How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

The trouble with such high-potency shields is that they would enable parties to cheese mechanics. Think of the "merry-go-round doggos" in e10s. A lot of parties just stack shields and mitigation so they can ignore the mechanics and maintain uptime. With higher potency shields, this sort of thing would become more common. (I think this may be the reason why they don't allow Noct AST shields and SCH shields to stack.)

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This week I was working on a complete healer rework design doc, and one of the conclusions I came to during it was that we needed to rethink shields because of stuff like this.

My personal answer was that most of the good shields would only cover missing HP, and shield healers would be based around HOT healing rather than immediate healing. The shields don't add to the HP, but cover what's gone until the HOT does its work, either together in one spell or as separate abilities.

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Originally Posted by IceBlueNinja

the game lies about spell speed increasing hots and dots ticks but I really dont see a dif when I tried like a 2k+ spell speed before, all I notice for sure was my shorter gcds , anyways I just hard core do crit and det(i dont do dh which i never know why healers do dh over det) det increase heal +dps , dh only does dps and thats not even that high. Think the chart I found was 1.4 to heals and dps of det and dh is just 1.8 increase to dps only.

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I thought Spell Speed increases the potency of HOTs and DOTs, not speed them up?

I don't like this idea.

I've already seen enough shield healers that basically think the other healer should do all the, well, real healing, because their job is to prevent damage, etc. Essentially a kindred spirit to the type that puts all the healing load on their cohealer in favor of looking good on DPS.

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Originally Posted by Dearche

My personal answer was that most of the good shields would only cover missing HP, and shield healers would be based around HOT healing rather than immediate healing. The shields don't add to the HP, but cover what's gone until the HOT does its work, either together in one spell or as separate abilities.

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Interesting idea. But then wouldn't shields be useless on players who are at full HP? For example, it's quite common now to shield the party pre-pull, but that would become pointless under your proposal.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

Interesting idea. But then wouldn't shields be useless on players who are at full HP? For example, it's quite common now to shield the party pre-pull, but that would become pointless under your proposal.

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That's like saying that normal healing is useless on someone that's at full HP.

Frankly speaking, it's the padded HP that's the issue in the first place. While yes, you could still have normal shields in addition to the covering shields, it's not necessary.

The point was for shield healers to continue existing and also feel different in play from pure healers. Changing up conventions isn't a problem in the slightest. We used to fish for a Crit-lo and deploy them to the party to ignore the first 30s of mechanics, but SE killed that hard. What's the difference with removing a pitiful 150 potency shield from the start of a raid aside from having an even smaller effect than what SE had already done?

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Originally Posted by Dearche

That's like saying that normal healing is useless on someone that's at full HP.

Frankly speaking, it's the padded HP that's the issue in the first place. While yes, you could still have normal shields in addition to the covering shields, it's not necessary.

The point was for shield healers to continue existing and also feel different in play from pure healers. Changing up conventions isn't a problem in the slightest. We used to fish for a Crit-lo and deploy them to the party to ignore the first 30s of mechanics, but SE killed that hard. What's the difference with removing a pitiful 150 potency shield from the start of a raid aside from having an even smaller effect than what SE had already done?

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Yes, fair enough. But one of the current advantages of shields over "pure healing" is that shields can be effectively used on players even at full HP. By using shields you can raise the player's "effective HP" above their maximum HP. If you take that away, then shields may have little point. Ultimately, effective HP is all that matters. If shield-healing and pure-healing were to affect effective HP in essentially the same way, then it's not clear that there would even be any real difference anymore.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

Yes, fair enough. But one of the current advantages of shields over "pure healing" is that shields can be effectively used on players even at full HP. By using shields you can raise the player's "effective HP" above their maximum HP. If you take that away, then shields may have little point. Ultimately, effective HP is all that matters. If shield-healing and pure-healing were to affect effective HP in essentially the same way, then it's not clear that there would even be any real difference anymore.

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I'll admit that's true.

The issue is that it's really difficult to account for healers in FF. Tuning for tanks and DPS is easy, but healers have the additional problem of gearing to take into consideration (at least it effects healers far more than the other roles), so making pre-shielding mandatory is difficult. Not to mention that the existing shields for our shield healers kinda suck. The AOE ones especially.

I think the only reasonable way to handle it is if the effective output ends up the same, but how each healer reaches that output being different.

Like, if SCH's own oGCD heals are instead all shields that cover missing HP, then the fairy actions are all powerful 15-30s regens, compared to WHM that simply throws out Cure2 or Cure3 to instantly refill people's HP at the cost of a GCD, the effect will be the same, but the feel would be vastly different, and thus there'll be differing reasons to play both.

Though I do think things should be far more complicated than that, but for a basic way to recover HP, I think this is a fine way to start things off.

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Originally Posted by BungleBear

The trouble with such high-potency shields is that they would enable parties to cheese mechanics. Think of the "merry-go-round doggos" in e10s.

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Surely this isn't so deeply embedded in the code that they can't simply make mechanics apply debuffs even if no damage is taken. Some mechanics even work this way already and will apply Vuln if fully shielded.

If it is impossible, at the very least I can't see why shields can't apply the heal component after the shield breaks or expires. It makes no point for pre-shielding when the heal component is wasted and you're spending a full GCD on 200 potency. Succor and Noct Asp Helios are terrible abilities in their current form and only ever used for being really safe, or the occasional artificial necessity the devs added to Savage raidwides to try and give Shields some purpose.

If Shield healer is going to be an identity they have to do something with them. Otherwise it's like having "Interrupt dps" and "Pure dps" as an identity despite the fact you barely ever need it. It's just silly.

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Originally Posted by Liam_Harper

Surely this isn't so deeply embedded in the code that they can't simply make mechanics apply debuffs even if no damage is taken. Some mechanics even work this way already and will apply Vuln if fully shielded.

If it is impossible, at the very least I can't see why shields can't apply the heal component after the shield breaks or expires. It makes no point for pre-shielding when the heal component is wasted and you're spending a full GCD on 200 potency. Succor and Noct Asp Helios are terrible abilities in their current form and only ever used for being really safe, or the occasional artificial necessity the devs added to Savage raidwides to try and give Shields some purpose.

If Shield healer is going to be an identity they have to do something with them. Otherwise it's like having "Interrupt dps" and "Pure dps" as an identity despite the fact you barely ever need it. It's just silly.

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Another way of solving this is immediate back to back AoEs. Take something like Absolute Zero from Shiva. If it had an afterburn effect that did less damage overall but remained spicy, the combined damage would be enough to break through the shield but not kill anyone. Thereby fixing the problem with applying debuffs.

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Originally Posted by ForteNightshade

Another way of solving this is immediate back to back AoEs. Take something like Absolute Zero from Shiva. If it had an afterburn effect that did less damage overall but remained spicy, the combined damage would be enough to break through the shield but not kill anyone. Thereby fixing the problem with applying debuffs.

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Or we know that bosses can deal unmitigatable % damage.
Have the boss deal 1% of your HP if it's a problem.

I actually wouldn't mind something like this, but not for SCH or SGE. I think this should only apply for WHM's Divine Benison and it's potential upgraded skill on the benchmark trailer. How the spell would work in my eyes is that once the shield will break, it will heal you for a certain amount of potency. That way, the spell will stand out compared to the other three healers in the game and it would fit SE's image about WHM being a "Pure"/"Regen" healer.