If Afflatus Misery was "more" of a DPS gain, would it ruin WHM?

[Mithron]

When I play WHM I go back and forth on this so much. Technically it already is because pooling 3 Glares into a burst window means 3 Glares you wouldn't otherwise have gotten, which results in DPS gains especially if it crits, correct?

What do you think? I like Misery and as vanilla as WHM is, I think it does bring it class identity and is very satisfying to see it hit hard. I'd like to know it was more than just me trading 3 Glares during a burst window.

[Elucesta]

I would love a for WHM to deal more damage on Misery overall, strong heals and strong kills lol

[Wasselin]

Sadly I think it would ruin White Mage, or at least make it feel less flexible and kind of clunky. If Afflatus Misery was a dps gain you would need to spend lillies whether healing was needed or not, which could feel a little strange. Already it's like this in dungeons on mobs, however, that works out a little bit better since you can spend them in between fights.

[Mithron]

If Afflatus Misery was a dps gain you would need to spend lillies whether healing was needed or not, which could feel a little strange.

But don't you already have to? Because 1. If it crits, that's more damage than all 3 Glares critting normally (I think), and 2. Using 1 GCD to get 3 Glares during burst windows is a DPS gain given you only lose 3 GCDs to make up for it outside burst windows.

[Nizzi]

Sadly I think it would ruin White Mage, or at least make it feel less flexible and kind of clunky. If Afflatus Misery was a dps gain you would need to spend lillies whether healing was needed or not, which could feel a little strange. Already it's like this in dungeons on mobs, however, that works out a little bit better since you can spend them in between fights.

You already spend Lilies whether healing is needed or not, because Misery is DPS neutral you want to avoid capping on them and as such should use them as a priority for healing or movement so you can maximize your Misery usage. Especially in fights with downtime where burning them is already a large DPS gain.

[ForsakenRoe]

Misery is equal to 4 Glares, and a raidbuff window is, lets call it 8 GCDs (because of POM haste vs some raidbuffs eg Chain being 15s). Because of this, you'd have either 8 Glares, or 7, + 4 because of a Misery. Even if that Misery does not crit/DHit, it's still 3 more Glares worth of potency being stuffed into the raidbuff window, that would normally not be in there. The only way it'd work out to be 'truly damage neutral' is if your comp was like, WHM/SGE/SAM/BLM/MCH/a duplicate DPS. If Misery were even stronger than it is now, it'd feel worse in my opinion, a lot worse. If it doesn't crit now, it feels pretty bad due to it's potency being in the 4 digits (please SE no more 1000+ potency skills). It can feel pretty jank as it is to feel like you need to 'waste' healing just to prep a Misery (I forget to do it most of the time), it's not so bad on SGE to keep your MP economy going because it's OGCDs there, but on WHM, dropping a damaging GCD to fire a Rapture that you don't actually need doesn't feel great to me. Lastly, it'd feel even worse to lose healing because of a hard-heal moment. Say you're at 2/3 Misery prep, and a mechanic comes up at 3:40 that you can't get through with just one Lily spend, you're forced to either dump Misery early (missing raidbuffs), or overcap on Blood Lily (losing a Glare worth of potency each time you do), the further from 'damage neutral' Misery were to hypothetically get, the worse either of those would feel. This could be solved by making the Blood Lily able to grow past 3, allowing a buffer, eg it costs 3 to Misery but it caps at 5, giving 2 Lily heal uses of leeway. Same could be done for Monk's TFC, spend at 5 but cap at 7 (since the 7 chakra is a whole lore thing for them)

Big burst healing into big burst damage into big burst healing into... cycle is the identity I'd want to see realized more for the class, so much so I wrote a whole stupid essay of a post about it. Rather than making Misery stronger, I'd rather we look at making other stuff be, uhh... I guess the best way to word it is, if Misery is damage neutral, how can we make our damage be 'healing neutral'? Hence my idea, a spell that we store up resource for passively as we do damage, then unleash when we need it for a damage neutral heal. And a 12s duration DOT, with way more potency upfront and per tick to compensate, so it feels way more bursty than the other healers. And Stoneskin.

[Rongway]

If [Misery] crits, that's more damage than all 3 4 Glares critting normally (I think)

That is not true.

Let critMult be the damage multiplier for a critical hit.
Let glareDmg be the average damage for a single Glare.
Let miseryDmg = 4 * glareDmg.

The damage dealt by four crit Glares would be
4 * critMult * glareDmg.
The damage dealt by a crit Misery would be
critMult * miseryDmg = critMult * 4 * glareDmg = 4 * critMult * glareDmg

If we consider critRate, the expected damage of four Glares would be
4 * ((1 - critRate) * glareDmg + critRate * critMult * glareDmg) = 4 * glareDmg * (1 - critRate + critRate * critMult)
and the expected damage of a Misery would be
(1 - critRate) * miseryDmg + critRate * critMult * miseryDmg, or (1 - critRate) * 4 * glareDmg + critRate * critMult * 4 * glareDmg = 4 * glareDmg * (1 - critRate + critRate * critMult)

Outside of raid buffs, 4 glares and 1 misery are equal.

Using 1 GCD to get 3 4 Glares during burst windows is a DPS gain given you only lose 3 GCDs to make up for it outside burst windows.

Right, Misery is a gain during raid buffs because you get the effect of raid buffs on three more Glares than you would have otherwise. Just keep in mind that you're not gaining "three extra Glares during raid buffs"; you're gaining "the effects of raid buffs on three additional Glares". The base damage of those three glares is already accounted for in the GCDs that you spent outside of raid buffs to prime Misery.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

If you want to give it a try, do any content that syncs you to lv74-81 as a WHM. At that lv range the potency of a single misery (~1,240p) cast outshines the total of 4 Glares (~1,160p). Recognizing this, I personally felt really inclined (and bad) to never overcap lilies even when there's no healing required. My hunch tells me this is an oversight from job dev's side..or they simply don't care enough about any content that's not the current capstone.

[Gserpent]

If you want to give it a try, do any content that syncs you to lv74-81 as a WHM. At that lv range the potency of a single misery (~1,240p) cast outshines the total of 4 Glares (~1,160p). Recognizing this, I personally felt really inclined (and bad) to never overcap lilies even when there's no healing required. My hunch tells me this is an oversight from job dev's side..or they simply don't care enough about any content that's not the current capstone.

It's the latter. Though replace "don't care" with "don't prioritize it." I think calling Square-Enix lazy or accusing them of not caring is probably being hyperbolic. But I do think they are *complacent.* It's weird, for a game with a start-to-90 process that's almost certainly over a hundred hours long at this point (watching cutscenes, doing normal raids and trials, etc), they sure don't seem to put much effort into anything that's not at the end of the ride.

Scholar has a number of issues similar to this. Ruin and Art of War have identical potency of 150; once you have Art of War, you can just shuffle Ruin off to some button you don't push much, for the rare occasions when you can't be up close to what you want to hit. The cost difference of 100 MP per GCD is largely irrelevant. Moreover, when Scholar is slated to get the Broil trait upgrade at 54, if you haven't done the class quest yet, your Art of War tooltip updates to 165 potency (since the Broil trait also bumps AoW potency), yet the actual potency is still the same 150.

There is a *lot* of this stuff in the game. I don't really fault them (much) for having it, as it's certainly a far lower priority than addressing major bugs (and Square-Enix deserves an *enormous* amount of praise for how generally bug-free their patches are), but the fact that it *never* gets addressed when it surely can't be *that* difficult to remedy is bothersome. Surely this is the sort of task that an intern or junior staffer could handle in their spare time.

[Bobby66]

Generally when you are dealing with a product that has enormous amount of technical debt, and a Frankinstain engine in this case, coupled with the language barrier they probably do not even have interns working on this project, since if something goes wrong it would be a nightmare to fix. That is just my guess as someone that did briefly work on TOR. They really did not let the low level interns work on the game itself, and their engine was far less messy than FFXIV.