The White Mage Issue - #CalmDownFFXIV

[SuzakuCMX]

Only bad part about the lily system is the part I hate the RNG!! Random chance and healing are a bad mix tuning can help ease the randomness but it will still be there too pester you at the wrong time.

Agreed, but the tooltips we've seen from E3 (50%/100%) are not THAT much RNG anymore. Confession RNG (20%) is much worse. It's still far from "WHM dead and useless" though that most of the forum seems to be spouting.

Balancewise I think WHM will be fine on release. Funwise is a different story.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I fixed it for you

Paladin would really like a word with about that. It waited two years to finally get properly balanced despite the devs insisting it wouldn't be a magic tank.

[SuzakuCMX]

Paladin would really like a word with about that. It waited two years to finally get properly balanced despite the devs insisting it wouldn't be a magic tank.

Was Paladin ever so unbalanced that it couldn't clear progression content? No. It just lacked damage compared to WAR/DRK and that's why people don't bring it along but it can clear progression content 100% fine on the same patch and in fact, did clear it pretty quickly.

EDIT: Actually I made a mistake and no PLD cleared it on patch 3.4 >.> So I guess PLD may be worse off than I thought but that might also be because nobody bothered playing PLD into Savage.

[Sebazy]

Just to add a correction here, Paladin was indeed at a significant disadvantage in A12S during early progression. DRK's CDs allowed it to tank the fight near enough from start to finish with the standard issue Warrior opener for agro. By contrast, PLDs were out of CDs for inceptions making a tank switch near enough mandatory at that point. Without that switch the PLD would die to the first tank buster in that phase or the melee hit that followed it.

One the first clears were out of the way and people started refining strats (and thus figuring out what they could just holmgang into insignificance) then PLDs came back into play and were less of a hinderance. Even much later on with echo though, it was always a rough time when I'd help an A12S with a PLD that insisted on tanking the encounter start to finish =(

[Tiva]

I fixed it for you

The only time I can think of where a class was balance one patch after it was clearly broken is warrior going from 2.0 to 2.1.
What are your other examples of this happening?
I see some people say this, and I feel like my perception of the issue may be off.
In my mind, Smn was broken throughout all of final coil (2.4) and I think it got a mp adjustment before 3.0 but I can't find the notes on it so I may be wrong. But it was left out of final coil prog pretty much. ETA Final coil came out 10/28/2014 (or close to that) and smn ruin and ruin 2 mp cost was decreased 24 Feb 2015. 4 months later. So that could be an example as well, but I cant remember clearly if that totally fixed the issue or not.
Jump and drg's magic defense was a problem all the way from launch to 2.45. They tried to "fix" jump before that but kept failing (jump animation still too long). Similar to the way they attempted to fix astro and kept missing the mark on that as well. I think we all remember how long it took for ast to be balanced... and then SE actually did something worse and overturned it. Many belive they should have left it and things would have evened out, but they added the balance buff and ruined it. Monk and paladin I'm not really gonna get into. Bottom line is I don't feel this was "balanced the next patch".

And honestly my past mmo experience may be different from yours... but I completely disagree that balancing happens often in this game like you imply. What SE tends to do is wait till a big patch, then push big changes. And they usually only change the class that is the problem. They don't "balance". They "buff" and hope that leads to balance. In other mmos I've personally played, I see small adjustments made all the time. They are constantly bringing small numbers up and down. Not just for the problem class, but for other classes too. And if something is obviously a problem, I've seen hotfixes literally the next day after patch release. I've never seen SE do this. They always seem to paint with a large brush. They don't make fine strokes to tweak things. Example- monk was kind of hard to address, because the biggest problem was it's utility. It's damage was very good. But other classes just brought decent damage and amazing utility. So what they could have done is made small adjustments to drk's threat (to make them less reliant on the utility nin brings) and made small nerfs to the dps buffs nin and drg bring (so the raid dps increase between bringing a monk vs brining these other classes wasn't so big). But since SE has this philosophy that they won't nerf classes... these options are not available to them. Additionally, they could have made Noct more viable, by making small nerfs to the fairy free healing. To bring sch down a bit. That would have made noct better comparatively. But they are stuck on this "players get mad at us when we nerf their class! ahhh!" crap to actually do any of this. It's like trying to play chess with only half the pieces.

[Tint]

"Once you reach that level 70 cap, and you reach Savage Omega, there may be [new] discoveries that you make at that point. So we hope that the players do try it out, and provide feedback once you’ve experienced it first hand"

And we will all be waiting until after Omega savage to see fixes if things are not right.

the devs want to see how we play their classes, see what discoveries we make they aren't aware of and see what we actually do in the content before they want to make adjustments.

[Rai_Takara]

Only bad part about the lily system is the part I hate the RNG!! Random chance and healing are a bad mix tuning can help ease the randomness but it will still be there too pester you at the wrong time.

The RNG is controllable, the problem is the reward for Lillies is kind of bad. Cool down reduction is either useless or broken, generally speaking. On top of that, to generate lillies, you have to use the most inefficient spells you have, aka Cure 1 and 2. If say lillies could be procced by regens and other ogcds, then they would see a lot more use. Same with confession stacks.

[Atreides]

Paladin would really like a word with about that. It waited two years to finally get properly balanced despite the devs insisting it wouldn't be a magic tank.

You say balanced when PLD actually got buffed through the roof in stormblood. While the other tanks got stomped. They should've done one of those options but the balancing team decided to do both... It's like there are 2 seperate teams working on the changes and make different decisions....

[AlphaSonic]

the devs want to see how we play their classes, see what discoveries we make they aren't aware of and see what we actually do in the content before they want to make adjustments.

I only need to read patch notes to see that WHM has 3 less abilities than AST.
First discovery done.

[Lemuria]

Only bad part about the lily system is the part I hate the RNG!! Random chance and healing are a bad mix tuning can help ease the randomness but it will still be there too pester you at the wrong time.

Overall, the Lily system is awful. If the 'best' it can do is give us a 20% cooldown on existing skills or give us a poor replacement for Stoneskin, then it's as good as non-existent as far as I'm concerned. You can't choose when to use it, and it won't add anything new or interesting, it's just there.

What did we lose in exchange for this terrible system? Stoneskin / Esuna / Shroud of Saints / Divine Seal / Protect / Cleric Stance. What did Astrologian and Scholar lose? Err... their own Esuna clones and Eye for an Eye? That's about it really. We also lost our 0-MP proc from Cure, MP reduction from Medica, damage from Fluid Aura. It's all take so far, with very little given in return.

The way I see it, Square-Enix has absolutely no idea what to do with white mage so they're basically turning it into the new 'base class' for every other healer to leech from.