A simple, yet engaging WHM

[ty_taurus]

So there's been some back and forth regarding the skill floor and skill ceiling of the healer jobs and how it's possible to keep a job simple while also adding depth to it. I've been thinking a bit about how I might approach this with WHM, and my hope is to try and prove that you can keep the job easy, simple, and approachable, yet also expand on its skill ceiling without impeding on that simplicity. So here are some light examples of what came to mind:

DPS Actions
I'd like to start with new DPS tools since there are just a few that are relatively simple in execution before I move onto some changes to healing actions. For this segment, know that we'd be keeping Glare, Dia, Holy, and Afflatus Misery as is, and I'll be using a potency of 300 for Glare and 900 for Afflatus Misery for reference.

Water and Banish
Starting at level 15, we replace Fluid Aura with Water and eventually upgrades to Banish alongside Glare and Dia.
Action Type: GCD Spell
Potency: 350
MP Cost: 400
Cast Time: Instant
Recast Time: 15s (Maximum Charges: 3)

Banish gives us a bit of extra damage and mobility on a short recast timer, but also a relaxed 3 charges giving WHM a little something extra to work with in regards to regular DPS. The damage gain is small and the charge system gives players time to sit on charges comfortably for a time when they feel most appropriate.

Germinate
A GCD spell that fully nourishes the Blood Lily and has a 120 second recast time (it also can only be used when in combat). A way to ensure you have an Afflatus Misery to cast during party buff windows.

Eschaton
A DoT spell that targets an enemy, applies a regen to allies nearby your target, and generates 1 lily at a high MP cost.
Action Type: GCD spell
DoT Potency: 50 for 15 seconds
Regen Potency: 100 for 15 seconds
MP Cost: 2400
Cast Time: 2.5 seconds

Eschaton's lily generation will become key when I explain some healing changes in a moment. It's DPS neutral at face value, and the high MP cost means you'll have another option for Thin Air, but. you're not pressured to use it aggressively, not to mention the DoT and Regen aspects of the move prevent you from spamming it.

Healing Actions
So I would like to rebalance Afflatus Healing a tad by merging Solace with Regen and Rapture with Medica II. This would help consolidate some of WHM's GCD heals and make Afflatus healing feel more rewarding since both Regen and Medica II have a lot of power. Additionally, Freecure is replaced with a new trait that makes Cure's cast time instant in contrast to Cure II. It would give it the slightest of niches.

Afflatus Propagation
This new Afflatus spell consumes a lily and nourishes the blood lily just like the others and will be key at making the Blood Lily a far more desirable tool. Casting Afflatus Propagation on an ally places a bud on them that lasts up to 30 seconds. This causes your next healing spell cast on that target to heal for 20% more HP and deal damage to all nearby enemies to that ally with a potency of 300

What this means is that Propagation is only a 50% DPS loss in contrast to the current 100% DPS loss of Solace and Rapture; however, it neutralizes the 300 potency loss of Afflatus Misery currently when activated with Solace or Rapture. You can actually turn Misery into a 150 potency gain if you can maintain using Propagation with Solace or Rapture. Keep in mind that positioning is also key, however, none of this interferes with WHM's healing ease.

In practice, there would need to be number adjustments to ensure everything stays balanced, but I wanted to establish the idea using Glare's 300 potency as a baseline because it was easy and familiar.

Additionally, I'd like to see Solace and Rapture lowered to levels 30 and 50 respectively while also adding in Afflatus Misery at level 50 with less potency. Instead of starting at 900 potency, its damage would increase as Stone/Glare's potency does to keep up with your DPS. Introducing these tools much earlier though would help teach new WHM players about their important gauge much earlier, which I think is important for the future of the job.

These are just a few abilities and simple changes, but I'd like to hear what some WHM players think about the concept, and also discuss whether or not these kinds of changes do or don't work with the skill floor and skill ceiling as some of us would like.

[Shurrikhan]

Basic critiques:

1. Germinate is not going to reduce the apparent loss of not having an Afflatus Misery in every other raid buff period (120, 180, 300, 360, etc.). You'll just now be expected to fit a further AM per 120 seconds, which can make the usual banked per-90 (effectively working itself out to matching the 2-minute interval, then the next 60, then skipping a 2-minute/60, next 60, etc) feel awkward due to the ability to overcap. It'd badly force you to have your Lily casts all planned out, instead of being usable for emergency heals (rare though that be) or mobility. Moreover that capacity (an extra 600 potency per 120s, or roughly 5pps or 12.5 ppgcd) is just going to be taken from our typical offensive ppgcd.

2. Eschaton seems perhaps overpowered, but certainly likely to be... odd. You've not attached a CD to this, so in multi-target situations you're effectively able to mass DoT at 250 potency each, only 50 short of Glare (or 125 combined when accounting for the Lily actually be spent IF you wouldn't have otherwise needed to heal and couldn't recover otherwise clipped ppgcd, but a bonus) or 27.5n short of Holy including Lily spending, while feeding up to 2 AMs off a single Thin Air. I just have to wonder what actual playflow you want from this. Under what scenarios should we do A, and after what limit does it instead become optimal to do B, per your intent, and what does that variance add to the gameplay?

3. Afflatus Propagation, on the other hand, looks really neat. It's relatively dps-neutral in AoE, can be used pre-pull, offers a nice double-Holy value AoE to our first (enhanced) heal on that target.... Good stuff. Admittedly, though, I'd probably be even more floored by this if, say, we still had the means to force out a crit via procs (as per the old Cure II -> III procs in ARR) and the damage triggered by that heal was actually just, say, 40% or 33% of its healing done. That said, I'm not sold on the idea of having a 140p heal (20% of 700) and 150n damage competing with Solace's 700 heal and no damage or and Rapture's 300n and no damage. It just seems to badly take away from the functional point of the Lily system.

Disclaimer: I didn't actually mind the earlier StB concept of Secret of the Lilies as indirect potency-refunding from healing actions done. I just felt it was weirdly applied (in being maxed at 3 stacks) and painfully undertuned. So, I may be crazy anyways.

Oh, and Water/Banish are fine, of course. Siphon a bit of spam ppgcd for a flexible mobility tool/nuke that benefits notably from downtime? Totally okay with that.

[ty_taurus]

Basic critiques:

1. Germinate is not going to reduce the apparent loss of not having an Afflatus Misery in every other raid buff period (120, 180, 300, 360, etc.). You'll just now be expected to fit a further AM per 120 seconds, which can make the usual banked per-90 (effectively working itself out to matching the 2-minute interval, then the next 60, then skipping a 2-minute/60, next 60, etc) feel awkward due to the ability to overcap. It'd badly force you to have your Lily casts all planned out, instead of being usable for emergency heals (rare though that be) or mobility. Moreover that capacity (an extra 600 potency per 120s, or roughly 5pps or 12.5 ppgcd) is just going to be taken from our typical offensive ppgcd.

2. Eschaton seems perhaps overpowered, but certainly likely to be... odd. You've not attached a CD to this, so in multi-target situations you're effectively able to mass DoT at 250 potency each, only 50 short of Glare (or 125 combined when accounting for the Lily actually be spent IF you wouldn't have otherwise needed to heal and couldn't recover otherwise clipped ppgcd, but a bonus) or 27.5n short of Holy including Lily spending, while feeding up to 2 AMs off a single Thin Air. I just have to wonder what actual playflow you want from this. Under what scenarios should we do A, and after what limit does it instead become optimal to do B, per your intent, and what does that variance add to the gameplay?

3. Afflatus Propagation, on the other hand, looks really neat. It's relatively dps-neutral in AoE, can be used pre-pull, offers a nice double-Holy value AoE to our first (enhanced) heal on that target.... Good stuff. Admittedly, though, I'd probably be even more floored by this if, say, we still had the means to force out a crit via procs (as per the old Cure II -> III procs in ARR) and the damage triggered by that heal was actually just, say, 40% or 33% of its healing done. That said, I'm not sold on the idea of having a 140p heal (20% of 700) and 150n damage competing with Solace's 700 heal and no damage or and Rapture's 300n and no damage. It just seems to badly take away from the functional point of the Lily system.

Disclaimer: I didn't actually mind the earlier StB concept of Secret of the Lilies as indirect potency-refunding from healing actions done. I just felt it was weirdly applied (in being maxed at 3 stacks) and painfully undertuned. So, I may be crazy anyways.

Oh, and Water/Banish are fine, of course. Siphon a bit of spam ppgcd for a flexible mobility tool/nuke that benefits notably from downtime? Totally okay with that.

Thanks for the feedback. Nicely thought out criticism.

OnGerminate: You bring up some interesting points. One thing that comes to mind might be... What if instead, it Nourishes the Blood Lily twice instead of thrice, and was on a 60 second cooldown with 2 charges? There's no longer the issue about overcapping on CD. 2 Charges makes it overall less of a DPS gain but also increases the flexibility of when it's optimally used. You don't need to have a fully empty Blood Lily going into it. If you have 1 Nourish, it takes you to full. If you have 2 Nourishes, then you can use Aff. Propagation > AM > Germinate. Paired with Eschaton's potential for Lily generation, you also have it for the openner since you can force a lily to immediately spend on Propagation. If we ultimately don't like Eschaton though we could also add the normal lily generation to Germinate itself. Thoughts on a change like that?

On Eschaton: Yeah this one is wonky. What I'd like to do is create a reason to want to use Thin Air on something other than Raise. Additionally, having a big MP spender gives you some wiggle room in skill expression since you can also use it outside of Thin Air when you're comfortable sacrificing a chunk of MP which I think has some value in job design. It's a very tricky thing as you mentioned, though, because playflow isn't clear and direct without controlling its use through a cooldown. You don't want it to just be a bigger nuke either because then it does put a lot of pressure on players to use it as much as possible. I've seen a lot of people gravitate toward Lost Seraph Strike in Bozja, and maybe something closer to that direction might make for sense for an action like this.

On Afflatus Propagation: The thing that I think works really nicely in Aff. Propagation's favor is it creates a way to make Misery worth working toward without encouraging you to waste heals for the sake of nourishing the Blood Lily. While making the damage based on the healing you offer to the target can be really interesting too, it makes the damage harder to control. I guess the biggest point of debate is what is the non-damage benefit associated with it? I agree that the increased healing isn't perfect, but I wonder what kind of ideas come to your mind in regards to that point.

[Shurrikhan]

Thanks for the feedback. Nicely thought out criticism.

OnGerminate: You bring up some interesting points. One thing that comes to mind might be... What if instead, it Nourishes the Blood Lily twice instead of thrice, and was on a 60 second cooldown with 2 charges?

I'd probably go the other way, honestly. Just consolidate the gauge space of 3 readied/bloodied lilies to a single Blood Lily, and, in that space, allow for 2 further lilies to be readied over that time. Voila, 5 charges max, essentially, up from 3, with no gauge UI bloat. That said, I still have to wonder at the function/intent of this. To me, it's just like SAM's Ikishouten but with little of the parameters/interactions that make that skill (mildly) interesting.

On Eschaton: Yeah this one is wonky. What I'd like to do is create a reason to want to use Thin Air on something other than Raise. Additionally, having a big MP spender gives you some wiggle room in skill expression...

I just feel like it needs (1) more deliberate scaling since, as a ST DoT, its practical ppgcd comparison is going to vary wildly and (2) something more obviously interesting about its skill expression than just that it's a chunky Mana spender (though, admittedly, every healer could benefit from that, as outside of rezzes MP feels like a watered-down afterthought at present).

Also, it's kind of odd to think though that Lost Seraph Strike is almost just Cleric Stance done right. (Personally -- mad hatter hat on here -- I'd probably have taken that further, though, in making WHM's utility an outright DPS burst phase, whereby all heals become enemy-castable primers for damage bonuses that follow along a non-linear but (variably) optimizable flow.)

On Afflatus Propagation: The thing that I think works really nicely in Aff. Propagation's favor is it creates a way to make Misery worth working toward without encouraging you to waste heals for the sake of nourishing the Blood Lily.

I feel like that's not so much a WHM kit issue as just a general healing requirements issue, though (and, to some degree, the non-WHM healer sniping excessively, without paying attention to WHM's available charges -- which, to be fair, should have a status bar element visible at least to one's party so they know how many unique seals, AF charges, Lily charges, or... Sage ammo... one has).

I mean, if we can't warrant even a single GCD direct heal per 30 seconds... that's an issue.

[ty_taurus]

Seraph Strike does feel really good, though it would probably need to be handled more delicately if we were to actually put it into practice for the WHM. Even if we could convince them to reintroduced some more relaxed DPS options back into healing, LSS as it stands is far too spicy for their tastebuds. But yeah, I do think having some legitimate MP-heavy action would offer something more interesting for healers to sink their teeth into if done correctly. We have this resource in the game, so let's use it, otherwise we might as well take it out too. You could very easily just convert MP into a job specific gauge for BLM and PLD. That's not what I want to happen, but it's scary to think we are edging closer and closer to that possibility.

Back on Propagation, basically I like the way the concept transforms an otherwise DPS loss scenario into a gain. The effect of Propagation is a loss to a direct use of Glare, but when you add 150 + 150 + 150 + 900, suddenly that's more than 300 + 300 + 300 + 300. Suddenly you have this long-term payoff that makes you want to GCD heal in a specific way, but the fact that the DPS from Propagation is centered around your target means you also need to think about positioning to get that profit rather than just press it and forget it. Being able to pair it with Solace and Rapture also makes it very usable with your other lilies rather than just dominating them, though honestly the more I've thought about your idea of having the DPS based on the healing you deliver is growing on me.