Suggestion: WHM change

[Katoar]

Hello,

I would like to request a change in Benediction as it is currently a little bit out of place and doesn't synergies well with the rest of the WHM kit and with the changes brought to The Living Dead it has also lost one of its niches.

My suggestion for change is as follows:

Benediction
Type: Ability
Cooldown: 30sec
Cast: Instant
Range: 25y
Radius: 15y
Effect: Cleanses all debuffs on nearby party members.
Additional effect: Applies five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice to self for 5 seconds.
Action changes to Blissful Sacrifice after activation.
Blissful Sacrifice: Upon activation, extends remaining duration by 5 seconds, afflicts 20% of max hp damage to self and simultaneously reduces max hp by 10% while under the effect of Blissful Sacrifice. Gains 2 stacks of Enduring Faith.
Enduring Faith: Allows for the execution of Exaltation, Tornado, Flood/Water III and Earthquake. Effect expires with Blissful Sacrifice.

Exaltation
Type: Ability
Effect: Upon activation Cleanses Blissful Sacrifice and its detrimental effects. The remaining Enduring Faith stacks are lost.
Additional effect: Restores 5% of max HP per stack of Blissful Sacrifice remaining
Additional effect: Gives 2% of the original max HP barrier to self and nearby party members for every Blissful Sacrifice used.

Tornado
Type: GCD
Effect: Calls upon the wind spirits to deal damage to the target and nearby enemies. Grants Wind element: Ready.
Enduring Faith Cost: 2

Flood/Water III
Type: GCD
Effect: Calls upon the water spirits to deal damage to the target and nearby enemies. Grants Water Element: Ready
Enduring Faith Cost: 3

Earthquake
Type: GCD - channel
Effect: Calls upon the earth spirits to shake the earth around self to deal damage in a wide area. Grants Earth Element: Ready
Enduring Faith Cost: 5

Elements mechanic
Wind + Water - Allows for the execution of Seraph Strike.
Wind + Earth - Allows for the execution of Drought
Water + Earth - Allows for the execution of The Tree of Life
Wind + Water + Earth - Allows for the execution of Spiritual Ray

Seraph Strike
Type: Ability
Effect: Rushes to target to deal damage
Additional effect: Grants 3 stacks of Enduring Faith

Drought
Type: Ability
Effect: Calls a sandstorm to deal Damage over time to the target and all nearby enemies.
Additional Effect: Increases the chance of receiving a Blood Spilled stack from Nuke and DoT ticks

The Tree of Life
Type: Ability
Effect: Erects a tree at the designated location for 30-60s. Nearby party members within 15y radius receive HoT. Blissful Sacrifice's Hp cost is halved and the max HP reduction effect is alleviated while affected by the Tree of Life's Aura.

Spiritual Ray
Type: GCD
Effect: Big and flashy DPS spell with 3-5s channel time.
Enduring Faith Cost: 2


Nuke and DoT at lvl 50 and above
Additional effect: has a chance of granting 1 stack of Blood Spilled
Blood Spilled: Upon activation of Blissful Sacrifice, heals self for 10% and nearby allies for 10% of their max HP.


Thank you for your consideration and the time taken to read this.

Edit:
Changed the name of Offering to Blood Spilled
Added Enduring Faith Cost to Spiritual Ray
Added second Additional effect to Exaltation.
For elaboration purposes, to Enduring Faith was added: Effect expires with Blissful Sacrifice.
The Tree of Life's Aura now alleviates max HP cost from Blissful Sacrifice.
Blood Spilled now heals instead of lessening the damage dealt by Blissful Sacrifice.

[deusdormit]

Exaltation already exists as an Astrologian skill. But tbh I wouldn't mind taking the Conjurer elemental theme into more of a Geomancer direction. Either as a stand alone job or branch off Conjurer personally. But good ideas though! :3

[JacobNewblood]

Effect: Cleanses all debuffs on nearby party members.
Additional effect: Applies five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice to self for 5 seconds.
Action changes to Blissful Sacrifice after activation.
Blissful Sacrifice: Upon activation, extends remaining duration by 5 seconds, afflicts 20% of max hp damage to self and simultaneously reduces max hp by 10% while under the effect of Blissful Sacrifice. Gains 2 stacks of Enduring Faith.

this is where you lose me, friend.
First, there isn't really anywhere where mass esuna is needed. majority of debuffs cant be cleaned. while it would be great for Bad Breaths. that's about it. In a certain fight it may be bad to esuna a debuff. (looking at you e8s)
also
Having a spell that costs ones HP and reduces HP. isn't the way to go.
Let's say, I have 50,000 HP. by using one Sacrifice stack, I lose 30% at first use(the initial 10% HP Reduce and 20% for cast) with 20% every after.
Ill be down to 45,000 hp from the 10% loss, and lose 9,000 HP per cast of sacrifice.(if the 20% is calculated after the 10% loss either way being proportionally the same since its % based)
Trying to use all 5 stacks, without heals, will kill us, and since the stacks only last 5 seconds, you'll need to heal in between or you can be in danger.
i like the concept, and would love to see it come to light, but not in a way that hurts (Literally) us. some mechanics do % HP and some raidwides are BEEFY. and since it leads to a DMG tool, many would not rather hold it.

But please SE give WHm Seraph strike and have it give us a 15 Second Cleric Stance..

[Katoar]

snip

Hello,

To address some of the points made:
- The detrimental effects applied from using Blissful Sacrifice are put in place to give room for skill expression. If executed properly Blissful Sacrifce's effect can be reduced only to 2.5% of max HP damage to self per stack activated.
- People are not supposed to use Benediction and then use 5x Blissful Sacrifice without thinking and considering the possible risks associated with it. I think this is what makes it a button that is not pressed on cooldown.
- The AoE cleanse is a flavour effect that does come in hand every now and then in casual content and people can utilize it without having mastered the other mechanics of the ability. Also, the battle design team can always introduce cleansable debuffs in savage. We had some in E8S. We saw that the number of multiple AoE-s in quick succession increased significantly this expansion and I would bet it was because of how Lilybell works. So we already know there is communication between battle design and job design teams.
- WHM already has access to oGCD heals and free lilies. I think knowing how to heal yourself is making this more interesting.
- My idea is to have the Stacks of Blissful Sacrifice always deal 20% of max hp prior to getting your HP reduced from its detrimental effect. Using 5x stack at worse will reduce your HP to only 1 point. Players will not be able to use it if their HP is lower than 15% unless they are under the effect of The Tree of Life aura or have a stack of Blood Spilled (original name - Offering).
- I think holding and choosing the right moment to use buttons creates more engaging gameplay.

[pikalovr]

honestly instead of HP make it cost MP it'd put far more thought into using it optimally as it will affect rez potential and make any mistakes from the party more punishing than popping it 5 times out of the gate with no worry cause you can. you know no raidwides are coming up so might as well just pop all 5 since you have no worries for 25 seconds unlike making it an MP cost where any number of mechanics can affect someone else and hurt you more by draining unneccessary MP. it would also give lucid dreaming and thin air alot more use cases than just being used for rezzes. especially if you force each special move we'll call it cost MP since they are GCDs

also you really need to add more to the special moves (GCDs) unless spiritual ray is super powerful most people will just go earth+wind for the halfing of the effect of the next blissful sacrifice. if they need it, and seraph strike should honestly just be the single target attack that grants faith stacks and another 2 blissful sacrifice stacks to the WHM and WHM having a seperate dash ability. especially if you want "casual" players to be able to use it. you need to balance the damage to a point where for example making sure spiritual ray (10 cost overall) is more powerful than a seraph strike drought combo (10 cost overall) and making sure drought is more powerful than quad seraph strike

the main point of a setup like this is to allow the player to push their MP as far as they feel comfortable with alot of WHMs just using the 5 stacks and call it a day. but the more experienced WHM in better groups might use multiple seraph strikes (since it is inded a faith stack increase at the cost of MP) and i would add a mana regen/max MP return effect to spiritual ray to help those who really wanna "greed" a way to not go OOM if they're smart about it. yes you basically only use bene once and on CD but if you do for example need to use exaltation (which you can now get even more effect out of now since you can build stacks using bene and seraph strikes) even without using bene on CD you need a way to reenter that loop. and you still wanna keep up your dots and occasional nukes for blood spilled procs if you don't feel you can sustain enough droughts

[SirShady]

White Mage rework.

I appreciate the creativity that went into this! If Squeenix isn't bringing us Geomancer or their equivalent earth/water/wind DPS class in the next expansion, they better bring back White Mage's nature magic. However, I'm a bit confused on how all this works.

Benediction as it is currently a little bit out of place and doesn't synergies well with the rest of the WHM kit.

Um, I'm not sure agree. It's just a big fat free full heal. Simple, easy to use, effective. It's a perfect emergency button for the game's fundamental healer. It doesn't really need any specific synergy. It's a good button and you use it when you need it. If you removed Bene, many White Mages would riot.

Benediction
Cleanses all debuffs on nearby party members.

Unless Squeenix decide that they're going to start throwing around cleansable status effects in the next expansion, I don't see this being useful. It doesn't synergize with its secondary effect either. You might as well just get rid of this altogether.

Blissful Sacrifice: Upon activation, extends remaining duration by 5 seconds, afflicts 20% of max hp damage to self and simultaneously reduces max hp by 10% while under the effect of Blissful Sacrifice. Gains 2 stacks of Enduring Faith.

White Mage has never been a self-sacrificing playstyle. This could lead to the White Mage killing themselves during certain mechanics for what would be a bread and butter part of their DPS kit with the way you've outlined it. The self-damage just has no reason to be here.

Tornado
Flood
Earthquake

So every 30 seconds you could use Tornado. After 60 more seconds you could use Flood for Seraph Strike, leaving you at 4 stacks. With your next Sacrifice you'd be at 6, which means you can either do another Tornado/Flood or just one Earthquake during the raid window. The mechanics all seem to do the same things aside from their additional elemental fusing, and the costs are far too high, especially if you want to make use of the earth combos. It would make more sense to have them all cost the same amount. The number balancing here is a bit of a mess. That's not even considering the fact that Spiritual Ray costs stacks as well. At minimum you would have to be 180 seconds into a fight to use Spiritual Ray. It wouldn't align with raid timers and if you get more damage out of using it then spamming with Seraph Strike, what's the point? One of these combinations would not be used depending on which one gave more overall potency.

[SirShady]

Tree of Life's healing is not necessary, and the passive reduction to Blissful Sacrifice is not good enough for it to be used over your DPS/Enduring Faith generator. This would never be used. So really only one of your elemental combos (either Seraph Strike or Spiritual Ray, depending on potency) would ever be used.

3-5 second cast on Spiritual Ray... Why though? Does it just do that much damage? I don't think we should have White Mage so focused on dealing damage that their damage spells roll over the GCD timer. If anyone is going to get a 5 second long nuke cast, it's Black Mage and even then, I doubt they'd ever do that without have a way to reduce it (Ley Lines?).

I'm already against the idea of White Mage sacrificing their own HP for whatever reason, but having the amount lost be tied to proccing on your damage tookit is superfluous. Either it would have a chance of falling off before you need it and be annoying, or you'd always have it up, in which case you may as well just set the default value to 5%. It'd be better just to get rid of the self-damage in the first place. It does nothing thematically or synergize mechanically with anything in the White Mage's toolkit.

Honestly, I like the idea that you have here, but it's far too many buttons, doesn't flow well with the awkward number game of Enduring Faith, and in general doesn't have a lot of synergy with itself. I'd love to see an elemental combo magic system like this for a new job like Geomancer, but it just doesn't seem to flow into the White Mage gameplan. Great concept for a new job! Pretty clunky for a White Mage DPS kit.

[Katoar]

GCD-s can have higher than 2.5 seconds recast time
WHM already has Presence of Mind
WHM has no DPS kit just random buttons for every occasion and one DPS refund button

You are jumping to conclusions. No potency has been set for Drought or Seraph Strike. It is all a matter of balance to make Tree of Life a viable choice but if we want to make it useless (talking about removing HoT) it is going to be useless. The Tree of Life's purpose is to enable White Mage to use all five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice every 30sec while under its aura. This is far more valuable. While we are at this I will move the removal of max HP cost from Blood Spilled to one of the benefits the Tree provides.
Also, Using Seraph Strike for DPS gain instead of going for Earthquake to cast Spiritual Ray will be pointless and will result in DPS loss.

So every 30 seconds you could use Tornado. After 60 more seconds you could use Flood for Seraph Strike, leaving you at 4 stacks. With your next Sacrifice you'd be at 6, which means you can either do another Tornado/Flood or just one Earthquake during the raid window.

I am uncertain that you have fully grasped what I have written.

The moment the detrimental effects of Blissful Sacrificed are removed, all thinking required evaporates.
As mentioned in the OP, Enduring Faith stacks are lost when Blissful Sacrifice expires or is cleansed through Exaltation.

Drought is meant to be an offensive maintainable buff.
The Tree of Life is meant to be a supportive maintainable buff
Seraph Strike is meant to ease the obtainment of the Tree of Life buff as with no stacks of Blood Spilled it will cost 60% hp and 30% of max HP reduction for a short time.
Spiritual Ray is meant to be a rewarding DPS spell for figuring out how to survive despite using five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice.
Lastly, I decided to use HP instead of MP as we already have an oGCD that synergies well with self-detrimental status buffs - Lilybell. And we can hopefully look forward to the implementation of more oGCDs like it.

[SirShady]

GCD-s can have higher than 2.5 seconds recast time
WHM already has Presence of Mind

Yes, but almost every GCD is on a 2.5 recast time for a reason. Making one of White Mages GCD's take longer serves no purpose and doesn't fit its identity. You CAN do it, but why? Does it just deal that much damage?
You would never hold onto Presence of Mind just to speed up one GCD if it didn't align with Spiritual Ray. That's a DPS loss.

You are jumping to conclusions. No potency has been set for Drought or Seraph Strike. It is all a matter of balance to make Tree of Life a viable choice but if we want to make it useless (talking about removing HoT) it is going to be useless. The Tree of Life's purpose is to enable White Mage to use all five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice every 30sec while under its aura. This is far more valuable. While we are at this I will move the removal of max HP cost from Blood Spilled to one of the benefits the Tree provides.
Also, Using Seraph Strike instead of going for Earthquake to cast Spiritual Ray will be pointless.

Why would I ever hold onto all these stacks to use a heal over time when I have a superfluous amount of heals in my kit already and can instead go for Spiritual Ray or Seraph Strike? Why would I ever go for Seraph Strike if building up to Spiritual Ray does more overall potency?

I am uncertain that you have fully grasped what I have written.

This we can agree on. From what I'm seeing, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Surely you'd just use all your stacks for Spiritual Ray if it gave the highest amount of potency? I think something was lost in translation.

The moment the detrimental effects of Blissful Sacrificed are removed, all thinking required evaporates.
As mentioned in the OP, Enduring Faith stacks are lost when Blissful Sacrifice expires or is cleansed through Exaltation.

What does this mean? So you can cleanse the stacks that give you your DPS combo if you want to heal yourself back and give a small shield to all allies. Why would I do that?

Drought is meant to be an offensive maintainable buff.

Wind + Earth takes 7 stacks of Faith. You get 2 stacks every 30 seconds from Benediction. If that's the case than every 120 seconds you can cast this. This is not a sustainable heal or buff. Even if it was, why would I use it when I don't need the extra healing? Wouldn't I be better off spamming Spiritual Ray as much as possible? Am I missing something here?
Spilled Blood has a chance to be gained from your DPS skills. It is spent by those same DPS skills as a 10% heal to everyone. Cool. But why? There is no way to manage when you will get a stack, and you're going to use these buttons for DPS anyway, so this just seems a little tacked on.

[SirShady]

Seraph Strike is meant to ease the obtainment of the Tree of Life buff as with no stacks of Blood Spilled it will cost 60% hp and 30% of max HP reduction for a short time.
Spiritual Ray is meant to be a rewarding DPS spell for figuring out how to survive despite using five stacks of Blissful Sacrifice.

Ok, yep. Definitely missed something here. Where am I getting all these free Faith stacks from? Why are we leaning into this self-harm playstyle for White Mage?
How would you ever be rewarded by this? Fight design in this game has huge amounts of unavoidable damage. If you lowered your max HP that much you'd get yourself killed to many late-game mechanics. Also, I think I finally see what's happening here. So you can spam Blissful Sacrifice multiple times to continuously lower your max HP, deal damage to yourself, and get more Faith stacks?

Again, why? Why am I killing myself to do my basic DPS rotation? Thematically it doesn't fit, mechanically you'd be killing yourself all the time in order to squeeze out as much DPS as possible which is counterintuitive to the entire healer identity, and you'd actively have to not use it for certain mechanics that target healers or you'd end up screwed.

Lastly, I decided to use HP instead of MP as we already have an oGCD that synergies well with self-detrimental status buffs - Lilybell. And we can hopefully look forward to the implementation of more oGCDs like it.

Lily Bell is on a 3 minute cooldown my dude. Its niche is being used on raidwides that hit multiple times. And you'd still have the max HP debuff. And again, I ask you, why is White Mage killing itself? Why would any healer have to constantly risk their own safety, and vicariously, the team's safety, in order to use their toolkit? Where does this fit in thematically to the straightforward nature/light mage identity?