Should WHM get a personal damage buff?

[Risvertasashi]

for me the only way would be to nerf WHM heals to SCH or AST levels (or massivly increasing hp-pools) but then again you could just play AST and thats not the the point of having classes in the first place...

The problem here is you seem to be under the misconception that WHM heals are stronger.

Let's take your first example. AST's CU is 150 potency, and follows the party when they leave the bubble or the AST cancels (which an optimal AST will). Asylum is 100 potency. Already quite a bit weaker.
A better analogy to SCH would be Whispering Dawn, which is 120 potency over a similar duration. Closer, but still more powerful. Benefic 2 is 715 or 747.5 potency, vs cure 2's 700 potency.

Now we can go on and on like this comparing potencies, but in the end I don't think it's what we should be looking at. At the end of the day, all healers have powerful heals. And I don't think anyone thinks healing in this game needs to be more powerful, HP bars in high end content yo-yo enough as is.

So then we look at other things.
MP? Well WHM was stronger here until AST was buffed, so it no longer retains the advantage.
Enmity? AST generates quite a bit less of it, both through stances and things like ES technically being a pet ability.
Utility/raid buffs? Well, once upon a time WHM had an upgraded protect and things like divine seal, but all of these were stripped and shared with the other healers. So now if you want unique utility, you must pick AST or SCH.
Damage? WHM did have an advantage here, but SE buffed AST to be above WHM and SCH has been on top since the start.
Mobility? AST is the clear winner here again, with the DPS spells getting reduced cast times, and Lightspeed getting CDR and buffed to synergize with DPS spells better.

SCH also gets an extremely powerful class mechanic - a whopping 480 potency oGCD regen, compared to WHM maxing out at 150 potency regen on a single target. And AST's class mechanic is, of course, cards, which can directly provide extra healing or damage as well as a number of raid buffs. Gated by RNG, but that RNG has been buffed itself many times to play nicer.

So, what exactly does WHM bring that no one else does...?

*crickets*

What does WHM bring that's stronger than anyone else?

Well, cure 3, sort of. It's 50 potency stronger than Indom, but quite a bit weaker than Earthly Star. Earthly Star is also oGCD, costs no mana, and generates no enmity (while cure 3 is notorious for ripping hate from tanks). Buuuut... cure 3 can be spammed. Except nothing in the game requires it. Any time cure 3 might have come in handy, Indom + ES can clean up handily.

--

WHM could be flat buffed quite easily and not become OP. Exactly how to do that is open to debate. Personally I'd be happy with Balance and Chain Stratagem as Role Action, but I doubt SE will do that. This thread is more themed around buffing WHM DPS. It's a very practical solution: AST + SCH can bring the raid buffs and still be desired for parse runs like always. But if WHM damage was not crippled, potentially offering raids higher DPS output than the other healers (instead of lower) could be a bit of a consolation to running a non-meta build - instead of feeling like AST is a flat upgrade in every way.

Long term fixes are much thornier. As long as SE insists that WHM is a "pure" healer, but not a strong(er) healer, and can't have utility, competitive DPS, raid buffs, and so on - and considering that most of AST's healing is a reskin of WHM spells - we're going to go through this cycle again and again. But WHM needs an advantage somewhere.

[Cerenessus]

Lets clear this up a bit:
Aetherpact need ca. 3min just to build up your fairygauge, you HAVE to spend your stacks to do so - therefore you cant holt back your stacks for times of heavy dmg or you will lag ap.
then it logs the fairy in place, greatly limiting her range and placing her in danger of getting hit and killed - your gauge drops to zero then - it logs her out of all her other abilitiys, no rouse, no illumination, no embrace...
and it take sereral seconds to get it aktiv...
Now we have a skill with lots of con`s and need to give it some sort of pro`s to balance it out - giving it a high pot is therefore one possible way to do so.

next is es and indo: just to make it clear here this are SCH/AST "oh shit!" AOE-heals. WHM´s is assize and PI.
cure3 is the AOE-big heal - something total different only WHM has of all the healers. And next? indo has a lot of pot? yes in needs to have it, because SCH also misses his AOE-small heal and only has indo and et to work around it.
and ES needs to be placed beforehand, needs to build up and needs to be place right - all cons than need to be balenced somehow or the skill would just be garbage like exco was before the buff.

also you say enmity is a problem if you spam cure3 but then you say there is no situation there you spam it. so why do you exactly have enmity problems?
also explain to me why a healer with assize, thin air and lucid dreams losses in mp- management against a healer that has the same lucid dream and will sacrifice his other mp-regeneration machanic to make his buffs an aoe.
i havent looked recendly but except for cure3 (the one you dont spam obviosly) your spell should cost a compareble amount of mp.

if you count all skills of the healers, WHM is a strong healer that can deal with all mechanics SE could come up with and can even soloheal.
also i dont have a missconception of WHM heals being stronger: i played WHM and while SCH is my main (i prefer petclasses) i even switched to WHM because sometimes i struggled to clear content because SCH heal require of lot of planning
what can leave you in trouble as soon an 1 dps eats a mechanic he should have dodged.

so a possible solution would be: remove cure3 (which looks like it only causes problems) and give WHM an insta-dmg spell with like 120pot

[Limonia]

But WHM needs an advantage somewhere.

Wasn't it said somewhere that WHM's "advantage" is that it's easier to play than the other healers and in turn must be worse? Just like it was said about PLD in the past. Maybe I don't remember it right. But maybe they deliberately make WHM worse in almost every way because it's supposed to be the most newbie-friendly healing job.

[Risvertasashi]

-snip-

Weird that you want to argue about SCH, but ok, here goes. You don't need 100% gauge to use it, and this is very suboptimal. You can easily rotate it with whispering dawn to keep pretty high HoT uptime to boot.

Secondly, you want to spend aetherflow stacks often, or you won't get the CDR for Aetherflow. Holding them is bad scholar play.

if you count all skills of the healers, WHM is a strong healer that can deal with all mechanics SE could come up with and can even soloheal.

Hey guess what. AST can also solo heal the hardest content in the game.

Anyways I'm not sure why you seem so determined that WHM must receive a hate-nerf. If any class needs a hard nerf, it's SCH, but you don't need to worry because SE never will. SCH's position in the party will be guaranteed regardless, so chill?

Wasn't it said somewhere that WHM's "advantage" is that it's easier to play than the other healers and in turn must be worse? Just like it was said about PLD in the past. Maybe I don't remember it right. But maybe they deliberately make WHM worse in almost every way because it's supposed to be the most newbie-friendly healing job.

This is a position some players hold. This is not the position the dev team has ever said they hold.

Also possibly a side effect of community bleed over. There's another popular trinity game going through some healer balance issues, and people there saying "well that healer should be the worst because it's easy."

[Erakir]

Lets clear this up a bit:
Aetherpact need ca. 3min just to build up your fairygauge, you HAVE to spend your stacks to do so - therefore you cant holt back your stacks for times of heavy dmg or you will lag ap.
then it logs the fairy in place, greatly limiting her range and placing her in danger of getting hit and killed - your gauge drops to zero then - it logs her out of all her other abilitiys, no rouse, no illumination, no embrace...
and it take sereral seconds to get it aktiv...
Now we have a skill with lots of con`s and need to give it some sort of pro`s to balance it out - giving it a high pot is therefore one possible way to do so.

next is es and indo: just to make it clear here this are SCH/AST "oh shit!" AOE-heals. WHM´s is assize and PI.
cure3 is the AOE-big heal - something total different only WHM has of all the healers. And next? indo has a lot of pot? yes in needs to have it, because SCH also misses his AOE-small heal and only has indo and et to work around it.
and ES needs to be placed beforehand, needs to build up and needs to be place right - all cons than need to be balenced somehow or the skill would just be garbage like exco was before the buff.

also you say enmity is a problem if you spam cure3 but then you say there is no situation there you spam it. so why do you exactly have enmity problems?
also explain to me why a healer with assize, thin air and lucid dreams losses in mp- management against a healer that has the same lucid dream and will sacrifice his other mp-regeneration machanic to make his buffs an aoe.
i havent looked recendly but except for cure3 (the one you dont spam obviosly) your spell should cost a compareble amount of mp.

if you count all skills of the healers, WHM is a strong healer that can deal with all mechanics SE could come up with and can even soloheal.
also i dont have a missconception of WHM heals being stronger: i played WHM and while SCH is my main (i prefer petclasses) i even switched to WHM because sometimes i struggled to clear content because SCH heal require of lot of planning
what can leave you in trouble as soon an 1 dps eats a mechanic he should have dodged.

so a possible solution would be: remove cure3 (which looks like it only causes problems) and give WHM an insta-dmg spell with like 120pot

Alrighty then.

A DPS eating a mechanic is what lustrate is for. Using one indom and another for whatever you want - energy drain, soil, excog, you name it - you still have a lustrate every 45s. If you run out of charges, well, I run out of tetras, too, and benison's saving potential on a DPS is...not the highest.

Neither Assize or PI are Emergency heals. Not really good ones, at least. Assize will NEVER be an emergency heal in raiding situations so long as it's tied to MP return. You are HIGHLY encouraged to use it on CD or very close due to that (on top of it being a source of damage, too). That's not to say you can't plan its usage for snap healing same as one does for Indom, but it's not something we'll ever keep on CD for long just in case of emergency. And PI outside of a single stack takes more planning than any other healing tool in the game, including Earthly Star, due to the underwhelming 10s duration on confessions that can't be refreshed if people are topped off - you better hope your cohealer doesn't hit an indom if you're trying to build a useful 3-stack that's not more effort than it's worth.

Indom NEVER needed to be buffed to 500 potency. I'll get that out of the way now. It was very strong as a 400 potency snap 30s CD that is instant and 15y radius. It helped shore up scholar's lack of aoe sustain if necessary, and emergency tactics did the same thing in situations where two scholars were present or another healer went off the edge (Ravana, etc). Buffing it was a knee jerk reaction to scholar at the beginning of Stormblood and the worry of "Now with Cure 3 and ES, Scholar has to have a high potency burst tool too." No, they didn't. With Aetherflow being a functional 45s CD in this expansion, Indom is even less of a concern to use simply due to more aetherflow charges.

Succor and Asp Helios both have their shield potency 150% now, too, meaning the scholar forced to on demand spam AoE is stronger than he was in HW. Given it's just one ET he'd have before starting to overwrite shields, but every bit matters. Succor is now 25 less potency than Indom used to be. Crazy.

Cure 3, meanwhile, has a disadvantage compared to both of these of requiring a tight stack, and while that isn't always a concern it certainly can be. That's not to say there aren't any other drawbacks, like ES needing its own planning ahead of time, but it's certainly something that feels understated on the forums. It might not seem like much, but the ranged eating another GCD to stack up for several mechanics can add up.

Speaking of Earthly Star, it's not exactly a weak heal if you're forced to detonate it early.

By the way, the reason WHM has aggro problems is not just due to Cure 3. It's because we're the only healer that doesn't have either a crapton of our healing offloaded to another source, or just passive aggro reduction by default. That used to be how scholar and AST handled their aggro, then they got the lucid aggro dump on top of it. In a DPS meta of 'tank stance/combos as little as possible' on top of raids requiring more raw healing since everyone's raw HPS potential has grown, WHM aggro is a bigger deal than it used to be in the days of casting Cure 1. WHM is also encouraged to use Thin Air to spam cure 3 in various situations. It is never needed (Indom + ES handles it, or in other cases Indom + Cure 3 would do the same thing), but due to Thin Air as a healer comp it's a waste of resources to not take advantage of Thin Air's potential.

But that conveniently goes against us when it comes to Aggro management. So now, Thin Air, a 100% mp-less tool, has a 'drawback' if used to greatest effect on high MP cost heals. Tell me, where's the drawback on lightspeed? Oh that's right, it got removed.

Even without this, our aggro can be so high early on in fights (especially with boss immune phases where HoT aggro accumulates even more) that a single Cure 3 is just that much closer, which we are forced to use due to encounter design. I mean it, healers are forced to do the 1-hp heal-to-full stuff a lot now. We can't just choose not to heal it - but WHM has no source of oomph healing that doesn't give us the same oomph aggro. Doesn't PI apply to our aggro too? I honestly can't remember on that one.

Now let's talk MP management. It's been mentioned before. WHM wins hands down in MP management this expansion, but it doesn't matter in a lot of situations due to how powerful Refresh is (and Mana Shift being available too). I am currently glad for it because our static lost our ranged DPS and is now refreshless, but we're an exception and not the norm with how much strength a ranged DPS brings to the party in general. With AST, don't conveniently forget they get to extend Lucid Dreaming and that their spells cost less than many WHM equivalents - the kicker being aspected benefic in Diurnal being a much heavier hit than regen. Lightspeed as well. This isn't to say AST MP is omg amazing - not really the case, but it's not a straight up comparison of lucid, assize, and thin air vs lucid. Scholar ain't exactly suffering either, else they would not be routinely using their holy-equivalent on bosses when moving or when needing to weave.

It's a good thing we win the MP department, too, since we're the only ones who spend MP on our heavy hitting burst AoE heal if Thin Air isn't available.

The hilarious thing is you mention REMOVING cure 3, the spell that Square has leaned on more and more as the reason you might bring a WHM as a 'balance' point so they can do the personal DPS they're SUPPOSED to have been doing all expansion. Hey, we already lost Divine Seal and Shroud to the other healers, what's one more unique thing?

Cure 3 isn't the cause of problems. Our being able to use it more freely this expansion has led to a stupid arms race of burst healing, lessening the relative value of Cure 3's burst that it used to have and increasing the burst capabilities of other healers. It's also helped highlight the discrepancy in aggro. Because we all have more burst healing, Square designs around more burst healing than we used to have to do. The 'emergency healing' value of these spells is seen less and less and such, since a lot of times they're used in straight up required spots now. No longer am I really in situations where, oh no, something went wrong, pop PoM DS and spam medica to try and keep people through the DoTs. A part of me misses getting an overcure proc and using it on two tanks that are both taking damage. That took recognition and application.

Square didn't have to give everyone bright and shiny tools to 'compete' with Cure 3.

But they did.

I am all for pros and cons of abilities and jobs to create unique gameplay and interesting approaches to solving encounter mechanics - but White Mage does not currently need a new con to go along with a bandaid buff to their damage output (which will make aggro generation even more slightly apparent, by the way, but is still the easiest bandaid). White Mage would still bring the least overall raid damage as a con, which is a pretty big factor, while not being anywhere near overpowered on the healing or MP sustain side of things.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

I have no idea why people keep suggesting mitigation skills for WHM when the solution is more to do with what they can offer unique to the raid. Right now their dps is ridiculously below AST and SCH and their healing is not a strong point, it never was, it was always about the same strength as any other healer's heal. Them simply having Cure III shouldn't warrant a 1000 DPS difference and no unique utility at all.

[Seraphor]

Wasn't it said somewhere that WHM's "advantage" is that it's easier to play than the other healers and in turn must be worse? Just like it was said about PLD in the past. Maybe I don't remember it right. But maybe they deliberately make WHM worse in almost every way because it's supposed to be the most newbie-friendly healing job.

By that logic, DRK and MCH should be amazing!

[Fernosaur]

so a possible solution would be: remove cure3 (which looks like it only causes problems) and give WHM an insta-dmg spell with like 120pot

So your solution is to gut WHM's one and only tool that keeps it relevant in its niche as a progression healer job and give them a crappy dps spell for it? Do you also think Ruin II should have twice as much potency and Balance should be a 20% boost again? I mean, if you wanna put the nail in WHM's coffin, let's at least go all the way.


There is absolutely no reason right now why WHM should receive a nerf, cause the only strength the job possesses is "it's easy." Which is true, I mean, WHM makes it a lot easier to clear content when you're kind of winging it and are dealing with mechanics in an uncontrolled and more-or-less improvisational manner, but other than that, there's nothing else to it. There's a lot of possible optimization to WHM because of it's rather awful mobility, but the gains for said optimization are so inferior to AST's and SCH's that it's kind of pointless anyways, unless you absolutely must play WHM over personal preference, which is 100% valid, but still less efficient and suboptimal.


In short, your arguments of saying the tools of other jobs have downsides is moot, because once you optimize things, those downsides stop existing, and only the upsides shine. The upsides being, of course, that SCH and AST both have massive oGCD healing that doesn't generate enmity, is readily available for almost every raid damage situation, and on top of it bring damage boosts for the entire party while providing comparable or superior damage to WHM depending on the player's skill. If anything, Asylum should be as strong in potency as Collective Unconscious, given that it's worse in pretty much every way, and Tetragrammaton should be on a 40s cooldown. And that would just be the start of things that could maybe help WHM.

[Cerenessus]

My solution would be to increase hp-pools while keeping healoutput constant and to spread incoming damage more.
Right now we have fights that are basicly raidbuster - 10sec later tankbuster -10 sec later raidbuster - 10sec later tankbuster....
And in fights like this hots and gcd-heals are ineffectiv because you HAVE to heal all dmg instantly or a dps will die from a prey or some other mechanic.
That is why SCH ogcd are that strong: you have many and you dont need more.

having bigger hp-pools would make hot stronger while limiting mitigation, it should also make more room for new healermechanics like combo-point-healer or dps healer,
because you need your hard hitting aoe heal ready the second the raidbuster happens and having your combo not ready at that time could cause a wipe.

what my mainproblem is: you dont ask for a better designed class - you ask to be more like SCH or AST.
you want more mitigation, effectivly beiing more like a SCH and therefore be a petless SCH
you ask for more raidbuffs, making you more an AST

but i NEVER read here: "please make WHM a stronger hothealer to give us more opportunitys to dps"
you dont ask for WHM to be a WHM, just a healer with different colored spells.

and that is just not what class-design is about.
and that is why SE will probably never give you what you ask them for.

[miraidensetsu]

what my mainproblem is: you dont ask for a better designed class - you ask to be more like SCH or AST.
you want more mitigation, effectivly beiing more like a SCH and therefore be a petless SCH
you ask for more raidbuffs, making you more an AST

Maybe because an Diurnal AST is more or less an faster WHM with cards?