The Pure/Barrier Split and my inane ramblings about it

[ForsakenRoe]

White Mage - Nature's Warden, Nature's Wrath

White magic in older FF games has been very mixed and matched, depending on the game. It's always had restorative magic like Cure, it's sometimes had 'nul-element' spells like in 10, it's had Holy be named as 'the ultimate white magic' in 5. What comes to mind when I think of White magic, however, is burst. No, not Burst the high level thunder spell, burst as in 'lots of number in small timeframe'. Burst healing, Burst damage, throwing Curaga out and massively healing the whole team always felt good in older games, so we can keep leaning into that, as WHM definitely can pump heals when it needs to.

Unfortunately, SE has definitely painted a lot of floor on WHM's design so far and we're pretty tucked into the corner on this one. It really feels like they wanted to have WHM be the 'starter healer', the 'simple healer' but that has left it with very little room to actually grow, forever held back by it's training wheels. Even so, with a bit of lore-abiding (probably) design and looking at it's past as a Conjurer, my brain spat out this:

WARNING: I AM NOT A THEORYCRAFTER I AM GOING FOR FEEL AND AESTHETIC HERE NOT EXACT POTENCY VALUES, IF POTENCIES SEEM WONKY THEY PROBABLY ARE, BUT CAN BE CHANGED EASILY

Plenary Indulgence moved to level 74
Afflatus Rapture moved to level 70 (now available in UCOB!)

New skill: Stoneskin (learned at 52 alongside lily gauge), GCD that puts a shield on the target equal to 300p heal, costs 1 lily
New skill: Afflatus Tragedy (learned at 62 just because there's a gap there), basically a downgrade from Misery, does 800p damage (4 stone3's is 880 so its a small loss still), this is just to help new players get into the idea of 'use lilies, get big hit that compensates the lost dps', upgrades to Misery at 76
New skill: Afflatus Bastion (upgrade from Stoneskin at 70), increases the shield from 300 to 400p
New skill: Afflatus Sanctuary (Learned at level 70 alongside Afflatus Rapture), GCD that shields all nearby party members equal to 200p healing, costs 1 lily

By keeping the potencies on the shields low, it lets the 'shield healers' be more specialised at shielding, but still giving WHM options to shield if it absolutely has to

Returning skill: Divine Seal (learned at 40), 2min CD that buffs healing actions by 20%, so 'Temperance without the damage mitigation', becomes Temperance at 80
Returning skill: Protect (learned at 10 or something), 60s CD that gives 5% damage mitigation for 10sec, upgrades to Plenary at 74. Plenary would retain the 5% damage reduction, in addition to it's current effect.

Returned from the dead skill: Fluid Aura (now renamed Water to fit better), now an instant cast GCD with a separate 15 second recast (affected by spellspeed), scaling damage like Stone, becomes Banish at Glare/Dia levels, does 40p more damage than Stone/Glare equivalent at any given level (say Glare3 is 310, maybe this could be 350?)

Aero/Dia changed to be 12 seconds duration, potency adjusted to balance, to mix up how often we're using Glare vs Dia (and to give the rotation a more 'bursty' feel) edit: 150 + 70per tick would total 430, while still keeping the base damage of the cast low to prevent spamming early application?

A new HUD element, the 'Nature Gauge' (name is WIP), a simple 0-100 gauge that fills by doing certain actions. Stone/Glare gives 1 point. Aero/Dia gives 1 point on cast, and 1 per tick (5 total over full duration). Water would give 5 due to being used less often than Stone. edit: Forgot dungeons exist, perhaps something for Holy like 'Each enemy hit by Holy grants 2 gauge' so bigger pulls = more gauge per Holy bomb thrown, the 2 instead of 1 would be to compensate for the fact we're probably not multi-DOTting in a pull of 8+ mobs. As a side note, Dia's ticks giving gauge would only count for the first enemy, so having multiple mobs DOT'd would not increase the speed you gain gauge. This is important to note for later

Upon reaching 50 gauge, you can use a new skill: Blessing of the Elementals (also WIP). This would be a new GCD AOE heal that heals for 500p, restoring 500MP to the WHM, and granting them 3 buffs. These buffs can stack, so if you need to use the skill twice back to back for some insane burst AOE healing, you won't be kicking yourself for losing stacks. The buffs would also have no duration, so they'll last as long as needed during downtime, and be consumed the next time you're able to hit the boss. These three buffs would be named after the three elements the WHM controls, maybe 'Rage of the River, Ire of the Earth and Wrath of the Winds' or something like that. The three buffs would essentially be consolation prizes so that casting the GCD heal isnt a DPS loss. The 'water one' would turn the next Water/Banish into Flood (yes Banish would go back to being an elemental spell for a second, because our natural roots shouldn't be completely forgotten in favor of pretty lights), 'earth buff' would turn the next Stone/Glare into Quake, and 'wind buff' would turn the next Aero/Dia into Tornado. These skills would replace your Glare, Dia and Banish keybinds for the next cast, similar to how Inner Chaos replaces Fell Cleave on your bars when you have the Nascent Chaos buff. No button bloat worries.

Since Glare3 is currently 310 potency, losing one cast of it to cast 'BOTE' is the potency I aim to offset, so my thinking is simply this: Quake is a 100p boost over the current level of Stone/Glare you have, Flood is a 100p boost over the current level of Water/Banish you have, Tornado is a little different, and is 20p per tick of the DOT stronger than your current Aero/Dia, with it's base cast being 30p stronger. The 4 dot ticks total 80, the cast is 30 to make 110, add that to Quake and Flood being 100 each, there's your 310 fully refunded. Additionally, these skills would generate Nature Gauge at the same rate as their regular counterparts, so Quake is worth 1, Tornado is worth 1 plus 1 per tick, and Flood is worth 5. As noted above, here is 'later', and Tornado's AOE-spread DOT would not give multiple ticks of gauge, only 1 per server tick regardless of mobs hit

The power of the healing of BOTE is intended to be a WHM themed answer to the, lets be honest, insane power of Earthly Star for AST. WHM has nothing that can really compete as it stands, so I came up with this as a way to reward WHMs who diligently protect nature with the power of violence. In my mind, a fully optimised run would get to the point where the WHM is able to deal with all the required healing using only their OGCDs, Lily heals (Rapture) and this new BOTE. Some things would be on the GCD yes, but the point of using OGCDs isn't because GCD bad, it's because 'GCD that loses damage bad' so DPS neutral skills are A-OK.

edit: More dungeon stuff: Quake, Tornado, Flood can all have AOE around target, with 50% damage falloff. This makes it so that after using the heal of BOTE in a dungeon pull, spending the buffs granted on Quake Flood and Tornado would be a DPS gain over throwing more Holy's, spicing up our 1 button rotation in AOE too. Tornado could even apply the DOT in an AOE, albeit at the 50% reduced amount. This would still be a big amount of damage to add to any trash pull though, and would give us back Aero 3's AOE DOT potential (but in a new form). Based on the current potency values, and the idea above, the potencies for these AOE effects would be: Holy, 150p to all targets around you. Quake, 410 to main target, 205 in AOE. Flood, 450 to main target, 225 in AOE. Tornado, 180 to main target, 90 in AOE. Tornado's DOT effect, 90 per tick on main target, 45 for all others.

Furthermore, if my maths is right (its probably not), we would get 24 GCDs per minute assuming a 2.50 GCD. 4 of these would be Water/Banish, giving 20 gauge. 5 of these would be Aero/Dia, refreshed once per 12s to give 25 total gauge. This leaves us 15 Stone/Glares per min, giving us 15 gauge, for a total of 60 gauge generated per minute. This would allow for roughly 1 BOTE cast per minute, with some leeway built in (not intentionally, this is pure coincidence) to allow for eg, dropping a Glare to use a Rapture to heal the team, casting your Misery, etc. Because you neither 'lose' nor 'gain' damage from using the BOTE skill, you'd also not need to worry about overcapping due to not needing to heal. Giving the option for super skilled WHMs to shift their BOTE healing vs Lily healing timings around to allow them to get both Misery AND the new Quake/Tornado/Flood into raidbuffs for more raid-DPS is a nice optimisation trick that gives depth to the class for those who seek it

edit again: I decided to try and do the maths on potencies and see how close I could get to the current potency per minute (PPM). As a baseline, not including any buffs like Presence of Mind, external buffs, prepping Misery's, anything, just me VS the dummy in a Glarefest. Currently 1min of combat looks to be 2 Dia's and 22 Glares, totaling 8140 potency. With the addition of Banish and the change to Dia's duration/potency, we'd theoretically get 5 Dia applications, totaling 2150, 4 Banish's at 1400, and the rest is 15 Glare's at 4650, with a grand total of 8200. If I really wanted to, I could probably work out maths to make it match the current total exactly, but I think it's close enough (and it being 8200 looks nice and neat)

Overall, I think what I got here still fits well within the cramped confines of SE's 'simple starter healer' idea for WHM, while giving it's barren treetrunk of a design a few branches, and some extra room to grow from there.
Edit: I've made videos! Don't expect production quality though, they'll be as crappy quality as my MSPaint diagrams. These are to illustrate the Fun Healer Gameplay we get to experience during the downtime of a boss, when no healing needs to be done, and the Potentially Slightly More Fun Healer Gameplay where I try to illustrate how the addition of one button (and the adjustment of one DOT's duration) can very easily spice up an otherwise dull rotation. I probably 'dropped the DOT' or 'clipped the DOT' or whatever because Dia's currently 30s, and I had to mentally picture it as being 12s, so it's kinda wonky gameplay, but I hope it helps to show the idea in motion.

edit: Cure1 evolves into Cure2 (700p, becomes 800 later, 500mp cost), Medica evolves into Medica2(300p, becomes 300p + 150p per tick, then later becomes 400p + 150p per tick). Cure 2 generates 5 Nature Gauge on cast. Regen generates 4 Nature Gauge on cast, and 1 Nature Gauge per tick (total 10). As with Dia above, Regen-ing multiple people will not give extra gauge. It'll give the 'on cast' part, but the ticks will behave as if only one person has the HOT. Medica 2 would generate 3 per tick (total of 15 over full duration), but it'd only consider the copy of the HOT on yourself (no multi-HOT benefits). Cure 3 generates 10 Nature Gauge on cast.

another edit: Additionally, when Medica 2's HOT effect is present on the WHM, the MP cost of Cure 3 is halved (from 1500 to 750), to encourage using it over just spamming Medica 2 over and over (as it'd be changed to 400p, plus 5 ticks of 150p due to combining with Medica 1). This allows for you to generate Nature Gauge even during high pressure heal situations such as end-of-fight enrages, and allows for more use of Cure 3 which is criminally underutilized as it stands

edit: As a further illustration to show the effect of 'what GCDs we use in a 60s loop', we have the top image right now, and this pitch would create the bottom image:

Only 7 Glares a minute! 8, if you want to count Quake and Glare as the same thing (they would share a button ala Inner Chaos on WAR), compared to the 18 we have now per minute