What exactly IS a White Mage?

[Risvertasashi]

No healer in the game can put a raid back together like WHM can. That's their strength.

I'm going to disagree with this on a rather simple basis.

As we're seeing from FFLogs, AST is seeing quite a bit of use even at the earliest points of this raid tier, ie, the prog phase - and maintaining exceptionally high performance. It is not the "farm/optimized party only" healer it was closer to being at the beginning of stormblood.

(Really if a group's having a lot of trouble, having a BRD+RDM makes a bigger difference than healer choice)

Is WHM's absurd aggro worth mentioning at all? SCH and AST both circumvent this pretty handily, but a WHM needs to have the party go on eggshells sometimes regarding its aggro.

Made some parts of UwU very interesting, and even the start of Final Omega was funky because of it.

Well... WHM has it bad for aggro, yeah (starkest difference when I ran AST through raids this week, didn't have to worry about ripping from the tank at all), but I wouldn't call it the defining flaw.

WHM's key flaw is that it no longer has any strengths compared to other healers. What white mage really needs is an advantage/strength that no other healer provides. (Or, if that's too much to ask for, at least make the raid DPS buffs role actions to make the healers equal/minmaxers uncaring)

Fixing WHM's aggro issues would be nice - probably one of the nicest things that could be done for white mage, even - but would not fix this fundamental flaw. The thread creator called this white mage's identity. When WHM is simply equivalent (MP, healing output) or worse (buffs, utility, etc) than all other healers in any area you care to talk about, then... WHM lacks identity/unique strengths, etc

So what's the beginner-friendly DPS/tank?

Everything else is allowed to be useful at a higher level and got reworked to attempt it, but we just discard WHM?

Yeah, the dev team doesn't do the whole "Well this job is easier so it should be worse!" balancing philosophy. Even RDM got some buffs recently, and SE's stated ideal is to balance utility vs DPS, not "easiness". RDM gets a ton of utility, so its numbers are less (but SE still buffed it a bit to keep it from falling too far behind).

It is. WHM has the worst of it due to how they can literally sit there and spam their big heals til' the Aggro shines Red. Though, I think with proper healing management between both healers it works itself out. The only thing I wonder about is what exactly are the aggro multipliers on their heals if they're causing that to happen even normally in UwU and O12S? Is it potential overheal that's adding to the aggro from WHM? Or is it simply just too high multipliers causing a giant aggro spike?

It's a combination of factors. First, tanks are using DPS stance and avoiding their aggro combo as much as possible, so there is not much enmity lead (this is optimal play).

Both AST and SCH defer some aggro generation to a pet (well, SCH defers a lot). AST's stance bonus further reduces all enmity generated.

Let's use o10s as a simple example, because ahk morn occurs early in the fight:
SCH will indom here, which is a bit of an aggro spike. But with the fairy focusing on tank heals - and using whispering dawn from the fairy if more party healing is needed - that's about it. Splitting between the SCH and fairy, it doesn't amount to much
AST will earthly star here, generating 0 enmity. If more healing is still needed, they might use CU, which generates a fair bit, but then the stance mitigates it.
WHM will probably cure 3 here. 1 cure 3 is enough to put you right on the tank's heels, and if you need to bene the upcoming tankbuster, that can push you over and force a lucid. If you need to use 2 cure 3s, or combine cure 3 with medica 2, you are assuredly going to rip hate off the more aggressive tanks.

But if your tank stays in defiance and spams butcher's block, I guess you'd be ok...?

Now that's a relatively easy fight. But in very high end content - last raid fight, ultimates, etc - you do need that tank DPS. And the healing tends to never really slow down. Hence, WHM's enmity problems. SCH splits it with the pet, AST defers some to a pet and gets a 100% uptime bonus.