Should Divine Benison be improved?

[Erakir]

snip

How relatively insulting, to sit and assume that none of us are thinking about the entire toolkits of other healers - let alone every job - when we make our observations. You might not have intended it, but certainly comes off that way.
Edit: In retrospect, you don't really come off that way too much, so apologies.

Yes, I and others are very aware of, say, Cure III's benefit of being targetable. I've called that out in posts in the past. There are plenty of people who take notice of the benefit of an additional 5y on Medica II as well. I'm also pretty certain Assize hits the healing adds in Shinryu Ex since it's coded to target enemies and allies (and heals them) while Indom doesn't, but I'd really have to pay attention a little more to verify this. This doesn't change my stance on Asylum being the tool I'd look at modifying before others, were I asked to buff WHM in some way without overhauling the entire kit. I also don't think I've found many that say Asylum is "bad" here - more that it could be improved to better fit scenarios since it has its own limiting factors that must be played around to utilize it well (I've mentioned some specific instances where Asylum felt really good to use in the past).

I've just gone and pulled a bunch of random logs from a certain website. I randomly sampled from the 100s, 200s, 500s, 800s - quite a few when looking at overall healing done. My conclusion is that few of these show Asylum at more than 6% of healing until Neo (Where it often sat 9-12%). I also found a few in O1S putting it around 10%, there. I'm not going to sit here and look for specific logs of people getting more use out of it, but I am absolutely sure they exist. My random sampling didn't come up with tons of them, though.

You're super against shielding in other threads and seem to want to go to a less bursty environment, or are worried about an abundance of shielding leading to that sort of mitigate-or-die lifestyle. I've seen it happen, I'm not really a fan of it either. It comes as no surprise to me that you're getting some better use out of Asylum, but it does come with a caveat of training the raid to better utilize it. I still wouldn't call it particularly powerful. Useless? Of course not.

On top of this, raw healing % breakdowns are not often a thorough argument in themselves. Timely healing is just as important as the spells putting up the big numbers and such things must be considered. When nourish first came out in WotLK on my druid it rarely ever amounted to more than 4% of my healing, but it filled a specific niche druids suffered in before - not fantastically, but we had the option, and I certainly was glad to use it there. We're in a world right now where WHM can afford to be pretty inefficient, which further makes Asylum less useful simply because it's straight up not needed in many scenarios and it will always be safer to top people off sooner rather than later if your MP and GCDs can afford it. Yes it means less damage which certainly can matter on progression. It remains safer.

You act like you're the only one who considers multiple facets of character ability and encounter design.

You're not.

I don't really disagree with a lot of what you say, even, particularly when it comes to flawed lily conception, last minute bandaids, and Medica II being so much of our healing. The lily discussion was already done to death, and as we're all aware, we pretty much got some bandaids to tie us over. There's still much to talk about. For instance, for all those speaking about never using Cure or Cure 2, there are plenty of WHMs clearing that use the spells a fair amount, regardless of it being more meta to ignore them and focus so much on OGCDs - and the leveling experience cannot be ignored either if your goal is to try and get these hardcast basic heals used more often. A shift towards more of them would likely mean a shift towards a more triage style of healing that WoW went towards when Cataclysm came out, making healers use efficient healing rather than spending our time DPSing. That's not necessarily good or bad but it's a huge design change and might be met poorly with those more accustomed to spending downtime DPSing. Or you could simply powerhouse those heals one way or another. You've either gotta make the heals stronger to warrant the time spent casting (including extra benefits, not just potency), or change encounters to warrant casting such heals over other options. I mean, it wasn't too long ago that Cure 2 wasn't so spammable, let ALONE cure 3. We used to actually look for freecure procs. But our MP economy is through the roof, and you can't just lower that because WHMs are currently relying on being able to cast a fair amount of cure 3's and medica 2's without murdering their bar to remain competitive. Every change is a tug on an entire spider web, as you point out.

Of course it's complex. Painting a full picture here on the forums would take pages and pages of discussion; there's simply that much to consider in how abilities are used and what compositions people play with. We could go on for hours about underlying issues with the job and how to address them, but there's the practicality of what Square might actually do mid-expansion with development time that is available. This base is likely what we're stuck with for awhile.

Meanwhile Secrets of the Lily II remains garbage and will so long as it keeps its abysmal proc chance - on those to-be-avoided cures as it is.