White Mage Attraction

[AmiableApkallu]

I'm not asking for more damage, I'm asking for unique ways to output that damage.

My feeling: Current job design is not so good at "unique" ways to output damage. Of the 11 DPS jobs (and 4 tank jobs), the only one I find that makes damage at all interesting is BLM, and that's because it has terrible feels when you fail: zero MP and not being able to get yourself into Umbral Ice for zero MP, dropping Enochian at 29 of 30 seconds. Melee are little more than variations on making single-target damage as convoluted as possible. Jobs based on buffs, such as BRD, provide zero feedback in game and thus are unsatisfying to play.

"Healing", on the other hand, at least provides feedback. People are standing, or they're not. They survive the next raid-wide, or they don't. You drag someone and kicking through a fight with 314159 vuln stacks, or you don't. If only those examples weren't so reliant on people making mistakes...

[AnotherPerson]

The moment you add any sort of multi-button DPS rotation to a GCD-based healer like WHM, someone's going to point out that those GCD heals are a DPS loss (à la the old lilies) or find a way to turn GCDs spent over-healing into a DPS gain (because of how damage is "refunded"). It's a balancing act the current WHM avoids because of Glare-Glare-Glare-….

The story could play out differently if healers received DPS credit for healing and mitigating [1] [2], but that's non-trivial to work out.

WHM already do that. They throw away excess lilies right before raid buffs to get Afflatus Misery under the buff window. Because Afflatus Misery is worth 4 Glares, you essentially get 3 more Glares worth in a buff window at the cost to your DPS. It's not much, but the alternative is "overcap your lilies, spend extra MP on Glare for the same value of the GCD".

I'm quite sure what people meant is that GCD healing is a DPS loss in the sense that WHM has to use Medica II more than other jobs due to a lack of free healing abilities compared to other jobs due to the inherent nature of being a GCD-oriented job.

And that's another big thing - people are all so focused on DPS because healer DPS is the only metric that matters anymore. That's because we have so much healing power so "powerful healing" that isn't used is thrown away and traded for something else when people want to improve and figure out how else to maximize their toolkit. It's another way to say "my versatility literally comprises of throwing my healing away for more DPS or overheal".

In other words, it's not very versatile at all. It sucks. There's literally no versatility to White Mage outside of "heal more" when damage doesn't require it, nor is damage consistently high enough to constantly require GCD healing.

We don't have movement speed buffs, we don't have LB charging buffs, we don't have skill slow buffs, we don't have CC.
You know what WHM has that actually been a niche ability? Presence of Mind - literally speeds up your GCD casts. Wow, something different and synergizes well with White Mage's GCD-gameplay! Why is it not used for GCD Healing? That's because we have so much healing that it will rarely ever be used for GCD healing. That's why it becomes Glare x300, but we already press Glare for most of the fight because we have so much healing power in regards to the content's overall damage. Nothing changes except Presence of Mind becomes a DPS skill on cooldown. No versatility.

Just pause for a moment to think - if damage was actually high enough where Presence of Mind actually was an ability we use to determine whether we should save the ability for a very fast damage-heavy duration of a fight, then it would be different.
The reality is that, the skill doesn't work like that. The gameplay doesn't work like that.
This is why healer gameplay sucks. There is no real thought to damage - so healing in the game is very uninspiring.

[vetch]

You know what WHM has that actually been a niche ability? Presence of Mind - literally speeds up your GCD casts. Wow, something different and synergizes well with White Mage's GCD-gameplay! Why is it not used for GCD Healing? That's because we have so much healing that it will rarely ever be used for GCD healing. That's why it becomes Glare x300, but we already press Glare for most of the fight because we have so much healing power in regards to the content's overall damage. Nothing changes except Presence of Mind becomes a DPS skill on cooldown. No versatility.

Just pause for a moment to think - if damage was actually high enough where Presence of Mind actually was an ability we use to determine whether we should save the ability for a very fast damage-heavy duration of a fight, then it would be different.
The reality is that, the skill doesn't work like that. The gameplay doesn't work like that.
This is why healer gameplay sucks. There is no real thought to damage - so healing in the game is very uninspiring.

You can actually use PoM for healing if you roulette into Stone Vigil, where you have Cure 2 but not Holy, with a tank that pulls wall-to-wall. It's exciting! And versatile! For 0.5% of content.

[Duskane]

I just want WHM to have a similar idea to RDM and BLM where your DPS rotation cycles through elements
instead of just light or stone spam with a wind dot.

[Mortex]

Oh, I see what you mean. But, as long as you're not overcapping on lilies, you still lose potential DPS from your maximum by using them to heal instead of saving two to dump during GCDs where you can't Glare (due to the boss being offscreen or whatever), so oGCD healing would still be preferred. No?



It's not that healing isn't valued. It's that having the most healing power isn't any kind of identity when one of the game's design goals is that all comps need to be able to clear, meaning all that healing power can't be required by the content. 'Guaranteed surplus healing' can't be an identity when one of the cornerstones of MMO combat gameplay is 'surplus is a waste'.

Mitigation is properly valued at the extreme high end, however, which leaves WHM with the least and worst mitigation of any healer, also least valued.

Blood lily if played correctly is actually minimal a dmg gain. It’s up ever minute so it fits into the 2 minute burst window and now it’s 100 % dmg neutral so you can skip glare and throw a lily before you over cap and more if you approve the burst window. Whm still is not good in comparison but it got way better then it was before.

[Semirhage]

Your horse and cart are backwards. The community has developed an emphasis on green DPS as a response to FF14's design degenerating to value DPS so nakedly. If enrages had stayed as loose as they were in ARR, outgoing damage as high, and healer design as difficult to DPS effectively with, then you wouldn't even need to explain to players that healing is important; they'd know it (as they did know it) from having experienced the disastrous outcomes of healers DPSing away when they should heal.

You can't blame players for learning how a game works and adapting their behavior to be better at it -- that is the point of playing a game.

Pretty much this. And you can say it until you're blue in the face, but the FFXIV community (especially in the general forums and places like lolReddit) will eternally Motte-and-Bailey the hell out of a defensive reaction to it. Point out that game design encourages something, and you're a brainrotted elitist sweatlord obsessing over optimization strategies when you should just chillax and enjoy overhealing that's just not that big of a deal maaaaaan. Who cares that WHM sucks so badly, everything is viable.

But gosh, healers being designed like shit is such a weird insurmountable problem. Can't be because they're badly designed, only parse pigs care about things like reward systems or a job gauge that rewards casting healing spells whether you healed intelligently or not. Who concerns themselves with the game teaching bad habits?

You'd think WHM being dead last place in performance with regularity is indicative of a set of problems with its design, but that's clearly just an obsession with orange logs talking.

[Semirhage]

In the parlance of the game, /doubt. The "community's" favored formulas say otherwise.

This is also an issue of intra-role imbalance. You can have tradeoffs, or no tradeoffs. Why do AST and SGE just have a crapload of completely free heals that cost them zero DPS? In a game where the DPS race is the point of basically every encounter, your potential DPS is a huge boon. Why bring a SnoozeMage with few oGCDs and a bunch of lossy GCD heals when you have another option that can heal for free and lose no DPS? Would you like a $5 piece of cake, or a $0 piece of cake?

Yeah I know the way this discussion normally ends is "lol bro who cares it's just five bucks it doesn't matter in the end why do you care so much" Because proportionally, 5 is infinitely more than zero.

One of the big things that has kept WHM an unattractive pick from a numbers standpoint is that, for the longest time, Square decided that WHM's "niche" was healing throughput. This might be a workable identity. In a different game. Because Square Enix has also made it abundantly clear: they want all party comps to be viable, and by viable, they mean comfortably so- not clearing by the skin of your teeth at the absolute skill ceiling, but clearable in a midcore, relatively chill party. One of the knock-on effects from this design consideration is that healers must all have healing throughput that comfortably clears everything. So if everyone has a massive amount of healing throughput as a baseline, what's the point of having -even more-? Making a class that's easier for someone really bad at healing to clear something I guess? It's not an advantage that makes WHM attractive to a skilled player. It's a safety net that makes them less attractive the more skilled you get.

[Supersnow845]

This is also an issue of intra-role imbalance. You can have tradeoffs, or no tradeoffs. Why do AST and SGE just have a crapload of completely free heals that cost them zero DPS? In a game where the DPS race is the point of basically every encounter, your potential DPS is a huge boon. Why bring a SnoozeMage with few oGCDs and a bunch of lossy GCD heals when you have another option that can heal for free and lose no DPS? Would you like a $5 piece of cake, or a $0 piece of cake?

Yeah I know the way this discussion normally ends is "lol bro who cares it's just five bucks it doesn't matter in the end why do you care so much" Because proportionally, 5 is infinitely more than zero.

One of the big things that has kept WHM an unattractive pick from a numbers standpoint is that, for the longest time, Square decided that WHM's "niche" was healing throughput. This might be a workable identity. In a different game. Because Square Enix has also made it abundantly clear: they want all party comps to be viable, and by viable, they mean comfortably so- not clearing by the skin of your teeth at the absolute skill ceiling, but clearable in a midcore, relatively chill party. One of the knock-on effects from this design consideration is that healers must all have healing throughput that comfortably clears everything. So if everyone has a massive amount of healing throughput as a baseline, what's the point of having -even more-? Making a class that's easier for someone really bad at healing to clear something I guess? It's not an advantage that makes WHM attractive to a skilled player. It's a safety net that makes them less attractive the more skilled you get.

That last part is basically the entirety of what’s always been wrong with WHM, you can’t balance content explicitly for savage in a game which is overwhelmingly biased to casual content, then put in a class that’s designed as the “newbie friendly” alternative without it messing up its sub-role balance generally to the detriment of the others.

Tanks get around this problem with WAR, it’s the newbie friendly tank but it also has its own powerful niche that is also specifically designed to attract newer people to tanking (massive self heal), WHM needs something like that or otherwise it just needs to have its balance disconnected from the others so that they aren’t dragged down endlessly by WHM.

Also please make another healer accessible at level 1, having so many threads where people ask for “what’s the best starting healing” and as an experienced healers you know WHM is the worst to start with because it teaches all the wrong habits but having to level something else up to get another healer when they can just pick CNJ massively biases WHM for no other reason than outdated game design

[Semirhage]

Oh no. I had another essay pop into my head. Here we go.

Why Lilies Aren't All That Great: Version 2022

So, Square has played their cards close to the chest when it comes to their broad-strokes vision for Healers as a role. Sometimes they'll give a reason for changing something, but they dialed the transparency on job design WAY back after the healers had a (justified) meltdown when Stormblood previewed. Square barely gave us a justification for some of the crazier changes; they said, "just try it out". It's said often on the forums that nobody at Squeenix headquarters plays a healer at any level of proficiency above "occasional roulette", or that they don't give much thought to the role at all. What gets into their heads when they do think about healers? Without some sort of fireside chat with explanations, all we can do is look at some of their more bizarre changes and try to pick a pattern of behavior out of the patch notes.

Stormblood lilies, one of the most memed changes. During the preview, before Square incorporated any feedback, a chance (!) of granting a lily when casting Cure or Cure 2. Gave pathetic low single-digit second discounts on the next non-Benediction healing oGCD you cast. Baffled the crap out of any healer who knew how to play this game. Why would you incentivize your two least-efficient (mana, time, potency, you name it) heals BEFORE using your most efficent, free ones? What did this system incentivize? Cure spamming.
Fey gauge. Rewards healing with even more healing. Sits full most fights. What? Why? Why is one regen the only use of this gauge? Scholars rarely need this much healing. What would the designer of such a gauge imagine the player does? Heal spamming.
Energy Drain removal. Why would you get rid of your Aetherflow dump? What the hell? What are you supposed to do with your remaining stacks? Sure, if you've got to Lustrate that darn Dragoon then you do it. But why leave Scholar with no useful way to drop their remaining Aetherflow charges when they aren't needed? What does this incentivize? Heal spamming.
No Scholar AoE on Stormblood launch. Who would greenlight this? Scholar was dead in the water when it came to dungeon damage. What would a Scholar end up doing in this scenario? Spam heals? Stand around and do nothing?
Why does Freecure still exist? This passive has been a meme for nearly four expansions now. Its MP conservation is never worth the time wasted fishing for it. What does this ability exist to incentivize? Cure spamming.
Why is Sage's MP economy directly tied to using its Addersgall heals? The MP you get back from using those heals isn't a nice bonus; it's mandatory if you don't want to eventually run dry. What happens in the event that you don't need the healing? Was that even a consideration? What does this incentivize? Heal spamming.
Why does at least one healer have gross mana economy issues when a new expansion drops? Not just some niche scenario, but spamming their cheapest GCD for an entire fight while maintaining casts runs them dry on MP, and there's no decision they can make other than standing around not casting anything to fix it. What sort of healer tested this? One that stands around and doesn't do anything between heals.

From my perspective, something's starting to take shape. Square hasn't come out and painted a picture of what their idea of a good max level healer looks like, but if you look at the shape drawn by their weird design decisions, you can fill in the blanks. Minimizing healing? Keeping your GCD rolling? Getting a feel for how your tools can weave into the rest of your kit? Supporting your party with intelligent use of your tools? Nope.

Square lives in a world where they think damage is constant. Everywhere. All the time. A good healer is a Cure spammer. oGCDs are for emergencies when the constant terrifying onslaught of incoming damage gets even higher. A skilled healer *might* get a damage spell in once in a blue moon, but otherwise stands around waiting for that constant tidal wave of incoming damage to fix. They view healers the way the Sylphie meme does. As a terrified newbie. So the healer kits are designed the way a Cure spammer would design them. Because good healers are Cure spammers.

So where do Shadowbringers lilies fit into this? They were lauded as Square finally discovering a positive direction to take WHM in. After a full expansion of a worthless job gauge, now there's a gauge that sees use. Hallelujah, we're finally turning this role around everybody. WHM is functional again!

Is it, though? What are lilies if not rewards for C U R E S P A M M I N G? They just made the reward attractive enough to use this time. Square Enix hasn't learned a single effing thing about how skilled healers play. It's not a light at the end of the tunnel. It's further evidence that Square is digging their heels in and forging ahead with the same BS idea for how to design healers they had all along: Cure spamming good. Good healers are Cure spammers. You're bored with the game? How? Aren't you spamming Cure? If you just cast Cure some more, maybe you'd see how good our design is.

Maybe if the role had a whisper of design that led me to believe Square understood that clever, or conservative, or well-timed healing should reward downtime with extra utility/damage/whatever, I'd believe otherwise. But ALL of the incentive systems in this role with the mild exception of Addersting reward you for spamming your abilities, not for using them well. Because good healers are Cure spammers. Maybe I'm too cynical, but I don't think Square designed Shadowbringers lilies after a come to Jesus moment where they learned the right lesson from the disaster that was Stormblood lilies. They just decided the main problem with them was that they didn't reward you for Cure spamming enough. Ah, there we go. Fixed. Increase the reward for Cure spamming, now we've got them playing like pros.

[Supersnow845]

Oh no. I had another essay pop into my head. Here we go.

Why Lilies Aren't All That Great: Version 2022.

I love how the only reason we ever forced squares hand in making a positive DPS change to WHM (that of misery going from 900 to 1240) was because we had reached a point where WHM had become so bad people actually began to ban them from parties

Square gates healers but they sure as hell won’t let you ban their precious sylphie class from any content because they can’t design it properly