Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[OcieKo]

WHM's arguable problem isn't that its actions don't fit the Job; it's that the previously unique function and feel of the Job have been steadily eroded since 2.x, and the first info on 4.0 doesn't do much to reassure players that WHM will be taking steps towards reclaiming a more defined identity among the healers.

...and it doesn't help that the Lily system as presented thus far is utterly lackluster.

The speed of building it somewhat problematic, the benefit gained not so much. I keep seeing this back and forth if, saving our CDs when their useful and always wanting 3 lilies to use with it. If your not spamming your OGCDs back to back and timing them to mechanics, your not using all the CDs too close in time to each other. The only thing I'm seeing thats consistent somewhat, is you want little to no control over the building of said lilies, you just want it to build up quickly with no deliberate action taken (argument for regen ticks over casts) at this point your basically asking for NINs Ninki gauge that builds up on auto-attacks (maybe NINs will like Arrow as much as I do now). I dont see the downside of having your CD readily available sooner, or how healing people causing your tools to become available more often counters the thematic of what a WHM is.

To be honest, the mechanic could be anything thematically, but if people don't think the WHM will offer equal competition to AST & SCH raid utility, there would be the same outrage. How do I know this? Because there was no outrage at the beginning of 3.0 when AST was introduced with a card mechanic, SCH had a pet mechanic and WHM had no class mechanic at all to play with. People didn't care about that. They got angry when the new Meta rolled in after AST got loaded down with buffs and WHM dropped to third place.

Truth. Can't even say I'm happy with what's being done to ASTs current kit. Can't even believe I'll ever play with the #s we saw, and from what it seems one of our 3 big new things is a 3rd round of RNG albiet the best odds we have in our RNG at 50% but still RNG (Spread/Draw is 1/6, Royal Road is 1/3, Lord & Lady is 1/2). I think "Star Bomb" (dont kid youselves you call it this too) looks pretty and will probably be our hardest hitting spell even after its inevitable pre-release potency reductions, not the OMG TOO OP mess it is now. Tho my sig tells you my biggest complaint on ASTs less than finalized info rumormill.

[Cynfael]

To be honest, the mechanic could be anything thematically, but if people don't think the WHM will offer equal competition to AST & SCH raid utility, there would be the same outrage. How do I know this? Because there was no outrage at the beginning of 3.0 when AST was introduced with a card mechanic, SCH had a pet mechanic and WHM had no class mechanic at all to play with. People didn't care about that. They got angry when the new Meta rolled in after AST got loaded down with buffs and WHM dropped to third place.

Lilies are mechanically unappealing based on what we know thus far. I get tired of repeating it, so I didn't bother to do so explicitly in that reply. However, they also happen to be un-fun.

WHMs didn't complain strongly at 3.0 launch because Assize, Asylum, and Tetra were all very effective, with the first two having some unique functionality.

The speed of building it somewhat problematic, the benefit gained not so much. I keep seeing this back and forth if, saving our CDs when their useful and always wanting 3 lilies to use with it. If your not spamming your OGCDs back to back and timing them to mechanics, your not using all the CDs too close in time to each other. The only thing I'm seeing thats consistent somewhat, is you want little to no control over the building of said lilies, you just want it to build up quickly with no deliberate action taken (argument for regen ticks over casts) at this point your basically asking for NINs Ninki gauge that builds up on auto-attacks (maybe NINs will like Arrow as much as I do now). I dont see the downside of having your CD readily available sooner, or how healing people causing your tools to become available more often counters the thematic of what a WHM is.

One of the issues with Lilies, aside from how they are accumulated and aside from the fact that their primary benefit is a sort of Spear card effect for specific skills, is that using any of the affected abilities blows the entire stack regardless of how many Lilies you have stored. This seems to be the opposite of intuitive or efficient and makes it very probable that you go through an entire fight reaping minimal or no benefit from the whole mechanic.

I suppose with Cure II having a 100% Lily proc, you could deliberately stack 3 of them before you know one of your key CDs is about to be up, but even at best it still encourages a potentially wasteful and counterintuitive style of play for a possibly marginal benefit. Now, as we've heard regarding PvP changes, there is potential to make it worthwhile; all of the speculation here is based purely on what we've seen and since heard following the media release.

[Fawkes]

If this is about fun, 4.0 WHM beats 3.0 and 2.0 by default of having a themed class mechanic to manage where there was simply nothing to engage with before. People literally complained less when SE gave them nothing in this field. It's not about fun or the theme.

I think 3.0 wins in the fun category. Going back to level 50 content is painful because I lose things like assize and tetragrammaton that had a positive impact on my playstyle. Nothing about the apparent cure spam of 4.0 sounds like fun.

[OcieKo]

Lilies are mechanically unappealing based on what we know thus far. I get tired of repeating it, so I didn't bother to do so explicitly in that reply.

One of the issues with Lilies, aside from how they are accumulated and aside from the fact that their primary benefit is a sort of Spear card effect for specific skills, is that using any of the affected abilities blows the entire stack regardless of how many Lilies you have stored. This seems to be the opposite of intuitive or efficient and makes it very probable that you go through an entire fight reaping minimal or no benefit from the whole mechanic.

I suppose with Cure II having a 100% Lily proc, you could deliberately stack 3 of them before you know one of your key CDs is about to be up, but even at best it still encourages a potentially wasteful and counterintuitive style of play for a possibly marginal benefit. Now, as we've heard regarding PvP changes, there is potential to make it worthwhile; all of the speculation here is based purely on what we've seen and since heard following the media release.

I'm also tired of going over why Spear and Lilies shouldn't get compared despite both being CDR BUFFS, but I'll do it anyways.

Spear and Lilies have the same value in ideal situations, yes. Spear has a higher opportunistic cost than Lilies, yes, why, because if we do it may slow down or prevent a more desirable different effect, which is currently unknown. Lilies is A. CDR or B. Shield. You can 100% guarantee 3 lilies in current knowledge every 9s, not recommend or a great idea, but possible. Without considering the opportunistic cost of spear, you can reasonably assume (based on 1/6 odds and at leadt 6 draws, doesnt make it true tho, we could and have drawn the same 2 cards 3 times in a row) you will get 1 every almost 2 minutes (draw 30s, redraw 30s, include some space for GCD casts and the visual read on the card, the absolute min of about 93-96s gets more to the 110-120s range). This basically amounts to you needing to use enough cure 2s or get procs from cure 1s in 2 minutes to = 20% to match spear.

Now lets say you want to accommodate from 1 spell vs 30s worth of spells, while not considering the vastly slower OGCD usage of ASTs outside of their cards. So your looking at Draw (unavoidable as long as AST uses a normal Spear on self, also currently one of the 2 most common ways of pitching it) Lucid Dreaming, Swiftcast, Synastry, Lightspeed, Essential Dignity, Collective Unconcious, and Celestial Opposition, with potential for Largesse and Cleric Stance (expecting a name change to happen here), so thats up to 9 skills or 180% additive CDR. Now, would you like to blow 9+ OGCDs of yours in 30s just to macimize use of it? Probably not, neither do we.

Given that the CDR only applies to skills that are used during it, is one of the reasons we use it seldomly, quite frankly aside from draw itself, we probably wont use more than 1 or 2 more CDs in the time we can use it, because its stupid and hurts us more than it helps. So assuming we arent giddily blowing our loads like its ero-christmas you looking at about 60% CDR in 2min (still not accounting for opportunistic cost) which means at worst 9 cure 2s in 2min or about 24s at worst which is 24/120 = 1/5. So 1/5th of your GCDs in that time period for the same CDR, assuming your healing a full hp target for no reason other than lily stacks (read: this is a stupid idea, dont). Now assuming all your healing in that same time is just regens and OGCDs, you lose 7.5s max to medica 2, and about 10s to regen on the MT (this world is ideal, people arent screwing up and needing more heals, and your refreshing regens in the last 2 sec not at 18s left). So 42/120 = 21/60 = 7/20ths, upgrade the cure 2 only to match 4/20ths. So your still using less than half your GCDs healing. Now find me a way to spend only 7 out of every 20s on healing GCDs as Noct AST (ideal world so Noct has to be able to do it too, or else it loses to itself in Diurnal).

So now the question is, do you not like to use the skills it affects? From what I gather that is not the case. Do you not want those skills available as often as possible? Id like to say its not the case, but the current impression is questionable on the matter. Only general negative impression I get is you dont want to use Cure 1 or 2 for pretty much anything because GCDs and somehow GCD count is the only gauge of efficiency that seems to matter in these arguements.

To be fair a lot of jobs didnt get new things on their gauge:
MNK Chakra and Greased Lightning easier to see.
NIN 1/2 is Huton easier to see.
SMN 2/3 is Aetherlow Charges and Dreadwyrm Charges easier to see.
SCH 1/2 is Aetherflow Charges easier to see.
AST 3/4 is Draw Card, Spread Card, and Royal Road Card easier to see.
WAR 1/2 is Stance easier to see, other is a slightly nerfed rework of an old mechanic (50% loss on switch is the slight nerf I'm implying here)
PLD 1/2 is Stance easier to see.
BLM 1/? (Not gunna lie havent quite figured the parts distinction of this one too well yet) is Astral Fire/Umbral Ice easier to see.
MCH 1/2 Reload easier to see (may have been nerfed also).
BRD you probably have a solid arguement here, theres is pretty new.
DRK not 100% sure if Grit/Darkside are obvious on it, probably are tho. If so up to 2/3.
DRG 1/3 Blood of the Dragon timer, easier.
Can't include SAM/RDM as their brand new.

WHM is pretty much the only one who went from 0 to something. Even with how new BRDs looks, its reworking stuff they had to be different, it will alter their playstyle. A lot of them will, and they didnt change nearly ad much as BRD. Most of the new ones are build em up and blow em down on stuff that requires them to have it or they cant use it. WHM has Benison, the rest can be used w/ or w/o lilies. There may be others who might not like the new mechanics after they get their hands on it, some grumbles here and there. Only one 230 page consolidation out of 13 jobs with roughly the same actual treatment on the matter (most of this thread focuses on lilies, if someone wants to check every post, be my guest, I dont think you gunna get under 51% tho, so Im saying it).

[dark494]

I think 3.0 wins in the fun category. Going back to level 50 content is painful because I lose things like assize and tetragrammaton that had a positive impact on my playstyle. Nothing about the apparent cure spam of 4.0 sounds like fun.

How does level 50 content have anything to do with 3.0 or 4.0 WHM? They're the same as far as any of the 52-60 skills are concerned. WHM isn't losing any tool in 4.0 that makes it any less than it already is, and gets access to so much more, no matter what it ends up being. 4.0 wins by default in that vein.

There's also one other thing I want to reiterate to this thread which has been lost on many people here falsely claiming that Yoshi wants healers to DPS or something. From a media tour interview:

"First of all, we do not expect healers to contribute to DPS. However we know a lot of the cutting edge players enjoy this aspect about the job and that those progressing in the raids early on use it help clear the fights. We decided to make it so that the idea was more approachable and less punishing so that if a player wants to try it, they aren’t sacrificing all of their healing capabilities to do so like they were with the old Cleric Stance. We didn’t like seeing healers doing entire dungeons in Cleric Stance, especially if they forget to switch back and heal!

That being said, and I want you to really reinforce this to your viewers, I firmly believe it shouldn’t be mandatory and we do NOT have the expectation of them to DPS."

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...NwqZTwPUw/edit

[Fawkes]

How does level 50 content have anything to do with 3.0 or 4.0 WHM? They're the same as far as any of the 52-60 skills are concerned. WHM isn't losing any tool in 4.0 that makes it any less than it already is, and gets access to so much more, no matter what it ends up being. 4.0 wins by default in that vein.

Umm, I don't know how you haven't heard, but in Stormblood WHM is losing abilities, and only gets like two actual new things, one of them is just a "don't worry about MP" button and the other is a nonsensical aoe heal that doesn't work on people you weren't already curing.

And the fun of the job isn't determined solely by the number of skills, but how they are used. My point about assize and tetra is that they changed how I played. Having more instant heals was a buff. If 4.0 changes how I play at all it will be by making me cast cure 2 more than I actually need to. The best case scenario for 4.0 right now is that it still just plays like 3.0, therefore it loses.

[DreamWeaver]

Posting my sentiment I wrote for another topic :

IMO, the first step for healer BALANCE in general, is to remove ALL "utilities" that buffs party damage, Balance/Arrow/Chain Strategem all gotta go.

This is an unhealthy "meta" where the value of a healer is how often they can stroke the DPS's shaft the most. I mean seriously, is that truly what healers are to you? Be the Balance-female dog of the party?

Our utilities should be about boosting the survivability of the party, stuff like CU, DT those are great, and I hope we'll see more skills like those instead of more "press this button to stroke your DPS shaft even harder".

[dvoraen]

My feedback is largely in the form of a proposal. Everyone's pretty much made the essential points. This Google doc I wrote pretty much summarizes my standpoint on it, and is my bid for #WHM4.4Buff.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...it?usp=sharing

[javid]

How does level 50 content have anything to do with 3.0 or 4.0 WHM? They're the same as far as any of the 52-60 skills are concerned. WHM isn't losing any tool in 4.0 that makes it any less than it already is, and gets access to so much more, no matter what it ends up being. 4.0 wins by default in that vein.

There's also one other thing I want to reiterate to this thread which has been lost on many people here falsely claiming that Yoshi wants healers to DPS or something. From a media tour interview:


https://docs.google.com/document/d/1...NwqZTwPUw/edit

That Yoshi P quote made me cry ..... but in honesty I knew deep down inside the game was tune, even bk in gordias, to recieve 0 dps from healers. DPS'ing healer was a "bonus" by design, instead of a requirement (like us CORE demand). /sigh

If anything I hope we can re-hide that Yoshi P quote....and continue to convince them masses that DPSing HEALER IS A MUST .

Posting my sentiment I wrote for another topic :

IMO, the first step for healer BALANCE in general, is to remove ALL "utilities" that buffs party damage, Balance/Arrow/Chain Strategem all gotta go.

This is an unhealthy "meta" where the value of a healer is how often they can stroke the DPS's shaft the most. I mean seriously, is that truly what healers are to you? Be the Balance-female dog of the party?

Our utilities should be about boosting the survivability of the party, stuff like CU, DT those are great, and I hope we'll see more skills like those instead of more "press this button to stroke your DPS shaft even harder".

To the second guy's point..... what you're describing (by removing healer provided dps utilities) is what Yoshi P calls "PURE HEALER"....and most these ppl hate the concept of a "pure healer" so.... if they could down vote a post, you'd be at -32?

[javid]

Umm, I don't know how you haven't heard, but in Stormblood WHM is losing abilities, and only gets like two actual new things

Technically, YES, Whm has lost abilities being UNIQUE to their job; but so has so many other jobs. Also Technically, you can reach into the cross-class system to retain all the CDs you have here in Heavenward. So again being technical!! WHM has actually got 1 of its cd's nerfed "divine veil", has loss Stoneskin being 100% accessible (which wasn't ever necessary....bad healing if u spamming Stoneskin) and has lost between 2-5 cross-class role slots (if you INSIST on having alllllll your original skills from Heavenward be available in SB)