WHM Desperately Needs An Overhaul

[Silver-Strider]

That probably needs to at least have banking, though, even if that may reduce the urgency granted. Having a chance to waste a loaded proc with each server tick is rarely a good fit for healer and would constrain any later attempts towards a lower-percentage-downtime design philosophy for healers.

How is having a Skill Ceiling high enough that you don't bump your head standing a bad thing? You missed a proc. That means there's room for optimization which isn't a bad thing. Anything is better than the nothing we have.

Moreover, I'm not sure how "break up all other possible procedures through immediate use of thing A upon proc-chime" would be particularly impactful or rewarding outside of a kit like that of BLM in which it should be held under state A and used mostly immediately under state B and both states are rotated between.

Healers have a similar system. It's call healing or DPSing. If I'm in a DPS phase, I don't need to heal and when I'm in my healing phase, it should be to build up my DPS phase again, or at least that's how it should work. Having a system in place so that your GCD heals don't negatively impact your contribution to the group is literally no different than asking for Misery to be DPS neutral. Maybe Regen gains the Diacloud proc. Dia becomes a 600 potency nuke that more than makes up for missing out on 1 GCD of Glare with the potential to be a DPS gain. Maybe Cure 2 get the Cleric Stance proc to double the potency of your next attack spell. Misery becomes an 1800 potency AoE nuke in 5 GCDs vs 5 Glares at 1550 potency on a single target. Does it encourage overhealing? Sure but then again, you have a trait to help solve that issue, don't you?

Literally, short of just adding more DPS buttons, there isn't really a good way to break Healers away from their 1 button spam. Procs could help though.

[Shurrikhan]

How is having a Skill Ceiling high enough that you don't bump your head standing up a bad thing? You missed a proc. That means there's room for optimization which isn't a bad thing. Anything is better than the nothing we have.

Right. We're talking about adding systems. Adding a system to which all others must be subordinate because it is "use within 3s of its proccing or risk wasting it" --and one has no means of controlling the opportunities for its generation beyond whether DoTs were worth using in the given fight-- will constrain those other systems. "Anything helps" only so long as the "anything" added doesn't also badly hamper any other system to be added.

Again, procs can work. Procs can be really good. With the right context. Damage optimization primarily being based around a "hit when flashing" mechanic (especially since it would, in this case, apply the DoT anyways, thereby making its periodic reapplication effectively passive in sustained combat and end up costing about as much complexity as it adds), though, is likely to constrain any future additions or more meaningful setup available to a job to little to no net gain.

[NightHour]

Yoshi-P hinted in the last live letter that some changes were coming to a lot of jobs - White Mage, Dark Knight and Machinist were the main 3 he pointed out.



There is another Live Letter on the 4th March at 03:00 PST / 11:00 GMT / 22:00 AEDT which should discuss 6.1 in a bit more detail.

[Silver-Strider]

Right. We're talking about adding systems. Adding a system to which all others must be subordinate because it is "use within 3s of its proccing or risk wasting it" --and one has no means of controlling the opportunities for its generation beyond whether DoTs were worth using in the given fight-- will constrain those other systems. "Anything helps" only so long as the "anything" added doesn't also badly hamper any other system to be added.

Again, procs can work. Procs can be really good. With the right context. Damage optimization primarily being based around a "hit when flashing" mechanic (especially since it would, in this case, apply the DoT anyways, thereby making its periodic reapplication effectively passive in sustained combat and end up costing about as much complexity as it adds), though, is likely to constrain any future additions or more meaningful setup available to a job to little to no net gain.

You act as though you'll always get a proc but given my experience with the Thundercloud proc, I don't particularly believe that would be a problem, especially since Regen only lasts 18 seconds (15s for Medica 2) vs Thunder lasting 30 and thus would have less opportunities to proc. There will be instances that Regen won't proc Diacloud and there will be moments that you might want to save it for movement and with a 40s duration, I don't particularly see it as stifling to the degree that you do. I don't see how having a proc somehow makes Dia any more or less complex to utilize. It's already pretty passive being a button we hit only once every 30 seconds so I don't really see any complexity involved with making it that we hit it once or twice more every so often.

I don't see SE adding any additional setup to Dia in the foreseeable future. Hell, I'd say the likelihood of them removing it before adding any additional setup is more likely given SE's history with healers, so I'd rather build it up now than await some other hypothetical situation that might never come.

[Semirhage]

I don't see SE adding any additional setup to Dia in the foreseeable future. Hell, I'd say the likelihood of them removing it before adding any additional setup is more likely given SE's history with healers, so I'd rather build it up now than await some other hypothetical situation that might never come.

Ah see I take the opposite position. Squeenix tells WHM mains to pound sand whether they ask for gruel or steak so I may as well demand they make the job actually well-designed, fun to play, and competitive because they're going to take a steaming dump all over it, delete skills, and make it weakest in role no matter what you ask for. Six years bay-bee!

[HisShadowX]

I personally love the White Mage, but I think all classes should simplify the abilities and make them upgradeable instead of having all these different abilities. Some abilities like Cure III become utterly useless.

[Silver-Strider]

Ah see I take the opposite position. Squeenix tells WHM mains to pound sand whether they ask for gruel or steak so I may as well demand they make the job actually well-designed, fun to play, and competitive because they're going to take a steaming dump all over it, delete skills, and make it weakest in role no matter what you ask for. Six years bay-bee!

And I agree with you on that. I'd much rather have Aero 3 back, add a Water/Banish attack to combo with Stone/Glare, have the Diacloud Proc and have a Single Target version of Misery all at once if I could, as well as make the entire leveling experience not feel like I'm trying to storm the beaches of Normandy. However, that's not going to happen overnight. We need to make revisions in a more controlled approach than just throwing the entire kitchen sink at SE because chances are that they'll see the Kitchen Sink and say, "if you want that, play WAR".

I don't want to give SE any reason to misconstrue what I'm asking for because "Go play Ultimates" comments got old quickly.

[HyperiusUltima]

*snip*

Sure, you can make Diacloud work this way, but I think what Shurrikhan is getting at here is the fact that WHM doesn't necessarily focus as hard on movement as BLM does. Planning out movement on a BLM in a Savage fight is HARD to many different reasons: Boss Mechanics, Forced Weaves, the works. It literally takes a lot of time for optimizing a complex job and to get your burst timings right as a DPS; but for WHM, they have a 1.5s cast time. This means that they have slivers of movement that add up over the course of multiple GCDs(which can be larger than a sliver with slidecasting). BLM was set up in a certain way where they want to plan their proc usage around boss mechanics and required movement, whereas WHM can plan their movement with the use of instants like their Lilies and Misery(with the only constraint being overhealing).

After having some time to think on the thread, I think I have an idea I'd want to propose for Strider since we're getting so focused on one aspect: Diacloud increases the next completed Glare cast's potency by 20 at a 20% rate. This would at least take the idea and focus it into the current systems that are in place; but an actual idea is connecting the dots in the kit. Our current issue is that in downtime, we literally do not have any systems in place for such(Cleric Stance used to be a button, but instead it literally made you heal for crap but boost your damage by 15%; they scrapped it after Stormblood). So, we technically have to make a new system from scratch that can be used in Downtime. I think one thing to consider is just backing up to the lore. We know WHM to basically be king of GCD Healing; and we've had oGCD healing overtake a majority of these aspects in this regard given the kits that were created in Shadowbringers and Endwalker to the point it's barely needed at all in some cases, so to bring more interest to WHM in the form of abilities that follow its lore would help a lot more than just still having Light for some reason without even going back to our roots.

Let's take SGE's Eukrasia as an example. It augments their skills to be Instants with different effects. I think that we can create a new system that involves the three elements that WHM starts with: Water, Earth, and Wind. Light only came from Shadowbringers when we traveled to the First; that should be the base of the kit at Lv 90. But, I think having this build-up alongside Misery would push WHM into a better spot being a GCD healer; yet, we'd also have to consider what effects could happen with this new system.

Something I thought up:

Add Elemental Attunement as a mechanic for Lilies. All we know right now is that Lilies are the crux of WHM's kit to lead into Misery. If we can augment those Lilies to apply additional effects instead of just healing, this means we can make some things happen. For instance, let's say we hit [insert button name here] to change Holy II into Quake which would be flat AoE Damage. This would be an AoE that can be instant and cause the next Lily in the Lily Gauge to become an Earth Lily. Earth Lilies could be used to apply a Single Target Stoneskin(10% Max HP) or a party-wide 5% Max HP Shield. For Dia, that same button can change it into Tornado, which makes the next Lily in the gauge a Wind Lily and is an AoE DoT. You can see where I'm going with this since it'd be focused on which buff came first, Earth or Wind? Wind Lilies grant self MP Regeneration, while the AoE version is a mini Assize. Lastly there's Flood, which changes from Glare(god I miss Fluid Aura) and does flat single target damage. Water Lilies would grant a HoT that's close to what M2 is in AoE, and in single target it'd be a basic regen. While this sounds like I'm getting close to Astro's toolkit, the idea behind it is different since you're actually getting an interaction every 10 GCDs instead of it being 1111111111 and then sometimes Lilies inbetween.

There is one thing I've wanted to try, but it'd be separate from Misery. Misery would still be allocated based on Normal Lilies used(since sometimes we don't have the luxury to guarantee an Elemental Attuned Lily during a fight), while I think a better Capstone(which can even put Liturgy of the Bell at 88 if need be) would be with this system granting Afflatus Resolution, which would technically be a different button than Misery that does big ST damage greater than Misery's current value so they don't have to fudge the numbers too much. While this idea is merely a pipedream(and probably not even balanced in the least) I just wanted to spitball ideas here for a minute since we're talking about interactions and trying to break up the Glare Spam with other systems that can be simpler. Generally, the CD of that button would be 30s since that's how long it takes to get a single Lily, but this is me just trying to rethink how WHM could be done to be more interactive.

[Silver-Strider]

Snip

Let's say Assize made Holy into Quake. That's on a 45s CD and is something we already use on CD. Adding a System to something we already do wouldn't really break away from our current conundrum of Glare Spam. You would need to add a new button in order to make it work and at that point, they might as well just add a full rotation if they're adding buttons anyway. That's the crux of the issue. No system can be added without constituting the necessity of more skills being added for it to function. This wasn't a problem when we had different DoT durations and more than 1 DoT to manage but with all that gone, there's only Glare spam. Based purely around the concept of Downtime, can anyone legitimately make a system that would break away from Glare spam significantly without necessitating the need for more buttons being added? The answer is no.

Diacloud proccing to make Glare stronger? I'm still spamming Glare.
Having me use Glare to Proc Holy and Dia into turning into Radiance and Tornado? Still spamming Glare.
Having Dia proc something that makes Holy into Radiance? Literally no different to the Diacloud suggestion.

The fact is, fixing downtime is reliant on adding more buttons. We need Aero 3 back. We need Water/Banish as a Combo for Stone/Glare. We need Bane, Shadowflare, Miasma1+2, etc all back to break away from the 1 button spam of healers and there is nothing we can think of that will be more impactful than having something other than our 11111 to click on.

[HyperiusUltima]

Diacloud proccing to make Glare stronger? I'm still spamming Glare.
Having me use Glare to Proc Holy and Dia into turning into Radiance and Tornado? Still spamming Glare.
Having Dia proc something that makes Holy into Radiance? Literally no different to the Diacloud suggestion.

The fact is, fixing downtime is reliant on adding more buttons. We need Aero 3 back. We need Water/Banish as a Combo for Stone/Glare. We need Bane, Shadowflare, Miasma1+2, etc all back to break away from the 1 button spam of healers and there is nothing we can think of that will be more impactful than having something other than our 11111 to click on.

While I'll agree on what you said in the first paragraph, again I was focusing on interactions that could help break up the 11111 spam even just a bit - and one of the things I think the devs are hung up on is job complexity when it comes to how many buttons a job has. I remember when they were talking about disparity before during the days of Heavensward, and wanted to close the gap; that was more or less focused on the skill ceiling for jobs in general. Now, we're in the opposite situation - the skill ceilings are too low, and it doesn't create interesting gameplay, even in Ultimate. While there is more room to add buttons on WHM, they have to do so in a meaningful way. If we add all what you suggested back, we'd be rolling back into Stormblood stigmatization with SCH overtaking damage in regards to DoTs and thus locking out WHM/SGE together. Also, just to reiterate how you don't like doing 111111, what's the point when you're then doing 12121212 with Water/Banish to Stone/Glare? You're merely substituting the same 11111 for a 1212, which still isn't engaging.

Also, once they give Healers the damage agency they need, high-end players are going to abuse it to push raids hard, thus then creating a development scenario where we would then be creating a stigmatizing environment where Healers are required to DPS to a certain extent; almost to the point you may as well roll back raids to Gordias, which I'd prefer not to given how many people struggled to even get past Living Liquid due to a near impossible DPS check.