Concerns about WHM in Endwalker

[CrimsonGunner]

Dumb question but...since everyone who tested the media tour says potencies are still subject to change, did that only apply to damage dealing abilities, or are we just assuming healer potencies stay the same because their tooltips are largely still the same? maybe the stat squish will affect them somehow too?

everything subject to change so can healing potencies but given the track record, you can expect all healing potencies will be identical

[CrimsonGunner]

right now the 2 fixes i see that can help whm stay the same are:

1) keep thin air as it is or have it a proper mana recovery tool - i prefer the first option obviously

2) make lilybell the new level 90 capstone skill be able to put it's stacks on a party member as well instead of just yourself cause if you need to get hit in order for it to work then it is stupid that it will be on whm the caster itself, i mean what you expect him to do run to an aoe like a bafoon to trigger lilybell and if he dies then what was the point for lilybell?
not to mention, raid wide aoe strikes continuously for 15s does not happen on all dungeons and trials and only on a select few fight have that for that long mostly in savage and ultimates and even then only during 1/2 moments there. basically nice idea, very very bad implementation making the skill completely useless for a high cd level 90 capstone skill

[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.

[Sebazy]

IMHO it's going to hinge heavily on the content, if we see another E12S part 1, chances are WHM will be suffering. If it's more like E8S with huge swathes of downtime everywhere, it's not going to be a problem.

[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").

[inhaledcorn]

I had an idea involving Thin Air: Move it to the Lily system with a condition. With the way Thin Air works now would make it in direct competition with heals, and that's my current problem with SCH. I don't want WHM to suffer that. Instead, Thin Air only works on Regen, Cure 3, and Medica 2. Now, these skills functionally exist on the Lily system without actually needing new skills. Solace and Rapture will still have benefits of being instant cast, but now you can use healing skills you were about to use anyway as a part of your Lily kit. Lilies during downtime is less dumped in Solace and are instead just a part of what you were going to do.

Additionally, moving Misery to oGCD as well as putting a 10-15% MP recovery effect on top will help with the problems of it not being DPS neutral.

[Rosa_Frandlia]

... 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").

Adding another change they could do that would be easy, bump Assize MP regen back up to the 10% it was in HW and SB.

[mobradovic00]

One thing I didn't initially realise was that, while new Thin Air is easier to spread out (for raises and such), using it on a Swiftcast raise is actually less convenient than one might initially think. You either have to use a Lily/Regen/Dot refresh for it, or clip one of the weaves. Since both Swiftcast and new Thin Air only apply to 1 GCD,
Glare -> Swiftcast -> Glare -> Thin Air doesn't work, as it consumes the swift before the raise, and
Glare -> Thin Air -> Glare -> Swiftcast also doesn't work, as it consumes the Thin Air before the raise.

I really question the rationale behind this change because it's really difficult to justify. I don't get it.