Why Won't You Main WHM

Simple enough. What's the primary reason you won't main WHM. Feel free to list secondary reasons also.

Is it the excessive debuffs and/or lack or desire to make a required yagrush? Would you be more inclined to play it if yagrush wasn't "required"

Is it the "now you're forever whm" mentality? Would you be more inclined to play it if you weren't whm4lyfe

Is it because you can't just mash savage blade? Can you not be bothered to pay that much attention

Is it because there is too much pressure on the healer? The party lives or dies solely in your hands.

Is healing just *** boring? Not necessarily "boring" but uninteresting.

Would you be more inclined to play it if there were bonuses from content? Double bayld, double drops, double gil, double exmplar, something

Let everyone know exactly why you use a 2box bot and won't actually play it so we can stop talking about it.

MOST games do not have dedicated healers. Some games have no healer at all. Every character can heal anyone else. And/or use items.

Because I have to choose between main hands if I were to follow my dreams and melee.

Yagrush, su5, moj, cursna stick

Odyssey has such *** lag 100% of the time, that seems to affect magic in particular, so you have PREDICT when your party is gonna need Cures and Erases even before they get hit.

And if you mess up then it's always your fault because "blame the lag" is an overplayed excuse even if it's true

So the game is bad, you would enjoy and play healer if the game simply ran better.

That's what's holding you back.

I know I used to really like White Mage. I was even pretty good at it.

Though I can't imagine playing it in the current pace of end-game. It's one thing to mash your Weapon Skill every 3 seconds, it's another to frantically choose the single best spell for a situation every 3 seconds. It also kinda sucks when you're trying to do things solo, because Trust AI requires you to constantly engage in melee combat and switch targets.

Pretty much, yeah.

The job is usually fun to play, especially with Yagrush. It's Odyssey that blows for WHM.

I played WHM once and then realized my mind was overloaded and I could absolutely not handle it. Can play RDM and GEO just fine as a complimentary role buffing supporting healing and everything else, no problem. Crazy enough, I feel like RDM buff/debuff rotations are more intense (but more predictable) and allows more room for error. WHM I could never adjust and I was/am an extremely careless player at times, so the stress of keeping people vertical was not something I thought I would be proficient at.

I feel like you have to have a certain level of attention to be good at WHM, while other jobs don't require it (obviously to be really good you should be attentive at all jobs). Bard you can mess up song rotation and then "fix it later". RDM/GEO Can overwrite or redo buffs. Tanks usually have an emergency buff they can pop to get things under control when they are not doing well. Or kite. DDs can turn around and not take damage. Mages can bind sleep heal etc. WHM generally has no real escape plan when things get messy (benediction is cool but 95% absolutely never use it). They have to keep everything together, and then if they die and don't have RR, they get blamed for the run being over. I've always respected great WHM because it's something I know I absolutely couldn't do well without programs.

Most games I can think of have no dedicated healing and/or has actual usable items to heal. FF6 FF7 (but dies) FF8 FF9(summoners who ALSO heal) FFX FF12 FF13(?) FF15 FF16 Suikoden LoD Wild Arms BoF Chrono Trigger/Cross DQ (?) xenogears grandia legaia "tales of" series "legend/secret of" series "saga" series Valkyrie profile disgaea

1. I don't have a Yagrush.
2. When I did try it out just for kicks, there seemed to be very little window between "player needs heals" and "player is dead" in the content I was running at the time (can't recall exactly. Might have just been Ambu or something.) Is this lag, a failure to be clairvoyant, or just bad mechanics? Could be all of those.

I enjoyed healing a lot on Paladin in WoW (Wrath/Cata days), so it's not the role that bothers me.

Paladin in wow does things in addition to healing, yes? It's more engaging. Less punishing etc

XI healer (generally) does nothing else. Can't melee, can't be distracted for half a second. Can't be in range of constant debuff spam. WoW Paladin is a secondary healer and tank? They aren't constantly erasing debilitation? (I know nothing about wow)

For me, it's the blatant disregard that some players have for just how stressful WHM can be. Some players purposefully go full throttle running from mob to mob at blazingly fast speed without regard for my MP pool. Because White Mages will never be on the DPS parse, some people will treat them as a human WHM trust. :/

I kinda like how White Mage can be engaging while doing nothing except for healing and other support tasks. Until your party starts taking significant damage, you can throw spells like Dia, Paralyze, Slow, and Regen, which can help reduce the amount of MP you need to use casting Cure. And then as damage starts getting flung around, especially in the latter quarter of the enemy's health bar, tailoring the Cure Bombs to the situation can be a great way to optimize both time and MP. And if you're doing fine with enmity, you can even drop the occasional Flash to reduce enemy accuracy before a big TP move.

I certainly never felt bored. By making the fights dangerous while rewarding optimal MP use, it's unquestionably the most satisfying healer I've ever played in any MMO.

So you want the game in general to be slower.

I don't think I qualify for this thread because I have a very strong WHM and have never/will never bot it, I always play it myself. I wouldn't say I "Main" WHM because my other jobs often take precedence over WHM, but I have played it quite a lot.

I enjoy WHM for a lot of the reasons people seem to dislike it:
-It requires thought and decision making
-It requires active play
-There is skill involved
-There are obvious and clear stakes
-Fights are dynamic and situations are unique

It feels like a puzzle and a game you're playing in real-time and always having to react to situations and come up with the best solution. You have a lot of various and different tools to deal with different problems, and you have to skillfully and accurately make decisions which lead to your team winning. It's almost like...a video game.

To me, this is the antithesis of DPS. You can take all of the bullet points above and reverse them and you have WAR, SAM, DRK, DRG, etc. You have some decisions, like when do I use Warcry or which WS should I use, but the vast majority of the time those decisions are either unimportant or already decided for you before the fight. You're almost never reacting to the fight in real-time or actively taking a role in the fights except to keep your character pointed at the enemy and hit a WS button.

I prefer roles like heal, support, & tank where there are things to do, decisions to make, and strategy involved. That's not always the case, sometimes the content is just braindead easy, but in my experience all content is braindead easy from an execution standpoint when you're playing certain jobs.

RE: Odyssey I've never had to predict anyone getting hit, or felt like I didn't have time to react because of lag. Sometimes people will get 2-shot in less than a casting time which is just bad luck (in Gaol) but there's never been a latency issue for me. Maybe it gets worse when 6 packs are pulled at once and things are teleporting all over, IDK.

I like the healer role, you are in charge of keeping everything running smoothly. The key is picking what healer will make your life easier for the given content.

WHM has some great QoL tools, that if taken advantage of does make things easier, but is not always the best option to heal with.

Agreed though, Segment farming especially with a group you do not know is really taxing.

I mained WHM for about 12 years. White mage in XI is pretty dull and one-note; you pretty much just play whack-a-mole (or predict-a-mole, in modern content) with HP bars and status effects. Scholar and red mage are just a lot more varied and fun to play (and are far better solo jobs!). And healing in general in this game is also fairly thankless and requires you to pay attention, not make mistakes... it's less forgiving than other roles, and people only notice when you screw up. When you do your job you are pretty much invisible. The obvious upside is that WHM was a simple path to endgame, particularly as far as effort-to-reward ratio... but "forever white mage" is definitely a thing... ***, sometimes I'd get so bored that letting people die was the only way to make the job interesting.

In any case, it didn't surprise me when the WHM role got taken over by healbots.

If I ever go back to white mage, I'd love to check out some of the other things the job can do, like melee and even nuking. Newer gear options seem like they could give the job some fun, if niche, things to play around with? It would be more interesting, doing things other than just spamming cures and -na spells.

I vaguely remember you... didn't we wipe a bunch of times in wave 3 dyna cause your bot whm broke?

...wait, that was me ;)

If only medicine in FFXI weren't so expensive/inventory cluttering. Medicated effect doesn't help. throw in Chemist job that can be subbed and allow more jobs to be self sufficient, would certainly make healer a much easier job to play. Reduce chakra/Vivacious pulse timer. Etc. Increase drain potency. Idk, it just seems stressful to me. I think many people feel that way, which is why you have more bots running the job (or outside healers in ML parties) vs actual players. I can't imagine a newer player ever getting enough experience to join an endgame group

I don't mind WHM, and I often manual WHM while botting DPS because frankly, the gap between a *well*-botted DPS and a manual DPS is nonexistant. The gap between a *well*-botted WHM and a top tier manual WHM is still considerable, never mind if you're using the garbage public tools.

I enjoy it for many of the same reasons Maletaru outlined. That said, if I had to make a biggest complaint about modern WHM, it's that SE has destroyed MP economy. There's basically no penalty for overcuring unless you use Raetic Rod+1 and really take it to the extreme, because emp pants are ridiculously broken. Probably something to be said about the insane amounts of refresh involved too, though I think they'd be fine without the pants.

In the older days (early abyssea and prior), a well-equipped tank would almost never die before you had the opportunity to heal them, but they might die if you didn't have the MP to do so because you didn't manage it well. Now, many different contents can drop a tank[or a mandatory dps-tank] in under 5 seconds. When you have a 3.5 second cast cooldown and lag can add over a second to action processing, you have to consider much further ahead of time. I personally see this as a much more artificial form of challenge, where the optimal choice 95% of the time may be deadly wrong if a certain set of circumstances play out after you hit one macro and before you can do another cast.

Anxiety.

Much less stressful to smash things.

I main WHM (though I can endgame every job)

I mostly find myself on it for anything new and tough. But when people get more comfy (sortie comes to mind) Scholar is a pref. healer cause they can do more magical damage and create skillchains for mages.

While I have a yagrush now and it makes things easier, I had no problems endgaming without, I did pray my EMP head proc'd more and counted my D.seal and stratagems if it was like a slowga or a bad virus (mamool ambu last month)

But I can assure you I find myself on many many jobs with the content, if you find yourself stuck on one job all the time? I'd suggest finding new people to play with if possible who share the roles. But if its tough? I know I'm getting my white robes on

WoW forced you to pick a role even if your class could do more than one thing. Paladin (at the time, don't know these days) could be a tank, healer, or melee dps. As a healer, you were healing. There wasn't much else going on, but you had some interesting tools to make it work. AoE heals over time that radiated from you. You could designate a target to always get healed the same whenever you healed someone else. Was a game with relatively large groups (10 to 25) so it was more whack-a-mole ish, but the UI could handle it.

Have mained whm on/off since 75 cap. Used to love it, now it's mostly anxiety inducing due to extreme latency from EU to the JP-onry XI servers. Combined with lag spikes in instanced zones it becomes impossible.

Same reason stunning any JAs is a crap shoot unless you use tools.

The latency just doesn't give any leeway and you need the reaction times of a 13 year old hopped up on red bull and adderall.

I loved playing WHM back in the day but in the current meta I have almost zero interest. I also just don't feel like making a mythic. No shade to those who enjoy that process or have done it many times, I'm sure it's very fulfilling, I just don't want to do it.

And parse. There is no scoreboard for healing/status removal

I don't like whm.

You play whm instead, we all win

I complain everyday that nobody wants to play WHM while actively searching for a new excuse to not do it myself.

I am not whm main.

that said, probably 80-90% of my endgame play has been as a whm.

WHM is like BRD in that once people you play with find out you have it and that you're somewhat competent at it, that is all you are ever allowed to be, unless you are the leader of the LS/group.

My first loves are RDM and THF, but I never get to play those because I have a freaking WHM... lol