Question of the century right there.
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spear would be fine to return because it gave an increase chance to let party crit but it was not 100% a garantee that your party will always crit and even then people still want only balance.
So really it should be that balance do not do damage buff can instead give a debuff to enemies like a slow or heavy or take away from pvp ast and give a slight increase movement speed or increase parties hp pool by about 5%.
Back then, crits also didn't have the 'if your move is a guaranteed crit, the crit rate increase from this effect is considered a damage up instead' thing we have now. So even if Spear were to return exactly as it was, it'd still be functionally a 'Balance' of sorts on SAM, MCH, WAR, etc
If the devs want to eliminate the shield/regen healer thing (which they should) they could give white mage something like this: A 30 sec CD that converts all regens and medica 2’s into a barrier equal to the amount of the regen remaining.
There is nothing inherently wrong with the shield regen dichotomy, the problem comes from the fact that the shield healers have 2x the HPS of the regen healers anyway
If the shield healers actually had about equivalent effective HPS (so including damage absorbed and damage mitigated) meaning they have about 66% less true HPS then the system would work, shields shield and regens heal back up, instead the shields just do both and the regens cry in the corner
Something that I'd like to say while we're talking about shield healers before I totally forget about them... is the fact that I couldn't help but think the shield healers' shields are.... bland. Boring. It's either purely to shield, or nothing.
Another 'type' of shield that I don't think I've ever seen in this game is something like this:
Grants a shield that reduces damage by [x]%. Will dissipates once [y] damage worth of cure potency is absorbed.
The closest one that we currently have right now is (Pan)haima. Functionally multiple layers of barrier that let some damage pierces through the shield while still retaining the remainder. These two kinda makes me think that SE was trying to replicate just that, but probably couldn't due to spagghetified coding or any other technical reasons.