White Mage Guide/Stormblood
- See also: White Mage and Guides
Endgame Substat priority
As a White Mage, your most important substats are Critical Hit and Determination, tightly followed by Spell Speed. Critical Hit will increase the chance and potency of crit heals, and determination will slightly increase every heal and also contribute to your damage output. Spell speed will increase the potency of your regenerative actions, which is something that the WHM is very strong at. Meld Vitality on your accessories as well if you feel you need extra health. Piety can be nearly entirely overlooked as the White Mage has the best MP management among the healers.
Healing Properly
Cure
Regen
Medica II
Healing Actions and strategies
One of the most common mistakes is overhealing. Needlessly casting Cure II, Medica, Medica II or any other grand heal creates unnecessary enmity and wastes MP. Instead, Cure should be your primary heal action and you should be keeping your tank topped off at 90-95% while letting Regen do its work on the rest. Use Cure II whenever you gain the effect of "Freecure" or if the tank goes below 50-70%.
As a White Mage, you have 3 heal over time abilities: Regen, Medica II, and Asylum. Keeping these up on the main tank as often as possible while allow you and your tank to relax and devote more attention to damage. Regen is also your most MP efficient healing GDC.
Whenever large instances of healing occurs, using Largesse is very helpful. However, be sure to use it proir to applying any regenerative spells and abilities. Any regenerative effects will not be effected by Largesse if it was applied before using it.
- Cure is a very basic, but extremely usefull healing action. It should be the bread and butter of White Mage.
- Heal over Time (HoT) actions are often very powerful with the White Mage. Be sure to use them!
Dealing with Tank Busters
Tank Busters (TB) can be frightening and stressful, but with the right tools and some swift reflexes, they can be dealt with quite easily.
Keep tabs on the boss and what abilities it's casting. If something is a bit slower than you're used to it's likely to be one of two things; A raid wide AoE or a TB. If you see the boss cast something that you know is a TB, prepare the tank with some damage mitigation by casting Divine Benison. As the attack lands on the tank, should the tank drop to about half, be ready to bring your Tetragrammaton on cooldown. If your Tetragrammaton is already on cooldown, then Benediction can function as a supplement.
- Divine Benison is an instant cast, but there's still a slight delay before the shield applies. Use it early on TB cast times.
- Benediction is a very powerful heal as it brings the target to 100% HP. The cooldown is very long, so telegraph the use of it with a macro to your party.
Dealing with Raid- or Party wide AoE damage
The other possibility of a slowly cast action coming from a boss is likely to be an inavoidable AoE that deals fairly strong damage. Countering that by preparing an AoE spell with wide range, in particular Medica or Medica II, to finish casting right after the damage applies helps very effectively with recovering. This strategy is refered to as pre-casting and is widely used at high-end tier raids and trials. If, perchance, the party has not recovered properly, follow up with Plenary Indulgence or Assize to bring them back.
In the case that you need to heal repetively due to the AoE causing damage multiple times over the course of time, using Thin Air and repeatedly casting Cure III in conjunction is a solid and tried strategy. One of these instances is during the transition between phases in the battle against Ultima, the High Seraph.
- Assize has a rather short cooldown while also being off GCD and dealing good damage. Use it often and a lot. Some timing is due, but mostly just use whenever it's available.
- If heavy healing is required, thin air is your go-to ability to make sure those healer checks won't drain you entirely.
Maintaining your Mana
White Mages has, as previously mentioned, some of the best MP management among the healers. While all casters have access to the role action Lucid Dreaming, the White Mage also has their Assize that restores 10% of their max MP. While this fact might tempt towards focusing on Piety to raise ones mana pool, it's really not nessecary as they regain their mana in many ways. The earlier mentioned Thin Air ability reduces the mana cost of all spells and abilities to 0% for a good 12 seconds. This is why it's so effective in conjunction with heavy healing.
- Use your Lucid Dreaming whenever you reach around 50% of your mana. This is a very good time to give yourself the refresh state that Lucid Dreaming gives you.
- Don't feel bad about bringing your Assize on cooldown often. Doing so will slow down the drainage of your mana by a very noticable amount.
Dealing Damage
The best way to deal damage as a White Mage is to constantly apply your Aero II and Aero III to deal damage overtime while you keep your party healthy. These two spells shoud be applied after the use of Cleric Stance as it, in likeness to Largesse, won't change the damage from any DoT's applied prior to its use. While active, it's always worth casting stone, or any of its iterations depending on your level. This also works very well with Presence of Mind to increase your cast and recast speed.
While Assize has been mentioned often, that's because it's so very useful. The damage it deals is higher than any other spells available to the White Mage as of the release of Stormblood. Again, it's highly recommended to use it often.
When dealing with a large mass of enemies, using Thin Air in conjunction with repeatedly casting Holy is a fantastic tool to deal damage. Be sure to apply Aero III prior to subjecting your foes to your Holy to maximize the amount of damage. Round it off with Assize as you reach half mana which, if Thin Air is available, should take around 5~6 Holies.
- Aero III is very useful to allow yourself to still deal damage while focusing on other things, such as healing.
- Holy is great for dealing with large quantities of enemies in one go. Be sure to keep tabs on your mana! Holy costs a lot of it!
Other Things of Note
However your playstyle looks, the one thing that divides a good healer from a bad one is their ability to adapt to a situation and pay close attention at how everybody's doing on health. Being able to do multiple tasks at a time will make you really stand out as a good White Mage.
It will be very beneficial to mention to your peers and party members that you're new to a certain instance if that is the case. If you are not new, then it's always a good idea to study visual guides and break down the instances so you know what happens and when it happens. Overall, practice animation breaking, rotations and other useful information. Get comfortable with the range of your spells and the power they yield.