WHM Desperately Needs An Overhaul

[HyperiusUltima]

Don't forget to Lower the cooldown of the lilybell from 180 to 120 seconds. This skill is already situational as hell, and STILL we need to choose WHICH situations to use it because if we use it in one, we won't have it up for the other. This sucks big time.

Was planning to. Sadly can’t edit on mobile(SE WHY).

[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.

[SoulSamurai]

What about changing the Lilies to OGCD and keep them in combat charge but not lose them when you die. This adds to our lacking OGCD healing and makes them useful.

Since we gained some OGCD and IMO tetra is double of that remove it to like a GNB 2 or 3 charge of Lilies on maybe a 90 second cooldown. This will add stacks to needed healing time (start of instance or on a raise to save MP) and also can be burned for a smaller burst phase if need in savage content with blood lilies.

Liturgy changed to either damage received by party and or button released heals.

I think this is a quick fix without too much reworking and can be pushed through in an update and then reworked at a later point. But this makes them very viable in content now.

[aiqa]

I don't think WHM needs a complete rework greatly improve it.
If they changed a few things I'd be happy with it.
- Reduce Afflatus Misery potency to 3XX and turn it into oGCD.
- Blood Lilly bloom afters using one normal Lilly, or Glare contributes to Blood Lilly.
- Add 2nd stack to Assize.
- Revert change to Thin Air.
- Remove heal on damage and auto detonate from Liturgy of the Bell, have stacks build up over time (1 stack per 2 seconds), require manual detonate, and increase potency.
- Lower Holy cast time to 1.5 seconds.

There are some other weird parts to the kit, like Cure 1 and Cure 3 being mostly useless. Those don't really get in the way to using WHM, but would be nice if they got some attention too.

[Silver-Strider]

I don't think WHM needs a complete rework greatly improve it.

I feel the opposite.

Healer design is stagnant and each healer plays so similarly to one another that it defeats the purpose of even having different classes to begin with. SCH and SGE are classified as Shield Healers but outside the 2-3 oGCD shields they provide, they're just as reactive to healing damage as WHM or AST. Other than AST's cards and SCH's fairy, there's nothing particularly unique about any of the healers so giving them some flavor again is necessary, IMO.

[baklava151]

I feel the opposite.

Healer design is stagnant and each healer plays so similarly to one another that it defeats the purpose of even having different classes to begin with. SCH and SGE are classified as Shield Healers but outside the 2-3 oGCD shields they provide, they're just as reactive to healing damage as WHM or AST. Other than AST's cards and SCH's fairy, there's nothing particularly unique about any of the healers so giving them some flavor again is necessary, IMO.

This always rubbed me the wrong way back in ShB when I played SCH (although it was mostly in casual content). Maybe it's a balance thing to keep shield healers from being too strong but I never felt like I was really preventing damage with Succor/Adlo/Sacred Soil when I usually ended up following up damage with an oGCD heal anyways. The closest I got was Critlo on the tank and Deployment Tactics but that's extremely unwieldy to use mid-fight other than for stacks

[Silver-Strider]

This always rubbed me the wrong way back in ShB when I played SCH (although it was mostly in casual content). Maybe it's a balance thing to keep shield healers from being too strong but I never felt like I was really preventing damage with Succor/Adlo/Sacred Soil when I usually ended up following up damage with an oGCD heal anyways. The closest I got was Critlo on the tank and Deployment Tactics but that's extremely unwieldy to use mid-fight other than for stacks

I feel like Pet Healer is a better term for SCH myself. They have several mechanics centered around the fairy moreso then their shields. Outside of Deployment and Emergency Tactics, SCH's Shield mechanics are largely ignored and considering that several of their capstone abilities involve the Fairy, (Dissipation eats the fairy, Aetherpact tethers the fairy and Seraph upgrades the fairy.) it just feels like shield healer doesn't really fit SCH.

[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.