Anyone Else Noticing Shield Healers Are Being Paired With Shield Healers?

Hi everyone! I was under the impression when it was decided to break healers into pure healers and shield healers that like wasn't going to paired with like.

So, why is it that in every heavy party I've been in as Sage, I've been paired with another Sage? It seems silly. After all, our shields don't stack the way regenerating heals do, which has led to me or the other healer overwriting the other's mitigation.

The hardest level 90 content we have can be cleared without healers, two Sages are not a problem for that.

Double SGE (and double anything) is bad, but a SGE+SCH is strong and won't be unheard of once savage releases. Might even be the meta comp for next raid tier. The only thing conflicting is GCD shields, which you wouldn't be spamming anyway.

Gods I hope they set the the matchmaker to always have 1 shield and 1 pure like they said in the live letter so we can f*** the queue times. Maybe healers will get some love after that.

SGE is just that popular right now, for quite a few reasons. Though savage is going to show us some real comps soon enough. How the pairings rank will be interesting, like usual, I doubt we'll see WHM in any of them until a few weeks down the line.

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Originally Posted by OtakuSempai

Gods I hope they set the the matchmaker to always have 1 shield and 1 pure like they said in the live letter so we can f*** the queue times. Maybe healers will get some love after that.

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I'd rather not have to deal with DPS queue times just because SGE is my main. If that were to happen, I think I'd just switch to BLM or something instead, rather than changing to another healer. SGE is just so buttery smooth to play, I have trouble even touching SCH even after maining it for seven years. Even Pepsis doesn't feel terrible compared to some of the shit SCH has to deal with.

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Originally Posted by OtakuSempai

Gods I hope they set the the matchmaker to always have 1 shield and 1 pure like they said in the live letter so we can f*** the queue times. Maybe healers will get some love after that.

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I thought during one of the live letters they said it's gonna change to 1 pure and 1 shield. I was bummed when I see double SGE and double SCH in the DF trials.

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Originally Posted by Miziliti

I thought during one of the live letters they said it's gonna change to 1 pure and 1 shield. I was bummed when I see double SGE and double SCH in the DF trials.

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As far as I recall, that was for the Raid Finder only. I don't believe anything was said about this in regards to DF.

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Originally Posted by Miziliti

I thought during one of the live letters they said it's gonna change to 1 pure and 1 shield. I was bummed when I see double SGE and double SCH in the DF trials.

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I believe they want to prioritize one of each - but better to just pair like together rather than leave everyone in the queue waiting for someone to get around to leveling their other classes.

Gotta say, I've seen far too many alliance raids where the healers were double Sage, double Sage, and WHM+AST.
Come on match making system, spread out those pure healers.

Given sage is both overpowered and the healer that hides the 1 button spam the most AND its got that new job honeymoon, yeah you'll see tons of sages

Plus the shield/regen split is a farce. Sage has 3 regens and 4 shields and 1 of those shields isn't used in practice so its effectively equal.

Yoshida advertised "one of each healer type" rule exclusively for Raid Finder. If you are on NA/EU you have likely never used that feature, and never will. For your average Dungeon Finder content it literally doesn't matter what your healers are.

Despite being the quintessential shield healers more often than not youll rarely use your normal full cast gcd shields, and thus rarely conflict with another shield healers. Ogcd or instant heals are more than enough to get through fights so far, not to mention sch and sge with all the general midigation is a lit nuts, can just about keep up 5-10% whole fight with 2 shield healers...

SCH/SGE is a powerful pair on the hands of well coordinated groups.

In pugs though? It could get messy.

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

SCH/SGE is a powerful pair on the hands of well coordinated groups.

In pugs though? It could get messy.

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You say could, but I find that it only happens when it would get pretty messy with any healer anyways. The difference is that with teh other healers (especially the pure healers), you still stand a chance at recovering as it's relatively easy to heal back to full before the next major AOE after half your party died. SGE's only choice is to pray that nobody gets hit by anything hard for the next 30-60s while healing everyone up more slowly.

The issue is that the pure healers basically only have to press like two buttons to recover from a near wipe once you got all the rezzes out, but the shield healers have to do quite a lot of work to fix the party from such an ordeal. But if people don't drop like flies on a regular basis due to standing in red twice a minute?

I'll admit that it's an iffy proposition in PUGs, but if your party got into that mess in the first place, there's a good chance they'll get into it badly enough that it's not recoverable.

Kerachole and Soil are an absurd combination for Prog. WHM is a bit lackluster right now, and really doesn't play nice with the other healers. AST is currently on the low end of rDPS, so for the time being, groups have been running SCH/SGE. After the balance patch on Tuesday, this may change, but unless they straight up prevent Kerachole and Soil from stacking, SCH+SGE will be a very strong prog healer duo.

Inb4 SCH+SGE becomes the ultimate guaranteed raid pairing, this causing the devs’ so called ‘splitting of pure and barrier’ heals to have been completely redundant as a result of their own design .

‘We are creating a distinction between pure and barrier healers then making one clearly better than the other thus negating the need for any kind of separation at all’.

Honestly I don’t see the savage patch changing much, but hopefully I’m wrong

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Originally Posted by Connor

Inb4 SCH+SGE becomes the ultimate guaranteed raid pairing, this causing the devs’ so called ‘splitting of pure and barrier’ heals to have been completely redundant as a result of their own design .

‘We are creating a distinction between pure and barrier healers then making one clearly better than the other thus negating the need for any kind of separation at all’.

Honestly I don’t see the savage patch changing much, but hopefully I’m wrong

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Also what I was thinking. My static is taking sch/sge for a spin ahead of the raid tier to see how we feel about it in prog. But outside of prog that's going to be the meta (barring some savage patch class reworks, sage nerfs?)

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Gods I hope they set the the matchmaker to always have 1 shield and 1 pure like they said in the live letter so we can f*** the queue times.

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Seems to me the addition of Sage will not entice more players to try healing. What it did is give the existing healers another job to check out. Since the pool of healers hasn't changed, I can't see that the queue times would be hugely affected.

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Originally Posted by Azuri

Yoshida advertised "one of each healer type" rule exclusively for Raid Finder. If you are on NA/EU you have likely never used that feature, and never will. For your average Dungeon Finder content it literally doesn't matter what your healers are.

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Ah. Everything makes sense now.

You are sort of correct in your assumption about me. I seldom use raid finder in FFXIV. You can blame the raiding scene in that other MMORPG™ for frying my soul to a crisp. Nowadays, I keep it all casual.

Out of curiosity, why would NA/EU players use Raid Finder less than other players?

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Originally Posted by IllyaPrisma

WHM is a bit lackluster right now, and really doesn't play nice with the other healers.

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How so? Nothing comes immediately to mind as to why white mages would clash with the other healers.

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Originally Posted by Connor

Inb4 SCH+SGE becomes the ultimate guaranteed raid pairing, this causing the devs’ so called ‘splitting of pure and barrier’ heals to have been completely redundant as a result of their own design .

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It wouldn't surprise me. As I said back when they first announced the divide, there's no point in it if they don't make shield healing it's own unique playstyle.

If one healer is Pure Heal and another is Pure Heal + Mitigation, it's not difficult to see why the second one becomes the more attractive option. AST is fortunate in that it has some mitigation too, but WHM is purely played because it's less tedious to play than AST, not by any merit of it's toolkit, which is poor design.

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Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

Ah. Everything makes sense now.

You are sort of correct in your assumption about me. I seldom use raid finder in FFXIV. You can blame the raiding scene in that other MMORPG™ for frying my soul to a crisp. Nowadays, I keep it all casual.

Out of curiosity, why would NA/EU players use Raid Finder less than other players?

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I was not making an assumption about you specifically. Raid Finder is a system SE uses for what they deem high-end duties (i.e. latest extreme fight, latest savage tier and all ultimates) to give player a little bit more granular queuing tools. Unlike Duty Finder, that just throws the required number of bodies in the instance, Raid Finder allows you to select a couple more options like being paired only with players who have cleared the duty previously or players who want to practice the fight.

This system is entirely abandoned and pretty much never utilzied on NA/EU DCs. Extreme and above are done more or less exclusively through Party Finder where party leader creates an advertisement for others to join them with a lot more robust selection tools (freely selected minimum required ilvl, full control over party composition, tags, etc.) and a short description (where they can put strategies and so on) and enters the duty as a pre-made party once it fills.

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Originally Posted by Kacho_Nacho

How so? Nothing comes immediately to mind as to why white mages would clash with the other healers.

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WHM has very little to offer in Off-Global Cooldowns, and they are a pDPS hog. This will force most of the healing load on the other Healer. You can observe this in a majority of Savage Clears or Ex Primals. WHMs HPS in comparison to the other healer is always significantly lower. They also have the issue of Assize being a forced damage CD. That's what I mean by "WHM doesn't play nice with the other healers".

I notice this, its so annoying getting another sage or a sch as my co healer like 95%, I rarely am seeing ast or whms its so LOL. On the note though I am gonna confess that sage + sage or even better sch+sage is stupidly op and even if party at 10% me and the co healer just tops off the party in a bat of the eye. Shields may not stack yes but the ogcs are so powerful to not even need shields though I love to use zoe+krasis and get a crit diag and laugh how my hp bar or a dps bar get fully covered or half a tanks bar get covered in barriers. Heck I can even eat a tank buster for meme when it happens.

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Originally Posted by Miziliti

I thought during one of the live letters they said it's gonna change to 1 pure and 1 shield. I was bummed when I see double SGE and double SCH in the DF trials.

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I thought this was for Raid finder, and hence not relevant to the English-speaking audience.

There is no reason to not pair 2 shield healers. There is no content that requires the throughput of a pure healer and the lack of stacking GCD shields(which you don't even use very much) is irrelevant. Hell I'd go so far as to say it's beneficial to have 2 shield users because they provide better mitigation and have a wider selection of ogcd healing allowing better dps uptime.