is used. This should really be a given.

I am on board with getting WHMs to cast cure and cure 2 more, and perfectly fine with lily procs being tied to them, but I also think they should be tied to medica with an increased proc rate. We can't be forced to use several gcds when multiple players need to get healed. However, I believe this is something that needs to come in a future patch. I also think they should have an increased proc rate when healing targets other than the tank, and the same goes for confession proc rates.

I see the lily mechanic as nothing more than a race against our CDs that the devs are being careful with. I believe that if they truly want us to cast cure 1 and 2, they will have to reduce the potency and/or duration on our regens. They haven't done that yet. I think they want to see it in our hands, and hopefully get it to where it should be with as few patches as possible.

Other than that, I am simply waiting.

[ty_taurus]

Oh, another design student, though in my case it'd really be just in name only.

If I may ask, I'm curious as to what you think of my own suggestions, as I personally believe the lily mechanic isn't very future-proof, though I'd be in full support of your suggestions to salvage it. Instead, I came up with an entirely new system revolving around WHM's elemental affinities (meant to stand in opposition to BLM lore-wise).

I imagine you've designed this concept more as a what-if factor and less of a solution to the current WHM; however, I want to take a moment to talk about the difference between ideas that are made to improve WHM vs ideas that are designed for the fun of the fantasy. This is primarily for anyone that might not think about the situation in this way. A lot of time and resources went into designing the lilies, and it would require just as much time and resources, if not more, to create a whole new concept. Altering the lilies in some way to make them stronger takes considerably less time and resources.

I want to remind everyone here not to focus too much on drastically new ideas because we can fall into a state of wanting something out of the WHM that we simply will not get. This doesn't mean it's bad to fantasize about ideas like this, but I just don't want us here to come to despise WHM because it won't turn into drastic and wild ideas that we've come up with here on the forums. That being said, let's get onto the analysis:

Earth
I actually had an idea for a similar concept way back before we knew anything about Stormblood; essentially casting Stone spells would build stacks that could be consumed to let the WHM cast Stoneskin II in combat instantly. I mentioned this a little earlier on this page, but I've come to realize that % HP based shields and heals aren't really healthy for balance in FFXIV because it favors Warriors over other tanks.

Moving onto your actions... I like the name "Granite Wall," but Tanks have an immunity system in place already. I don't think this means there's no room for an immunity, but creating a shield that's unbiased to what job you give it to would be a nice and healthy idea. I would combine elements of your Granite Wall and Jagged Shield into one action that replaces Divine Benison: A barrier that has a detonate effect.

I also want to flip your detonate on its head. As it stands, meta players probably wouldn't ever place it on the main tank. Why? Because taking damage is lowering the damage the shield will do upon detonation, ultimately discouraging using it defensively. I will come back to this later with Font of Creation, but I say that the barrier should actually apply Earth Blessing to the player you placed Granite Wall on. More on that use later. Maybe critical hits with Stone spells will cut out 5 seconds from Granite Wall's cooldown.

As for the barrier itself, let's say in shields for an amount based on the caster's VIT, to create an unbiased barrier as I mentioned earlier. Perhaps the calculation for how much VIT to calculate goes up slightly for each player that has Earth Blessing? This could be interesting, especially if you can only apply one blessing per player. More on that as I talk about the other elements.

Water
But with your Calm Water idea in mind, I think it's really a lot to take in. There are so many nooks and crannies of the ability that it seems difficult to remember. You have to cast Cure/CureII, or Medica 3 times in a row to get 1 stack, but Medica II has a tiny chance to create a stack, but only when critical hitting, but Holy just has a 20% flat chance per cast (which isn't a water spell anyway.) It's mechanically complicated and I really don't see why it would need to be. And then the actual buff has a number of different effects per stack which is asking a lot of the player, especially when you combine it all with the other passives from Earth and Wind.

Like I said before, simplicity is key. Actions that have simple uses but can work in many different ways are the ones that are the most engaging to play. If you're going to get a Water Blessing somehow, it should be simple to grasp, and not too challenging to manage alongside Earth and Wind. Also, I'm fairly annoyed with how the water element is basically non-existent on WHM's skill set. I'd like to encourage something to replace the joke of an action, Fluid Aura, with something that could be used.

Let's talk about your Vital Aura. The problem with a crit shield is that it's likely something that would only be used on tanks, but what if it did something different. Let's say it applies a heavy HoT for a short period of time, similar to Wheel of Fortune on AST. Maybe it can also have a much lower cooldown so it can be applied somewhat frequently. When the HoT ends, the target also receives Water Blessing. By adding an offensive water spell, like Flood, perhaps it applies a debuff to the target of flood that causes them to deal 20% less damage to players with Water Blessing? I think that's overall a lot simpler, and works with some of the themes you were going for in your water design.

Wind
First, I'd need to do the math on how frequently Aero DoTs and Regens critical hit to get a better understanding of how quickly you want to be hitting 15 stacks. That being said, I feel like the reward of 5 seconds off Assize and critical hit chance feel a little bland of a buff to be building for. I also feel like it might be nice to be rewarded for keeping DoTs maintained. Perhaps you get a stacks of Raging Wind per tick of Aero and Aero III (Not really sure if Regen needs to be a part of this.) At max stacks, that's when Tornado can be active, and the stacks drop off if no DoTs have ticked for a short period of time. The idea here is that skilled play should reward players with the stacks to cast Tornado.

As for Tornado, I get that you're trying to replace the lost 3rd DoT, but I don't feel like that's a satisfying enough reward to be building stacks in either iteration. A lot of people would probably feel like it was frustrating that they had to build up this stack just to get something that could originally be cast for no effort. That being said, I think Tornado could do a lot of cool things. I'm thinking along the lines of Iron Jaws on Bard, where Tornado can reset the timers for Aero II and Aero III, but imagine if it also would detonate any current stacks on the target, doing all the remaining potency damage at once before resetting the DoTs. I feel like that could be really rewarding if it required maintaining Aero DoTs throughout a fight.

As for Wind Blessing, I imagine we could make some changes to Thin Air to make it apply Blessings on allies. I'm thinking of dramatically reducing the duration of Thin Air while also reducing the cooldown, and having it apply to yourself and your target, similarly to Synastry. You and our ally have all MP and TP costs reduced to 0 for 5 seconds, and that ally gets a Wind Blessing. It would need some numbers testing, but I think that could be a unique form of utility. These stacks of Wind Blessing will passively build stacks of Raging Wind on you, getting faster the more players have the buff. This makes Tornado easier to achieve if you pass Thin Air to multiple allies.

Font of Creation
Alright, so I talked about these blessings you created for each element, and this is essentially how they come together. I like your idea of utilizing your elements in Font of Creation, but I think we could actually merge this with Plenary Indulgence and effectively replace the Confession stacks and do different things. First, you can only have 1 Blessing per player (Earth, Wind, or Water. Applying one will overwrite any current Blessing on that player.) Plenary Indulgence could have a flat potency of 500, consume Earth Blessing, Wind Blessing, or Water Blessing on any players that have them and doing something differently. Earth Blessing applies a shield equal to the healing provided and lasts a short time (say 15s or so.) Wind Blessing grants a 20% Attack Speed buff (Again for 15s.) Water Blessing applies a hefty HoT (100 potency for 15s, aka, 5 ticks =500 additional potency.)

This would be extremely powerful, but would take a lot of time to built it up for the entire team. If nothing else, it would still at least provide a raid-wide heal for 500 potency. Seeing as us ASTs will get Earthly star which will give a 675 potency if activated immediately, and 900 if activated after 10 seconds, I feel like this change to Plenary Indulgence is completely justified.

Ultimately, a lot of this would need time and testing to feel satisfying, and for everything to have the right numbers. You have a lot of ambitious ideas overall. I totally get where that comes from, as I do that a lot too. I think this skill set could've been a great starting place for WHM to go through, but would've needed plenty of refinement. Even the suggestions I made I think need a lot of fine tuning as well.

[SaitoHikari]

Uh, yikes, I didn't even realize you posted long before I made mass revisions to the wall of ideas a few hours ago (which you can see in the post above). Yeah, it clearly needs a lot of fine tuning, which is why I asked for you to go through this since you came up with something simple yet effective. I know there's a fine line between just altering something to be workable and something that's way off into the realm of dreams that will never happen, but I figure now's a better time than any when the developers are clearly scanning these forums for ideas now. Whatever the devs roll with absolutely should be as future-proof as possible, because having WHMs go through a Bard-style rework come next expansion isn't very desirable.

- Regarding Jagged Shield, the amount of damage inflicted is always 50% of the target's max HP at the time of casting, hence the wording 'when the shield is broken'. But making it scale off of the caster's HP instead of the target is a better idea in the long term, because as you mentioned, the whole scaling Warrior favorability stuff. And as for Granite Wall, I wanted to give WHMs a type of utility that the other healers didn't have, and letting them essentially give a Holmgang to a DPS or another healer at risk of dying to a major mechanic (due to weakness or too many vulnerability stacks) is certainly unique instead of giving them another generic damage absorption/reduction spell.

- Merging Granite Wall and Jagged Shield together probably isn't a good idea. It's a bit contradictory to reward the party with bonus damage for having the healer let someone's HP drop to 1. Then again, I don't even remember what I had in there before I mass revised it.

- Regarding Water, to be honest, I wasn't sure HOW I really wanted the Water Blessing stacks to be gained. At first, I left it to just casting Cure/Medica-type spells 2 times, then I decided to increase it to 3 and expand it to include Medica II crit ticks and Holy, considering the problem with the current lily system is that the rest of WHM's toolkit is already designed to discourage casting Cure/Cure II as much as possible. On second thought, it'd be better to simplify it by axing the Holy generation effect and reduce the amount of Cure/Medica-type spell usage down to 2. The MP reduction effect should probably be axed too - considering I just thought to have Thin Air become part of the Wind mechanic.
(I also thought about having Fluid Aura and Tetraglammation generate Blessing too, but the last thing we need is to give WHMs even more of a reason to knockback enemies away from the pack in dungeons, and Tetraglammation isn't something that should be carelessly spammed.)

- I replaced Vital Aura with Reflect, because I realized a crit shield/debuff/knockback blocker is just way too situational, and whenever it'd be useful, it'd turn WHM into a required class for the fight. Plus Reflect is an iconic spell. When I mentioned future-proofing, I wanted to set up a framework to introduce other iconic spells in the future, like Quake and Flood.

- Regarding Wind, I struggled with deciding how many stacks there should even be in the first place, and settled on 15 since Aero III will generate crit ticks far more often as there are more enemies in a fight (not to mention that Aero III + Tornado during a large pull will probably result in Rage of the Wind being activated repeatedly in a VERY short amount of time). I thought it'd also be a reasonable enough number for single target fights since Aero II ticks would be thrown into the mix as well, whereas Aero II single target spamming isn't very feasible in mob packs. I decided to toss in Regen here because it's essentially considered a wind-aspected spell already (or at least I think it is), and it IS a single target heal over time effect. (By this logic, Medica II should probably count too, but it's a group healing spell and the last thing everyone needs is to have WHMs needlessly generating massive amount of emnity on themselves during large pulls for the sake of squeezing out extra DPS because... Reasons.)

- I originally was thinking of having Tornado having a debuff-detonate type effect like BLM's Thunder procs. What made me decide against it was that it'd pretty much be straight up broken (unless it's turned into a single target spell, which goes against what it actually is in the first place), for healers aren't really supposed to have THAT much damage. WHMs already have the highest personal damage output of all the healers already. To be honest, the current iteration of Tornado is just like that because I wasn't really sure what to do with it besides having it be a small DPS boost in single target fights and a major mob-wrecker in large pulls. An Iron Jaws type effect does sound neat though. Actually, on second thought, it's better, because it'd give us room to bump the potency of the spell up to like 150 or something and reduce the cooldown to 20 seconds (so WHMs don't end up with a Rage of the Wind buff that they can't spend at all throughout the entire buff duration because both Tornado and Thin Air are still on cooldown, and Font of Creation was designed to be used with wind stacks but BEFORE you generate enough to lose them all and gain Rage of the Wind instead).

- Font of Creation... Admittedaly, I just wanted something to tie all three elements together, but this definitely needs a lot of tweaks. Applying blessings to other players seems really complicated.

That said, I'm grateful you decided to humor me, and I hope this was as educational to everyone else as it was to us, ha. There's always many factors to consider in skill/ability design. It is so much harder than it looks.

EDIT: On second thought, the Wind part especially needs to be reworked, because I just realized you're not really going to see Tornado within a reasonable timeframe when you're playing solo. Which, in hindsight, makes the whole lily system feel even worse than it already is. Every other job gets reliable ways to use all of their tools at their disposal for use in solo content. White Mage currently cannot.

[ty_taurus]

The idea behind the merged Granite Wall and Jagged shield was that it was no longer an immunity, but a shield that worked off your own VIT stat, not the target's to avoid it showing favoritism to WARs. I'm not diving deep into calculations for this kinda thing, but it would start off on the lower end of the spectrum and get stronger the more Earth Blessings are on your team. When that shield breaks, that's when Earth Blessing would appear on that target.

You mentioned an issue of dealing too much damage with the idea of a detonate on Tornado, but if you're dealing 50% of your target's max HP as damage, and you put that on a tank with 40k... that's a 20k nuke you're doing as a WHM. I can understand not realize that that's damage caused by the WHM, but it's your action.

As for reflect, while I don't think that could be a broken ability if balanced correctly, I really don't see it as water element. That's more generic healing powers kinda stuff.

As for the complication of Blessings... if each blessing has one specific ability that can trigger it, and it stays on the targets until used, I don't think it would be too complex. The effects are pretty straightforward, and the flexibility to decide what blessings go on who, and what effects Plenary Indulgence could trigger applies some strategy that doesn't necessarily punish novices while also allowing veterans to shine.