White-mage is doomed - and why

[Icecylee]

Let's not forget that the "it" there is merely having to reapply basic M. Defense, Phys. Defense, status-effect-specific immunity buffs, or element-specific resistance buffs. And if we're already so reluctant to spend a GCD on Lily casts that ultimately recoup three-quarters of their would-be offensive value, how fond do you really think WHMs are going to be of having to recast Protect once per 30 seconds, etc.?

It's not like the devs are going to allow a permanently maintainable buff to be powerful enough to be significant; at best, like Regen, it will merely save you a bit more than a GCD of healing per its duration, making it a slightly more efficient use of that GCD (but likely without Regen's instant-cast mobility or its ability to see significant use for apart from whichever will be MTing over Protect's duration).

I feel like there's a couple ways that even within the context of 14 they could play around with getting stuff to sort of feel like the classical buffs while still making sense here, they'd just need to get creative and maybe have the effects be slightly overkill to compensate for eating GCDs, such that they'd make up for potential GCD attack/heals lost. An idea just came to me that might do stupid stuff in the context of savage, but could be fun to mess around with in normal dungeons/trials and at least illustrates the point.

So something like protect would be a single target GCD ability with a cooldown, probably in the minute range. Acts as a channeled ability that gives 40~50% damage reduction while it's active, with the MP cost to keep channeling it ramping up the longer it goes on. After the channeled effect ends, it'd give the target a Shell status that would grant a smaller 5~10% DR effect, with the duration of that scaling higher the longer you channeled the protect effect.

Reflect could work in a similar way too, I think. You'd probably knock down the DR granted to something more reasonable like 20~30, and rather than an after effect, whenever you ended the channel it'd do damage to any enemy that hit the target while it was active, either based on the amount of damage dealt, or the number or hits or the length of the reflect or w/e would be make the most sense or be easier to balance around.

Even re-raise wouldn't be too hard to do, I don't think, with a bit of inventiveness. Make it an instant cast spell you can only cast in combat, grants re-raise to the target. Whenever that target dies, it'd immediately refund the WHM enough MP to cast raise, and grant a short duration status that makes their next raise instant cast. I don't know how useful something like that might actually be but like... there's definitely *some* merit, especially with something like whitemage that's been a series staple since the very first game, in considering how they could potentially reconfigure classic abilities into something that could make sense for 14, especially if they're going to keep moving away from the lore's more shamanistic aspects and refuse to commit harder to making the lily system more interesting.