Consolidated White Mage 4.0 Feedback Thread

[Belhi]

The reality is that people don't want their Job to be the less useful one and the problem with a pure healer focus is that once you can heal something, any additional heals you can pull off is wasted. More to the point since even generally you have setups with one off healer and one main healer, assuming AST can still pull its weight as a Main Healer, its heals will be the amount you really need to do the content which will make any additional heals WHM bring wasteful. AST on the other hand will still bring its buffs.

WHM might turn out to be great and they might have solved much of the issue with healing. However I haven't seen anything to convince me they are actually addressing the issues present and I don't have much faith the devs have really come to grasp what the issues with healing design is at the moment.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

I don't have much faith the devs have really come to grasp what the issues with healing design is at the moment.

Honestly, I'm thinking the same thing. They would NEVER have kept up with a pure healer if they saw how useless it is as a competitive healer.

Unless they want WHM to be the only non competitive job in the entire game...Which is just silly to think about.

[Kabzy]

I hope they do remove Stoneskin and replace it with a instant shield, the likes SCH and AST get.

SCH don't get an instant shield actually, only AST has access to that. If they give it to WHM too it would be rather odd if the shielding healer was the only one without access to an instant shield.

If anything, they should remove it from AST. Having an instant shield gets you out of too many situations easily, and with Cleric Stance no longer being a barrier, there really is no reason for such a powerful tool to belong to any healer imo.

[SpookyGhost]

Ideally, all healers compositions should be equally rewarding, but let's be honest this is wishful thinking. No matter what SE does, one composition will always be deemed better than the others and hence get the meta stamp.

I think a lot of people get confused on this. The goal isn't to have all 3 be exactly equal, but to have the difference between the best and the worst be minimal enough that you can bring either without harming your team by a huge margin. An easy example of what bad balance looks like is PLD in A4S - you're actively making progression significantly harder for your team by not bringing a DRK due to the insane amount of magic damage in that fight. That's what we want to steer clear of, if one job is slightly better than the other in some particular fight then that's not an actual big deal.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

I think a lot of people get confused on this. The goal isn't to have all 3 be exactly equal, but to have the difference between the best and the worst be minimal enough that you can bring either without harming your team by a huge margin. An easy example of what bad balance looks like is PLD in A4S - you're actively making progression significantly harder for your team by not bringing a DRK due to the insane amount of magic damage in that fight. That's what we want to steer clear of, if one job is slightly better than the other in some particular fight then that's not an actual big deal.

Another good example is Summoner and Black Mage this tier. Neither were considered "meta" yet many groups at even the hardcore level ran with one. Both jobs brought acceptable utility and were extremely powerful. Monk lagged somewhat below but found a home on the lighter midcore scene and below. We'll always have a "meta," but job disparity should be closer to what Casters were this tier. Currently, White Mage is just a weaker Astro.

[javid]

We can't know what the new healing balances will be. But it is extremely possible SE can make whm a pure?healer and not make it overwhelming nor make it all together less efficient. The issue we have here is presuming that, "it just can never work." They can make it work and with community feedback from the optimizers will help make it work. So instead let's talk about how a pure healer could optimally got fit in the meta. Then compare what we expect woth the actual and constantly provide the feedback needed for proper balance.

[Sanghelios]

W...e.

A pure Healer wont fit the meta in this game and thats simply because there wont be enough incoming damage that a pure healer is really mandatory. AST/SCH always needs to be viable too and so that setup has to be able to clear content too. Imagine they would increase the incoming damage so much that every group would need a pure healer aka whm to get through healing spikes. It would be another situation than what we have now, because now every healer is able to get through all the floors just fine, just that whm lacks utility but none of the healers is absolutely mandatory. A mandatory pure healer in the meta would end up throwing either AST or SCH out of the endgame literally entirely.

So yea, if whm is going to be the pure healer with little utility, then there is no chance for being in meta over the whole next expansion. Utility is everything that matters.

[javid]

You don't know for a fact any of the things you just stipulated.....thats been my point. Hocus it you know what the new game inc raid dmg will be? How is it you know the kind and the totality of utitilites ast and sch will have in the new game? How is it you know what version of "pure" healer the new game is bringing? These are all the things you're assuming..... we'd be more productive speculating on the type of pure healer they might implement and the corresponding content and co healers required to make a pure healer work.

[Sanghelios]

Well some things are obvious tho. Yoshi specially said that whm will be pure healer, so its clear that ast/sch wont be pure healers and so on they will have more utility than whm. Content wont be so hard that a whm is absolutely mandatory so they are out of the meta. Surely there is not much known yet about all the skills but this thing is pretty much confirmed already. Feel free to quote this in some months.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

From 3.0, we can derive that a pure healer in their eyes is a healer that doesn't bring any offensive utility. Whatever utility they could potentially bring, would be defensive, and in a game that's heavily catered to an offensive playstyle, that's already a downside.

Take this, and add the fact that all healers have to heal for around the same amount AND be able to just as easily heal all content with any composition, and we have our current issue: That a healer that focuses on nothing but healing and defensive utility can never match healers that heal just as well while offering decent defensive AND enourmous offensive utility.

See the issue? Every healer can do everything that WHM can and more. WHM can just do healing, and it is only slightly better, and I mean very slightly, like a 10 potency difference.