White Mage's 6.1 changes fail to address a core issue I have with the job.

[Semirhage]

the first boss mechanics, if a person get hit by the mist attack he gets a debuff that is basically a cleansable doom.

That's Dead Ends, not Alzadaal.

[RinaShinomiya]

I'd argue mechanics like these are hard to spot because their display is so freaking tiny / easy to mistake for a class specific buff. You basically have to go off of the party list, which only displays 5 buffs & debuffs at a time and even then you need to specifically look out for that tiny blue stripe that indicates that's a cleansable debuff. Why can't cleansable debuffs be displayed like above the players head so its easier to spot just like health bars are when you're not full HP? This is totally a poached suggestion from Sarixis's recent Video discussing how to improve combat encounters with the most minimalistic amount of effort but its a really good one and the devs absolutely should consider it.
Then again, Interrupt mechanic display got overhauled for Tanks and they are still MIA so even if they did it there is a high chance of Esuna continueing to gather dust.

[Chopstix]

i read the op but for the life of me i didnt grasp what the core issue was?

no reason to ever use medica 2, unless u r in a heal intensive phase such as curtain call, or u have no other means of aoe healing (which is simply not gonna happen with 20 sec lilies), keep in mind this is lvl80 up

u get 3 lilies in a minute, u really dont need to think about saving them for downtime, u have lots to burn, just dont use them under buffs

also fantastic for on demand movement, overheal is honestly whatever, might as well be an addersting cast that u get for free as far as im concerned

WHM with this change is better than it has been for a very long time, hell im finally using blood lily more than once or twice a fight, no longer will ur sweaty parsers be making the co healer do all the healing, or keeping their light parties above 1 HP lmao

[QooEr]

i fail to see why this is a "problem" at all. white mage now has something actually interesting to optimize beyond the previous "chad your cohealer as much as possible".

Lets bring up the ultimate example. Say you reaaally wanted those 3 lilies for downtime to use misery on raid buffs. You might be inclined then to say that in the last 60s of a given phase, whm basically doesnt want to use lilies, right? except... youre failing to account for the downtime itself to charge lilies too. depending on the length of the total downtime in the fight, playing like this will inevitably lead to lost lilies, which means you can then shuffle your lily usage around to fill in the gaps. its not at all like last whm where you wanted to avoid lilies at all costs, now you have an actual puzzle to solve for heal optimization.

Moreover saving misery for raid buffs only makes sense for ONE misery. wasting 3 raid buffs gcds to get a second misery in raid buffs is counter productive unless you get super lucky with a dh crit on the second misery.

As for the "overhealing" argument. overheal in this game has no punishment, and i say this as someone who likes to minimize overheal and minmax healing in encounters. The reason you avoid overheal is because its a waste of resources, and that waste of resources CAN lead to a dps loss. if you didnt need those resources, ergo no dps loss, then who cares if you overhealed? the same happens with earthly star and assize most of the time. If an encounter does so little damage that in a whole minute your lilies ended up being overheal, then youre probably doing some throwaway dungeon or trial that nobody cares about. this overheal issue is more reflective of encounter design than job design.

"oh but you might overheal if you use it for movement and then you needed that lily later on for actual damage" then you have a nice puzzle to manage and optimize your lily usage around. this is the opposite of a problem imo.

[Semirhage]

"oh but you might overheal if you use it for movement and then you needed that lily later on for actual damage" then you have a nice puzzle to manage and optimize your lily usage around. this is the opposite of a problem imo.

Lilies reward you whether you wasted a resource or used it wisely. Pancaking the idea of a skill ceiling down onto the floor. Doesn't matter if you saved a heal for the best moment or farted it out on a full HP target out of combat. In fact, it's often BETTER to do it out of combat because it makes the lily even more of a gain.

Lilies are stupid because they reward playing intelligently and playing stupidly on a near-equal basis. They do nothing to encourage skill, just brainless heal barfing gives you nearly as much of a reward as healing intelligently. But that's Square's goal: to solve the skill gap issue by making the output from useful key presses approximately as effective as rolling your face on the keyboard.

[QooEr]

Lilies reward you whether you wasted a resource or used it wisely. Pancaking the idea of a skill ceiling down onto the floor. Doesn't matter if you saved a heal for the best moment or farted it out on a full HP target out of combat. In fact, it's often BETTER to do it out of combat because it makes the lily even more of a gain.

Lilies are stupid because they reward playing intelligently and playing stupidly on a near-equal basis. They do nothing to encourage skill, just brainless heal barfing gives you nearly as much of a reward as healing intelligently. But that's Square's goal: to solve the skill gap issue by making the output from useful key presses approximately as effective as rolling your face on the keyboard.

i agree that the lily system is shallow as is, but this change did the opposite of what youre claiming for whm. rather than avoiding lilies at all costs they actually have an actual purpose now. you dont decrease the skill ceiling by adding options. you can "fart out lilies" as you put it, but if the wasted lily comes back to bite you in the butt later, then its not as brainless as you claim.

im only speaking through the lens of healing in savage and ultimate, mind you. if yoship has given up on healing in 99% of the game, so have i.

In any case, if i had it my way to "combat" the downtime issue, i would add an effect so every afflatus skill used reduced the cooldown of assize by X seconds. that would make it a bit more fun on the dps side too since assize is kind of addicting to use, and saving all your lilies for downtime can lead to lost uses of assize depending on the value of X, so that could lead to some interesting optimization puzzles.

[Grimoire-M]

i agree that the lily system is shallow as is, but this change did the opposite of what youre claiming for whm. rather than avoiding lilies at all costs they actually have an actual purpose now. you dont decrease the skill ceiling by adding options. you can "fart out lilies" as you put it, but if the wasted lily comes back to bite you in the butt later, then its not as brainless as you claim.

As someone who loves Energy Drain’s taxes, yes Lilies are as brainless as Semi claims. They removed the downside to the system that made it a trade off in the first place, leaving only the highlights of the dumb ways to optimize it.

[Silver-Strider]

keep in mind this is lvl80 up

This is one of my personal core issues with the job, and really all jobs that only have a skeleton of their rotation (some even less than that), at low levels. I firmly believe that jobs should have a solid foundation of their core skills long before level 80, or even level 60 tbph.

I understand that designing new skills and animations is a time consuming process but there is a plethora of old cut animations and skills that could be refurbished and reintroduced to several classes and jobs to not only make the leveling experience overall better but also give classes more than 10 skills by level 50 so they could realistically start learning their job more effectively.

There is no reason Solace and Rapture need to be level 52/76. They're copies of Medica and Cure 2, skills that we have since level 15/30. Same thing with Temperance, just return Divine Seal and upgrade it as 80.

You could do this with so many skills and jobs that it's staggering to see it hasn't happened yet and I will continue to advocate for reform.

[QooEr]

As someone who loves Energy Drain’s taxes, yes Lilies are as brainless as Semi claims. They removed the downside to the system that made it a trade off in the first place, leaving only the highlights of the dumb ways to optimize it.

i like energy drain too, but unlike scholar white mage doesnt have much else to help their cohealer. having a whm cohealer before 6.1 was pure misery because the healy healer that cant heal or they do even more atrocious damage is the dumbest design ive ever seen and it leads to everyone bending over backwards just so they can do decent-ish damage. i dont think lilies are perfect now by any means but its a vast improvement over whm's past sandbag design.

i think people want lilies to solve every issue with whm's design, but thats too much to solve with a single system as simple as lililes imo. if what you want is for whm to actually have any kind of depth it needs something else added to it.

[ty_taurus]

I'd argue mechanics like these are hard to spot because their display is so freaking tiny / easy to mistake for a class specific buff. You basically have to go off of the party list, which only displays 5 buffs & debuffs at a time and even then you need to specifically look out for that tiny blue stripe that indicates that's a cleansable debuff. Why can't cleansable debuffs be displayed like above the players head so its easier to spot just like health bars are when you're not full HP? This is totally a poached suggestion from Sarixis's recent Video discussing how to improve combat encounters with the most minimalistic amount of effort but its a really good one and the devs absolutely should consider it.
Then again, Interrupt mechanic display got overhauled for Tanks and they are still MIA so even if they did it there is a high chance of Esuna continueing to gather dust.

What I've been saying for years is to copy FFXII's way of displaying status effects. Look at how they're displayed over Vaan's HP in this example:

https://youtu.be/95UjHTt0XCY?t=132

Not to mention you also get the icon by the HP bar above his head. But having that blinking indicator is 1000 times more effective than a microscopic cyan bar above the tiny debuff icon lost in a sea of buff and debuff icons.