Should Divine Benison be improved?

[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.