That is to say, for boss fights, or even champion fights, banners outweigh the “oh shoot” button of a shout heal. At 1120 heals plus 25 stacks of life signet, a shout heal lands for approximately 2500 heals, and can be dropped every 25 to 40 seconds. Te buff from a shout lasts approximately 15 seconds or less. If you have 3 shouts slotted, you can reliably give your group 7500 heals every 30 seconds on average.
With the same healing stat, Banners last just shy of 90 seconds (the tooltip duration is incorrect), and tick for approximately 325 heals every 3 seconds (or 110 a second to make the math easy) as a persistent regen that does NOT APPLY ITSELF to people with full health. Unlike a shout heal, none of your outgoing healing is being wasted. So, in 30 seconds, one banner heals for roughly 3250 and provides a persistent boon that lasts for as long as the heal, and you do not have to keep watching your skill bar to pop the heal when it may or may not be useful.
A couple of things:
First, a dedicated Shout build will probably be running the 20% reduction in shout cooldown to maximize the amount of healing that can be done. Yeah, you miss out on the Warhorn reduction (which is probably the great benefit of a Banner build), but with a reduced CD on Shake It Off, you use it more often, and get some good benefit out of it. I actually run a Hammer/Rifle build because I find that the CC from the two weapons makes for excellent damage prevention, while giving me a ranged option for enemies that aren’t melee-friendly.
Secondly, I typically run Runes of the Water, which, combined with a low-cooldown healing skill (like Mending or a traited Signet of Healing) can provide almost 35-50% regen uptime for people near you, which is pretty solid compared to the banner regen, which is a full 100%. The great thing about shouts, however, is that they actually do have a pretty decent uptime on buffs. I typically use Shouts on cooldown (For Great Justice and On My Mark) to provide constant stacks of Might and throw down a little vulnerability to speed up encounters, saving Shake It Off for condition removal or healing emergencies. The healing aspect is typically secondary to the buffs themselves.
Now, I’m not saying that the Shouts are superior to banners at all. I actually usually run the Banner of Tactics in a raid-ish group for the AoE heal and Regen and Swiftness. I just don’t think you can compare shout builds and banner builds, because they both rely on fundamentally different philosophies (i.e., HoT vs. Spot Healing). Neither is better, they simply excel at different types of heals.
), or maybe even a Focus-wielding Thief with some magical tricks up his sleeve? Or how about a Hammer-wielding… well, I really don’t know, but still, it’d be pretty sweet.