Quote Originally Posted by Semirhage View Post
"Bringing WHM up" in Stormblood's paradigm is waaaay more than potencies. The other two could mitigate in several different ways. And had a bunch of free burst heals and regens. And party damage buffs. AOE Esuna. MP refresh. Excellent personal damage. WHM was missing entire categories of personal capability that the other two had in spades, plus they could handily cover the vanilla blandness that WHM brought to the table.
Remember, the idea isn't 'revert to 4.0 wholesale', it's 'take inspiration from design of 4.0 re: rotations, while keeping the improvements on QOL/useability that 5/6.0 brought, ie Lilies, Divination being a predictable raidbuff (better for balancing/less damage swing), etc'. Going back to 4.0 wholesale would mean, for example, removing Art of War (to mirror Miasma 2) and Energy Drain, and nobody wants to have that happen again. I'm going to assume SE would leave AST as the current 'Diurnal only' now that we have SGE, even if I got my way and had 4.0 style design come back for the 'HW three'. As such, to address each of the things that made SCH/AST OP and WHM 'not good and also very bad in SB':

Mit: Either add Protect as a 60s CD that mirrors CU on AST (upgrading to PI at later levels to save hotbar space), or drop Temperance to a 1min CD, shortening it's duration a little (to 15s) if needed.

Free burst healing/regens: Lilies being reworked addresses this somewhat. AST gets an average of 600p of healing every 20s via rotating it's current OGCDs (CO/CU/Star). WHM gets 400 per 20s, with it going to 600 with PI. We have to remember, SB's version of PI was not good either, and has since been made more useable. It also has Asylum for 900p total. Lilybell is the big thing that can be looked at IMO. A 3min CD that gives 1000p for instant detonation, up to 2000p if all 5 stacks are popped 'properly' as it were. But it's direct competitor is Macrocosmos, capable of deleting certain mechanics (though I imagine they're going to be very wary of how they design hp-to-1 style mechs going forward because of it). I think if they change Lilybell to be a 120s CD with 4 stacks, or a 90s with 3 stacks (and delete the penalty for early detonation), the skill would feel so much better to use. Macro remains with the niche of 'it can delete mechanics sometimes' and Lilybell gains a niche of 'it's up twice as often'. You'd be able to rotate, every 45s, between Asylum and a 3stack Lilybell, for 2100 potency per 90s before even touching Lilies. Lilybell would also have a seperate 'niche' of sorts, of the versatility of choosing how to do it's healing. You can pop it upfront for burst, you can leave it to get even distribution of pulses (ie for a DOT). Macro doesn't have that, you choose when it gives you the burst of healing, but you can't split that burst up into smaller amounts, meaning less agency in the healing it provides

Party damage buffs: WHM got a solid showing in SHB when it's personal damage was so strong that it was not only outstripping party buffs, but also some of the tanks, this is again a numbers thing. I don't think giving WHM a raidbuff changes anything in either direction. SAM exists fine and has no raidbuff, yeh it drops from it's top spot as everyone gets gear sometimes, and other times not. BLM is the same, often hanging around in the top 3 without having a raidbuff. Just requires SE to be good at tuning numbers which.. yeh, could be an issue I guess. Definitely not possible with 4.0 AST (as it was then), but with something like what I've put in that other thread (ST cards with roughly equal contribution to damage, Divination as the raidwide buff, thereby making it's damage output 'predictable' from a balance perspective), it should be possible to balance WHM against it a lot easier compared to the insanely swing-y damage of a 4.0 AST

AOE Esuna: Doesn't exist anymore, but if it were to come back I'd imagine it'd be on WHM if anyone (as a lily spender), since SCH has Expedient now as a 'cool weird utility thing'. If AOE Esuna came back on SCH, I dunno what I'd do for WHM. The first thing that comes to mind is a Raise skill that has a long CD (like, 5+ min), but raises the target with no weakness (or if they have weakness, doesn't turn it into brink of death). People would complain that 'my utility only good for prog' but I could say the same about something like Neutral Sect, you don't actually 'want' to use it because it only works on GCD heals

MP refresh: Addressed with Thin Air and the damage-neutral-Misery change, we now save 1600MP per min due to prep/firing a Misery. Every time they reduce Assize's CD it helps a little too. SB WHM's MP economy was not great, and HW was even worse, but now it's been helped a lot. If needs be, we can have a trait added somewhere that says that Thin Air affects the next 3 spells instead of one. If they added my ideas we'd be getting +500 each time we casted the big AOE heal I made too (the one that grants you a Quake/Tornado/Flood cast) but hey, a quick-and-dirty fix can be to just increase Assize's restore amount

Excellent personal damage: Personal-damage wise WHM is on the right track in relation to AST and SCH, its higher than them (in personal damage) which, since it has no raidbuff, is where it should be. But this is once again a case of 'can SE balance a non-raidbuff class versus one that has raidbuffs', and it's doubly precarious because AST is so heavy into raidbuffing in terms of it's identity, it's like comparing DNC and MCH. SHB shows they're capable, whether intentional or by fluke, of making WHM be competitive even without having it's own raidbuff

If you were to ask me 'do you believe its possible to have SB style design, and for the healers to be well balanced against each other?' I'd say 'yes it is absolutely possible'. If you asked 'do you believe it's possible for SE to achieve this', I'd hesitate before answering, and I'm not sure which way I'd answer it. I want to believe that if they put their mind to it and decided 'this is the way we are going with healers', they'd get the numbers right. The problem is that they don't want to go that way designwise, else they'd never have done the SHB changes in the first place

6.2k characters i done did a Ren