A simple, yet engaging WHM

[ty_taurus]

Basic critiques:

1. Germinate is not going to reduce the apparent loss of not having an Afflatus Misery in every other raid buff period (120, 180, 300, 360, etc.). You'll just now be expected to fit a further AM per 120 seconds, which can make the usual banked per-90 (effectively working itself out to matching the 2-minute interval, then the next 60, then skipping a 2-minute/60, next 60, etc) feel awkward due to the ability to overcap. It'd badly force you to have your Lily casts all planned out, instead of being usable for emergency heals (rare though that be) or mobility. Moreover that capacity (an extra 600 potency per 120s, or roughly 5pps or 12.5 ppgcd) is just going to be taken from our typical offensive ppgcd.

2. Eschaton seems perhaps overpowered, but certainly likely to be... odd. You've not attached a CD to this, so in multi-target situations you're effectively able to mass DoT at 250 potency each, only 50 short of Glare (or 125 combined when accounting for the Lily actually be spent IF you wouldn't have otherwise needed to heal and couldn't recover otherwise clipped ppgcd, but a bonus) or 27.5n short of Holy including Lily spending, while feeding up to 2 AMs off a single Thin Air. I just have to wonder what actual playflow you want from this. Under what scenarios should we do A, and after what limit does it instead become optimal to do B, per your intent, and what does that variance add to the gameplay?

3. Afflatus Propagation, on the other hand, looks really neat. It's relatively dps-neutral in AoE, can be used pre-pull, offers a nice double-Holy value AoE to our first (enhanced) heal on that target.... Good stuff. Admittedly, though, I'd probably be even more floored by this if, say, we still had the means to force out a crit via procs (as per the old Cure II -> III procs in ARR) and the damage triggered by that heal was actually just, say, 40% or 33% of its healing done. That said, I'm not sold on the idea of having a 140p heal (20% of 700) and 150n damage competing with Solace's 700 heal and no damage or and Rapture's 300n and no damage. It just seems to badly take away from the functional point of the Lily system.

Disclaimer: I didn't actually mind the earlier StB concept of Secret of the Lilies as indirect potency-refunding from healing actions done. I just felt it was weirdly applied (in being maxed at 3 stacks) and painfully undertuned. So, I may be crazy anyways.

Oh, and Water/Banish are fine, of course. Siphon a bit of spam ppgcd for a flexible mobility tool/nuke that benefits notably from downtime? Totally okay with that.

Thanks for the feedback. Nicely thought out criticism.

OnGerminate: You bring up some interesting points. One thing that comes to mind might be... What if instead, it Nourishes the Blood Lily twice instead of thrice, and was on a 60 second cooldown with 2 charges? There's no longer the issue about overcapping on CD. 2 Charges makes it overall less of a DPS gain but also increases the flexibility of when it's optimally used. You don't need to have a fully empty Blood Lily going into it. If you have 1 Nourish, it takes you to full. If you have 2 Nourishes, then you can use Aff. Propagation > AM > Germinate. Paired with Eschaton's potential for Lily generation, you also have it for the openner since you can force a lily to immediately spend on Propagation. If we ultimately don't like Eschaton though we could also add the normal lily generation to Germinate itself. Thoughts on a change like that?

On Eschaton: Yeah this one is wonky. What I'd like to do is create a reason to want to use Thin Air on something other than Raise. Additionally, having a big MP spender gives you some wiggle room in skill expression since you can also use it outside of Thin Air when you're comfortable sacrificing a chunk of MP which I think has some value in job design. It's a very tricky thing as you mentioned, though, because playflow isn't clear and direct without controlling its use through a cooldown. You don't want it to just be a bigger nuke either because then it does put a lot of pressure on players to use it as much as possible. I've seen a lot of people gravitate toward Lost Seraph Strike in Bozja, and maybe something closer to that direction might make for sense for an action like this.

On Afflatus Propagation: The thing that I think works really nicely in Aff. Propagation's favor is it creates a way to make Misery worth working toward without encouraging you to waste heals for the sake of nourishing the Blood Lily. While making the damage based on the healing you offer to the target can be really interesting too, it makes the damage harder to control. I guess the biggest point of debate is what is the non-damage benefit associated with it? I agree that the increased healing isn't perfect, but I wonder what kind of ideas come to your mind in regards to that point.

[Shurrikhan]

Thanks for the feedback. Nicely thought out criticism.

OnGerminate: You bring up some interesting points. One thing that comes to mind might be... What if instead, it Nourishes the Blood Lily twice instead of thrice, and was on a 60 second cooldown with 2 charges?

I'd probably go the other way, honestly. Just consolidate the gauge space of 3 readied/bloodied lilies to a single Blood Lily, and, in that space, allow for 2 further lilies to be readied over that time. Voila, 5 charges max, essentially, up from 3, with no gauge UI bloat. That said, I still have to wonder at the function/intent of this. To me, it's just like SAM's Ikishouten but with little of the parameters/interactions that make that skill (mildly) interesting.

On Eschaton: Yeah this one is wonky. What I'd like to do is create a reason to want to use Thin Air on something other than Raise. Additionally, having a big MP spender gives you some wiggle room in skill expression...

I just feel like it needs (1) more deliberate scaling since, as a ST DoT, its practical ppgcd comparison is going to vary wildly and (2) something more obviously interesting about its skill expression than just that it's a chunky Mana spender (though, admittedly, every healer could benefit from that, as outside of rezzes MP feels like a watered-down afterthought at present).

Also, it's kind of odd to think though that Lost Seraph Strike is almost just Cleric Stance done right. (Personally -- mad hatter hat on here -- I'd probably have taken that further, though, in making WHM's utility an outright DPS burst phase, whereby all heals become enemy-castable primers for damage bonuses that follow along a non-linear but (variably) optimizable flow.)

On Afflatus Propagation: The thing that I think works really nicely in Aff. Propagation's favor is it creates a way to make Misery worth working toward without encouraging you to waste heals for the sake of nourishing the Blood Lily.

I feel like that's not so much a WHM kit issue as just a general healing requirements issue, though (and, to some degree, the non-WHM healer sniping excessively, without paying attention to WHM's available charges -- which, to be fair, should have a status bar element visible at least to one's party so they know how many unique seals, AF charges, Lily charges, or... Sage ammo... one has).

I mean, if we can't warrant even a single GCD direct heal per 30 seconds... that's an issue.