Should Divine Benison be improved?

[Joe777]

I mean, isn't a single target lily burning 30s cooldown Damage Shield ability a bit lacking compared to the other healers? Why not make it like this instead:

1 Lily: Works exactly as it does now.
2 Lilies: Cooldown is reduced by 10s.
3 Lilies: Cooldown is increased by 10s and has an AoE effect 20y around the target.

Divine Benison will also stack with other Damage Shields.

Edit: Was not aware Divine Benison got reduced cooldown from lily stacks. Could've sworn it didn't before...

[Kabzy]

It's fine as it is. Though it may be miniscule, it does add a CD reduction based on the number of Lillies you use up like all the other abilities.

Making it AoE is a no no. WHM is not a shielder and actually it wouldn't synergise well with its co-healer. Shields don't stack, and a WHM using an AoE shield would be useless unless they were paired with a D.AST, which generally never happens.

[Sebazy]

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 =\

[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.

[Tridus]

The ability itself is pretty good, I think, as it fills in a gap without overly stepping on the toes of the other healers, and that it's oGCD makes it pretty unique. It's the requirement for a lily that hinders it when no other skill has one, as that gets you stuck in situations where you either can't use your other lily consuming skills without locking out DB, have to cast a largely pointless cure to be able to use DB, or can't use DB because you just also used Tetra/Assize.

The only adjustment I'd want to see, really, is making it work like every other skill that uses lilies and work without one, but at full cooldown.

[Exiled_Tonberry]

Like others have said before, the ability itself is great. The requirement of at least one Lily is not.

And be careful what you ask for, because the second lilies supercharge most of your spells if you have 3, you're going to feel the need to waste 3 GCD on heals you probably don't need in order to get that supercharged effect.

I do think Lilies are stupidly underwhelming (lower CD is about as boring as you can get for a special ability), but I'd prefer them to not make an even worse decision and make us heal 3 full times before getting our full effects.

[Valmaxian]

I do think Lilies are stupidly underwhelming (lower CD is about as boring as you can get for a special ability), but I'd prefer them to not make an even worse decision and make us heal 3 full times before getting our full effects.

I agree. Also, some guages don't do anything special other than display info, so at least it adds something somewhat useful. As for DB, I agree that it shouldn't be lily-dependent.

[Raminax]

I like Divine Benison. I would've liked it even more if it didn't require a Lily to cast, which is about the only change I can think about to not make it broken.

Either that or let lilies be generated through casting Stone so that DB is more reliably available, but that's a discussion for another time, seeing as it would've affected more than just Benison.

[Erakir]

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's a travesty to me that as usable as Benison is, I hear people use it less and less in fights as they get better simply because lily generation plummets as you cast fewer cures. I *want* to use Benison - Casting cure 2 and following up with benison is like a guaranteed crit every 30s with the crit portion not overhealing. Something that you -should- feel efficient using, a free-mini-boost. And yet here we are - It feels bad to pass it over cause the GCD to generate the lily becomes less and less worth it (Not to mention, a risk if your cohealer tops off the person while you're casting and you get no lily at all). And like yourself, the times I've had to suddenly tetra and lose the shield I had planned on using in 3s just sucks.

During HW I was a big proponent of some sort of synergy with DPS, things like allowing stone casts to stack or proc MP reduction of stoneskins, helping offset the harsh MP costs and letting you stay in Cleric's longer to avoid triggering the 5s lockout again (And shields happen to play oh so nicely with HoTs if a person isn't topped off when the shield is applied, almost like we could regen a tank and buffer them with small shields or something to make tank health stable and less ping-pongy). Heaven forbid we got to make better use of that "lovely" 0.5s cast time reduction trait. One could do similar things with the aero line tied to regen, or any number of spells, but that basic point remains. It's important to not make it ~more~ healing than not DPSing, but more of a little bonus that you can weave back into healing related mechanics.

It should come as no surprise that I'm sad we can't generate lilies with DPS as well. If they put, say, that 20% chance back on stone casts, suddenly it's gonna start popping up more often. Heck, if you gained one every 5 casts of stone - would it be a real problem if a WHM was generating 3 lilies every 30-40s or so doing nothing but DPS, given the whoop-de-do nature of the CD reductions as it is? I'd say probably not.

Food for thought - as meh as CD reduction is for the other skills, I'd consider that benison *might* benefit the most from it, despite the reduction being so small. This is specifically because other abilities are often planned for mechanics, and while I've planned benison a fair bit, too, its lily requirement leads to it being phased out, making it more usable as a 'whenever feels decent' skill. However, it also means generating more lilies to constantly use, which decrease as fight experience goes on, so you probably won't really capitalize much on 24s Benison vs 30s. Tetra is the other ability I feel benefits the most from CDR for its reactionary nature.

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.

Also, Kabzy, I want to say Benison stacks with SCH/AST shields. The tooltips for the latter specifically state not stacking with Adlo (for AST) and Nocturnal stance (for SCH). I haven't tested it in a long time but I could have sworn I looked at it early into the expansion and saw they stacked. Stoneskin always stacked with AST/SCH shields too, which is why we'd spend 8 GCDs stoneskinning the raid for things like Nerve Cloud in T11 back in ARR, and why if you really felt like it you could take Stoneskin as SCH for extra tank HP on dungeon pulls on top of Adlo. Right now, it makes benison unique in being the only healer skill that can further increase a tank's EHP past Adlo/Benific 2. If this is incorrect someone please slap me, though.