Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

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 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.

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....

You haven't solved the problem that the bonus the lilies gives is still bad. AST Spear is better in every possible way since it's actually the worse card that you can get and you can reroll it for a more useful bonus or even a 500 potency heal or 300 potency damage spell.

AST at worse will get the bonus that WHM will get through lillies every 30 seconds (and for all the abilities that have cooldown) and at best will get a 20% damage bonus for one of the party members every 30 seconds.

WARNING: Wall of text incoming~

My biggest gripe about the WHM changes in SB right now is that their new abilities and job gauge seem unfun.

Of the fifteen jobs, I only count three jobs whose new core mechanic / job gauge has a random element:

1. BRD
2. AST
3. WHM

BRD relies on crit procs from their DoTs for song-specific effects, but they still have the effects of their new songs and can make use Troubadour without needing DoT procs. i.e. Only a part of their new job gauge has a random element. Also, with both DoTs lasting 30s each and Iron Jaws no longer having a cast time, BRDs require minimal GCD investment to gain Repertoire stacks and song procs (1-2 GCDs every 30s).

AST's core mechanic of drawing cards has been designed around being random. As such, they have many tools to mitigate the randomness (Spread, Royal Road, Redraw, and now Minor Arcana and Sleeve Draw). Furthermore, the pay-offs for AST's random draw system are fantastic! The Balance is currently overly powerful. Arrow, Bole, Spire, and Ewer all have their uses. At its very worst, assuming everything but Redraw is on cooldown, and an AST draws an unneeded Spire/Ewer, then redraws that into a Spear. Spear is without a doubt AST's worst card, and it grants a blanket 20% cooldown reduction for a single player to all their abilities for 30s.

Let's have a look at WHM now in comparison.

WHM's new job gauge is entirely dependent on random procs, with no way to mitigate against bad luck.

With the current system, WHM's best case scenario is casting Cure / Cure II three times, getting a lily each time (0.8% average chance of this with the current numbers!), and then spending them all (because they get consumed) to reduce a single oGCD heal skill by 20%, at the expense of 3 GCDs at the absolute minimum, and much more like 15 single target heal GCDs on average (every 37.5s on a 2.5s GCD). So WHM's best case scenario is a 0.8% chance of spending three GCDs (7.5s) for a 20% cooldown reduction on a single ability, and more typically once every 37.5s (with no ceiling for bad luck!), whereas AST's worst case scenario is granting a player 20% cooldown reduction to all their skills, spells, and abilities for 30s every 30s.

Even if we disregard the fact that high level WHM players rarely spend many GCDs on Cure and Cure II, WHM - as currently previewed - will be the only job in SB whose entire new system is completely dependent on RNG. Aside from a reworked Stoneskin ability, and the Thin Air cooldown (which is awesome btw), the rest of WHM's new abilities are fully gated behind random procs, cost GCDs, require single target heals (which are GCD inefficient), have a weak pay-off even at three lilies (especially when compared with their fellow healer AST), and players are provided with no way to mitigate against bad luck.

No other job in the game has a core job mechanic so dependent on both randomness and inefficient use of your GCD. The lily system, and similarly, Plenary Indulgence both suffer from this problem.

To me, these new core WHM mechanics and abilities are not fun. If I wanted to gamble like that, I would go play slots in a casino - at least there's a potential pay-off there.

------

So what can we do about it now?

My proposed solution for the time being is to remove all randomness from generating lilies and also for Plenary Indulgence's Confession stacks, and then give players time to see how they feel about the new abilities without any reliance on random luck or procs.

Potencies and cooldown times can always tweaked, but if this change doesn't make WHM players happy, then we as a community can acknowledge that the core design of the new abilities and mechanics themselves were a mistake, and try to redesign them and find a new more promising direction for WHM.

Perhaps controversial, but these new changes to WHM remind me of the Diadem rework. Yes, players were complaining and making a lot of noise about the randomness of the Emergency Mission and the i280 weapon drop rate thereafter, but this really just diverted attention from and masked what I believe to be the core problem with the reworked Diadem - that the core experience of running around killing FATEs isn't fun.

I have a sneaking suspicion that the current iteration of WHM in Stormblood is suffering the same FATE (heh), with the randomness issues masking crucial design flaws with the new WHM changes, but I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Originally Posted by Yallaid

I'm just curious, because I cannot read the JP boards but why do you feel they don't have any issues? I've been linked to at least one post from earlier that was translated where a JP player voiced similar concerns as those on our side of the fence.

Not doubting, but I feel like SE responds more strongly to feedback from JP community so I'd like to know where they stand right now.

There's just very little chatter on the JP forums compared to here, and they're much more organized with their board and topic usage (we have more than 10x the number of threads in nearly every board than they do), and the healer changes discussion is primarily focused on the same thread they've been using for the last 4 years. A lot of the topics are more focused on things like custom emotes, QoL suggestions, how AST should use their cards, SCH's lack of damage, and worry over Rescue being abused.

The one thread where they talk about it (http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...83%83%E3%83%89), doesn't have a ton in it (only 10 pages of SB discussion on many different topics). This thread here, for example, is already 10x bigger than that. A few people mention primarily that WHM looks uninteresting, but not "broken" and "dead" like the NA side suggests. One of their biggest complaints I see more often is the disparate number of skill difference between the healers, how WHM has less skills than the other 2 overall. Some people sad that they don't have stoneskin (and how that affects lower level dungeons). Even more conversation dedicated to talking about the WHM Barrier skill, trying to figure out its usage and how many lilies it costs and whether or not it should buff based on how many lilies get used up by it (because it currently uses all of them but doesn't change potency based on how many get used, and 15% is low), and how it'll interact with barriers from other jobs. Some of them are quite excited at the prospect of building crit WHM and becoming "super fast" healers with all the CD reductions. Also lots of talk about balance of healers at lower levels, like in Aurum Vale, not at 70. There are some people voicing sentiments like they think it's a great feeling that they're changing the playstyle of healers to be more healer-ish and WHM is going in the right direction for that. SCH and WHM appear interchangeable based on content. WHM just needs to contribute to party DPS since they don't bring damage utility, which is fine because their strong healing abilities will give them more time to DPS. There a couple suggestions early on on how to tweak a few numbers to make it desirable.

But, they also seem to be in general agreement that they will withhold any judgement until the final mechanics and values are set when the game is released. And a lot less (read: none) of the rage and doom & gloom from here.