The Future of WHM

[Liam_Harper]

A shield you don't need is just as useless as a heal you don't need and WHM can't have a buff or damage spell because Misery locks the whole design into a corner.

Content simply needs to hit harder and/or more often so there are less situations where you're sitting on 3 lilies and don't need any.

[snuggans]

A shield you don't need is just as useless as a heal you don't need

well no because overhealing does nothing but a shield gives the tank that 2nd HP bar for upcoming damage. more wiggle room for me to pew pew

[Liam_Harper]

well no because overhealing does nothing but a shield gives the tank that 2nd HP bar for upcoming damage. more wiggle room for me to pew pew

But the shield absorbing damage reduces the damage you need to heal further, leading to something else overhealing instead or still resulting in less lilies needed. It's just like that wasted Solace except you heal in advance instead of afterwards.

In most cases, even Savage, a tank can be sustained purely from free oGCD's, their own self heal and the aoe heal you use for the rest of the party. Pushing a shield onto them on top of that is unnecessary.

The reason WHM's are spamming Solace on a fully healed tank is because there's no damage to heal, like you said. A shield does nothing because there's no damage to heal, they'll still end up fully healed without it, even if you pew pew.

To be frank, I’d very much prefer devs to keep the old 30s default timer BUT can be speed up through a good use of WHM’s other kits. To name a few that I mentioned in the past: a use of tetra speed up lily timer by 15s, breaking benison shield speed up by 5s, and few others that I couldn’t remember without looking back in the list.

I'd tie it to dps personally, but I know that would cause uproar.

Tying it to heals is always awkward (especially a "good" use) because heals aren't always needed or you have a GCD heal spamming co-heal. Even on harder fights Rapture is much better value than Tetra so you'd happily pop a pure overheal Tetra to prep for a raidwide. Breaking a Benison shield is a good idea, although I still think bosses need to hit harder so you aren't just going through the motions despite the fact that your co-healers Kardia and Nascent flash would have it covered if you didn't bother.

It's very hard to properly reward healing. There are too many factors. Co healer, the encounter, gear, group skill and so on. Rewarding dps is easy, it's always useful.

[Silver-Strider]

I can only think of a handful of ways to deal with surplus lilies and none are particularly likely to happen.

1) Return Lilies back to 30s
2) Rework our oGCD toolkit to GCDs tied into the Lily System
3) Remove some oGCDs to make the Lily System more needed
4) Increase damage the party takes
5) Nerf the potency of healing skill.

Returning Lilies to 30s again would hurt WHM's DPS as Misery would no longer align with Raid buffs
Reworking our oGCD into GCDs tied into the Lily system just makes them into GCD Aetherflow abilities and unless Lilies start off capped as well as have them passively generate outside of combat, we'd be unable to utilize them during the start of an instance.
Removing some oGCDs could theoretically work but which oGCDs? Tetra is probably the most likely but what else would you remove?
Increasing the damage would work but SE has already killed that idea
Nerfing Healing potency would work too but considering that they recently buffed potencies, I doubt that's happening too.

SE just needs to admit to being wrong and make the game slightly more demanding in regards to healing. Add mobs/bosses that throw out some spicy DoTs or can Crit party members, have raidwides that do more damage the lower your health is, have mechanics that hit a random DPS multiple times in rapid succession while the boss is hitting the Tank with a Tankbuster. Right now, all SE does is add more and more healing tools and nothing to justify their existence or inclusion because even ignoring half of them will result in overhealing in most cases and Savage/Ultimate can barely justify having 2 healers as is and that needs to change.

[snuggans]

But the shield absorbing damage reduces the damage you need to heal further, leading to something else overhealing instead or still resulting in less lilies needed.

not necessarily, the shield would mean that the other heals can be delayed and you'd spend that period DPSing instead of maintaining the tank, your argument is based on not making any alterations to playstyle after new abilities are added to the game. remember, the point is to be able to offload surplus lilies in a way thats still useful when the tank's HP is doing fine, a shield would accomplish this and buy you more time to DPS while helping unlock Misery without Solace overheals

also i have no idea what you mean by "WHM can't have a buff or damage spell because Misery locks the whole design into a corner.", it just seems like you're boycotting any proposed changes just because

[Kabzy]

not necessarily, the shield would mean that the other heals can be delayed and you'd spend that period DPSing instead of maintaining the tank, your argument is based on not making any alterations to playstyle after new abilities are added to the game. remember, the point is to be able to offload surplus lilies in a way thats still useful when the tank's HP is doing fine, a shield would accomplish this and buy you more time to DPS while helping unlock Misery without Solace overheals

also i have no idea what you mean by "WHM can't have a buff or damage spell because Misery locks the whole design into a corner.", it just seems like you're boycotting any proposed changes just because

1) It probably would be bad for WHM to get another shield. Considering players all want to optimise and we have lived in the OGCD meta for a while now, it'd be weird if the "pure" healers were shielding more than the barrier healers; given that SCH/SGE ideally don't want to GCD cast any shields and so only have their OGCD shields that are on longer CDs than D.Benison/C.Intersection.
2) I don't think WHM should get a damage spell linked to lilies. It puts it in the same spot as SCH where you'll essentially get a penalty every time you need to use lilies for a heal. Not to mention it would have to take a hit to one of its other spells as WHM is doing pretty good with pDPS at the moment.

I'd like to see something innovative but I'm not sure exactly what. A buff would mean WHMs would need to optimise play around buff windows, which isn't the complexity they ever put this job at. They could maybe do something DPS wise if it was on a much longer CD than lily generation, but then you essentially have the same problem again. They could bring back abilities like Virus or Eye for an eye, but SCHs would be hella salty.

[MintnHoney]

I'd like to see something innovative but I'm not sure exactly what. A buff would mean WHMs would need to optimise play around buff windows, which isn't the complexity they ever put this job at. They could maybe do something DPS wise if it was on a much longer CD than lily generation, but then you essentially have the same problem again. They could bring back abilities like Virus or Eye for an eye, but SCHs would be hella salty.

TBH, it doesn't have to be something profound. We could...
-Make WHM the selfish DPS healer; the healer who can capitalize on a buff window, using a torrential storm of elemental rage that accumulates based on actual healing provided to the party (healing = rage, a concept we're all familiar with). From there, you just alter general parameters to compensate, though I doubt this would require a massive edit to numbers overall depending on frequency. Or,
-Give WHM another ability which activates when the Blood Lily has affected enemies a certain number of times (i.e. 3 times, and you get a "you did it!" bonus effect, the "blood bouquet" or something). Or,
-Make WHM the basic buffer, who provides the basic-but-much-beloved basic ATK+ buffs to the party (in the form of a familiar spell called Bravery, which becomes available if a Lily is successfully used to heal party members and not just used to overheal). In response to that, change ASTs buffs to be indirect/weird buffs (for example, rather than just ATK+, have AST increase the Weapon Damage number on an affected character's weapon by 5, (or something more reasonable, because I don't know the exact formula(s) for damage and therefore don't know how much WD is weighted in damage calculations), keep SCH buffing characters' other battle parameters like Max HP and Movement speed, and allow SGE to buff themselves using 1 out of every 3 Addersgall gained to change their Auto-attacks to a (short-) ranged attack that uses MND in damage calculations for 15 seconds (or a more reasonable amount of time, again, I don't know the formula(s))).

Or a whole plethora of other ideas that players would like a hell of a lot more than what I can come up. They also have other games and series, under the Squeenix umbrella, to draw inspiration from, and it's not as if they need to tread absolutely brand new territory.