Should Divine Benison be improved?

[Sebazy]

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but Benison is the only oGCD barrier in the game? It’s also pretty powerful on a tank, it’s also unique in being percentage based rather than reliant on actually healing (which makes it quite potent the moment infirmity style debuffs come into play).

So lilys aside, I think it’s actually pretty decent.

The only issue I have with it is it requiring lilys to actually use. There’s nothing more annoying than having to waste GCDs to have it ready for stuff like Tera slash or O4s in general, whilst there’s always that risk of firing off Assize on CD or a clutch Tetra only to shoot yourself in the foot and be left unable to Benison in time. Kind of limits how dependable it is =\

[Joe777]

Correct me if I’m wrong here, but Benison is the only oGCD barrier in the game? It’s also pretty powerful on a tank, it’s also unique in being percentage based rather than reliant on actually healing (which makes it quite potent the moment infirmity style debuffs come into play).

So lilys aside, I think it’s actually pretty decent.

The only issue I have with it is it requiring lilys to actually use. There’s nothing more annoying than having to waste GCDs to have it ready for stuff like Tera slash or O4s in general, whilst there’s always that risk of firing off Assize on CD or a clutch Tetra only to shoot yourself in the foot and be left unable to Benison in time. Kind of limits how dependable it is =\

It might've been the only oGCD barrier ability before 4.1, but Shake It Off changed that. Of course, that's only if you count barriers you can use on others. Self-barriers include Shade Shift and Manaward.

As for the OP - Honestly if I had to address any of our abilities, Asylum would be the first one I look at before Benison. And that's after doing something with that garbage Secrets of the Lily II trait.

Indeed Secret of the Lily II is pretty much useless, and Asylum is pretty weak in both effect and potency, but the thing to wonder about those 2 is how to improve them? Just make Secret of the Lily II guaranteed to shave off some of the CD? Add a little mitigation to Asylum? Or perhaps add both MP and TP regen to Asylum?

[Trunks]

I can't be the only one who thinks this "Asylum is bad!" narrative is absurd...? Just on a cursory look at some logs from OS fights, it is among my highest-output abilities pretty consistently, usually only surpassed by Cure III, Medica II, and sometimes Assize and/or Regen. If you're looking for "bad" abilities, Cure and Cure II are a good place to start -- I use them, combined, less often than I use Benediction, a 3 min CD.

This mindset of drawing direct comparisons between abilities in different Jobs rather than comparing and contrasting their respective toolkits in totality is problematic. There's a real case to be made that WHM's toolkit is less versatile than SCH's, and I don't even think it's worth arguing in regards to AST. But that's not a matter of "Asylum is weak" (or any other single ability) so much as the fact that AST's extraordinary overall versatility both shapes and fits the meta in ways that WHM's "brute-force" healing style can't and doesn't.

For example, it's almost never talked about that WHM is the least range-limited of the three healers. Cure III can be used to target multiple players far from the caster; this is basically the combined healing functionality of both Synastry AND Earthly Star, without the drawback of ground-placement and without a CD. Medica II also has a 20y radius.

But there really isn't any need to spam tanks with Cure III through, say, Akh Mourn on Shinryu. Is that because the damage is too low, or is it because tanks have more options and flexibility in their toolkits, or both? Players will always take the path of least resistance -- and it's far less risky to mitigate / shield damage than to heal it. In a typical 8-player group there is such a glut of tools to mitigate or negate damage that WHM's powerhouse healing is consigned to irrelevance. (Again, I'm going to point out the egregiousness of The Bole here; no, RNG is not a significant enough drawback to excuse it.)

It's really easy to say, "x ability is bad, plz buff!", but it's silly. The interplay between encounter design, healer Job design, and tank Job design is extremely complex. Rather than singling out individual abilities, it's more appropriate to take a holistic look. So what's WHM's problem(s)? In terms of balance: its healing toolkit revolves much too heavily around Medica II and Cure III. In terms of gameplay: Lilies were ill-conceived from the start and the last-second fixes right around SB launch were cheap band-aids; its DPS gameplay is likewise lackluster. These two flaws underlie almost all of the suggestions and complaints about this Job, and I think it's more helpful to hammer that point home than to argue over specifics, lest we cause the devs to miss the forest for the trees.