RoF use...
A lot of people DO call it the "Oh Shit!" prot of GW. Thats because--when you reflex cast it on someone who suddenly takes a lot of damage--it functions so. its a quick save against quick damage surges. (An Aside: if damage IS surging, then RoF's heal is no longer all that small.) But even that is not really clear.
Alright, I loathe to do this, but lets look at it from a red bar perspective. And we're going to do that in a very wierd way.
Imagine for a moment that you're playing one of those side scrolling fight games from the late 90s. you have the two little anime characters on either side and they're bouncing up and down with their hands up ready to fight. One's a little Mhenlo, the other is a little uh...Cynn. See it now? Hope so.
But we're going to do something different fromt he classic fight game. Instead of two bars, one per opponent, you have just one and its a tug-o-war. Imagine now that the monk is using his first three--the top three you'll use per match-skills just as one would in a side scroll game like that. You have the straight quick jab, the slow roundhouse kick, and the medium speed uppercut. quick jab is very fast but doesn't do much, slow roundhouse is slow to get off but does a lot. and the uppercut is somewhere in between.
if your opponent in our fictional sidescroller walks up and attacks, our tug-o-war bar goes down, toward gray, toward death and his win. we use our punches to keep the bar from filling our color (in this case, gray and death to the player; we're red and keep them alive). The more of either color, the better a side is doing. Lots of red; we're winning. Lots of gray...I hope you get the idea.
By now, in our fictional tug-o-war, you may have a good idea what the other two skills are. WoH and, lets say, Dismiss. WoH is a little slow but, conditionally, very powerful. Dismiss is also slow but it does more than just heal AND if the conditions are right, it "hits" for a respectable amount.
when people say to just go ahead and use your WoH, they're adopting a "roundhouse kick to all situations" strategy (well, not really, but in our game they are). That can work. If you're always hitting for the most you can hit for, then that red bar is going get gray get gray then POW! Big red surge to the bar.
But now we add something new to the mix. remember, we're not playing a single game of Tug-o-war here. We're playing 4 such games minimum, max of 8 at a given time.
if your response to all 8 games is 'ROUNDHOUSE!' then when you actually need that hard red bar hit, you'll be waiting for it to recycle from another game you were playing. You save that roundhouse to fight back hard punch against hard punch, and you have a chance that it won't be recycling when one of these tug-o-wars starts to dip in gray's favor.
But what do you do in the meantime? Quick jabs pop pop pop. Prot spirit on the mesmer because the frontline look to be balling...but the ele and your duo took a dip too and they're close to the mes--jab uppercut. WHOA! Mesmer got hit hard but the PS/SBond combo negated a kill--ROUNDHOUSE!
All game long. I know that sounds crazy but when I started GW, thats how I saw red bars (and yes, when I started GW, I tended to WATCH said red bars more than the field. I think most if not all of us did). Thats what RoF did for me. It was my quick jab; something I could use quick quick quick on any of those 8 tug-o-wars and still have my uppercut and roundhouse in reserve.
Now? It functions much the same way when I hybrid. RoF is my first reaction to a non-threat dip of the red bar when I carry it. its the first punch I throw unless I see a ball forming, a spike incoming. Its that "they might be doing something over here on this bar, on this player, so lets toss something over there to let them know I'm watching...let them know there'll be no funny business getting by me." Even then, though, I'm not just swinging skills all over the place like mad. If I'm not sure (against a good team, you're rarely sure the incoming damage is a feint or the real thing) then RoF is my "he might need a heal in the next 8 seconds" skill.
I hope this helps someone understand why people who RoF spam still consider it great.
GGs
