WHM 1-2-3

[RopeDrink]

Honestly, if you think that WHM has a lot of buttons you should just add another hotbar and adjust your keybinds. I don't even think that SCH has enough buttons, WHM is even simpler because a lot of their abilities are used almost nowhere so you don't need them.

I at no point in this entire thread even remotely hinted that WHM had too many buttons. The post you are referring to is in reference to someone else who claimed that WHM hotbars are literally empty, despite the fact that multiple DPS jobs have less than they do. Context, people.

[Crushnight]

You want to be amused and depressed at the same time? Check out the graveyard mess on the unused/probably-could-click-this-skill-if-I-really-need-it side of my hotbar.

I just wanna cry at that, just like I did at ShB's launch when I looked at all 3 healers ;_; I miss a lot of our old skills and animations.

[Raikai]

I just wanna cry at that, just like I did at ShB's launch when I looked at all 3 healers ;_; I miss a lot of our old skills and animations.

Yeah... I wish some of those spells would be repurposed instead of deleted.

I mean, technically Protect was bad. Maintenance buffs only make sense when it's a exclusive boon for a job/class, but every healer had it. However, Protect is an iconic FF spell... Could've been baked into someone else's kit as a dmg reduction cooldown or something.

[NobleWinter]

Death is always punishing especially for a healer. We come back with barely any mp, abilities like Draw, Aetherflow, Assize, and Lucid may still be on cooldown. Fairies need to be summoned, gauges rebuilt, etc. It seems the Devs dont mind locking most of our kits behind being skilled enough to stay alive already. WHM already require you to be alive 30 seconds for Afflatus anything. I don't see why locking anything behind dps on a class that has Thin Air would be seen as too punishing. It takes Scholar 4 minutes to get a full guage and it disappears on death too.

[AnotherPerson]

Death is always punishing especially for a healer. We come back with barely any mp, abilities like Draw, Aetherflow, Assize, and Lucid may still be on cooldown. Fairies need to be summoned, gauges rebuilt, etc. It seems the Devs dont mind locking most of our kits behind being skilled enough to stay alive already. WHM already require you to be alive 30 seconds for Afflatus anything. I don't see why locking anything behind dps on a class that has Thin Air would be seen as too punishing. It takes Scholar 4 minutes to get a full guage and it disappears on death too.

Of course death is punishing, the problem is how recovering will be on a WHM. For AST, they can draw within the next 30 seconds and get MP back and most of their healing tools are on a 60 second cooldown and MP wise their healing spells are very generous in MP cost. For scholars, it takes them 60 seconds to get their aetherflow back at worst. The skill's cooldown is ticking while they're dead so coming back with MP is much easier within every minute. WHM's Thin Air is up every 120 seconds, which is a huge difference in frequency at which they can gain MP back because a lot of mechanics can happen within 2 minutes. Having more frequent intervals to recover MP is a lot smoother in recovering than having a large CD that may not be up very often because you can spend MP more liberally for an extended period of time, whether it would be for healing or for DPS.

Having less spaced intervals with strong MP recovery tools means if you die after using one, your MP is gimped for a longer period than the others - less MP for both DPS and healing. If you lock heals into a DPS resource, it doubles down on this problem as WHM has to spend MP casting more healing spells to make up for the loss of Afflatus Solace/Afflatus Rapture that was locked away by DPS GCDs. This leads to less heals overall and less DPS in the long run, which is counter intuitive to having a healing gauge generate healing resources. While Assize does give 500 MP back, WHM also has the most expensive GCD heals (Medica II and Medica I being 1300 MP and 1000 MP respectively while Diurnal Aspected Helios and Helios is 800 MP / 700 MP respectively). Afflatus spells offset this MP cost heavily - every 30 seconds a WHM essentially get a free Medica or Cure II cast, which is equivalent to 1000 MP in return. Locking Afflatus spells in DPS GCD spells in this comparison means you spend 3 DPS GCDs (1200 MP) to get an afflatus spell back, so your net healing gain is -200 MP. It means you lose MP for getting an afflatus spell and afflatus heals are no longer 'free'. In other words, to heal through an encounter when MP is an issue and the priority is to keep the party alive, you don't DPS and work on filling up the lily gauge, you ignore the lily system entirely ...

Again, not a big issue when everyone's playing right, but ignoring the healing system when you need healing seems like bad design.

[Grimoire-M]

It's that a large reason why SMN got changed in ShB?

Losing all of your progress on a 2-minute rotation on death was part of why they added more Demi-Summons, yes. The real reason was they wanted more Demi-Summons to make Summoner’s aesthetic match player expectations. They also ditched the horrendous mechanic that was Stormblood Aethertrail, which only added more jank to the overall rotation, through myriad forms of lockouts. It’s basically why we have DWT as a temporary movement cooldown too.


As for improving WHM’s DPS rotation? I think I’d still prefer DoTs or charge actions. Mostly because those soft cooldowns reward flexibility if tuned right. A combo chain above 2 sounds fun if it works like Machinist’s procs but most of the situations I’d even want to use such a mechanic are limited to alternating DPS and healing GCDs and aim to help with WHM’s mobility problem or offset their taxes.

[Almagnus1]

Losing all of your progress on a 2-minute rotation on death was part of why they added more Demi-Summons, yes. The real reason was they wanted more Demi-Summons to make Summoner’s aesthetic match player expectations. They also ditched the horrendous mechanic that was Stormblood Aethertrail, which only added more jank to the overall rotation, through myriad forms of lockouts. It’s basically why we have DWT as a temporary movement cooldown too.


As for improving WHM’s DPS rotation? I think I’d still prefer DoTs or charge actions. Mostly because those soft cooldowns reward flexibility if tuned right. A combo chain above 2 sounds fun if it works like Machinist’s procs but most of the situations I’d even want to use such a mechanic are limited to alternating DPS and healing GCDs and aim to help with WHM’s mobility problem or offset their taxes.

Personally I'd rather see most of the cast times on spells reduced to 1.5s so we have the option to have weave windows around the DPS 1-2-3, Holy, Cure 2, or Medica 2 depending on what you need more of at the moment. The only way that'd work is if most of the insta cast spells became OGCD along with possibly turning Fluid Aura into a OGCD damage spell allowing us the flexibility to go towards a more DPS or healing focused spell casting as the situation warrants it.

[Grimoire-M]

Personally I'd rather see most of the cast times on spells reduced to 1.5s so we have the option to have weave windows around the DPS 1-2-3, Holy, Cure 2, or Medica 2 depending on what you need more of at the moment. The only way that'd work is if most of the insta cast spells became OGCD along with possibly turning Fluid Aura into a OGCD damage spell allowing us the flexibility to go towards a more DPS or healing focused spell casting as the situation warrants it.

I mean if you want that AST is right there. And it does a solid job at remaining distinct. White Mage doesn’t need to copy it. I also wouldn’t mind having to pay the weave tax on Scholar if it was actually viable to use Ruin II, as that opens up DPS oGCD opportunities on them, which fits with their generally fiddlier toolkit. To me White Mage’s Lily system just needs more supplemental GCD options around it, whether that’s heal + damage, supplementary movement/weaving options, and/or a retuning of their current oGCDs to better support their GCD focus. WHM’s lower APM is something I’d rather keep intact relative to AST and SCH too, even if the game sped up. Sage I suspect might work out similar to what you’re hoping for, though its ‘oGCD DPS action’ will likely be a cleric stance rehash that you may balance against potentially similar healing or mitigation stances, juggling all of them to flex your access to certain cooldowns or resources in a pinch. How that core avoids being a tax laden mess remains to be seen.

[Semirhage]

I mean if you want that AST is right there. And it does a solid job at remaining distinct. White Mage doesn’t need to copy it.

So how might White Mage design go about solving the Clipmage problem? 1.5 second casts is just an easy, if lazy way to do it. While it doesn't necessarily have to happen the same way, "having the ability to weave your oGCDs" also isn't some Astrologian-exclusive identity. It's the hallmark of a class that's actually designed to flow well.

[Almagnus1]

So how might White Mage design go about solving the Clipmage problem? 1.5 second casts is just an easy, if lazy way to do it. While it doesn't necessarily have to happen the same way, "having the ability to weave your oGCDs" also isn't some Astrologian-exclusive identity. It's the hallmark of a class that's actually designed to flow well.

That's been one of the problems with the WHM class for a while now... it just doesn't flow very well.