Having played sage, I now have a question

[rewd]

Which is precisely the scenario the devs wish to avoid.

You want the Lily charges not for healing, but for a damage boost. Which is NOT what Afflatus Misery is even for in the WHM toolkit. I said it before but i'll say it again: Misery is a REFUND of damage lost to GCDs needing to be spent on heals.
It was never and according to the lack of an upgrade trait, will never be a DPS boost button. Therefore, no. You get no Lilies before a fight. Use it the way the devs clearly intended it to be used and stop crying about it.

Instead of being aggressive for no reason, could you spend some time reading messages with your eyes open this time instead?

What does your message have to do with anything at all?

[Acece]

Which is precisely the scenario the devs wish to avoid.

You want the Lily charges not for healing, but for a damage boost. Which is NOT what Afflatus Misery is even for in the WHM toolkit. I said it before but i'll say it again: Misery is a REFUND of damage lost to GCDs needing to be spent on heals.
It was never and according to the lack of an upgrade trait, will never be a DPS boost button. Therefore, no. You get no Lilies before a fight. Use it the way the devs clearly intended it to be used and stop crying about it.

I would imagine the trade off would be that whm wouldn't be able to generate blood Lilly outside of combat.

[Rilifane]

To be fair, Aflatus Rapture and Solace are literally just Cure II and Medica but instant without a mana cost and are on the GCD.
Unless a target will die during the 2 seconds needed to cast the normal versions of those spells, Afflatus buttons don't offer anything mechanical to a WHM outside of mobility and a wider weave window.

Comparatively, ALL of Sages most powerful heals are tied to Addersgall stacks.
Simililarly, Scholars have most of the their best healing tools tied up in Aetherflow.
Astro needs to manage cooldowns, because being careless means being without the proper tools when they need them.

White Mage doesn't have to deal with any of that.
Cure II is just as powerful as Afflatus Solace, So a WHM isn't missing anything mechanical from its kit by not having Afflatus charges at the ready, unlike Sage and SCH. That resource management is part of those jobs identities and playstyles.
AST doesn't get a full rack of seals (signs now?) to start with either. Because they're not necessary to the job in the same way Aetherflow and Addersgall are.

tldr i guess is that WHM doesn't require Lilies to heal, while SCH and SGE need Addersgall to access most of the kit.

Every healer has a Cure II and a Medica. And for every healer, "unless the target dies during the 2s..." applies. SCH doesn't need AF to access Succor or Adlo. Sage doesn't need Addersgall to access Diagnosis/ Prgnosis or Eukrasian versions.
The reason why Lily heals should be compared to oGCDs is because they have a damage return in the form of Misery; they and oGCDs are the more or less dps neutral healing/ free healing. The only actual resources for party healing WHM starts with are Asylum and Lilybell as Assize is kept on cd and used early in the opener outside of edge cases, like add phase alignment. Single target it has Tetra and Benison; Benediction is usually planned around tankbusters.

Sage, on the other hand, starts with Pneuma, Panhaima, Holos and Physis II that don't require Addersgall and 3 Addersgall stacks for Kerachole and Ixochole on top of that.
SCH starts with WD, Seraph and Fey Blessing that don't require AF and also has Recitation for Indom on top of starting with 3 AF for regular Indom and SS.
AST naturally has all of it's resources at the start of a fight.
WHM starting without Lily doesn't just mean they have access to a low dps loss-heal but also means PI is useless early fight.
It's also the only healer that can't weave properly during aoe spam. So unique.

NO healer requires unique resources to heal. They all have a GCD toolkit that's pretty much the same across the board.
So saying "But WHM can always spam GCD heals while the other healers have to manage their toolkit!" is not logic. It's just admitting that WHMs toolkit is so barebone, it's reduced to spamming their ARR GCD heals once those precious few resources are on cooldown (and what a hefty cooldown it is for Lilybell). All the more reason to let them start a fight with some Lilies.

[Silver-Strider]

Which is precisely the scenario the devs wish to avoid.

You want the Lily charges not for healing, but for a damage boost. Which is NOT what Afflatus Misery is even for in the WHM toolkit. I said it before but i'll say it again: Misery is a REFUND of damage lost to GCDs needing to be spent on heals.
It was never and according to the lack of an upgrade trait, will never be a DPS boost button. Therefore, no. You get no Lilies before a fight. Use it the way the devs clearly intended it to be used and stop crying about it.

God forbid the "selfish" healer asking for more damage when it's literally all we bring to the table. Since WHM is the most punished by having to use its GCD heals, it would be logical to offset that loss sooner rather than later and even in the case that people spend it on Misery in the opener, this wouldn't even bring WHM's damage up enough to even matter. I looked at so many different ways to improve WHM's damage to be balanced and granting 3 lilies to start with was among the weakest ways to do so, offering a meager 0.3% damage buff to WHM's total contribution to an encounter, which wouldn't have even been enough to match SCH, much less AST at the time. That small an increase would help to offset WHM's damage decline from occurring as quickly in an encounter but ultimately would be insignificant in the long run in terms of DPS buffs that WHM would need to be meta relevant. Hell, unless Rapture/Solace became full on oGCDs with Misery remaining a GCD, WHM would STILL be weaker than AST but the DPS gap between them would be significantly reduced to less than 1%.

1 Extra Misery is not game breaking