With Stormblood having been released nearly three months ago, I think it’s an alright time to now discuss about how I feel White Mage has changed and with it going on in future. Lets get the annoying bit out-of-the-way first – the story.
Well the story pretty much sucked as we did not do much but I guess that’s a given seeing the story line showed us as a legendary powerful White Mage that even the Conjurer Guild looks up to. I suppose it was also nice seeing that kid again and seeing she hasn’t killed herself out right.
I would still love to see a daily class quest as that is what this story felt like. You can read up on this idea here: Daily Class Quests. The Healer & Cleric Robe also needs changing but you can read about this here: Why the Healer Robe has to change.
The robe still used to this very day
Lilies
To be honest Lilies is not as bad as it originally sounded but there is quite a few problems that would be great if they were sorted.
The first is being able to control when to use lilies. There are quite a few times you want to be able to use Assize in a couple of seconds but all of a sudden you need to use Asylum and now the cool down timer is on Asylum and not Assize.
The second part is lilies does not affect everything. There are quite a few skills that it does not affect such as Cleric Stance, Largesse, Presence of Mind, Thin Air, Swiftcast, Lucid Dreaming and even Benediction.
Why does the main change of White Mage with lilies does not affect most of its tool kits while the likes of while Astrologian’s Celestial Opposition which extends the timer of those skills – role skills included.
It would be great if lilies could be controllable when you wish to use it and for it to be able to affect the role skills as well. Imagine being able to use lilies on Cleric Stance to increase your DPS, Largesse to be able to do more burst healing right to being able to have Presence of Mind quicker – the possibilities are endless.
Arguably, the best White Mage Robe.
Confession
Plenary Indulgence. Such amazing power that allows us to get procs and then perfectly time when we need to use such a powerful burst healing … oh wait that isn’t this skill?
Plenary Indulgence is a skill where now if you use an AoE heal (Medica, Medica II and Cure III) you will gain a stack that last a couple of seconds. Heal again and you get two stacks and if you do it once more you get three stacks.
Sounds good in theory but it isn’t. The skill has such a short timer you can not really “plan” to use it anywhere beyond it being used in any fight where you just need to spam AoE healing for a short bit.
Increasing the time on this would go a long way (even if they nerf the skill itself) as it would allow White Mages to build up procs and save them knowing they can use it in roughly thirty seconds in order to do a sudden burst heal.
A wonderful skill in theory but bad in practice.
Princess White Mages is a common Final Fantasy theme.
Divine Bension & Role Skills1
I included both of these together because I will be talking a bit about Protect and our former Stoneskin. Divine Bension is not a great skill – period. The fact it uses lilies automatically forces you to pick against a tiny barrier or lowering the cool down timer of a different skill.
Divison Bension isn’t even affected by the lilies it uses. Really this skill should be a small spammable barrier just like our old Stoneskin but the more lilies you have the more you can use it or the more powerful it could be.
Protect itself is in a funny place. Having it as a role skill just keeps it in for the sake of it. They should either make the values you have with protect as your base line or have protect to actually be useful. I for one would love to see PvP’s version of protect to be added for White Mages – it would give a much-needed barrier.
Hell that is what Divine Bension should have been in the first place.
And about the role skills? Is there an actual reason beyond “forcing” cutting down buttons for why Esuna was removed from every single healer and added to the role skills? It’s a vital bit of your kit and made each healer visually feel different even if it did the same thing (we won’t go into the fact we had a trait with it).
This can be fixed easily by simple re-adding the old skills back for the three healers or allow us to have access to more than five role slots. There is no such thing as “builds” in Final Fantasy XIV – lets stop pretending there is and let us have access to the stuff that was taken away from us.
1. Its worth adding as a quick note that I am not going to debate Cleric Stance. While I loved stance dancing – its overwhelmingly been a pouplar change in Final Fantasy XIV’s community and if it means I can deal damage without people calling me out on it and saying I should only be healing then so be it.
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