Endwalker White Mage has Issues

[EaMett]

And Ive started progging p4s and jesus lord is WHM bad for it. Imagine having to drop it because AST is so much better for that fight since WHM HAS to do multiple gcd heals so the party doesnt die in the first 3 minutes of the fight. How bad is that? I am not enjoying this. I dont know how to play AST well.

AST is pretty amazing for the p4s fights.

[artypartytime]

I wish using a lily proc'd an ocgcd lower potency dps skill "blood petal"

Using 3 blood petals would unlock a high potency gcd blood lily.

My personal dream for white mage is to feel like a powerhouse in both healing and damage

The ultimate im pretty but dont mess with me class.

[LuciaMirain]

AST is pretty amazing for the p4s fights.

Yeah, after having massive anxiety I started to get the hang of when to use my tools, I even started to enjoy it a bit. I did msq on AST so I had SOME sense of it but it felt so buttonbloated that I left it for WHM. But WHM was just not good for this encounter. We are doing it blind as well so this is going to take a while. But I am sad that WHM feels so bad this expansion that I actually had to drop it. That is not good jobdesign.

[Liam_Harper]

And Ive started progging p4s and jesus lord is WHM bad for it. Imagine having to drop it because AST is so much better for that fight since WHM HAS to do multiple gcd heals so the party doesnt die in the first 3 minutes of the fight. How bad is that? I am not enjoying this. I dont know how to play AST well.

This is true. WHM is (predictably) the most popular healer even in Savage if you look at the overall statistics. It's literally twice as popular as AST on the first boss (which coincidentally barely needs any healing).

However, from p3 onwards it changes significantly with WHM being roughly on par with SCH and AST for usage. On p4s it falls behind SCH and on part II barely keeps up with AST. It's also the least represented in speed kills for all bosses. That might change later once gear makes the heal checks easier, but it seems when content actually requires serious healing, WHM is simply a bad class.

I'm not surprised at all. Not only does AST pack ridiculous amounts of oGCD's and free healing, those abilities are also much better than what WHM has. AST has access to 10% mitigation on half the cd that Temperance has, has Neutral for even more mitigation and Macrocosmos simply deletes mechanics. AST GCD's are also equal to WHM and cheaper on a class with infinite mana. All WHM has is Cure III and Bene memes.

[Ryme]

I think at this point despite whm's popularity its fairly obvious that whm is just not in a good spot atm. It just kind of needs everything, a bit more damage (and fixing it internal potency balance with misery), more healing (either through additional tools or improvements to is existing ones) and a lot more mp economy. It's hard to say what will be in 6.08 outside of what Yoshi-P mentioned specifically but he also made a general statement that no job would be neglected. Well sadly whm feels pretty neglected so far in EW so I guess we will just have to see if 6.08 puts the lie to that statement or not.

[LuciaMirain]

I think at this point despite whm's popularity its fairly obvious that whm is just not in a good spot atm. It just kind of needs everything, a bit more damage (and fixing it internal potency balance with misery), more healing (either through additional tools or improvements to is existing ones) and a lot more mp economy. It's hard to say what will be in 6.08 outside of what Yoshi-P mentioned specifically but he also made a general statement that no job would be neglected. Well sadly whm feels pretty neglected so far in EW so I guess we will just have to see if 6.08 puts the lie to that statement or not.

I dont think they will change anything with WHM. They have never really known what to do with healers to begin with and every expansion they keep showing that they still do not know. WHM is in a bad spot but it is viable in all content so why would they change it? Ive cleared the doorboss of last savage fight yesterday and WHM was absolutely fine and viable and we had a comfy clear. Once we are better geared it is back to spamming glare as per usual. They absolutely should change lots of things in WHM, as this and many other threads have shown, but I don't think they will. Maybe some small potencychange, anything else would require them to actually think how the healers are played in endgame.

[Kukajoo]

As a WHM main since 2.0, as of Endwalker I quit the class. I doubt its going to get much love as the brick-brain brute force tutorial healer class that it is. Liturgy of the bell is an incredibly disappointing lvl 90 ability, like a worse version of Sages Panhaima, sure the potency is double Pans but it only procs when you yourself get hurt, not the rest of the party. Panhaima comes it at half the potency but applies to every party member individually. The moral of the story is play Sage I guess. If people stop playing WHM then, maybe finally Square will see it needs help.

[LuciaMirain]

As a WHM main since 2.0, as of Endwalker I quit the class. I doubt its going to get much love as the brick-brain brute force tutorial healer class that it is. Liturgy of the bell is an incredibly disappointing lvl 90 ability, like a worse version of Sages Panhaima, sure the potency is double Pans but it only procs when you yourself get hurt, not the rest of the party. Panhaima comes it at half the potency but applies to every party member individually. The moral of the story is play Sage I guess. If people stop playing WHM then, maybe finally Square will see it needs help.

They could easily drop the potency of the heals and make it have a shorter cooldown, +5sec longer duration and make it trigger off any partymember. But doing savage so far has shown that the damage is so spread out that 3 min cooldown is "fine". And I would honestly take any of the changes I proposed at this point. It is so niche it could be taken out of the game and it would make no difference at all. I use it twice in each savage fight.

[elioaiko]

I haven't progged past P2S but judging from pugging that fight on every healer, WHM falls short pretty badly.

SGE might be weak in dungeon content but honestly is still pretty viable because dungeon is easy anyway.

AST and SCH do just fine in dungeons as well.

While yes WHM is the dungeon king, that's all it has been good at and this is due Misery and Holy's stun. That's really it.

WHM mains can hate AST all they want but there's something that AST will always have over WHM and that's a versatile kit, even more so now that Nocturnal gone.

The problem for WHM is its obsessive focus on being too simple. So much so that it actively hinders any creativity in the job. If you look at both WHM and AST's kit it's pretty clear that the devs simply don't know where to go with WHM. With AST it's clear they want it to be the delayed heal timer healer that gets rewarded for properly timing their CDs along with cards along with having a meaningful reward system with their MP recovery.

One of its biggest problem was a fix to a healers 1.5s cast. WHM desperately needed more options to weave and before the change, you would use a lily as it was better than nothing and at least you would have Misery. Now, it feels even worse to use lilies, highlighting how the lily system was a fix, not an improvement from its StB iteration.

And for popularity, people will still play WHM no matter how bad it is because for one, it's a classic job and a lot of people love WHM. But P4S has proven that WHM being the "best" in severe healing situation, is simply a lie. It's the worst at death recovery, is a selfish healer due it\\'s lack of OGCDS, therefore burdening SCH and SGE when it comes to rotating raidwide healing.

Simply putting, the GCD heal design for WHM is and will never work. Not as long as Misery is DPS negative and lilies only limited to regenerating every 30s.

At this point people need to stop pretending like SE saved WHM during ShB. They didn't, they straight up nerfed AST and SCH to be on WHM's level and even then, AST came out stronger than ever. And even SCH can stand against SGE evenly.

These are the same devs that had the audicity to conjure up the original StB Plenary and Lily Gauge. ShB WHM was a fix not an improvement because was already at rock bottom. People kept going on about "WHM was spared," but did it have to lose? Aero 3?

SE and their fear of doing anything polarizing on WHM and the WHM crowd that is content with its current state will be the exact reason why WHM will remain as it is.

The fact that the only reason to play WHM is because you want to turn your brain off and Glare spam.

[Semirhage]

Greetings, I am WHM Cassandra. I've been complaining/warning about this in varying forms since Heavensward. WHM is like this because it's trapped in a circular logic loop wherein it's simple, weak, has no utility, no complexity, and no identity. It's harder to see this by comparison when the other healers have complexity stripped off, but it's always there. Expect this to be the homebase WHM will always return to. There is -nothing- this job is allowed to shine at. It gets to be second place at best in any given category; they're all more efficient healers, have more mobility, more utility, better MP economies for their -more powerful- heals for literally no reason, and Sage does more personal damage while the party damage buffs from the other two will outshine WHM faster than you'd hope.

It stays this way because the nanosecond WHM is actually good at something, several things happen. For one, it already has brand recognition and fandom working against it. If it's actually competitive for once? People flock to it. Square balances jobs based on (un)popularity, and will immediately buff the sh*t out of the other healers in response. Furthermore, mains for the other healers will wail and shriek and gnash their teeth: WHM is the bad crappy healer for babies! It's not allowed to be better than MY complex class that puts in more effort for less output! Also never give WHM any complexity because that's MY identity!

The logic loop will circle the toilet every expansion, and WHM is always, ALWAYS going to be just a liiiiittle bit worse than the other healers, for some very disappointing reasons.