Why Won't You Main WHM

And because THF is useless.

I like playing MMORPGs and in order to continue liking to play MMORPGs I avoid the role most contingent on the behavior of other players

I've never liked being the main healer. I like to be up close and personal, hitting the monster. I don't mind being healing support or wiping people's debuffs and stuff, but they don't even give WHM the ability to do this for multiple people without significant gear investment.

Meanwhile, they give BLU stuff like Winds of Promyvion and DIffusion Mighty Guard. SCH gets Regen V.

Keep in mind too, that old WHM in XI didn't even always have the temp stoneskin gained from cures nowadays. There was a reason back in the day that all of the DDs subbed NIN or some other subjob that gave them an adequate survivability boost. WHM has never been given the actual tools it needs in this game, independent of gear.

And as the years have gone on, they've only kicked up the frequency of monsters doing shitty things, while barely increasing WHM's ability to respond.

Like, this is a game where your frontline needs to be proactive in their own survival too, but hardly any players want to play like that/get a kick out of burning out their life to do big number (myself included).

And like, even without lag, as a WHM or healer, you gotta be on the ball to respond to any of the mob's possible moves/spells that could come out at any point in time. There are just some ***in your face back to back TP moves that all the predictive ability in the world won't let you heal through.

Oh and also Auras/monster Geomancy. Status effects that can't be dealt with by the healer at all. /golfclap bravo SE, Bravo.

TL;DR it didn't look like my sort of fun even when it was easier, and it has only gotten more difficult.

No, I think that coordination, strategy and pacing yourselves just take precedent over face-rolling everything as quickly as possible. For example, if you're in a group that does full-clear Sheol C runs, even with ML50 SAM/WAR (BRD/PLD), etc, you're going to kill extremely fast, but run all over the place. A WHM just can't be in two or three places at once to heal the groups of people who've spread out.

The face-roll, high-speed, "always full-clear", zerg play-style puts Healer's needs (and sanity) at the bottom of the priority list.

(Honestly, I think SE should give WHM a sticky-bomb that you can attach to players. When it explodes, it curagas everyone around that player. It'd be like a roaming Curaga).

I don't want the pace of game play to be slower, but rather, maximum efficiency/DPS/killspeed/farming doesn't have to always be "disregard the WHM".

Eventually, this game is going to only have 10 people left. The top 9 will ***on the bottom 10th person for only having 15 Mythics and 14/16 Prime Weapons. None of them will have WHM, unless it's run by CurePlease or Healbot.

I main WHM and enjoy it. You don't need a Yagrush - Esuna works well enough for most things despite trade offs and with the Dynamis club it's better than Yagrush in certain situations.

The problem with WHM is there's no big numbers you see on your screen so it's not exciting...you can't magic burst or skillchain a cure. I think it basically is "I have to pay attention and can't mash Savage Blade" mindlessly like you pointed out.

They could add some Silver Voucher quests or Mars Orb quests for "Heal your party for 100,000 in Dynamis" or "Remove 50 debuffs from party members" type ANAM quests. 14 Rewards you for tanking and healing. No reason not to introduce it here.

That's a neat idea. Job-specific Mars Orbs. You go in and have to cure a mimic to 100% as his HP slowly ticks away. LOL

I think the root of the problem is that the barrier to be a healer is already massively huge for most players: suppose you just picked the game, need to choose one out of 6 jobs to starr, then you notice WHM takes simply FOREVER to beat mobs.

Im not saying current day, where you can use DD trust. Back then i mean.

So, probably you resorted to any of the other 5 jobs to start. So, you would only main WHM after you have some mileage with other job.

Now playing WHM is… probably one of the most stressful jobs to play. So stressful that in my melee multibox setup, the HQ was always the WHM char. Because i can fail on buffs, on debuffs, on DDing. But for anything relevant.., i can not fail in healing.

And with the speeds we have nowaday, where midtier foes only need 2/3 moves to drop an entire HP to zero it requires some sort of reflexes and quick judgement. That fraction of second where you need to decide between healing, healing who, healing with what, na-ing, na-who, na-ing what. So, thats a set of 3 consecutive decisions to be made, and if you take long, any of them could become inviable.

The second branch of decision is interesting: if you have yagrush, then at least you dont need to decide who to na/erase, reducing the mental load. But then, this scenario only comes with a huge investment.

In the end, i dont dislike healing, as it the most importsnt role i play in multibox scenarios, but i feel like this game demands the most of the player that plays healer than most other jobs.

But sadly unlike bard, which has become significantly more pleasant to play over the years, as its song durations and melee damage options have improved, white mage has gotten arguably worse to play. There are more status effects to deal with, monsters can floor your DDs in a flash, and Odyssey lag can make healing unpredictable.


LOL Tekkai was bizarrely the worst set-up healbot I've ever encountered in XI... I'll miss him.

In 14 the jobs are also a lot more homogenized, and all jobs have more proactive things to do. A tank in 14 has about 40% more HP than the DPS roles and the defense and magic defense values on their gear are magnitudes of levels better. But despite that tanks still put up about 60% of the damage numbers full fledged DPS are capable of. So while not as high, it's not like 11 where your DD jobs can dish out 11-18 million damage over the course of a dynamis run while your tanks don't even do 300k. All tanks have self healing abilities too, including the non magical ones. A level 90 Warrior actually has an almost comical amount of self sustain and self heals, and gunbreaker is no shirk either. Healers have a similar level of proactivity, and also contribute to damage in addition to healing much like the dps do.

You really can't compare 11's combat system to 14's. The two are completely different beasts.

It gets to the core of a lot of the issues though. Too much burden placed on the WHM. Too much too fast too often too important. And meds are severely lacking.

Other games handle (healing in general) much better than one dedicated healer. Who if they literally blink their eyes lose the encounter. Or may have deaths just due to latency.

I agree with you. Most modern content is pretty reasonable to cure through if your DD's are wearing hybrid sets like they should be, but there are still far too many dd's who don't hybrid appropriately, so unless you know who you're running with it can be discouraging for the healer. And then you have the higher vengence tiers in odyssey, which just throw everything out the window. Quite frankly it's just stupid how often some of those Nm's look at you funny and just go "ok now you're dead". Xevioso's incisive denouncement is a perfect example. Your healer could have their PC set up in S-E's server room and it wouldn't matter. You can't cure through something that takes the player from 100% to dead in an instant.

I enjoy WHM quite a bit and I try to play it as often as possible, but I don't really "main" it, mostly because

1) I am pirate for life. So money/time often goes to cor first....=(

2) The the return on gear investment feels lower than other jobs.

No Yagrush? Just use JA for AoE Na.

No high end cure potency set? Well one cure 3/4 still cures most of HP using mid-tier cure gears anyways.

No MP efficiency improvement gears? Just get ballad from Brds or bring med.

There are many play style/pt composition adjustment that people can do to improve a healer's performance. Unlike DD , their performance that is entirely stat based.

Personally, I really enjoy brainstorming for playstyle/pt composition solutions to get WHM job done. Many other DD job doesn't offer this kind of open ended gameplay. Your DD either do X damage because your current stat produces this number, or you don't. So playing as DD is less fun to me because of that.




Lol I WISH people make me WHM forever, but serious WHMs always took my spot in events D;


But that's part of the fun! =D

Oh the thrill of one DD died or not getting na=getting on everyone's /blist as a terrible whm. <3 <3 <3

I think I stopped maining WHM around Abyssea era when I started low manning things more, and trusts becoming a thing pretty much sealed the deal. Once my PLD was decently geared, that was often in more demand anyway. Sure, I'll chill and pull your mobs while you do all the work.

I firmly believe FFXI is overall better mechanically than FFXIV, but there are still quite a number of lessons that FFXI could learn. I mean, crafting using XP instead of RNG skill ups? What a thought.

(FFXIV is great from story and other perspectives. Love it.)

IDK if I agree with all this talk of blink and someone's dead & nobody else is helping you heal. PLD is absurdly good at helping with heals, and there are very few scenarios in today's gameplay where someone will be 1shot. Even if they are 1shot, it's because someone *** up their sets or *** up a mechanic, not any failure on the part of the WHM, so I fail to see how that is a "you" problem while playing WHM.

If someone in my group gets 1shot, I don't look at the WHM and ask why they didn't have a cureskin, I check the person who died and ask them what killed them, so we can adjust.

For Xevioso you need to have Scherzo up which, once again, isn't the WHM's responsibility.

Maybe this just comes from playing with friends and not with pickups or mercs or whatever, but I have never experienced any of this anxiety or blame throwing w/r/t playing WHM. And removing debuffs is a breeze, you just push the button and it's gone, on a whole party. If you can't be bothered to build a single level 75 mythic to play your job...you're gonna have a bad time with basically every job in the game, as you can't effectively endgame anything without at least one REMA, except maybe a Naegling WAR? Though you won't get far in Ody/Sortie/Dynamis doing only Naegling WAR so...IDK...I don't think a single REMA and NQ dynamis neck for near-peak performance is too much to ask.

I've seen V25 Xevioso insta KO people wearing full hybrids even with scherzo up. Multiple times.

This is extremely surprising, but even if true, anyone who would blame that on the WHM is a psychopath

But it is the WHM's fault.
They didnt:
re-shell after droning
re-baraera (presuming Incisive is wind based)
keep a full cure-skin

THREE things they didnt do.

But yeah, I've been OHKO'ed by that move in full DT with Scherzo more times than I would like to count.

I think people who play with a regular group of friends are going to find that it's probably a lot less anxiety inducing since those friends are generally going to be far more forgiving of any mistakes, and also they are a known quantity in terms of gear/ability.

I would 100% play WHM more often if I still had close friends who played, but most of them have now moved on so I focus on the jobs I enjoy that don't involve as much uncertainty.

Simple reason. This game has 22 jobs. Why would you "main" something? Just be flexible and play what's needed or what you want. If you're always on the same job and end up not enjoying it, that's your own fault. Either join a different group or get different friends to play with.

WHM is not Ingrid. <Main problem. Dual wields Axe and Dagger, rips the souls out of landed aristocracy, murders undead.

WHM doesn't even murder undead AND undead aren't plentiful enough that it would matter. There is an entire line of Banish vs Undead gear and it really doesn't benefit WHMs.

Change it so Banish does bonus damage to more than just undead (Demons, Elementals, Dahaks, Amorphs, Lamia, Taru that look at you crossways). Make banish do more damage the closer the mob is to death. Rip them souls.

This too..... It's possible that people died in 1 or 2 runs, or getting -na 10 seconds late with one mistake. But those rarely fail a run entirely unless you are doing the hardest content with a very tough DPS check.

In most content if you made a bad decision you lose some segs or clear ambu a min late or warp and retry. That's all there is. Only in some higher level Odyssey that one DD died means failing entirely.

But for some people people dying is the end of the world in every content. That's when playing whm becomes a "burden".

I came back to the game around November 2017, on a character that I quit back in 2005. This character, at the time of my coming back, had WAR42, WHM37, NIN27, RDM17, SMN12, BLM8 rest at 1 or unlocked.

I then mained WHM for a full three years in all events, while I was catching up on other jobs (especially war, as rdm took forever to gear up and was not in a good spot at the moment that I resubbed, only became good again after Su5 weapons and Malignance). I ended up making a good number of melee sets and doing quite well at it even, tho everyone still grimaced whenever I'd engage, nevermind that I was landing 20k Mystic Boons (pre-nyame) and parsing a good 15% of the parse while still keeping everyone alive...

Nowadays I never play whm unless it's with my inner circle of frens, or for helping the odd fight in gaol/omen, or for exping my alts.

The reason is simply that the vast majority of other players just... go off and LEROYJENKIIINSSSS and expect you to cover their butts. Running behind corners and columns in Ody C. Moving to the other side of bosses in Omen/Sortie, juuust out of range of cures. Running out of range of shellra/barspells/auspice then complaining they don't have it. Refusing to put any DT in their main sets because then they can't top the parse anymore (cuz JA/WS timing is not something they can do since most people just load up autows and go afk anyway, which is slower to ws than a real human). Odyssey gear solved this latter issue somewhat, but it's still a problem for many jobs, especially the light armor DDs.

Add to this fact that everybody and their grandma has a yagrush WHM bot around, which is not worth 10% of a real human WHM that knows their stuff, but they prefer to bring that to content anyway so they can double up on drops or points, or, more legitimately, that in some situations SCH can bring a lot more utility.

So, to resume, it's a combination of
- not being appreciated
- my life being made harder than it needs to be
- sometimes it's just not the right job for the situation (and this is nobody's fault)
and the result is that my whm, while still nicely developed with r15 Yagrush, has gone on the backburner with all sets largely unupdated since 2019 outside of empy+3.

I'm sure lots of people are in similar boats.

This mirrors my own thoughts for the most part. I have WHM, I don't mind pulling it out for people I'm familiar and comfortable with, and in my experience %95 of the population are reasonable, understanding, chill people, but it's not a job I particularly excel at, so I tend to avoid putting myself in a situation that might land me a bad reputation if the wrong person blows a gasket over something that was or wasn't my fault. WHM is a means to an end, because it's a role I can do well enough to lead to success most of the time, and it's a role not many people will pickup themselves, but I definitely limit my exposure so to speak. A lot of other factors then descend from that. Like, I'm not gonna put in the time and resources to make a Yagrush when I'm already eyeballing a Carn, Kenkonken, DP, etc., all for a job I don't necessarily enjoy playing, further compounding the issue.

Doubleposting for justice.

The other half of the reason why I stopped accepting WHM invites to stuff is Divergence. I got stuck for three years maining WHM on divergence runs. Getting clears on other jobs was extremely hard, I had to literally threaten to not come anymore if they didn't let me come other jobs, because a bunch of dudes needed to be on their stick swinging dps jobs. Now, three hours of being one of the only two healers in alliance, twice per week, with people that don't know what hybrid sets were, or that kept running out of range of curagas, was way too much. I quit the dynamis LS then I stopped going whm on stuff unless it was with my smartest friends.

It's a really interesting job otherwise, as many others said it's really the glue of the party. But it's like bass: if it's doing its job well, you kinda don't notice it's there unless it starts a solo (which in this case means: unless you wipe then the whm proceeds to tank the NM for 8 minutes while everybody else recovers. I've done that multiple times.)

</rant>

I dont main whm anymore because I was a soloing whm main and in 2008 that meant extremely slow exp, only speeding up after 51 with holy and apollo staff and reposing nuking bst pets

But since I had never played a final fantasy before, when a friend told me "there is a class in this game so powerful, they can even bring themselves back to life after dying" and I was hooked/mind blown. "Okay let's give this final fantasy 11 game a chance"

So crazy you wouldn't want to waste your resources on something you legitimately don't enjoying playing. I wonder what player base would have tried to convince you that you should just do it anyways while they put all their resources into their favorite job and want you to keep supporting them.

That might put it a bit harshly, I don't have a chip on my shoulder or anything, and I wouldn't necessarily say I've felt pressure from anybody, either specific or the playerbase as a whole, to get Yag. Just merely that the priority of Yagrush is another factor in my reluctance to put my WHM out there, but I get what you mean.

That combination of like a 2 tic rate, horrible optimisation in instanced content that lead to heavy lag spikes and beeing a far distance from the servers tought me to stay away from timing critical tasks like healing, tanking or stunning.

The game doesn't have enough lenience for these tasks and a error is often punished with death which is penalized harshly in form of CP loss and weakness with long downtimes. This will make you unpopular pretty quickly among shout parties, which makes it difficult to get experience. Capacity or Exemplar parties will not prepare you for endgame.


On top of it all I've been fooled to invest a lot of time and gil into multiple jobs befor because I got told it would get me into groups, when I finally had them at a decent level I still didn't have a easy time with party invites because everyone else also jumped on the bandwagon and a couple of months down the line the nerf bat hit hard.

WHM (or BRD, COR, RDM...) would be another job that I don't particularly enjoy and this time I'd not just invest time and gil without certainty SE isn't going to devalue it a few months down the line, I'd also have to drop gear or pay a monthly extra for wardrobes.