If SCH got Energy Drain back, why not do the same for WHMs?

[EaMett]

I mean, they have Assize.

But to be clear here, you're FOR WHMs gaining an oGCD water attack on a 30 sec CD, but NOT for it costing a shared resource because that would... be too powerful...?

Essentially, yes. I didn't say they shouldn't have potencies readjusted though. Also the main reasoning for not having it on a shared ressource is 1) because you would have to add 225pot on top of the damage it does (assuming it generates the blood lily), this also breaks a few healing priority schemes amongst healer pairs so quite an involved change 2) balancing simplicity between healers since there are already parallels in place (3 AF stacks, 3 lilies for similar healing opportunities, the discrepency in generation time can be accounted for with ED usage) 3) Since the cooldown is equal to the time required to get a lily there's no need to add it to the shared ressource. This also lines up with SCH using, on average, one ED per 60s AF stack set (ballpark figure), but this ultimately depends on the potency of fluid aura (I've kinda been functioning on an 80 pot basis).

PS: I'm also advocating for adding damage to fluid aura mostly as a gameplay improvement for more skills to weave. Not as a means of giving whm more damage. So it's more important for this to not affect the rest of the kit that I feel is pretty balanced at the moment.

[Dynia]

DISCLAIMER: I know White Mage is in an excellent spot right now and I'm not idly asking for buffs because I'm under any delusion it "needs" them to compete. It was the first healer I leveled this expansion and I understand full-well it's crazy strong.

However, I would like to invite you to consider the following before you start throwing bricks at me just for saying "give" and "WHM" in the same sentence.

The primary justification for returning Energy Drain to Scholars has been so that Scholar would have a means to dump Aetherflow charges before its cooldown came back up, if healing skills weren't deemed necessary to burn them.

In the same sense, White Mage has a very similar resource system with its Lilies, but instead of being on a strict timer, it simply wishes to churn out Blood Lilies as often as possible for Afflatus Misery. However, the only means it has to do so right now is through healing spells, much like our Drain-less Scholars did -- and ones on the GCD at that, which means even less opportunity to use them during damage pushes.

So if SCH has an offensive resource dump "for when healing isn't necessary", why not do the same for WHM and its Lilies? Just for QoL?

For instance... Water magic? That's been a notable gap in WHM's arsenal since Fluid Aura lost its damage. It could still fit the Lily theme (Avatar fans know what I'm talking about), and even with the push to make WHM more Holy-oriented, we still see watery oGCD skills like "Divine" Benison. And with the lorebooks confirming Cure is Wind-aspected, we can't even argue "waters of life" for this, so it's just... weirdly missing.

To be clear here, I'm not suggesting that WHM necessarily even be "buffed" by this in any numeric sense. You could make Water no stronger than Glare or any rank of Stone, and just an alternative instant attack to spamming Aero/Dia in movement phases if the DoT's already on the target, akin to WHM's own Ruin II.
Alternately, it could be an oGCD attack, which would probably be mostly self-balancing without even needing to rank up, since it would always clip the GCD off Stone/Glare.
I honestly don't care how. My only concern in this thread is simply in offering the means to dump Lilies when your oGCDs were already sufficient healing.

If you've read this far and still disagree, feel free to throw bricks now, but I can't really see why we make one thing true for one but not the other.

I will tell you what ppls will tell you:
- "whm is op now no need to add anything" <--- i loled, whm is not op ...
- "whm don't need buffs" <-- 2 more patches for sch and astro and it rly will need some bufs

ppls forget how much whm lost since HW and how bad was in SB, so yeah they should add some more things to lily mechanic ...

[tikiwiki]

I'd just like to see an instant cast glare you could spend lillies on

[Archwizard]

Essentially, yes. I didn't say they shouldn't have potencies readjusted though. Also the main reasoning for not having it on a shared ressource is 1) because you would have to add 225pot on top of the damage it does (assuming it generates the blood lily), this also breaks a few healing priority schemes amongst healer pairs so quite an involved change.

So... I have some concerns with this line of thinking.

One, spreading out the value of Afflatus Misery over its requisite GCDs both diminishes its own damage value and gives a damage value to several healing skills that deal no actual damage. Makes sense in pure theorycraft but flawed reasoning in real encounters, especially since it means that healing aside they will always be weaker than Glare.

Two, under this logic, increasing the cost would inherently act as a buff, not simply justify one. Having the means to consume two Lilies in one GCD, regardless of what other actual effect it has, would innately give it an inherent damage value equal to or greater than Glare.

Three... it still doesn't change the original comparison to Aetherflow! Without access to Energy Drain there was no inherent "loss" in SCH not using the Aether skills so long as you were using Aetherflow itself on cooldown to regen MP, because there was no damage conversion to lose, only resources that could only have been spent on healing.
In the exact same light as leaving Aetherflow off CD, holding three Lilies is akin to overcapping resources, especially as the generation timer stops while you're capped.

[EaMett]

So... I have some concerns with this line of thinking.

One, spreading out the value of Afflatus Misery over its requisite GCDs both diminishes its own damage value and gives a damage value to several healing skills that deal no actual damage. Makes sense in pure theorycraft but flawed reasoning in real encounters, especially since it means that healing aside they will always be weaker than Glare.

Afflatus skills are just glorified oGCD heals that are on the gcd. The DPS loss for using an ogcd healing skill (double weaving aside) is about 80 potency for sch. Using an afflatus skill is a 75 potency loss so it's pretty balanced. The caveat being that you need to use misery to get the payoff which means you can't use them to heal the end of an encounter if you know the boss will die before your misery, as that will then be a dps loss. The upside to that caveat is that based on circumstances (buff windows, number of targets, etc) that dps loss can become a dps gain. Something sch is incapable of doing for example. Not only that but WHM can double weave into the afflatus skills which would be equivalent to SCH doing a triple weave in terms of potency cost of weaves. So really, the upside to the afflatus skills are greater in every aspect appart from near the boss death where you need to restrain yourself (and even then it's still a gcd heal without a cast time).

Appart from the above I really don't see how theorycraft and real encounters are different.

Two, under this logic, increasing the cost would inherently act as a buff, not simply justify one. Having the means to consume two Lilies in one GCD, regardless of what other actual effect it has, would innately give it an inherent damage value equal to or greater than Glare.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by this. The idea that you could use multiple lilies faster than a GCD completely unbalances the mechanic. Also, using lilies already have the potential to do damage that is greater than glare if circumstances are right.

Three... it still doesn't change the original comparison to Aetherflow! Without access to Energy Drain there was no inherent "loss" in SCH not using the Aether skills so long as you were using Aetherflow itself on cooldown to regen MP, because there was no damage conversion to lose, only resources that could only have been spent on healing.
In the exact same light as leaving Aetherflow off CD, holding three Lilies is akin to overcapping resources, especially as the generation timer stops while you're capped.

This one is a bit of a brain f**k. Every oGCD is a loss. That includes AF heals and AF itself so you wouldn't even cast it unless you really needed the mana. (No content requires you to use AF on cooldown without ED appart from maybe titan).
What needs to permeate here is that optimizing play includes reducing the cost of your oGCDs. If you're a SCH you will always use them in pairs with ruin II as much as possible in order to obtain two oGCDs for the cost of one. It's important to note here that there's no upside to using AF stacks to reduce your loss of damage.

On the other hand WHM afflatus skills have an opportunity for weaving. Even though their initial cost is the same as an oGCD, as long as you weave something useful into them their value is equivalent to a glare+clip. If you double weave into them it'll be a dps gain compared to a glare+2clip scenario. If you misery during certain parts of the fight it can also be a dps gain. As such a WHM should never be overcapping their ressources since there's an advantage in totally overhealing your afflatus skills to weave something else (benison, assize, asylum, bene, tetra, etc), whereas a sch only faces a loss when using their ressource so they would rather let it sit rather than overheal.

If you have no use for your lilies for an upcoming mechanic you have these options:
- overheal with afflatus to weave an ogcd you would otherwise clip
- overheal with afflatus when in movement and incapable of casting
The combination of the above severely reduces the overcapping opportunities

[Archwizard]

This one is a bit of a brain f**k. Every oGCD is a loss.

I... what?

The only way that can be true is if every oGCD comes at the cost of dealing damage, which by their nature as off-GCDs isn't inherently true so long as you don't clip GCDs -- until you add Energy Drain into the mix as an alternative skill on the same resources that deals damage, but that's a circular argument because that example is exactly the point in question.

If you have no use for your lilies for an upcoming mechanic you have these options:
- overheal with afflatus to weave an ogcd you would otherwise clip
- overheal with afflatus when in movement and incapable of casting
The combination of the above severely reduces the overcapping opportunities

We're literally talking about preventing overcapping without wasting resources.

[Shurrikhan]

We're literally talking about preventing overcapping without wasting resources.

And, again, is that function remotely a necessity? The minimum output of any Lily, even at 0 healing, is a Glare's worth of damage. That's already quite significant and its GCD is damn near necessary for keeping WHM from playing clunkily due to its plethora of oGCDs. If anything we just need more instant casts, not more oGCDs.

As someone who has tended to vastly prefer WHM over all perhaps but late-SB AST, I do have a horse in this race, but I still don't feel an oGCD means of preventing overcapping is at all necessary, especially if give solely as a function.

Save it for next expansion's Growth spell or the like, if we don't ever get anything more druidic, spreading healing to anyone wounded from a party member epicenter, or bouncing variable duration powerful HoTs around the party or whatever.

[Archwizard]

And, again, is that function remotely a necessity? The minimum output of any Lily, even at 0 healing, is a Glare's worth of damage. That's already quite significant and its GCD is damn near necessary for keeping WHM from playing clunkily due to its plethora of oGCDs. If anything we just need more instant casts, not more oGCDs.

As someone who has tended to vastly prefer WHM over all perhaps but late-SB AST, I do have a horse in this race, but I still don't feel an oGCD means of preventing overcapping is at all necessary, especially if give solely as a function.

Save it for next expansion's Growth spell or the like, if we don't ever get anything more druidic, spreading healing to anyone wounded from a party member epicenter, or bouncing variable duration powerful HoTs around the party or whatever.

Not to be pedantic, but by the given logic, one Lily -- as one of four GCDs to fire Misery -- is only 75% of a Glare's worth of damage.

An oGCD dump was only one of the suggestions I made in the OP. I'm fully on-board with all Lily spenders being GCDs, particularly the instant heals we have now, for exactly the reasons you touched on -- weaving the oGCDs we already have, and having tools for mobility and snap healing.
The point of the thread is asking why we don't have a means to dump the resource so we can keep cycling them rather than capping and delaying the Blood Lily, particularly as SCH just got a means to dump the resource when healing is unnecessary.

Also, doesn't Afflatus Rapture already count for "spreading healing"? Or at the very least wouldn't it be easier to just have AffRap be targeted, rather than bloating the kit with another button for exactly the same purpose "but elsewhere"?

And to be honest I wouldn't be terribly surprised if next expansion's growth spell was some kind of multi-Lily dump, like a 3-Lily clone of Benediction ("Afflatus Serenity") or introduction of Reflect ("Afflatus Vigilance"), or even just introducing another attack as a Risk-Reward skill ("Afflatus Wrath").

[Maeka]

Eh, to be quite honest, WHM quite powerful and I'm afraid that if we got anything, ANYTHING else, we'd be quite overpowered.

Yes, I know, you want to pop Misery as often as possible. They succeeded in making you care about Lilies. But, given how freaking powerful Misery *IS*, especially when you land a crit, much less a direct one, there's a reason they want it to be limited.

Giving us a way to dump lillies constantly to throw more Misery casts is just gonna make us overpowered.

Misery is supposed to be that thing you can do after spending 90+ seconds of throwing out instant heals. It's not meant to be farmed and used "on cooldown". That's just not how it was designed from the get-go. And this is why we can't have good things, players see the highest damage button on their bar and they wanna push it as often as they can push it and find ways to abuse the system to push it more often. But to do it, you gotta give up some Glare casts if you want to waste Lilies frivolously just to get more Misery casts.

It's gotta be balanced somehow. Otherwise we're going to get the nerf bat.

[EaMett]

I... what?

The only way that can be true is if every oGCD comes at the cost of dealing damage, which by their nature as off-GCDs isn't inherently true so long as you don't clip GCDs

The only way an ogcd doesn't incur a dps loss is weaving it into an instant DPS skill that needs casting. That only leaves you with the basic dot for the most part. That's one opportunity every 30s which is not nearly enough. Every other oGCD is by default a clip that you can potentially optimize by weaving it into something else to lessen the cost (in the case of whm that's afflatus skills). So the vast majority of oGCDs comes with a dps loss compared to the main dps skill (glare/broil). Whether you're using ruin II or afflatus.
Double weaving allows you to negate the loss of one of the ogcd skills. Casting misery on multiple targets allows you to negate the loss from all ogcds weaved in the afflatus skills (and more), casting misery during a buff window can negate an extra ogcd's worth of loss.

We're literally talking about preventing overcapping without wasting resources.

It's not a waste if you get something from it. Casting indom on full hp party is an 80 potency loss and no gain at all. Casting an afflatus on a full HP party is a 75 potency loss with plenty of gain opportunities, be it by double weaving ogcds, casting misery on multiple targets etc... When in movement and incapable of casting anything it's even a 100ish potency gain over using Dia provided your instance doesn't end before you can cast misery.
Yes you lose the healing aspect but it's not a waste if you don't need it in the first place.

Also if we're going to get technical. Afflatus comes at less of a cost compared to other healer's ogcd options so it should be higher priority of use in full parties. This significantly reduces overcapping opportunities. Some exceptions apply (like if a mechanic requires a WHM single lily + ogcd + other healer ogcd, but could instead be healed by 2 of the other healer ogcds. In that case it's better for the other healer to handle it all).