Should Divine Benison be improved?

[Ghishlain]

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.

Unless they changed it in 4.1, Benison does indeed stack with Galvanize / Nocturnal Field. In fact Benison also stacks with TBN from DRK making for some super sweet shields when you put the two together.

I do agree that it sucks that Benison needs the Lily now that the midcore/hardcore raiders are basically at a point where casting single-target GCD heals is pretty inefficient. The only time I use Benison currently is either (1) things are going south because someone goofed or (2) when I'm doing Aero 3 after GC-Delta in O4S [SC + Cure II + DB after Aero 3 resolves so tank is ready for Earthshaker].

I would support any move to shift Benison away from the Lily requirement. Even if it gets a small CD increase to compensate (say 45s), at least then we would try to use the ability off CD at every opportunity with the added benefit of Lilies reducing the CDR on Benison if we had Lilies available at the time.

I also want to add that as much as I'd also be a proponent of DPS spells generating Lilies, I got a feeling we won't see that. Based on some of the comments from the developers and how they've done the healers so far, it doesn't feel like they would entertain the idea of a DPS augmenting a healer's healing kit as a means to "not encourage a feeling of Healer's needing to DPS".

[Erakir]

I also want to add that as much as I'd also be a proponent of DPS spells generating Lilies, I got a feeling we won't see that. Based on some of the comments from the developers and how they've done the healers so far, it doesn't feel like they would entertain the idea of a DPS augmenting a healer's healing kit as a means to "not encourage a feeling of Healer's needing to DPS".

Yeah I'm not really holding my breath, either. The mindset would be a bit ironic in this case, as the only thing it'd actually do is make it less intimidating to DPS ala the helpful augmentation without negatively impacting lily generation or healing capability should one choose not to DPS, a similar reasoning they used for the removal of the stance-dancing Cleric Stance. Still, I'm not expecting them to do anything like that due to backlash of "How dare you give a healing benefit to DPS!"

I might have to disagree with removing the lily requirement if it comes with a CD increase, though. That's a double edged sword in a way. I'd benefit, sure - It would certainly keep its use up for raiders as we use less cures, but it's a negative impact on the healers that are spamming cures a lot in dungeons, whether they're undergeared, inexperienced, or their party is doing dumb things. It might make healing harder for new healers that are generating plenty of lilies already. I'd be careful about more Plenary Indulgence scenarios, where making things more useful as the savage level leads to less usefulness outside of that content. Given I'd say this wouldn't be a major case (It's not like the usefulness is being lessened, simply the raw HPS of it), but if I were a dungeon WHM used to using benison every 24-30s or so and I saw it upped to 36-45 simply because raiders wanted to use it more, I have to say I'd feel slighted.

However, an offset to this would be an increase in the lily's effects if they're adamant on keeping it as cooldown reduction. After all, said cure spamming situations lead to an overabundance of lilies to benefit from.

Edit: Kazby - Gotcha! I see your point with that for sure

[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.

[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)

[Kabzy]

Also, Kabzy, I want to say Benison stacks with SCH/AST shields.

Oh yeah I knew that but I should have elaborated. I was just speculating that IF they were to make an AoE version of DB, it would most likely have to be treated as our current shields and not be allowed to stack. Which would actually further ruin the spell because, as stated, it would lose its' uniqueness in being able to stack with shields as Stoneskin did before it.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[Tridus]

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.

As a tank HoT, Aslyum works. WHM already has a tank HoT, though, and two of them if you're using Medica II. A third one that has a side effect of temporarily locking out DB (unless you use it after DB) is not exactly very interesting. I'd probably enjoy it more if they changed it to "everyone standing in this gains 10% skill/spell speed", because it'd let me fling rocks faster.

CU and SS are more limited use, but they do very useful things in those situations, stacking isn't exactly uncommon, and they don't require the party to stand still for the entire duration to work. I mean, SS *could*, if you used it as a tank mitigation, but then it's doing something better than Asylum with the same limitations.

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.

Keep in mind that we're on the second version of PI now. WHMs complained about the first version so much because it required spamming Cure to get confessions at a 20% rate, and would only heal targets with confessions... which meant it was effectively a tank heal. There's been far less complaining since it was changed to be usable. It works fine now, it's just something that only really shines at the bleeding edge. And that's fine. Those buttons are going to exist. I'd rather see fewer of them than more, of course. (Probably one of the reasons I dislike SCH is just how many buttons feel that way, where you're constantly juggling all these situational things. For those who enjoy that style of gameplay, great!)