WHM DPS needs to stay this high.

[Ftail]

Unfortunately, the devs seem utterly determine to maintain White Mage's identity as the selfish healer.

Why is that a bad thing when they are currently top healer?

[Lagomorph]

Why is that a bad thing when they are currently top healer?

It's a bad thing for two major reasons, I think.

Firstly it's very difficult to balance. Raid buffs like chain stratagem, card, divination usually have a consistent expected dps contribution in top level play. Sure you could give white mage the personal dps to make up for not having these buffs, and they would be a competitive healer. In casual play, though, the dps contributions of the aforementioned raid buff amount to a lot less, thus the white mage personal dps advantage in that settings actually becomes very overpowered. Currently though, I'd argue that even in top level play whm personal dps alone is far ahead of a scholar's or astrologian's combined personal dps and raid buff contribution.

Secondly, there is this stigma in the community surrounding selfish classes, and it's really unhealthy for the game. As much as a few white mages around here would like people to believe, they were nowhere near as bad off in stormblood as some people say. In fact, out of the 3 final raid fights and 2 ultimate fights, 4 of these fights included a white mage in the world first group. Neo exdeath, god kefka, ucob, and uwu all were cleared first with a white mage. Only on final omega was the world first group one with an ast/sch comp. Despite this, the community had it set as the norm that whm was bad because the speedrun groups never used one. I don't think that there is a way to balance whm with personal dps alone while simultaneously removing this stigma surrounding them. Clearly right now white mage is the favored healer, but look how far ahead of the other healers in terms of raid contribution they needed to be for this to be the case.

[BunnyChain]

What is your estimation for its DPS contribution?

If we take a very rough average of 50% extra damage from a crit, at 100k rDPS burst damage average in an opener and assuming CS straight up adds +10% crit rate, it amounts to +700 rDPS from Chain Strategem at 4 uses in a fight.

Literally on the first page. As an interesting side note, the numbers taken from this parse had the WHM and SCH separated by 1400 DPS; and the WHM doing about 10% total damage, so you could futher reduce it by 70 DPS that WHM gains from CS.

[RopeDrink]

I'm not going to go in-depth because we all know this can all turn on a dime with the upcoming patch(es) and the cycle continues.

I had an Amaurot earlier where our one first-time bonus was a DRG doing 8.6k DPS. This could have been gear or general lack of experience/awareness due to it being their first time, yet I was pushing out 11-14k as a WHM.

It has been said before that a WHM with total freedom could give a Dancer a run for their money. That was likely an exaggeration (and was something I heard during the early-access portion where everything is new and shiny rather than being dissected in full), plus I'm not one for hear-say in general, but I genuinely hope that is how things actually go for WHM. I'm very happy with the actual Healing buttons right now and have always been a "Cleric-Stance-On" minded Healer. Given our 'utility' involves +Healing Asylum, HoTs for days and one relatively long CD'd AoE mitigation button, if you butcher our damage or normalize all Healers to having similar, we will once again fall back into the trap of being the least desirable due to the others having wanted utility buttons without sacrifice to raw healing/damage (safely assuming AST/SCH gets buffs, that is).

[LegoTechnic]

It has been said before that a WHM with total freedom could give a Dancer a run for their money. That was likely an exaggeration (and was something I heard during the early-access portion where everything is new and shiny rather than being dissected in full), plus I'm not one for hear-say in general, but I genuinely hope that is how things actually go for WHM.

I would be careful about saying stuff like this, because you don't want them catching it. AoE aside where it's fine for healers to excel, the majority of DPS jobs are way too complicated and involved to have their output be anywhere close to that achieved by 2-button spam. Some of them have incredibly intricate rotations and/or mechanics, and it simply wouldn't be appropriate for a healer to rival that with a kit as uninvolved as a healer's tend to be, as the DPS options have always been fairly free with no rotation to speak of.

If it's actually an issue, and I doubt it is, then the only thing that will result from it is smack from the nerf bat.

[RopeDrink]

I have played MMORPGs for decades of all shapes and sizes and presently play all roles in FFXIV, so you don't need to describe DPS to me, nor should you take my post as an indication that I want a Healer to be level with them in terms of DPS. That Dancer comment, as said, was an over-exaggeration stated by a random I encountered during early-access, yet the essence of it I can get behind.

My point was I do believe White Mage should be below them (but above tanks) - respectable damage to compensate for the lack of providing what other Healers do (ie. lack of utility compared to AST/SCH), which seems like the only option when Square incessantly adhere to this notion of having one "Pure Healer", which is a dead concept if other Healers provide the exact same damage potential at no detriment to healing power. If they nerf WHM damage, or buff others to be equal to it, then we end up in the exact same old trap we always have - our 'selling point' being something everyone else provides (except they provide other things too, while we don't).

[Yuyuka3]

In casual play, though, the dps contributions of the aforementioned raid buff amount to a lot less, thus the white mage personal dps advantage in that settings actually becomes very overpowered. Currently though, I'd argue that even in top level play whm personal dps alone is far ahead of a scholar's or astrologian's combined personal dps and raid buff contribution.

I assume by casual play you mean dungeons and EX-Primals? As in, piss-easy content? The notion that the game should be balanced around this is idiotic, sorry. Such content is completely irrelevant since it's so easy everyone can do it with every job in very good time.

As much as a few white mages around here would like people to believe, they were nowhere near as bad off in stormblood as some people say. In fact, out of the 3 final raid fights and 2 ultimate fights, 4 of these fights included a white mage in the world first group. Neo exdeath, god kefka, ucob, and uwu all were cleared first with a white mage. Only on final omega was the world first group one with an ast/sch comp.

Let me translate. Out of a 6 month content cycle (3 if you mash Savage and Ultimate together), WHM was used by high-end groups for a grand total of, what? 2-3 weeks each tier maybe? And then shelved for AST, at least for the first two tiers, and immediately for the third.

Silly me thinking there is any problem with this at all! It was in the best spot possible since forever and very loved by everyone, how could I not have seen that?/s

[MrSmiley]

WHM should go unchanged, their dps should be what they bring. SCH could use some minor tweaks, I think they should unnerf stratagem, or reduce its cooldown a bit, its too weak for a 2 minute cooldown. AST needs help, badly.

SCH might even be fine the way it is (fun issues aside), the answer we need is not to nerf anything but to buff ast out of the hole its in.

[Lagomorph]

I assume by casual play you mean dungeons and EX-Primals? As in, piss-easy content? The notion that the game should be balanced around this is idiotic, sorry. Such content is completely irrelevant since it's so easy everyone can do it with every job in very good time.



Let me translate. Out of a 6 month content cycle (3 if you mash Savage and Ultimate together), WHM was used by high-end groups for a grand total of, what? 2-3 weeks each tier maybe? And then shelved for AST, at least for the first two tiers, and immediately for the third.

Silly me thinking there is any problem with this at all! It was in the best spot possible since forever and very loved by everyone, how could I not have seen that?/s

No, casual players does not mean bad players. I've known some players who play the game casually (2 raid nights a week) who always manage to get the final fight of a raid tier down. The point here is, these players often do not put much time into optimizing their cooldown alignment, resulting in less dps from chain strategem and cards/divination.

Further, let's look at some statistics from a website that I probably shouldn't say the name of here. These are the total times the 3 healers were used. Hopefully these tables don't get too malformed from the formatting.


____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Deltascape:___16274 __14749___13558
Sigmascape:__18696___20578___15315
Alphascape:___11258__16409___11885

Is there a problem with balance here? Sure, there definitely is. Is it as bad as people (like you) make it sound? Not even close. And actually, look at deltascape and sigmascape, where white mage was being used more than astro. And in alphascape, where white mage was used a comparable amount to astro. But wait, I have some more numbers from that same website:

____________WHM_____SCH____AST
Shb trials:___62857____50329___23838

It's almost like the balance problem here is far worse than it was in stormblood, with white mage being way more overpowered right now than ast/sch ever were.

[Connor]

Let’s be realistic; they’ll buff Broil and Malefic, super buff some SCH/AST oGCDs for more DPS uptime than White Mage then call it there. Either that or they’ll add huge damage potencies to an oGCD like Earthly Star or Energy Drain when it returns next patch

Whether that fixes the problem or not is irrelevant lol, because the devs have an entirely different idea of what healers should be than what the players want.

I’d say that it’d be cool if Scholar and Astrologian got adjustments in other areas to compensate for the DPS difference, like utility or reductions on cooldowns or whatever, but I know nobody cares for that so that so I’ll just leave it as an aside rather than try and think up something detailed.