Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[MintnHoney]

As an Astrologian main since the day it was released (I jumped out of the Monk ship and never looked back), I think it's interesting to see White Mages up in arms over Earthly Star. Personally speaking, let's create a strange situation of equivalency: since everyone's equating this to Assize, let's make it so that Assize has this potency (200 Attack, 900 Heal max), and we'll just flip it for the Astrologian (900 Attack, 200 Heal max) and make it the devastating landmine it could be. *sigh* If only...

Dreamy sighs aside and complete seriousness applied:
With regards to Confession and Plenary Indulgence, the way it was worded in the preview I had seen (via MTQCapture), I had assumed that the ability would heal all nearby party members with a potency that increased as more confession stacks were gathered. So, as long as the primary target had (a) confession, nearby party members would be healed instantaneously for at least 400 potency. I feel like this might have been the idea you were going for originally, but at the last minute, decided it was too much and tried to reign it in and require that the individual required confessions in order to get the heal. In fact, I feel like that's what I saw inside the Benchmark...
Even if this scenario isn't quite true, I think that would be a way to fix the Confession and Plenary Indulgence situation: simply require that someone have the Confession(s) to create the free AOE heal, and, suddenly, you have RNG stacks that would be acceptable because the reward has an impact (even more so, since the idea was to keep the White Mage as the "pure healer") that would be appropriate for an ability granted as the penultimate, current max level ability for the White Mage.

As for the Lilies, cooldown reduction is nice, but, I would say, not as important for the skills that the Lilies affect. I suppose if you applied this to Benediction, then it might be more worthwhile.. however, rather than applying a simple cooldown effect to a few abilities, Lilies were described as providing various effects to spellcasts, at least from what I remember of the Live Letter, and I believe providing various effects based on what ability is used would be a good compromise. Once 3 lilies are accumulated, perhaps the next 3 abilities used could provide bonus effects, and lilies could no longer be accumulated until the current lilies were used up. Perhaps, using the lilies with Divine Benison would provide the same effect as an AoE effect (or a cooldown reduction, here, could suffice I guess), while Tetragammaton could provide a Haste-like buff to the target (or, considering the etymology, perhaps makes the next spell cast by the White Mage instant cast (which would be a great added side effect and give the White Mage an identity that allows them an advantage with the Role Ability slots)), and Assize could have its potency altered (or you could go all the way and simply make it a better Retrogradation and add in a debuff/buff removal).

Anyway, that's what I would do with both implemented systems that would, hopefully, not compromise their integrity while providing the benefits that would make players happy.

Edit:
I suppose it would be worth taking a moment to reconsider the requirements for Divine Benison's cast, with regards to what I've proposed here. Even if what I've written isn't "acceptable" for use, the decision to make this ability utilize all lilies without any gains for the amount of lilies used makes it a cheap sink rather than a cool ability that an elementally-inclined Conjurer would use. Either use all lilies with an added effect for each lily used, or use 1 lily maximum (but that wouldn't coincide well with idea I had).