Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[Aurum]

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.

[Duelle]

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.

The problem with getting rid of the RNG is that then you need to design a healing system entirely built around generating and consuming lilies.

I mean, it can be done, but can get a bit messy. An example would be that the Cure and Medica lines of spells generate a lily. In addition to offering a bonus per lily active (I like Spell Speed for this), lilies empower certain cooldowns (Assize, Asylum, my suggested Stoneskin) and allow the use of certain skills in the 62-70 range.

So your gameplay would be generating lilies through use of casted heals, hanging on to them until you need to use them to empower Assize/Asylum/Stoneskin or consume them to execute one of the nifty 62-70 skills.

Plenary Indulgence

Plenary Indulgence and Confession makes me think the devs saw how Atonement works in WoW for Discipline Priests and sort of missed the point of why Atonement works the way it does. As currently designed, it's a convoluted way of setting up an AoE heal, which I'll admit makes little sense.

[Focant]

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.

[razzgrizz3]

When gear capped for A9/A10, a WHM can solo heal the fight with regens, tetra, and bene and go back to DPSing.

lol are yout talking about savage?
would you happen to have a video of yourself solo healing a9a10s with only regens and tetra + bene?

[magnanimousCynic]

lol are yout talking about savage?
would you happen to have a video of yourself solo healing a9a10s with only regens and tetra + bene?

I don't see an S near A9 or A10 so I assume they're talking about normal mode.

[Sieben79]

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

[Estriella_Faerie]

[...] We already covered we lost Aero, we have Aero 2 & 3 and I didn't see their potency going up. [...]

Technically, for high level content we also lost Aero II. It will still be on our bars, sure, but we'll probably never cast it again. Unless there's a mana issue, where Stone IV would cost too much and put us out of mana, Aero II is a dps loss, since its full potency seems to be lower than one Stone IV (250 vs 260).

Also, Thanks a lot Reiryuu for taking the time to compile all of this. Just one thing I don't think you mentionned on your first post, the lackluster reward from lilies. You mentionned the conditions for gaining them and how quickly we will lose them, but not the shitty reward they give for such a high "cost" (bad playing by spamming Cures instead of Regen I mean).
Semirhage explained it clearly here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4175579

[Reiryuu]

Also, Thanks a lot Reiryuu for taking the time to compile all of this. Just one thing I don't think you mentionned on your first post, the lackluster reward from lilies. You mentionned the conditions for gaining them and how quickly we will lose them, but not the shitty reward they give for such a high "cost" (bad playing by spamming Cures instead of Regen I mean).
Semirhage explained it clearly here:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...=1#post4175579

Done! Thanks for the link

[kinkyboots426]

I feel like the removal of stoneskin is a big issue.

WHMs no longer have a shield that is consistent. Take current content in account.
What will happen when your synced in Alexander and Punishing heat comes up and you dont have Stoneskin etc.


A few very easy fixes are. Put stoneskin back in the game and just give it to WHM.
Allow stacks from the new whm healing mechanic to be place on characters from more whm abilities. Medica/ Medical II/ Cure III...Assize...Even Holy
Asylum by running in and out of the Bubble itself.

Some people may not like this but Holy should probably HEAL and do Damage even it is less DMG.

If WHM is the pure healer, there needs to be a reason for the healing to be constantly needed. Like constant AOE dmg we saw in SHIVA EX.

If WHM is a pure healer...then make it the best one.

[Reiryuu]

What if confessions gave a 5/10/15% chance of a direct hit chance? Not as good as a crit sure, but it could then effect skills and abilities that jobs have that don't offer crits? Or some ability like FF6's Pearl, a holy type spell that consumes all confessions on the party for extra damage?