An Integration of Former and Current Ideas for WHM

[Dearche]

I'll preface this with saying that I'm not a fan of WHM. I've never been, so I am no expert on the job.

That said, I as still a healer main, and it's not like there aren't things which appeal to me in WHM.

WHM has always been seen as the primary healer, the one who did the bulk of the healing work ever since ARR, but between the excessive homogenization (why is WHM a better shield healer than SCH, the preeminent and OG shield healer?) and the oversimplification, I had thought that there was a way to both make WHM accessible to new healers while keeping them fun and viable for endgame raids.

That idea was something which I had mentioned here before, but that was as the GCD healer.

The idea is that WHM's core abilities are all GCD abilities. Rather than rely on a whole bunch of oGCDs and use GCD spells as backup and DPS, GCD spells become the core of WHM's healing and offense.

The heals would need a bit of a potency boost of course to balance out the fact that most of their oGCD heals would have to be stripped out or converted to GCDs. In turn, I think every one of WHM's GCD heals should provide lilies, the main WHM mechanic which I find to be one of the brightest bits of WHM's current kit. Of course, automatic lily generation would have to be stopped for this sake.

But unlike as it is now, lilies won't be used to fuel WHM's oGCD heals. Instead, you stock them up, and once you get three or five of them, they are converted automatically to single blood lily. That blood lily can be used as it is now, though I suppose that afflatus misery's potency would have to be balanced so that it's potency would equal the number of GCD heals you do get a blood lily times the potency of Glare.

Even if you use almost all your GCDs healing, there would be no potency loss on offence.

There would have to be more changes to make long periods without significant healing to be more interesting.

Perhaps for the sake of returning to WHM's lore roots, WHM could lose its two existing attack spells and gain three different attack spells of differing elements? One water, one wind, and one earth. In addition, there could be a final spell tied to each of the three: commune with nature.

Commune with nature could be a spell which generates a random buff, one corresponding to the three elements WHM governs. The buff will increase the potency of the next attack spell of the corresponding element. In addition, the attack spells could all be instant casts to give some additional mobility.

Anyways, this is my proposition for making WHM interesting again. A new skill set which would be easy on new healers, while giving space for veterans to stretch into. It might not be the most complex, but combined with the usual oGCD heal buffs (will need more than just one 20% buff every 120s) and some raid utility skills, I think it would make for a healer with both a solid identity and an enjoyable play style.

[Semirhage]

and some raid utility skills

Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. I wish. That's a good one.

Shadowbringers showed us that the devs' vision for WHM is "the boring simple healer that clips a lot with no utility". And they'd rather destroy AST and SCH to balance them numerically with that vision. They haven't changed their minds since Stormblood, when we proved them conclusively wrong there. Let's just say there's a looooot of inertia against digging WHM out of the boring grave, but I also think it's the best option for rescuing SCH and AST from it too. If WHM's horrible design dragged the other two down, it stands to reason that designing it well can be the road to restoring them.

I don't hate most of these ideas, but good luck getting the healer design team to think of WHM as anything beyond "but it has Cure and Stone right? Perfect. Design finished."

[ty_taurus]

Ahahahahahahahahahaha. Ha. I wish. That's a good one.

Shadowbringers showed us that the devs' vision for WHM is "the boring simple healer that clips a lot with no utility". And they'd rather destroy AST and SCH to balance them numerically with that vision. They haven't changed their minds since Stormblood, when we proved them conclusively wrong there. Let's just say there's a looooot of inertia against digging WHM out of the boring grave, but I also think it's the best option for rescuing SCH and AST from it too. If WHM's horrible design dragged the other two down, it stands to reason that designing it well can be the road to restoring them.

I don't hate most of these ideas, but good luck getting the healer design team to think of WHM as anything beyond "but it has Cure and Stone right? Perfect. Design finished."

And that's really the thing in general, isn't it? They vehemently demand that healing should play in a very specific way without really thinking about whether or not that actually fits into the way content is designed in this game (spoiler alert, it doesn't), and they continue to fight our way of playing healer in every conceivable manner without actually touching the reason why we play that way. I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

[Dearche]

I can't help but feel that someone somewhere in the design team is always shouting "We keep taking away their DPS, why are they still using it!?"

To be honest, I can't help but feel that this might actually be the real sentiment within the ones in charge of designing jobs. Either that, or that they believe that the best way to make people play a role that's less popular is to make it as easy as possible to get into, which means making them as braindead as possible. Not realizing that making gameplay overly simplistic is how the entire genre of JRPGs almost got wiped out until less than a decade ago. At least in the west.

It's ridiculous that the rest of the FF franchise is going the other way by making things like gameplay mastery an important aspect of the series, yet XIV is trying to do the opposite for every role except DPS.

That aside though, while I don't actually expect these changes to be implemented, or even seen by the dev team (since I doubt they look at any thread here that doesn't have like 10k views or something), the idea behind these changes was to create a WHM that had as low of a skill floor as possible, while not being boring for veteran players to play. In fact, I think with stripping out so many oGCD skills, it's actually simpler than the current WHM, yet loses none of the flexibility.

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Then again, it could just be an oversight, as SCH had its potency for broil 2 raised just so they could nerf energy drain and get people to stop doing the ruin 2+energy drain combo in place of using aetherflow for healing. Seriously, if that's not a malicious nerf on player expression, I don't know what is.

[Semirhage]

Also, I don't think the idea of raid utility is a forgone conclusion. WHile AST would entirely lose its identity without cards, SCH still has chain stratagem and has never lost it. So unless if SE cares so little for healers that they had intended to strip all raid utility from healers aside from the AST cards, and simply forgot that chain stratagem even existed (I don't say that this isn't a possibility), the skill does suggest that SE does think that raid utility should be a part of the healer kit, even if it is on a very basic level.

Though, at the same time, it's possible that SE does actually account for healer damage in job design as WHM's attack potency is the highest of the three healers in place of having any raid utility.

Oh, my chortling about WHM and raid utility isn't because I don't think Square wants healers in general to have utility. It's because WHMs have been begging Square to give them something to do during downtime for years. Some form of raid utility would have killed two birds with one stone: given WHM something to manage, while also bringing them up to AST and SCH's level. Back in Stormblood it felt like garbage playing WHM compared to the other two. You did less damage, your heals weren't really any stronger than theirs, you had nothing to do in downtime except refresh your dots and spam Stone, and if your party needed you to do anything other than heal them up or stare at them while spamming Stone, you were SOL. Lethal AOE damage going out? Can't help you, I have no AOE shields and no damage reduction. And no debuffs to reduce boss outgoing damage. Party's struggling with a tight DPS check? Oh well, I don't have anything to help you with that. Need to Esuna multiple people quickly? Don't look at me, I'm not Selene. As a WHM, there was no scenario you were uniquely useful in outside spamming Cure 3. Conversely, there were TONS of scenarios where the other two healers were invaluable, but you had no equivalent ability to help. Offensive utility was just the tip of the iceberg there; WHM just had effectively nothing unique going for it.

Shadowbringers healer design by all appearances is the healer design dev saying "yeah we see WHMs have been begging for utility for literal years now, I'm gonna go with no. But we have to balance this out with two really strong, flexible healers. What to do....oh I know! Let's blow up their flexibility instead."

[Levirre]

At this point, just give us a dps rotation, move all healing into ogcd skills, and then add job flair where you actually have to pay attention to the gauges. I don't think they will ever be able to make healing fun with how the game plays. Any instance not max level strips you of huge utility compared to other classes, plus you barely even need healing anyway at those levels. Raids from primal to Savage are already scripted to the point you just memorize when big damage is coming and pop your ogcds anyway.

[BungleBear]

The idea is that WHM's core abilities are all GCD abilities. Rather than rely on a whole bunch of oGCDs and use GCD spells as backup and DPS, GCD spells become the core of WHM's healing and offense.

Isn't that how it is now? The Afflatus spells are already GCDs.

If a job had no oGCDs, it's CPM (casts per minute) would be very low, because it would have nothing to weave. You'd just be doing one action every 2.5 seconds, which might get a bit boring. WHM already has the lowest CPM of the three healers.

[Dearche]

Isn't that how it is now? The Afflatus spells are already GCDs.

If a job had no oGCDs, it's CPM (casts per minute) would be very low, because it would have nothing to weave. You'd just be doing one action every 2.5 seconds, which might get a bit boring. WHM already has the lowest CPM of the three healers.

Well, this was an older iteration of healer ideas I've had, but my idea for WHM is that GCD healing is the core of it's design.

To make it work though, WHM would need two things. First, instant casts so that they could keep their GCDs going during movement intensive mechanics. Say, if there was a spell 'Quick Cure' which was like a 200 potency cure, but instant cast.

Second, is to make WHM's DPS not suffer due to all the GCD healing. So maybe it's main offensive abilities are oGCDs. Of course, throwing an oGCD every GCD is painful even if the cast times are short enough to allow weaving, so maybe you can only use one oGCD attack every 3+ GCDs? To make it combo with the healing image of WHM, and the lily system already in place, maybe make it so every GCD heal will generate a lily instead of being on a timer, and when you get 3, they convert into a blood lily, which could be used for Afflatus Misery like now?

Of course, Afflatus Misery would need a higher potency so that simply doing the current DPS spam wouldn't be better. 1200 potency Misery would probably make playing WHM feel very nice indeed.

Though, this alone wouldn't entirely fix WHM, it would be a good start.

[BungleBear]

To make it work though, WHM would need two things. First, instant casts so that they could keep their GCDs going during movement intensive mechanics. Say, if there was a spell 'Quick Cure' which was like a 200 potency cure, but instant cast.

Second, is to make WHM's DPS not suffer due to all the GCD healing.

These seem to be the issues that SE attempted to address with the revamped Lily system in Shadowbringers. WHM got two new instant-cast GCD heals, Afflatus Solace and Rapture, and a big damage spell, Misery, that "refunds" some of the DPS lost due to GCD healing. I'd say this solution has been fairly successful. I know some people still complain about WHM's lack of mobility, but the job is at least more viable than in Stormblood.

[Dearche]

These seem to be the issues that SE attempted to address with the revamped Lily system in Shadowbringers. WHM got two new instant-cast GCD heals, Afflatus Solace and Rapture, and a big damage spell, Misery, that "refunds" some of the DPS lost due to GCD healing. I'd say this solution has been fairly successful. I know some people still complain about WHM's lack of mobility, but the job is at least more viable than in Stormblood.

The main issue is that while the current Lily system is quite successful, that's on the level of taking something terrible and making it less than good. It's an improvement, but we're still in the negatives.

The two big issues with the lily system is that you only get one lily every 30 seconds, if you want to use a lily for movement, you need either a blood lily up, or someone hurt to heal, and the system's pretty much useless if you're on a big movement mechanic that lasts more than one or two GCDs. This last one especially happens quite often, though the other two is only a little bit less common of an issue.

It wouldn't be so bad if you could just generate blood lilies through some alternative means, like an instant cast GCD "quick prayer" that simply gives you a third of a blood lily or something.