Starter healer... WHM?

[Semirhage]

Also, AST is the worst healing class imo for levelling dungeons...So the fact that ast has cheaper heals and mobility in levelling dungeons is completely inconsequential.

Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

[Roeshel]

Is it? AST doesn't need to stun mobs with Holy. It has a gazillion brokenly overpowered oGCD heals that have hilariously short cooldowns. They're available every single pull, even if you somehow need to dip into using all of them. And it has infinite free single-weaving space even on Gravity, so its damage doesn't get slowed down at all. Holy is the best damage reduction cooldown to be sure, but once its diminishing returns wear off you need to keep an eye on the tank and either clip the hell out of your damage to keep them up with your few oGCDs, or halt your GCD damage entirely to heal. AST is, just like in Stormblood, just a superior WHM in all but a few niche scenarios.

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

[Semirhage]

Putting regen and asylum is all you need for your tank to be sustained in a big pull. Even if the mobs are not dead by the time asylum and regen runs out you just reapply regen, use tetra and benison and continue with the spam, only 140 potency lost. You have 400 bonus dmg potency from assize so you still win against ast. WHM has stronger damage output than ast at the current level 80 dungeon content. And I just checked for ala mhigo from stromblood. White mages just deal more damage because they have good sustain.

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

Misaligning dia with assize is not that big of a deal, just improvise.

By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

To answer the original question instead of just sparring over whether AST or WHM is better, WHM has basically no nuance to it as long as you plan on just running expert roulette and you don't care about eking out every drop of efficiency out of your job. AST is harder to wrap your head around at first, but if you run both through expert you'll eventually someday find yourself wondering "Why the hell does this ridiculous AST job have a six-HUNDRED potency off-GCD heal on a THIRTY second cooldown, and why do I never have to stop blasting to use it? Why do I have to hard clip Holy to use Assize unless I want to dot one of the things in this group or blow a lily on the tank that's barely taking damage? Who designed this stupid WHM job and why does its kit feel like it wasn't created by someone who knows how this game's combat system flows?"

[Roeshel]

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

By improvise, do you mean clip? There isn't a way to do this without losing damage. AST doesn't have this problem at all. Because AST is designed in a way that gels with this game's combat system, and WHM isn't. Being incredibly mobile, never clipping anything, and never needing to slow your damage down to heal is a really unbeatable set of advantages in almost all situations.

Man, WHM has a bunch of really craptastic design facets when you actually try to optimize it. Being immobile is a huge disadvantage in a game that forces you to deal with nearly all mechanics by moving. Having so little damage-neutral weaving space forces you to clip your GCD, in a game where most of your output comes from maintaining your casts. It has zero party damage increases in a game that makes percentage buffs more and more effective as time goes on in an expansion. AST doesn't have any of these problems. It excels in not just one or two, but ALL of these areas, and all it pays for all of these quality of life advantages with slightly lower base potency on its damage spells.

I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

[Semirhage]

I know that ast is a better healer generally speaking. I just don't think that whm is the absolute garbage people make it out to be.

It's playable, but it's got a lot of clunky weaknesses in its design that are compounded by the fact that those weaknesses relate to core competencies with the combat system. And on top of *that*, the other two healers don't have these weaknesses. We're ironically in the same design space as we were in Stormblood, except AST and SCH had their gameplay and skill ceilings pancaked down. The reason we're still here is that the ceilings weren't the problem; AST and SCH are better than WHM because they're fundamentally designed in ways that complement how the combat system works. Because their "weaknesses" are fake news because encounter design never puts any pressure on those weaknesses.

I don't know why my brain is going to generic RPG mechanics instead of just FFXIV, but imagine a single player RPG with classes laid out in front of you. AST and SCH are classes that have "downsides" like "This class takes a hefty 50% penalty to all gold drops! But as an upside, all shop items are free". or "This class is hobbled and can only move at 1/4 speed. But as an upside, they can short range teleport at will". or "this class suffers from a -5 to social rolls. Also there is only one single difficult social check in the game that matters to a sidequest". Meanwhile WHM's are more like "You have a 20% penalty to strength, but a 10% walking speed bonus out of combat".

[Roeshel]

Does that make AST particularly bad at dungeons? They lose -zero- damage potency from their healing. I don't think that makes WHM so much better or more fluid than AST. At that point they're just approaching healing in different ways. Doesn't change the fact that AST isn't anywhere in the same galaxy as clunktastic as the immobile damage-lossy WHM gets when a tougher fight is going south.

I went through the patch notes from Shb because I saw that whm's percentile in top 50 was a lot higher in the first shb raid tier. Ast actually used to be clunky when it spammed its AoE in dungeons. It had a longer cast time so using cards or ogcd while AoE was not an option unless you want to be whm 2.0. Healing while dealing damage on mob packs was possible only if they used lightspeed. There weren't always as fluid as there are now.

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

[Semirhage]

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

Nearly all of those clears had the WHM's partner doing the lion's share of the healing work. Because those WHMs wouldn't have done nearly that much damage if they had to use their clunky healing kits that require stopping their damage output to use them.

Also, why does that matter? Glare could be 5000 potency for all I care. Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is still awful design. Having basically no weaving space is awful design. Clipping your GCD is awful design. Having basically nothing to manage is awful design. Being an immobile turret with your only fluid movement options being a DoT refresh or a possibly unnecessary heal is clunk as hell. Having a high personal damage output potential doesn't mean a job is designed well.

[Roeshel]

Nearly all of those clears had the WHM's partner doing the lion's share of the healing work. Because those WHMs wouldn't have done nearly that much damage if they had to use their clunky healing kits that require stopping their damage output to use them.

Also, why does that matter? Glare could be 5000 potency for all I care. Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare Glare is still awful design. Having basically no weaving space is awful design. Clipping your GCD is awful design. Having basically nothing to manage is awful design. Being an immobile turret with your only fluid movement options being a DoT refresh or a possibly unnecessary heal is clunk as hell. Having a high personal damage output potential doesn't mean a job is designed well.

How it doesn't matter? Ultimate is harder than savage and you guys say the class is a disaster because the top parties for the current savage tier don't have many whm-s. The second party for the epic of Alexandar has a whm and a sch, both having nearly the same amount of hps and both having nearly the same amount of rdps. So it is possible, to have high rdps and do your share of the healing.

Whm's weaving space are the lilies, they are just limited. Unlike sch who has on gcd instant attack spell or ast who has lower cast time on malefic to make room for an ogcd. If whms get more lilies per minute they are going to weave more. Glare has higher potency to make up for the loss of dps from using a lily, this is called balancing a class. Imagine if misery had 1200 potency and you get a lily once every 10-15 secs. You will have a class with the perfect neutral healing and weaving space. They will have a lot of movement and literally no resources to manage because lilies consume no mp and come for free, just like ast's ogcd heals, unfair right? These two small changes don't really change what whm is. They are just making it extremely easy to play whm efficiently.

Also once upon a time, good mana management was a requirement to play ast. AspHelious had 1100mp cost, combust was 500, benefic II - 900 and cards gave no mp when drawn. Combust dealt significantly less damage prior to 5.1, malefic dealt slightly less damage too. So that class had its drawbacks, but these drawbacks were removed to make it easier to play. For eden's gate the top 50 almost never had an ast in their party. So I guess in Endwalker we might see whm becoming a lot easier to play efficiently as well.

[Sighearth]

I went through the patch notes from Shb because I saw that whm's percentile in top 50 was a lot higher in the first shb raid tier. Ast actually used to be clunky when it spammed its AoE in dungeons. It had a longer cast time so using cards or ogcd while AoE was not an option unless you want to be whm 2.0. Healing while dealing damage on mob packs was possible only if they used lightspeed. There weren't always as fluid as there are now.

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

WHM is the more "comfy" healer and the most popular one. 1 specific encounter is also not a good example. Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit. When you try speed runs (which is arguably the hardest "content" in the game since you have to heal as little as possible to deal as much damage as possible) you will see whm have a very minor participation. For E12s p2, for example, only 10% of the top 50 groups had WHMs. Which is to be expected since ast + sch have much more free heals, better raid dps etc. In ultimate where the majority just want to survive until the end, WHMs gcds are very attractive.

[Roeshel]

Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit.

This doesn't make sense to me. Don't ultimates have enrage timer? I haven't done any so I don't know. How is speed clearing ultimate not about optimization if speed clearing savage is? Also isn't the content that tests a healer's ability to heal the best type of content to draw a conclusion from? If speed clearing ultimate is not the type of content where you are pushed to the limit which content is? When ogcds are not enough whm is prefered even for speed runs for ultimate clears. Whm is the healer job with the highest participation for the fastest ultimate clears. Savage is easy when it comes to healing which is why whm is not needed for speed clearing so I can't in any way consider that savage is pushing healer classes to the limit.

Also, ast was buffed, before 5.1 it was doing significantly less damage, despite it losing no dps from healing. So the gap between the healer's rdps is not really a matter of design. It's about balancing the classes, ast's buffs scale exponentially as the stats of your party members become stronger and stronger. For the last raid from eden's gate (titan) the top asts got roughly around 1,8k rdps from cards and divination. In e12s p2 they get more than twice - 3,8kdps. If you compare them to their real dps output you will see that for titan cards and divination boosted the best ast's own dps by 23% while in e12s p2 they boost it by 32%. That's 9% increase in rdps without any big changes being made to the cards and divination. Only sleeve draw was changed from giving three random cards, to securing that you have 3 different seals aligned for your opener. Imo that change was a nerf because you get two cards less every three mins, which you could have turned into lord/lady of crowns, and you are only achieving what rng could have done for you. In any case, from e4s to e12s Ast received 9% boost to rdps from cards and divination despite them doing the exact same thing and not receiving a direct buff. Ast has good scaling.

The only utility spell that whm has for damage increase is Presence of mind. That ability doesn't scale at all. It is a flat, linear personal buff whose efficiency is diminished by having higher spell speed which is a stat you need to deal more dps. That buff grants you roughly 2 extra casts of glare in all cases. That's 600 extra fixed potency that scales only with your personal stats. I guess this is why in the epic of alexandar ast has lower rdps than whm despite having access to the same kit as they do in e12s p2. The stats are lower so the gap in scaling is not noticeable.