Coming back to WHM

[Wawachume]

Didn't they just speed up Medica 2, not nerf it?

EDIT: Yeah, the duration was halved from 30 to 15 seconds, but the potency was doubled from 50 to 100.

[Liam_Harper]

Don't give the guy bad advice if you don't understand WhM that well.

You're technically correct on Esuna to a point. It has a tiny handful of situational uses, like paralyze and a few bosses with lethal DoT's designed to be removed. I'd keep it on your bar. However you could count all these situations on one hand. Most DoT's won't outpace a HoT, they aren't "very powerful", they're just a nuisance. Poison in particular tends to be barely noticeable. Bad healers will Esuna these on sight and think they're being useful, but are in reality wasting GCD's. I very rarely need Esuna.

Cure is rubbish. Really, just forget it exists after lv30 and only use Cure II. Cure II won't eat your MP like crazy, yes this isn't Stormblood, we have more MP management than ever.
Cure II will indeed be your main single target heal (after Tetra, Bene and Regen) until you unlock Solace which is first priority.

Did I mention Cure is bad?

Solace and Rapture may not be oGCD but they're worth 225 potency each (after lv74) and create a weave window (weave windows are very valuable on WhM). They are not like regular GCD heals.

Medica II was not nerfed. It was buffed. The potency was doubled and the duration halved, so the HoT is stronger and condensed. This isn't Stormblood. It's better than Medica in most situations.

Plenary is 200 Potency. The others are 200-300. You mean double (or less), not more. Plenary is great though.

Assize is exactly the same as before. You use it on cd for dps.

[Maeka]

Don't give the guy bad advice if you don't understand WhM that well.

I understand WHM perfectly well for general use for which the OP was asking.

They weren't looking for max DPS savage raiding guides, they were looking for layman's terms, the casual Expert Roulette type stuff. Which very few people on these boards understand, and I've experienced this myself, is I'm just looking for general tips and people are going on and on about weaving oGCDs and pushing 99.9% performance out of the job when... that's not what I'm looking for. Neither is the OP. People on these forums talk like you gotta be absolute perfection, rather than giving general pointers to start with, and slowly adding more as the person gets more skilled with the job and more comfortable doing the job, no they think you should MaxDPS right from the start the first time you try to play.

Then what happens is a person Q's up, tries to do that and fumbles all over themselves and people die while they were casting DPS spells because they forgot the first job of the healer is to, you know, cast heals to keep people alive.

Instead of going on and on about weaving and max DPS, how about letting the OP understand the heal buttons, and advise him on different methods, and such to let him get muscle memory and stuff like that down, first?

You're technically correct on Esuna to a point. It has a tiny handful of situational uses, like paralyze and a few bosses with lethal DoT's designed to be removed. I'd keep it on your bar. However you could count all these situations on one hand. Most DoT's won't outpace a HoT, they aren't "very powerful", they're just a nuisance. Poison in particular tends to be barely noticeable. Bad healers will Esuna these on sight and think they're being useful, but are in reality wasting GCD's. I very rarely need Esuna.

I was replying to the person who said to remove it from your bar altogether, lol. Why are you talking like we disagree on this?

Cure is rubbish. Really, just forget it exists after lv30 and only use Cure II. Cure II won't eat your MP like crazy, yes this isn't Stormblood, we have more MP management than ever.
Cure II will indeed be your main single target heal (after Tetra, Bene and Regen) until you unlock Solace which is first priority.

Until some tank that knows nothing about mitigation buttons decides to pull 3 groups of mobs and you blow Tetra, Benediction, Benison, all 3 Solaces, and Assize and have nothing left. Cure2 spam will eat through your MP rather fast. It's happened to me before.

Did I mention Cure is bad?

Not in all situations. *shrug*

Solace and Rapture may not be oGCD but they're worth 225 potency each (after lv74) and create a weave window (weave windows are very valuable on WhM). They are not like regular GCD heals.

Again you're talking about weaving and junk that you worry about in Savage Raids. I never once said that Solace and Rapture should be avoided and not used. When did I say that? I said "Don't treat it like an oGCD button" as in, don't hit one of these buttons expecting to immediately cast something else right after because it ain't gonna happen.

Medica II was not nerfed. It was buffed. The potency was doubled and the duration halved, so the HoT is stronger and condensed. This isn't Stormblood. It's better than Medica in most situations.

But yet you need to cast more of them to keep the HoT up, it falls off a lot quicker.

Plenary is 200 Potency. The others are 200-300. You mean double (or less), not more. Plenary is great though.

Odd, I oftentimes see the Plenary heal come up as being more than the original heal. The numbers are displayed on screen, afterall.

Assize is exactly the same as before. You use it on cd for dps.

Maybe it has something to do with gear levels and health pools, that this is early patch and my last memories of Assize from Stormblood being late patch, but it just seems to heal for more % of someone's health meter now than it did before despite the potency numbers attached to it.

[Jaelommiss]

I was replying to the person who said to remove it from your bar altogether, lol.

I listed my five least used WHM actions because OP wanted to know what actions were optional.

Trying to find basic rotations but also certain spells to have on my bar and not.

After being told that it's best to keep everything mapped, he insisted that:

I'll do the Hall of Novice but i dont feel a need to bar every skill.

While it is best to keep all actions available, if we are trying to answer the question "what can be safely removed?" then we must accept that we are no longer seeking an optimal situation. No matter what is chosen to be removed there will be fringe cases where the removed actions would have been useful.

In answer to OP's question I supplied Repose, Fluid Aura, Rescue, Cure, and Esuna. The first three are almost never used and the last two can temporarily replace something else on the hotbars when required. There is plenty of time to replace Cure II with Cure in low level dungeons or to place Esuna on the bars in the handful of instances where it is worth using.

I maintain that these actions are used less than others and that there is a smaller impact to removing them compared to other actions. It's still a bad idea to remove them, but that's a given when attempting to answer OP's question.

It's people like Jaelommiss that cause wipes.

My personal performance speaks for itself. You're more than welcome to check it for yourself if you truly think I'm a poor healer.

Rather than attacking on someone for answering the question, why don't you take a crack at it? What abilities would you suggest OP forgo given that he is insisting that he doesn't need them all?



Edit: Upon further thought, making two macros to swap between two hotbars would probably be the best solution if the inability to map all actions stems from limited screen real estate or difficulty using a keyboard or controller. It trades two buttons (one on each bar) for an additional hotbar. If the limitation is related to player ability to learn and understand multiple abilities then this would not work.

[HyoMinPark]

There’s honestly no reason to not have all of your skills on your bar, though—well, with the exception of Fluid Aura and Repose. The latter is needed during one of the ShB role quests for healers (they literally force you to use it for a mechanic), but otherwise, I don’t find myself using it too much. I still have it on an auxiliary bar just in case I feel extra dangerous and want to cast it, though. It’s good for things like PotD and HoH, but if you aren’t running that content, it loses much of its value beyond level 30 or so. Even against overworld mobs, since they aren’t that dangerous. Fluid Aura I removed when 4.0 dropped and they took the damage off of it; it serves virtually no purpose.

WHM doesn’t have enough skills that one would need to be concerned about saving space—I’ve fit everything (including the role skills; not including Fluid Aura and Repose) onto less than 2 crossbars of space (I have my primary cross bar [16 buttons] and then 8 buttons on the second one that I use in just about every encounter [for a total of 24 buttons]); and, with the Extended Cross, I can access all of them without even swapping my crossbars at all. Concerns about hotbar space on this job are virtually non-existent.

Please do have Esuna on your bar. Even if it’s not needed in high-end content, it will be your luck that you get thrown into something like Dun Scaith or Exdeath NM and actually need it to cleanse a Doom mechanic. The amount of times people die to those two Dooms because healers don’t have Esuna on their bar is a bit unbelievable (and it’s quite annoying when I’m the one who dies because they won’t use the skill). I also have Cure I on my bar despite not using it at all at higher levels—mostly so that, when I’m thrown into a piece of baby content, I don’t have to open up my actions and start moving things around and wasting time. There’s still plenty of room for all of your necessary skills with it and Esuna present. And having them on there doesn’t make you some “elite”—it just means that you’re prepared for every scenario.

[Tigore]

The off globals and cooldowns beyond 60 gradually reduce the need to use the basic GCD heals for White Mage. Sometimes, I am only needing to use Regen as my basic spell on the tank with Tetragrammaton, Divine Benison and Afflatus Solace taking care of most the rest. For the 80 Expert wall to wall pulls I do, Temperance (Angel Wings), Asylum and Thin Air + Presence of Mind are staggered to keep the tank up. Anytime I can get away with using Holy for trash pulls, I do so and use Tetra / Divine Benison in between when necessary. It really helps to stun the enemies while Regen and Asylum are rolling on the tank. This may be unnecessary to say, but remember to use Lucid Dreaming when you drop below around 8000 mana.

For the Cure debate, I may use it on occasion to top off a tank if I am unsure how well they may take multiple bursts. In most cases for the 4 man 80 dungeons, the tanks don't need it very much from me. If anything, the DPS might get it from me more often than the tank which is still not very much more. Afflatus Solace and Tetra may have a higher chance of usage if the DPS took enough damage. 24 man Alliance raids may be a different story for Cure usage on the tank.

As for the heal I use the least, it seems to be Cure 3. It may have more range, but the radius is only 6 yalms with Medica covering 15 yalms around oneself. I still have it on the bar just in case I really need it for a stack mechanic. Even then, I can often use Assize, Afflatus Rapture and Medica 2 first before needing to consider Cure 3 or Medica.

The spells that could be removed with almost no implications are Rescue and Fluid Aura. The bind from Fluid Aura is usually unnecessary with how much you can heal yourself soloing. The times I tried to use Rescue, the DPS still got hit by the mechanic since it took 2 - 3 seconds until it finally yanked the player to me. Repose does get used for the Healer Role quest of Shadowbringers, but almost never again it seems for other times.

[aiqa]

snip

That is exactly my experience with WHM.
Though if I want to top someone off I prefer to place Regen on them over using Cure, so I never use Cure on the higher level content.
I think for a next expansion Cure is one of the spells that could use an upgrade trait.

[Maeka]

@Jael:

Okay, here are the skills I've found very little use in. Keep in mind that this is NOT for Savage/Extreme content, but for Expert Roulettes and Trials:

1). Fluid Aura. Does anybody use this, at all, for any reason? If you did get aggro, you want to run the mob to the tank, not push it away from you (and probably away from the tank as well).
2). Repose.
3). I know I'm gonna get flak for this, but Cure 3. We got Medica II. We got Rapture. I've not seen a use for Cure 3 in 4-man, or 8man Trials. It seems like Cure3 is more used for very specific situations in which you stack as I've found the radius appears to be abysmally small, even smaller than Plenary Indulgence which already misses people frequently because Ranged DPS seem to think that they must stay at maximum casting range at all times.
4). Medica. I very rarely use this. If we take a big hit, I will usually Plenary+Medica II, or Plenary+Rapture. If we take a small AoE hit, it's just gonna be a Medica II likely if I expect we're going to take another soon. Otherwise its a Rapture.

I think everything else should stay on the hotbars other than maybe some of the lesser-used Role actions... but yet even things like Rescue should be on there because you never know when you could save a life with it, but if it ain't on your bar then... well, that's not happening.

EDIT: My apologies for any 'attacks', I will admit that I said what I did out of frustration because I have run into a number of bad healers who never Esuna anything, including the times you REALLY need to, like the times I mentioned in my response to you. I never meant to imply Everything that can be Esuna should be Esuna'd, but yet when we get a wipe on Mist Dragon because people dropped dead of the DoT there (this was rather frequent back when it was current), it started to get old really fast, having to tell healers that they NEED to Esuna that.

[Liam_Harper]

Why are you talking like we disagree on this?

I never said we did. I elaborated on how Esuna, while situationally useful, isn't something you want to spam on every DoT or debuff you see.

Until some tank that knows nothing about mitigation buttons decides to pull 3 groups of mobs and you blow Tetra, Benediction, Benison, all 3 Solaces, and Assize and have nothing left. Cure2 spam will eat through your MP rather fast. It's happened to me before.

How are you going to keep a tank with 3 groups of mobs on them and no mitigation alive by switching to 450 potency heals over 700? I've never been in that situation, especially with good Thin Air, Holy and Lucid usage, but it sounds like a tank that bad is screwed either way.

Again you're talking about weaving and junk that you worry about in Savage Raids.

I don't even run Savage right now. Why would you choose to play poorly in content because it's not Savage? Weaving is very important. I never accused you of saying Solace Rapture shouldn't be used, but they are by nature different from regular GCD's which is important to note.

But yet you need to cast more of them to keep the HoT up, it falls off a lot quicker.

You never aim to maintain full uptime on a Medica II HoT. There isn't enough raidwide aoe in most fights. You don't need to cast it more often than in Stormblood.

Anyway, not trying to start arguments, just want to keep the advice clear and correct for the OP's sake.

[Maeka]

I never said we did. I elaborated on how Esuna, while situationally useful, isn't something you want to spam on every DoT or debuff you see.

Ahh, kinda sounded like it? Maybe I misread.

How are you going to keep a tank with 3 groups of mobs on them and no mitigation alive by switching to 450 potency heals over 700? I've never been in that situation, especially with good Thin Air, Holy and Lucid usage, but it sounds like a tank that bad is screwed either way.

Usually what happens in this type of situation is I blow Tetra, my flowers, Benediction, Assize, and by the time all of these are done, there's only 2-3 mobs left in the pull and Cure/Cure II is enough to keep the tank going until the end of the pull (and it's all I got left). I will usually try to pop some Freecures with Cure 1 when I think I can sneak one in without the tank dying, and by the time this is all said and done, I hope to have 3, 4k+ MP left so that I start the next pull with full MP or near it. Now sometimes by this time, Tetra might be back up, and I might have gotten a flower, maybe almost 2 by now, but I don't wanna blow them because I know he's just going to do the same thing all over again with the next pull and I really need those buttons to be ready for the next pull and I don't want to waste them when the hardcasted Cures will be enough.

I don't even run Savage right now. Why would you choose to play poorly in content because it's not Savage? Weaving is very important. I never accused you of saying Solace Rapture shouldn't be used, but they are by nature different from regular GCD's which is important to note.

There's a difference between playing "Poorly" and being a bit relaxed and not at the edge of your seat trying to squeeze every GCD and oGCD possible.

That or maybe I'm misunderstanding the definition of "weaving" -- when someone says that, I picture people trying to squeeze out every 0.1sec that they possibly can, trying to sneak oGCD spells inbetween non-oGCD stuff, etc.