White Mage Band-Aid Suggestions

[LylyWeiss]

After a late night talk with my friend about healers in XIV, i've come up with what I believe to be a simple and easy fix to a lot of WHM's issues as it is right now. I genuinely believe if the devs incorporates these two things it'll put WHM in a really healthy spot without being too overpowered.

1. Make Afflatus Rapture and Afflatus Solace oGCD's. This gives WHM access to more heals without dropping glares and lets them do burstier heals when you really need it. This also incentivizes using lillies instead of just letting them float by as most people do right now unless they need to move or really need fast heals immediately. This also makes it where the potency of blood lilly doesn't have to be adjusted because dropping them as oGCD's makes each blood lilly a 590 potency gain over Glare 3 instead of a 30 loss as it is rn. This simultaneously gives you more blood lillies per fight because it incentivizes you to use your lillies even if you don't necessarily need the healing in order to keep them growing, unlocking the blood lillies more often for DPS sake. This adds another level of optimization to WHM that was removed after ShB because you would similarly not want to cap on lillies back then as well for the sake of unlocking the blood lilly which was at worst DPS neutral, with the chance to be positive.

2. Make it so that when you use Presence of Mind, every spell costs 0. PoM is easily WHM's biggest MP drain as it is right now and as much of a blessing as it is DPS wise, it reminds me of MNK with Arrow cards back in StB because you just bleed MP SO fast rn when you use PoM. As much as i'm not a huge fan of Thin Air as it is right now, it DOES still have its uses if you're smart about your usage. Even so, on fights like P1S that have pretty much 0 downtime, even if you use Lucid well, WHM still bleeds MP pretty bad, mostly because of how much glare spam you do during PoM windows. This is not an issue that current Thin Air can really prevent, therefore I propose we put old Thin Air's ability on PoM itself, and keep new Thin Air as it is right now for bigger spells like Cure III, Raise, Medica II.

I know this wouldn't fix EVERY little issue that WHM has but I strongly believe with these two changes you could put a quick Band-Aid on the job to put it in a much better spot than it currently is. I should also note that this is only based on my experiences in the current savage raid, so I can't speak on how good these changes would be in past Ultimates or the leveling experience of WHM as it is right now.

[RinaShinomiya]

Honestly you dont even have to go that far. Just make misery DPS neutral that way players don't have to avoid it. That by itself saves 8% mana per minute, couple that with Thin Air which saves 4% mana per minute at minimum and assize's 5% MP per 45s and we're very close to the 20% MP standard per minute. Now change tetra to grant a Lily on a 60s cooldown and we got a winner. Both MP and DPS fixed with little to no changes.

[Archwizard]

Thin Air would be fine if they just extended it from one spell per charge to three, akin to BLM's Triplecast or the ShB version of RDM's Accelerate.

Then as Rina said, make Afflatus Misery DPS neutral by increasing its damage with Glare/Holy Mastery.

[LylyWeiss]

MAYBE the PoM changes are a bit drastic, but I feel like what you propose doesn't change the fact that WHM doesn't really have much oGCD healing abilities and is the only healer that really has to interrupt their DPS to do proper healing. Not just that, but with Assize being tied to your DPS, hardly ever is it used for healing except by coincidence or if you co-ordinate with your co-healer, so one of WHM's healing oGCD's usually goes down the damage drain leaving you with just Asylum and Bell for non-GCD healing. All i'm saying is if they're gonna give Sage 6 oGCD AoE healing abilities, AST 5(arguably 6 if you include Microcosmos) and SCH 6, they could at least bump WHM up from 3, especially since A.) Assize is tied to damage, B.) Asylum is a bubble and sometimes isn't nearly bursty or wide enough to cover everyone and C.) Bell requires you to be hit to activate or get healed for about half of what the total potency of bell is supposed to do.

[LuciaMirain]

MAYBE the PoM changes are a bit drastic, but I feel like what you propose doesn't change the fact that WHM doesn't really have much oGCD healing abilities and is the only healer that really has to interrupt their DPS to do proper healing. Not just that, but with Assize being tied to your DPS, hardly ever is it used for healing except by coincidence or if you co-ordinate with your co-healer, so one of WHM's healing oGCD's usually goes down the damage drain leaving you with just Asylum and Bell for non-GCD healing. All i'm saying is if they're gonna give Sage 6 oGCD AoE healing abilities, AST 5(arguably 6 if you include Microcosmos) and SCH 6, they could at least bump WHM up from 3, especially since A.) Assize is tied to damage, B.) Asylum is a bubble and sometimes isn't nearly bursty or wide enough to cover everyone and C.) Bell requires you to be hit to activate or get healed for about half of what the total potency of bell is supposed to do.

Reading your text just made me annoyed at the state of WHM again. How can the devs not see these things?

[RinaShinomiya]

MAYBE the PoM changes are a bit drastic, but I feel like what you propose doesn't change the fact that WHM doesn't really have much oGCD healing abilities and is the only healer that really has to interrupt their DPS to do proper healing. Not just that, but with Assize being tied to your DPS, hardly ever is it used for healing except by coincidence or if you co-ordinate with your co-healer, so one of WHM's healing oGCD's usually goes down the damage drain leaving you with just Asylum and Bell for non-GCD healing. All i'm saying is if they're gonna give Sage 6 oGCD AoE healing abilities, AST 5(arguably 6 if you include Microcosmos) and SCH 6, they could at least bump WHM up from 3, especially since A.) Assize is tied to damage, B.) Asylum is a bubble and sometimes isn't nearly bursty or wide enough to cover everyone and C.) Bell requires you to be hit to activate or get healed for about half of what the total potency of bell is supposed to do.

Lilies being DPS neutral would greatly reduce WHM's need for ogcd abilities though.

Do we really need to homogenize things further by giving WHM CO equivalent or ES equivalent?

[LylyWeiss]

Yes Lilies being DPS neutral would cut down on the need for oGCD's when there's big downtime between the damage you're taking, but in some fights and scenarios, the fact that WHM has pretty much no oGCD's means that they have a hard time outputting the amount of healing needed in a short amount of time. For instance, the final Channeling overflow in P2S paired with coherence, you can put down bell but if you don't get a fast arrow you don't take any damage to trigger your bell heal until the biggest chunk of damage is already coming at you, and because of how spread out everyone is before grouping up, Cure 3 is likely to miss people running for the stack so you're pretty much forced to Medica or Medica II and then Afflatus Rapture and then try and see if anyone needs any extra single target help with Tetra or Benison in the split second before the massive stack damage goes off. My point is, for what is supposed to be the best straight up HEAL healer, they even struggle with this because there's really not much they can do while WHM's wait for their GCD to tick over. WHM's are alright at the cleanup after if you make them damage neutral with the blood lily, but their lack of oGCD healing makes their effectiveness in the big moments pretty weak because they really don't have much to supplement their GCD healing.

As far as homogenization goes, I really don't understand how Collective Unconsciousness and Earthly Star have anything to do with an Afflatus Rapture oGCD because literally none of these skills are alike at all besides the fact that they heal. One's a regen, one's essentially a burst bubble and the other is just a heal. Your argument for that makes no sense to me.

[RinaShinomiya]

Yes Lilies being DPS neutral would cut down on the need for oGCD's when there's big downtime between the damage you're taking, but in some fights and scenarios, the fact that WHM has pretty much no oGCD's means that they have a hard time outputting the amount of healing needed in a short amount of time. For instance, the final Channeling overflow in P2S paired with coherence, you can put down bell but if you don't get a fast arrow you don't take any damage to trigger your bell heal until the biggest chunk of damage is already coming at you, and because of how spread out everyone is before grouping up, Cure 3 is likely to miss people running for the stack so you're pretty much forced to Medica or Medica II and then Afflatus Rapture and then try and see if anyone needs any extra single target help with Tetra or Benison in the split second before the massive stack damage goes off. My point is, for what is supposed to be the best straight up HEAL healer, they even struggle with this because there's really not much they can do while WHM's wait for their GCD to tick over. WHM's are alright at the cleanup after if you make them damage neutral with the blood lily, but their lack of oGCD healing makes their effectiveness in the big moments pretty weak because they really don't have much to supplement their GCD healing.

As far as homogenization goes, I really don't understand how Collective Unconsciousness and Earthly Star have anything to do with an Afflatus Rapture oGCD because literally none of these skills are alike at all besides the fact that they heal. One's a regen, one's essentially a burst bubble and the other is just a heal. Your argument for that makes no sense to me.

My point is more that WHM is the GCD healer and the devs should rather double down on it GCD healing instead of getting 10 identical oGCD's like everyone else and forget their GCD skills even exist. Doing oGCD lily spells would also be a nightmare to balance and would probably just force the devs to misery being dps negative unless used with oGCD's.

[LylyWeiss]

If the devs wanna make GCD healing more important they need to shift all healers in that direction instead of leaving WHM out in the cold cause as it is right now most WHM's in high end content heal as little as possible with the exception of bubble and bell and Pienary AoE's where need be, while their co-healer handles the bulk of the healing with their oGCD's all for the sake of WHM casting as many glares as possible. AND THEN DESPITE ALL THAT...WHM is still doing the least healing AND the least damage of all the healers. If people really wanna go the "Make Afflatus Misery DPS neutral" route, and that's what the devs go with, i'll take it, but at the end of the day I really don't think it's gonna make as big of a difference as people think it's going to and I think for WHM to truly shine as a good healer, it needs a change at a fundamental level to put it more in line with the other healers currently.

[Semirhage]

So long as GCD healing has an opportunity or resource cost while AST and SGE can just barf out endless healing for zero MP, time, or DPS cost at all, they'll "mysteriously" put out higher numbers on both fronts while also having utility. WHM sucks because it's the only healer still married to the idea that they can't just do whatever they want instantly and for free.