Burnt out of the healer BS

[GrimGale]

SE should embrace healers secondary identities: SCH as a debuffer, WHM as a nuker and AST as a buffer.

Give each a system as complex as the AST cards use to be to fill the healing downtime.

Have SCH use AF stacks to find enemy weaknesses and reveal them with Chain Stratagem to create burst windows.
Have WHM water the lillies by weaving together healing and damaging spells.
And AST focus on aligning buffs, extending and changing them to fit the needs of the party.

Idea: Afflatus spells are oGCDs, Fluid Aura is an oGCD weak damage spell that can only be used after casting a healing/damaging GCD and grants a buff to the caster which increases white lilly generation speed by X% for X seconds.
(obviously adjusting global potencies for all that.)

[Yuyuka3]

Genuinely trying to understand:


1. If you don’t think WHM was fun, why didn’t you change? I’m not trying to imply you should have. I assume there is something about he WHM job that appealed to you enough that you didn’t want to leave it. I’d like to know what that thing is.

2. How would you change WHM to make it as fun as the other healers used to be?

Also, can’t speak for others, but I only started actually visiting the forums when they messed up my class. I imagine it’s the same for a lot of people. They’re not the same ones who were actively telling you to deal with it for the last few years. If you tell us what changes you’d like to see to make WHM more fun (and other WHM mains agree) I for one would be happy to support you in lobbying SE for change.

1. I didn't say it wasn't fun; but it was troubled, with the biggest trouble being people telling you to switch, or being rude about how WHM is for 'unskilled'/new players due to its simplicity (btw, I also raided as SCH in HW, I found its 'complexity' quite overrated back then even, which is why I shake my head over that claim so much right now), which is more an outside issue than the job itself. Also, it just had so many stupid, outright redundant parts, like the entire 4.X Lily system, PI for a big part of the expansion, and what has to be the worst trait in the entire game (SotL II, you won't be missed), on top of no utility whatsoever. What kept me going was a pretty weird mix of nostalgia, the hope that things might turn out fine one day, and pure spite against those telling me to play AST, which I always hated due to it feeling like a very lazy copy-paste job of the other healers.

2. Right now, I wish for some weaving options. They look plenty on paper, but I find myself wanting for something to weave in surprisingly often even if I use Benison on CD, especially when taking double-weaving into account like in the opener, and that you sometimes don't actually have to use, say, Tetra because nobody took damage. And between Regen, 3 - 4 Afflatus-spells in 90 seconds (if you actually need them), Dia and the option to Swiftcast something e.g. for movement, there are so many potential weave windows that I at times stand there without anything to klick while waiting for the GCD to wear off. Also, only a single of my weaving options, Assize, deals damage, so it would be nice to have something in that regard especially, since weaving a healing-CD into a heal is often not necessary at all, and my only damage-GCD I can use for weaving is Misery and Dia, and if I use Dia, I might have to clip it just to weave; that doesn't feel good to me at all. I would honestly like to see Misery off the GCD, even if they should nerf it a bit if they do so. I think that would help already. Also, a negative about Lilies I see is that while SCH can get three aether stacks immediately at the beginning of the fight, the first Lily will only appear after 30 seconds. That might sound like a small thing, but a single Lily at the start would feel pretty nice in quite a few situations, though this isn't such a big issue. It's also a bother that all Lilies, including the blood lily you spent so much time getting, vanish if you die, but I guess that's something I just have to deal with, as SCH had to since forever. *shrugs*
Also, I know many will disagree on this one, but some rDPS-utility would be nice. They have to nerf our rDPS if they do so to not make us completely op, but with how fixated many players are on this even today, it would literally be the easiest way to stop the cycle of WHM falling out of grace we lived through twice now, and which I predict happening again. Another option would be getting a debuff instead.

Even if they aren't the same people, they do act the same way (and also, some are actually the same people...), which is already extremely agitating and frustrating. By now, I'm pretty defensive about this topic, since I have to read through the same old, tired arguments again for the xteenth time now.

[Miiu]

all who post here on forums that leave game: we all know you will back soon ^^

and I hope they won't change healers, i love how they are now
once again healers meant to heal not to dps, don't like healer dps kit ? change to dps class, simple

I usually think an opinion shouldn't be dismissed because someone is newer to the game but in this case. Since you apparently joined in 2017. People were already used to how sch worked for 4 years before you joined and now that has completely changed after 6 years of people sticking with it because that is what they enjoyed.
Telling those people they should just switch jobs and stop complaining because they don't like what their favorite job has become is pretty short sighted.
Also fun fact: If you enjoy what healers are now. You could have had that the whole time.... just don't use dps skills.

[Yuyuka3]

I usually think an opinion shouldn't be dismissed because someone is newer to the game but in this case. Since you apparently joined in 2017. People were already used to how sch worked for 4 years before you joined and now that has completely changed after 6 years of people sticking with it because that is what they enjoyed.
Telling those people they should just switch jobs and stop complaining because they don't like what their favorite job has become is pretty short sighted.
Also fun fact: If you enjoy what healers are now. You could have had that the whole time.... just don't use dps skills.

Without wanting to attack you or anything, but...
"Just play something else!" is exactly what WHMs got told for a pretty long time now <.<

I mostly agree with the rest of your post, though.

[Elladie]

Could you go into specifics of what you like about this iteration relative to the last? Not looking to be combative, mainly trying to see what makes you happy about the current state of the job.

I have been playing it mainly in the new raid in a group where I know my co-healer, both my tanks and some of my DPS. MY CO-healer is a WHM currently. Healing the raids, learning mechanics, and aiming to DPS as much as possible has been very entertaining. I have a range of healing abilities, including a few oshit buttons, so I've found it a more pleasant experience than (for example) healing the first tier of Omega on SCH right at the start when ppl were undergeared. Seraph is great, and I also use Sacred Soil more than previously. Excogitation has always been my go-to button and that hasn't changed. The buffed crit adloqium (I forget the name) is also gorgeous. DPS has had a button reduction but I honestly don't get why pressing two buttons (or 3 if you don't have a paper tank and dare risk a bane) is so very much more engaging than pressing one? I mean it's not like it constituted an actual rotation, and the engagement for me in playing a healer is in keeping people alive whilst handling mechanics. Handling mechanics is my biggest issue because I have directional dyslexia (I'm not joking, this a serious handicap) and I am elderly in terms of the player base so my reaction time and memory is not what it was. For me, the fights and healing is very nicely tuned.

I appreciate that people who play at a higher level are probably less engaged, but I would also suspect the majority of players are more in my skill range and therefore likely to be happy with the current situation

[Semirhage]

1. If you don’t think WHM was fun, why didn’t you change? I’m not trying to imply you should have. I assume there is something about he WHM job that appealed to you enough that you didn’t want to leave it. I’d like to know what that thing is.

2. How would you change WHM to make it as fun as the other healers used to be?

Not the person you're asking, but I agree with the tenor of her complaints. 1. I like the aesthetic. I think the Amdapori lore is neat. I like the idea of keeping the team alive while blasting opponents. I'm more fond of its aesthetic than poison fairy mage or star fortune teller mage.

2. I'd love to have impactful rewards in the kit for playing well. Misery I've heard is -okay-, but I peaced out on healing this expansion a while ago so I wouldn't know personally. I've got a *lot* of complaints about SE's handling of WHM over the years. I get pruning needing to happen, for example, but I'd love an expansion where I didn't feel like they were nerfing the crap out of skills you use (Holy, for the umpteenth time. Fluid Aura when it had damage. Deleting Aeros. Shroud of Saints. Divine Seal.) and buffing things you avoid using (Cure). I'd love a reward model for improving skill that excites me a bit more than "you've managed to refund yourself time with judicious use of your abilities? Congratulations! Now you get to, with a few exceptions every 30/45/90 seconds, cast one spell over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. No cards to juggle or anything else. Just that." Trimming the fat from your skill usage should feel like a refinement, and personally 211111111111111111111*snore* isn't my nirvana.

[Hatstand]

snip

1. Right. That makes sense. Although I'm still a little fuzzy on why you find the current pushes for change upsetting. Is it because in only complaining when SCH and AST were changed we're implying that it doesn't matter if WHM has those problems? If that's the case, I can tell you my thinking, but that's all. If that doesn't help, I guess it doesn't help. I find WHM a little dull. Not necessarily less skilled but certainly lacking the phrenetic pace I enjoyed on my SCH. It seems more thoughtful. WHM was my first healer, and I did enjoy it when I played it, but I moved on rather than campaigning for change because I know that the style of play that suits me doesn't suit everyone, and it's good for them to also have a job that they enjoy. Quite frankly anyone who belittles other people based on their preferred job is a bit of an a#%. I hope you can understand that there are frustrations on our side, too. Right now the SCH dps rotation closely resembles the old WHM one, and so it's hard to say that we don't want to be that, that we want to be different from WHMs, without disparaging WHM at least indirectly. Ultimately, again, I think it really comes down to wanting different healers to play differently. We loved our old style, and we want it back.

2. Do you think it would work to have some sort of low potency dps ability on a 2-ish second cooldown? Presumably you'd have to nerf glare a bit to make up for the extra damage opportunities. I did think when I was playing my WHM that it seemed odd to have so many instant spells and so few things to (regularly) weave with them. Alternately, or possibly additionally, I'd love to see a way to spend regular lilies on dps. I love decision making and risk/reward calculations, and letting WHM decide whether to spend their resources offensively or defensively would be great. Alternately, if they want to keep basic lilies healing only, I'd love to see the generation rate of lilies be partially based on dps dealt, so you still gain lilies over time, but faster when you're dealing damage. This would set up a lovely dynamic where your dps and heals actively feed each other in both directions. As for lilies at the start of fights, perhaps an ability on a 3 minute cooldown to give you one Lily? It doesn't amount to that much extra, but would mean you could always start an instance with one. As for rdps utility, absolutely. Something like chain stratagem could be added to give WHM some utility without impacting its gameplay much. Ofc, all these changes would require potency changes to balance, but I leave that for others to figure out.


My concern when I propose changes for WHM is that I might be trying to shift it away from what WHMs enjoy and towards what I enjoy. I don't main WHM (at the moment) and so my opinion on what it should be counts for less than that of those people who do main it.

[fantasticm]

2. How would you change WHM to make it as fun as the other healers used to be?

Not them, but stance dancing. I miss it. I'd like to see it brought back, but unlike most other WHM abilities, I wouldn't want to see it shared with the other healers via cross role.

I think WHM should maintain it's high pDPS, despite it being harder to maintain than King of oGCDs The Lord Scholar. If WHM is not going to have any sort of raid DPS utility (which after 4 years of asking is looking more and more likely), then I think a high-risk high-reward system that allows them to lay on some serious burst damage at the cost of their healing would be interesting, fun, and in-line with the general aesthetic of the job. It would reward skill and timing, as well as be easily ignored by Sylphies and new players so WHM can remain the 'teaching job.'

I don't think it would necessarily make WHM more desirable for raids (after the inevitable SCH/AST buffs and/or WHM nerfs), especially so long as the DPS 'muh parse' mentality remains. But it would make the job more engaging for people like me, that enjoy pushing the line and making tanks sweat whilst unleashing the fury of the gods upon hapless mobs. And then healing. If needed.

Mind you this is all pure fantasy. It will never happen.

[Trunks]

Genuinely trying to understand:

I know this wasn't addressed to me but I'll give my answers anyway, as a similarly frustrated WHM.

1. It's not that WHM was never fun. Stuff like God Kefka or UwU? Super fun! Leveling dungeons when your tank's getting beat to a pulp and you can spam Holy? Super fun! But that's like 0.1% of game time. It's the monotony when you get to farm content, or when content is simply not designed with sufficient heal checks to necessitate use of WHM's plethora of healing spells. I can't speak for anyone else, but I did toy around with AST as well. It's pretty. But I like White Mage's aesthetic, and AST just felt clunky to me. I wasn't going to force someone in my static out of the group and force us to find a new healer by switching Job mid-expansion. They're all traumatized by earlier experiences on that count. My group appreciated me as a healer.

I actually wound up taking a break from the game once we got to O11s because I was so bored (and busy IRL) that I was literally falling asleep during raid. And 'lo, our static stopped raiding. So this is why people stick with Jobs they're unhappy with. Loyalty to its previous iterations, and loyalty to the people they play with.

2. This is a tricky question. The problem with WHM, as we see it, is that it lacks something the other Jobs have. So it's not really about tweaking existing stuff. The fundamental design is flawed, and indeed, is the source of most imbalance between the healers. SCH's healing kit is primarily off GCD, allowing it to use most of its GCDs on doing damage. AST's raid DPS comes largely from its off-global card system, allowing it to use many GCDs on healing without completely tanking its rDPS contribution. WHM, meanwhile, has most of its healing and damage toolkits on the GCD, with limited abilities to weave. This chart makes it pretty stark:



For SCH, the loss of Embrace targeting and Energy Drain, and the inability to activate fairy abilities during spell casts, has been a huge dumbing down of the Job - and yet they still have more to weave than WHMs do, even without using Emergency Tactics at all.

In order to achieve a semblance of balance (and for single-healer content) the healers each have to have the same core functionalities. In White Mage's case, more of this functionality is packed into its GCD spells: its damage spells are more potent, and its healing spells more varied and versatile.

But we all have the same number of GCDs, which means WHM's performance and playstyle is dictated by encounter design far more than the other two healers. That's why WHM looks like a DPS powerhouse now, but in a challenging Savage or Ultimate raid will likely fall behind SCH. That's also what we mean when we say SCH has become WHM. In content without a lot of healing, we're both just spamming one button. This is how WHM has always been, and it feels awful when you're not healing a lot. Their solution to this seems to have been just a huge nerf to healing, requiring more usage of healing spells. The problem there, of course, is that this still tanks WHM's rDPS, and SCH has as few healing spells as it does damage spells.

The obvious thing to do with Shadowbringers would've been to make WHM a bit more like the other two. It had a useless Job gauge. They could've done anything. Instead they took a different approach, giving WHM a mechanic that offsets its personal DPS loss when it has to use GCDs to heal. At this point, I'm resigned to the fact that they just won't give WHM more oGCD abilities because they think WHM players are one-armed toddlers who can't press more than one button every 2.5s.

So, looking at realistic changes, perhaps they could develop this a bit further. Ditch the passively-generated Lilies altogether. Require the generation of 5-6 Lilies to make the Blood Lily bloom. Cast-time heal spells (Cures and Medicas) generate 2 Lilies, and instants (Afflatus) generate 1. Then, give us a second option for expending the Blood Lily: a short-duration (~10s) buff (Afflatus: Wrath?) to our damage which has a greater potency potential than Afflatus: Misery. Tweak potencies as necessary, and slap an MP cost on Solace and Rapture.

This achieves several goals:

1. WHM still gets the desired mobility from the Afflatus heals, but it doesn't incentivize always using those spells first, and indeed punishes you for over-relying on them. It also pares back on WHM's total disregard for MP.
2. It further stabilizes WHM's rDPS contribution by offsetting the DPS loss of using GCDs on healing. This also allows WHM's maximum pDPS potential to be toned down a bit (tanks rejoice).
3. It restores an element of planning and decision-making around how to use the Blood Lily gauge, without totally punishing you for making the "less optimal" decision.

Alas, what're the chances? I hope you weren't expecting a short reply!

[Sloprano]

It has been enlightening coming to this forums after spraying morning coffee on the monitor as I read the 5.0 changes for sch. Most for seeing my favorite job is not the only affected by sweeping changes that altered it in a very different way or not, which seems in whms case.

Short story: I started this game wanting be a healer, a whm, but started in Limsa as acn to be with my friend going mrd. After all I needed the acn levels then. Got to 15, MSQ took me to Grid, unlocked cnj, leveled to 30, unlocked whm, played a bit and quickly missed acn for it's playstyle. Went back, unlocked sch unknowing what it was, and never looked back. Also unlocked ast, but by then schs style was so ingrained I couldnt bear leveling with one dot and one damage spell and no pet. Thinking it might be better at max level for those who seemed to enjoy the playstyle, feel or aestethic.

5.0 happend, sch now feels like the whm and ast I left at level 35. More skills sure, at the same time less to do. And now Iearn it was what you had for all these years and the "Y'all need to calm down" before SB when the changes were announced seem even more inapropriate. As if you knew then as I suspected now that this probably won't be good.

Knowing how busy sch was in hw and pld in sb, with a large varied set, looking for oppertunities to make little changes here and there is something I would wish for on everyones job. Everyone might not use the whole set, it probably wouldn't be necessary at all times, but those who would want to stay busy could.

Im mostly here advocating for return of the old sch (or new and similar), but seems more and more necessary as a whole to get the developers out here and talk the people who have played all these jobs for 6, 5, 4... No matter the time they started and hopefully discuss and incorperate some feedback. Dream scenario would be where those who simply look to the healer role to only heal would find little changed and those wanting to do more find an intricate system within their reach.

Maybe I shouldve expressed my gratitude for sch here back in 3.0. The devs might have taken note, changed nothing in ShB and I wouldnt made long-winded posts with burning sensation for a mmo job.