Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[tikiwiki]

besides lilys buggyness it feels like a fine mechanic but confession stacks are stupid why is it a 20% chance to get one you rarely use cure!

[Mnemosynia]

Rotating between Divine Seal Regen, Asylum, Tetra, Assize, Benediction is good enough.

If you meant literally ZERO cures, yeah that's kinda BS, but rotating your oGCDs between pulls, you'll probably need to cast a single Cure II for every pull or so.

This is a whm who knows how to play, people dont understand if you never use your cd's they are worthless.

[Vrahjin]

I don't do EX trials, only the story ones, and generally the 24-man raids, so this is completely from the eyes of a casual player.

Firstly, I'm glad the chance of generating Lilies was increased (that media tour thing.. oi, what a debacle). It was 100% genuine trash. Now, not as much.
Do I wish Lilies could proc on more spells? Yes, of course. Do I wish Lilies did a little more? Yes, very much so, especially in regards to DB - it's still ridiculous that it provides no extra benefit but still eats every Lily.

In 4-man content, WHM is pretty fun. I don't think many are disputing that. I'm always casting something. Never running out of MP thanks to LD and TA, constantly belting out heals and damage spells.
Generally, not much extra time is needed spent healing compared to HW (except in Ala Mhigo, where tanks love to pull everything up to the goddamn dogs, only one tank so far hasn't needed a hailstom of Cure IIs and basically everything else in my arsenal).
However, I do find myself overhealing a bit more, mainly to throw in a Cure II to be sure I can activate DB. I don't quite like that, but at least my MP isn't suffering, and no one's died on my watch yet.

When it comes to casual play, WHM is just fine and dandy.

Except, you know, for PI. That's basically an "oh the tank has a confession? Better use this heal because I'll never get to use it otherwise"-heal. That really needs a rework, both how Confessions are generated and how/where they stack. It's sad to see our level 70 spell being so extremely underwhelming.

[AutumnsHollow]

I got my white mage to 70, and did the extreme primals both on astro and white mage.

I noticed that numbers wise white mage is doing quite a bit more DPS than astro. But from what I've seen with sleeve draw I personally draw and am able to put out more balances than I used to be able to. Fights would also end faster when I was on my astro compared to when I was on my white mage even with lower personal DPS. This is all based on my own experience though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Thin air & assize changes was as amazing as we expected it to be. The MP gained from the both is quite liberating. I'm not a fan of Planery Indulgence at all, but it is nice for a freebie heal when it does proc. But on the flip side to be quite frank, I never actually needed that freebie heal because regens were doing the job they were supposed to be doing. I don't feel as if I got any extra DPS uptime because of it. Divine Bension being gated behind lilies is frustrating personally. Liliy cooldown reduction is hardly noticed personally for myself in these fights.

I don't like lilies at all personally. I feel like I'm getting punished for being efficient at my job. In susuano/lakashimi extreme playing optimally I hardly ever had enough lilies for divine bension for tank busters. I found it frustrating personally because my regens/OGCD heals were doing most of the work on the tank, and sometimes when fishing for a lily for incoming tank buster in both fights my regen would actually outheal the damage, and I'd have no liliy for the tankbuster, gg. We have enough MP resource these days where we don't have to worry about cure 2ing as much and can be trigger happy with it, but the gameplay they want us to engage in feels bad personally. I ran into situations where a cure 1 would be enough before the tankbuster to fish for a liliy, and would result in no overhealing. But that requires gambling for a liliy, so although the tank doesn't need it, to ensure I get a lily it's better to cure 2, but that's inefficient and results in overhealing but to ensure I get a lily for Divine Bension I have to do that. PFing these fights and getting a trigger happy cohealer who tries to keep everyone topped will also prevent you from getting lilies as you cannot get lilies if you do not heal actual damage. I also do not like the fact that you can't precast heals anymore if you actually want to get lilies. Having lilies used up by tetra, aslyum & assize are awful IMO as well.

It's disappointing because astro gameplay is a lot more intuitive and fluid IMO ATM, but I do love white mage. I have a feeling we'll see quite a bit change for quite a few classes before omega comes out. Hopefully not after the raid tier. For people who care though white mage is amazing in PVP ATM.

[VanilleFang]

This is a whm who knows how to play, people dont understand if you never use your cd's they are worthless.

I use my CDs all the time. MAybe I can be a little more lenient on my Bene use but it's not very easy to keep up a tank who doesn't use CDs... which I've been getting a lot lately.

[EllieShadeflare]

TL;DR: WHM... could have been treated worse, but could be better.

Cross Role Crap: Things could have been far worse. Lucid Dream/Shroud of Saints gained a buff, Largesse makes up for the others' lack of healing buffs, and you can always take out or add Protect/Esuna/Eye for an Eye. The other options stink, other than Swiftcast.

Lillies: Not that bad, and could have been way worse. You're always gonna use a Cure/Cure II anyway, and if you're trying to big pull, trash will hit like BRICKS. At least this rewards you for using Cure/Cure II right, but it is definitely tacked on.

Skills: This is the legitimate issue here. WHM are gutted down to a mere 22 total skills (after consolidation), whilst everyone else has 26+. Giving WHM back Stoneskin and SS II would help things out, Divine Benison could have its effect changed to something and Confessions should proc at the same rate as Lillies. Another skill after that would put WHM at the same skills as the others.

[Kethic]

I got to i314 yesterday, have farmed most of the combat content at this point. In general, WHM is manageable. I feel outclassed by AST in almost every instance, but it's a pleasure to run with AST or SCH, as they shore up the areas we can't really handle easily. They have more options for handling mechanics in interesting ways, whereas we're expect to just power through them in a traditional manner, which seems to be what they really meant when they said WHM Pure Healer.

I spend a lot of time DPSing. Most of my time, in fact. But we only have 3 dps buttons. I would trade Confessions and Plenary for another DPS tool any day, if that's the role they want for us. The rest of the kit flows moderately well, and DB is quite useful in very specific situations, mostly in dungeons or during predictable large damage on non-tanks.

Overall, Meh+1. I don't expect we'll see any drastic changes, but I'm holding out hope for a Confessions/Plenary change.

[Ceasaria]

If Divine Benison didn't have a lily requirement, I would use it for every tankbuster. But gating it behind RNG or a required cure II... just really limits its potential.

It's different from a stoneskin or a shield.
Your co healer (Ast or Sch) will use shield before a tank buster.
Divine Bension is for after a tankbuster.

The way how it's designed (locked behind Lilies), I use Cure II + Divine Bension after a tankbuster, not before.
It's a good maneer to prevent the tank to die with an auto-attack, or other damages after.

[loreleidiangelo]

My raid cohealer is displeased with the changes to WHM for the first time since she started playing mid-ARR. She normally loves the class and has never really fussed over things like "meta" or "utility", just played the damn game, so her displeasure with the 4.0 WHM additions is pretty telling to me that they weren't well thought-out or were implemented poorly, at the very least. In particular she wasn't really happy with the lilies addition, and said aside from Benison use don't really affect WHM gameplay in an interesting manner.

Haven't leveled it myself enough to comment, but those are the comments offered by someone who has mained it at the raid level since like 2.4.

[EZ5902]

Been playing WHM to 70 and i gotta say Divine Benison is crap, it either uses 1 or all your lilies, it should use 1 and 1 only, or the protection it provides should scale with how many lilies are used, preferably I'd rather it use 1, oh and the time should be increased too, 30 seconds atleast.

Next, Plenary Indulgence, confession are rubbish since they go on the healed member, could heal that member, get a stack, and member would be fine and stack becomes useless, confessions should go on the WHM, stack should last longer, 1 minute, but the recast of it should also be increased too, 2 minutes, I'd say.

Not sure if this is unbalanced but that's my say.

I also thought we would get more role slots as we got to 70, we don't, still 5...
So 2 of these slot don't really give healers much choice because we need protect and esuna, infact a third is forced upon WHM and possibly AST, Lucid Dreaming (why change the name anyway, Shroud of Saints was better), yes AST has Ewer but you can't really rely on the card when you want it.

What does everyone think?