Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

I don't raid and I'm pretty casual in terms of what content I do, so a lot of the raid concerns don't really bother me. The changes I've seen don't really concern me, though lily RNG will probably annoy me. I mostly just dislike that the role abilities were obtained by taking them from WHM and forcing WHM to choose when it used to get them all. This isn't exactly enriching my life as a healer or making me glad that I play WHM.

I guess it's worth adding that I don't necessarily use Cure or Cure II a lot, especially as I get more familiar with content and out gear it. Adding lilies isn't really going to change that, so it would be nice if other spells had a chance to proc them so I could just go on my merry way healing however I feel like and mostly ignoring the RNG.

Originally Posted by Cynfael

If that happens, I'll laugh with you, but there's nothing in SE's history of designing this game that should lead anyone to believe that desperately high healing requirements will be implemented across the board with 4.0.

You don't need to have played the 4.0 client to express legitimate concerns based on the information available thus far. The Lily system alone should have everyone, including SE, scratching their heads.

But that's the point of the changes they're trying to make: They're trying to shift the jobs more towards their proper roles. Healers more towards actual healing. Tanking more towards actual tanking. So they gave healers more healer tools, buffed their healing, reined in their dps capabilities. They added more tank tools for tanks, and active tools to mitigate both self and party members. The reason they do this is so they can start designing and tailoring new content towards these intended roles and how they designed them. That's what I see them doing here.

Originally Posted by Mahkii

To take this one step further, we have no reason to believe that 4.0 WHM is designed such that it would be better at handling this than any other healer. I do not believe that SE would think that would be a good idea either.

You missed the point, and what I said. That content, especially raid content, is 8-man content. There's always 2 healers. It's not about designing any 1 healer to be able to handle it. But rather something that can only be handled by both healers, together. That's why I said both healers spamming.

Originally Posted by dark494

But that's the point of the changes they're trying to make: They're trying to shift the role more towards their proper roles. Healers more towards actual healing. Tanking more towards actual tanking. So they gave healers more healer tools, buffed their healing, reined in their dps capabilities. They added more tank tools for tanks, and active tools to mitigate both self and party members. The reason they do this is so they can start designing and tailoring new content towards these intended roles and how they designed them. That's what I see them doing here.

I actually don't perceive this shift. If anything, they've increased playstyle fluidity for healers by removing the stance-dance that turned off a (surprising) number of players. To be fair, I am also strongly biased against this popular notion of cookie-cutter roles being somehow desirable. Structure can be a useful thing to a certain extent, but this game has only 3 roles to begin with.

The problem isn't that SE wants to give WHM more healing tools; it's that the tools are bad. This is a very rare case where you don't even need to play the content to know that the premise itself is faulty simply because the indicators are so obvious. As soon as you see that there is an RNG system based solely on Cure and Cure II that grants somewhat dubious rewards to mutually exclusive actions (use anything Lily-related and they are all gone), there is an issue.

Plenary Indulgence is the only thing that isn't indisputably awful, but even that is a skill that seems to be suggesting way more utility than it can actually deliver. As a tank heal, it has potential for progression since you will almost certainly be casting Cure and Cure II more frequently. For average content where you cast Cures infrequently, its value is little or none depending on RNG.

Originally Posted by Cynfael

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I just gave you an example of content that completely contradicts this notion that a whm will never use cures and will always use other tools to get through everything. But that's the point I'm trying to make: This game has always been about the content that dictates how each jobs pans out and plays. DRK was a terrible job in the beginning, and people always took PLD at first. And very much so, something like A2S was horrible for DRK, and PLD excelled in there. But then A3S and A4S DRK excelled, and then people figured out how to play it in that content, and suddenly it became the best MT and PLD was never seen again in the meta and all the cries to revamp DRK went away with it. The content is what says how each job performs and where they perform well at. In that vein, there are 2 things I want to point out. Firstly, Stormblood is coming out, not Heavensward. They didn't design any job changes or tailor them whatsoever for Alex, and none of you are hella excited to go do Alex progression and raiding in Alex and Dun Scaithe and all the old 60 content. Secondly, whatever the content in Stormblood is, and it may be a rehash of similar Alex requirements, nobody knows what it even is. It's not out yet, so we need to chill out with the bashing and drama. That's why the raider community is somewhat laughing at the kneejerk reaction this has turned into, and why they have been repeatedly putting out video after tweet after blog post telling people they need to calm down and see what the content says each job's role will be. The JP forums are saying the exact same thing, "let's see what the content shows before judging how the changes work out".