Is Benediction still worth a 5 minute CD?

[Exiled_Tonberry]

With recent healer discussion and current content in the game, I'm finding it harder and harder to find warrant why this ability needs to be on such a long CD.

The only positive to it is that it's still usable through Cleric Stance and healing debuffs. Other than that, it has an extremely annoying delay in it's effect and a excessively long CD meaning you probably won't use it again for the duration of the fight.

Not to mention if a Tank is in this much danger of dying that Benediction is needed, your co-healer would most likely have popped their relevant insta heal too, resulting in Benediction being wasted in a way.

I'm not denying the ability isn't strong of course, but 5 minutes for a simple full heal when essential dignity and Lustrate can get very close to the same results and be used much more often seems overkill.

[Masekase_Hurricane]

Not to mention if a Tank is in this much danger of dying that Benediction is needed, your co-healer would most likely have popped their relevant insta heal too, resulting in Benediction being wasted in a way.

Nah Co-healer should be busy dpsing :P

[Risvertasashi]

If we didn't have Tetra, I would say the CD on benediction should be reduced to bring parity with other healers. But... we do have Tetra, so I think this one part of white mage is OK.

[ADVSS]

Just needs to get rid of the animation lock, same for the tank mega cds

[Enkidoh]

Really, be thankful it's only five minutes! It could be like it how it was in the old days in FFXI when it was on a two-hour long cooldown! It's meant to be an 'emergency' heal to throw on the tank in a hurry, not a main part of your healing kit. So I don't see SE ever changing this I'm afraid.

[AlphaSonic]

Thank god FFXIV it's a different game and it's not FFXI, so FFXI shouldn't take part into this conversation.

Benediction as an emergency heal sucks, it's bad, it's terrible, it's only useful when you are in cleric and you don't want to drop cleric. If you want an emergency heal as a WHM you have tetra. Benediction needs to have the animation delay removed to be considered a good emergency heal and even then maybe dropping the cooldown to 4 minutes wouldn't be bad.

[Nekotee]

Not to mention if a Tank is in this much danger of dying that Benediction is needed, your co-healer would most likely have popped their relevant insta heal too, resulting in Benediction being wasted in a way.

Not when your co-healer is a strong asshole :P who knows that you have Bene off-CD

I'm not denying the ability isn't strong of course, but 5 minutes for a simple full heal when essential dignity and Lustrate can get very close to the same results and be used much more often seems overkill.

I do agree on the fact that a CRIT EssenDigni can do a similar job as Benediction, and if the tank got Convalescence because the spell got a potency enhancer...
But show me a case where Lustrate can heal for almost 20k in a single hit...

Beside, with the 3.0 change of lustrate, Benediction stay as the only healing spell bypassing the ClericStance
And that is an enormous advantage XD

[ChiiSoSeriouz]

Essential and lustrate don't get close to the same results unless you compare them to tetra. When is the last time you cleansed WD off a drk with one lustrate?

[Cabalabob]

Benediction is the single best way to remove DRKs walking dead, a SCH has to blow all their lustrates and an emergency tactics adlo to heal a DRK enough to remove that, AST needs to essential dignity and spam benefic 2, whm can wait til 1 second on walking dead and boom, instant top up, doesn't even have to leave cleric's stance to do it. On top of that, they have the same CD.

A well co-ordinated DRK and WHM can get some amazing free dps time out of living dead and benediction.

That said, I agree they should work on that awful animation delay on benediction and hallowed ground. We've seen that they are capable of doing this lately as they've been changing the activation time of buffs like greased lightning and astral fire/umbral ice to be before the animation goes off.

[Eisengrim]

Thank god FFXIV it's a different game and it's not FFXI, so FFXI shouldn't take part into this conversation.

Hey look, another person that's triggered by the mentioned of FFXI for some odd reason.

They were making a comparison to a previous similar game in the series and saying it could be worse, if benediction were like that. Sounds like a decent part of the conversation to me.

At 5 minutes though I forget to even use benediction most of the time though. I mostly use it when using holy in dungeons and the tank gets a little too close to dying.