Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

Originally Posted by Yhximott

Honestly even a tiny bandaid like letting us control when we use the Lilies would lift a great deal of the grief. An ability on a 1s recast that MUST be activated in order to consume Lilies. Then we could control their flow. Also make the recast reduction much more substantial. 4% will NEVER be useful.

Divine Benison's recast 1s, and make it so that 1 DB = 1 Lily consumed. Then we could save it for a big mechanic. 1 Shield for MT, and then 2 others for either both healers, or 1 healer and 1 tank.

Divine Benison has a 1 min recast I do not know if that was a typo on your part. The thing still is why are you trying to always have 3 lilies it is not called for... You can do Divine Benison for 1, they didn't raise the recast time on the older skills. So it is really an extra proc that cure/cure 2 can do, just like how they make the costs of bigger cures cheaper! So now you throw a cure 2 after a tank buster, can insta shield MT to get a free 15% hp shield! Meaning more time for you and other healer to DPS! Saving it waiting for 3 just seems like not really using the lilies to their power.

i've played healers since the days of everquest.

if there's one thing that remains consistent in all forms of MMOs, it's that healing is about planning and expecting for the worst. even with 'reactive' healing, i promise those healers know when to 'react' just as proactive absorb based healer knows when to be proactive. its a difference of seconds in mechanics.

healing is not suitable to be designed around RNG mechanics that are non-interactive. these Lilies need to be tied into different game systems or interactions (particularly not something as uncontrollable as RNG reduced cooldowns, which again is an issue)

please consider a total redesign of the Lily system. RNG in healing can be fun in small doses. it should not be part of the core systems. that is not good design, and it is not a good system for healing.

I did not comment on this before, but the situation with the shared role abilities does not look very good.

• WHM loses 4 of their current abilities to cross role, so 4 out of 5 slots are spent reacquiring your own abilities.
• For that last slot, you are asking for WHM to choose between swiftcast, eye for an eye, and rescue.
• The obvious decision that will be made is swiftcast.
• That means WHM who currently use eye for an eye will lose access to it.
• That also means anything new like rescue sits in the same boat as all of the abilities that were deleted for not being used frequently.
• Its actually a good thing, when we look at it this way, that healers can offload their Virus/Disable to the RDM, because they would not have enough cross role slots to have it anyways. Otherwise, I would have preferred anything in the vein of Disable or Virus to be healer utility.

At least when we look at AST and SCH, we can rest assured that they will not have enough cross role slots for rescue either. By the way, what happened to Deployment Tactics on SCH? That was actually a nice skill to have.

Originally Posted by Alsar

First off I want to preface this with saying that these arguments are not about "the meta" or "optimal comp". With 3 healers and 2 heal slots there will always be one healer left out, that being WHM is not the issue here. The issue is that the new skills have basic design flaws that don't make any significant change to the class like an expansion should do. And what's worse, the new systems simply do not seem like fun. I'll go over each change and what I think of them.

Secret of the Lily:
I can't believe anyone in the dev team actually thought this was good. In my opinion it's lazy design at best and the definition of "tacked on". Anything else would be better than this.

The entire concept is flawed, besides the layered RNG and bad numbers, it has zero impact on your playstyle as WHM. You could completely ignore the system and there would be no repercussion.
Any half decent healer can tell you that you plan your healing cooldowns according to the ecounter's outgoing damage. The fact that you can't control what generates lilies and what uses them makes them completely useless. Let me make an example: There is a tankbuster and another tankbuster in one minute. Of course you use Tetra on both. Tetra randomly coming off cooldown five seconds earlier makes no impact on your heals, you would still use it on the second tankbuster.

Solution:

A complete rework of this system is needed.

• Get rid of the RNG. Any kind of RNG with healing skills is useless to healers. There needs to be guaranteed ways to generate lilies and I need to able to decide what I want to spend them on. For example make every instant skill (Tetra, assize, asylum, beniscon and plenary) give us one Lily

• It needs to trigger off something else than cure 1+2. Good WHMs use as little cures as possible as other skills are more MP and GCD efficient.

• Give lilies a passive buff (sps up, crit up, heal up; whatever). This would introduce an interesting decision: "Do I want to spend my lilies or do I want to keep my buff?" Of course this buff can't be too strong or you would never want to spend it but I'll leave the balancing to the professionals.

• Make Lilies a resource. My proposal for this is as follows:
  With Lv52 give us an oGCD that consumes 1 lily and improves the healing power of our next skill. This would offset the loss of divine seal (as Largesse is considerably weaker than DS) and it would fall in line with yoshi-p's (and the dev teams?) direction of making WHM the pure healer. WHM has the fewest skills so giving it one wouldn't hurt.

If you really wanted to keep lilies as they are (pls don't) you'd need to design fights so that they required shittons of healing. As that would mean a huge increase in difficulty that will never happen.

Thin Air and Stone IV

Thin air is simple and effective. A good addition to our kit, nothing to add here.
I am completely indifferent to Stone IV.

Divine Benison

Basically an instant graniteskin (the old 2.x stoneskin) with a cooldown. Decent skill overall, althought the cooldown being 45s wouldn't hurt either.

Secret of the Lily II

Again, totally useless trait because of aforementioned reasons. Could be replaced by a trait making the active healbuffs of lilies stronger, or literally anything else.

Plenary Indulgence

RNG again. If you read this far I don't have to tell you why this skill is bad. Plenary indulgence could be a lily spender, alternating its potency by the amount of lilies you have. Could also just be an instant AoE heal but confession stacks being random needs to be changed. Could also keep it as is and just make the confessions 100%.

Changes to old skills

• The removal of divine seal hurts a bit, but with my proposed changes that should be okay.

• Stoneskin wouldn't necesarily have to be removed, its only use was for weakness in fights and to shield before, as it was too expensive otherwise.

• Assize got a hefty buff, not only is the cooldown much shorter but with the changes to cleric stance you now get both the heal and the damage. Good shit.

• Cure potencies got "buffed" but not really. With the buff of diurnal sect they potencies are just similar to AST.

• Fluid aura not doing damage anymore. It a dps loss but on the other hand using it was always a bit annoying. It's okay I guess.

Meta, Party composition and all that jazz

The problem here doesn't really lie with WHM. It's simply the other classes being too strong. Card buff in 3.4 was supposed to be a band-aid (to fix what exactly?) and I really hope they revert these changes by 4.0. SCH getting a very strong crit buff was also a negative surprise in that. Apart from fixing its innate problems, WHM simply needs something to be on par with those dmg buffs to be considered in the meta.
This is something that would be nice but it's not 100% necessary like the WHM skill rework. WHM can clear anything just fine without party buffs but the group has to make up for it and that's another negative towards WHM.

For first example. If you had a lily you can shield for 15% on first TB (Depends on how much HP is left after it to say what next action should be) Just simply makes less room for errors when it comes to it.
Simply I think you act like WHM now 100% revolves around lilies when they do not! I mean were you complaining how there was RNG chance that Cure 1 can give a free Cure 2 before? Sure you were not. Now you simply have another proc that goes a long with the skill.

For Plenary Indulgence again can turn into another free heal to give out. True it's max power is most likely never going to be reached but if you think in smaller terms it becomes a really good skill. Again you have to throw off a fast Cure and it puts a confession on the target you can then insta heal them for an extra 400 potency heal! Same as base Essential Dignity!

As for old skills it got buffed in SB, so how is that really removed?
Stoneskin used to be used a lot more just they toned it down! In coil people would need stoneskin + adlo. In HW yes was needed less.
Fluid Aura was a loss if you only look at healers losing damage on their cc skills. If you look at every class then it is more normal.

I do agree the SCH crit skill is silly and should of never happen. Though I still think Astro is more hurting in terms of DPS, they are trying to rely on balance/arrow draws to make up for their now weaker DPS.

Originally Posted by 13unny

Idk if a fight doesn't need Esuna that was already a dead skill many times were not casting it anyways. Protect was only used on people that were killed.
Now if you also look at what WHM were already crossing over best skill was Swiftcast, and a nerf Virus and Eye.
So now for once we can have 5 skills and more freedom to pick between them where other healers are more locked.

If you count on people dying + Boss you have to have Esuna
Protect, Swiftcast, Eye, Esuna , Cleric Stance for more damage or can go switch eye out for Largesse if more healing is called for in the fight.
Since we have Thin Air now to help with manga could leave Lucid Dreaming out!
Other healers will have to ditch a very useful skill to have protect if no WHM there with the free slot

Over all WHM has more free reign to pick what role actions they want where AST/SCH are more locked.

Also you could say that AST/SCH lost a DoT and Esuna as well! (Also Eye for SCH)

I could see something like the following happening:

• Only one of the group's two healers will opt-in to protect.
• AST will choose to not opt-in to cleric stance in favor of more support, because a %-based buff actually benefits them less when they start out with less damage on average.

WHM+SCH comp might have WHM take protect, SCH take Eye for an Eye, and both take cleric stance.
AST+SCH comp might have AST take protect and rescue while SCH takes Eye for an Eye and cleric stance.
Perhaps, you even pick one of the two healers to be in charge of Esuna.

Originally Posted by 13unny

Simply I think you act like WHM now 100% revolves around lilies when they do not! I mean were you complaining how there was RNG chance that Cure 1 can give a free Cure 2 before? Sure you were not. Now you simply have another proc that goes a long with the skill.

Making a system that you largely ignore isn't that great of design. Especially when you look at all the other jobs and see how their UI interacts with their class.

I find it hard to see all the other jobs and then look at what WHM gets and go "Well that looks about the same amount of thought and effort that went into making this".

Originally Posted by 13unny

Divine Benison has a 1 min recast I do not know if that was a typo on your part. The thing still is why are you trying to always have 3 lilies it is not called for... You can do Divine Benison for 1, they didn't raise the recast time on the older skills. So it is really an extra proc that cure/cure 2 can do, just like how they make the costs of bigger cures cheaper! So now you throw a cure 2 after a tank buster, can insta shield MT to get a free 15% hp shield! Meaning more time for you and other healer to DPS! Saving it waiting for 3 just seems like not really using the lilies to their power.

DB being 1s recast is one of the quick changes I would make.

The idea being that SE could make these changes -very- quickly without having to rehaul, buying them time to make more substantial changes.