WHM 1-2-3

[Raikai]

I just wanna cry at that, just like I did at ShB's launch when I looked at all 3 healers ;_; I miss a lot of our old skills and animations.

Yeah... I wish some of those spells would be repurposed instead of deleted.

I mean, technically Protect was bad. Maintenance buffs only make sense when it's a exclusive boon for a job/class, but every healer had it. However, Protect is an iconic FF spell... Could've been baked into someone else's kit as a dmg reduction cooldown or something.

[blue_skies]

Mine ain't.



This is assuming that you literally place every button down. There are still outlier moments where I'd want access to Fluid and Repose (despite the fact that I haven't pressed one of them since Heavensward, and the other is barely even niche). Meanwhile, I have equal (or less) buttons on MCH, DRG, BRD, DNC, DRK, WAR, RDM, etc. I know, I know, the point is less about button counting and more the fact that us WHM's are not exactly drowning in buttons to worry about, but really, MCH has a literal graveyard full of empty hotbar slots by comparison. It's not fair to say ours is empty unless you're literally stripping fat from the bone.

-----

As for the actual topic, I'm one of those few people who miss Cleric Stance.

As such, I'm all in favour of damage combinations and/or extra buttons. The fact it devolves into spamming a single-target button or AoE button 90% of the time can surely be expanded in a simple but meaningful way.

I'm guessing you'd hate Ninja then:



More buttons, an extra combo gauge and Mudra combos to memorize.

I personally love it. It's by far my favorite class and is incredibly rewarding to play. By contrast, my alts either feel too easy or overly simplified.

[blue_skies]

I had a thought about making it a two step combo, but you can do either the first spell or second spell, the follow up with the second spell or first spell, respectively.
Doing one or the other would generate a different resource for WHM. Maybe Earth > Water would generate 5 Healing Lily points, while Water > Earth would generate 5 Blood Lily Points.
Every 30 points of the Healing Lily (up to a max of 100), it allows the usage of an Afflatus Solace/Rapture.
Every 30 points of the Blood Lily (up to a maximum of 100), it allows the use of an instant-cast damage spell that's as strong as the first spell, for weaving/movement purposes.
Using three Healing Lily actions will make a healing specific Lily bloom, allowing for a Cure III-like instant GCD.
Using three Blood Lily actions will allow the use of Afflatus Misery.

Or something like that.

I like this idea. I think Afflatus Rapture should have a damage/DoT component similar to Assize. I don't like that I have to burn healing CDs if I want to align burst DPS.

[AnotherPerson]

I had a thought about making it a two step combo, but you can do either the first spell or second spell, the follow up with the second spell or first spell, respectively.
Doing one or the other would generate a different resource for WHM. Maybe Earth > Water would generate 5 Healing Lily points, while Water > Earth would generate 5 Blood Lily Points.
Every 30 points of the Healing Lily (up to a max of 100), it allows the usage of an Afflatus Solace/Rapture.
Every 30 points of the Blood Lily (up to a maximum of 100), it allows the use of an instant-cast damage spell that's as strong as the first spell, for weaving/movement purposes.
Using three Healing Lily actions will make a healing specific Lily bloom, allowing for a Cure III-like instant GCD.
Using three Blood Lily actions will allow the use of Afflatus Misery.

Or something like that.

That would design WHM into a destructive loop if healing resources are locked behind hardcasting & spamming a DPS GCD mechanic, mainly for situations where you do need to heal because of a bad run / people taking extra damage & dying everywhere, but your heals would be locked behind a lot of DPS GCDs in situations where you don't have time to DPS.

Quickest example I can think of is if you died and lost all your gauge, unlike a RDM where they can just build their DPS meter back up and just have a DPS penalty, dying as a WHM would mean you lost a huge portion of your healing kit & healing output that you may could planned on healing a different mechanic at that time, which defaults you back into using Medica II / Cure II with a huge -25% stat debuff and mana cost. This implies means you won't be spending time to DPS since you don't have resources to get everyone's HP up as fast as your healing resources are still locked away via not DPSing, which ends up being in a destructive loop of no GCD DPS and more Medica II spam (and more MP expenditure) to catch up. This is in addition to heavy movement phases where you are forced to move and can't hardcast for a while - which postpones getting your lily gauge up.

On another note, it also means that while the Afflatus healing spells could be MP-less to cast, it's definitely not free since it cost you a couple of DPS GCDs to unlock the spell - and DPS GCDs do have an MP cost. Afflatus spells now incurs a hidden MP cost which is deducted from your natural MP regeneration. This MP cost is negligible when the battle is fine and you're supposed to DPS to help out, but it becomes a burden when you aren't afforded the luxury to cast your combo in succession as it means less MP-less heals in the long run.

tl;dr : This design seems good for complexity but it's also very punishing to a WHM if you die once because it puts them even further behind when they're trying to catch up.

[NobleWinter]

Death is always punishing especially for a healer. We come back with barely any mp, abilities like Draw, Aetherflow, Assize, and Lucid may still be on cooldown. Fairies need to be summoned, gauges rebuilt, etc. It seems the Devs dont mind locking most of our kits behind being skilled enough to stay alive already. WHM already require you to be alive 30 seconds for Afflatus anything. I don't see why locking anything behind dps on a class that has Thin Air would be seen as too punishing. It takes Scholar 4 minutes to get a full guage and it disappears on death too.

[RopeDrink]

I'm guessing you'd hate Ninja then:



More buttons, an extra combo gauge and Mudra combos to memorize.

I personally love it. It's by far my favorite class and is incredibly rewarding to play. By contrast, my alts either feel too easy or overly simplified.

I don't hate it at all. What I said about overall button count has no bearing on my own preferences. Someone claimed WHM's bars are empty, yet you can swap over to MCH (which is one of the spammiest) or various other DPS which are literal graveyard action bars by comparison. We don't need tonnes of buttons in order to make something more engaging than what we have, though I'd have absolutely no problem with more buttons to press. Still, there's something to be said for the simplicity of WHM even if it's not engaging enough for some people. I love diving in and wailing on everything with Holy or Glare between the occasional weave or oGCD, though it's no surprise others find it dull as dishwater.

It's a relaxing contrast to my time spent pushing 20's on my Resto Shaman in WoW - a class/spec that has been rife with button bloat since vanilla and still has tonnes to press after all attempts to cull the overall button counts across the board. Here in FFXIV, I miss old Cleric Stance, and while Protect and Stoneskin were poorly implemented, I don't think deleting them was the answer. Even if you remove those and choose to remove drivel like Repose and Fluid Aura, I still have equal (or more) buttons on my WHM compared to various DPS. The problem is there's no engagement with them, whereas MCH (which gives me huge holes in my UI) is a very active job despite that fact.

It all depends on whether Square believe the current GlareGlareGlareHolyHolyHoly+occasional heal is worth changing. I don't believe they'll add anything else as they clearly want to avoid lacing healing with too much to consider outside of "keep people alive", especially considering the fact that 50% of healers you meet in roulettes act like half their kit doesn't even exist and wouldn't know a Stone or a Holy if it smashed through their own monitor. I'm not wholly convinced that a more engaging kit would encourage such types to change, but it'd be a good start.

Combos, Procs, some kind of revamp of the Lily system, or having it tied to damage so you can ramp up Afflatus burst quicker. Who knows? Maybe something like throwing Stones having a chance to apply a diluted Stoneskin on a nearby friendly close to the target. Shrug. I'm not one for devising systems in my head on the fly as a non-developer who doesn't believe much will change due to how Square have treated WHM for so long.

[Almagnus1]

That would design WHM into a destructive loop if healing resources are locked behind hardcasting & spamming a DPS GCD mechanic, mainly for situations where you do need to heal because of a bad run / people taking extra damage & dying everywhere, but your heals would be locked behind a lot of DPS GCDs in situations where you don't have time to DPS.

Quickest example I can think of is if you died and lost all your gauge, unlike a RDM where they can just build their DPS meter back up and just have a DPS penalty, dying as a WHM would mean you lost a huge portion of your healing kit & healing output that you may could planned on healing a different mechanic at that time, which defaults you back into using Medica II / Cure II with a huge -25% stat debuff and mana cost. This implies means you won't be spending time to DPS since you don't have resources to get everyone's HP up as fast as your healing resources are still locked away via not DPSing, which ends up being in a destructive loop of no GCD DPS and more Medica II spam (and more MP expenditure) to catch up. This is in addition to heavy movement phases where you are forced to move and can't hardcast for a while - which postpones getting your lily gauge up.

On another note, it also means that while the Afflatus healing spells could be MP-less to cast, it's definitely not free since it cost you a couple of DPS GCDs to unlock the spell - and DPS GCDs do have an MP cost. Afflatus spells now incurs a hidden MP cost which is deducted from your natural MP regeneration. This MP cost is negligible when the battle is fine and you're supposed to DPS to help out, but it becomes a burden when you aren't afforded the luxury to cast your combo in succession as it means less MP-less heals in the long run.

tl;dr : This design seems good for complexity but it's also very punishing to a WHM if you die once because it puts them even further behind when they're trying to catch up.

It's that a large reason why SMN got changed in ShB?

[AnotherPerson]

Death is always punishing especially for a healer. We come back with barely any mp, abilities like Draw, Aetherflow, Assize, and Lucid may still be on cooldown. Fairies need to be summoned, gauges rebuilt, etc. It seems the Devs dont mind locking most of our kits behind being skilled enough to stay alive already. WHM already require you to be alive 30 seconds for Afflatus anything. I don't see why locking anything behind dps on a class that has Thin Air would be seen as too punishing. It takes Scholar 4 minutes to get a full guage and it disappears on death too.

Of course death is punishing, the problem is how recovering will be on a WHM. For AST, they can draw within the next 30 seconds and get MP back and most of their healing tools are on a 60 second cooldown and MP wise their healing spells are very generous in MP cost. For scholars, it takes them 60 seconds to get their aetherflow back at worst. The skill's cooldown is ticking while they're dead so coming back with MP is much easier within every minute. WHM's Thin Air is up every 120 seconds, which is a huge difference in frequency at which they can gain MP back because a lot of mechanics can happen within 2 minutes. Having more frequent intervals to recover MP is a lot smoother in recovering than having a large CD that may not be up very often because you can spend MP more liberally for an extended period of time, whether it would be for healing or for DPS.

Having less spaced intervals with strong MP recovery tools means if you die after using one, your MP is gimped for a longer period than the others - less MP for both DPS and healing. If you lock heals into a DPS resource, it doubles down on this problem as WHM has to spend MP casting more healing spells to make up for the loss of Afflatus Solace/Afflatus Rapture that was locked away by DPS GCDs. This leads to less heals overall and less DPS in the long run, which is counter intuitive to having a healing gauge generate healing resources. While Assize does give 500 MP back, WHM also has the most expensive GCD heals (Medica II and Medica I being 1300 MP and 1000 MP respectively while Diurnal Aspected Helios and Helios is 800 MP / 700 MP respectively). Afflatus spells offset this MP cost heavily - every 30 seconds a WHM essentially get a free Medica or Cure II cast, which is equivalent to 1000 MP in return. Locking Afflatus spells in DPS GCD spells in this comparison means you spend 3 DPS GCDs (1200 MP) to get an afflatus spell back, so your net healing gain is -200 MP. It means you lose MP for getting an afflatus spell and afflatus heals are no longer 'free'. In other words, to heal through an encounter when MP is an issue and the priority is to keep the party alive, you don't DPS and work on filling up the lily gauge, you ignore the lily system entirely ...

Again, not a big issue when everyone's playing right, but ignoring the healing system when you need healing seems like bad design.

[Grimoire-M]

It's that a large reason why SMN got changed in ShB?

Losing all of your progress on a 2-minute rotation on death was part of why they added more Demi-Summons, yes. The real reason was they wanted more Demi-Summons to make Summoner’s aesthetic match player expectations. They also ditched the horrendous mechanic that was Stormblood Aethertrail, which only added more jank to the overall rotation, through myriad forms of lockouts. It’s basically why we have DWT as a temporary movement cooldown too.


As for improving WHM’s DPS rotation? I think I’d still prefer DoTs or charge actions. Mostly because those soft cooldowns reward flexibility if tuned right. A combo chain above 2 sounds fun if it works like Machinist’s procs but most of the situations I’d even want to use such a mechanic are limited to alternating DPS and healing GCDs and aim to help with WHM’s mobility problem or offset their taxes.

[Almagnus1]

Losing all of your progress on a 2-minute rotation on death was part of why they added more Demi-Summons, yes. The real reason was they wanted more Demi-Summons to make Summoner’s aesthetic match player expectations. They also ditched the horrendous mechanic that was Stormblood Aethertrail, which only added more jank to the overall rotation, through myriad forms of lockouts. It’s basically why we have DWT as a temporary movement cooldown too.


As for improving WHM’s DPS rotation? I think I’d still prefer DoTs or charge actions. Mostly because those soft cooldowns reward flexibility if tuned right. A combo chain above 2 sounds fun if it works like Machinist’s procs but most of the situations I’d even want to use such a mechanic are limited to alternating DPS and healing GCDs and aim to help with WHM’s mobility problem or offset their taxes.

Personally I'd rather see most of the cast times on spells reduced to 1.5s so we have the option to have weave windows around the DPS 1-2-3, Holy, Cure 2, or Medica 2 depending on what you need more of at the moment. The only way that'd work is if most of the insta cast spells became OGCD along with possibly turning Fluid Aura into a OGCD damage spell allowing us the flexibility to go towards a more DPS or healing focused spell casting as the situation warrants it.