Why White-mage's lot spells bad game design

[Claire_Pendragon]

Rescue is one of the best skills in the entire game, what are you on???

agreed
my ONLY complaint is that i can only use it once per boss fight, and i need it at LEAST 3 times per boss fight. but its easily the best healer ability in large group content.
now if only we had the pushback of fluid again, to help organize mobs into the correct positions. (remove the dmg if u want, i just want the pushback)

[Kraniel]

I actually think of all the healers, WHM is currently sitting at the most decent spot as the "dumb and easy healer class". Every game needs one in my opinion.

That said, they did screw up big time with Fluid Aura ... I don't even understand why they nerfed it this way in the first place to be honest. Was it really menacing the "meta" in any way ? It was actually a useful skill when ARR came out and i'm upset they turned it into what it is now. It doesn't even deserve a slot on a hotbar ...
So yeah, i think for sure they should give back proper utility to WHM, along with a couple more DPS skills.

Also sorry but Rescue is absolutely god tier. Like Claire just said, if i had one complaint about it it would be its stupidly long CD.

[Sebazy]

Sadly, such healer design are well received by bigger audience. Many angry healers in this forums claim ShB healers are so bad that healer numbers are few, but in fact, the number of healers, especially White Mages, grow exceedingly large.

Despite not having utility, not enough weaving window, less efficient than Diurnal Astro, it seems to me that the majority of player base just don't care.

One can even say ShB white mage is now at the best position it could ever be by just looking at the statistics

While I disagree on the issue WHM has in leveling experience, I do agree that WHM traits need some rework. Free cure fishing is stupid and not practical. Repose and Fluid Aura have their use but are way limited to certain situations

This gets a yes, but also a no from me.

In some regards, I do actually agree that WHM is in the best state it's ever been. It pulls it's weight at all levels of content and is mathematically somewhat competitive in Savage which is a rare treat at the end of an expansion. It's kit is straight forward, effective and punchy. It's not perfect but IMHO I feel that it flows better than SCH and AST and it's kind of strangely ironic that it has the most interesting DPS kit of all 3 healers even if it's not strictly the most potent in actual play.

However that's where my agreement ends.

IMHO WHM is popular because SCH is just hateful to play at the end game now, whereas AST feels like a mountain of unrewarding busywork. Even if it is a tweaked and reskinned level 34 ability with a firework dropped ontop, wings feels great. The Lily system isn't amazing mathematically, but dropping bombs on trash or on a boss during a buff window feels great. AST is just so much more subtle whilst SCH is left wondering where it's last fairy cast vanished off to.

And then of course there's the mildly important issue that healer kits exist in a game that doesn't come close to requiring any of it. The disconnect between the job design and content design is just getting bigger and bigger each expansion it seems.

IMHO Healers should be buffing/debuffing DPS with enough healing side effects to keep the group going. But instead SE seem to insist on pushing themselves further and further into a corner.

[Kraniel]

To be honest i think unfortunately this will be difficult to change, and not only because there's more people playing FFXIV recently, but also just because of the way boss mechanics are designed in general.

Every mechanic is always a gimmick that a certain role has to fill, for instance you have two tanks and the boss will execute a mechanic that requires a tank swap, so here you go.
After that there's a room-wide AoE, so healers get to press their button.
DPS just have to not stand in bad stuff and keep their rotations up.
Sometimes people will need to pair up to soak some damage, etc ...

There's no mechanic that requires you to bring a specific job in your party, and i'm sure most of us understand the logic behind it ; It's to avoid certain classes to become required and others made useless. This way, everyone can play whatever they want to play.

This leads to the standardisation of jobs that we know today ; everything pretty much plays alike (especially for tanks and healers).
So unless they start to have actual healer intensive mechanics in boss fights, that require us to plan around, and possibly bring a certain combination of jobs, regardless of which healer class we pick, our role will remain :
- Heal tank
- Heal after room-wide AoE
- Rez when people die

[FoxCh40s]

This gets a yes, but also a no from me.

In some regards, I do actually agree that WHM is in the best state it's ever been. It pulls it's weight at all levels of content and is mathematically somewhat competitive in Savage which is a rare treat at the end of an expansion. It's kit is straight forward, effective and punchy. It's not perfect but IMHO I feel that it flows better than SCH and AST and it's kind of strangely ironic that it has the most interesting DPS kit of all 3 healers even if it's not strictly the most potent in actual play.

However that's where my agreement ends.

IMHO WHM is popular because SCH is just hateful to play at the end game now, whereas AST feels like a mountain of unrewarding busywork. Even if it is a tweaked and reskinned level 34 ability with a firework dropped ontop, wings feels great. The Lily system isn't amazing mathematically, but dropping bombs on trash or on a boss during a buff window feels great. AST is just so much more subtle whilst SCH is left wondering where it's last fairy cast vanished off to.

And then of course there's the mildly important issue that healer kits exist in a game that doesn't come close to requiring any of it. The disconnect between the job design and content design is just getting bigger and bigger each expansion it seems.

IMHO Healers should be buffing/debuffing DPS with enough healing side effects to keep the group going. But instead SE seem to insist on pushing themselves further and further into a corner.

You always have a way of saying what I want to say, but better. It is a joy to read your posts, truly.

[Dalex]

The only thing I want is an upgraded version of fluid aura, a water-themed utility attack like whirlpool that pulls enemies into a central spot for easier AOE control. It would be especially useful for pulls with lots of ranged mobs that the tank is having trouble LOS'ing into the rest of the pack.

[RopeDrink]

I personal want see holy do more damage in upper 70-90s cause at that point barely see the monsters hp move at all.

Do bear in mind that WHM's in the 70-80's are already casually capable of topping mass-pull charts purely by lacing Holy spam with the odd MIS/ASS, and that the degradation of health bars is the absolute worst way of gauging the actual power of a spell, especially in terms of AoE skills, which are intentionally designed to hit less than ST-spells as a tradeoff for hitting more targets.

reasons i have issue with cure III boils down to game designs and boss mechanics. there countless times where everyone takes damage or we have aoe that compresses everyone together. i began cast cure III and everyone scatters before cure III is off. and they miss that big bulky heal. don't lie say this never happen to you.

It doesn't, because I don't cast it reactively. 99% of the time I'm under a stack-marker, my CureIII's go off at the same time as the animation. I've gotten so used to doing this that you will often avoid seeing the healthbars actually go down from the mechanic in question due to the heal being bang on target. In short, if your concern is people "running away", then you're casting it too late. Be more pre-emptive with it.

we also need talk about holy animation. how slow that is its bit junk upon casting holy white ball also takes a second before it explodes so actually casting time of holy 3.50 cause of the sheer junk of it

Snapshotting is a thing. There's a reason why you can cast Holy into a running pack and stun them despite seemingly being miles out of range. The animation has to play out, but the effects are earlier than presented. Similar applies in reverse seeing as you only have to avoid telegraphs, not actual enemy animations. In almost all cases, these are registered ahead of time, even if the playing field doesn't immediately represent it, and this in itself doesn't present any real problem with Holy (which is best used when the enemies are already in position, not while they're farting around).

it changes when get higher there brief case where you get cure II realise hey dont need case cure 1 anymore.

Do you know what's funny? Watching Asmongold's streams. Every time he heads to old synced content, his chat is always calling out healers using Cure I. You know why they're using it? Because you're not getting the same level of MP regen as you would with Assize, Thin Air, and Lucid at higher levels -- with Cure II spam being a good way to go OOMP. CureI can proc free CureII's, and is still a 450 potency on a shorter cast than CureII. Someone like me (when we have no oGCD's and no Holy in lower content such as Stone Vigil) will casually heal/damage mass-pulls simply by using a very simple CureI/Stone rota, which is enough to keep the tank alive while weaving in damage and also avail of the FreeCure system to save MP doing it. Other healers would assume that all they can do is spam CureII and the usual Regen/MedicaII's, which is a good way of going oom during wall-to-wall pulls where you might not get a lot of OOC downtime to regen enough MP for comfort between packs.

cure should have trait that makes it cure 1 and cure II to cure III.

Except it shouldn't, because all three Cure's do different things and serve completely different purposes, whereas all versions of STONE are basically higher potency versions of a singular baseline spell that does nothing different other than hit harder. Some people are already complaining about how WHM has so little to press as it is, yet you'd ask to have three healing options merged into a singular for no good reason.

any white mage main knows holy has aoe jank! most aoe animations you do damage then then animation. holy is different. moment you finish casting you get this lag or 1.50 wait for it explosion before it actually does anything. on that note. look at it from that prospective then you can actually see why holy can be seen as bad all for holy animation change just so get deal its damage quicker so dont have wait for big white ball to explode

On the contrary, I wager most WHM mains would disagree with your entire post and its shoddy reasoning.

[Deceptus]

Except it shouldn't, because all three Cure's do different things and serve completely different purposes, whereas all versions of STONE are basically higher potency versions of a singular baseline spell that does nothing different other than hit harder. Some people are already complaining about how WHM has so little to press as it is, yet you'd ask to have three healing options merged into a singular for no good reason.

Except they don't.

Cure 1 is laughed at once Cure 2 becomes available so there's zero reason for Cure 1 to exist once Cure 2 does. It should absolutely be upgraded via trait.

As I've said before, Cure 3 should be a direct trait upgrade from Medica and rename it to Medica 3 keeping the larger aoe range. Medica 1 is useless in higher levels.. This frees up Cure 3 to be the next big single target heal. It also gives consistency. Medica line is AoE healing, Cure line is single target. Zero chance for confusion.

[RopeDrink]

Except they don't.

Except they do, and it's an absolute fact that you can check in-game at your leisure, but I suspect you are replying to my comment at face value rather than as a reply to a different proposition. It doesn't change just because you go from primarily using one of them to primarily using the other later on, and it's certainly not even remotely comparable to the likes of StoneI>StoneII>StoneIII single-button trait progression, which is what the person I replied to is proposing for Cure.

People laughing at one after gaining the other doesn't change the fact that they do not act the same way at all and never have done -- so long as a faster-cast FreeCure and an AoE version exist, in a game that can have you flim-flam from older to newer content on a whim, where you absolutely would still use CureI, especially without your ream of oGCD's, Holy, or a full complement of MP-Regen tools in either dungeons or synced trials/raids. The problem most people have is the lack of real usage for CureI later in the game, which is true, but also a different discussion.

I'd rather Square actually improve on all three Cure buttons for engagement rather than merge them. If it keeps up, then what's next? Merge Regen, Medica, and MedicaII into "Regenica"? I mean, it's two AoE heals and two HoTs, so we may as well cull some more buttons seeing as they are similar and/or more commonly used later on.

[FoxCh40s]

Except they don't.

Cure 1 is laughed at once Cure 2 becomes available so there's zero reason for Cure 1 to exist once Cure 2 does. It should absolutely be upgraded via trait.

As I've said before, Cure 3 should be a direct trait upgrade from Medica and rename it to Medica 3 keeping the larger aoe range. Medica 1 is useless in higher levels.. This frees up Cure 3 to be the next big single target heal. It also gives consistency. Medica line is AoE healing, Cure line is single target. Zero chance for confusion.

I can't believe I'm disagreeing with you Deceptus, but yea. Each Cure really does have its separate uses;
Cure 1 is maintenance healing on single target with added bonus of Free Cure.

Cure 2 is single target tempo heal, keep yourself ahead of the curve in terms of Damage to Hp ratio.

Cure 3 is Ahk Morn super spam/big successive damage hits solution.

If anything, Medica and Medica 2 have really been the out of place spells in terms of naming conventions.

If anything, the should have been named Cura and Curaja.