Thread: Thought experiment for a minorish WHM playstyle change

Hi all.

So I'm not a raid gamer or anything like that but I main white mage.

Now I love white mage with all of my heart and soul but we all know that it's not necessarily the most 'interesting' of the healers. Or just as a playstyle in general.

I don't personally have deep qualms but I've noticed some unhapiness on the forums. So more so that I wanted to draw a bead on the playerbase, I came up with a few changes. And I'd like to ask everyone (mostly the white mages) how they make you feel. This is more just for fun.

So:

Changes:
1) Presence of Mind's initial speed up decreased to 10%. Increase duration by an appropriate amount. Lets say 30 for argument sake. Cooldown unchanged.

2) Freecure changed to 'Ebb and Flow' and is moved to lvl 35 :
"Should regen (or medica 2's HoT) heal a target , reduce the cooldown of PoM(presence of mind) by X seconds. (Multiple ticks from different targets do not count. Must acutually restore HP to count) " With the intention of lowering the cooldown of PoM effectively down to say... 90 seconds or something similar. Can vary as needed for balance purposes.

3) at lvl 52, Ebb and Flow upgrades and 'Secret of the Lily' is granted in a slightly altered way, as these two passive would now work together.
•"Ebb and flow's cooldown reduction on HoT ticks has increased. The increase, whatever it is, allows PoM to be used back to back (assuming that you're using your regens to lower the cooldown) and allows you to keep the stance up by reapplying the buff before it ends.
•Remaining in PoM for 30 seconds improves it, increasing the cast reduction to 15%.
•Secret of the Lily no longer ticks when you are in combat. Instead, it ticks as long as you are in PoM. It still has the same 30 second to a lily function.

4) 'Divine benison' has an additiona affect. "As long as the shield holds, treat it as a regen tick for Ebb and Flow"

5)at lvl 74 (in tandem with Transcendent Afflatus), Ebb and Flow improves once more
•Staying in PoM for 60 seconds upgrades the reduction to 20%|

Design goals:
-Give white mages something 'active' to maintain during fights and make the lily gauge more engaging without functuatlly changing how often we get them
-Make them feel a little faster, for healing or damage dealing (as long as you heal properly)
-Make freecure less of a 'newbietrap' since you so rarely use cure 1 in late game.
-Make the playstye more interactive without acutally changing how a white mage pays (You'd play a white mage mostly the same way people do now, just be mindful of your stance ot make sure you perform properly)

Thoughts?
I'm obviously not suggesting this change should go to live. More just seeing what people think. (Assume that any potencies are adjusted to make sure they don't over or under perform in terms of DPS or healing)

Sounds fun? Sounds tedious?

I think if you like to actively maintain charges then just play scholar (aetherflow) and your idea would just homogenize healers even more. Seriously I don't blame you for thinking healers are boring since we spam 1 button for 80% of a fight, but there are thousands of ways to make healers more engaging without making them arbitrarily more difficult. IMO the problem isn't WHM, the problem is that DPS has become the ONLY relevant metric in the entire game and since every fight is on a script that makes a whole lot of our skills irrelevant like medica, medica 2, cure, cure 2 since we have more efficient and powerful heals with cooldowns like Assize and Afflatus Rapture.

You say that WHM isn't the most interesting of healers but the only reason I even still play healer is because white mage is a reactive support which I prefer and I find very interesting. Scholar is proactive support which requires setup and foresight and AST just has way too many buttons and I can't be bothered playing around with cards. I can see you are trying to create an incentive to use more skills, but for a reactive job like white mage it should never be a requirement like it is for scholar. Honestly if they implemented this I would probably never play healer again.

So to answer your question, sounds tedious. I think if SE wanted to make healers seem less boring, they have to make some fundamental changes in the way this game approaches content in general. The easiest way to make all jobs engaging is to add variability so it's not the exact same run every time, which is why I really enjoy alliance raids because all kinds of crazy stuff happens with a group of 24 people and WHM reactive play style feels really good.

EDIT: You know what I would do is add some synergy between the healer skills, for example if SCH (or ast) put shields on your group, any REGEN effect would gradually make those shields permanent (until it breaks from damage) by removing the cooldown. It would give people a more reason to play different jobs and maybe someday they will finally remove that stupid LB penalty for having dupes.

I don't hate the core idea. A sort of greased lightning playstyle would be more interesting than just Glare spamming for sure. It'd likely need a lot of tweaking (like for example, a really well-designed mechanic encourages/rewards you for playing your job "correctly", and keeping 100% regen uptime isn't quiiiiite what I'd encourage, but at least the no overhealing clause brings it closer to something good). My big issue with WHM is hard to describe succinctly. You aren't *doing* anything. For basically any scenario you're in, you react to the situation with the correct single whack-a-mole button. One person took damage? Use one of several functionally identical single target heals; the decision between them has a fairly rigid priority order and deciding which one becomes a more mundane task the longer you play the class, and you're basically never punished for choosing "wrong" anyway in most content because they're nearly identical. The whole party took damage? Same thing. A group of enemies faces you? Better cast The Only AOE Damage Spell. Lucid came off cooldown? Press it. There isn't really any buildup or even a rotation to disguise the monotony. I'm in scenario A? The answer is answer A. That wasn't enough? A. Wasn't enough? Apply more A until done or the scenario changes. It's like playing DDR, except for some reason all the songs on your personal playlist have really long runs of the same arrow direction over and over instead of varying it up. You aren't really rewarded for playing intelligently, nor are you really punished for playing stupidly. And to make matters worse, Glare spamming is the least interesting of all the shallow decision-making scenarios in this list of situations, and the only thing honing the previous list of also fairly shallow decisions rewards you with is a swifter return to the most boring one. At least maintaining a greased lightning/enochian type status is juggling *something*.

*Hmms*

I see.
I took what you guys had said and kept it in mind while I did some of the later dungeons (not raids mind you)
True to form, you guys have a point.

Though that does make me even more sad when I realize how little I'd need to use some of the other tools WHM has near their start.
Poor cure 1 is just lying there in an alley like an abandoned child.

I wonder if Medica I and Cure I (or 2) should morph and become the lily skill they mimic whenever a lily is available. Since they're effectively just upgraded versions (being free and instant)
You could even make an argument that Cure I becomes Solus and Cure 2 becomes Tetragramiton (when either become available) since tetra is just cure 2 but in an oGCD version. Granted that doesn't fix the problem of 'never using the cure 1' part of cure 1 problem.

One things for sure, we need to do 'something' about free cure and fluid aura...
Maybe turn Freecure into Ebb and Flow and make it proc FA on the occasional stone/glare? Gives Fluid aura some damage and turns the bind into a stun on next cast?
Maybe later it improves and can also proc on holy's? Turns the fluid aura into a mini aoe on top of hte damage and stun (I guess it's just an instant cast holy at that point, haha)
Maybe casting PoM instantly procs this FA passive? Or gives us a lily on activation?
Maybe bring Aero 3 back as a proc, or a 'once a Aero/Dia expires after running it's full course, the next Aero/Dia' cast is an upgraded Aoe version. The fabled Tornado...or whatever 'divine energy' attack we now have haha.

I unno. Spitballing things that would make the job a little more interesting for downtimes. (without being too much of a direct buff)
Thanks for sharing either way, fellow white mages. I'm definitely not at experienced as some of the rest of y'all, but I'm glad to be among the ranks =)