A Divine Change

For anyone that may be able to cast their mind back to the release of Stormblood there were a few problems I had with White Mage that I felt had to change. The first was Lilies wasn’t that great and the removal of Stoneskin but the information in the latest pre-patch notes have brought music to my ears. 

Before I talk a bit about this read below.

A change we will welcome

For anyone that doesn’t remember Stoneskin was a “spammable” barrier that the healers could use at will at the cost of MP that was equal to Cure II. In Stormblood they decided to remove it (still, no idea why) and instead gave us a skill called Divine Benison. 

This ability is a barrier that absorbs damage but would take every single Lily with it (although it does affect the cooldown timer on it like it would for Assize) but this caused quite a major problem that some people never understood.

Basically, if you know you have to use Divine Benison for a tank buster or whatever you had to purposely hold back from using pretty much any other ability with the important one being Assize. So instead of being able to use Assize quickly to get your MP back and THEN pop up Divine Benison you had to wait until you needed to use the ability and then use Assize which also meant you had no Lilies in order to reset the timer on Assize (which lets face it Divine Bension recast is 30s – there is rarely a time you would want that to come back faster) compared to Assize which is 60s and heals, DPS and gives you MP back at the same time.

With the new change this means that while it is still very likely Lilies will still cut down the recharge timer of Divine Benison it means we can now use our other abilities and not worry if we will get a Lily before we need to use Divine Benison. In other words, we don’t need to hold back our abilities or use a sudden Cure / Cure II in order to get a Lily back where otherwise we could still be DPSing.

It’s a shame that Stone IV still does not provide us with a Lily or that Plenary Indulgence’s Confession stacks still run out pretty fast – the above is a change I welcome with open arms although the most important change has not happened yet: THE HEALER ROBE NEEDS A WORKING HOOD.

I am not going to make another post for the other changes so I am quickly going to give my opinion on a few other things with job balance. The first is finally the change to Excogitation is long overdue and finally, it will still do something even if you have a hyper-active co-healer (or Paladin / Red Mage spamming heals).

I have no idea why Summoner was nerfed and it quite dishearting to see yet another patch where a caster is not “ideally” wanted and that the meta still stays the same with DPSes. Black Mage changes don’t “seem” to be worth it but I can not comment much there.

Lastly, although a lot of the community is quite upset about Warrior I think it is a welcomed change. If it means we get more people switching their mains over to a tank because they no longer feel the pressure to have to know the job insanely well in order to do the numbers expected by the community and have fun with feeling like a DPS tank. It also seems that Warriors will now be more of a tank rather than a mini-DPS.