Thread: WHM wishlist for 5.0

Originally Posted by Sebazy

My biggest wish is that SE will hire a job designer that is specifically experienced with playing all 3 healers at both mainstream content and the highest levels of play aka early savage and ultimate progression. Without this, I'm not especially optimistic. I'm still pretty salty about just how much of a step back 4.0 was for healers in general. The state of the media preview was somewhere between unforgivable and plain embarrassing for a game that's 4 years old.

Savage Sebazy, I like it. Though I guess swimming in the kiddie pool that is this game's healer design for 5-and-a-half years is enough to wear anyone down.

Tbh I think if they're going to stick with this healing-lite gameplay that focuses more on DPSing and rDPS buffs the devs should integrate it better. Let your DoTs buff magic damage on the boss so casters are less of a meme. Let your filler nukes enhance your next healing spell or something. Something that just FEELS a lot better than, "I'm casting this damage spell because I have nothing else to do".

Also, give AST and WHM stuff like Disable/Enhanced Virus back so stacking that makes SCHs less mandatory for raid content. Then the devs can delete the monstrosity that is AST Sects and focus on giving them some new functional healing style.

AOE Divine Benison for WHM would also be legit, and tie into this goal. Giving Asylum the 10% damage reduction that CU has would also help.

I posted this in another thread, but this seems like a better place for it.

Give Whm Misery and Solice Stances.

With Solice active whm non regen cures (basically just Not regen and Medica 2) now grant a shield for 25% of the health healed, Esuna becomes AOE And Whm passively gets 5% damage taken reduction.

With Misery active heals grant a buff for 10 seconds that boosts Crit and Direct hit rates by 1, 2, 3% each (Based on tiers). Holy Imposes a 2% increased damage taken on the target for 10 seconds and stone 4 has a 50% chance of a guaranteed Crit and instant cast when an Aero DOT crits.

Both passively Boost healing potancy by 5%

I don't honestly think any of that is too powerful. And it fits into the Hardcore healer or DPS stances that Cleric's Stance user to provide. And would make whm stand out a bit from the other healers.

Plenary Indulgence was always useful if you aren't one of those healers that feel the need to 100% everyone immediately after every raid-wide.

WHM is a job that is designed around two things: regens and and burst heals over short periods.

Plenary Indulgence (as well as Cure III and Thin Air) are designed around this play style. Where other healers work by either preventing damage or healing it up immediately via pre-set stars, WHM is about ignoring damage until right before it needs to be healed. This compiles your heals from the previous raid-wide and the incoming raid-wide together into one heal session, all of which can be covered by Thin Air, and all of which contributes to Confession stacks.

Example:

After the first Tidal Wave on O9S, do not heal. Instead, wait a couple seconds, use Thin Air, and stack on the stack point. As Chaos begins to cast Umbral Slash, cast Cure III twice to 100% everyone leading into Umbral. You now have two PI stacks. You can then cast a third Cure III or Medica II as Umbral's damage lands, netting you three PI stacks within Confession's 10s duration, allowing you to follow with a 3-stack PI to heal the rest of the damage.

Because of this, the 30s Confession was never needed. Now that they have caved and extended it, however, more windows open up where you can use Plenary Indulgence at 2 or 3 stacks without compiling heals, or where compiling heals isn't an option.

Originally Posted by NocturniaUzuki

WHM is a job that is designed around two things: regens and and burst heals over short periods.

In the current state of the game, for me it does not make sense at all. It's either two big damages back to back that any combination of two healers can work on (and by doing so, avoiding to rely on only one healer- which is the poitn of having two healers), or big damage and downtime, where a Medica II / Aspected Helios / Eos regen's name I forgot will be enough.

"Burst heal" is the problem for me. It's highly situational, and yet again, a well timed Earthly Star / Indom + Helios or Medica will do it perfectly, negating the use of two Cure III for instance.

Originally Posted by Mansion

In the current state of the game, for me it does not make sense at all. It's either two big damages back to back that any combination of two healers can work on (and by doing so, avoiding to rely on only one healer- which is the poitn of having two healers), or big damage and downtime, where a Medica II / Aspected Helios / Eos regen's name I forgot will be enough.

"Burst heal" is the problem for me. It's highly situational, and yet again, a well timed Earthly Star / Indom + Helios or Medica will do it perfectly, negating the use of two Cure III for instance.

Two healers is always overkill though. If you're taking two high-skill healers into a raid in the first place, the usefulness of every GCD spell in the game is negated. Two excellent healers who are genuinely working together to build a duo rotation can basically remove all GCD heals from their rotation just by working together to build an oGCD rotation between the two of them to cover all incoming damage. This is where those extremely high DPS healer runs come from. The healers literally waste no time on GCDs, and instead do nothing but cast offensive spells while working together to cover all the healing solely with oGCDs.

Every healer can also solo heal, though, which is really where actually having to use an entire healer kit comes into play. MP sustain also actually comes into play, which is another benefit of the burst heal approach, since compiling heals into Thin Air time (and using a 3-stack PI instead of an extra Cure III) massively reduces MP strain. There are a lot of windows to use compiled healing. Any raid-wide damage that occurs in quick succession, or is heavy enough that the entire Medica II regen duration doesn't top the party off, is viable for compiled healing. You can also stretch out the compilation. This happens a lot on O11S. For example, after the second big fists, I will Medica II, but won't top the party up entirely. Then, heading into the next Flamethrower combo, I will wait until just before Flamethrower goes out to top up the party with Medica (1 confession), then reapply Medica II and use 2-stack PI instead of 1. With the new 30s confession duration, I could actually net all 3 stacks, so it's a nice enough change. But it was never necessary to make PI useful.

Originally Posted by NocturniaUzuki

Meow.

Yeah, I follow you there. But, there is a gap between healing in O11S or the book phase in O3S and in O10S or O6S for instance.

Of course, Plenary is useful. But the 10s duration on Confession made it very niche for those few situations you metion (I guess Heartless Angel into Ultima from Kefka would allow it too) and hard to use outside of those situations, while the 30s duration makes it more manageable. You can almost keep it up for 1min30, and get a powerful free heal at the end of this duration (I guess Seiryu is perfect for that with his 5th element nicely spaced out). This is more in line with how 80% of the raid damage works than those isolated healing checks we are discussing.

do people not realize that Water base aether are a No No for white mages

I'm curious. To the people who want Stoneskin back, have you played WHM in ARR? Or even HW for that matter?
Stoneskin was horrible in every iteration it went though. First Stoneskin was slow to cast and have awful returns in general. Stoneskin II was simply a preshield.
HW Stoneskin was actually laughable. Like, I'm pretty sure I took that thing off my hotbar eventually.
Divine Benison is what Stoneskin should have been long time ago, and even then was at risk of being garbage until SE had the sense to take it off the Lily system.

I see absolutely no reason why anyone would want Stoneskin back when there are a million other things WHM could benefit from.