My White Mage Rework Idea. Creating the Black Mage of Healers

[Fathym]

Iv been thinking a lot about how I personally would rework the healers and today I decided to take an hour or so to write out what my full White Mage rework would look like. Iv always felt like White Mage was supposed to be the Healer equivalent to Black Mage with premeditated movement and correct GCD usage being the determining factor between the good and bad players. I also wanted to add significantly more decision making points for the player while making sure to prevent spell bloat. All of the changes that I would make are listed below and I would love to hear what you guys think.

To preface this, in my design Lilies will no longer be gained over time but by using healing spells or completing the 3 part damage combo.

Removed Spells: Regen, Assize, Tetragrammation, Divine Benison, Dia, Glare.

Spells that will gain lilies: Cure I, Cure II, Cure III, Medica I, Medica II, Benediction


New Spells
Stone(Max Rank): Deals earth damage with a potency of 250. Gain earth attunement for 30s. May only have one attunement buff at a time.
Cast time: 1.5s

Water(Max Rank): Deals water damage with a potency of 250.
Cast time: 1.5s
Additional Effect: Consume the earth attunement buff to grant a healing over time effect to a the lowest health nearby target and gain water attunement for 30s. May only have one attunement buff at a time.
Cure Potency: 150
Duration: 9s

Light(Max Rank): Deal unaspected damage with a potency of 250.
Cast time: 1.5s
Additional Effect: Consumes water attunement to deal 100 additional potency damage and gain 1 lily.

Triplecast: The next three spells will require no cast time.
Duration: 15s
Recast Time: 60s

Modified Spells
Aero: Deal wind damage with potency 60.
Duration: 30s
Additional Effect: 10% chance after each tick that the next Cure I will have no cast time and cost no mana.

Benediction: 2.5s cast time 30s cooldown

Medica: Cast time: 2s Cure Potency: 400

Medica II: Cast time: 2s

Cure III: Restores target HP. Potency: 500
Additional Effect: Grants healing over time effect to target.
Cure Potency: 200
Duration: 18s

Afflatus Solace: Restore a friendly targets HP Cure Potency:500 OR
Deal 200 potency damage to an enemy target and gain a 1 Blood Lily stack. (Blood Lily stacks only gained when the Afflatus spells are used for damage.)
Recast time: 1s (spell will be ogcd)

Afflatus Rapture: Restores friendly target HP and the HP of all nearby party members. Cure Potency:200
OR Deal 100 potency damage to an enemy target, all nearby targets and gain 1 Blood Lily stack. Recast time 1s (spell will be ogcd)

Afflatus Misery: Can only be cast at 5 blood lily stacks. Edit: potency reduced to 700

edit: I forgot to mention that all spells not mentioned above would be unchanged.

[Marc-Vigar]

Ooooorrrrr... if you wanna feel like a BLM, go play BLM... and leave us with our oGCDs so we can actually do mechanics while healing, because unlike BLM we don't have any teleporting spell.

[Eclipse12187]

Is there anything else changed about benediction? With its current iteration with your changes it sounds like a 30 second full heal. Also your regen effect on the water spell needs to be either 6 second duration or 9, dots and hots tic every 3 seconds. Does holy still exist? I see no base aoe besides rapture on an enemy, which I’m not really a fan of how you have rapture worded. I’d personally end up using rapture far more as a damage spell on the boss than as aoe healing because I tend to keep the boss targeted when I do aoe healing. The healing potency numbers are also far lower than what we currently have them at (700 for solace, 300 for rapture). Cure 3 is also a massive 1700 total potency when you take its regen into account (18 seconds is 6 tics at 200 a tic).

Do we require going through the 1-2-3 of stone water light in order to gain a lily?

Edit: i see some info i missed in the original post

cure 3 is single target so it seems as opposed to the aoe we have, so its more like a super buff aspected benefic. medica 2 doesnt have any potency numbers listed so i cant compare it to anything. is there a cap on lilies?

overall it looks like you're going for a more "atonement" style of healer like WoW has, focus on doing damage to generate lilies as well as smart healing regens, since stone water and light (why isnt water water aspected damage instead of ice?) all deal the same potency and the only reason to combo would be to gain lilies or the hot it seems like you can just spam 1>2 to throw hots up, or 2>3 (assuming you dont need to consume the earth buff to gain the water buff) in order to generate lilies. lilies being a lower potency damage wise and requiring 5 means you lose out on 250 potency over 5 casts, in order to hit for 900 (assuming number unchanged) on the 6th, which would be a potency gain of 200x5 lilies + 900 misery vs 6x250. its a lot of work for that gain also assuming you dont need to burn those lilies for actual healing.

just to put things into perspective, using your listing and strictly dpsing, you would have to 1>2>3 combo 5 times, 15x2.5s gcd for 37.5 seconds of straight casting, then burn the lilies 5x2.5 for a total of 50 seconds between misery if played that way. or you can use cure 1 5 times to generate 5 lilies, 12.5 seconds, burn 5 lilies, 12.5 seconds, and pop misery 25 seconds into a fight. you could get 2 miserys per minute, only using aero, 5 casts of cure, 5 lilies, and then misery for a 30 second rotation for 5000 dps/min. whereas doing an actual 1>2>3 rotation with 2 aero refreshes for a 55 second rotation, for 5850 pot/min roughly. theres a very small disparity for playing suboptimally vs optimal with your current numbers, the 1>2>3 should probably increase in potency on each combo cast because why would i bother with the 1>2>3 if i can just do cure > damage lily and not only get more misery's but do pretty comparable potency per minute, while also keeping my party healed up.

edit edit: i see the water attunement on light adds 100 damage, adding 500 potency per minute onto the dps rotation for 6350 pot/min roughly

[Fathym]

Thanks for the feedback! You're right about the regen. I forgot about the 3s tick. Probably should lower it to 9s. That way it will stay up consistently if you can keep casting. Maybe lower the potency slightly. Potencies are really hard to balance appropriately when your just sort of making estimations in your head. The damage potencies probably need slight adjustments as well. Adding a bit more potency to the 1-2-3 combo might be beneficial but I'm not quite sure how much. I chose Ice attribute bc i don't think their currently is water attribute damage in the game right now. I could be wrong about that. Not that it matters much since damage types dont really matter in this game.

I probably should have specified in the original post but any spell that I havent specifically mentioned is unchanged. I didn't really want to mess with Holy as I feel it is a pretty fun skill to use. Plus I don't want to over complicate the class by adding an aoe combo on top of everything else.

As for your question about benediction. The major change I made was that I added a 2.5s cast time to the spell so it would need to be comboed with triplecast or swiftcast to work instantly as it does now. At a 30s cd you will be able to use the spell much more often, but without one of the mentioned abilities, you will need to preplan to use the spell effectively. The goal of the rework is to make it so that the only instant cast heals the player has are the lilies and to use a ogcd heal for healing requires a sacrifice of damage. Thats where the skill ceiling lies. In using triplecast, swiftcast and the free cure I procs effectively you net more damage and ultimately more Afflatus Misery casts.

You also mentioned that the Afflatus Rapture rework would feel clunky. While I get that, I feel like the the added flexibility makes up for it especially since you can just make a quick target self macro and the spell will function exactly the same as it does now.

For the amount of lilies that can be carried at one time, I'm thinking either 3 or 5. 5 would make it easier to not overcap but there is the problem of being able to literally hold 5 ogcd burst spells that combine into a massive Afflatus Misery proc. For that reason it would probably be best to stay at 3 like it is now. It shouldn't be to difficult to prevent from over capping since I reworked all the spells except for Benediction into 2s cast time abilities.

Edit: Holy III might need a reduction as well but Im not sure. I basically just took the Regen spell thats Potency:200 duration:18s and added an instant heal on top to make up for the 2s cast time. Maybe 500 instant is too much though.
The other option for the lilies would be to increase the cap to 5 but make them disappear after 15s out of combat. That way it would be harder to stack them up for crazy stupid initial burst.

Edit: After rereading your comment I realised a massive misunderstanding. I probably should make it bold so its more visible. A major part of my rework is that Aflatus Solus and Aflatus Rapture become OGCD abilities meaning that they can be weaved between any of the other spells. This means that the lily you gain from the dps combo can always be weaved in right after the cast finishes, increasing the damage by 200. It should also be noted that, while you can 1>2 spam to get to get hots out, you can't 2>3 spam as gaining the water attunement buff requires consuming the earth attunement. I still think you're right about there not being a large enough damage difference so i would probably reduce the potency of Aflatus Misery by 200.

[Fathym]

My rework would literally give you significantly more ogcds and instant casts so your ability to move for mechanics would actually increase while also providing a wider range of decision making points which, in my opinion, is sorely lacking in the white mage class right now.

[AnotherPerson]

Wait... but none of this fixes the clipping WHM still has to deal with.
Currently, lilies are an instant GCD, so we use them to weave other healing oGCDs and then refund it back into Misery.

If you change Lilies to be oGCD, but we generate a lily whenever we cast Cure I/Cure II/Cure III/Medica I/Medica II/Benediction, and Light.. we're just goanna be clipping left and right with every skill being on a 2 sec cast time. That's even worse than what we have now.

[Liam_Harper]

With Rapture and Solace being nerfed and GCD heals generating lilies, you're basically only going to Solace the boss for Misery. It works out roughly 2500 potency per minute if you're just spamming your 1-2-3, (5 x 200 + 700 per 40 sec or so) which no WHM is going to turn down. If you needed more healing, you'd throw in some Medica II and Benediction for more lilies. Each lily generating heal is worth 316 potency after all with Solace + 1/6 of a Misery. So using Solace/Rapture to heal is 316 potency lost while using a GCD to heal is more like 80 potency lost. This also makes Asylum lose significant value, as potent as it is, being a GCD that does not generate lilies.

There's less decision making than you'd think. It boils down to 1-2-3, DoT, Solace and Misery to nuke boss, Benediction, Cure III and Medica II.

2 sec cast times don't equal weaves either. oGCD's require 0.7 sec + potential latency, which is the reason Malefic is 1.5 sec cast for single weaving.

The heal on Earth isn't really worth much, the majority of the time it'll be wasted healing on a player who would get healed anyway by your next aoe heal and 450 just isn't enough for clutch. As we've seen with SCH's Embrace at endgame, small heals you have no control over have far less value.

[Eloah]

Why would a Water spell deal Ice damage? Also this doesn't feel fully fleshed out. Ypu mention spell changes but not how they interact with one another while leveling. Most people agree Cure become obsolete once you get Cure II and beyond, what keeps it in play in your new rework. Also why get rid of Regen, it's an iconic and decent spell to have.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

Wait... but none of this fixes the clipping WHM still has to deal with.
Currently, lilies are an instant GCD, so we use them to weave other healing oGCDs and then refund it back into Misery.

If you change Lilies to be oGCD, but we generate a lily whenever we cast Cure I/Cure II/Cure III/Medica I/Medica II/Benediction, and Light.. we're just goanna be clipping left and right with every skill being on a 2 sec cast time. That's even worse than what we have now.

And that was the problem with SB WHM. I had runs of Gymlet Dark where I wouldn't generate a single lily even if they only took 5 seconds off an oGCD recast.

[Fathym]

With Rapture and Solace being nerfed and GCD heals generating lilies, you're basically only going to Solace the boss for Misery. It works out roughly 2500 potency per minute if you're just spamming your 1-2-3, (5 x 200 + 700 per 40 sec or so) which no WHM is going to turn down. If you needed more healing, you'd throw in some Medica II and Benediction for more lilies. Each lily generating heal is worth 316 potency after all with Solace + 1/6 of a Misery. So using Solace/Rapture to heal is 316 potency lost while ausing GCD to heal is more like 80 potency lost. This also makes Asylum lose significant value, as potent as it is, being a GCD that does not generate lilies.

There's less decision making than you'd think. It boils down to 1-2-3, DoT, Solace and Misery to nuke boss, Benediction, Cure III and Medica II.

2 sec cast times don't equal weaves either. oGCD's require 0.7 sec + potential latency, which is the reason Malefic is 1.5 sec cast for single weaving.

The heal on Earth isn't really worth much, the majority of the time it'll be wasted healing on a player who would get healed anyway by your next aoe heal and 450 just isn't enough for clutch. As we've seen with SCH's Embrace at endgame, small heals you have no control over have far less value.

Ah. I misunderstood how ogcds worked. I though it was possible to have the animation time short enough to fit within the .5 second window but realized after research that it is impossible. To start with, I will move the dps cast times down to 1.5s so lilies always have a place in the rotation to be weaved without clipping. As far as the smart heal goes, the point of the spell is to have a hot that, in most cases, reapplies to the main tank as long as you are going through your 1>2>3 combo. Maybe changing the targeting mechanic to whichever teammate has the high enmity would be more effective.

What you said about only wanting to dps with the ogcd's is sort of the goal. The idea behind the whole rework is that the player's only ogcd heals will be tied to their dps. The skill expression involved is in using your gcds effectively in combination with aero procs and triplecast so that as many of the ogcds can go towards damage as possible. It rewards good play with significantly higher damage output while still giving the flexibility of ogcd heals when things go wrong. The potencies almost definitely need balancing though.

You're also right about asylum. I'll just revert it to instant cast as it doesn't really have a massive heal on it anyways.