Thread: Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

Originally Posted by fantasticm

... We get one useful skill over the course of 10 levels, Thin Air.

That name is SO VERY appropriate for the thing we get in this expansion.

Originally Posted by otarolgam

Um...

What if the Lillies are a bonus perk while you work with everything else you had...?

The problem is this. Lillies effect around 6 CDs I think and whenever one of those CDs is used it resets the Lilies. Now on average if you are spending all your GCDs spamming Cure or Cure 2 you are likely to get 4 to 5 Lillies optimistically. A number of those CDs are on 1 minute cooldowns. This means, unless your not actively using CDs when they are available you will be using Lillies before you reach three, probably most of the time only with 1 Lilly. Lillies cd reduction is exponential. So having only 1 Lilly means only a 4% cd reduction, which for most of the CDs it affects is basically around 2 second.

Fundamentally you will probably be saving a total of maybe 10-15 seconds off all 6 CDs in a minute and with little control over which ones get the most CD unless you actively don't use CDs to save the lillies for a particular CD. To me seems a little counter productive and devaluing of the mechanic cause it means restricting CD use.

Note, that is if you spam nothing but cure and cure 2 constantly.

Originally Posted by fantasticm

You and me both. From what I've heard/translated, the JP community is equally unhappy with the state of WHM, thus greatly enhancing our chances at an overhaul. Oh My God do I pray. From this day forward until it happens.

The issue is that from a player's perspective this seems like an obvious issue. Something that seems like the devs should have spotted. The only time you have designs that seem strange like this but make sense in context is if the gameplay has been altered for the design to fit. However if that was the case the other heals haven't been altered really to compensate for such a change which leads to just more balance issues.

Honestly I don't know why they don't seem to be picking up on this but they seem to have been having trouble understanding the problem since AST was introduced. Fundamentally the design of their Jobs doesn't seem to match with the healer gameplay design of FF14. Its building a street car and then making it do offroad driving. There are going to be issues. The design doesn't match the environment it functions in.

Some thoughts from a guy that likes to run his mouth:

1) When I first saw the WHM UI, the lilies thing instantly made me think of the flower bell UI from Revelation Online's Spirit Shaper. For those who never saw it before, Spirit Shapers have a gauge similar to WHM's lily UI, but with 6 buds instead of 3. Every time that class uses a heal, a green flower appears on the UI, and each green flower active makes your heals stronger. Whenever a damage spell is used, a blue flower appears, and your attack spells deal more damage with more blue flowers up. Switching spells resets the gauge (so if you accumulated green flowers by casting heals and then use a damage spell, you lose all your green flowers), so you had a mechanical benefit for sticking to casting heals or casting damage spells. No RNG involved, and it was more based on sticking to casting one type of spell.

2) Like others have said in this thread, this is RNG within RNG, and heals are supposed to be dependable. It's one thing to have RNG procs like "next Cure is instant cast" or "next cure costs less/no MP" or "next cure refunds it's MP cost". It's another when you have a heal powered by RNG.

3) I get the feeling damage intake by tanks is going to increase. There's no way in hell you'd create mechanics centered on spamming Cure and Cure II without adjusting tank damage taken. If we were to see more AoEs and such, Medica and Cure III would have been included in the RNG lily proc system, but the design seems to be very deliberate.

Assuming #3 has any merit to it, we should probably also look into how WHM's healing output compares to AST and SCH.