White Mage Attraction

[AnotherPerson]

The moment you add any sort of multi-button DPS rotation to a GCD-based healer like WHM, someone's going to point out that those GCD heals are a DPS loss (à la the old lilies) or find a way to turn GCDs spent over-healing into a DPS gain (because of how damage is "refunded"). It's a balancing act the current WHM avoids because of Glare-Glare-Glare-….

The story could play out differently if healers received DPS credit for healing and mitigating [1] [2], but that's non-trivial to work out.

WHM already do that. They throw away excess lilies right before raid buffs to get Afflatus Misery under the buff window. Because Afflatus Misery is worth 4 Glares, you essentially get 3 more Glares worth in a buff window at the cost to your DPS. It's not much, but the alternative is "overcap your lilies, spend extra MP on Glare for the same value of the GCD".

I'm quite sure what people meant is that GCD healing is a DPS loss in the sense that WHM has to use Medica II more than other jobs due to a lack of free healing abilities compared to other jobs due to the inherent nature of being a GCD-oriented job.

And that's another big thing - people are all so focused on DPS because healer DPS is the only metric that matters anymore. That's because we have so much healing power so "powerful healing" that isn't used is thrown away and traded for something else when people want to improve and figure out how else to maximize their toolkit. It's another way to say "my versatility literally comprises of throwing my healing away for more DPS or overheal".

In other words, it's not very versatile at all. It sucks. There's literally no versatility to White Mage outside of "heal more" when damage doesn't require it, nor is damage consistently high enough to constantly require GCD healing.

We don't have movement speed buffs, we don't have LB charging buffs, we don't have skill slow buffs, we don't have CC.
You know what WHM has that actually been a niche ability? Presence of Mind - literally speeds up your GCD casts. Wow, something different and synergizes well with White Mage's GCD-gameplay! Why is it not used for GCD Healing? That's because we have so much healing that it will rarely ever be used for GCD healing. That's why it becomes Glare x300, but we already press Glare for most of the fight because we have so much healing power in regards to the content's overall damage. Nothing changes except Presence of Mind becomes a DPS skill on cooldown. No versatility.

Just pause for a moment to think - if damage was actually high enough where Presence of Mind actually was an ability we use to determine whether we should save the ability for a very fast damage-heavy duration of a fight, then it would be different.
The reality is that, the skill doesn't work like that. The gameplay doesn't work like that.
This is why healer gameplay sucks. There is no real thought to damage - so healing in the game is very uninspiring.

[vetch]

You know what WHM has that actually been a niche ability? Presence of Mind - literally speeds up your GCD casts. Wow, something different and synergizes well with White Mage's GCD-gameplay! Why is it not used for GCD Healing? That's because we have so much healing that it will rarely ever be used for GCD healing. That's why it becomes Glare x300, but we already press Glare for most of the fight because we have so much healing power in regards to the content's overall damage. Nothing changes except Presence of Mind becomes a DPS skill on cooldown. No versatility.

Just pause for a moment to think - if damage was actually high enough where Presence of Mind actually was an ability we use to determine whether we should save the ability for a very fast damage-heavy duration of a fight, then it would be different.
The reality is that, the skill doesn't work like that. The gameplay doesn't work like that.
This is why healer gameplay sucks. There is no real thought to damage - so healing in the game is very uninspiring.

You can actually use PoM for healing if you roulette into Stone Vigil, where you have Cure 2 but not Holy, with a tank that pulls wall-to-wall. It's exciting! And versatile! For 0.5% of content.