WHM aggro generation needs to be looked at

[Ghishlain]

This is further compounded by Earthly Star being considered a pet as far as enmity goes (if I'm not mistaken?)

I did this test in the past and I couldn't remember the result so I tested it again just to be sure.

While on AST, I partied with a WAR friend of mine who was equipped with a Diamond Axe and a Penta Melded 350 necklace. They had Defiance on and Overpowered a level 1 Training Dummy 3 times just to establish initial threat. Then we performed three Earthly Star tests. I allowed the Star to charge to Giant Dominance before popping it.


Test #1 - Myself, the WAR, and the training dummy were hit by the star - my enmity went up
Test #2 - Only the training dummy was hit by the star - my enmity went up
Test #3 - Only myself and the WAR were hit by the star - my enmity did not go up

So, to me this seems like the healing component of Earthly Star is not checked for enmity but the damage portion is. Which is unusual and almost feels like an oversight more than anything else.

Soooo, to go back to quoted text, yes, it is further compounded by the fact that the healer enmity (which is definitely the largest chunk at 720 potency x 8 players) is not recorded as enmity, this making AST enmity control even better.

I'd like to also randomly add that unlike the SCH fairy, the AST's star does not seem to suffer any level correlation to its stats when it heals. 720 potency healed for what was anticipated based on my Benefic average (10K Benefic, 18K Earthly Stars)

Hmm, so it's basically something that was either overlooked or not deemed important enough to fix. That's interesting. I wouldn't go as far as to call this Imbalanced or anything, but requiring a Nin or the tank to do more aggro combos than normal to make up for a WHM being in the party is not very good.

If this was indeed intentional design and AST is just the exception then that's fine, it just doesn't look that way right now.

I agree about the oversight bit. I would've liked for the enmity trait removed from sects with the inclusion of Lucid Dreaming as a Cross Role since WHM and AST would have equal concerns for the enmity issue.

With the above being said, this MAY also be an intentional design decision as they might have wanted for each healer to have a particular type of weakness. WHM being Enmity, AST being MP consumption, and SCH being heavily CD/Resource dependent.

Who's to say. I wouldn't doubt that the weakness may have been intentional but I've been pretty vocal about how I dislike the identities provided to WHM, AST, and SCH that I'm leaning that it wasn't intentional and the weaknesses just happened to occur as they did.

Also, I know it doesn't speak to the any sort of enmity change for WHM were trying to discuss in the OP but here is some specific advice to the O8S fight opening that has helped us out. I found that in our composition of WHM / AST, the AST has the potential to solo heal most of the opening with minimal assistance from me (WHM) with a whole crap ton of precasted Aspected Helios (both HoT and Shield since they can sect swap before pull) and Collective Unconciousness HoT ticking on everyone. Also a prepositioned Earthly Star so it's a Giant Dominace when the first Heartless Archangel goes out will pretty allow your WHM to focus deeps and not worry about enmity until you get to the first Foresaken. I can't recall if my AST uses Largesse in that opening too but they do use a cheap MND potion so take with a grain of salt. Even with all that healing, our WAR MT doesn't even use a Butcher's combo, just a Eye Combo while in Defiance then moves into Deliverance shortly after Heartless Archangel resolves so they aren't killed by the difference HP calculation (lol >>;....). They do get Shadewalked though. I generally only contribute a Medica II pre-casted and a Medica II after Celestriad resolves with an Asylum going out to handle the subsequent Ultima. My Assize goes out when I refresh Aero (which generally happens shortly after the first Ultima goes out). My Lucid tends to be used near the Light of Judgement cast where I'm riding something like 75% enmity of the MT and I don't have any enmity issues afterwards.

Hopefully the above will help iron out any sort of enmity issues you might have in the opening of the God Kefka fight.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Those are some very interesting finds about Earthly Star, Ghishlain. I never even thought to check if the heal of Earthly Star generates aggro or not. The way every heal works in the game, you would think that it does.
That really does seem unintentional.

And yeah, again if it was actually intentional I have no problem with a weakness of WHM being enmity control. But if it was unintentional, which it's starting to sound more and more like it was, I would like it looked into.

There's no way to control your healing in a fight like o8s, where damage constantly needs to be healed quickly and sometimes topped.

Those are some good tips for WHM btw. Unfortunately, I actually PUG all of savage these days, so this is not entirely reliable for me when I'm on WHM QQ I'll make it work though.

[EaMett]

Enmity management is one of the few things that makes WHM somewhat challenging. If anything I feel they should make it worse and give whm more tools to play around it. Of course extra healing mechanics would be nicer but since they seem to repeatedly screw those up...

In general, grabbing aggro is often the result of non optimized healing (aka you should offload some to your co healer). In pugs this often means that you need to either communicate with your co healer or heal moderately as to not grab aggro and let them "feel" that they need to put more back into it.
Also, I don't care what anyone says but a tank being in tank stance for one single extra enmity combo is not going to break the raid dps. Tank dps optimization is awesome but c'mon, you've got one task. Losing aggro to a healer for your dps is a rough equivalent to a healer letting someone die for their dps. It doesn't matter how poorly they play, suck it up and build an enmity lead (especially in pugs).

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Enmity management is one of the few things that makes WHM somewhat challenging. If anything I feel they should make it worse and give whm more tools to play around it. Of course extra healing mechanics would be nicer but since they seem to repeatedly screw those up...

This actually sounds really nice, and if they gave us actual tools to deal with this I probably would find it fun. I mentioned earlier that tieing some kind of aggro dampener to Plenary stacks would be neat, but I don't see that ever happening.

[KDSilver]

WHM always had that "problem", but thing is, it's part of the job.
This class is the most concerned about overheal, meaning that a proper management of your healing and Lucid Dreaming usage is the key.

Besides, that's not always a Tank problem.
If your co-healer (shielder) overshield and heal unecessary damage that Hots could have heal, it's not entirely your fault.

Let's not remove more mechanics to handle on our healers that make that job fun to play.

[CorbinDallas]

I would have to lucid right before/during first graven in Kefaust, even when I literally only used 3 abilities to heal during the entire opener, all of which were off global. I would use asylum to top off the first fire, assize the second, and bene the buster (holmgang), sch would also use fairy regen and indom/succor at some point. Despite the sch doing the bulk of active/burst healing, I was still right up the tanks ass in threat.

Fact is, being optimal, i.e. healing as little as possible, does nothing to manage threat when you're the healer that has the highest burst damage of the 3 healers. White Mage needs some help, we can't rely on just lucid. Give me shirk.

[Trunks]

Stopped playing WHM this tier because of this. Tanks refuse to use aggro combos because "muh deeps" (great design!). If anyone, anywhere, makes one mistake and I have to heal them or, god forbid, use Benediction, it's curtains. Really fun gameplay: do I let them die for their mistake and cause a group wipe to mechanics, and get complained at for not healing; or do I heal them and get complained at for the massive 30% overhealing I'm doing that's generating too much threat?

My favorite part of all this, of course, is that WHM's one and only aggro reduction ability was taken from the Job and given to every caster, including ones with access to Diversion and innate enmity reductions. And WHM got... ... ... ... oh right, nothing in return except a nerf to reflect that it was now a role ability.

[Kabzy]

Stuff

Enmity generation is a party responsibility. You could time your first use of Lucid a bit early to cut aggro in half, it's not like WHM really need to time when to use Lucid anyway. Then there are NINs who have their enmity abilities. However, it seems more like you need to find a better group of people to play with. Tanks should definitely be in tank stance if you've tried the stuff I've mentioned already. I think every group that runs WHM will eventually come to this problem, but you change things around and adapt. If nothing helps, then I'd say the problem probably is with the WHM and them overhealing, or bad/non-existant healing from your co-healer making you do all the healing solo.

As for your last comment, SCH here! I hate the fact that they changed Aetherflow and gave us Lucid in return. We did NOT want it! :'D

[Sebazy]

Stopped playing WHM this tier because of this. Tanks refuse to use aggro combos because "muh deeps" (great design!). If anyone, anywhere, makes one mistake and I have to heal them or, god forbid, use Benediction, it's curtains.

As a healer who is notorious for being very HPS heavy (Multiple world top 10 HPS all stars rankings across the last 5 tiers), you are exaggerating a fair bit there =P

Don't get me wrong, if I don't have a Nin in a pug then yes, I have to make a conscious effort particularly around the first 2 to 3 minutes of God Kefka, and sure I've pulled agro randomly off tanks on other turns this year too, but that's more down to them being bad than me being an agro monster (The PLD my alt had in O5-O7 this week was a good example of one that was just bad rather than one that was chasing DPS).

If I have to start throwing unplanned cure IIIs out because stacks are getting messed up then sure, but if you’re walking such a knife edge that single target patch healing is putting you over the line then there's something fundamentally wrong somewhere, be it with the tank, your lucid timing or your overhealing. Things such as letting Medica II & WD take care of the group healing between light and first trine makes a big difference when you don’t need to top the group for 20+ seconds.

[Fernosaur]

Having flashbacks to getting Aero III'd during Almagests in v4s prog. Eugh.

It's honestly a little bit funny that SCH and AST have zero enmity issues on top of all their other strengths, and WHM is the only one that has to deal with this. One would think Earthly Star would cause the same issues, but lol pet healing.

I can't really think of a solution, though, other than giving them a passive trait. Maybe attaching it to Secret of the Lilly would be annoying because it would force a Cure cast before the heavy healing, and during the opener, of all things, for the final tier fights. I didn't really have the chance to finish this tier due to group scheduling problems, but hearing about the opening Heartless into Ultima, it looks like they're a fan of opening final boss fights with a heavy hitting raid crunch, so it's going to continue to be a problem, probably.