The Fluid Aura Problem: What Should be Done about WHM's Useless Skill

As the title suggests, in 5.0 WHM's Fluid Aura Skill lost even more effectiveness as it is now a bind only skill. It is considered worthless by many. Nobody really used it at all in 4.X, but now with 5.0, I'm assuming nobody has this skill on their hotbar.

So, what changes should Square do to make Fluid Aura a reliable skill that all WHMs should use?

Have it reduce the damage the target deals
Make it into a ground base AoE regen that turns into Asylum later on via trait so its useful in low level content and just evolves with natural progression
Make it a Palisade-esque buff we can throw on an ally to have them take reduced damage from X seconds
Make it an oGCD damage ability that generates Lilies once the Lily System is unlocked via a trait.

Literally any one of these will be better than a single target bind that is immediately broken upon anyone hitting the target.

OP, I agree. I'm not sure why they changed it as it was a great utility.
Hopefully a little adjustment can be done.

Devs are clearly thinking ahead on this one. It will be given to all healers in 6.0 to be used in one quest.

3.x Fluid Aura: Bind, knockback, damage
4.x Fluid Aura: Bind, Knockback
5.x Fluid Aura: Bind
6.x Fluid Aura: Just an animation that does nothing at all.

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Originally Posted by Gemina

3.x Fluid Aura: Bind, knockback, damage
4.x Fluid Aura: Bind, Knockback
5.x Fluid Aura: Bind
6.x Fluid Aura: Just an animation that does nothing at all.

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One of these was a beneficial change.

You could turn it into some kind of knockback so you could move caster mobs into a pack of mobs to be more easily aoe'd.

Now that Fluid Aura doesn't even do damage, it's literally become the equivalent of a Role skill (a bad one at that). My suggestion that they can make this skill useful again without necessarily making it do damage, is to make it so that it inflicts Heavy and a slow+20% debuff for 10 seconds.

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Originally Posted by Silver-Strider

Have it reduce the damage the target deals
Make it into a ground base AoE regen that turns into Asylum later on via trait so its useful in low level content and just evolves with natural progression
Make it a Palisade-esque buff we can throw on an ally to have them take reduced damage from X seconds
Make it an oGCD damage ability that generates Lilies once the Lily System is unlocked via a trait.

Literally any one of these will be better than a single target bind that is immediately broken upon anyone hitting the target.

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Or, they could just revert bind's effect back to what it was at ARR's launch, and to counteract it: impliment a ward spell to prevent status effects that would be applied and work just like stoneskin. Heavy and bind are almost totally useless to just outright ineffectual ATM

WHM's dot in pvp increases target's damage taken by 10%. Maybe give to FA this effect in pve, but reduce to 3% or increase cd to 1,5 min and make it 5%?
or make it a lily action so we wont sit 3 stacks. It should do damage or maybe debuff enemy (not just bind ,heavy and etc its still useless debuffs)
oooor ... when I was doing msq I noticed Y'shtola have water flare or something. She makes a giant water bubble which explodes ...that would a nice upgrade

I'd just like the damage back on Fluid Aura so we'd have an oGCD damage spell to weave with all the GCD Lily spells. xD Even if it's low potency, I'm perfectly fine with that... just something to make it worth more than it currently is.

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Originally Posted by Alistaire

You could turn it into some kind of knockback so you could move caster mobs into a pack of mobs to be more easily aoe'd.

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We would still be left with the problem of people mis-judging distances and mobs being knocked into a pack while the tank has just started to bring the pack over, etc.

If the idea is to make it a positioning management tool, I think a better change would be to make it a vortex-like effect, where mobs are pulled closer together to a ground target.

But then again, I think handling of ranged mobs is the tank's job, and tanks already have so little to do in trash packs (as a tank myself).

Another idea is to make it a knock-down, which can then be given to all healers. WHM: Fluid Aura. SCH: Energy Drain. AST: Discard (side-effect of discarding a card; you're gonna discard it anyways why not throw it at the enemy). Or make it a new status effect "Disorient" that is essentially knock-down but has its own diminishing return.

Devs should make this a dash/jump skill for whm, make whm a unique caster since it has limit in party buffs unlike sch/ast

I would really love to know why it was important for WHM to have a bind and not a knock back? Moving an enemy that was casting an AoE canceled their AoE so it was a neat way to "stun" certain attacks but the bind just doesn't have nearly as much use. It doesn't even last long enough to be meaningful. I guess it give you enough to cast sleep? But for all that swift-cast and sleep would be the same thing.

I suppose it's important if you want to solo PotD/HoH but... at this point I'm removing it form my hotbar too. I haven't touched it since it lost it's potency and now no knockback makes it completely useless when you could be casting other more effective skills.

In 4.x i used it for 2 things: Stunning the fear AoE of that one add type when doing Leviathan ex solo and for moving the mud pie in arboretum hard mode out of the cone AoE

Now i really don't see any use for the spell whatsoever.

Some kind of debuff would be great maybe like suiton but not that strong, even the old knockback was useful sometimes, at this point I erased from my hotbar.

Kind of interesting revisiting the past sometimes...

Should have been upgraded to Flood a LONG time ago.