Do people in this game not comprehend the concept of shield healers?

To shield heal effectively you need knowledge of a given encounter. You need to know when the damage is coming so you can prevent it. Sometimes you miss your mark, it happens.

Edit: a more seasoned healer can probably figure out what attack is gonna be the big AoE to prevent, but you have to be on top of the enemy castbar if you're gonna react in time. AoE shields have a 2.5 second cast time.

In order for healers to pre-shield, they need to know when specific attack is coming. If the healer is new then they probably don't know the timing of the attacks yet.
Some healers also might forgot the timing of the attacks if it's a content that they haven't been in for awhile or the ones they rarely queue in for.

If you don't know the timing of the attacks then another thing you can do is to put shield up all the time. Just refresh every 30s if there's no damage. I usually do this if I'm new to a raid or ex trial.

Outside of specific times where you need shields to keep people alive, is it better to overheal when everyone is at full health in order to get shields up or just wait until after they get hit to heal? It seems like it would be more efficient to do it after because then the heal half of the spell is actually doing something.

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Originally Posted by Recon1o6

Incoming damage is so low that in many cases, the aoe heal from the shield aoe is enough. Consequently players dont pre shield

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The lack of chained (non-tank swap) tank busters and chained raidwides/stack-and-shares is another factor. Due to the time difference between damage sources regens end up being more cost effective and good enough in handling most hard hits.

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Originally Posted by Fawkes

Outside of specific times where you need shields to keep people alive, is it better to overheal when everyone is at full health in order to get shields up or just wait until after they get hit to heal? It seems like it would be more efficient to do it after because then the heal half of the spell is actually doing something.

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It'd be more efficient to use something like Whispering Dawn or Fey Blessing. Unless they actually need the hp soon to survive an aoe, I wouldn't even bother casting succor and just let them passively heal or from ogcds.

honestly i get it, but we really should have a pure support healer type along with shield/regen types we need one that uses neither but buffs to the point it makes up for it

that shouldn't be on range honestly that should be apart of healers to buff the team ..

I don't play a "shield healer" to keep people shielded all of the time. Like any other healer I play it to reactively heal them when they take damage using off-global heals. The shields are for extreme cases where everything else is on cooldown and I need to not just heal them but also prevent incoming damage, but this is a very rare situation, such as a tank not using mitigation right.

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Originally Posted by Eien713

casting their shielding spells after the attack hits, which is pretty pointless.

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If you're precasting a shield when people are already full, you're wasting the direct heal portion of the spell. If another AoE is coming within the next 30s, it's better to cast the shield spell after the first hit so that you get the full effect of the direct heal and also the shield.

And of course there are lots of cases where an oGCD will do all the healing you need without you having to stop to use a shielld at all.

Shields are only worth precasting if you would die without a shield.

Shield hearing's value isn't healing it using your kit and shields to negate mechanics outright. This is only in raid play, so casual content just use ogcd and carry on broiling.

Shields are useless in casual content. Specially if your co-healer likes to overheal 99% of the time by chaining Medica II, Afflatus Rapture and Assize anyway.