Is it just me or is WHM suffering?

[Irenia]

The way we treat piety reminds me of accuracy from years ago.

Accuracy was important not because it felt good to increase, but because it felt bad if you didn't increase it. And that sucks.

We got rid of accuracy. Perhaps piety should go away as well.

[Kabzy]

...We got rid of accuracy. Perhaps piety should go away as well.

Sometimes it's hard to sympathise because of ideas like this. A lot of us liked the complexity healers had in 2.x/3.x, but the crybabies had to get them dumbed down to what we have now. And yet you still want to further simplify things. SE may have gone too far, but this is practically what the playerbase asked for.

[BaconBits]

One thing needs to be understood: WHM is a Basic healer. Easy to pick up. But anyone can be a master of this class, that's why basic pure healer.
Scholar a bit more advanced, need to use your...yes, brain to play with it.
Astro is an Advanced pure healer. Tricky and very busy job. Not for everyone.
Another thing needs to be understood: There is no boring job. No boring healer. Gossip is not true, don't believe in, the healer not a green dps. healer Can contribute dps but significantly Their Job is to keep the party alive and help to correct mistakes (doesn't matter why mistakes happen)
WHM can be boring if the player only contributes a dps with their 2 dps spell and shouts if a dps ask some heal: "Not my job to correct your mistakes!"
A very familiar sentence isn't it?
I speaking from experience because I have whm but I wanted some more advanced healer and I have a very good Astro. I love to play with it. A real adventure. Also I have dps as well and I have some bad taste if I see a whm at the party. That's means I will die because of a lack of heal. Because they are busy contributing that tiny dps and don't care about a real DPS.
Be a good healer, play for your party, keep them alive and you will be the best healer and busy healer and everybody learn your name, believe me.

[Liam_Harper]

Sometimes it's hard to sympathise because of ideas like this. A lot of us liked the complexity healers had in 2.x/3.x, but the crybabies had to get them dumbed down to what we have now. And yet you still want to further simplify things. SE may have gone too far, but this is practically what the playerbase asked for.

Accuracy is not complexity. It's "stack to x amount and forget about it". Piety is even worse because you bring a weak stat as a "just incase", then if you and your group play well, it's completely dead. There's no skill involved, you just bring a big chunk of uselessness incase your group are potatoes.

It irks me when players cling to things that are clunky, broken or useless and argue that trying to mitigate their negative impact is skill or complexity, because it prevents us from having actual skill rewarding jobs that feel smooth to play. Instead of focusing on gameplay improvements, you're focusing on fluff.

Piety can go out the window, into the garbage and be burnt.

[Kabzy]

Accuracy is not complexity. It's "stack to x amount and forget about it". Piety is even worse because you bring a weak stat as a "just incase", then if you and your group play well, it's completely dead. There's no skill involved, you just bring a big chunk of uselessness incase your group are potatoes.

It irks me when players cling to things that are clunky, broken or useless and argue that trying to mitigate their negative impact is skill or complexity, because it prevents us from having actual skill rewarding jobs that feel smooth to play. Instead of focusing on gameplay improvements, you're focusing on fluff.

Piety can go out the window, into the garbage and be burnt.

Nope, and this tunnel vision you have is exactly the problem. I'll agree accuracy was a bit unnecessary. However, MP management used to be a genuine skill healers needed. And it wasn't a solo responsibility. You'd have to be careful with your resources because the BRD would have to use Ballad to sacrifice their own DPS for healers. There was actual synergising between roles. Healers also had things like Virus and E4E for more raid responsibility beyond throwing an OGCD out every 2m.

Throwing piety out just means that in the rare occasion you do have MP issues, you're not expected to adjust at all. You want yet another layer of niche complexity thrown out so you can spam 1 all day.

Also clunk is definitely subjective. Some people loved the risk-reward of Cleric Stance, others like you labelled it clunky so you could get rid of it and have an easier life.

[RinaShinomiya]

Nope, and this tunnel vision you have is exactly the problem. I'll agree accuracy was a bit unnecessary. However, MP management used to be a genuine skill healers needed. And it wasn't a solo responsibility. You'd have to be careful with your resources because the BRD would have to use Ballad to sacrifice their own DPS for healers. There was actual synergising between roles. Healers also had things like Virus and E4E for more raid responsibility beyond throwing an OGCD out every 2m.

Throwing piety out just means that in the rare occasion you do have MP issues, you're not expected to adjust at all. You want yet another layer of niche complexity thrown out so you can spam 1 all day.

Also clunk is definitely subjective. Some people loved the risk-reward of Cleric Stance, others like you labelled it clunky so you could get rid of it and have an easier life.

I'd argue piety is a stat that actively contributes to the Nukespam gameplay and disincentivises usage of GCD healing due to them being an extreme MP negative.

At the end of the day you'll never convince anyone that gearing a stat that increases MP regen exclusively is worth it when you could gear Crit or SpS or Det, all of which increase your damage while also helping out with healing. Piety doesnt even boost healing potency.

[Rilifane]

Nope, and this tunnel vision you have is exactly the problem. I'll agree accuracy was a bit unnecessary. However, MP management used to be a genuine skill healers needed. And it wasn't a solo responsibility. You'd have to be careful with your resources because the BRD would have to use Ballad to sacrifice their own DPS for healers. There was actual synergising between roles. Healers also had things like Virus and E4E for more raid responsibility beyond throwing an OGCD out every 2m.

Throwing piety out just means that in the rare occasion you do have MP issues, you're not expected to adjust at all. You want yet another layer of niche complexity thrown out so you can spam 1 all day.

Also clunk is definitely subjective. Some people loved the risk-reward of Cleric Stance, others like you labelled it clunky so you could get rid of it and have an easier life.

Stacking Piety to X amount for safety is not MP management. Just like doing autos when you're out of MP isn't MP management.
Real MP management is about actively making choices but we currently don't have good choices because of the way healers are designed: oGCDs don't cost MP, you can't just not raise someone because "MP management" when the next mechanic needs them alive nor can you let someone die because "MP management".

MP management would be something like having a skill with a low cooldown, e.g. 10s, that boosts your MP regen for some time. You could theoretically keep in cooldown and have infinte MP.
But it's a dps loss over your nuke, so you'll want to use it only as much as necessary. Got raised but LD still on cooldown for some time? Keep it on cooldown for a bit. Needed to chain ress? Same. Party plays well? Use it less often.
Unlike Piety, which is just a constant flat MP regen increase, it's dynamic.
Or the classic efficient but weaker healing vs expensive but quick/ strong healing which we don't have here because GCD healing is a huge dps loss and the weaker spells are also often less efficient than the stronger ones. You take your pick according to what the situation requires.
Or a skill that reduces damage output by a certain % but also MP cost by a signifcant amount. Best used for raising and GCD healing, obviously, but also viable if something went wrong and you're low on MP as it would be a dps loss in a vacuum but a dps gain vs just nuking like normal and then doing autos.
Or dps skills having different MP costs and you could stack a buff that when consumed, reduces MP cost; letting you use stronger, more expensive skills without emptying on MP but also great for GCD healing/ ressing.

Designing and balancing all of that is obviously more difficult than just giving us a stat that you "stack to comfort level" and call it a day.
Most healers don't hate MP management, they just hate passive "MP management" like Piety or "keep LD on cooldown, no downside to not doing it". It's fluff; not complexity, not active, not something that needs you to evaluate each situation.
Mage's Ballad is a good example of active MP management; Piety is not. It's just desperately clinging to something we no longer have.
I wish we had active MP management, I wish it was still an actualy layer of complexity to healer gameplay but I'll never consider Piety of all things as an example for MP management.

[Doragan]

I wish they would do something with Piety. Like, make the heals stronger. Reducing the mana cost on spells. Reduces incoming damage. Give you more Max MP like before.. or even make up something like a direct hit heal clone. At least, something more than a dead stat that gives you a very, very small increase of mp gain per tick. It's definitely the game's worst stat just because of that.. but it really doesn't have to be.

At the same time, I wish they would give the Stormblood mana tools back to ranged DPS and Caster. Sure, that wouldn't fix the MP issues that WHM have, but it would make it work via a team effort, at least. And if you don't want this to be abused by DRK, just give them a debuff or a trait that limits coming mana from the party, like the DPS stance used to do, I don't know.

[Saefinn]

One thing needs to be understood: WHM is a Basic healer. Easy to pick up. But anyone can be a master of this class, that's why basic pure healer.
Scholar a bit more advanced, need to use your...yes, brain to play with it.
Astro is an Advanced pure healer. Tricky and very busy job. Not for everyone.
Another thing needs to be understood: There is no boring job. No boring healer. Gossip is not true, don't believe in, the healer not a green dps. healer Can contribute dps but significantly Their Job is to keep the party alive and help to correct mistakes (doesn't matter why mistakes happen)
WHM can be boring if the player only contributes a dps with their 2 dps spell and shouts if a dps ask some heal: "Not my job to correct your mistakes!"
A very familiar sentence isn't it?
I speaking from experience because I have whm but I wanted some more advanced healer and I have a very good Astro. I love to play with it. A real adventure. Also I have dps as well and I have some bad taste if I see a whm at the party. That's means I will die because of a lack of heal. Because they are busy contributing that tiny dps and don't care about a real DPS.
Be a good healer, play for your party, keep them alive and you will be the best healer and busy healer and everybody learn your name, believe me.

Taking that last line. Being a good healer, playing for your party and being the best healer won't mean you will be a busy healer. It will mean the opposite, because good healers heal less. If your party is good then your healers heal less. You end up finding there's this big period of time where you're not healing and it can be pretty chunky, especially on something like WHM where it is easy to keep people's health topped up.

So what is your reward for being great at WHM?
Dia->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare->Glare

There is a reason it is called "Glare Mage" by some.

There are different views on this, but we can all at least agree that this is not what a busy healer looks like...and that is a problem.

It can still be basic to pick up without such a lackluster healer downtime.

But I agree with the general sentiment that different healing jobs should vary in difficulty to play and should vary to different preferred playstyles. But one of the problems we get is that for a lot of content healing is pretty low effort, especially if you are experienced. However, one reason I like SGE is because it has a steeper learning curve, but I am actually resistant to optimising my SGE play because I worry I will hit a spot where I stop enjoying it because I hit a level of optimisation where I am locked into longer periods of spamming Dosis...which arguably goes against the mantra of a good healer, but hey, what's the point if I'm not enjoying it? As long as I am good /enough/.

However, I wouldn't expect WHM to have a steeper learning curve and that people should find it fairly intuitive when they pick it up. But it doesn't have to be braindead to do that.

[MiaShino]

Ugh piety, the dump stat of FF14. It kinda reminds me of resistance in Dark Souls, existing only as trap for new players who do not understand how stats work.

Goal is to become mana positive when doing damage until group learns fight then mana neutral. Only white mage appears to be mana negative when doing damage yet all healer gear always has piety.

Pre-gearing if you are raising yourself oom and so is co-healer you are probably already doomed to hit enrage anyways and time could be better spent on learning mechanics then "the complexity of MP regen".

Most other rpgs with stats bother making said stats useful in multiple ways.

Examine Will/Mind for one brief moment using dungeons and dragons (and all things based on the DnD rule sets). It will increase MP/MP recovery BUT also provides magic defense, allows one to resist attacks against the mind, and can increase hit chance for spells.

Compare this with piety's low MP regeneration yet nothing else offered. Feels like I only have this stat because my kit doth not have MP regeneration baked into it which is.. bad design?

Every point in piety can also create cascading effect. I have less crit/determination/direct hit so now my heals heal for less annnnnd am doing less damage. This will result in my needing additional healing (possibly) and will extend duration of fight which as you can guess will result in more healing required. More damage required for clearing and more healing required means I will expend what little tools white mage already has. I may require expensive gcd healing, mechanics will occur for longer increasing chance someone will mess up resulting in.. more healing and damage required to clear.

Or, or I could just meld useful stats and have useful stats on my gear? Perhaps even use the fantastic MP economy every other healer but white mage has?

What really chaffs my everything about piety is how detrimentally it can effect you when synced. Gear bloated with piety? Welp! Shall meld the other stats then! Oh wait materia is disabled when synced and 99% of content is done synced so now I have gcd of slow, no crit, and useless MP regen in content that barely requires any healing to begin with. Brilliant!