Differentiating healer identities

[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.