Can we please continue removing GCD heals to the point where we have none?

[Roeshel]

It is a good thing that Sage has only 2 GCD heals on their hotbar. It is fantastic when compared to White mage who has 8 in total. Now that not clipping gameplay has been enabled, can we move forward and remove any GCD spell that is not damage-related? Together with the removal of Fluid Aura & Afflatus Misery, White mage will have 10 free slots for a brand-new rework and a new job gauge to get creative with. We can go as far as removing Thin Air, Temperance and Plenary and with that WHM will have 13 free slots for a complete overhaul. I will give the benefit of the doubt and assume that PoM was been reworked into being that new buff that WHM has to maintain and not include it in the abilities to be deleted.

I don't think it should take another decade to reach a better style of gameplay. We should not be held back by lore and 8 years old job quests.

We are already seeing X-times come Ruin, which might be even more prevalent in EW. Healing on demand has already been removed from the game content and so should our GCD heals which are heals on demand. The changes are lagging behind.

SE, even if you don't plan on reworking WHM, make sure that whatever you do, you make lilies oGCDs or DPS neutral by the time EW has been released unless you want more tanks to be Glared to death.

[Saraphin]

Now, come on. They're trying something different and new with Sage. let's see how it goes...and see how many tanks die to the playstyle in dungeons.

Seeing as I don't even have Fluid Aura on my bar? the removal made me go "...that's still around?".

Look, we go through this EVERY expansion. They did it with AST (and nothing against ASTs) they bring it it overtooled, then they change things patch by patch. the WHM will survive, the WHM will still be relevant and if you think that we're going to have another 3.5 Great Kickening, i don't think we're going to see that this time around for 8/24 man stuff. The WHM will persevere and those of us skilled on it will come through, staring blankly as we see what needs changed, what's overdone, what's underdone and sipping our Tea and Coffee to keep our Salt levels down while we wait.

By the way...have some tea or coffee. it's too early to be this salty, wait until Early Access Weekend then go full Salt Mage.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

[Roeshel]

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

That's the whole point of oGCD. Proposing GCD to get their own count time is worse than having thm on oGCD because of DPS loss.

With Cardia, Sage already has ST regen ticking that is slightly stronger than the normal GCD regen whm and AST have but it only gets stronger as you gain more spell speed. Healings spells should not obstruct DPSing, they should encourage it. Sage has been designed following this idea.

By the way...have some tea or coffee. it's too early to be this salty, wait until Early Access Weekend then go full Salt Mage.

I will not be playing White mage unless it deals more damage than Sage which is very unlikely.

Now, come on. They're trying something different and new with Sage. let's see how it goes...and see how many tanks die to the playstyle in dungeons.

They are not trying anything new. They are switching from enabling comfy GCD overhealing to offensive GCD on which the player is dependant in order to fulfill their job's responsibility and they've been doing that since SHB by first introducing a plethora of oGCD heals whose sole existence suggests that the devs are encouraging healers to DPS.

All healers now have 1.5 cast times which seems like a small change but for that change to happen a lot of balancing needs to be done especially for Scholar with their strong oGCD healing. They locked the utilization of the full healing kit behind DPS loss in raids and nerfed the fairy because the numbers are really off if the pet doesn't get nerfed. The only reason AST ended up stronger than WHM was not because they have neutral DPS healing, but because of severe scaling issues caused by the card's buffs that were taken into consideration upon release but due to lack of popularity AST ultimately got buffs in 5.1. Astroligians with 45 potency on DoT and 1600 AoE neutral healing can only dream of out-dpsing & out-healing WHM & SCH despite their DPS losses for healing. AST had no strengths anywhere in the game. Playing the job instead of WHM was basically doing more work for weaker results. AST was not WHM+ as people like to refer to it, it was WHM- in every way imaginable. Playing the job probably felt like trading usefulness for fancy cards.

[Misutoraru]

Rather than deleting GCD heals, I’d rather see them giving cooldown to those spells, particularly speaking the AoEs. So rather than trying to top everybody up to 100% with excessive Medica/Medica II/Cure III/Succor/Helios spams, with cooldowns people will have to think ‘a bit’ before using each spell.

Single target GCD spell can probably stay without cooldown or if any, a short one.

That might worth a try making heal more interesting, rather than dumb down healing even further.

We might fainlly look more like healer and less green DPS

[Saraphin]

All healers now have 1.5 cast times which seems like a small change but for that change to happen a lot of balancing needs to be done especially for Scholar with their strong oGCD healing. They locked the utilization of the full healing kit behind DPS loss in raids and nerfed the fairy because the numbers are really off if the pet doesn't get nerfed. The only reason AST ended up stronger than WHM was not because they have neutral DPS healing, but because of severe scaling issues caused by the card's buffs that were taken into consideration upon release but due to lack of popularity AST ultimately got buffs in 5.1. Astroligians with 45 potency on DoT and 1600 AoE neutral healing can only dream of out-dpsing & out-healing WHM & SCH despite their DPS losses for healing. AST had no strengths anywhere in the game. Playing the job instead of WHM was basically doing more work for weaker results. AST was not WHM+ as people like to refer to it, it was WHM- in every way imaginable. Playing the job probably felt like trading usefulness for fancy cards.

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

AST is just as powerful as WHM, i've healed right along side ASTs that can keep up with WHMs in ALL aspects. So...if you are saying AST is "WHM-" you need to rethink how you're playing it.

[Roeshel]

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

AST is just as powerful as WHM, i've healed right along side ASTs that can keep up with WHMs in ALL aspects. So...if you are saying AST is "WHM-" you need to rethink how you're playing it.

The WHM- thing was only 5.0 in Shb. I didn't read all of the patch notes of Heavensward or those for Stormblood.

Currently at 5.5, the only thing AST is better than WHM at is the Single Target boss encounter in a party of 8. I don't think AST is WHM-, they are just another healer for me.

You don't recall when it first came out, AST was out doing WHM at healing and DPS. I remember that in 3.5. I remember being kicked from 24 man raids because I was running WHM. I remember trying to get clears on EXs and joining a party, then getting kicked with an "Oh, we forgot, we don't want WHMs".

And people were arguing with me that Fun > Balance

[Saraphin]

Heavensward was a very very dark time for WHM, to be truthful.

they're still tuning the healers...and we know they will. Sage is going to be overtuned, the other healers undertuned and by 6.4 the potencies and other things will be changed. it will be more "equalized" but...while we can look at what they've released, until we can get our hands on it? we won't be able to give feed back that they'll really listen to.

we looked at everything for HW, saw the changes, tried to point out..."this ain't gonna work" and got told "Try it out". Lo and Behold, people were right and...they spent the time retuning it so that things were closer. I'm not saying that the status of healers are perfect. far, far from, but...i think they probably should have made Sage a DPS instead of a healer and continued to work on balancing out the three we have now.

I like having FUN in 14, but when one class is overtuned more than another, similar sort of class...you're going to have people going "no, we do not want this in our group". even in non-ex, non-savage content. so it'll be back to like...5 people queuing for things together so that classes aren't booted...which will increase queue time for single queued people.....

...it's a vicious cycle, it really is, but...it'll get sorted out, may take a bit, but i've hope things will be made closer to an equilibrium. However: "Hope for the best, prepare for the worst".

[Semirhage]

Chasing perfect balance is an impossible goal, but Square has come as close as just about any company can hope to. I agree that fun is more important than perfect numerical balance- with a caveat that is relevant to the healer role. If you're going to tip something out of balance, you'd better at least make it uniquely useful somewhere, and failing that give it something fun and impactful to manage or work with. Their utter refusal to do anything of the sort with White Mage is why I've personally found healer imbalance especially egregious; when I'm playing Red Mage, I couldn't care less that my explosions are less powerful than Black Mage's. It's not like they're pulling orders of magnitude higher numbers than I am, and I'm enjoying the flow that the class has and the neat little things I can do to squeeze more out of what I'm doing. When I'm playing White Mage (especially in the Heavensward/Stormblood era)? I was playing a job that was A) weaker than its competition B) had less to do than its competition C) had a lower skill ceiling than its competition, and D) to make up for all that, had a boring downtime rotation with nothing to manage or work toward. And the Endwalker job trailer let me know that it's still going to spam one boring spell over and over again, with likely no unique utility, nothing to manage, and if past expansions are anything to go by it'll be wimpier than AST's output within a patch cycle. Sounds like garbage to me!

[Kabooa]

That might worth a try making heal more interesting, rather than dumb down healing even further.

We might fainlly look more like healer and less green DPS

I'm usually one to lean on the side of optimism, but I said this same thing when Shadowbringers dropped. Outside very specific encounters, this did not hold true. Perhaps if the raw power of healing didn't get hotfixed for the first Savage patch, this might have held true, but it didn't.