Thread: White Mage's 6.1 changes fail to address a core issue I have with the job.

i fail to see why this is a "problem" at all. white mage now has something actually interesting to optimize beyond the previous "chad your cohealer as much as possible".

Lets bring up the ultimate example. Say you reaaally wanted those 3 lilies for downtime to use misery on raid buffs. You might be inclined then to say that in the last 60s of a given phase, whm basically doesnt want to use lilies, right? except... youre failing to account for the downtime itself to charge lilies too. depending on the length of the total downtime in the fight, playing like this will inevitably lead to lost lilies, which means you can then shuffle your lily usage around to fill in the gaps. its not at all like last whm where you wanted to avoid lilies at all costs, now you have an actual puzzle to solve for heal optimization.

Moreover saving misery for raid buffs only makes sense for ONE misery. wasting 3 raid buffs gcds to get a second misery in raid buffs is counter productive unless you get super lucky with a dh crit on the second misery.

As for the "overhealing" argument. overheal in this game has no punishment, and i say this as someone who likes to minimize overheal and minmax healing in encounters. The reason you avoid overheal is because its a waste of resources, and that waste of resources CAN lead to a dps loss. if you didnt need those resources, ergo no dps loss, then who cares if you overhealed? the same happens with earthly star and assize most of the time. If an encounter does so little damage that in a whole minute your lilies ended up being overheal, then youre probably doing some throwaway dungeon or trial that nobody cares about. this overheal issue is more reflective of encounter design than job design.

"oh but you might overheal if you use it for movement and then you needed that lily later on for actual damage" then you have a nice puzzle to manage and optimize your lily usage around. this is the opposite of a problem imo.

Originally Posted by QooEr

i fail to see why this is a "problem" at all. white mage now has something actually interesting to optimize beyond the previous "chad your cohealer as much as possible".[...]

Hi QooEr, I read your post, and I have to say I disagree. I did not mention in my OP that the WHM would be blowing lilies during raid buffs, and the issue I was mostly trying to point out is that the design of white mage's misery mechanics are very skewed when it comes to downtime.
The reason this is a problem is not because it gives the WHM something to optimize, the problem is that the way the WHM optimizes Lilies is often to force your other healer to GCD heal instead, since the Lily is worth more potency during downtime than their nuke during uptime. This is the problem I have playing with white mage, as a healer pair. I am saying that I do not want to play Scholar along with a White Mage because their Lily dumping during downtime is SO strong now, that it's more than Broilja, and thus asks the Scholar to use Succor in place of a white mage using that Lily for healing. It's a net potency gain of at least 15 potency, and a little more with raid buffs in mind, which isn't much, but it's still optimal. It actively discourages me from playing Scholar together with a White Mage, because I know that I am destined to be in this situation many times. It is not fun for me to play next to.
And, for the record, there is nothing to optimize between "maybe I needed that lily for healing instead of moving"-- if you can use it when you can't cast glare, it is ****ALWAYS**** stronger to use it when you cannot cast glare, as detailed in the second half of my OP.
//edit; and I mentioned in the OP as well that I do think the changes were coming from the right place, but the execution of the Lily system has problems that I believe should be adjusted. Not asking for it to be nerfed or reverted, I think it needs changes. It's "better than it was before" because WHM can heal sometimes now, but in a few ways it is worse for me to play Scholar next to, which is what this post is really about.