WHM Desperately Needs An Overhaul

[Silver-Strider]

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Something that I was trying to do was limit button bloat as much as possible so that there wouldn't be much issue with implementation, hence why Protect, Fluid Aura, etc all upgrade into skills we currently have available. The only skill that I realistically added was an AoE DoT to the job. If people wouldn't complain about it, I would've added back Cleric Stance to function as WHM's Eukrasia, turning Cure 2/Medica into their Afflatus Equivalents while also expanding on the Lily System by reworking Misery to be the Afflatus version of Holy, adding Afflatus Versions of Medica 2 and Cure 3 as well as a single target version of Misery to act as a Glare equivalent but because all I hear with that suggestion is "Hurr durr Homogeny bad", my options to add skills that don't contribute to button bloat are extremely limited because realistically there isn't a way to include them UNLESS you add a Eukrasia button. Flat out having our skills turn into their Afflatus Versions upon gaining a lily causes conflict with skills like Glare and Holy because you end up using your Lilies outside of your control now that you HAVE to use them, which causes you to have little to no agency on when you can unleash Misery so I'm kind of stuck when it comes to including new things.

As for your suggestions.
I kind of went overboard on fixing WHM's MP economy that a free proc of Cure 2 is just not needed. I buffed Assize+Thin Air, reduced the cost of several abilities, made Lilies give MP, lowered the CD on several of our oGCDs, etc. that I severely overdid it.

Protect, Protectra, Stoneskin, Shellra. What's in a name? Ultimately they'd just turn into Aqua Veil, Divine Benison, etc. so it's whatever. I called Stoneskin 2 Graniteskin because it sounded better but since it turns into PI at the end of the day, it doesn't really matter.

Reraise seems....problematic for a number of reasons. No healer ability should be % based (Lady/Lord of Crowns are problematic for this reason alone) but to make it something that is actually somewhat abusable seeing as you could potentially cheese several other mechanics with it, if it works, doesn't seem like a balanced thing. I feel Reraise should be a status effect that occurs when a target is rezzed by 2 people at the same time that cancels out the weakness debuff that is standard with rezzing. That way, Healers don't feel like their MP was wasted unnecessarily by a lack of communication and the group suffers for it less.

Removing Repose is fine. They can just make it into a Duty Action like Vril on Lakshmi for the 1 quest its required in and nothing would be lost.

[Herrisa]

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I agree with you that a lot of skills they removed should come back and be a lower version of higher level skills such as Protect, Shell, & Stoneskin. Not to mention those are classic whm skills and it hurt when they removed them.

For button bloat, having Cure upgrade to Cure II, Medica mimicking Medica II, just a weaker potency, then upgrading to Medica II when the times comes will help. My concern with mp regen is the pre lvl 52 (Assize) problem. Insert story: newbie tank + 1st room Aurum Vale + healer death = <lvl52 whm mp regen horror show. Trust me, Lucid Dreaming doesn't cut it so a better type of mp recovery besides Lucid Dreaming is needed at those levels. Spamming Cure and hoping for a Cure II proc is rough, very rough, on the mp pool.

Names are important since it will at least avoid confusion (why does this Stoneskin do this but this Stoneskin do that?), not to mention the background database stuff going on.

I played WHM on FFXI so I'm partial to Reraise and wish it was in our toolkit but, yeah, it can be problematic which is most likely why they won't let us have it. Thinking about it and reading what Plenary Indulgence in the real world is (getting people out of Purgatory by prayer) what if it was completely changed and became a 2nd Raise skill for whm which will raise a single-target without the weakness buff but on a very long cooldown? It will also remove the Confessions mechanic which seems redundant and underutilized.

[Silver-Strider]

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I suppose if Cure 3 got the radius buff I suggest to 15y, you could merge Medica and Medica 2 in a hypothetical situation but then Afflatus Rapture seems out of place. A 400 potency AoE heal with nothing to compare it to other than being a weaker Cure 3 kind of makes you question why it exists when the original skill is an AoE regen. You could just rework Afflatus Rapture to be a regen as well but I feel as though WHM has lost enough as is without trying to consolidate it even more. The reason it works for Cure is because its just a weaker Cure 2 but Medica and Medica 2 function quite differently from one another that I'm not sure you could merge them normally.

I tried to address MP issues on low level WHM as much as possible, with Lilies skills being available at 30, Fluid Aura acting as a low level Assize with the 5% MP restore, and the low level oGCDs skills of Stoneskin, Protect and Divine Seal offering some extra cushion for those types of scenarios. Believe me, I know WHM's MP issues very well, I stomached it all back in ARR and it was easier with those extra tools, even if they're not the same as they were back then.

On the topic of names, I still feel that they're all meaningless in this game. Bozja and PvP are such minor areas of the game that skills sharing a name between them all is largely inconsequential because you aren't exposed to those areas often enough to even matter and when you are exposed, it doesn't really take all that long to read the tooltip to find out how they differ from one another. It's a minor nitpick and not one that I really care enough to distinguish.

[BoobooDaBear]

I am definitely not a healer main, but when I heal I use white mage. I thought I would share my thoughts about changes to strengthen white mage while also trying not to tip balance to hard. There are only two abilities I would change to bring improvement.

free cure: make Stone/Glare the ability that procs free cure. Doing some unnecessary math, since we all already know cure fishing is bad, a 15% proc means you cast cure seven time per proc, granting 3500 potency, costing 3500 MP to get one free 800 potency heal. The cure power of cure II is nearly equal for half the GCDs, 3200 for four cure II's costing 4000 MP. The situations you need heal spam is pretty much only trash pulls, and cure wont keep the tank alive. You pretty much never (or should never) cast cure once you have cure II. This will fix some of the MP problem since you get free cure for spamming glare, which you already were doing.

Lily: I want to compare lily to the other healers special resource heals.
AST has no special resource heal, it instead has cards which can be kept on CD, additionally AST heals cost a less MP. This is the least comparable to lilies but the difference is the card CD can always be ticking.
SCH using aetherflow, a 60 second CD granting three charges and restores 20% MP, you can also hold your charges and let the CD tick, letting SCH use up to six 600 potency heals on a 1 second recast in rapid succession. CDs also tick while dead, making little downtime aetherflow, but lilies and addergall reset to zero if you die.
SGE gets addersgall, which they get every 20 seconds and spend for a 600 potency heal and a 7% mp restore on a 1 second recast. This ability recharges faster, recasts faster, restores MP, and you are always generating stacks.
While WHM gets 1 lily every 30 seconds only while in combat (the timer also resets if combat ends if I'm not mistaken) for a 700 potency heal on a full GCD recast.
How I would fix this is recharge every 20 or 30 seconds (depending on how often Devs want blood lily to activate) in and out of combat like SGE and shorten the recast to 1 second to match SGE and SCH heals.

Side topic: Lots of players are saying, using the blood lily is a potency loss over glare spam. I do not think the potency of 4 GCD glare, vs 4 GCD for one blood lily is comparable. You can only blood lily once every 90 seconds when you get 3 lilies (36 GCD), and you glare/dia/heal 33 times between every blood lily. So really its a potency gain, because you will have to stop the glare spam to heal during actual play. Yes if you are just doing a DPS test, blood lily is a damage loss, but in practice you should be spending lilies anyway so I do not think it needs a potency buff or really any change, especially if lilies generate in and out of combat.

Regardless of blood lily, lilies are inferior to the special resource heals currently being used by the other healers, both in how long it takes to get your stacks, and how quick you can spend them.

[ty_taurus]

Side topic: Lots of players are saying, using the blood lily is a potency loss over glare spam. I do not think the potency of 4 GCD glare, vs 4 GCD for one blood lily is comparable. You can only blood lily once every 90 seconds when you get 3 lilies (36 GCD), and you glare/dia/heal 33 times between every blood lily. So really its a potency gain, because you will have to stop the glare spam to heal during actual play. Yes if you are just doing a DPS test, blood lily is a damage loss, but in practice you should be spending lilies anyway so I do not think it needs a potency buff or really any change, especially if lilies generate in and out of combat.

Making Afflatus Misery always a DPS neutral action would do a lot of good for both experienced healers and casual healers. As it stands, yes, Misery is always a DPS loss. Even if you're forced to use GCD healing, you are still losing damage, which makes Misery a partial return of DPS rather than a full refund. But WHM is already the healer pressured far more than any other to GCD heal due to an overall lack of OGCD healing that's almost ubiquitously outclassed by tools every other healer has access to. In other words, they lose a lot more DPS uptime due to just not having the resources to pump out free healing like the other healers can.

Having said that, though, I think keeping WHM as a low APM job is a good thing. There are a lot of players that want something slower and easier to play, but that doesn't mean WHM needs to be boring either. It's totally within the design team's power to make WHM all about making impactful choices with the spells they choose while still allowing its tools to be forgiving.

Making Misery completely DPS neutral, without any other changes, would make quite literally everyone happy. Experienced healers would be fully encouraged to take advantage of the GCD healing for once in the history of FFXIV as you benefit from being net positive on HP while maintaining your momentum. Meanwhile, casual players benefit from a naturally raised skill floor since you're promised a certain amount of optimal DPS every 90ish seconds, though you also aren't pressured to pump out as many Miserys as you can. So even if you are optimizing, you can sit on full lilies when no healing is needed and not need to use them.

The only potential concern is encouraging pumping out Miserys during burst windows. But for casual players, that's not something they're thinking about anyway, and we could also resolve that issue very easily by just giving Misery a 20 second recast time, if it even would be a problem at a higher level of play.

What I find ironic is that it aligns perfectly with the design team's goals of healing. It almost feels like they won't do it to spite the midcore/hardcore audience even though it would also benefit the casual audience. But then again, they also heavily nerfed Thin Air. You know, to make healing "easier" and "more accessible."

[Rika007]

What I find ironic is that it aligns perfectly with the design team's goals of healing. It almost feels like they won't do it to spite the midcore/hardcore audience even though it would also benefit the casual audience. But then again, they also heavily nerfed Thin Air. You know, to make healing "easier" and "more accessible."

The great lie of this whole conversation is that there is not a middle ground where the dev teams want for healing to be easy and more accessible, cant meet the high end crowds want for healers with more coherent kits and engaging downtime options. We've literally seen hundreds of suggestions from players that do not in anyway touch the accessibility of the game for players on the lower skilled end, and are strictly designed around the idea of making the current kits for healing both just work better and provide a more engaging experience overall. And many of those ideas work perfectly fine within the dev teams current view of accessibility and low stress.

The biggest failure of the dev team post ARR is not recognizing that middle ground can't be reached. The second biggest is in thinking the current healers even appeal to a 'casual' audience. Casual players doesn't equal bad. And there are many casual players who just play it and within a few months of playing realize they are bored and try a different role.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

My personal wish list:

First and foremost, give back the good ol' Aero III

Cure II
Potency bumped to 900p
MP Cost = 800

Cure III
Potency bumped to 650p
Extend the radius to 12y
Cast time = 1.5s
MP Cost = 1300

Medica I
Cast time = 1.5s
MP Cost = 700

Medica II
Upfront heal bumped to 300p
MP Cost = 900

Regen
Potency per tick bumped to 300p

Afflatus Solace
Unlocks at lv35.

Afflatus Rapture
Unlocks at lv62. At the same level grants 5% MP restoration for using healing lilies, including Solace.

Asylum
Cooldown reduced to 60s.
Duration shortened to 18s.

Tetragrammaton
Each use reduce next lily timer by 15s.
Gains 2nd charge at lv78.

Fluid Aura
Returns at lv15 but effect changed. Functions as baby version of Aquaveil.

Divine Benison
Breaking the shield reduce next lily timer by 5s.

Assize
Gains an upgrade trait at lv68. Grants "Tornado Ready", enabling the execution of instant GCD "Tornado". Last for 30s or until Tornado is used.

Tornado **NEW**
Deals wind damage with a potency of 420p to one target and 70% less to all nearby enemies. Also inflict wind damage over time with a potency of 50p for 21s. (damage fall off also applies)
Can only be executed under the effect of "Tornado Ready". Replaces Aero III hotkey until "Tornado Ready" is spent or expires.
Radius = 6y

Afflatus Misery (Two Alternatives)
#1 Simple potency bump to 1,240p, OR;
#2 Slight bump to 930p. Each Misery cast grants 5 stacks of "Glaring Inspiration", raising next spell potency (includes healing spell) by 20% while also eliminating cast time.

Liturgy of the Bell
Duration extended to 20 seconds.
Healing waves now have different conditions of proccing and how it affects the outcome:
#1 Procs at 400p/wave if the WHM is hit. This condition nourishes blood lily at the same rate as using healing lilies.
#2 Procs at 300p/wave if the WHM detonates the waves manually by pressing the hotkey. No blood lily nourishment, but reduce next lily timer by 3s per stack.
#3 Procs at 350p*remaining stacks if the timer expires on its own. Reduce next lily timer by 5s for each remaining stacks. Also no blood lily nourishment.

Some numbers are whacky I admit (especially the additional damage spell and the lily timer reduction), but decided to just put in some ideas that's been circulating in my head.

Also I liked Silver-Strider's idea to add back Stoneskin and Divine Seal. I'd love to have more things to weave that low

EDIT: I forgot to add that Freecure should've been an upgrade of Cure I to Cure II lol.