Differentiate pure heals and shields?

kinda just chit-chat, right now there is not enough distinction betweene shield and pure healers, but come 6.0 hopefully we are given justice ,honest opinions, how would you guys decide to make pure heals and shield work differently from each other, and yet keep their effectiveness, or have a different advantages in use?

I think some nice ways would be to leave pure heals and regens as they are, but make shields act differently -- like making shields a whole lot more effective (like , big enough to be a second health bar), but actually giving them a bigger cooldown, or forcing them to be channeled instead of casted -- preventing damage to the target, at the cost of the caster's MP.

any ideas?

Channel attacks are very unpopular in this game. Anything that forces GCD clipping feels awful to use, and, for the most part, you can trick the server tick into keeping the defensive part of the channel for the only part of the attack that you need. Just look at how people use Collective Unconscious. If they want to make shields more effective, then the half-and-half heal + shield needs to be converted to just raw shields, probably also being HP% based. Also, there needs to be more oGCD shield skills and more ways to weave it. And, if we want shields to be really effective, then we need less dark attacks that ignore them.

Maybe a bit off topic but I always focus target boss when in sch/noct. I think most shield healers do. The diff is we learn and memorize all the boss attacks so when we see the casting bar moving, it's time to shield up before the big attack. Whether it's single shield to tank or aoe shield to group, it all the same. Pure healers is more relax. I just heal when I see your hp less than 50%.

Shields have a delay before they activate so waiting for a cast bar to start to apply shields has left me with useless shields far too many times. I normally end up using more reactive healing on my first time in an encounter and then once I learn it Im shielding far in advance. I know Scholar has a lot to set up with Sacred Soil, Seraph and Consolation, Deployed Critlo, and Fey Illumination. It's a mess trying to use all those well reactively. If anything I hope they change shields to have a permanent or just longer duration. If they cost so much to use I should get more than 30 seconds out of them and then I wouldn't worry about wasting them.

Not sure it necessarily needs to be differentiated more than it already is. Shields have extra value because you can make it so that people can take more than their maximum amount of HP in damage, but the downside is that you need to be proactive with them (it's not much of a downside given the length of time that shields stay on party members). But, there are a few ways that I've seen other games differentiate shields from pure healing (all of which would be a balancing nightmare):

1. Implement shield degradation - Shields tick down as they sit on people, losing efficacy the further from the point between putting the shield on someone and them getting hit. With this setup, SCH's Emergency Tactics could maybe consume the shield to go a full heal to that point instead. Shields would decrease about the same rate as regen heals, so shield + regen would be fairly strong (unless they're already at max health)

2. Shield Specific Mitigation - Shields have their own armor value, so damage dealt to shields may be higher/lower than the damage that would be dealt to straight up health. This would make shields stronger on low armor classes. e.g., if you have a 1,000 shield on a BLM and a PLD, an attack that deals 500 damage to the shield would deal that damage to both of them, personal armor would be ignored. This would make shield healers either incredibly powerful before gearing up in a tier, or nearly useless after gearing up though.

3. More effects for broken shields (a la TBN) - Have different shields which, when broken, give different effects to the person the shield was put on (or the caster who put the shield on them). Shield that, when broken does a small AE heal to everyone around the person, one that gives the person a X% mitigation boost for X seconds, restores X MP to the caster, gives the caster a buff that allows them to use another ability, etc.

4. Lower duration on shields (plus maybe "bonuses" for shields 'running out') - Have shields be 8-12s long or something, if the buff runs out while some shield is left then there's a bonus (e.g. shield's duration runs out it does a normal heal on the target, gives the caster MP back, basically the stuff above), also, make them stronger to specifically deal with burst damage. Then you have regen being strong for sustained damage and shields available for burst damage (as long as you can preemptively shield).

None of these things really fit with the game though, and as I said, would be a nightmare to balance. I feel like it's better that we look at the balance as Regen vs Shield, not "Pure Heal" vs Shield.

EDIT: Was reminded of another way of differentiating:

5. Absorption Rates - Shields have a percentage absorption rate. For example, a 50% shield would result in half of the damage dealt to shields and half to health.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

3. More effects for broken shields (a la TBN) - Have different shields which, when broken, give different effects to the person the shield was put on (or the caster who put the shield on them).

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These are all neat ideas, but this one... it sounds so obvious! Why doesn't SCH already have something like this? Would be super cool to see, and super funny if they added it to an AoE shield. Maybe if it pops for a short buff people will QQ and come in for heals more lol.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

Channel attacks are very unpopular in this game. Anything that forces GCD clipping feels awful to use, and, for the most part, you can trick the server tick into keeping the defensive part of the channel for the only part of the attack that you need. Just look at how people use Collective Unconscious. If they want to make shields more effective, then the half-and-half heal + shield needs to be converted to just raw shields, probably also being HP% based. Also, there needs to be more oGCD shield skills and more ways to weave it. And, if we want shields to be really effective, then we need less dark attacks that ignore them.

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Yeah, with latency and the bad code the way it is, channels would be a nightmare.

They can even add shields that apply a buff - it doesn't shield until after a certain duration of time passes or when the healer uses the skill again (like Earthly Star and Horoscope), but the longer the buff stays active, the stronger the deployed shield would be.
I figure this should have been what deployment tactics should have been changed to since you can no longer deploy on faerie anymore.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

1. Implement shield degradation - Shields tick down as they sit on people, losing efficacy the further from the point between putting the shield on someone and them getting hit. With this setup, SCH's Emergency Tactics could maybe consume the shield to go a full heal to that point instead. Shields would decrease about the same rate as regen heals, so shield + regen would be fairly strong (unless they're already at max health)

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This one suggestion is particularly problematic. Shields are, by design, already numerically inferior to regens. This is an intentional design decision because shields allow you to survive a hit that would have killed you, whereas a regen would not prevent death even though the overall numerical effect is higher when the regen ticks for its full duration. Deflating shields over time would be double penalizing unless the initial shield potency is far far greater than we have now; however, increasing initial shield potency higher than we have now would trivialize many mechanics because healers would just get better at timing their shields to cast as late as possible, negating far more damage than the devs ever intended.

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Originally Posted by Rongway

This one suggestion is particularly problematic. Shields are, by design, already numerically inferior to regens. This is an intentional design decision because shields allow you to survive a hit that would have killed you, whereas a regen would not prevent death even though the overall numerical effect is higher when the regen ticks for its full duration. Deflating shields over time would be double penalizing unless the initial shield potency is far far greater than we have now; however, increasing initial shield potency higher than we have now would trivialize many mechanics because healers would just get better at timing their shields to cast as late as possible, negating far more damage than the devs ever intended.

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The only way shield degradation would be okay is if the amount the shied lowers goes into healing, making it both a shield and a regen effect.

There are a lot of mechanics in game that force you to heal players to full in order to prevent a player death. This includes both fight specific mechanics (Doom, White Hole, Fallen Archangel, etc.) as well as Living Dead. If your 'Shield Healers' are unable to address these mechanics, should they be in the game to begin with?

Shield Dissipation: Turns already applied shields into health.

Vampiric Ward: Shields heal targets based on damage done by healer.

Feedback Ward: Shields that haven't faded away gain health based on damage done by healer up to a percentage of their original value.

Magnifying shields: Specific healing skills no longer heal target, rather they add more health and duration to the applied shield on the target.

Bouncing shields: Ward bounces off party members back to full potency after it is consumed.

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Originally Posted by inhaledcorn

The only way shield degradation would be okay is if the amount the shied lowers goes into healing, making it both a shield and a regen effect.

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But then it's just halfing the very concept we want to differentiate, no?

Personally, I'd rather see shields reworked entirely to instead apply added (Magic) Defense that degrades over mitigation thus done, such that they have a total eHP increase across multiple strikes more similar to regen without being able to completely cheese mechanics (as they'd be able to if they absorbed all damage until drained and had that kind of overall strength). Both should be a sort of soft "they're covered; now we don't have to worry about them" with shields being the more preemptive but also the more quickly capped (shield effects shared and therefore merely replacing, rather than stacking, with each other) and/or expensive. At present, though, shields are so all-or-nothing that they're really only a single-blow maximum eHP increase that therefore has to be balanced so far down not to break mechanics that they're badly inefficient in not just mana, but potency per GCD.

@GrimGale

That's the direction I'd like to see healer designs go in as well: any and all ways of increasing eHP or better maintaining it when and on whom it's needed, not necessarily aimed at a pure healing / shield healing distinction, but just... diverse and interesting jobs.

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Originally Posted by ksuyen

Maybe a bit off topic but I always focus target boss when in sch/noct. I think most shield healers do. The diff is we learn and memorize all the boss attacks so when we see the casting bar moving, it's time to shield up before the big attack. Whether it's single shield to tank or aoe shield to group, it all the same. Pure healers is more relax. I just heal when I see your hp less than 50%.

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Something I love about noct (RIP come 6.0) that I can't really do with SCH is shielding a non-tank player targeted by an ability - on a SCH, between casting adlo, the shield delay, and maybe latency, chances are the ability already went off and the shield is wasted, whereas with noct I can just instantly drop an aspected benefic on them.

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Originally Posted by ksuyen

Maybe a bit off topic but I always focus target boss when in sch/noct. I think most shield healers do. The diff is we learn and memorize all the boss attacks so when we see the casting bar moving, it's time to shield up before the big attack. Whether it's single shield to tank or aoe shield to group, it all the same. Pure healers is more relax. I just heal when I see your hp less than 50%.

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For me, the stress is the opposite way. I have a really slow reaction time and a tendency to freeze at stressful moments. On WHM I watch for someone's health to go down, spend two seconds processing the fact that it's gone down, spend two more seconds panicking and not knowing which button to press, and by then they're at like 10% and I'm doing a mixture of frantic spamming, hitting benediction, and watching somebody die. On SCH I just put shields on anyone I expect to take damage in the near future.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Something I love about noct (RIP come 6.0) that I can't really do with SCH is shielding a non-tank player targeted by an ability - on a SCH, between casting adlo, the shield delay, and maybe latency, chances are the ability already went off and the shield is wasted, whereas with noct I can just instantly drop an aspected benefic on them.

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I like that too. Actually—and this is sad given how much I like the theme of AST—I think it's the only thing, mechanically speaking, that I like about nocturnal better than SCH.

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Originally Posted by P0W3RK1D

kinda just chit-chat, right now there is not enough distinction betweene shield and pure healers, but come 6.0 hopefully we are given justice ,honest opinions, how would you guys decide to make pure heals and shield work differently from each other, and yet keep their effectiveness, or have a different advantages in use?

I think some nice ways would be to leave pure heals and regens as they are, but make shields act differently -- like making shields a whole lot more effective (like , big enough to be a second health bar), but actually giving them a bigger cooldown, or forcing them to be channeled instead of casted -- preventing damage to the target, at the cost of the caster's MP.

any ideas?

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Question: Isn't the differentiation being Regen x Shield, instead of Pure heals x shields?

That was the impression I got... "basic" heals would be for everyone, but part of the healers focusing on regen effects to supplement that and the other on shields.

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Originally Posted by Raikai

Question: Isn't the differentiation being Regen x Shield, instead of Pure heals x shields?

That was the impression I got... "basic" heals would be for everyone, but part of the healers focusing on regen effects to supplement that and the other on shields.

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I think Yoshi P calls "Regen" healers just Pure Healers.

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Originally Posted by LeonKeyh

2. Shield Specific Mitigation - Shields have their own armor value, so damage dealt to shields may be higher/lower than the damage that would be dealt to straight up health. This would make shields stronger on low armor classes. e.g., if you have a 1,000 shield on a BLM and a PLD, an attack that deals 500 damage to the shield would deal that damage to both of them, personal armor would be ignored. This would make shield healers either incredibly powerful before gearing up in a tier, or nearly useless after gearing up though.

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This is just complicating things for no real reason.

Lets say you have someone with 2000 HP, and you stick a 1000 HP shield on them... but the shield has twice the 'defence' of the player. It's essentially just a 2000 HP shield. So why not just make it a 2000 HP shield instead of a "double defence" 1000 HP shield? At least then that player and the other healers know what that shield can take.

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Originally Posted by GrimGale

I think Yoshi P calls "Regen" healers just Pure Healers.

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Basically because healers either restore HP lost, or protect HP via shields.
'Pure' heals and regens both restore HP, so they're both the hallmarks of 'pure healers'.
However shield healers need to have some pure heals to be able to deal with damage when 'protecting HP' via shields fails.

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Originally Posted by ItMe

These are all neat ideas, but this one... it sounds so obvious! Why doesn't SCH already have something like this? Would be super cool to see, and super funny if they added it to an AoE shield. Maybe if it pops for a short buff people will QQ and come in for heals more lol.

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This is how Dark Knight's Blackest Night works and it feels great to use (one of the few things that still feels great with Dark Knight). You spend a resource that you would otherwise spend on a DPS action, but if the shield breaks, you get to use one of those DPS actions for free. It basically turns into a shield and the damage rather than just the shield or the damage if you use it at the right time. It's beautiful during big pulls.

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Originally Posted by Allegor

Something I love about noct (RIP come 6.0) that I can't really do with SCH is shielding a non-tank player targeted by an ability - on a SCH, between casting adlo, the shield delay, and maybe latency, chances are the ability already went off and the shield is wasted, whereas with noct I can just instantly drop an aspected benefic on them.

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instant shields are beautiful with ast, even aspected helios too via light speed is instant. co 60 cd only + helios/aspected benefic always there is why to me noct sect ast is more powerful than sch similar to how we our regens are claim better than whm. With sch you gotta pray to get a cata with alqo to be able to use DT and after using DT it has a long 1min+ cd which makes additional catas useless while its on cd, while co 60 seconds + helios is more spammish. Though alqo has a 300 pot its shield its only 125% unless cata where as ast already gets the raw 250% which makes it slighty beat alqo dispite the slightly higher potency if alqo dont crit, but if it does it wins aspect benefic cause the higher potency but then CI 200% +netrual aspected benefic 250% is technically 450% lol .Dirunal shields best nocts single shields while nocts best dirunal party wise since co+helio is 250% in noct where as you cant do it in dirunal. Hopefully sage has a kit similar to noct ast then I wont care that noct is gone lol. Regens maybe mathematically better but shields allow you to be saved from something that may hurt you badly or even 1 hit you or even in some old dungeons block a debuff that comes after an attack or even knock back effect if you take 0 damage. for me as a heavy noct user I usually pre shield knowing when aoes will happen and if neutro is up I use it to have both shield and the regen. Shield healing for me is less stressful vs regen healing too. Regens and shields are a team thing, noct ast/sch should be pre casting when aoe is about to come and whm/dirunal ast should then regen the remaining damage , so in that instant both is equal with only regens abit better mathematically when it ticks which makes sense since its to repair as much damage as possible more than a shield. when I think of it really ast is busted cause we are to technically not be a better regen/shielder than whm/sch since we are like the rdm type healer of the group. SE I guess didnt care, but its only fair since they damaged our stormblood cards to this boring lame shadow bringers mess boring cards else maybe if they left it alone they probably wouldnt have op the regens and shields of ast. Side note IMO sage should have been a another regen class and ast should have lost dirunal and kept noct because since ast was regarded as a time mage and time mage has a barrier effect call reflect in most final fantasies it simply would have make sense we kept noct and lost dirunal. make sure to make lovely memories of noct now :p.