Quote Originally Posted by ForsakenRoe View Post
Last time this was suggested, it was as 'what if WHM had this advantage over other healers' and it was shot down instantly because 'this doesn't help with damage in fully optimized speedruns, once everyone's learned the fight 110%'. Though I am guilty of similar ideas, I thought back in SHB 'what if we make Bene a role action, and give WHM something super strong to compensate' and the thing I came up with was 'res, but without weakness'. It's a very WHM thing in older games, isn't it, to be 'very good at raising dead allies'. Life, FullLife, Auto-Life, etc. Oh well, as long as SE insists on keeping it as the 'babbys first healer' I guess it's kinda inevitable we gravitate towards that kind of idea. 'Do damage' is kinda hard to come up with fresh ideas for, especially on healer, and doubly so on 'healer that isnt allowed a raidbuff because that's AST identity!'
Which is why I suggested temporarily removing ress debuff for a role action - all healers will get this skill. We have Esuna for crying out loud, and Esuna can be directly merged into Cure 1 / Physick / Diagnosis / Benefic with nothing of value lost since every job has it. Giving every healer the ability to reduce ress weakness is not a loss. It's a gain for prog and a gain for recovery. Just because it doesn't help with damage in fully optimized speedruns, doesn't mean speedruns are the only content that exists in the game and everyone plays perfectly in every piece of content. It's not a gamechanger, but it's something that can see more use than Esuna within the current system. This also isn't a ress - which highlights a key difference in its utility. Just because someone else raised someone, it doesn't mean you are unable to help alleviate some of that ress debuff. For balance sake, I would assume the debuff isn't removed, just temporarily nullified until this buff skill wears off. Additionally, to prevent overlapping of this skill by 2 healers, it can just extend the total time of the stat nullification buff.

Assuming I'm reading this right... As for WHM-specific skills and why this skill would be shot down, I think that's because you're trying to take benediction away from WHM, which has different implications to this story entirely. Benediction is one of those key identity skills (big heal regardless of stats) that WHM posses. By changing it into a role action for another action, you also reduced WHM's innate healing power and increased the healing to other healer jobs (thereby weakening WHM's healing output in relation to the other healers). If you want to add something into WHM to give it an advantage over the other healers, it would have to be an additional hotbar skill that they don't have to lose a skill for. To be honest, WHM lacks skills in general, so it's not particularly a bad thing to give it another skill.


For stuff that isn't a direct raidbuff but can serve as utility and speedruns, SE have to open the possibility for allowing mistakes that normally cannot happen as a separate skill since WHM's gimmick is all about super powerful healing ability (cause you know, support utility is meant to alter the way you handle mechanics). Dunno how well that would work when they're quite adamant on not allowing support utility on fight design though.. seeing how they nerfed SCH's expedient. :/ But here's an idea in its rudimentary state:

A skill that allows a positioning placement that can increase melee DPS if it was possible (bigger boss hitboxes are a mistake and I will probably die on this hill). SCH has mitigation and movement speed for all party members. What if WHM has uptime and increased maximum survival for one party member? We can think of something along the lines of The Heroes' Gauntlet stack markers. WHM can target a party member, summon a rock (aetheric construct) on the party member, and the rock applies something like PLD Cover to the party member. 50% of the damage the party member takes is moved to the rock (debuffs caused by regular hits and aoe like vulnerability up and damage down are fully transferred over to allow this to work), but the rock has its own HP bar (scaled by WHM stats), so it can also be used as a stack marker & healed. If the rock is still alive by the end of the skill duration, reduce this skill's cooldown by [x] seconds. You can use it to save an ally from cleaves, you can use it for single target multi-hit attacks, you can use it for tankbuster stacks, and you can use it to substitute a party member for smaller stack markers. That being said, if you use it for heavy hitting mechanics to undo a mistake, the cooldown for its next use becomes longer because the rock will definitely die before the duration expires, but it can also lead to different ways to approach the fight with a WHM over AST's card buffs because this is both uptime utility and simultaneously doubles as a big external HP bar skill but for only one ally. The mitigation is powerful, but it also isn't available as an AoE skill so its purpose is more focused.

Though that may be pushing support utility too much, but I put it out here cause we're just trying to think of any support utility for healers at all.