White Mage Flavor in 6.0

[elioaiko]

I wish Misery would actually have a satisfying feedback audio wise. It's just silence, break which is strange. I get that WHM is supposed to be graceful but considering we had dungeons and an expansion as to why light can be bad, it couldn't be too difficult for them to make Misery sound satisfying? It's a small nitpick I know. But Stone IV sounded like it hard considering WHM is the powerful hard, hitting healer.

Glare is alright, but I kinda wish SE wouldn't default to just white lights with a blue-ish tint. I feel like they could use different colors?

[aiqa]

Nature is fine as a flavor but the Stone123 visuals were terrible, I much prefer Glare. In general I am fine with holy magic, though it could do with it's own more distinct visual theme over the "generic magic" we have now. For visual flavor I'd like some animation updates for WHM over VFX changes, the combat stance and run animations are not great.

[Ultaniku]

While Glare and Dia were both pretty spells, they weren’t as satisfying visually as the later level stone and aero spells. I hope they mix up the elements some in EW.

[currentlemon]

I'm all in favor of separating the Stone and Glare spells. My dream scenario in 6.0 is that instead of replacing Stone with Glare, the latter is a separate spell entirely. We'll still have Stone IV by level 80, but Glare will also be apart of WHM's DPS rotation. Just think of the possibilities. We can have Glare effectively replace Fluid Aura as an updated skill or maybe have it as a instant cast GCD spell like Aero/Dia. Include Aero III back into the mix and an actual water DPS spell like what Y'shtola has in the story, and we're golden. And in the level 90 toolkit, Stone IV will upgrade to Earthquake and Aero III will upgrade to Tornado while levelling.

[Bacon4Makin]

Stone IV will upgrade to Earthquake and Aero III will upgrade to Tornado while levelling.

The reason we upgraded to glare in the first place is because JP is already on Stonja, I really doubt they'd stick Aero III though, btw this means that AST will be getting a new spell instead of malefic and scholar will in 7.0 at this rate

[Derio]

Since they arent adding Geomancer to the game. We could see some more water and air spells.

[Truen]

I hope, no I pray, they provide more dps options for all healing jobs. This garbage they forced on us with the 5.0 build is tiresome.

[NobleWinter]

I just want WHM, the supposed brand name of healers, to have healing priority with their skills. The trademark of the class is overpowered healing but they are the last one you want to actually cast a healing skill. Misery needs to have its potency dropped to 620 and cost a single dark lily. That way every time you heal with aflattus anything you end up with a dps gain from the Misery it triggers. The Maim and Mend Trait should also cause every GCD healing skill to have a % chance to trigger an enhanced Stone/Holy by guaranteeing a crit. This would make the relationship between healing and dps much more fluid and rewarding and would also open up more desperately needed weaving windows for oGCDs too.

[Saefinn]

Given they are rooted in nature, I liked that aspect to it. It's less so for WHM outside of FFXIV, but it's a flavour of it specific to FFXIV.

But as we have been making the complaint of "we need more to do in our downtime on healers", they really could satisfy both sides of the argument here. I just seems odd that Glare is an upgrade of Stone. Heck I'd have expected upgrades to like Quake and Tornado (the latter of which Y'shtola has, so it exists).
I get there is a holy aspect too, so maybe there is room for both.

I would propose the following:
- Glare becomes a Lily dump. I realise this is an Energy Drain equivalent, but as they made Lilies similar to Aetherflow, the same problems have similar solutions.
- Dia becomes a defense down debuff. Like it was in XI. Or another utility spell. WHM complained about lack of utility versus SCH & AST, there's a solution.
- Quake becomes the next upgrade of Stone
- Aero continues to upgrade as Aero
- We get an AoE Aero return as Tornado

And these adjustments I think would also pave way to allow for the down time adjustments SCH and AST have asked for.

Plus I don't think it over complicates things either should we get more to do healing wise and the same thing, it breaks up any downtime there is.

[Almagnus1]

Here's what I would tweak with the class... and largely leave it the same as is:

• Cure 2 is a direct replacement for Cure 1
• Free Cure gets deleted
• Thin Air becomes available earlier (preferably shortly after Lucid Dreaming is unlocked at 24)
• All non-Raise cast times drop to 2 seconds
• Medica 1 upgrades into Medica 2, and Medica 2 has a base potency increase to 300 and increase the HoT to 200
• Extend the range of Cure 3 to 8y (so it matches Asylum's range)
• Restore Stone 4 and Aero 3
• Lilies are generated on a skill crit (DPS or healing), HoT tick crit, or DoT tick crit
• All lily skills become OGCD skills
• Glare changes to be an 400 pot damage spell that consumes a single lily instead of mana and contributes to the Blood Lily
• If Temperance is on Cooldown, you can consume the Blood Lily to cast it without affecting it's cooldown

I'm scratching my head for a healing oriented blood lily option as every part of the lily mechanic should allow the WHM to either go damage or healing so there's an option to use resources as it makes sense in the fight, and right now I'm using Afflatus Rapture to dump lilies as I'm always letting it tick. Having more options around how to generate (and dump) lilies would help with making the class feel a little more fluid.

Overall, WHM is in a good spot, so most of what I'm asking are QoL changes rather than large changes overall. I also want more skills to work with so I've got a bit more to manage as WHM is a little too simple atm.