White Mage vs Scholar - Why is White Mage lacking?

[VanilleFang]

I play both but mostly stick to Sch. because of my deep SMN roots. A team of Sch and Whm is good. I'd like Whm to get more DPS spells maybe Wind 3 or Earth 3 anything like a AOE with a dot just to make Whm more fun to play.

I don't see how more DPS would "fix" WHM. WHM, if anything, really only has issues with one thing. And that's MP. More DPS would make them more fun? I find WHM plenty fun... And WHM already has a lot of DPS, why would you want to add more?

[Parawill]

One thing a lot of people tend to oversee is how the class works. Not the skills, but how the class functions as a whole. The main reason why a lot of people LOVE scholar--aside from their shields, mitigation and DPS boosts--is because of Lustrate.

Now why do I say Lustrate? Because there have been a variety of posts complaining about Lustrate vs. Benediction. But why is this the case? It's because Scholars can do more things between global cooldowns (GCD for short) than White Mages can. And because of this, it enables Scholars to throw in that beautiful clutch Lustrate onto someone while simultaneously throwing out 300 potency embraces on-top of Adlos and Physicks.

So when looking at a Scholar as a whole, they have essentially two global cooldowns and a variety of off-gcd which enable them to output more skills per second. When doing anything as a Scholar, you have three things to do per GCD rotation:

[1] GCD Skills.Aero, Cure, Stoneskin, Protect, Physick, Succor, Adloquium, Leeches, Ruin, Ruin II, Bio, Bio II, Miasma, Miasma II, Resurrection, Shadow Flare, Summon, and Summon II.

[2] Fairy Skills.Embrace, Silent Dusk, Fey Light, Fey Glow, Whispering Dawn, Fey Covenant, and Fey Illumination.

[3] Off-GCD Skills.Surecast, Swiftcast, Lustrate, Sacred Soil, Aetherflow, Virus, Cleric Stance, Eye for an Eye, Energy Drain and Bane.

Now looking at White Mage, the OP has already pointed out White Mage's strengths and weaknesses. Especially how Regen cannot be compared to an Embrace.

Regen doesn't come close to what Eos heals for on a single target.

Agreed. Embrace has a 300 potency whereas Regen has a 150 potency over a 21 second duration (1050 total potency). Up-front healing is almost always better than heal overtimes as it puts you ahead in healing when it comes to HP per second vs. Damage per second.

Let's see... What else... Oh. A Tl;dr.
When a group is well experienced in a dungeon and is only taking unavoidable raid-damage, Scholars excel because the bulk healing White Mage's have isn't needed. Therefore, the enables Scholars to rely on their second GCD cooldown set (Fairy) to heal while they can DPS and do a variety of other things.

And and and and. Regen =/= Embrace. It's sort of like that question asking you if you'd take 1000 dollars now or get 1000 dollars every 5 years for a total of 50 years ($10000)

[FranSeara]

I don't see how more DPS would "fix" WHM. WHM, if anything, really only has issues with one thing. And that's MP. More DPS would make them more fun? I find WHM plenty fun... And WHM already has a lot of DPS, why would you want to add more?

Making WHM more FUN to play could be good for a many players (I hate playing Whm.....it's boring = Scholar rocks!!) Like I said FIX the MP issues first then make them more fun to play. Adding earth 3 or Wind 3 wouldn't destory the job but make it stand out and show its a job full of great potential. They are masters of earth and wind...let them show it! ps: not putting down the job but I wanna see it shine.

[Zedd702]

-snip-

Let's see... What else... Oh. A Tl;dr.
When a group is well experienced in a dungeon and is only taking unavoidable raid-damage, Scholars excel because the bulk healing White Mage's have isn't needed. Therefore, the enables Scholars to rely on their second GCD cooldown set (Fairy) to heal while they can DPS and do a variety of other things.

And and and and. Regen =/= Embrace. It's sort of like that question asking you if you'd take 1000 dollars now or get 1000 dollars every 5 years for a total of 50 years ($10000)

What I don't get is why in the hell anyone would even compare regen to embrace in the first place... It's not a fair comparison at all, even for an argument such as this one. And yes I know that you did not compare it as your last sentence indicates you acknowledge that regen =/= embrace. What I don't agree with in your tl;dr section is this:

Scholars excel because the bulk healing White Mage's have isn't needed. Therefore, the enables Scholars to rely on their second GCD cooldown set (Fairy) to heal while they can DPS and do a variety of other things.

Have you met ANY of the primals? Have you met Scyalla, Xande, Twintania, or even done any of the HM dungeons? And that's just the early content that requires "bulk" (assuming you meant group/AoE) healing.

Seriously AoE healing is needed and scholar's do not possess many tools at all to cover this arena. They cannot sit on a team in a HM dungeon with fairy on auto heal, while they just DPS, sure if they are bad SCH's and let teammates die occasionally during rare instances when tanks lose hate or more frequently when bosses do damage to the entire party.

Scholar and WHM's both have pros and cons. The ONLY thing WHM lacks is a better MP recovery skill. The only thing they should buff is SoS in one of two ways (either slash the recharge time of the skill by half or increase the amount of MP restored). Other than that WHM is just fine as is...

[Kelya]

The ONLY thing WHM lacks is a better MP recovery skill. The only thing they should buff is SoS in one of two ways (either slash the recharge time of the skill by half or increase the amount of MP restored). Other than that WHM is just fine as is...

I would even say WHM is already perfect and does not require any better MP recovery skill Still can't figure out where so many ppl find that WHM have issues with MP ? Actually WHM job is to manage MP, this is different, this is one of the core of the job, not an issue or a lack or whatever x)

[Able]

I think SCH and WHM are almost perfectly balanced. They complement each other so well and they have clearly defined roles.

[Zedd702]

I would even say WHM is already perfect and does not require any better MP recovery skill Still can't figure out where so many ppl find that WHM have issues with MP ? Actually WHM job is to manage MP, this is different, this is one of the core of the job, not an issue or a lack or whatever x)

Erm I disagree that it's their job per se... That's more of a SCH/SMN responsibility as they have skills to do so IMO... Should the player be aware of their MP playing WHM? Sure. Also don't misunderstand me. Although I said they "should" buff SoS. What I meant to say was if anything the only thing that should be changed is a buff to SoS.

If you have a team that has two WHM and the WHM's are required to rez several times as we know end-game and content can be very demanding on healers. Those rez's can hinder you significantly and in some cases , Titan EX comes to mind, once someone dies they become more difficult to keep alive and sometimes even tumults or other mechanics will kill the party member in question. Yes some of that can be blamed on gear or bad timing of rez's and a plethora of other things.

It's one thing if the WHM is just spamming AoE heals, throwing away their MP, but it's another is they are doing all the can and know what is required in certain phases/mechanics that require DPS checks, mishaps, etc.

I think SCH and WHM are almost perfectly balanced. They complement each other so well and they have clearly defined roles.

Agreed.

[Kelya]

Yeah with double WHM it will be complicated to surpass many raises but in one hand if you do your job correctly, you will have enough MP saved for these raises (+ the MP potions + the mage ballad + the SMN if there is one), in the other hand, if there are so much raises to do, the whole team need to improve, it's not really the MP pool of the WHM that is going to slow the progression, but sure it doesn't help if you want to "help the more you can to go further in the battle".

Then you can go Piety build like a lot of WHM... and you have no more reasons to worry about that (5K + MP is huge and the gameplay is totally different from having 4K, the tolerance of error increases a lot).

Remember that assuming you have better MP recovery to "panick raise often/party failing" that would also mean you would have this MP recovery bonus in all the others situations where you don't need to raise. You would have it available all the time, meaning you could use it for another thing than raising, and thus, you would have easier moments to do your job when things are already going good (i.e not raising a lot), reducing the difficulty of the job for 0 reason in this case (similar effects than having Piety build).

So I understand the desire to help the team the maximum with your job when you are progressing in the content, or in a pick up team or others situations. But these are only some situations from the rest of all the situations. Going Piety build you almost resolve this problem about raises but the advantage is you let the choice to the gamer because YOU choose to max your Piety stat and you are not imposing it to all the WHM in the world, so this improvment in MP recovery is still very uneeded overall.

[Zedd702]

Yeah with double WHM it will be complicated to surpass many raises but in one hand if you do your job correctly, you will have enough MP saved for these raises (+ the MP potions + the mage ballad + the SMN if there is one), in the other hand, if there are so much raises to do, the whole team need to improve, it's not really the MP pool of the WHM that is going to slow the progression, but sure it doesn't help if you want to "help the more you can to go further in the battle".

I never depend on mage ballad at all. There are alot of terrible BRD's out there that don't know how to or even when to apply their skills. They just (narrow-mindlessly) focus on DPS (as most do, while ignoring everything else). I'm speaking of just core mechanics of WHM. I have often times been on teams where there was no SMN or BRD or teams that where did have a SMN or BRD, but they never really used anything outside their normal DPS rotation, unless one of the WHM's died.

Then you can go Piety build like a lot of WHM... and you have no more reasons to worry about that (5K + MP is huge and the gameplay is totally different from having 4K, the tolerance of error increases a lot).

Lol. I don't do piety builds on WHM as it's a waste IMO. I'd rather the MIND get the points than the negligible points from piety as that really does not help MP THAT much imho. I feel that you think i am complaining or whining about this and I want to take a moment to reiterate that I am not. In fact, I don't have many issues with WHM at all unless the team is not informed of the encounter and I am left mindlessly spending MP healing through avoidable AoE's that people don't move out of etc. I was just stating that If that devs DID decide to do anything to WHM that the only thing that they should change/buff is SoS (outside of any future spells they'll get from lvl cap increase). I like WHM as it is, but that change would help the job more. That's all I was saying.

Remember that assuming you have better MP recovery to "panick raise often/party failing" that would also mean you would have this MP recovery bonus in all the others situations where you don't need to raise. You would have it available all the time, meaning you could use it for another thing than raising, and thus, you would have easier moments to do your job when things are already going good (i.e not raising a lot), reducing the difficulty of the job for 0 reason in this case (similar effects than having Piety build).

So I understand the desire to help the team the maximum with your job when you are progressing in the content, or in a pick up team or others situations. But these are only some situations from the rest of all the situations. Going Piety build you almost resolve this problem about raises but the advantage is you let the choice to the gamer because YOU choose to max your Piety stat and you are not imposing it to all the WHM in the world, so this improvment in MP recovery is still very uneeded overall.

This is irrelevant as you misunderstood my position completely...

[Kelya]

Then it's a player problem (the bard/smn that isn't helping when needed) and that's all ? I know how meeting bad players / bad situations in the fight is as a healer, but this is part of the game itself, in the end that doesn't require some help, as little as it would be, because the help is permanent once you give it and it changes the job a lot even if it seems minor. You already have the over gear + echo buff to do this to help when things go wrong and team is chaotic, but again, when it's not, when you're raiding with a WHM/SCH (it's mostly that in raid normally) and static/known team, you never want that little extra help and if you want (only raison then is for progression) then you can add some piety to be comfortable enough. And when it's time to fail, then it's time to fail and do better. But here this is only my opinion, otherwise you can ignore this paragraph and read the following.

I was talking about Piety build for all those do it because actually there are a lot and I heard a lot about it but I never said you had troubles with your MP and the goods WHM are for me, those who can do any fight without a lot of MP, sorry if it wasn't clear but I will never stand for stacking piety ^^ I was just giving another solution to the "MP recovery bonus" since in this way, those who feel the need can have it, and those who don't, stay like that. This is the important point, I don't really want to say "yes/no we need some MP recovery" but I'm saying that if the answer is "yes", if that happens, then that should happen with the Piety build in order to let the player choose. It's like the echo : you can choose to turn it off, if it wasn't possible, honeslty a lot of ppl (I hope!) would be very angry about that.