Developers : Healer design mentality needs to change

[Ultimatecalibur]

Incorrect. Benediction has never been intended for emergencies only in this game, ever. The animation delay is still there to this day and if you use it solely for that reason you'll lose many casts. It was always meant to align with tank buster mechanics. Case in-point, Eden's Promise E12S Savage. Both tanks get the buster at the same time and have to perform the tank swap because of the opposite debuffs. Tank one is likely to use several CDs, and other should be using going immunity. I always Bene the Gunbreaker in this opener and use Benison refresh and Tetra on the Dark Knight. The Dark Knight will use their immunity, Living Dead for the 2nd buster later in the fight and Bene is back up for it.

Way back in ARR, Tankbusters came out a lot more often (some as often as every 30s) and Benediction was on a 300s (6 min) cooldown. It was more or less an emergency button and you could use it on average two times a fight at most. Tanks were also expected to swap roughly every 2 to 2.5 minutes in high end due to only having 3 mitigation cooldowns. This was also a time when WHM risked going OoM when sustained healing with Cure I, BRDs were needed during raids for TP and MP recovery and attacks could randomly Crit forcing Tanks to be topped off most of the time.

Fight design has changed so that most damage is avoidable and tankbusters are once every few minutes, Crits on most attacks have been removed, Benediction's cooldown has been halved and all cooldowns reset after a wipe.

Benediction started out as the WHM emergency button, but now has become one of the WHM's primary healing abilities due in part to a reduced cooldown length and lowered healing requirements.

The original 4.0 Lily design was such as disaster because casting Cure/II is not nominal. Lilies today are able to be used for healing-on-the-move mechanics because WHM has the least mobility in this game, not BLM. In Savage you don't have to heal all damage right away, it can delayed to weave from movement and this is where it's nominal instead of casting Medica IIs. Damage goes off, stand there and finish the Glares, then move into your clock position(s) for the next mechanics while weave the lily heal. You can actually get Misery gain in a fight like E11S because of all the healer movement and downtime.

Which is due to Fight Design and Job Design not aligning. Lilies were originally designed under the assumption that fights needed constant sustained gcd healing with ogcds being interwovent to cover the HpS deficit caused by increased incoming damage which would have been fine if fights required sustained healing of the level. Fights on the other hand had very spike heavy damage patterns which were coverable with ogcds, Shields, Regens and the occasional Cure 2 equivalent. The original Lilies were less relevant the fewer Cures a WHM casts and the player base figured that they didn't need any to clear content.
Also a lot of the movement troubles and lack of weaving windows that the WHM suffers from is due to Glare's 2.5s cast time which leaves no time between gcds. Where as Cure's 1.5s and Cure 2's 2s cast times leave a fair amount of time for weaving between gcds.

Benediction may often get used as an Emergency Full Heal button, but I would argue that's not its most optimal use (and I suspect not the intended use). In casual content in particular, I will frequently allow a tank drop to 20% health or so while doing damage or whatever, then hit them with a Benediction in order to top them off. That lets me use one oGCD to heal them to full, rather than using, say, three GCDs (three lilies), or two GCDs (lilies) and an oGCD (Tetra), or whatever. It's vastly more efficient -- especially since when I play WHM my oGCD healing options are considerably more limited than when I play, say, AST. As WHM I've got basically three immediate healing options for oGCD (Tetra, Benediction, and Assize), four if you count Divine Benison's shield as healing,

Not arguing that Benediction isn't being put to good, proper or optimal use. Just that usage has changed from the intended form over the game's lifetime.

"Optimal use" and "Intended use" tend to be vastly different. Abilities the devs think of as mostly Emergency buttons and design fights assuming that they are not used often get messed up when players find optimization strats that use them. It often feels like the devs forget that the tanks each has an Invuln that can cheese mechanics.

and one of those (Assize) is really more a damage ability with a convenient healing side-effect.

Assize started out more as a once every 90s MP recovery tool that would also heal and deal damage.

Plus, if I reserve Benediction as only an emergency panic button, 95% of the time I will never end up using it at all during a run.

There is a phrase “It's better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.” The devs seem to design the jobs with this mentality.

[Packetdancer]

Not arguing that Benediction isn't being put to good, proper or optimal use. Just that usage has changed from the intended form over the game's lifetime.

I wasn't speaking of the original intended use in 2.x; I was speaking of the intended use from 5.0 onwards -- i.e., the intended use as of the most recent job redesign. I probably could have been more explicit in my intention there. Because I agree the community's use of the ability has certainly changed over time, but as you point out...

Fight design has changed so that most damage is avoidable and tankbusters are once every few minutes, Crits on most attacks have been removed, Benediction's cooldown has been halved and all cooldowns reset after a wipe.

...fight design has changed as well, which to me suggests that the devs are aware how people have been using that ability differently and design the fights accordingly now.

So, I know Benediction originally served a different purpose, but I don't think the devs necessarily still intend it to serve an identical purpose now. After all, the job has changed in plenty of other ways; back in 2.x we had Protect and Stoneskin, we had Cleric Stance to swap Mind and Intelligence around (and damage abilities were based on Intelligence), etc.

The job does not function the same way as it did in 2.0, so I'm not sure we need to assume that the intended use of an ability now is identical to the intended use when it was introduced.

Assize started out more as a once every 90s MP recovery tool that would also heal and deal damage.

Yes, but again: I don't think that's the current intended use. Look at the tooltip for Assize provided by the devs:

Assize
Deals unaspected damage with a potency of 400 to all nearby enemies.

Additional Effect: Restores own HP and the HP of nearby party members
Cure Potency: 400
Additional Effect: Restores 5% of maximum MP

The way that tooltip is set up, I feel like it highlights the damage-dealing aspect of the ability as its primary purpose; the MP-restoration is not only in the 'Additional Effect' section, it's the second of two listed additional effects. Even if the ability started as an MP-restoration ability, it feels to me like it is now viewed as primarily a damage ability even by the devs; in other words, what the devs intend us to use that ability for now is not necessarily the same thing as when it was introduced.

The community's use of an ability can change over time, on that we both agree. But I would also say that what the devs view as the intended part a given ability plays in combat can also shift over time, especially expansion-to-expansion as they rework jobs; just because something was the intended use back in 2.0 doesn't mean it's still got the same intended use now in 5.41.

And I do not feel that the intended use of Benediction now, in 5.x, is as an Emergency-Only "Oh Shit" Button.