Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

Here's what I'd like to see done with lilies:

1) Have them proc from more skills.
As is, the lilies incentivize the use of very little of WHMs toolkit, so having them proc from more skills would let people heal in their preferred way and still get lilies.

2) Have current OGCD skills not use them and instead tie them to a new ability. This is where the system runs into issues as it is now. As a healer, one of your goals is to save mana, and one of the main methods of doing that is using your OGCDs instead of your spells. The issue is that if you want to stack lilies you can't use OGCDs because they'll use them up, so you end up in a situation where you're delaying using skills so that you can shave time off of those skills recast, which doesn't make sense.

As far as the type of skill I think would work well with lilies, I'd personally love something like this:
Ability: Divine Seal
Cost: 3 lilies
Recast time: 15s
Effect: The next spell cast will have an MP cost of 0, a cast time of 0s, and its potency will be doubled. In the case of raise, the target will be raised without weakness.

I don't have any specific fixes or anything to share, but I'll add my opinion of the White Mages changes to the pile. Simply put, nothing about the White Mage changes is remotely interesting or engaging.

Reliance on Cure and Cure 2 to generate lilies makes engaging the new system single-minded and, possibly worst of all, horrendously uninteresting. It's similar to the awful feeling of spamming Split Shot on Machinist, hoping for a proc, just amplified exponentially due to lack of skills to reliably generate lilies and an even lower proc rate. Even if you do save up stacks, the pay-off is negligible. Lowered cooldowns? Yes, how useful! Aside from the fact that it's inconsistent and difficult to plan for, and thus, play around. At least when Astrologians pull something other than Balance they can at least do something with it. But I suppose we can use lilies for Divine Benison? Well, in addition to the already stated consistency issues (isn't White Mage supposed to be reliable and steadfast?), it's literally just Stoneskin! We lost something we can cast as many times as we want and at any point for something that does the same thing but is on a minute cooldown and requires lilies to use! Sure it's instant and thus possible to use in a pinch, but you're also actively denying yourself other benefits to use it. Plenary Indulgence is just more aoe healing but, again, with added inconsistency. Honestly, it feels like every new White Mage skill is "trade reliability for no MP cost and instant casts." Maybe interesting in concept, but the way it's being implemented just encourages ignoring the system entirely. Why ever bank on something so unreliable that offers nothing unique or overly beneficial?

Perhaps worst of all though, and truly the thing that upsets me the most, is how absolutely un-fun the whole system sounds. There's nothing cool or engaging about maybe, possibly lowering cooldowns or getting access to a slightly more powerful version of a skill you already have. There's no feeling of having new tools to resolve problems with. It's like White Mage just gained one big passive trait rather than something you actually USE. This, honestly, gets back to the whole idea of White Mage as a "pure healer" and how, in my opinion, this design philosophy is fundamentally flawed with the way FFXIV is constructed. Proceeding with that in mind necessitates that White Mage do nothing but exactly the same thing, just with different buttons. If you confine yourself to "they only do direct heals" you've left no room for literally anything else. It's painfully obvious, because clearly their only idea on how to stick to this idea while still adding new stuff was to make it unreliable. Because that somehow makes things fun I guess??? I don't know, it seems so ill-conceived.

Who knows, maybe I'm mistaken and things will be more interesting than I imagine them to be right now. I would love to be wrong, because I love White Mage. But honestly as it appears to me White Mage is poised to be the most one-track, redundant, and boring job to play, and it kills me. I don't know how you'd fix this. I'd almost suggest just scraping the whole thing and starting over, but I'm sure that's not feasible. Maybe make all the overhealing we'll inevitably do with this system beneficial in some way. Give out buffs or have it all go into some kind of charge bar to blow on something. I don't know, just give White Mage something interesting that it can call its own and actually use.

What comes to my mind is: do we really need the Lv70 Plenary Indulgence healing spell? It's nice to have more skills but I don't think this is one (at the planned confession system) that we can rely on because the stacks are timed.

So if there would be an incoming aoe-damage at all partymembers we already can use our aoe-heals (medica, medica 2, assize, asylum and for stacking mechanics cure 3). With Thin Air these costs 0 MP. With swiftcast we can use one instant.

So Plenary Indulgence is just another aoe heal skill that we get at level 70?

Wouldn't be another aoe heal/damage comboskill like assize varying on global existing confession stacks be better?

EDIT: Ok, I read the tooltip again and it seems the skill use all the Stacks through the entire party. But for me it's a little boring Edited the text

I think an easy tweak to confession and Plenary Indulgence would be to have confession proc from all healing, and then for planary indulgence to do a raid-wide heal on anyone with confession stacks. This stops it being yet another emergency tank heal and then turns it into a reward for good healing. With full confession stacks doing something like a Tetra and no stacks doing the equivalent of a Cleric Stance cure I.

Imma just repost something I posted in another thread. Just a random idea that someone probably already came up with in this thread, but it is waaaay too long to read. XD

Someone (probably) already previously​ stated it, but temporary HP would be an elegant solution.

Overheal converts into temporary hit points. Have it a Job trait called Bubble that replaces a job skill that's now cross role (It's even thematically fitting because WHM uses water, and water is the essence of life. It'd be nice to have another water based thingy). The amount allowed is either HP bases or potency based (I prefer the latter. The former could get a little crazy with War), with each lily added raising the ceiling on temporary HP allowed. Have Crits proc lilys as well as random Cures. Confession should be based on percentage of health healed (That is including overheal and temp HP) and last the duration of a fight.

There. WHM HoTs and mega heals (Leading to overcure) isn't such a burden, but actually a benefit. This effectively makes the "pure healer" so much of a healer, it turns overheal into real healing, and makes for amazing synergy with the other healers, not to mention actually being a safe, extremely preemptive healer. Perhaps Medica 2 would be a bit too strong, but if it's identity is supposed to be the pure healer, then so be it. Let it be strong as hell.

It's a shame we are so close to launch and the devs wan't to release this job in a very sub par /pathetic state compared to the other healers.

I thought this game had supervision? testers? proper management? people with passion ? what happened ? this looks like 1.0 team quality. The other jobs seem fine but this is just crap.

I have heard at least two related arguments for making WHM as the specialised healer and these include:

1) WHM is good for parties learning the fight.

2) WHM is good for parties who want to clear an endgame content with less risk of wiping (because they have a specialised healer).

To me, these two arguments are poor for two reasons:

1) People gradually learn the mechanics of any fight (endgame or no) very fast. Hence, WHM's advantage for clearing novel content dissipates very quickly - look at HW now. This is the end status of WHM after, say, a couple of months an xpac is released. WHM's corresponding demand will also drastically decrease months after SB's release and most WHM will be pressured to switch to AST/SCH because of this. Or worse, they might be replaced if they refused or statics that are created months after SB will refuse to LF WHM. This is the exact situation of what we have now for WHM.

2) Statics that have prolonged difficulty managing endgame mechanics (or any other boss mechanics) for the longest times, tend to be poor raiders. Let's admit that not all raiders are equally competent - just run Dun Scaith to see my point. Hence, what people using this argument is doing is essentially putting WHM's demand into statics that are relatively consisted of poorer raiders and do not put WHM on equal demand for the entire range of statics (i.e., poor to good). To put it in another way, WHMs are perpetually favoured by statics LF first clears - seasoned statics all LF AST/SCH replacements.


In addition, there is also the other consequence of the poor reputation of a static and WHM that includes a WHM developing over time - the presence of a WHM in a static might be used as a sign that a static might be mocked or regarded as 'poorer quality'. In addition, WHM being created as an 'easy' healer to play also creates this potential mockery of players playing this class... I think we have to think of the wider consequence for the statics accepting WHM and players who play WHM themselves with the direction this class is going into. This concern is not only for SB but applies for the general direction WHM has developed.

It appears unfitting to develop, what most considered, a classic healer role in the FF franchise, to such reputational consequence for both the static WHM is in and the players who play WHM with the direction WHM is taking.