Honest question for people dissatisfied with WHM:

[CrimsonGunner]

tbf i would argue that all healers are pure misery currently. Sage less so if you like gundam but otherwise its as bad as the rest.

A big problem with the game is that it flat out does not make learning basic combat techniques mandatory and/or explain well. Things like ABC, doing damage as a healer, using ogcds in weave windows etc.

A lot of the people i seen tht reccomend whm are people who aren't healers.
If someone asked me for healing reccomendations, I would straight up tell them dont

its more then that really which is sad:

1)the lore of the game so not relevant to their kits its like you are told of an amazing mages and your charecter has the kit of a derp from another planet cause he ignored common logic and went the derpy way.

examples: ast varied card buffs, diurnal/nocturnal sects , sch strategic side of the kit, sch 2 different fairies, whm elemental magic and sylphie lesson about using all aspects other then just cure I spam.

2) baited free cure/benefic that are not that helpful and much more punishing cause you don't heal so well cause of it.

3) gcd healing punishes you for using them and hard, whm suffers from mp issues so use cure III (the "best" heal) and suffer cause it drains your mp so much you can hit rock bottom from the first cast and before you ask/think no problem he probably can handle it then wrong. whm is the most mp heavy among the healers and guess how "good" his mp regen with thin air? the answer is go back in time to shb thin air, cause now skill lives to its name now (meaning it worth nothing).

4) your leveling experience is skill drought for 10-15 whole levels and ur job gimmicks for example whm is at 76 meaning from 1-76 you dont have your full gauge and gauge skills and sch have a gauge for 1 use only which u get at level 70,and 2 skills that nuke half your healings skills at your hotbar at 60 and 80 cause reasons.

5) others can heal, tanks can heal ,dps can heals even the trust npc can heal themselvs(and if they are healers they can do both and have more options then the actual healers), meaning a healer doesn't even need to be there ppl treat themselves instead, combine with damage so low u can just use hp potions and be fine as well(u don't need to use but it exists) .

the only thing ppl can recommend whm for is ppl that don't want to play a healer and want to go afk.
i wont be surprise if the reason trusts exist is cause they planning to send the healer roles to oblivion and simply pumping everyone with changes filled with despair to get rid of the last fools that have any hope things get better.

*sorry, had to vent out and give a much more detailed description to your post.

[IceBlueNinja]

Nah im pretty sure WHM been under the bus for quite some time now. Has nothing to do with SGE releasing. StB WHM was a thing to behold for all the wrong reasons and that expansion didnt get a new healer

for sure cause i started as whm and for a so call beginner easy healer going through it was so miserable up to hw where I then bought an ast lvl 60 jump ticket before stoemblood release and been in love with ast since until ew.. ruin it.

[Leonerdo]

(Unpopular opinion disclaimer: I guess I'm just a broken player who likes "broken" designs. It doesn't mean y'all are wrong though. I just want something different.)

I think I figured out why I like WHMs current kit (so I only want tiny buffs). It's the only healer actually playing a resource management game.

All the other healers just have so many free cooldowns, they barely even need to keep track of which ones are up. In Savage you plan what to do with your 2-/3-minute CDs and the rest is easily filled just by alternating Earthly Star and CO, or Physis and Kerchole. SCH at least loses damage if they're spamming Sacred Soil/Indom, and Whispering Dawn/Fey Blessing isn't quite enough in some situations.

WHM has slightly fewer cooldowns so they need to pay attention to them more. Burning a lily just for movement, or panic healing with lilies/medica 2 when Assize/Asylum could handle it if you planned ahead -- those lazy things will cost you in the long run. You pay in MP, and you pay in damage. WHM actually has to pay attention to MP efficiency (somewhat) and cooldown efficiency to manage the costs. And that optimization is fun.

The only semblance of difficulty on the other healers is keeping track of a larger number of abilities. But that's not really interesting if you aren't forced to use them all. For example, healing TEA on AST was fun cause my cooldowns were actually stretched thin. But that's the exception that proves the rule.

On the other hand, in P2S, I switched to SGE for one reclear and was able to heal it easily, first-time, forgetting to use Holos/Panhaima/Pnuema in several spots. Physis and Kerachole just cover way too much healing on their own. P3S and P4S would probably take a bit more experience/planning, but I know once I figure out where to use Panhaima/Pnuema the rest would fall easily into place. And I would pay nothing for it. There's no room for growth there.

On WHM, I'm trying to squeeze out every use of my cooldowns as possible, and taking inventory of every point of cure potency to avoid wasting anything, while still using Medica II on harder mechanics. Eventually my static (sorta casual) will all have BiS and we'll get more optimized, and I might be able to drop some more Medica II casts.

And to me, that's not a weakness or a punishment, it's a challenge and a reward. Every other healer getting everything for free just sounds cheap and boring.

Maybe Dragonsong Ultimate will shift the balance enough, so that WHM struggles too much, and the other healers struggle adequately.

[Risvertasashi]

I think I figured out why I like WHMs current kit (so I only want tiny buffs). It's the only healer actually playing a resource management game.

I might've bought this before the Thin Air nerf.

As is, there's not really much management - you are MP negative and will run out of MP doing nothing but spamming a 400 mp spell. Even using assize and lucid on CD. And gods forbid if you need to use an area healing spell that costs MP.

Unless, of course, you make a piety build. But that's not interactive, so can you really call that management?

But even then, you also have much less ability to rez and thus much less recovery ability if anything goes less than perfect in a run. Which... if you really like that more power to you but I can't say I would.

[LuciaMirain]

There is so little healing needed in the fights that the only place I use Medica 2 once is at the end of p4s curtain call and honestly not needed there either. In p1s I run out of mp at the end because I am mindlessly pressing glare and the few ogcds I have to heal while my team heals the rest, I need to use my thin air stacks or else I am completely out earlier. I used to use asylum before but....our ranged switched to dancer that has curing waltz and shields and regens and now not even asylum is needed in the first two fights.....
There is no managing with WHM. It is braindead and now that I have picked up sage it boggles my mind that WHM is left in this state.

[Liam_Harper]

On WHM, I'm trying to squeeze out every use of my cooldowns as possible, and taking inventory of every point of cure potency to avoid wasting anything, while still using Medica II on harder mechanics. Eventually my static (sorta casual) will all have BiS and we'll get more optimized, and I might be able to drop some more Medica II casts.

Like you mentioned, that's a symptom of content being to easy, not WHM being engaging. WHM just gets to experience the need to optimize oGCD's a bit earlier because it has limited tools. This gives an illusion of engagement and planning, but in reality you're just trying to stretch a handful of buttons to cover some mild damage.

Using Medica II on WHM usually isn't a smart decision, it's "I had no choice, I have no tools". You simply had to use it because Lilybell, Asylum and Rapture were on cd. Mapping well doesn't reward you either. The co-heal needs to do the work for WHM to shine and WHM provides the worst healer dps in the game in return. That's not a reward.

For example, healing TEA on AST was fun cause my cooldowns were actually stretched thin. But that's the exception that proves the rule.

Exactly. Healing TEA on AST was fun because you had that wide toolkit, but you had to put the entire thing to use. Much more thought and planning and more rewarding for the good player. Suddenly all those cooldowns aren't free or overkill, they're tools that can go much further in the hands of a skilled player.
Yes, it's the exception, but it shouldn't be the exception. All endgame content from EX upwards should be that fun.

[Semirhage]

Maybe I've been playing it too long, but WHM doesn't even have anything remotely close to "interesting" management for me. I don't view it as an interesting system of tradeoffs at all. What tradeoffs? You have the free oGCDs (that the other healers unfairly have far more of), which you use first. Then you have your DPS loss lilies, which you use second. Then your unfairly more expensive but not actually stronger GCD heals, which are third. That's the priority order. There's no real interesting interaction between your heals. They don't feed one another. They don't *do* anything other than "cure the party by X amount". I'm not managing MP by making meaningful choices. I'm just running dry spamming my basic boring damage nuke over and over and over again while being hamstrung by my arbitrarily smaller oGCD kit, outputting less damage and lower healing numbers than the others because WHM has to suck for ~reasons~.

IMO, WHM doesn't struggle for interesting reasons. They struggle because their kit just sucks.

[Hanayumi]

Biggest thing id want for Whm is all afflatus skills as ogcd, if theyd do that, Whm would feel worlds better to play to me...

[ty_taurus]

Biggest thing id want for Whm is all afflatus skills as ogcd, if theyd do that, Whm would feel worlds better to play to me...

WHM's role of being the GCD healer can actually be successful if we improve the potency of Misery instead. Moving them off the GCD just makes WHM more like all the other healers. It would be a good thing to have a more fleshed out WHM that retains its identity as low APM rather than making it heavily weave-focused which is something that trips up a lot of players. It should foil against BLM's themes and mechanics more in that regard as well.

[Malackai]

Biggest thing id want for Whm is all afflatus skills as ogcd, if theyd do that, Whm would feel worlds better to play to me...

Exactly!!
Personally I am still wondering why on earth the Lilly spells are still on the GCD.
Ever since they were introduced in Stormblood it made the class feel so disruptive/clunky trying to use them and I don't get it they are a limited resource skill anyway so make them OGCD.. Might actually help the class flow a little better in general...

Not that its the main WHM issue by far but every tiny bit helps >_>