Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

1: Everything about the Lilies is bad. They're random, they're slow to get, they're weak to use, they're uncontrollable. It needs a rethink.

2: Secret of the Lilies 2 is garbage. It's also random and slow to get and weak. Erase it. THAT should be when we get confessions, and confessions should DO something for the player they're on. Also they shouldn't be off of the same lame casts at the same low percentage as lilies.

3: Plenary Indulgence shouldn't consume confessions, instead it should extend their duration by a small amount. Otherwise, there's no way that confessions could be balanced in having an effect, and thus couldn't be fleshed out into being something actually interesting instead of a weird buff we have to watch for.

4: Give us back Divine Seal. It's ours. Other people can have Largesse, but Divine Seal has been the "yeah but WHM heals a lot" button since the beginning.

5: Honestly take a look at what you've done to Ast. The power that class has on the build we saw is obscene. It outclasses all others in the roles they were supposed to excel in, while still having the greatest buffing power.

Adding in my two cents, which have possibly been said by others as well. I won't focus on cross-role, as those are for every job and I think others have explained it as well as or better than I would have. I'll also try to focus more on the mechanics of it rather than numbers.

1. The lilies (as shown) main effect is to reduce the cooldown of certain abilities, with a maximum effect of 20% reduction . Most cooldowns aren't used as soon as they're available on healer - you save them for when you actually need the healing. This effectively negates any effect the lilies actually have.

2. The fact that Tetragrammaton, Assize, Divine Benison, and Asylum all remove all lilies makes our own skills compete with each other in the worst way.
For example, let's say I'm trying to spam Assize as often as possible. In order to still use my other abilities but not interfere with the cooldown reduction for Assize, I'd have to use ALL my cooldowns in rapid succession to prevent them from removing a precious lily for Assize in the next 60 seconds or so.

3. As a caveat to #2, using your abilities when you need them instead of spamming them all means they might only get 1, or maaaybe two, lilies each (being very optimistic here at media tour RNG rates). Due to scaling, you won't even notice the effect this has (as opposed to noticing you're holding the skill for 12 more seconds before use); this means that actually using your skills wisely means you get no benefit from the new system.

4. Divine Benison just feels like a really big nerf to Stoneskin. We used to have 18% shield to put on a friendly target whenever we wanted. Then it had a potency cut. Now it's halfway back to where it was under a new name (and free of mp cost) but we have to have a lily and we can only do it once every 60 seconds. It also does not scale with lilies, but removes them all. Considering the hurdles needed to cast it, the detriment it is to my other skills if I'm saving lilies, and the fact that the tanks can shield HP for other party members more reliably, I probably won't even put this skill on my hotbar.

5. On a positive note, Thin Air is amazing and we love you for it already. TY TY TY

6. Plenary Indulgence seems like a huge let-down as it was shown from the media tour. The main reason I think it fails as a useful skill is because it requires us to have ALREADY done the healing with Cure I and II. There just aren't too many scenarios when I can make use of randomly stacking confession on someone and healing them again with Plenary Indulgence in a 30-second timeframe. If the confession stacks were on the white mage instead of party members, there was another way besides Cure I and II to generate stacks, and/or the stacks lasted longer than 30 seconds, then it could be very useful. Heck, one amazing change would be to have the skill activate a 10-yalm aoe heal around those with confession stacks. But in its demonstrated iteration? Simply a more active Regen that I have to click every 15 seconds.

7. Having all the new changes lumped into Cure I and II also makes our own skills compete with each other:
---I can spam Cure I and II for minimal benefit, ooooor I can use my other skills in an effective, mp-efficient manner while ignoring the new system entirely.
---I can spam Cure I and II for minimal benefit, ooooor I can use some damage dealing skills to offset my lack of party DPS utility...while ignoring the new system entirely....and simultaneously not building confession stacks.
---I can spam Cure I and II hoping for a crit to give me some cooldown reduction from the new trait....or I can realize this happens so infrequently it doesn't have a tangible effect on my own throughput.
(I do recognize that spamming single target Cures is necessary sometimes, but it's definitely NOT the majority of my time in combat)

I completely understand some of the RNG numbers if everything is balanced around end-game raid content that requires cure spam in some cases....but for most content you've delivered so far it's just not needed. Having such low RNG percentages (or any RNG tied to our skills, really) in casual content is going to mean the majority of the playerbase won't really get to use the new skills or lily system that often. Add that to the fact that our base tooklit was stripped pretty heavily, and it feels like we're left with a much weaker version of our 3.0 selves.

Originally Posted by javid

That isn't at all true....

Yes it is. Cure I/Cure II is the lowest priority heal you have. It's the last resort heal for WHM. You use literally every other skill (besides Cure III lol) in your arsenal before you resort to using Cure I/Cure II to heal. It doesn't mean you don't end up using it a lot to heal in raids.

You don't have to totally rehaul it, SE, just change what you added to make it better:


The issue is the RNG. All the other Jobs have a lot of control over their new systems, whereas the Lily procs being a 20% chance on spells that are not even our bread and butter really pigeon holes us. If the gimmick is going to be the use of Lilies to reduce the CD's of your heal bombs and the use of Confession + Plenary Indulgence (which is begging to be spammed with a 15s recast, and no MP cost), then there should be a more reliable method of obtaining these resources. This is made a doubly poor decision by the fact that Confession stacks, which decide the worth of our new max skill, fall off after 30 seconds.

Issues:

-A 20% chance to grant confession on Cure I/II should be a supplement. Cure I/II should be the only things that grant us the 20% chance on crit to reduce the CD of Assize and Asylum (this I like don't change it). They should not be the soul source of BOTH important new resources.
-Confession does NOTHING but fall off if unused, and the chances of it being stacked in the first place are abysmal.
-Regens and Insta-Casts are a WHM's main tools - NOT basic heals - yet with the exception of shortened recast timers they remain completely unchanged and offer us nothing in the new system. They're affected by it, but don't contribute to it.

Solutions:

Stacks of Confession should be permanent until used.
OR
They should grant some sort of benefit in the event they fall off (a small heal, a debuff removal/resistance, or a Lilly to the WHM), though the former seems more reasonable given the structure they seem to have set up with the kit.

I wouldn't put the persistence of the stacks of confession up for debate. They should have no timer. Period.

SYNERGIZE OUR KIT PLEASE
-Everything that uses a Lily; Assize, Tetragrammaton and Divine Benison should GUARANTEE a stack of Confession on anyone they hit. Maybe also a maximum of 1 stack granted in Asylum. You might be able to balance this by only granting 100% chance of Confession if a Lily is used.
-Plenary Indulgence should have a longer CD, and should GUARANTEE a Lily.
-Benediction should GUARANTEE a Lily. You've already heard the rage about Bene not hitting the intended target and being wasted. A Lily would not only be a reasonable reward for doing your job successfully, but it would soften the blow for wifs.

OR

-Cure III, both Medicas, and Regens should also have a chance to stack Lilies and Confession, though maybe at a reduced rate (10%, 5%, 1% respectively) without the crit requirement.
-Thin Air should have the added effect of giving you 3 Lilies instantly. We'll have access to Lucid Dreaming anyway, so we won't lose out on the benefit of 0 MP cost if we use Thin Air for Lily generation.

OR

-Dealing ANY critical hit should have a chance of granting a Lily. Any crit heal or crit damage.
-Any crit heal should stack Confession, to include critical region tics and group crits within AOE heals.

Reasoning:

The idea seems to have been built around reducing the CDs for your heal bombs so that you can burst out the most heals of any healer, in exchange for having only one native raid utility (sort of): Devine Benison's shield. The issue is that you have to cast (statistically speaking) 5 Cures to reliably get 4%, 10 for 10% and, 15 for 20% CD reduction to be used on ONE ability. If this is the foundation of our new setup, we need better chances than that.

The stakes are the same when depending on the generation of stacks of Confession, which have only one purpose: An instant, free group heal on a 15s CD. It seems like the Plenary Indulgence was meant to heal the party/raid, but the Tank is clearly going to see the lion's share of it's use, and using it like a professional healer sound's impossible. What I see happening is the healer spamming Plenary Indulgence every 15 seconds just in case someone somewhere has a stack of Confession that's just about to run out.

WHM's changes are different from the other Job's changes in that the WHM has EXCEEDINGLY little control over the new mechanics around which the Job will now revolve. My suggestions put the power of the new system into the hands of the player AND encourage them to put their new abilities to use strategically. Stacking Confession on the party as a contingency for a burst heal, and being rewarded for it with the keys to it's new mechanic; the Lilies. This could make WHM the Healz version of BLM: building and burning it's resources for a constant stream of perfect health, or burst heals that can hold a candle to the raid utility of the other healers.

We don't mind being "Pure Healers." It's WHM after all. But if you're going to do that, you need to make it as easy for us to blast out INSANE HEALS as it is for others to buff and shield the party.

In summation: Either give us control over the generation of our new resources, or make them MUCH more abundant.
And again: MAKE CONFESSIONS PERMANENT.

Originally Posted by AlphaSonic

Buff it for 4.0 and then Rehaul it. The lillies mechanic feels that it was slapped in the last second and doesn't feel cohesive with the job at all.

"Self defeating" is probably the best way I've heard it described. In order to try to optimize with lilies, you have to ignore substantial and very good portions of your kit and so play unoptimally....