Should Divine Benison be improved?

[Trunks]

The less shielding in the game the better. That said, I almost never use Divine Benison because... honestly, Cure is of very limited use. Yet they explicitly added a Lily requirement to it so that it would be more limited than Stoneskin, so I don't think that's going to change.

I wouldn't mind the Lily requirement being removed and changing it to a "heals for x under condition y", e.g., 20% of target's HP if the target's health drops below 30%; or even to a high-potency, short-duration, single-target heal-over-time, e.g., 200 potency instantly and then 200 potency HOT for 9s.

[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.

[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.

[KDSilver]

What suck with Benision is the lily requirement.

If you have no lily, you have to cast cure or cure ii.
But if everyone are full life, you won't be able to generate a lily, and so, won't be able to use benision.

In other word just get rid of that lily requirement.
Otherwise, it's a really good skill, no need to change it.

(they could even just remove lilies actually)

[Cynfael]

Benison is great; the Lily requirement wasn't the best idea. I don't think it's so game-breaking that gating it behind a resource that is shared with Assize, Asylum, and Tetragrammaton is necessary. Remove it from the Lily mechanic altogether and keep it as a flat 30s CD for all I care, but it will be much more fun and intuitive to use that way.

[Trunks]

snip

Apologies if I came across as condescending. To be clear, I wasn't directing my comments at everyone, but I also didn't wish to target anyone; obviously that's a tough line to walk because I can't foresee how others will perceive it. Asylum has been singled out a few times in just this thread, including in a comparison to Sacred Soil and Collective Unconscious, and two of the handful of active threads in this subforum are about targeted buffs to WHM abilities with the justification that someone else has something. It has been my experience that this tit-for-tat mentality is self-reinforcing. I give SE's devs a lot of credit, but they're not immune to whining en masse, so it's always prudent to try to head off damaging or short-sighted ideas before they become embedded into a militant commentariat.

On the substance I think we're largely on the same page. My biggest concern, as you noted, is the development of a "mitigate-or-die" healing meta. Design trends can easily become embedded in the development cycles and entrenched in the community's mindset. It's far more palatable to scale things back than to completely revamp or remove them, which is why I vehemently come out against any suggestion to add more shielding or mitigation. Power creep over the life of an expansion is inevitable. One stat affects non-tank survivability (VIT) while multiple affect our throughput. As we get more and more gear our healing output relative to health pools will continue to rise. This naturally favors mitigation, while WHM's core strengths are already in a precarious spot.

For examining current capabilities I don't think there are too many relevant encounters other than O4S and perhaps Shinryu. The former is a fight which actually favors WHM's capabilities because you can spend so much time stacked and Almagest is a match made in heaven for Cure III. And yet, it was first solo-healed by an AST (very soon after release, I'll add). This gets to the core of the problem which I was trying to articulate: healing (/shielding/mit) in general is so powerful that the strengths of WHM are virtually irrelevant. Asylum's seeming weakness is more a function of a lack of need more than a specific problem with the ability's design. It's "just more healing" on a Job which has it in spades. So the issues I see here are: (1) the game offers few opportunities to showcase the healing differential WHM benefits from, and (2) even when it does provide those opportunities, AST can just AOE Bole + Collective + shield through it. Healing? How quaint. Why bother with the stress? The same for basically every one of WHM's strong points. Take MP economy. No question, it's there. But between the Ewer, the ability to extend Lucid Dreaming's duration (a double insult given this was originally WHM's ability), Light Speed, and then the potential presence of SMN/BLM MP batteries or a BRD, well, what's so good about WHM, again?

So would I mind seeing Asylum changed, say, so that the HOT persists when people walk out of it? Not really. Would I mind seeing it turned, say, into a copy/paste of Sacred Soil? You bet. But in any case it's just more band-aids on band-aids on band-aids to a Job that's been stitched back together after multiple dismemberments. If your ship's springing leaks left and right, sure, you can just plug them as they come and carry on. But eventually you're either going to need a few months in dry dock or you're going to sink.

[Erakir]

snip

Eh, you really didn't come off condescending, I'm at fault for a bit of an overreaction, so again, I apologize.

I could go into more detail, but all in all I've got some pretty similar concerns for the development as you do, including the power creep of throughput stats. I've also mentioned several times in the past that WHM's MP economy is fantastic but with refresh being way less of a burden to use now alongside not-very-painful-to-use mana shifts I really haven't seen the MP economy be a super super strength, either, as no one seems to be hurting bad there. I mean, it's entirely possible they make encounters with mechanics that specifically work against it (As an example, General Vezax in WotLK WoW, where MP regeneration is turned to 0 for the entire fight and efficiency is very important), but right now we haven't seen such a thing this tier.

I mean, I am able to raise a small army during 24 mans, I suppose~ Now if they'd stop standing in the pillars of doom that'd be just great.

I've also talked at length in another thread about not having a bunch of content to showcase HoTs, and I think that'd tie in here as well with your general point of showcasing the strengths of the job. Of course, right after I said it we got Shinryu Ex which has a time where benediction is super convenient and regens are well worth casting on multiple Reiryus, go figure - but that's the sort of thing I'd like to see more of even if they're not perfect or super creative scenarios. It'd be even neater if Asylum and Assize worked on them, but I mean - minor DoT from hellfire is a great time to put that soap bubble to use, too. It doesn't change what you talk about - toolkits being simply that powerful overall - but it's something I appreciate nonetheless.

For asylum, there's so many things they could do to it, it'd be a shame if it just became a carbon copy of SS like you say. I could mention many thoughts and ideas here to try and address it, but they'd all be adjustments to help it better fit into our current encounter designs - which one could say are bandaids, aye, though some of these ideas are more unique and dynamic than others. For random instance, consider an Asylum that is most effective (100/target) on a full raid, but scales up slightly if less are in it (Maybe 200 potency per target with 2 in it, or 250 if only one). It might be too powerful with current mechanics, but it's something unique and would improve its versatility. There's plenty more, from lilies affecting radius to duration to other effects that could synergize with other healers, so much to talk about that could be interesting. Square's own engine would probably come into play for some of these. I've no idea what it's ultimately capable of. Regardless, I want to make abilities thought provoking and fun to use. If someone thinks to themselves "You know, I think I did a smart thing using it like that" then I'm thrilled. As simple an example as it is, holding Assize in the final boss of the vault because it's just a perfect radius to hit all 8 flame spheres? That feels good.

Things go out the window entirely when we talk of a huge shift in encounters and damage, and I fully admit it's another avenue they could take. I don't personally think they will anytime soon from the history of encounters here, but hey, never know what's around the corner. I didn't expect to be healing dragon heads, either.

At any rate, I think we ultimately share many similar thoughts but might have been starting from a different angle. I appreciate you not lashing back at me, as I could be seen as rather rude in response.

Also, Hyperion represent~

[Tridus]

Apologies if I came across as condescending. To be clear, I wasn't directing my comments at everyone, but I also didn't wish to target anyone; obviously that's a tough line to walk because I can't foresee how others will perceive it. Asylum has been singled out a few times in just this thread, including in a comparison to Sacred Soil and Collective Unconscious, and two of the handful of active threads in this subforum are about targeted buffs to WHM abilities with the justification that someone else has something.

I'm one of those people targeting Asylum, but more because Asylum is something I hardly ever use than anything else. Honestly if you removed it from my bar, it'd be several encounters before I noticed (unlike something like Assize, where id't take ten seconds). I'm not sure I'd care, either.

I spend most of my time in the DF, and Asylum is barely worth using in most of the content in the DF. It's biggest problem vs SS & CU is that unlike those two, you have to stay in it for an extended amount of time for it to do anything of consequence. Even on an encounter that doesn't have people moving often enough to make that a fools errand, you can't trust people in the DF to stay in it. They'll wander off to wherever they want to be, and now it was a waste of clicks to put it up . I mean, it'll work fine on the tank pretty much all the time, but "more tank healing" is not exactly something WHM is in need of. I certainly won't use it when I might want to use DB soon, because it just burned all my lilies and now I can't cast DB. That could be fixed without changing what Asylum does by having it put a HoT up when you enter it, so it keeps working if you leave.

Maybe it's better at the bleeding edge of content, but if the only time something is particularly good is when the top 2% are doing it, that's kind of a problem... especially when PI is already in that boat. And that's setting aside that when said bleeding edge stuff is already solo healable within a month of it coming out, who needs more healing? One healer doing the job of two suggests pretty strongly that there's more than enough healing to go around, more of it that's a hassle to get full effect from is redundant.

On the substance I think we're largely on the same page. My biggest concern, as you noted, is the development of a "mitigate-or-die" healing meta. Design trends can easily become embedded in the development cycles and entrenched in the community's mindset. It's far more palatable to scale things back than to completely revamp or remove them, which is why I vehemently come out against any suggestion to add more shielding or mitigation. Power creep over the life of an expansion is inevitable. One stat affects non-tank survivability (VIT) while multiple affect our throughput. As we get more and more gear our healing output relative to health pools will continue to rise. This naturally favors mitigation, while WHM's core strengths are already in a precarious spot.

This I agree with, but it's SE's doing. When you have bursty damage, the biggest risk is someone dying before you have a chance to heal them. When you can get someone from 1% to 100% in seconds, stopping damage from happening is vastly more powerful than being able to heal it faster than you already can. Rabanstre has a couple of things like that where you take damage and get a DoT and the first DoT tick is likely to kill you, unless you're shielded, in which case you may get a second one. No amount of "more healing" is better than the extra time you get from that shield letting the person live an additional tick (my favorite is when 2 or 3 people get it and the other healer doesn't have Esuna, fun times).

They probably could design encounters that favor WHM's sustained HPS throughput more, but they don't. At this point, I'm not sure I expect them to until another expansion brings another round of ability rebalancing, perhaps with an eye to nerfing healing potency so it's less necessary to burst everyone for huge damage in order to threaten them. As it stands right now, the "mitigate or die" meta is coming around because the game favors mitigion, as the mitigation healers also have enough HPS to recover everyone after they mitigate fast enough that doing it faster doesn't matter.

For examining current capabilities I don't think there are too many relevant encounters other than O4S and perhaps Shinryu. The former is a fight which actually favors WHM's capabilities because you can spend so much time stacked and Almagest is a match made in heaven for Cure III. And yet, it was first solo-healed by an AST (very soon after release, I'll add). This gets to the core of the problem which I was trying to articulate: healing (/shielding/mit) in general is so powerful that the strengths of WHM are virtually irrelevant. Asylum's seeming weakness is more a function of a lack of need more than a specific problem with the ability's design. It's "just more healing" on a Job which has it in spades. So the issues I see here are: (1) the game offers few opportunities to showcase the healing differential WHM benefits from, and (2) even when it does provide those opportunities, AST can just AOE Bole + Collective + shield through it. Healing? How quaint. Why bother with the stress? The same for basically every one of WHM's strong points. Take MP economy. No question, it's there. But between the Ewer, the ability to extend Lucid Dreaming's duration (a double insult given this was originally WHM's ability), Light Speed, and then the potential presence of SMN/BLM MP batteries or a BRD, well, what's so good about WHM, again?

Yep, agreed.

So would I mind seeing Asylum changed, say, so that the HOT persists when people walk out of it? Not really. Would I mind seeing it turned, say, into a copy/paste of Sacred Soil? You bet. But in any case it's just more band-aids on band-aids on band-aids to a Job that's been stitched back together after multiple dismemberments. If your ship's springing leaks left and right, sure, you can just plug them as they come and carry on. But eventually you're either going to need a few months in dry dock or you're going to sink.

Yep. I think we're mostly on the same page. I don't want Asylum to be the same as what everyone else has, either. Why have three healing jobs if they're effectively identical? I do want a reason to push the button more often. That's in comparison to DB (the topic of the thread), because aside from the nuisance lily requirement, I already use that one frequently and it does something useful without being a carbon copy of everyone else.

[Kabzy]

I'm one of those people targeting Asylum

I'm not too sure on this one. Compared to the other two healers, Asylum is much easier to use and totals at a potency of 800 which is definitely a GCD or two saved in healing. It's basically a tank HoT in most scenarios, but that's still a good tool to have. ASTs bubble is great, but it has very limited use. You can pretty much only use it when everyone needs to stack and also you'll only keep it up if nothing is targetable. Otherwise it's basically used like a point blank Asylum, which is not always convenient. SCH loses to both in the battle of the bubbles because their one is flat out useless unless it actually mitigates a death. Being tied to AF means it's in competition with abilities that are better than it in most scenarios.

Maybe it's better at the bleeding edge of content, but if the only time something is particularly good is when the top 2% are doing it, that's kind of a problem... especially when PI is already in that boat.

I've actually been a little baffled at this, but I can actually understand why WHMs have complained about PI so much. When you look at their HW additions, WHMs got abilities that were useful in a general sense. I'm a SCH main, and when HW hit 3/5 of our new abilities were pretty much linked to raiding only. Both tactics and Dissipation were extremely situational in casual content and really shined as tools in raids. I'm not 100% sure about other jobs, but based on that alone I can say that it's not unheard of for a job to get abilities that may only have uses in higher end content. So I don't really see Plenary as a 'problem'. You might not see it being used all the time, but it has proven its use in Savage, mainly 04s.