Differentiating healer identities

[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.