Burnt out of the healer BS

[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.

[Yuyuka3]

Snip

I'm honestly glad you are around. You can explain what bugs me far, far better than I can...

This again nailed it completely.

[galbsadi]

One thing to note here, that I think this really misses:

The vast majority of SCH oGCD abilities are tied to Aetherflow, which can expect typical availability of 3 stacks/min.

Under typical circumstances, that means you're looking at closer to 5 oGCD heals without blowing a major cooldown (that's three Aetherflow abilities and WD and Fey Blessing). If you blow all your cooldowns, AND have a perfect stack (i.e. start with 3 aetherflow and have aetherflow off CD before time's up AND use Dissipation AND use Seraph) you get closer to an expected 10-15 uses, of which about 8 of them will be Lustrate (which is nice, but still only 600pot) and one of them is about the same as Plenary (i.e. not that useful by itself).

If you're popping all of those cooldowns to do this, odds are something is going very wrong and you're either (a) about to wipe or (b) about to be using a lot of GCD heals and praying or (c) trying to save a DRK that the WHM could save with a single Benediction.