Concerns about WHM in Endwalker

[AnotherPerson]

It would be very nice to see Lilies + Misery become DPS Neutral. I'm still doubtful it'll happen though, it's unlikely to see Misery be DPS Neutral unless they make SCH's Ruin II also have to be DPS neutral since they both serve a similar purpose.

With both Glare and Broil being 1.5 sec cast time, lilies and Ruin II are going to be used mainly for being instant cast - 2 weave slots + mobility. Both still pay a DPS cost for using it.

At least, in the case for lilies, it's still healing while repaying DPS back at no cost to MP.... whereas using Energy drain for Ruin II is no longer a DPS gain anymore because Broil also grants a free weave 1.5 sec cast time, so having to use aetherflow healing with Ruin II is a lot more expensive than before.

I will have to play WHM in Endwalker to tell for sure, but I'm not too concerned with having less MP overall. Even currently in ShB, using Lucid Dreaming + Assize on cooldown is generally enough to be MP positive even with spamming Glare. You go MP negative if you have a very low piety build, so BiS would just include some piety gear to bump your required piety up a bit with Thin Air and PoM's change. If anything, having a slightly higher piety requirement on gear is better; if you ever get synced down to Lv 50 content and below, you're no longer abnormally MP hungry. Plus, the new Thin Air would then no longer feel like you have "too much MP" - which was the original reason why people went low piety builds in the first place, since Thin Air supplemented their lack of MP by giving free MP cost entirely. If anything, it'll just put a different skillcap on managing MP economy.

[mobradovic00]

It would be very nice to see Lilies + Misery become DPS Neutral. I'm still doubtful it'll happen though, it's unlikely to see Misery be DPS Neutral unless they make SCH's Ruin II also have to be DPS neutral since they both serve a similar purpose.

With both Glare and Broil being 1.5 sec cast time, lilies and Ruin II are going to be used mainly for being instant cast - 2 weave slots + mobility. Both still pay a DPS cost for using it.

At least, in the case for lilies, it's still healing while repaying DPS back at no cost to MP.... whereas using Energy drain for Ruin II is no longer a DPS gain anymore because Broil also grants a free weave 1.5 sec cast time, so having to use aetherflow healing with Ruin II is a lot more expensive than before.

I will have to play WHM in Endwalker to tell for sure, but I'm not too concerned with having less MP overall. Even currently in ShB, using Lucid Dreaming + Assize on cooldown is generally enough to be MP positive even with spamming Glare. You go MP negative if you have a very low piety build, so BiS would just include some piety gear to bump your required piety up a bit with Thin Air and PoM's change. If anything, having a slightly higher piety requirement on gear is better; if you ever get synced down to Lv 50 content and below, you're no longer abnormally MP hungry. Plus, the new Thin Air would then no longer feel like you have "too much MP" - which was the original reason why people went low piety builds in the first place, since Thin Air supplemented their lack of MP by giving free MP cost entirely. If anything, it'll just put a different skillcap on managing MP economy.

The issue I see personally is that WHM specifically is disadvantaged compared to the rest. I'm sure adding some piety to your BiS list will make it 'fine', but if only WHM has to do that, it's not really the most fair thing ever. Regardless of anyone's personal feelings of how healers look right now, if 3/4 jobs can do something and 1/4 can't, it's a big disadvantage compared to the rest.
I do agree that making lilies DPS neutral makes SCH look somewhat silly, but I'd argue SGE existing and Addersgall heals costing 0 DPS, while every Aetherflow heal is a loss of 100 potency makes SCH look very silly already, so not much is lost I feel.

On another, slightly unrelated note - synced piety works the same as level 80 piety, the number is just different. The base tick is always 200MP every 3s, and your amount of piety determines how much more you have in addition to that. Depending on your level, the formula is different, but 1000 piety at level 80 will always behave like 1000 piety at level 80, regardless of what level you get synced to and what number you see on the stat screen.

[AnotherPerson]

I do agree that making lilies DPS neutral makes SCH look somewhat silly, but I'd argue SGE existing and Addersgall heals costing 0 DPS, while every Aetherflow heal is a loss of 100 potency makes SCH look very silly already, so not much is lost I feel.

Addersgall heals cost 0 DPS, but Sage also has no Addersgall DPS dump, so you'd still burn 'sage lustrate' to get MP back if you overcap since it's directly tied into your MP management. Some people dislike that. On the reverse, if you remove SCH's Energy drain to bring SCH in-line with Sage and make Aetherflow heals "cost 0 DPS", people will dislike it more because their aetherflow heals are not getting value if healing isn't necessary. That, and less complexity.

The issue I see personally is that WHM specifically is disadvantaged compared to the rest. I'm sure adding some piety to your BiS list will make it 'fine', but if only WHM has to do that, it's not really the most fair thing ever. Regardless of anyone's personal feelings of how healers look right now, if 3/4 jobs can do something and 1/4 can't, it's a big disadvantage compared to the rest.

But WHM was always the advantageous healer in piety than the rest because they never needed more piety as a result of Thin Air. AST and SCH were usually the ones to meld piety since they didn't have that kind of MP negation for encounters. SCH's MP economy was entirely contingent on how much extra damage is taken and spent for Aetherflow heals instead of Energy Drain to restore MP, and AST naturally ran out of MP if they had to do anything outside of Malefic over the course of a fight before the 5.3 skill adjustments, so it's generally a lot more common for AST and SCH to add gear with piety to overcome these differences.

If anything, with the Endwalker changes, SCH, Sage, and AST's MP are standardized to account for both DPS and GCD healing whereas for WHM, their MP regen is brought to the same line as the other healers to account for DPS and Thin Air was adjusted to account for more the MP expensive GCD healing. The MP changes pretty much evened out the MP economy with a normal piety build for all 4 healers, but still allow all 4 healers approach MP economy differently instead of homogenizing it. Now, you just add more piety than usual if you really need it for GCD healing.
The main issue is really just how the Lily system fits into this. People always see lilies as DPS loss, but most will use it for weaving oGCDs or heavy movement instead of clipping their DoT, so we still use the healing component of the lilies in the end if needed. However, now that Glare can be used for weaving, they don't want to use the lily system at all for the same reason we don't want to use Ruin II. The only problem is that the lily system is most likely integral to managing the WHM's healing MP economy so we save as much MP for DPS GCDs instead. Spending GCDs on free-MP healing spells still affect your overall MP economy in the end because GCDs not consuming MP over the course of the fight translates to having more MP for future GCD spells. Just 3 Afflatus heals and 1 Afflatus misery = 4 GCDs of no MP whereas spending 4 GCDs on Glares consumes 1600 MP. That difference alone is an additional 1600MP every 90 seconds.

However, this makes the lily system really applies to the average player, not so much for highly optimized settings where you want to get as much DPS as possible and have less overheal usage by coordinating with your co-healer. This problem, again, is because the lily system results in a net DPS loss vs Glare, so the extra MP that you could've gotten from just using lilies over the course of the fight is lowered in an optimized environment. Making Afflatus Misery DPS Neutral to Glare will immediately remove this problem, but making Afflatus Misery DPS Neutral has its own problems too.

Of course, if SCH gets a trait to change Ruin II by gaining 1 stack of Ruination to make using Ruin II DPS Neutral via using Aetherflow heals, then there's no longer a problem. If that ever happens though, I'm pretty sure Energy Drain will be removed to adjust for it.

[CrimsonGunner]

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doesn't it just sums it up that whm is no longer the prog friendly healer anymore?
one of whm strong suits was his mana management was the easiest of the 3 healers with thin air, now when shit its the fan you basically have nothing cause despite everything you said those lilies were already the first thing to go when u needed a cure/medica spams and when u actually need to dip on gcd heals frequently cause people get hit, you have nothing cause the other healers have ogcd heals that cost nothing which they can throw and whm has none other then lilybell that you can only count if ur hit so you go oom.
sch has all his fairy ogcd and aetherflow stacks, ast has loads of ogcds to help heals but whm has none of those free ogcd other then bene and tetra(asylum like sacred soil dont count for cause its regen not raw heal)

my point is the other healers have loads of mana free cast and skills that they burn long before they burn their own mana pool, whm has none of those and the lilies regenerate 30 per one so unlike the platora of ogcd the other healers have to pull from, whm has basically 3 gcd for aoe spams before dipping to his mana pool.

[AnotherPerson]

doesn't it just sums it up that whm is no longer the prog friendly healer anymore?
one of whm strong suits was his mana management was the easiest of the 3 healers with thin air, now when shit its the fan you basically have nothing cause despite everything you said those lilies were already the first thing to go when u needed a cure/medica spams and when u actually need to dip on gcd heals frequently cause people get hit, you have nothing cause the other healers have ogcd heals that cost nothing which they can throw and whm has none other then lilybell that you can only count if ur hit so you go oom.
sch has all his fairy ogcd and aetherflow stacks, ast has loads of ogcds to help heals but whm has none of those free ogcd other then bene and tetra(asylum like sacred soil dont count for cause its regen not raw heal)

my point is the other healers have loads of mana free cast and skills that they burn long before they burn their own mana pool, whm has none of those and the lilies regenerate 30 per one so unlike the platora of ogcd the other healers have to pull from, whm has basically 3 gcd for aoe spams before dipping to his mana pool.

This is heavily dependent on content design. WHM's still pretty prog friendly to me, if "Prog" strats still mean very safe and designed to be 'foolproof' and simple, even at the cost of DPS. It's just not "Prog King" with unlimited MP for fixing errors or healing huge hits in a row at no cost. I'd say it's still pretty competitive as a prog healer. Your counter-part to progging in the pure-healer slot is AST - but AST's toolkit is very reliant on predicting damage ahead of time.

In terms of emergency & unplanned healing for AST, Microcosmos isn't effective if you use it after people mess up on a mechanic since it has to be activated beforehand... and doesn't work if they actually died to the next mechanic before the AST manually triggers the heal. Earthly Star won't reach it's max potency until after 10 seconds, (and while it takes 10 secs to reach full potential for 720 aoe heal, the new dps adjustment might make it worth using on cooldown over healing, which is somewhat similar to Assize). AST relies on your time and regens from Collective Unconscious, Celestial Opposition, and Aspected Helios. The problem is... if you have time for HoTs to tick, you're probably not in a spot where things have gone to hell.

In terms of emergency & unplanned healing, WHM has stronger flexibility in upfront heals on-demand with their toolkit, especially with Confession, Asylum's trait, and Temperance lasting a set amount of time - your GCD heals can be heavily beefed up as a result and work as direct healing. This includes lilies being affected by their enhanced healing trait. Although it's not by much, if it's a really urgent situation and you need as much healing throughput within 2-3 GCDs, WHM does this really well.

If you compare their GCD healing buff synergies, AST's heals are have less flexibility in immediate potency for everything other than Neutral Sect. Synastry only works with 1 target, so it heals a maximum of 2 people. Horoscope helios is a one-use skill every 60 seconds, but you're going to clip if you try to trigger Horoscope outside of Lightspeed if you want to continually heal with a second use of Helios right after Aspected Helios. After all, Horoscope Helios is meant to be used in a delayed form but can be activated earlier if necessary.


In terms of lasting MP? AST's Astrodyne definitely makes it stronger in prog - doubly so because their MP cost for all spells are cheaper.

In terms of accessible Burst MP? With 2 charges on Thin Air, it's basically a variable -secondary- MP bar. It's actually a pretty neat way to look at it in that perspective. While other healers restore MP faster, WHM holds a secondary MP bar in reserve.


I will say AST looks a lot more powerful overall simply from design kit and gameplay, but WHM is no means weak for prog. Each has their advantages. Of course, nothing is yet set in stone until we experience it in Endwalker to be sure of anything being changed.

... but if MP on WHM really becomes an issue, there's a lot of different quick band-aid solutions while keeping the Thin Air charge system.
-They could add extra MP regen when using thin air.
-Make each charge of thin air work for the next 2 spells instead of the next spell (a.k.a. old thin air but more flexible).
-Lower the charge time of Thin Air greatly (~30 to ~45 seconds per charge).
-Lower the charge time slightly but increase the number of charges to 3 (creates greater flexibility in holding a "reserve MP pool").

[KDSilver]

WHM will not be clipping anymore, which mean more Glare and MP usage.

Overall, it looks like they nerfed healer mp regen

[Reiryuu]

Yeah, I'm kinda worried in Endwalker. I am thinking I might change over to Paladin and give it a shot. Sage looks cool and it could be fun for a while, but I think once the newness and the laser novelty wears off, it's not going to be a whole lot different. Another big concern I have is... does SE consider having a level 90 character "enjoying the content on that character"? It seemed to imply that in the Jesse Cox interview, so I'm wondering if I should even level my healers...

[KDSilver]

Sage looks cool and it could be fun for a while, but I think once the newness and the laser novelty wears off, it's not going to be a whole lot different.

I agree... at 70%.
I think it will still have this "little something" more as a fully acknoledge healer meant to deal damage to heal.
And within its toolkit, it looks like it has the potential to be a bit more flexible than sch for example.

So mostly yes, but a bit of i'm positively hopeful

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

WHM will not be clipping anymore, which mean more Glare and MP usage.

Overall, it looks like they nerfed healer mp regen

Everytime I read this in healer discussions, I dread of that possibility the job devs are trying to make the ‘wait for mp regen’-game a thing for healer, slowly but surely.

I hope not.

[Reiryuu]

Everytime I read this in healer discussions, I dread of that possibility the job devs are trying to make the ‘wait for mp regen’-game a thing for healer, slowly but surely.

I hope not.

That was WHM in 2.X and 3.X =p