Whm

[NobleWinter]

A 20% reduction is pretty nice when you're desperate for abilities. That aside, I wanna mention that after giving it much thought I feel like Plenary Indulgence had really good intentions. White Mages can over heal a lot and tend to in practice. As your skill level rises though you become more aware of how you generate enmity through Healing and Plenary Indulgence seems to be the answer to that at higher tier levels. It allows you to top people off without investing in another full Medica 1 or 2. It is really only as useful as you make it because there is no reason not to use it constantly paired with Medica to top people off and avoid the MP cost and over heal of Medica II. I think this skill just requires more thought than traditional overhealing calls for so it gets overlooked. WHM has no small group heal. It allows you just enough potency to top off the party or can undo a near wipe if your cohealer has died and you are pumping out heals. It is the necessary nuance White Mage was missing all along.

[Bourne_Endeavor]

A 20% reduction is pretty nice when you're desperate for abilities

Except there will never be a scenario where you need your abilities to come up faster. Mass dungeon pulls will be dead long before it matters. And you will map your oGCD for specific uses in Savage, not fling them around willy nilly. The cooldown reduction is laughably small without three lilies, and it's only mildly decent on a couple spells with three. Regardless, you aren't going to spam Cure II just for lilies because that's inefficient healing. Any good WHM will tell you lilies are nearly worthless.

[NobleWinter]

Mass Dungeon Pulls and Savage are not for low skill and low gear healers. In a leveling dungeon you can get a lot of mileage out of the cool down reduction and this is where it was intended to shine. WHM was designed like a tricycle and everyone wants to ride it like Kawasaki. Luckily, it can perform well in top tier content but its made primarily to assist a struggling healer in a struggling party. The fact it doesn't emphasize DPS with any tie to lilies is intentional. The fact it rewards cure means they actually expect some people to spam cure and it happens. It may not be satisfying to look at your traits and gauge and realize they are meant for someone of low skill to learn and succeed but it is what it is.

[number473]

I don't think we are going to see any changes to WHM before the next expansion and that is because the class is okay. Well, I should say that the class is fine, but it is also completely broken. There are class mechanics that don't work at all about the class, but the class still functions because all of it's numbers have been pushed up, so things seem fine. The end result is a class that feels fine (even good) to play but is still really deficient in a lot of ways. It is the healing class with the fewest skills, but it is also the healing class with the most dead skills and traits.

When it comes to lilies I think they need to be completely deleted. WHM doesn't need a mechanic like this and as it is implemented at the moment they are completely irrelevant to how you play the class. The don't offer gameplay choices and they don't really do much beneficial. Compare this to aetherflow which is a resource which you have to manage and which gives you many choices as far as what you want to use it on.
So, we have the idea that WHM is the "beginner" or "simple" healer. White mage has already done quite a lot to differentiate itself from the other classes in terms of its toolkit in the expansions: whereas scholar has its toolkit of aetherflow abilities, white mage has its selection of cooldowns which it can use along with its efficient regens to heal powerfully and effectively. Once a player has played to level 50 on white mage they are as prepared with the basics of healing as they are going to be, whether they stick with the class or switch to AST or SCH. I personally like the simplicity that is part of the job's design, but I don't think it needs to be a 3 button class even after 2 expansions.

Addressing plenary indulgence: there are a number of things wrong with this skill. At least it's not as completely worthless as the version that was originally revealed, but there are still a number of problems.
- It's really complicated and has a really long tooltip.
- It is usually complete overkill, except in the hardest fights in the game. In easier content like expert dungeons, it doesn't save needing to use a GCD aoe heal and so might as well not exist. Even in much raid content, a lot of healing is covered by your co-healer's oGCD aoe heal (indom/earthly star) so it is only effective when there is high damage repeatedly over a short period of time.
- Even though it is an oGCD skill, it still costs one or more GCDs to use. In other words it doesn't save you a cast. This is the same problem that lilies have, although at least the payoff is slightly better here.

So here are some potential replacements for it that I consider reasonable:
- Replace it with a 300 potency aoe ability with a 1 minute cooldown, no conditions attached. (Yes, I would be happy to have my level 70 capstone skill replaced by a skill that is just 1/3 of a skill that I already have)
- It becomes a trait that replaces medica/medica II/cure III with enhanced versions that have 150-300 more healing potency. Once used it goes on cooldown for 30-60 seconds, during which you cast the regular version. Cooldown can be shown on the job gauge. (Here we simplify an extra button into just making your existing skills more powerful)
- It becomes a skill that converts all remaining healing ticks into instant heals. (not sure how much I like this one)

[Bourne_Endeavor]

Mass Dungeon Pulls and Savage are not for low skill and low gear healers. In a leveling dungeon you can get a lot of mileage out of the cool down reduction and this is where it was intended to shine. WHM was designed like a tricycle and everyone wants to ride it like Kawasaki. Luckily, it can perform well in top tier content but its made primarily to assist a struggling healer in a struggling party. The fact it doesn't emphasize DPS with any tie to lilies is intentional. The fact it rewards cure means they actually expect some people to spam cure and it happens. It may not be satisfying to look at your traits and gauge and realize they are meant for someone of low skill to learn and succeed but it is what it is.

So they designed a gauge which gradually becomes worthless the better you are as a player? And White Mage is the only job with this "feature"? Jee, I wonder why White Mages are salty. It's almost like the system punishes you for improving. Furthermore, you are again overestimating this apparent value. You think DF tanks care about lower geared healers? I've had tanks do big pulls when I was still in Shire gear leveling through Stormblood dungeons. I kept them alive, albeit with a lot more Cure II spam. In fact, they were taking so much damage, I couldn't possibly hold Tetra until I had three lilies or wait to cast Divide Bension so I don't waste lilies on it over Assize. That tank needs healing immediately. And if tanks do small pulls, the damage is negligible to the point of irrelevance.

[Tridus]

As a powerhouse Healer WHM can use it's healing abilities more frequently as it's gimmick. This gimmick shines in terrible situations. If your tank is under geared and your dps think red areas are for an experience boost than the lillies suddenly do a lot and help out in every single pull in a dungeon. The play style "benefits" tremendously from lillies but its a class tuned for learning and progression while Scholar and Astro are tuned for high skill parties and speed skills. All Healers can clear all content but they clearly have different purposes in their design.

No, the gimmick shines never. In a terrible situation, it takes five minutes to get an extra use out of Assize if you only use it when you have maxed out lilies vs no lilies at all. And that requires you to get max lilies lined up for every Assize, which requires not using them on something else. So while you're busy in a terrible situation you need to actively acquire lilies and actively avoid using Tetra/DB/Asylum when Assize's CD is nearly up, five times, in order to get anything meaningful out of lilies.

It's a trap. Trying to do that is something newbie WHMs do, with the games encouragement. It's just a distraction that makes life harder for little benefit. Veteran WHMs will ignore the lilies entirely and simply use the toolkit on hand to deal with whatever is going wrong.

There's a reason why common advice for new WHM players is "hide the lily gauge and pretend it doesn't exist." That will give you better results than if you focus on lilies.

[NobleWinter]

Being able to use a skill 7, 12, or 3 secs sooner when you need it is a good thing. Lillies are definitely not something you need to concentrate on but that's why they are good for beginners to healing. Paying attention to AoEs and your party's health can be very overwhelming for a beginner. WHM is an introductory healing class. I keep refering to the intention of the design and no arguments here go contrary to what I have stated that intention is. Skilled players are not "punished" by the WHM traits. They are simply irrelevant. It would be great to have raid dps or a trait that was useful at high skill ceilings but those kinds of desires don't make WHM bad or ineffective. The entire system is not nearly as horrible as people make it out to be. Scholars live and die by Aetherflow charges and it takes a good amount of expertise to use them well. They are not meant for beginners. White Mages are. We're even talking about a game where Healer DPS isn't even factored into most encounters. So of course the traits favor healing. Of course they encourage "bad" play. They encourage you to try and succeed at healing in a game where anyone can be a Healer by switching their weapon.

[Tridus]

Except lilies are not newbie friendly. The game encourages you to do something that is suboptimal for a boost that doesn't matter. And as you get better, they actively get less and less relevant. That's silly.

The job gauges should not encourage poor play by their very design. WHM is the only one that does. That's clearly a big problem. That WHM works despite it is a testament to the strength of the rest of the kit, it doesn't exonerate the design of lilies. They may be irrelevant to skilled players, but they're actively detrimental to newbies by teaching them how to play poorly.

[loreleidiangelo]

Except lilies are not newbie friendly. The game encourages you to do something that is suboptimal for a boost that doesn't matter. And as you get better, they actively get less and less relevant. That's silly.

The job gauges should not encourage poor play by their very design. WHM is the only one that does. That's clearly a big problem. That WHM works despite it is a testament to the strength of the rest of the kit, it doesn't exonerate the design of lilies. They may be irrelevant to skilled players, but they're actively detrimental to newbies by teaching them how to play poorly.

As someone who dabbled with WHM a bit this last tier due to increasing frustration with the dullness of AST's healing kit, I agree with this. WHM has a great kit with arguably some really interesting tools, but lilies are not one of those "great tools" (Confessions could use some tweaks but I actually think they're okay as a concept). At best you'll get some shorter Assize CDs during dungeon pulls that don't really matter since there's travel time between mob pulls anyway. In a raid scenario I've only found one extremely niche use for them for God Kefka (first Heartless Archangel/heal to full phase) that I can easily work around for slightly more MP cost, and that's tailoring to my raid team in particular, which means it likely won't even be optimal for other people to replicate. As we saw with AST's old Spear card, CDR isn't a useful proc for anything in the game because of how scripted the combat is. Even AST's Lightspeed CDR on Dignity mostly goes ignored IMO because with the new Lightspeed buff you're lining it up with Celestial Opposition anyway. In a game where healing is more reactive maybe and events are less predetermined, having an ability up sooner would probably universally be a boon. But that's not how XIV is designed, and I'd like to see lilies given a rework. They should generate off of regen ticks or damage spells, pretty universal staples to playing WHM optimally, and they should do something meaningful based on stacks, such as flat potency increases (ie each lily increases the potency of lily-affected moves by like 10 or 20 per lily spent). Simple changes would make them feel a lot better to use, even if not insanely engaging.

[NobleWinter]

I've made plenty of suggestions about possible changes to WHM and lilies in this forum and we talk about it a fair bit in my free company as well. It's just that tying any healer trait directly to DPS is great for advanced players but a distraction to newer players. We commonly tell them to stick to just healing until they are comfortable with the roll so Im at a point where I can't advocate that for WHM anymore. Using Regen ticks for lilies encourages over healing too. Im of the mindset that cumulative cast time is the answer. For every 15 seconds you spend casting you should get a lily. This would make active players get rewarded which is subtle incentive to DPS. I would love to see Cure 3 get reworked so it's range expands further for each lily. 1 yalm added for 1 lily. 2 more yalms added to that for 2 lilies. 3 more yalms added for 3 lilies. Cure 3 would basically increase to 12 yalms after 45 seconds of casting which is still smaller than Medica by 3 yalms but way more useful. Aero and Regen wouldn't contribute any cast time to building lilies since they have none. This change would give you more flexible options without much stress and bring new life to a spell many WHM's ignore. Secret of the Lillies 2 would cause Cure 3 to deal a fixed amount of AoE damage at 20 potency to all enemies if any lilies were consumed adding an interesting component to WHM's DPS kit. It just grants efficiency to WHM play style and no headaches. Since WHM already has MP reductions tied to it's Cure Spells this would make the identity of WHM more solid.