Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

Imo, the problem with the new WHM isn't the new lily mechanic and SE desire to make it a "true healer".

The first problem is that current content focus heavily on very hard DPS check and not on healing. Which poses the problem, why would we need more heal if all that matters in most cases is DPS? When we take a look at most of the first kills in Acreator, we can see a SCH dpsing most of the fight and an AST fishing for aoebalance before pull. FF14 party raids are smalls, only 8 players, unlike WoW 10 man, 8 man offer very little flexibility as we'll need to cover the 2 tanks and the required heal, and here lies the issue, most content do not require 2 heal, but they require more than 1 heal. You basically need 1.2-1.5 heal. Which leads to the current meta of healer dps + ast.

So unless SE drastically changes 4.0 raid balance and make that 2 full time healers are actually required and tune down most dps-check to be less intense so that we won't need aoe balance + libra just to do the fight, the WHM lilies mechanic will not serve much purpose.
In short, why would we want more heal if there is nothing to heal?

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The second issue is, as many people pointed, the mechanic is underwhelming. It is not strong enough. Not only is it too weak, but it kind of is contradictory in the gameplay it promotes.

Proc rate too low:
Lilies proc of CureI-II with a 20% chanec and 100% of a crit, with a 2.5 GCD we will statistically get 1 Lily every 12.5sec and 3 every 37.5sec for a 20% CDR.
If we take into account that WHM crit won't be especially high at launch, it is fair to assume that crit won't reduce the lilies fishing by a great margin. Including crits, let's say it takes on average 30sec. A this is NOT considering the cast of any Regen or Medica which would delay even more.

Also, assuming the raid meta will be the same, which means healer will have plenty of time to DPS, lilies not procing from StoneIV means the better the raid plays, the weaker the mechanic becomes. A WHM dpsing 80% of the fight, only to do medica + Regen will basically never fish a single lily, making the whole "core WHM mechanic" inexistant.
To put it in other word, imagine how SCH and AST would be if everytime they use BroilII/MaleficIII, the fairy stops healing and the draw-a-card cooldown stops refreshing. The more they dps, the more what makes them valuable disapear.

Cooldown reduction too weak:
On the healing aspect only, WHM strength compared to other healers will be the vaste amount of healing skills they'll have. If we compare to AST who only posess Essential Dignity and the new galaxy exploding skill as of global cooldown heals, the WHM wins hands down. Same goes for the scholar who requires charges to use their most potent spells.

However, this great amount of cooldown actually weakens the lilies mechanic.
Since the WHM has more tool to heal, it is natural and expected for them to use these CD on a regular basis. But, using these cooldown on a regularly makes reaching 3 lilies a very unlikely event.

Lilies CDR works like this with the average time it would take to get there without crits (wich will be low on release) and the use of Stone,Medica,Regen
1 lily : 4% CDR 12.5sec.
2 lily : 10% CDR 25sec.
3 lily:: 20% CDR 37.5sec.

Assuming the WHM uses his cooldown every 20-25sec, this will give him an average of 4% or 10% CDR on every cooldown. Now, is 4%-10% CDR actually strong? Is it worth the spot of "WHM unique mechanic". I personally believe it doesn't. It is not too weak, it is trivial.

4% or 10% will hardly make a difference into a fight and the WHM healing output.
Also, let's not be fooled, this 4-10% would only apply for the spells consuming the lilies, not the entire WHM arsenal.

And this is where it gets dirty, if you want to hold your lilies to use on a long cooldown, you're not using your cooldown, so they do not refresh, so you're arguably wasting healing. If you still do so, it would take on average 15 lilies to grant you a whole cooldown, a whole cooldown would then take on average 180sec if you NEVER use medica or regen (this could be compensated by a few crit here and there), so let say 3min.
A fight hardly last more than 10minutes so you would at best get 3 full cooldown IF YOU DO NOT USE ANY COOLDOWN TO REACH 3 LILIES. One can argue that you overall lost a lot of healing by holding your cooldowns like this.

The purpose of healing cooldwn is to respond to high healing demand, it is to paliate the shortage of heal caused by strong mechanic or players failing.
The lilies defeat that purpose as you're rewarded for not using your cooldown, but at the same time, not using your cooldown punishes you as you hold your healing potentia. No matter what you do, you loose.

Simply buffing the CDR won't change the core of this issue, if you made the CDR becomes 8%, 20%, 40%, you will force player to hold on their CD even more.

The lack of control:
The final and last issue with the lilies is the lack of control and the substantial reward that derives from that lack of control.
AST cards are strong, everyone will agree, but their strength comes from their randomness, Balance is powerful because you only get it 1/6 of the time, AST strength comes from their randomness. They can attemp to force some cards through Redraw and Hold, but the outcome stays random. However, the AST can hold their strength for when they are needed. As an AST, I'm not forced to use my card everytime I draw it, I can save it for the next phase, or next dps check etc.

WHM cannot do that without being punished. The Lilies system does not allow the white mage to choose which CD they'll reduce unless they do NOT use their cooldown, which is a very counter productive mechanic in my opinion.

Conclusion : Too weak (to not say useless)

And too weak is an undersatement. Deleting the Lilies mechanic would hardly impact the current WHM. And this is a HUGE problem.

Deleting the Fairy from a SCH severly impact his healing
Deleting the AST cards cooldown (but Draw a card) severly impact his buffing capacity
Deleting the Lilies from the WHM doesn't change a thing, they loose roughly 7%CDR.

A WHM can effectively turn off the lily visual and totally ignore the mechanic will do just fine as there's nothing to toy around.
Compared what an Astro can give every 30sec. A Spear is miles stronger than the WHM mechanic, a spear grants 15% CDR to all skill for 15sec. Whihc means that a WHM using ALL his CD during a spear would basically use something like 20 lilies. In a more realistic manner, the WHM will reduce most of his CD with 1-2 lilies. The lilies mechanic is therefor a global 7% CDR. It is simply non existent.
And here, I compared a simple cooldown to the WHM core new mechanic.

QUICK SOLUTIONS IMPLEMENTABLE BEFORE PATCH DAY IN 11 DAYS
This solutions are only number tweaking and could easily be implemented before patch 4.0 day.

#1 Make Lilies Linear

Lilies CDR reduction should scale linearly
1 Lily: x%
2 Lilies: 2x%
3 Lilies: 3x%

A player should NOT be punished for using his CD. A new player should NOT be penalised for using his tools to overcome a fight.


#2 Buff the CDR so that 1 lily actually matters

Fishing one lily, without a crit, can take some time. Making one lily reduces the CDR by a non trivial amount would help as many CD will be used with 1 lilies on signifcant fight. (Not talking about 4man ezmode)

I suggest 10%,20% and 30%, even though I still believe that these numbers will be too low to reduce their cooldown to a point where their healing potential will rival AST and SCH utility.

An alternative solution would be to buff the proc rate. In short, the CDR/min gained from lilies should be increased.

#3 Make all Base skill proc Lilies

Lilies should proc from AT LEAST : CureI-II-III, Regen,MedicaI-II,StoneIII-IV

The 37.5sec considers the exclusive use of CureI and II, which is NOT how any healer heals. Healng requires the use of MedicaI-II and Regen, every single time a WHM uses the spells they delay their lily by 2.5sec. Same goes for the DPS


Finally, a deeper issue is that there is no strategy to the lilies, they are just there. There is no interaction nothing. They're up, you use them and that's it. There is no added effect to a spell.
But this would obviously take more than 2 weeks to adress so I didn't believe it was urgent
Oh and I'm not covering that new shield mechanic that also feels uterly underwhelming
This was y long 2 cents

Finally, I would like to point that no matter how good a WHM heal will be, if the raid content doesn't change toward more heal requirement and less insane DPS check, only two case will make the WHM viable

1- WHM heals so much that they effectively worth 2AST and 1.5SCH, meaning that premade group can do Savage with 5 dps 1 heal.

2- Raid heals is so intense that any group not running a WHM will require better play from the player. By that I mean that a SCH AST group would have a much harder time keeping their group alive than a WHM SCH for instance.

There is no in between, if the content won't require the excess of heal the WHM can bring, they won'y be brought. If the content doesn't require two heals, then they must be able to do as good as SCH+AST together, if the content will require a lot of Heal, than they'll shine as long as they bring substantly more heal that it significantly helps overcome a fight, if they only bring 10-20% more than the SCH/AST that won't do it.