Thread: WHM 5.0 First Impressions

Originally Posted by Wilford111

snip.

I didn’t say instant Cure II instant Medica are bad. They’re redundant. We already have those abilities. All they did was make it so we can use them every 30 seconds without a cast time or cost. Woo. /s This is fine for prog or leveling content, but any healer who understands a fight and the incoming damage doesn’t need two extra GCD’s to manage. It literally takes you out of your rhythm.

And yes, they WILL replace Cure II and Medica eventually.

Misery is a compensation, but only in a pack of mobs. On a single target it’s a loss. But again, I’m not even talking about DPS capabilities because that wasn’t my point to begin with.

Again, not talking about DPS, but I don’t consider pDPS to be raid utility. We’re a support class, we should be able to provide some sort of support.

I’m glad you’re happy with the blood lily mechanic. It feels clunky to me.

I’m complaining about not having any healing boosts PRE Asylum, when our only options are Cure I, II, III, Medica, Medica II, and Benediction. Notice, all of those except Benediction are GCD. Largesse/Divine Seal was an important ability to us in earlier content since we don’t have oGCD heals to weave. The extra boost of healing is essential in big pulls. That’s not a side. That’s a fact.

Not once in my comment did I argue for one side or the other. I merely explained why the changes have turned me off from the job, as you had requested. White Mage used to have a steady, flowing rhythm to it. That’s completely gone now.

If you want to talk DPS healer vs Pure healer, then fine. Every job in the game should have a more complex DPS rotation other than 211111111111111121... period. There’s no argument to be had there. I couldn’t give a flying fig if it’s one extra DoT in Aero III or an actual lore based elemental rotation. We still have to complete solo duties, and it’s boring AF. Yes, two dots with shorter, differing timers is still far more engaging than what we have now.

So I don’t know what else to say to you. The job doesn’t flow and it hasn’t been fun to play. Yes this my opinion and it’s subjective but you asked and I explained it.

Originally Posted by Reiryuu

I seriously don't get people like you. Why is it that because I enjoy playing healers and that I choose to be a healer does it mean that I cannot have a fun and engaging experience in all aspects of a game including solo play? It's 2019. We should be allowed to expect more from game designers than age old tropes from the 1980s. There are plenty of other games out there that do this, FFXIV should not get special consideration.

Thank you for this. This is how I feel.

The expansion slightly improved WHM (yay lilies are no longer completely useless), but even after SCH's massive nerf and AST being oversimplified, WHM is STILL the last in line of my choice of healers. This is not meant as slander against WHM mains, but I hate redundant skills and I hate overhealing, and WHM has too much of both for my taste. They should have made WHM have the ability to build a shield with its overhealing (say, to a max of 10% of the target's HP) and that would shore up the main weakness of WHM - that is no mitigation. But frankly, despite the great HoT and burst healing skills this class has, it's ultimately lost if people are at full health and there's a huge, unavoidable AOE coming. WHM can still do NOTHING to mitigate big hits... namely scripted boss AOEs or tank busters.

Not a fan of many of the changes for White Mage to be honest. I've levelled the job to 80, so here are my thoughts having played to cap.

1. Aero III is sorely missed.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here, we lost a lot of damage potential with this skill. Higher level enemies tend to stick around long enough to make those DoT's count, and Aero III was Aoe. Now we have to rely on Holy. While the MP cost of Holy is now more manageable, let's not pretend that the damage is anything to write home about. 130 potency is pretty weak, especially from a healer. Afflatus Misery is a one-off burst, and not even a very good one. As big as the numbers might seem to the untrained eye, it's actually pretty weak considering we can only pull it off after burning three lillies.

2. MP is harder to manage.
With the capped MP, we can cast Cure II ten times before we're drained. Oh, I'm well aware that we can and do regenerate MP which bumps this up to a figure closer to 14, but it's still lower than pre-expansion figures. Piety, which is supposed to benefit our refresh, has such a minimal effect that it's scarcely worth melding onto your gear (+400 piety gave +50 mp/tick). Lucid Dreaming saw its potency slashed from 80 to 50, almost half of what it was previously, which now means we now take twice as long to recover what we used to get. Assize has reduced MP regeneration to 5%. Refresh skills were removed from supporting DPS classes, and there's no more Mana Shift either.

3. The new heal-centric focus is just not engaging.
In their attempts to make healers focus on healing, they've ripped the heart out of the jobs. Raise now eats a quarter of my MP, which basically means I need to save Thin Air to cast it, and with Afflatus Solace being on GCD it's a pain to use alongside other cure spells. Lillies take a while to regen, and only regenerate IN COMBAT. That means there's literally no way to stock them up before a battle. It feels cumbersome an unwieldy. One positive is our AoE lilly skill. Arguably one of the few I can say has no major downside.

White Mage isn't bad but it doesn't feel as good as it did before the expansion. Diluting healers to a pure healing role just results in some very frustrating and un-fun moments.

I wish AS wasn't on the GCD because at least from the Qitana Ravel on I had tanks who'd want to do big pulls and be so damaged that popping everything else while still waiting for the my first lilly charge to pop was annoying. Also at least for me I have ended up spaming cure II more often because to me cure just didn't feel like it was really doing anything. Now, I know I probably have been just getting bad tanks, but having to use bene because their hp is just dropping that fast feels soo bad. Specially when it's before your first lily. After the ball has been rolling and you're just sitting on lilies goin could you get hit hard enough so I can use AS on yah so I can use Misery on this group? Otherewise Holy, Assize and Misery to me feels like things just melt.

Level 80 now, so let me gather my thoughts.

- Healing requirements haven't changed much if at all. Let's get that out of the way right away. Nothing has changed to any appreciable degree outside of the new car smell. New, varied mechanics are always appreciated, but their lustre will fade with time.

- Lack of Aero III hurts. A lot. Not even for the damage, but it was certainly nice. Keeping track of one DoT is simply less engaging than tracking two. Also for hearing/seeing different spell animations/effects.

- Solo content is pure, distilled tedium. Be it FATEs, overworld questing or solo duties. I struggle to understand why healer gameplay is expected to be so utterly pointless. I can just alt-tab out and play with one hand while reading messages on Discord in the vast majority of cases. This is ridiculous.

- Low level content is more of a chore than ever. Something is going to have to give eventually. Either the roulette system needs to change (eg dungeons are selected from the 10 or so levels below that of your lowest party member) or level sync needs to change. Anything 50 or lower is so mind-numbingly boring that I just want to instantly leave. Like it or not, this is a problem that needs serious addressing.

- new skills are pretty meh overall. From VFX to SFX to what they actually do. Not impressed with Cure II 2.0 and Medica 2.0. I sometimes have to double check if I cast Misery because I barely notice its visual effect, and it doesn't really make an impactful noise, especially when compared to how amazing Holy is on a VFX/SFX front. Worst offender is Temperance, which is just a recoloured magicked prism, giving the effect of Largesse (which was taken away from us, which in itself was already taken from us back when it was Divine Seal) with a wooden shield duct taped to it. As our capstone skill. Absolutely insulting. Could have at least made them look like actual angel wings.

- Lilies continue to promote poor gameplay decisions. It feels bad to sit on a time-gated resource, it feels bad to use that resource, it just feels bad. Not enough damage on boss fights to really require their use over your other tools, but in a big trash pull, blowing every single lily you have as soon as you can, even if it overheals, is the absolute best use of your GCD (so long as you can make a blood lily) because Misery's AoE damage is just that good. BLM has a time gated resource (Polyglot). The skills which make use of their resource are outright better than any option in their standard toolkit, so you don't feel bad about using them, unlike Misery when it comes to a single target fight (aka 3 Glares For The Price Of 4). We need something else to burn Lilies on.

- WHM doesn't have enough stuff to weave often enough that requires 3 new skills to do it with, which are perplexingly stuck behind a time-gated resource, two of which have limited use if you want to use them to their fullest potential (ie minimising overheal, especially when most of our oGCDs are for healing), and one which is further gated behind use of the other two. I guess this is where they put Secrets of the Lily II. Someone on WHM design really loves double layered gating. All we needed was one skill we could use at will with a lower-than-GCD cast time. Not this clunky mess. Doesn't feel great to clip Dia but it's more flexible than any of the Afflatus skills.

- Assize needs to be put onto the charge system so that you can use it more effectively since two of its three functions serve you better by casting it as soon as it comes up, so it will be available sooner. This is another issue related to the inflexibility of time-gated resources.

- WHM's mana economy is ridiculously good. Thin Air is as fantastic as ever. Assize's mana nerf was uh, unexpected (especially after its MP recovery was already nerfed via the mana cap) but sure, okay. Lucid is theoretically more potency over the same duration (50 v 80 pot over 21 seconds, so 350 pot/60s versus 560 pot/120s) than it used to be, but again, further compounded by the mana cap. Raising is about the only thing that really punches WHM in the gut hard. Had a couple of alliance raids where people kept dying. It was hell.

In short, more of the same, except a bit more boring.

Healers or content design needs an actual rework. Since content design is unlikely to change (which is fine, content design is pretty okay for the other two roles, and enough people already struggle with the difficulty set how it currently is), it falls to changing how healers work. Why do we not have DPS rotations that aren't broken by our healing toolkit? Why does our healing toolkit not combo with anything? Why do we not have a healer based on a skill priority system (ie like bard) rather than a rotation based one? There are so many routes they could take to make healers play uniquely.

Instead we have healing that isn't engaging. DPS that isn't engaging. Just a limp noodle on both sides.

Originally Posted by Gemina

TBH, current Aetherflow IS discount Aetherflow. Current lilies are actually better than Aetherflow. I come to this conclusion for two reasons. The first is WHM gets access to a lily ability every 30 seconds, and are only in a situation where they need to dump lilies if they are currently full. Even then, they only need to spend one. SCH gets three charges every 60 seconds. SCHs ogcd heals are completely dependent on Aetherflow stacks and they are in an extremely bad situation if they've used up all their flows and are in need of quick healing, and it is nearly as bad if that healing isn't required and Aetherflow is about to come off of CD with no skills to dump those charges on. SCHs do have Dissipation and Recitation, but these are other resources that WHM does not need to accomplish what it needs to do.

The second is WHM at least gets Misery. Sure, lilies might operate on the GCD, but Misery still feels rewarding even if it's more of a DPS return than gain. SCH's don't get anything. WHM still have three offensive AoEs in Assize, Holy, and Misery. SCH has Art of War. Yay :/

No one here wants to discount the fact that Scholar and Astro got hit really hard. We’re just sad that White Mage, like all healers, is boring AF.

Curious about the Aetherflow tho. Three stacks of Aetherflow every 60 seconds is essentially one stack every 20 seconds, which is still faster than one lily every 30 seconds. And at least Scholars have more options for their Aetherflow (tho they NEED ED or something similar, and they should really bring back the Quickened Aetherflow trait).

Originally Posted by DiznypKC

No one here wants to discount the fact that Scholar and Astro got hit really hard. We’re just sad that White Mage, like all healers, is boring AF.

Curious about the Aetherflow tho. Three stacks of Aetherflow every 60 seconds is essentially one stack every 20 seconds, which is still faster than one lily every 30 seconds. And at least Scholars have more options for their Aetherflow (tho they NEED ED or something similar, and they should really bring back the Quickened Aetherflow trait).

It's not one stack every 20 seconds though; it's 3 every 60 seconds. Unfortunately, I'm afraid "essentially' isn't a factor here. If a SCH has used up their stacks and need more, they either have to use Dissipation or Recitation or tough out the remainder of the CD on Aetherflow.

My main point though is that lilies are not a discount aetherflow. It can still use some refinement, but it is so much better than its SB iteration, and better than ShB aetherflow.