Starter healer... WHM?

[Sighearth]

So I want to level a healer on top of my growing list of jobs. I'm *really* interested in AST, but I'm on a controller and the constant target switching and general busyness is just overwhelming.

I have SCH at 37 but I hear that's just as bad.

So I'm guessing go WHM? I haven't the slightest clue how lilies work, and I'm not used to NOT hardcasting heals(last played a healer in 3.1, had all 3 at 60 and was pretty good at AST but now? Urrgh) so I'm like...

What do? Suggestions?

I'm a 100% controller player. I play all 3 jobs even thou I main SCH. I have done all content in this game, from guildhest to all ultimates, and I can guarantee you that you can perform optimally in a controller with any of the healers. It all comes down to build muscle memory, practice and comfort. The controller will not hinder you in any way if you choose to play with it.

[Sighearth]

SCH's ogcds feel underwhelming that's why they are not played often.

Compared to diurnal ast who has :
Earthly Star - 720
Celestial Opposition - 700
Collective unconscious - 500
Horoscope - 200
In total - 2120 raid-wide healing potency every minute for free without any resource management. We can even leave out Horoscope and you still acquire 1920 cure potency by pressing 3 buttons while spamming malefic.

Per-minute Sch has:
Aetherflow - 3 aether stacks, needed for heals
Whispering Dawn - 537
Indomitability - 400
Sacred Soil - 500
Fey Blessing - 224
The last aether charge can be used for ED but since we are discussing how much sch can heal per minute we will use it on sacred soil again (it has 30s cd) for the extra 500 cure potency.
So in total, you can get 2,161 raid-wide cure potency from a sch per minute without any gcd heals. Just a little bit more than an ast but you have to press more buttons.

Sch also has on 2 min cooldown summon seraph which can execute Consolation two times for 768 potency in total (shields included). However, when it comes to gcd aoe healing sch can't even hope to compete with whm and ast. But that's not that big of a deal because gcd healing should be avoided whenever possible. Even in savage where healing can get intense, you won't need to use gcd if everyone is using their mitigation tools and playing properly at least that's my experience so far. Unfortunately, that happens only in log runs.

Just a correction, soil is 600 potency. You forgot the insta tick you get when placing it.

[Sighearth]

I went through the patch notes from Shb because I saw that whm's percentile in top 50 was a lot higher in the first shb raid tier. Ast actually used to be clunky when it spammed its AoE in dungeons. It had a longer cast time so using cards or ogcd while AoE was not an option unless you want to be whm 2.0. Healing while dealing damage on mob packs was possible only if they used lightspeed. There weren't always as fluid as there are now.

I have a question btw. If whm is the worst designed healer why is it currently the healer with the highest percentile for the top 50 ultimate clears for the epic of Alexandar? Isn't ultimate supposed to be the hardest of the hardest content to clear?

WHM is the more "comfy" healer and the most popular one. 1 specific encounter is also not a good example. Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit. When you try speed runs (which is arguably the hardest "content" in the game since you have to heal as little as possible to deal as much damage as possible) you will see whm have a very minor participation. For E12s p2, for example, only 10% of the top 50 groups had WHMs. Which is to be expected since ast + sch have much more free heals, better raid dps etc. In ultimate where the majority just want to survive until the end, WHMs gcds are very attractive.

[Semirhage]

How it doesn't matter? Ultimate is harder than savage and you guys say the class is a disaster because the top parties for the current savage tier don't have many whm-s. The second party for the epic of Alexandar has a whm and a sch, both having nearly the same amount of hps and both having nearly the same amount of rdps. So it is possible, to have high rdps and do your share of the healing.

Glare has higher potency to make up for the loss of dps from using a lily, this is called balancing a class.

What? No. That's backward. Glare's higher potency means there's a greater opportunity cost when WHM uses a GCD heal. Lilies mitigate most of that loss, but not all of it. WHM's ONLY damage neutral weave space is Dia (unless you Swiftcast your next Glare as one of those weaves). SCH has this problem as well, but its lossy weaving is at least on demand.

The job is designed in a way that punishes you for being skilled at playing it. I don't think it's just my personal opinion that RPG classes should be designed to get more fun the more you improve with playing them. I don't know how many ways I can explain that WHM's design forces a skilled player to fight off its weaknesses instead of playing to strengths.

[Roeshel]

Any ultimate is about clearing and not much about optimization or pushing the job to the limit.

This doesn't make sense to me. Don't ultimates have enrage timer? I haven't done any so I don't know. How is speed clearing ultimate not about optimization if speed clearing savage is? Also isn't the content that tests a healer's ability to heal the best type of content to draw a conclusion from? If speed clearing ultimate is not the type of content where you are pushed to the limit which content is? When ogcds are not enough whm is prefered even for speed runs for ultimate clears. Whm is the healer job with the highest participation for the fastest ultimate clears. Savage is easy when it comes to healing which is why whm is not needed for speed clearing so I can't in any way consider that savage is pushing healer classes to the limit.

Also, ast was buffed, before 5.1 it was doing significantly less damage, despite it losing no dps from healing. So the gap between the healer's rdps is not really a matter of design. It's about balancing the classes, ast's buffs scale exponentially as the stats of your party members become stronger and stronger. For the last raid from eden's gate (titan) the top asts got roughly around 1,8k rdps from cards and divination. In e12s p2 they get more than twice - 3,8kdps. If you compare them to their real dps output you will see that for titan cards and divination boosted the best ast's own dps by 23% while in e12s p2 they boost it by 32%. That's 9% increase in rdps without any big changes being made to the cards and divination. Only sleeve draw was changed from giving three random cards, to securing that you have 3 different seals aligned for your opener. Imo that change was a nerf because you get two cards less every three mins, which you could have turned into lord/lady of crowns, and you are only achieving what rng could have done for you. In any case, from e4s to e12s Ast received 9% boost to rdps from cards and divination despite them doing the exact same thing and not receiving a direct buff. Ast has good scaling.

The only utility spell that whm has for damage increase is Presence of mind. That ability doesn't scale at all. It is a flat, linear personal buff whose efficiency is diminished by having higher spell speed which is a stat you need to deal more dps. That buff grants you roughly 2 extra casts of glare in all cases. That's 600 extra fixed potency that scales only with your personal stats. I guess this is why in the epic of alexandar ast has lower rdps than whm despite having access to the same kit as they do in e12s p2. The stats are lower so the gap in scaling is not noticeable.

[Roeshel]

What? No. That's backward. Glare's higher potency means there's a greater opportunity cost when WHM uses a GCD heal. Lilies mitigate most of that loss, but not all of it. WHM's ONLY damage neutral weave space is Dia (unless you Swiftcast your next Glare as one of those weaves). SCH has this problem as well, but its lossy weaving is at least on demand.

The job is designed in a way that punishes you for being skilled at playing it. I don't think it's just my personal opinion that RPG classes should be designed to get more fun the more you improve with playing them. I don't know how many ways I can explain that WHM's design forces a skilled player to fight off its weaknesses instead of playing to strengths.

So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

[Semirhage]

So playing optimally whm would be smth like, you gain a lily every other cast of glare, you can store up to five, six maybe more lilies and when you use 3 of them you gain access to 1200 potency misery. No damage loss, movement available on-demand, healing available on-demand, weaving available on-demand with no damage loss. Would you call that a balanced role though? As far as I know, the devs had the greatest trouble balancing ast because it has all of that.

Edit: Tbh, now that I think about it doesn't sound too bad but I still think that it won't be balanced if the potencies remain the same.

I'll put it this way. With the exception of Black Mage, all DPS and all tanks can double weave after basically every single (or every other, in Red Mage's case) GCD. They never have to clip anything, or lose any damage from using their oGCDs. Does having infinite weave space make them all play the same way? Black Mage has no raid buffs, but does significantly more damage than Red Mage to make up for it (we'll ignore Summoner and its...interesting balancing issues). Does this make Black Mage overpowered?

White Mage can very well remain the "GCD healer". But development work has to acknowledge that, in this game, GCD heals *are* in a vacuum strictly weaker choices than oGCD heals. They just are. They're generally not instant, they're not free, and they take time away from your damage rotation that oGCDs don't. If WHM is going to remain a GCD healer, all of those factors need to go into the design of things like procs that mitigate those downsides. Maybe all GCD heals give blood lily charges. That's one of the most boring ways to do it, but it's better than nothing. GCD healing isn't just a "different" way to heal than oGCD healing. Unless you specifically design it to skirt those factors, it's a directly inferior method of healing, just due to the way FFXIV's combat system works. Compound that annoying weakness with the fact that WHM has no party buffs outside Temperance (a level 40 ability that was nerfed, stolen off into the role system, then deleted and given a damage reduction component and sold back as a capstone ability), has no secondary system of note to manage, and has no real movement tools outside blowing healing spells or a single DoT refresh, it's a barebones clippy Glarebot for the sake of being a barebones clippy Glarebot.

WHM can have an identity without needing to clip, remain immobile, etc. Unfortunately, the development team has decided that WHM's identity is trapped in an extremely limited design space, because "being fun to play after getting good at it" or "having any tools outside vanilla heals" is apparently SCH and AST's exclusive shared identity.

[Sighearth]

Its a complete different mindset. The speedrun community for savage is way bigger and more interested in doing savages than ultimates. Ultimate is not so much for speedrun because the way less people try that. And how my phrase doesnt make sense? You absolutely dont need to push the jobs to the limit to get a clear. You barely need to know the basics of your job to get a clear. All ultimates dps checks are a complete joke. Combine that and only a few caring about ultimate speedrun you dont have nowhere near the fierce competition that is savage speed run. Also, for speedrun you need to farm RNG most of the time, and with ultimates that sucks due to the duration of the fight

[Roeshel]

And how my phrase doesnt make sense? You absolutely don't need to push the jobs to the limit to get a clear. You barely need to know the basics of your job to get a clear.

Okay, I didn't know that. I was left with the impression that ultimate > savage. There was one dude who came into my e12s loot party and said that savage is just hard casual content and that ultimates is the place where it gets tough so I just assumed that ultimates are harder than savage.

[Semirhage]

Okay, I didn't know that. I was left with the impression that ultimate > savage. There was one dude who came into my e12s loot party and said that savage is just hard casual content and that ultimates is the place where it gets tough so I just assumed that ultimates are harder than savage.

Yeah that guy wasn't quite correct. As far as I'm aware, Ultimate is largely about perfect mechanic execution and has fewer hard DPS checks. Still have some, mind you, but they're not as much of a focus.