Suggestions to Buff/Change WHM

[Muziko]

First of all I want to say I am very pleased that you all were on board with the suggestions. Even if it is a bit early to tell since we haven't seen all the skills but up to what 64 was it? Even still, I hope that SE sees some of these suggestions and quite frankly just ganks'em to use in game. I haven't had the pleasure of reading each of your posts today cause work and attempting to be an adult. Still, first thing tomorrow I will check all these out and post some more in depth ideas when I get home.

-Keyo Reinhart

P.S. On a side note trying to adjust your posts on the mobile side of this forum is pretty garbage to me :X

[manamoppet]

Some few suggestions:

Stoneskin/Quake
Have it sort of be like Titan's heart phase and detonate the stoneskin to cause aoe damage around the player who has the stoneskin applied. Still protects against damage while barrier is up. Would be great for both solo and group content.

Cure III
Should also grant confession like Cure I&II. As raid and primal utility this would help with shielding a bit of damage like AST does with their Collective Unconscious. Rescue doesn't pull more than one person, but often there are more than one melee/mage standing in an aoe. Healing at or after a party buster doesn't help if they get a k.o. from having no shield to reduce damage.

Sacrifice
Sacrifice 50% of max mp and all lillies to multiply the next single-target ability (like the BRD Barrage skill). Reduce cooldown time of Thin Air by xx%. Edit: To clarify, single-target ally or enemy.

Sanctify/Sublimate
Next healing spell grant confession to valid targets and one lilly to self.

It would be nice to be able to have a small variation of Holy to shoot forward too, like a Fluid Aura II, since damage has been/will be removed from Fluid Aura.

[BigMedic]

1. Revert med2 to 2.0 status 15 duration 100 pot regen
2. buff pom 30s duration 90s recast
3. passive lily gain every 10s
4. single target holy nuke spell with pot of 200 500 900 base on # of lily
5. spell/ability to target/self buff to recover % damage taken as hp, can be multiple hit or single
6. Thin Air to up 15s from 12s, 12 is just weird and too short

[Snat]

One thing I would like to see with Lilies (other people got into better ideas how to get them) is something you could use them on outside of resetting a cool down you are timing anyway.

Imagine having a spell like Quake which is buffed depending on the amount of Lilies you have.

[Sieben79]

Overlooked this Topic, so I'm posting my little suggestion here:

I would like it if the lilies regenerate over time. Each 10s one lily so that we have after 30 seconds three lilies. This would be disable the RNG and wouldn't affect the players playstyle.

Give us a buff (for the whm only) if we have have a certain amount of lilies for a dam% and heal% buff (1=5%, 2=10%, 3=15%) and add something special to the skills if it use up the lilies and not something cheap like CD reduce.

As for the Confession stacks: Every Spell at usage should grant a rng stack. I don't like to track down the stacks on partymembers, the stacks should be shown at the players bar. So if we have gathered a certain amount of stacks, make Plenary Indulgence availbe to use. And for the damagedealer among us add a second lvl 70 skill: Mega Holy! (use also Confession stacks)

[Thomias]

I have always wanted to capture the WHM's role in working with the Elementals so here is my idea.

Commune with the Elementals:
3 second cast time
gain one lily
for each lily add a stack of refresh on self (10 for each)

Blessing of Earth:
Consumes lilies
A damage reduction spell that works like protect for party at increasing duration with the amount of lilies used so like 30 secs 60 secs 120sec

Blessing of Wind:
Consumes lilies
increases Skill and Spell speed for party at increasing duration
10 secs 12 secs 15 secs

Blessing of Water:
Consumes lilies
AOE esuna and debuff shield at increasing duration bla bla bla

i think this woudl give us back some of what we lost to the cross role (Protect and Esuna) And give us a little utility while still keeping in the feel of the WHM. Though this does not keep with the pure healer thing.

[Akiudo]

Considering it's quite apparent how the lilly system wasn't really thought through here is my idea what would work better, constructive feedback always welcome.

First things first Baseline changes to the lilly system
Either Make them timed or alternatevly

Raise the procc chance on cure, you shouldn't want to use cure, but if you do it should be usefull

Give a chance to procc on other heals, at least on casts, skills can stay excluded, say
for example 40% on cure I/II , 15% on Medica I/II, Cure III and Regen, numbers are a question for the balancing team, just want to get accros the point


About the lillys themselves this are changes i would think would work out a lot better then what we currently get

Drop the cooldown reduction crap, it simply doesn't work with fights scripted out as hard as the ones in final fantasy, and this isn't even saying anything about the fact that if i want to use it on assize but need a benediction right now it gets wasted.

Let the Lillys Strengthen things in a way that is usefull, with an adequate production of lillys (see changes to procc further above) you would have let's say a stack of three lillys a minute on average, this lillys could then enable you to do one of the following

Divine benison (think the cooldown is to high but for arguments sake let's keep the original 60 seconds)
uses up your lillys, shield the target for 10/20/30% depending on number of lillys used

Planetary Indulgence Raise the cooldown as to not make it spammable, say 60 seconds, drop the whole confessions thing, lower the potency accordingly
Uses up Lillys, 200/300/400 aoe heal depending on stacks

Third Skill with mega awesome mccool name 60 seconds cooldown
Uses up Lillys Raises Skill/Spellspeed by 1/2/3% for 30 Seconds
yes, basically fay wind whatever, would work out as a damage buff while costing lillys which could be used on the now at least decently usefull other skill so it's a trade of a comfortable and good whitemage would have to decide on making or not, but it would open up the possibility without really beeing useful, especially considering every other healer get's ways to do what a whitemage does (raising heal output, dishing out the big guns) while whitemage barely steps into the realm of the other twos strengths.

Like i said, feedback is welcome, numbers are to be ignored please as they are basically placeholders to get the idea across, this factor could be balanced in any way the devs deem fit, i just wanted to show a way that i feel lillys could be a nice addition to an existing toolkit instead of the current system that seems counterintutive to healing smart instead of simply healing often

[Gemina]

Literally the only thing I think they need to change before SB hits is the duration on confession stacks. They should last until Divine Benison is used. This should really be a given.

I am on board with getting WHMs to cast cure and cure 2 more, and perfectly fine with lily procs being tied to them, but I also think they should be tied to medica with an increased proc rate. We can't be forced to use several gcds when multiple players need to get healed. However, I believe this is something that needs to come in a future patch. I also think they should have an increased proc rate when healing targets other than the tank, and the same goes for confession proc rates.

I see the lily mechanic as nothing more than a race against our CDs that the devs are being careful with. I believe that if they truly want us to cast cure 1 and 2, they will have to reduce the potency and/or duration on our regens. They haven't done that yet. I think they want to see it in our hands, and hopefully get it to where it should be with as few patches as possible.

Other than that, I am simply waiting.

[SaitoHikari]

Uh, yikes, I didn't even realize you posted long before I made mass revisions to the wall of ideas a few hours ago (which you can see in the post above). Yeah, it clearly needs a lot of fine tuning, which is why I asked for you to go through this since you came up with something simple yet effective. I know there's a fine line between just altering something to be workable and something that's way off into the realm of dreams that will never happen, but I figure now's a better time than any when the developers are clearly scanning these forums for ideas now. Whatever the devs roll with absolutely should be as future-proof as possible, because having WHMs go through a Bard-style rework come next expansion isn't very desirable.

- Regarding Jagged Shield, the amount of damage inflicted is always 50% of the target's max HP at the time of casting, hence the wording 'when the shield is broken'. But making it scale off of the caster's HP instead of the target is a better idea in the long term, because as you mentioned, the whole scaling Warrior favorability stuff. And as for Granite Wall, I wanted to give WHMs a type of utility that the other healers didn't have, and letting them essentially give a Holmgang to a DPS or another healer at risk of dying to a major mechanic (due to weakness or too many vulnerability stacks) is certainly unique instead of giving them another generic damage absorption/reduction spell.

- Merging Granite Wall and Jagged Shield together probably isn't a good idea. It's a bit contradictory to reward the party with bonus damage for having the healer let someone's HP drop to 1. Then again, I don't even remember what I had in there before I mass revised it.

- Regarding Water, to be honest, I wasn't sure HOW I really wanted the Water Blessing stacks to be gained. At first, I left it to just casting Cure/Medica-type spells 2 times, then I decided to increase it to 3 and expand it to include Medica II crit ticks and Holy, considering the problem with the current lily system is that the rest of WHM's toolkit is already designed to discourage casting Cure/Cure II as much as possible. On second thought, it'd be better to simplify it by axing the Holy generation effect and reduce the amount of Cure/Medica-type spell usage down to 2. The MP reduction effect should probably be axed too - considering I just thought to have Thin Air become part of the Wind mechanic.
(I also thought about having Fluid Aura and Tetraglammation generate Blessing too, but the last thing we need is to give WHMs even more of a reason to knockback enemies away from the pack in dungeons, and Tetraglammation isn't something that should be carelessly spammed.)

- I replaced Vital Aura with Reflect, because I realized a crit shield/debuff/knockback blocker is just way too situational, and whenever it'd be useful, it'd turn WHM into a required class for the fight. Plus Reflect is an iconic spell. When I mentioned future-proofing, I wanted to set up a framework to introduce other iconic spells in the future, like Quake and Flood.

- Regarding Wind, I struggled with deciding how many stacks there should even be in the first place, and settled on 15 since Aero III will generate crit ticks far more often as there are more enemies in a fight (not to mention that Aero III + Tornado during a large pull will probably result in Rage of the Wind being activated repeatedly in a VERY short amount of time). I thought it'd also be a reasonable enough number for single target fights since Aero II ticks would be thrown into the mix as well, whereas Aero II single target spamming isn't very feasible in mob packs. I decided to toss in Regen here because it's essentially considered a wind-aspected spell already (or at least I think it is), and it IS a single target heal over time effect. (By this logic, Medica II should probably count too, but it's a group healing spell and the last thing everyone needs is to have WHMs needlessly generating massive amount of emnity on themselves during large pulls for the sake of squeezing out extra DPS because... Reasons.)

- I originally was thinking of having Tornado having a debuff-detonate type effect like BLM's Thunder procs. What made me decide against it was that it'd pretty much be straight up broken (unless it's turned into a single target spell, which goes against what it actually is in the first place), for healers aren't really supposed to have THAT much damage. WHMs already have the highest personal damage output of all the healers already. To be honest, the current iteration of Tornado is just like that because I wasn't really sure what to do with it besides having it be a small DPS boost in single target fights and a major mob-wrecker in large pulls. An Iron Jaws type effect does sound neat though. Actually, on second thought, it's better, because it'd give us room to bump the potency of the spell up to like 150 or something and reduce the cooldown to 20 seconds (so WHMs don't end up with a Rage of the Wind buff that they can't spend at all throughout the entire buff duration because both Tornado and Thin Air are still on cooldown, and Font of Creation was designed to be used with wind stacks but BEFORE you generate enough to lose them all and gain Rage of the Wind instead).

- Font of Creation... Admittedaly, I just wanted something to tie all three elements together, but this definitely needs a lot of tweaks. Applying blessings to other players seems really complicated.

That said, I'm grateful you decided to humor me, and I hope this was as educational to everyone else as it was to us, ha. There's always many factors to consider in skill/ability design. It is so much harder than it looks.

EDIT: On second thought, the Wind part especially needs to be reworked, because I just realized you're not really going to see Tornado within a reasonable timeframe when you're playing solo. Which, in hindsight, makes the whole lily system feel even worse than it already is. Every other job gets reliable ways to use all of their tools at their disposal for use in solo content. White Mage currently cannot.

[ty_taurus]

The idea behind the merged Granite Wall and Jagged shield was that it was no longer an immunity, but a shield that worked off your own VIT stat, not the target's to avoid it showing favoritism to WARs. I'm not diving deep into calculations for this kinda thing, but it would start off on the lower end of the spectrum and get stronger the more Earth Blessings are on your team. When that shield breaks, that's when Earth Blessing would appear on that target.

You mentioned an issue of dealing too much damage with the idea of a detonate on Tornado, but if you're dealing 50% of your target's max HP as damage, and you put that on a tank with 40k... that's a 20k nuke you're doing as a WHM. I can understand not realize that that's damage caused by the WHM, but it's your action.

As for reflect, while I don't think that could be a broken ability if balanced correctly, I really don't see it as water element. That's more generic healing powers kinda stuff.

As for the complication of Blessings... if each blessing has one specific ability that can trigger it, and it stays on the targets until used, I don't think it would be too complex. The effects are pretty straightforward, and the flexibility to decide what blessings go on who, and what effects Plenary Indulgence could trigger applies some strategy that doesn't necessarily punish novices while also allowing veterans to shine.