Is it just me or is WHM suffering?

[Alaylia]

Before EW WHM was always my go to healer if I was uncomfortable with a run. It was simple and I felt I could easily do my job and even prevent wipes.

With the Thin Air changes and the damage nerfs I feel basically useless on WHM. So often I run out of mana during a boss fight, and I'm talking about when the fight is going well and I'm not having to raise anyone. Just do my heals for raid wide damage and glare spam. Even with Lucid being used off cooldown I'm always out of mana.


I really think some things should be reverted back.. but it isn't like I'm an expert. Anyone else of the same mind? :v

[-BlueGreen-]

Honestly, this isn't the first time a new expansion made at least some healers feel like their MP pool drains too fast. It is interesting that this time around WHMs are the only one complaining about it, but from what I understand, it's also largely brought about by not wanting to meld piety to gear. Of course, that's likely due to piety being 100% useless unless it prevents you from running out of MP. I do recall, however, that the past strategy was simply meld piety into the earlier gear sets of an expansion and phase it out as the higher ilvl gear brings in higher base amounts of piety you can't avoid until you're no longer melding piety at all. It's not a popular solution, I'm sure, but if you're consistently suffering from MP issues, give it a shot.

It seems SE want piety to have a reason to exist, but like much of their other design decisions around healer, it doesn't seem like they really know how to make healers play well. Even if you're willing to meld piety, it won't fix your MP issues when running content that syncs your ilvl since that kind of sync disables your materia slots!

Last resort: Buy/make some Super-Ethers. HQ ones restore 1800 MP every 270 seconds. I don't know if it's enough to plug the gap you guys are seeing, but it's something that doesn't bother your melds. You could also invest in +piety food, though I'm not sure the impact that will have.

[Haadrak]

I'm not sure the issue is with exclusively with WHM and Piety though. I think the issue is the fact that some Healing Jobs can get away with paying no or very little heed to Piety whatsoever while Job's like WHM need large amounts of Piety in order to function on longer fights. This means that other Jobs can spend a larger amount of their stat budget on stats that make them DPS or Heal more effectively which ironically only serves to further decrease any potential reliance on Piety they may already have. Given there seems to be a consensus that WHM seems to be performing worse than the other Jobs with regards to both damage output, utility and mana preservation the only thing that WHM seems to have over other Jobs is raw healing output which isn't necessary for any of the current content and only serves to drain your MP pool faster. I think what most people seem to be asking for is for either WHM MP efficiency to be increased or for the other Healing Jobs to have their Healing efficiency decreased, or maybe a mixture of the two, in order such that all Healing Jobs need to invest equally into Piety to achieve similar MP efficiency.

The other issue is that it causes further discrepencies where Jobs that need Piety may seem to do very well on shorter fights and the better other DPS Jobs perform, shortening fights, the better Jobs dependent on Piety perform, making it a nightmare for balancing purposes. This has the rather counter-intuitive result of punishing WHM for being in poorly performing raids. However better optimised raids are less likely to want WHM because of their MP issues... This also says nothing of the discrepency between dungeons and raids which further causes confusion for newer players to the game who, after healing a number of dungeons might feel as though their MP management is fine, only to discover that in raids it is not.

Now there could be arguements about certain Jobs needing more MP efficiency because their spells on average are less effective per cast, however I think that is the broad stokes of the argument. Bear in mind I'm not sure where I personally sit on these issues and it may be that 'check' stats like Piety that simply cause your Job to cease to function if you do not have the requisite amount of it should go the way of the Dodo. How MP management would change if that were to happen however is another topic.

[Rilifane]

All other healer recover at least 2k MP per minute without Lucid, just by doing things they're supposed to do anyway and that are free.
WHM recovers signifcantly less by default while also having the highest MP cost on GCD heals and cast time reduction on 2min, making it spend MP faster than others. "just meld piety" would be fine if it was the same for all healers - but it's not, only one of four healers has this problem. And with the weakest and smallest toolkit, you will have to GCD heal much sooner than the other 3 if anything at all goes wrong.
WHM has the weakest heal output and the worst MP economy by a good margin - it may not be obvious right away because you barely need healing in the first two savage fights and can muddle your way through the 3rd if your co heal is good without anyone noticing your weaknesses but once things go south, WHM is screwed no matter which fight we're talking about while the other 3 can heal and raise just fine without emptying out on MP.
WHM is MP negative just from spamming Glare and that should never be the case.
AST had some problems pre SD/ LS change in ShB but Piety was only necessary in chaotic groups so you could take more resses/ GCD heals without having to do paper cuts afterwards. But WHM is MP negative when spamming their cheapest spell they should always be spamming.
If Assize restored 10% and TA would affect the next two spells, it would be a huge help and put WHM in the same ballpark as the other three. With TA as it is right now, you have to clip it for a SC Raise.

[elioaiko]

WHM has always been suffering, just AST and SCH took a massive hit in the beginning of ShB.

WHM was given a working gameplay mechanic in that of the lilies. The other two got changed so severely that they became unpopular due to fairy issues and 5.0 AST.

WHM was literally at rock bottom coming out of StB. It had nothing to really lose in ShB.

After AST got their initial issues sorted out, the devs reduced their MP cost on spells and actually gave them MP recovery through their cards and rightfully so as it feels intuitive to gain MP for drawing cards constantly with Astrodyne as the bigger payoff.

In fact, every healer besides WHM has MP recovery built into their kits. SGE gets MP back for spending their addersgall and SCH gets back MP with keeping Aetherflow on CD and Energy Drain remaining stacks that are unused.

WHM still doesn't have MP recovery built into their gameplay. And that's because WHM has no meaningful gameplay mechanic that rewards them for using it. Lilies are not supposed to be their MP saver. Because you get them on 30s timer. Also lilies and Misery are a DPS loss. No other healer is punished for using what saves them MP. Thin Air is just another button thay can easily be forgotten and typically cannot save your MP after death as they now only work on the next healing spell.

Simply put, WHM is back to where it was. The same boring healer it always has been. The dev team is too afraid to make WHM any harder than a braindead rock so it'll never see anything more complicated than just adding more direct healing. It's actively being held back because the devs want it to be the beginner, easy healer and therefore will never be better AST or any other healer.

It's issues are at the core of its design–or lack of design. Their playrate might indicate that there's nothing wrong but that doesn't mean that WHM is in a good place.

[Alaylia]

It is interesting that this time around WHMs are the only one complaining about it, but from what I understand, it's also largely brought about by not wanting to meld piety to gear.

Wont deny I'm complaining cause healing is not a main role for me.. so using WHM has always been the easiest if I need to fill for farming expert runs. I only really noticed these changes when beginning the process of leveling my WHM from 80-90 and kept running into... where my mana at???? kek. WHM is an easy to pickup healer job I can use when it isn't an all around comfortable role for me. I don't dislike the intricacies of the other healer jobs; just that I don't want to subjugate 7 other people I don't know with those less then stellar [;3] skills.

[RobynDaBank]

In my humble opinion even if WHM is easy to pick up, a new player who may die a lot will definitely struggle coming back up to speed after being resurrected.

[eagledorf]

I kind of agree with the sentiment that WHM is working fine, it's AST that's broken. MP should require management, that's why SCH MP recovery got nerfed.

[Liam_Harper]

I kind of agree with the sentiment that WHM is working fine, it's AST that's broken. MP should require management, that's why SCH MP recovery got nerfed.

SCH MP recovery didn't really get nerfed, they just tied all the mana to Aetherflow. This means you don't empty on mana if you have to aether heal.

AST MP is a little over the top, but there is no such thing as mana "management" in this game anymore. If you can literally go empty from pressing Glare because you had to Raise once or twice, the only way to "manage" your mana is to stop casting entirely. Which is awful design and punishes you for someone else's mistake, or because you kept uptime.

WHM mana is an abomination. Thin Air becomes worse the better you play. Lilies are technically +4% mana, but cost 85 potency each use (or 310 near the end of a fight if you don't end on a Misery). Even if you use every lily, your MP/min is worse than the other healers unless the fight was a mess and you had to GCD heal. But if the fight is too messy, you're screwed anyway because you have so few oGCD's you have to resort to hardcast heal spam well before the other healers, which you can't really sustain for long.

This isn't even mentioning low level, where WHM has the most expensive GCD heals, the least number of oGCD's, no Embrace or Kardia to boost it and has to wait the longest before getting access to MP recovery. I never understand why people recommend WHM as a starting healer, because it's absolutely terrible at low levels. Not only will you struggle more, but you'll learn slower because you have less tools to practice with. It's probably the worst beginner heal.

[inhaledcorn]

I can understand wanting to nerf WHM's MP economy to some degree because of its ability to raise without the massive MP cost. However, they hit WHM's MP economy too much without compensating for it in other areas, especially since WHM is far more focused on GCD healing than the other healers. That's one major problem WHM has right now: What made its MP economy good was nerfed without it being compensated in other areas.