The Future of WHM

[Liam_Harper]

well no because overhealing does nothing but a shield gives the tank that 2nd HP bar for upcoming damage. more wiggle room for me to pew pew

But the shield absorbing damage reduces the damage you need to heal further, leading to something else overhealing instead or still resulting in less lilies needed. It's just like that wasted Solace except you heal in advance instead of afterwards.

In most cases, even Savage, a tank can be sustained purely from free oGCD's, their own self heal and the aoe heal you use for the rest of the party. Pushing a shield onto them on top of that is unnecessary.

The reason WHM's are spamming Solace on a fully healed tank is because there's no damage to heal, like you said. A shield does nothing because there's no damage to heal, they'll still end up fully healed without it, even if you pew pew.

To be frank, I’d very much prefer devs to keep the old 30s default timer BUT can be speed up through a good use of WHM’s other kits. To name a few that I mentioned in the past: a use of tetra speed up lily timer by 15s, breaking benison shield speed up by 5s, and few others that I couldn’t remember without looking back in the list.

I'd tie it to dps personally, but I know that would cause uproar.

Tying it to heals is always awkward (especially a "good" use) because heals aren't always needed or you have a GCD heal spamming co-heal. Even on harder fights Rapture is much better value than Tetra so you'd happily pop a pure overheal Tetra to prep for a raidwide. Breaking a Benison shield is a good idea, although I still think bosses need to hit harder so you aren't just going through the motions despite the fact that your co-healers Kardia and Nascent flash would have it covered if you didn't bother.

It's very hard to properly reward healing. There are too many factors. Co healer, the encounter, gear, group skill and so on. Rewarding dps is easy, it's always useful.