Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

There's an extremely simple solution to this:

Make some shields do the Galvanize Effect

Other Shields do the Catalyze Effect.

Allow them to stack.

Because getting two shield based jobs that have part of their kit ruined because of the developers stubbornness sucks.

Honestly, I'd argue the non-stackable barriers issue is a moot point. Sure it's an inconvenience when you pit specifically barrier healer GCDs against pure healer GCDs, but as has been mentioned previously, barrier-healing with E. Diagnosis/E. Prognosis or Adloquium/Succor is very infrequent and not the main source of healing for either the Sage nor the Scholar. I'd even say that the two actually work quite well together from what we've seen so far since both offer fantastic OGCD healing in spades and having two libraries of OGCD healing to work with is a very powerful asset. Both Kardia and the faerie working in tandem offers a pretty noteworthy amount of passive healing as well. Even if you do need to use your GCD heals, with a bit of communication, you could even work around one another's barriers quite comfortably and take advantage of each other's barrier-enhancing cooldowns (Zoe for the Sage and Recitation for the Scholar).

Astrologian is just too obscenely good to not be meta, but if we didn't have a bonkers healer in the ring, I think a good Sage and good Scholar would prefer to work with one another over even a fantastic White Mage. It's ultimately still quite early to be making too many meta assumptions, however.

Sage and SCH should work well on most, if not all encounters because all it means is one healer can't use GCD shields, so you just put the SCH on Succor duty if you need a GCD shield ...which you really shouldn't because you've got 2 healers with buckets of mitigation and oGCD shields as well as more than enough pure healing to keep everyone healthy. On high end content mitigation is extremely important to survive one-shot raidwides and having 2 sources would be rather useful.

I'd expect SGE + SCH to work far better than WHM + Either.

Been practicing one of the new ex trials. Simply from a 'feel' perspective, I found it quite noticeable how its harder to keep everyone healthy when its 2 barrier healers vs 1 barrier + 1 'pure'. Yes, if everything goes perfectly in a run and nobody makes mistakes you won't need much or any gcd heals with shields. That's a big 'if' though - there's always some chaos while practicing, and practicing is a big part of learning a fight. Just seems bad that one combination of healers has to struggle more than another combo that fits together better.

As someone mentioned the shields are mainly on the gcd heals. Funnily the pure healers have more access to offGCD shielding that stacks with other shields than the shield healers. Scholar has no off-gcd shields at all as far as I know, Sage only has haima and panhaima (both on a long 2min cd, but they are quite potent if situational). I'm quite sure that if you combine a pure healers offGCD skill with either shield healer's gcd shielding, you already reach similar or bigger amounts of shielding than if two gcd shield heals stacked together (mainly talking about aoe shielding - in single target due to the crit interaction you can get crazy big shields even on a single shield healer, and would be easy to have that part excempt from stacking). If getting too much shielding is the reason why two shield healers can't have their gcd shields up at the same time - why then can pure healer's shields stack to bigger amounts of shielding?

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Originally Posted by Chyro

Been practicing one of the new ex trials. Simply from a 'feel' perspective, I found it quite noticeable how its harder to keep everyone healthy when its 2 barrier healers vs 1 barrier + 1 'pure'. Yes, if everything goes perfectly in a run and nobody makes mistakes you won't need much or any gcd heals with shields. That's a big 'if' though - there's always some chaos while practicing, and practicing is a big part of learning a fight. Just seems bad that one combination of healers has to struggle more than another combo that fits together better.

As someone mentioned the shields are mainly on the gcd heals. Funnily the pure healers have more access to offGCD shielding that stacks with other shields than the shield healers. Scholar has no off-gcd shields at all as far as I know, Sage only has haima and panhaima (both on a long 2min cd, but they are quite potent if situational). I'm quite sure that if you combine a pure healers offGCD skill with either shield healer's gcd shielding, you already reach similar or bigger amounts of shielding than if two gcd shield heals stacked together (mainly talking about aoe shielding - in single target due to the crit interaction you can get crazy big shields even on a single shield healer, and would be easy to have that part excempt from stacking). If getting too much shielding is the reason why two shield healers can't have their gcd shields up at the same time - why then can pure healer's shields stack to bigger amounts of shielding?

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Working as intended - Dev team stated they designed high-end fights to have 1 pure healer and 1 barrier healer. Other combinations may work, but they only tested 1 pure healer and 1 barrier healer for clearing high-end fights, which fits into their design choice.

As for SCH, they have Consolation as oGCD shields.

Personally never had issues with my friends playing double scholar in the past. I'm sure moving forward we can do double shields just fine. Shields are incredibly stro g in this game, that's why they don't stack, but shield healers bring more than just shield

It has always been a difficult one to solve simply because shield stacking can mean mechanics cheesing. SCH and SGE have enough to handle pure healing, but sure it'll be less efficient versus WHM or AST. But IMO that really is only a problem if you're looking at high end content, by which point you're talking EX, Savage etc. and the devs have intentionally made a pure & shield healer split there, so you wouldn't be doing SCH/SGE or SCH/SCH or SGE/SGE for that content.

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Originally Posted by Saefinn

It has always been a difficult one to solve simply because shield stacking can mean mechanics cheesing. SCH and SGE have enough to handle pure healing, but sure it'll be less efficient versus WHM or AST. But IMO that really is only a problem if you're looking at high end content, by which point you're talking EX, Savage etc. and the devs have intentionally made a pure & shield healer split there, so you wouldn't be doing SCH/SGE or SCH/SCH or SGE/SGE for that content.

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People will be doing whatever gives more DPS to the party, that includes SCH/SGE and even solo healer runs if it comes to that.

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Originally Posted by rewd

People will be doing whatever gives more DPS to the party, that includes SCH/SGE and even solo healer runs if it comes to that.

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Aye, they would if it comes to that, I mean in meta set ups of course. I figure maybe it'd be unlikely because I expect a dual shield healer set up would spend more on healing buttons to compensate any handicap as the OP is complaining about said handicap. But then yeah, it all still depends on balance, if like 5.0 and shield heals become inefficient and if SGE and/or SCH output that little extra damage then that's what's gonna count with meta. And if shield healing goes the way of 5.0 then I think outside of meta set ups, then people will just take their preferred jobs anyway.

SCH/SGE works great. You shouldn't be GCD healing anyways, and if you absolutely need GCD shields, the SCH is the best person for that. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a fight where they don't work.