Breaking a Dichotomy - Give Everyone Shields

[Shurrikhan]

I'd really rather not. Heck, I'd sooner prefer that Stone charged Stoneskin so that I had to weave in damage at some point to get Stoneskin out in time to save a tank from a tankbuster, even in -- or, ideally in -- a truly healing-intensive fight, than simply have yet another on-demand shield option. I'd prefer shields to be an expensive but powerful utility, ideally each afforded in some different way.

I'd much rather see AST diversified to not simply go between SCH-flavored WHM+Cards and WHM-topping WHM-base + Cards.

[Silver-Strider]

It's not as though WHM didn't have shields before and while Stoneskin 1+2 wouldn't really work as % based shields when Tanks are bordering on the 150k health department, I fail to see why SE couldn't have just adjusted their values into flat numbers instead of just removing them outright

[Sloprano]

Dungeons aren't where the game's challenge lies. There's no enrage time limit, no hard punishing mechanics. Nothing 'typical' about incoming damage because it varies drastically with the tank's gear and competence thanks to iLevel requirements, and nothing that forces them to use cooldowns or die. They'll blame the healer while they should have been using their cooldowns. Nothing which forces the players to do more than the very bare minimum (keeping aggro/keeping everyone alive/dealing damage).
I feel I may have gotten off-topic.

That's the thing, Extreme and Savage seems where the Healers are currently balanced around, but are still expecting us to run dungeons, all 73 of them and only three of them let us use the whole arsenal. If considering all the Duties, 202 duties are available in the Duty roulettes, (plus 300 floors of Deep Dungeons). 8 of those in roulettes gives you the whole skillset. Unless you do it unsynced but then you won't get the tomestones you need for gear so you can get into Extreme and Savage where the SE apparently hid all the fun. Not only is the conventionalized healer job barely engaging here bare the occasional Mist Dragon and Griffin, but even with a light party of +71 levels we still get Sastasha or Tam-Tara.

If SE expects us to toil and trugde through Copperbell for the umpenteenth time devoid of any challenge so we can get our entrance ticket to Savage and Extreme (that we might not be wanting in the first place) I find the least they could do is make the low-level stuff fun. Fully carthatic and challenge replaced just by blasting the entire packs of poor spriggans and hectatoncheirs with a colorful rainbow of varied dots, Miasma II and Shadowflare while Eos flies around smacking mobs with my Codex, but I can't. I'm stuck pressing 1 for Ruin until my finger bleeds because I the role I signed up for isn't needed unless the tank takes off all their gear.

For the shared skills this is what Cross-Class skills and secondary and tertiary classes did back in 2.0. It's not as straightforward as Role skills, but it was a sight near better because it actually enticed me to level other classes and get conjurer to level 34 for Stoneskin. Sure I might not plan on playing White Mage, but at least that gave me a bit perspective on how that class works, and by extension how it might feel to play White Mage which is invaluable if I get paired with one. With how quick leveling goes these days, I'm still scratching my head why they didn't embrace classes instead of the trying to ignore them out of existence they are doing now.

Because as I saw it, the Class was the base the Job's identity could spring from. They could all share some roots with Arcanist, Conjurer and make Time Mage for Astrologian, if only to make a second healing Class. All of the sharing some skills with each other and you could see how much you could put to use from entirely different ideas of how healing could work. The identity I think would help is sharing parts of all the jobs base, then go in completely and imaginative directions of how healing can work. Last time that happend seem to be HW, where each one blossomed in it's own direction, maybe AST was swaying a bit side to side from the stories, but then slowly and suddenly the divergence ended and they homingly converged into each other.

[Deceptus]

Every job already does have shields.

AST has them in Noct Sect, they even have a shield in regen sect in the form of Celectial Intersection (which is stronger than a SCH shield)

SCH has them in Adlo and Seraph Shield

WHM has divine benison

[Bobsmiaw]

WHM DB:
000 heal
500 shield

AST CI in Diurnal:
200 heal
400 shield

AST Asp. Bene in Noct:
200 heal
500 shield

SCH Adlo:
300 heal
375 shield

In term of shield strength (normal potency/not critical), WHM and Noct AST is equal and higher than SCH Adlo.
If SCH Adlo crit, it become the strongest shield.

Also, Diurnal CI is strong but not as atrong as WHM DB (they have same 30 sec CD).

[EaMett]

Somehow feel like we need more diversity at this point. Not less. We need more niche healing and encounters that benefit different healer pairs instead of going down the homogenization rabbit hole which is a bit of a fallacy in it's own right.

[Canadane]

I was hoping this topic was about offhand shields.

[Eloah]

Doesn't every job beside the casters and dragoon have some form of shielding?

[Deceptus]

Doesn't every job beside the casters and dragoon have some form of shielding?

MCH/BRD don't as well, nor do SAM/MNK

[Allegor]

Doesn't every job beside the casters and dragoon have some form of shielding?

SMN got a shield through Titan now, and BLM has Manaward, even BLU has a shield, leaving RDM as the only caster without one.