Starter healer... WHM?

[Roeshel]

What? No. That's backward. Glare's higher potency means there's a greater opportunity cost when WHM uses a GCD heal. Lilies mitigate most of that loss, but not all of it. WHM's ONLY damage neutral weave space is Dia (unless you Swiftcast your next Glare as one of those weaves). SCH has this problem as well, but its lossy weaving is at least on demand.

The job is designed in a way that punishes you for being skilled at playing it. I don't think it's just my personal opinion that RPG classes should be designed to get more fun the more you improve with playing them. I don't know how many ways I can explain that WHM's design forces a skilled player to fight off its weaknesses instead of playing to strengths.

So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

[Semirhage]

So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

I'll put it this way. With the exception of Black Mage, all DPS and all tanks can double weave after basically every single (or every other, in Red Mage's case) GCD. They never have to clip anything, or lose any damage from using their oGCDs. Does having infinite weave space make them all play the same way? Black Mage has no raid buffs, but does significantly more damage than Red Mage to make up for it (we'll ignore Summoner and its...interesting balancing issues). Does this make Black Mage overpowered?

White Mage can very well remain the "GCD healer". But development work has to acknowledge that, in this game, GCD heals *are* in a vacuum strictly weaker choices than oGCD heals. They just are. They're generally not instant, they're not free, and they take time away from your damage rotation that oGCDs don't. If WHM is going to remain a GCD healer, all of those factors need to go into the design of things like procs that mitigate those downsides. Maybe all GCD heals give blood lily charges. That's one of the most boring ways to do it, but it's better than nothing. GCD healing isn't just a "different" way to heal than oGCD healing. Unless you specifically design it to skirt those factors, it's a directly inferior method of healing, just due to the way FFXIV's combat system works. Compound that annoying weakness with the fact that WHM has no party buffs outside Temperance (a level 40 ability that was nerfed, stolen off into the role system, then deleted and given a damage reduction component and sold back as a capstone ability), has no secondary system of note to manage, and has no real movement tools outside blowing healing spells or a single DoT refresh, it's a barebones clippy Glarebot for the sake of being a barebones clippy Glarebot.

WHM can have an identity without needing to clip, remain immobile, etc. Unfortunately, the development team has decided that WHM's identity is trapped in an extremely limited design space, because "being fun to play after getting good at it" or "having any tools outside vanilla heals" is apparently SCH and AST's exclusive shared identity.