Isn't it about time for WHM to get an AOE mitigation tool?

[Kabzy]

I'm not sure what relevance this has to the discussion, aside to say that comfort level plays a role in one's performance. It's not a particularly strong argument for balance unless you're simply trying to emphasize that things aren't awful.

I could be wrong, but the way I've read it is that their comment had nothing to do with balance per se but more about WHMs seclusion outside of progression. Exiled stated that WHM is only used for progression and then switched out, and I'm guessing Ghishlain's response was that somebody who mains and is comfortable with one job would probably still outperform the other even if it may theoretically be more optimal.

Edit: nvm, just read their post below. xD

As for your second point, you kind of highlighted it yourself. WHM is a powerhouse and that definitely shines during progression when people are more prone to making mistakes. They could go ham on the HPS, but you won't see that reflected in ... uhh ... data ... because that's simply not optimal.

You're right in that the difference is not huge, but there's no denying that things like Cure 3 made moves like Almagest a breeze, saving more GCDs to use for DPS. Benediction synergising with Holmgang saving you another 2-3 GCDs. These are just a few examples of the power WHM brings that AST/SCH simply cannot match. They can deal with it, but they can't match that level.

[Ghishlain]

I'm not sure what relevance this has to the discussion, aside to say that comfort level plays a role in one's performance. It's not a particularly strong argument for balance unless you're simply trying to emphasize that things aren't awful. A good X is better than a decent Y only points out that Y is not ridiculously overpowered, and it would be an even bigger cause for concern if that were the case.

Yep, this is actually my point entirely with this. If a low-skilled player on X job can do everything a mid-skilled player can on a Y job, that means X job is much more powerful than it should be and there should be some balance between the two.

In the current iteration of healers, we don't see that divide. They all contribute similar things in different ways. There are some divides there, yes, but it isn't the massive gulf that is there when you compare WHM vs AST in the 3.4 era when AST had better MP longevity, better raid utility, and basically equal DPS.

Now that we're at the current state, people shouldn't consider swapping out healers to something that is deemed more optimal unless the group is striving actively to reach the absolute heights of speed killing.

[edit] Just edit this point a bit more for clarity's sake. In this discussion I'm not speaking towards job imbalance but more speaking towards an individual's contribution to their group. Even if the current meta is AST > SCH > WHM, a WHM who's comfortable on their job but not comfortable with either SCH or AST will most likely contribute more to their party than if they made the swap.

We're all not world first raiders or speed kill specialists. We all have different ranges of skill sets and abilities. Even if AST in theory outclasses SCH and WHM, it's still possible for the individual's skill and comfort with WHM to contribute more to their raid versus playing AST.

You also still talk about massive WHM throughput. I've yet to see people really prove this. It usually ends up talking about spamming cure 3 and timely PIs. When looking at logs with standard comps for healing, often only super high on bad attempts where everything is going wrong and healing throughput is really shown, WHM appears the most often but it is far from dominating the lists. Everything I've seen shows an advantage to WHM, but to this day I've yet to see "Massive WHM throughput" outside of Cure 3 spam despite it being thrown around all the time. Massive implies it absolutely stomps the competition. It does not appear to.

My definition of throughput is HPS spikes versus total healing potential. Diurnal AST has a higher healing potential cap versus WHM because their heals are overall stronger than WHM. However, AST's weakness in this regard is the fact that they're mostly constrained to their GCD in order to actually spike heal. Essential Dignity and Earthly Star from AST vs Tetragrammaton, Divine Benison, Benediction, Assize, and Plenary Indulgence from WHM. This means WHM itself has better tools to clean up oopsies if called for. Not to say AST can't do that, but WHM has more potential for wipe recovery versus AST because of their MP longevity and multitude of oGCDs at their beck and call.

This means very little for raid groups already clearing Shinryu and Omega (Savage) and have the content on farm but has significantly more bearing on those groups who are commencing with progression. In some respects this is why I disagree with using log data as a total healing potential metric because you also can't measure potential on farm groups because, well, they're doing their best to minimize necessary healing and how they go about achieving that is different from group to group, not really giving a solid picture of the healing.

If you use Neo-exdeath player healing metric, you can see there are far more WHMs versus ASTs but I still don't think that's a fair judge either as we don't know the context of each individual group on the list either.

One will definitely find more mileage out of the WHM kit in less structured environments such as Rabanastre where mechanical slips can and will happen but it's also not to say going with SCH or AST makes you a weaker healer either. It just means you need to approach if differently too.

I personally don't think I used the term "massively" ahead, but correct me if I'm wrong in this regard. I do appreciate AST has stronger GCD heals while WHM has more oGCD heals and players should use the individual kits accordingly to their strengths.

=====

On your topic of Assize versus Reiryu heads in Shinryu, I have seen you state that earlier this week so I decided to try it last night while we're doing Shinryu. Here's the Twitch clips for it. Unfortunately, Assize doesn't seem to heal Reiryu's ; ;

I do think the worst part of the heal check is trying to target the adds in the final phase when the massive honking hit box of the boss is in the way, lol. While I don't think the mechanic is the most interesting of heal check, I can appreciate the developers going out to try something new. I hope this leads to better and different heal checks in the future.

And yes, I also do enjoy deleting an add outright with Benediction. lol.

[Erakir]

Snip about comfort levels

I can certainly agree with this, thank you for the clarification. I just don't want potential discussions to come to a complete stop because we're in a pretty decent state all around, but I definitely appreciate recognizing our current scenario as a reason not to go AWOL, and it's particularly important to recognize that we're not all going to be pushing perfect meta styles of optimization which can lead to different healing styles being needed in different groups - on top of everything about comfort level performance.

Snip about healing metrics

Do bear in mind, given the tools available at our disposal, the reason I looked at healing numbers themselves rather than speed kills was specifically to try and test this metric. Groups faring worse on their kills or pushing a solo-heal (ish, with two healers) kill is going to be a better metric of healing potential than completely optimized kills with healers doing their best to share loads as possible while putting out tons of damage. I also intentionally looked outside of Neo to see how things are faring in the other fights.

I completely agree that we're not going to get the full story, especially since wipes aren't there, and I really don't want to understate Cure 3's use in progression, myself, particularly as someone who used it all the time in the name of progression during the Gordias days. And of course, healing is always such a pain to really delve into with all the individual factors during every single fight. Throughput over an entire fight is indeed not burst throughput, and so much of our healing comes from Medica 2.

It also doesn't help my own data that I personally haven't been into Neo yet, due to our group's own situation. I'm fully confident we can, based on the actual time spent in hours on other fights, but life is life. It hurts that I can only go off what I read from others, here. I've seen a lot of nifty things SCH and AST can do in O3S and Exdeath that I find others tend to overlook when talking about raid stability.

Ultimately though I can't find myself disagreeing with you. I just worry about the general sentiment I've heard that WHM is some godly king of the healing world when it comes to progression that I see echoed off from time to time here, and I always want to make sure its particular strengths are not overstated, since ameliorating abilities to help push through those times when everyone has less limbs left than Raubahn in a fight aren't completely limited to WHM - I find a lot of them on SCH, actually. I feel like sometimes I need to go on snopes to look for someone willing to say a WHM can't pull a LB3 out of their posterior twice a fight, if that makes sense.

Also, unrelated, but while I'm here, I'm never going to like that benediction gets used so much for holmgang. Oh I completely understand it. Part of me just cringes everytime I see "Oh-shi" buttons relegated to planned uses like that, but that's simply the name of the game when it comes to optimization. I'm also slightly bitter that we've got a DRK rather than a PLD so we have the extra fun of dealing with living dead instead of hallowed, but that's unrelated to healer abilities really. Never really loved living dead's design, myself. Feel it could go down to 50-75% health needed healed as it is.

Snip about Reiryu's

Yeah, Sebazy corrected me here, too. It's sad. And I swear it's ridiculous how far away they can spawn in the final phase, too. Had a few times where we both thought we were done with 10s left or so and suddenly saw that one of those heads was just laughing 35y away at 1hp. I also appreciate them trying something different with it - I always like to see them branching out with encounter design.

Thank you for going out of your way to give it a shot!

Snip about forum editing

1000 character limit why ; ;


But *high five* back - I'm glad I share my wordiness with at least another here > > I could talk healing design in MMOs for days. It's something I really really enjoy doing, heh..

[Ghishlain]

Edit: Reading posts above, weeeeee

I know you haven't edited it in your comment yet but holy crap I think some of us are too good at walls of text. lol. *Random high fives*

[edit] I think I'm done trying to say what I'm trying to say since I tend to be too wordy and think too fast. lol >>;

[inhaledcorn]

They really should. It's impossible to achieve true healer balance unless all healers have access to the same, basic tools. In the case of healers it's: healing spells (single target and AoE - two levels), healing abilities (single target and AoE), DPS skills (DoT, single target, and AoE), and damage mitigation spells (single target and AoE). White Mage really should have Stoneskin I and II back, but reduce the cast time and MP costs to make them worth it.

Thematically, Stoneskin was also the "healing" Earth spell that WHM used (Cures are Wind aspected, and the healing abilities are Water aspected, I believe. Divine Benison and Plenary are probably Holy). If they fix the problem that "only Cure gives Lilies" design problem they decided to implement, then WHM's overall kit can feel more "complete".

But, blah-blah-blah homogenization. Y'all aren't complaining about WAR now having a team barrier like PLD has. In fact, you're more complaining that DRK doesn't have one.

[Miste]

But, blah-blah-blah homogenization. Y'all aren't complaining about WAR now having a team barrier like PLD has. In fact, you're more complaining that DRK doesn't have one.

This is the healer forum not the tank forum. So /shrug, I personally barely know what tanks even have in their toolkits as I don't really play them. Ain't no use complaining about tank stuff here imo xD

[Kacho_Nacho]

This is the healer forum not the tank forum. So /shrug, I personally barely know what tanks even have in their toolkits as I don't really play them. Ain't no use complaining about tank stuff here imo xD

Yeppers. We're just healers. We like healing so that's what we like to talk about.

Ain't nobody here but us healers. Ain't nobody here a' tall. Ain't nobody here but us healers...

[Miste]

Yeppers. We're just healers. We like healing so that's what we like to talk about.

Ain't nobody here but us healers. Ain't nobody here a' tall. Ain't nobody here but us healers...

heheheeeee xD

[Cabalabob]

Honestly I think they should just change secret of the lily 2 to make divine benison AoE when it consumes 3 lilies, I mean what a garbage level 68 skill, a 20% chance that something that happens about 20% of the time will proc a 5 second recast reduction on 2 already fairly short recast skills proced by a skill we rarely use? Come on... WHMs have been asking for an AoE mitigation tool for ages and we get that?

[Miles_Maelstrom]

Honestly I think they should just change secret of the lily 2 to make divine benison AoE when it consumes 3 lilies, I mean what a garbage level 68 skill, a 20% chance that something that happens about 20% of the time will proc a 5 second recast reduction on 2 already fairly short recast skills proced by a skill we rarely use? Come on... WHMs have been asking for an AoE mitigation tool for ages and we get that?

You think divine Beninson is garbage? What world do you live in?