Quote Originally Posted by Id_Slayer View Post
My whm is level 35 and I am COMPLETELY GUILTY of fluid aura shenanigans ....
To be fair, sometimes you need Fluid Aura. Especially in lower level...although it's beautiful in ST too. The trick is to not be stupid in how/when/why you use it.

Low level. If you have a nooblet tank/slow as crap DD's it's nice because it can effectively knock one mob out of range for a couple seconds saving the healer a cure or two. Or even better, it can sometimes save the day if additional adds accidentally link and are too much for the tank to hold/take damage from. If your dd's are good enough, they can typically kill at least one mob before the 'bind' wears on the link (or have it close to dead). Making life easier on all. More specifically, once you have repose, you can (if your party isn't AoEing), knock back the #3 mob/sleep it so it's not accidentally hit and awoken. Also, it is nice low level if you get hate because, you can use it to ping pong the mob back into the tank's range without needing to move...but to do this, you need to be standing in a direct line with the tank.

In ST, it's sexy because in the 'add fights' between bosses it's very likely that as a healer you'll pull hate on an add here or there and these adds hit kinda hard+ tend not to be picked up right away by the OT's (like they should be). But one Fluid Aura+Repose can get the mob out of strike range+closer to the Tanks/DD's that need to kill it when they are ready and the Repose buys you time. I've just gotten into the habit of sleeping all the adds I can in these fights (with or without Fluid Aura) to keep all the squishy mages safe until the Alliance decides to kill them. Saves lives.
Obviously, however Fluid Aura should NOT be part of your normal 'rotation' lol. It's just a good utility spell that you can use to help a group out as/if needed. But party composition and skill also greatly factor into whether or not you should use this skill. It's an annoying and/or waste of time skill if you are in a decently skilled/geared group that can handle hate/mitagate damage well and kills at a reasonable speed. Sometimes I think one of the reasons seeing Fluid Aura cast annoys tanks is because they know if a WHM has to rely on it, they likely aren't holding hate well.

Other times, WHM's get blamed for fluid aura ping ponging and it's NOT them....it's the smn and their darn carby/garuda. So you know, it is worth checking before assuming.