Differentiating healer identities

[KarmaYraeon]

I've never quite understood where the "high raw potency healing" image for WHM comes from:

- Lustrate and Druochole aren't that far below Afflatus Solace, Cure II, and Tetragrammaton.
- Indomitability and Ixochole are the same potency as Afflatus Rapture and Medica.
- Adloquium, Succor, Eukrasian Diagnosis, and Eukrasian Prognosis actually come out ahead of Cure II and Medica if you include the shields.

Or from a different angle, any combination of healers has to be able to deal with "oops, everyone's at 1% HP" mechanics in Duty Finder, so WHM's allegedly high potency heals don't set it apart in the exact scenario where high potency heals ought to mean something, because the party can't rely on having a WHM in the first place.

I wish WHM were the healer counterpart of BLM, but for me, WHM simply lacks in everything that actually makes playing BLM interesting and fun.

It isn't so much that white mage has high raw healing potency, and moreso that it feels like white mage could and probably should lean more into that style of play. A more straight forward healer that is at least neutral in terms of doing its gcd healing, perhaps beyond just the lilies feeding into afflatus misery. The idea of it playing as a mirror to black mage where it swaps between a heal-focused phase and a damage-focused phase that feed into eachother is kind of a stretch, but something along the lines of healing being at least net neutral for more than just 3 lilies would be nice. Like lilies taking 30 seconds to generate instead of 20, but then casting non-healing gcds reduce the time left to your next lily. Maybe using non-lily gcds improve the potency of following damage spells and vise versa along a similar vein as astral fire and umbral ice stacks.

The idea is general that it would be nice for the class to feed more into that long cast, high power fantasy as a healer, not necessarily that it currently sits there. Sage and scholar tend to focus more on mitigating damage than really healing it, and astro focused on its ogcd healing, so if only by that metic, it feels like white mage should be able to more reliably and better use gcd healing and benefit from it, rather than just spend a few lilies and get a net neutral out of it every now and then.

[AmiableApkallu]

It isn't so much that white mage has high raw healing potency, and moreso that it feels like white mage could and probably should lean more into that style of play.

Okay, fair enough, but I'm still left wondering what niche that style of play actually fills. For White Mage to not be required in any content, content cannot deal out so much damage as to make high raw healing potency required. Which means the only way to make that potency uniquely useful is for the players to repeatedly take avoidable damage and/or tank the floor. Is that interesting? Can that be made interesting? (I don't have the answer.)

I could see White Mage leaning into a GCD-based, cast-times style of play, though. I mean, it already does. It's just not satisfying when the healing kit is so heavily biased towards "restore HP" and the DPS kit is… well, what I've been doing since I was a Lv.1 CNJ .

[KarmaYraeon]

Okay, fair enough, but I'm still left wondering what niche that style of play actually fills. For White Mage to not be required in any content, content cannot deal out so much damage as to make high raw healing potency required. Which means the only way to make that potency uniquely useful is for the players to repeatedly take avoidable damage and/or tank the floor. Is that interesting? Can that be made interesting? (I don't have the answer.)

I could see White Mage leaning into a GCD-based, cast-times style of play, though. I mean, it already does. It's just not satisfying when the healing kit is so heavily biased towards "restore HP" and the DPS kit is… well, what I've been doing since I was a Lv.1 CNJ .

Comparing to other healers, white mage focuses more on its gcd healing than the others. Looking at ast for instance, it has really solid ogcd healing, but its buttons usually require some kind of delay, planning, and/or a substantial cooldown. Looking at what sage could be, its healing would go hand in hand with its damage, rather than relying on it. And unlike scholar who is all about manipulating shields and health pools to preemptively inhibit damage, white mage would cover the grounds of being a solid option for clean up after the fact.

The idea is that white mage would perhaps play in opposing fashion to the other healers. Its niche would be consistency, not just raw power. Where astro can use earthly star or macrocosmos to cover sizeable healing, they each can only really be used once in a pull, and a handful of times in longer duration content like savage fights. Where sage can spot heal pretty well or reduce damage taken, white mage can better clean up a mess in a fight without having to lose out on its DPS to do so.

White mage, generally seen as the simpler, approachable healer for prog and newer healers, it would have a strong, reliable skillset focused on using its GCDs to cover healing. Its raw healing power would mean that using its GCDs would be more benefitial than the other healers using theirs. Exactly how or why can really be what sets WHM apart though, and I don't have a singular solid answer or idea. Looking at it as a mirror to blackmage, it could be that healing empowers its damage, and vice versa - bouncing between phases of healing and damage-dealing, where healing empowers follow up damage spells, and dealing damage empowers follow-up gcd healing. Alternatively, you could go the perhaps simpler route of making its pure healing and damage GCDs like cure 2, medica/2, glare and holy simply have a higher potency than what other healers bring to the table, but with a longer cast time. A single gcd on whm would be more substantial than what the other healers provide, giving it the same low skill floor it currently has as a new healer-friendly job, while also giving it the blackmage treatment of having a high skill ceiling, due to the nature of needing to know what to cast and when to maximize uptime during fights that might require more movement or mechanical know-how.

[KarmaYraeon]

Looking at it as a black mage equivalent, I imagine that in execution, it would be designed in such a way that healing leads to empowered damage so that it is almost always at least net neutral dps regardless of exactly what GCD the white mage is casting, meaning that it is a far more consistent and reliable gcd healer than the others when it comes to responding to damage taken. Healbotting would mean you aren't getting damage out, thus nothing is being empowered and so that still sucks, but for someone using both damage and healing, it wouldn't feel as bad to stop dealing damage to get any gcd healing out to cover any damage or simply as a safety net of sorts. As such, you can play safer by using your healing gcds more, without the concern of losing out on damage overall through a fight. The other healers would probably have ways to have a higher overall rDPS, or in sage's case higher personal dps given the idea of relying on that damage to heal, but the idea is that in terms of raw, personal damage and healing, white mage would sit on top. At least above ast and sch, in terms of personal dps and pure gcd healing.

[ForsakenRoe]

it could be that healing empowers its damage, and vice versa - bouncing between phases of healing and damage-dealing, where healing empowers follow up damage spells, and dealing damage empowers follow-up gcd healing.

cough cough

Alternatively, you could go the perhaps simpler route of making its pure healing and damage GCDs like cure 2, medica/2, glare and holy simply have a higher potency than what other healers bring to the table, but with a longer cast time. A single gcd on whm would be more substantial than what the other healers provide, giving it the same low skill floor it currently has as a new healer-friendly job, while also giving it the blackmage treatment of having a high skill ceiling, due to the nature of needing to know what to cast and when to maximize uptime during fights that might require more movement or mechanical know-how.

I'd be hesitant to add more healing with longer cast times. Not cos of 'more healing' that's whatever to me, the 'longer cast times' would make it harder to react to 'oops something gone wrong' fast enough. Lilies aren't there 100% of the time, and there's been several times where I've expected a certain amount of mit on a raidwide in P8S, it's not there, I try to Medica2 in time to start countering the bleed, and it just doesn't cast fast enough. On the DPS side of things, I sem to recall a lot of people wanted AST's 1.5s casts on all the healers so they could move, with a select few people wanting to keep the WHM cast times long, so that lilies were an interesting optimization tool. I don't think SE's gonna U-Turn on that decision any time soon, and personally I wouldn't want them to, moving for stuff as a WHM in SHB felt super janky because of those 2.5s casts. I guess the other half of the issue is, what's the point in 'more healing strength compared to other healers' when it's by design that the other healers have 'enough to clear the content'? They tried this in SB, saying WHM was the 'Pure Healer' and it was 'pure dogpoo', because AST had enough healing to clear stuff and also brought hella strong raidbuffs with The Balance.

[KarmaYraeon]

They tried this in SB, saying WHM was the 'Pure Healer' and it was 'pure dogpoo', because AST had enough healing to clear stuff and also brought hella strong raidbuffs with The Balance.

Understandable on the note of longer cast times making immediate healing more difficult, but I imagine that, similar to black mage, white mage would then get other tools to help compensate for the fact. While not exactly giving them triple cast, it might be interesting if they had other tools to give them moments of speedier casting. If not a new button entirely, they could for instance give Thin Air 3 charges rather than two, make it reduce the MP cost of its next spell by 50% rather than 100%, and make it cast instantly like swift cast, for in the moment instant casting to compensate for the fact they would otherwise have to spend more time casting. I also feel that white mage, along with astro and scholar, should get some kind of mobility tool like sage's Icarus to be honest.

As far as the comparison between ast and whm go, I think the same can really be said about any healer really. They all need baseline healing enough to get through the content, and ast's strength came/comes from the efficacy of its healing. I mentioned before, but the idea is that where ast has powerful ogcd healing on cooldowns, whm would rely on their GCD healing, without falling behind in terms of damage. The idea isn't that whm would have more healing than the other healers, but instead that the gcd healing it provides is potent without forcing it to lose out on also dealing damage. In terms of late content like savage or ultimate, ast will always have an advantage over whm due to its cards and divination. Simply the fact that it provides bonus damage will always give it a place over the other healers, which is why I mentioned making something like that feel more impactful and a bigger part of its identity rather than just a tacked on gimmick to keep it busy. By comparison, whm would be extremely self-reliant. Its personal dps would be much higher, and the consistency of that damage far more reliable. Same with its healing. Other healers might have the potential to do more, but none of them would have the same safety and consistency of a whm. In the case of savage or what-not, it would mean a whm can cover a lot more of the required healing without forcing it to lose out on dps, making not only their job more reliable and keep it ahead in terms of personal dps, but also help the co-healer focus more on whatever its niche or identity is.