Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

Originally Posted by Skyrior

All of the following is written from a raiding perspective. ...
Square Enix, what were you thinking?...

Maybe they were thinking:
Raiding players: 2% dissatisfied;
Everyone else... 98% OK/don't care/will play it before make comments.

Mission accomplished. Skill tweaks later IF needed.

Right now, going into SB it drives me crazy that so many WHM JOB SKILLS are being moved to cross class. We are losing job skills, being forced to waste our very little cross-class actions on what WAS ours, they haven't added cross class slots which I think is silly (why keep us at 5??) I feel a little worried that WHM is about to seriously fall behind.

Originally Posted by TheLastDream

i use Cure1/2 all the time...... in Level 30-50 dungeons... Maybe that's where that want us to shine, old content!

Hey you know what... What's leveling WHM going to even be like for new players?
They've lost so much stuff, even JOB UNIQUE ABILITIES like Divine Seal. This was important shit... There's going to be this really weird gaps where they just don't obtain anything. Sigh. Jesus.

Originally Posted by LalaRu

Maybe they were thinking:
Raiding players: 2% dissatisfied;
Everyone else... 98% OK/don't care/will play it before make comments.

Mission accomplished. Skill tweaks later IF needed.

I'd argue they were actually thinking "hmm, how can we make an entry-level healer that any dolt with half a brain can play up to potential on?"

I mean, the WHM changes seem targeted squarely at the most inexperienced and/or lazy players out there. Don't want to think about DD? Don't worry - we're building mechanics so you can claim C1 / C2 spam is intended play. Afraid of having to assess when a tank actually needs healing? Just throw a cure on him regardless - it might proc a Lily or a Confession stack! Don't want to have to think about when you can run close to an enemy to squeeze in a Fluid Aura? Worry not - it doesn't do damage anymore!

The funny thing is, if SE just came out and designated certain DD / Healer / Tank jobs as 'learner-friendly classes', I actually wouldn't much mind. I'm not automatically opposed to the idea of intentionally dumbing down a few jobs so that they're accessible, at the cost of those jobs not being viable in end-game raids. What's making me angry is that SE isn't acting as if this is intentional, implying that they're either (a) lying to us, or (b) vastly more incompetent than I had previously thought, which is an increasingly difficult trait to demonstrate.

How are you already playing the game? I want too! /sarcasm

Wait till the game launch before assume everything is bad on this job.

Originally Posted by Vhailor

Don't want to have to think about when you can run close to an enemy to squeeze in a Fluid Aura? Worry not - it doesn't do damage anymore!

This is a good change, all damage has been removed from stuns/silences so now those can be important again. Right now people use that OGCD skilll and most of the times enemies that require being interrupted end immune, also the amount of bad WHM (or BRD/MCH) that use fluid aura at the wrong time lowering the overall party DPS is huge.

I don't usually post on the forums, but I have to say I'm extremely disappointed in the new updates to WHM. I know it's been said ad nauseum but I'm hoping the devs hear just how many of us are disappointed and discouraged by these changes. For an expansion focused on creating synergy within a party white mage has been left with nothing to contribute to that, and as far as we can tell a useless ability at 70. Even more concerning is since our skills are now role skills, I won't have room on my bar for protect since I need swiftcast, esuna, eye for an eye, lucid dreaming, and legrasse in case things go south. So I'll be levelling my white mage to 70, but unless I see significant changes when I get there I'll immediately level my astro and other classes.

All of the things you mentioned (the encouragement of Cure I/II over regens, the introduction of RNG, etc.) have bothered me as well. Additionally, while scholars gained utility and astrologians kept theirs, we still bring nothing to the table in that regard. In fact, with the removal of Stoneskin, we've effectively lost our only form of active mitigation for any pre-SB content. Instead, we get to use all of our (RNG-dependent) lilies on a new level 66 single-target shield. Not to mention, the confession stacks are based on spamming Cures on party members-- for a group heal? It just seems really inefficient.

But hey, we get to keep Repose.

Originally Posted by Nihility

or they just undertuned the current dungeons so much that keeping some regens rolling is often more than enough to heal through any of it.

Play the level 50 Storyline dungeons for ARR. It's such a faceroll right now, that I was in a group for The Praetorium that had one other WHM who didn't do CS either, but kept spamming regen instead of cure and it was kinda like "they aren't even bleeding?" At least they weren't spamming Medica II until the boss.

But if everyone is wearing level 60 gear after completing V3.0's content, then they are at least 20% more overpowered than the WoD level 50 gear (I checked.) So before that content even became available people would have only had level 42-50 gear in various configurations.

So what should SE do to reduce the amount of faceroll in older content? Make everything hit harder to make up for overpowered tanks? Maybe the storyline content should be the exception and if anyone "hasn't completed it" sync it to the weakest ilevel character in the party so there's some challenge. If everyone's completed it, sync it to the average ilevel. But then we'd have people kicking players for not having BiS gear. So that would be an issue.

How do you balance something without making people complain? Well for starters, actually survey players, ask their consent to record their game input for certain dungeons and when it's complete, give them a score (eg DPS %, Enmity %, Heal %) and "Do you feel this content was too long or too short?", and "Did you feel this content was too easy, about right, or too hard?"

Throw away the data from people who provide low quality data (eg idle, pressing few keys,) and people who are not playing their role as defined (more DPS actions than Tank/Heal on Tank/Healer roles) and you have your tuning parameters. So let's say the WHM is too easy because they are healing too much, then you either nerf the healing potency, increase the MP cost, or increase the CD time. From experience playing the game "as Yoshi-P seems to think people should play it", without using Shroud of Saints, you have just enough MP to get through everything. You run out if you are doing anything BUT healing. Shroud gets you over that MP hump if you use it when there is enough mp consumed to use it. Like to me, it feels like all the regular dungeon content is balanced for that play style. But then you have players who want to mainly DPS and heal as little as possible, so they blow all their HoT's at every opportunity so they have more DPS uptime. If they are seriously expensing more MP DPS'ing than healing then they are certainly playing it as far from Yoshi-P intended it to be played as possible, so that would call for a nerf to the regen and medica II. However players playing WHM as intended still want those skills, so perhaps the CD on these skills should be extended so that they can't just be on full time.

So what does StormBlood actually do?
Lily system at level 52, so of no help in older content
Fluid Aura no longer does damage (wait people were using this for damage?)
Aero and Aero II folded into the same skill at level 42
Benediction recast down to 180s from 300s
Cure potency up to 450 from 400
Aero DoT potency up to 30 from 25
Cleric Stance changed to buff with GCD
Stones all folded into the same skill

What doesn't it do?
Holy is still nerfed from it's 2.0 incarnation.
Regen is unchanged, instant cast but still has a GCD
Medica is unchanged
Medica II is unchanged
Stone is unchanged

So on all the level 50 content and earlier, nothing has actually changed for the WHM other than no more StoneSkin that nobody ever used because the tanks ran off and it drops off after one hit in just about every situation. I pretty doubt pretty much that any changes to pre-50 content would happen since people just don't seem to care about the mechanics any more.

On the HW content you can start using the lilies at 52. So as far as I'm concerned they could have made it so that the enemies at level 52 and higher actually hit harder. When you play HW storyline content you typically get more milage out of the level 50-60 skills anyway (including medica II and regen) So the loss of one of the stackable DoT's from Aero is a loss, but that's pretty much it. If the point of the lilies is to make Cure and Cure II relevant, that's probably what Yoshi-P intended.

There's another solution. Make not following the mechanics more often instant-kills and bring in some version of "Life 2"(arise) and "Life 3"(reraise) from FF6. Basically the fight with Ultima Weapon at the end of ARR 2.0 should have been instant-kills for missing the telegraphed attacks regardless of gear.