White Mage Attraction

[Semirhage]

In the parlance of the game, /doubt. The "community's" favored formulas say otherwise.

This is also an issue of intra-role imbalance. You can have tradeoffs, or no tradeoffs. Why do AST and SGE just have a crapload of completely free heals that cost them zero DPS? In a game where the DPS race is the point of basically every encounter, your potential DPS is a huge boon. Why bring a SnoozeMage with few oGCDs and a bunch of lossy GCD heals when you have another option that can heal for free and lose no DPS? Would you like a $5 piece of cake, or a $0 piece of cake?

Yeah I know the way this discussion normally ends is "lol bro who cares it's just five bucks it doesn't matter in the end why do you care so much" Because proportionally, 5 is infinitely more than zero.

One of the big things that has kept WHM an unattractive pick from a numbers standpoint is that, for the longest time, Square decided that WHM's "niche" was healing throughput. This might be a workable identity. In a different game. Because Square Enix has also made it abundantly clear: they want all party comps to be viable, and by viable, they mean comfortably so- not clearing by the skin of your teeth at the absolute skill ceiling, but clearable in a midcore, relatively chill party. One of the knock-on effects from this design consideration is that healers must all have healing throughput that comfortably clears everything. So if everyone has a massive amount of healing throughput as a baseline, what's the point of having -even more-? Making a class that's easier for someone really bad at healing to clear something I guess? It's not an advantage that makes WHM attractive to a skilled player. It's a safety net that makes them less attractive the more skilled you get.