New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[Absurdity]

1. Shielding is not that useful outside of prog and once you have said content on farm, GCD shielding is hardly ever needed. People get better gear and have more HP and less likely to get one-shotted. At this point, regens are infinitely better because they are MP-friendly and they passively heal everyone back to fill HP, which is why Diu. AST is generally the better of the two.

2. This could lead to AST being worse or better than WHM bringing us back to SB where WHM could be neglected by the community. This would heavily depend on what they do to AST and if they intend on changing WHM. The same thing will happen to Sage and SCH as well.

1. It currently isn't yes, that's why I'm hoping for changes that actually make shields matter throughout the entire raid's lifespan. Who knows, maybe mechanics that deal weak party damage but apply a nasty debuff if they aren't negated by shields.

2. I see it more as a potential positive because now you only have to balance healers within their specific niche. Before they needed AST to be on par with WHM and SCH, now it theoretically only needs to be on par with what WHM does. This does of course only work if barrier healers actually have their uses and aren't just relegated to bench warmers once prog is over.

If they plan on reigning back how versatile a kit has to be, that frees up action slots. What they spend it on is where it's going to matter.

We can only hope. As much as I would like this to be a thing, I remain sceptical until we get more information.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm suspecting they'll attempt to up the amount of damage we take again. Though if I were them, I'd make all raidwides and tank busters Max HP percentages. Large ones at that. Imagine if the raidwide always did 80% of the party's health unless mitigated. Suddenly, shielding is way more important. Imagine if that tank buster did 110% of the tank's Max HP. You'd need shields and mitigation on them, heavy doses, to keep them up. Things like that which suddenly turn shields from jokes to mandatory to survive. As a side effect, burst healing becomes needed more often.

Scaling raidwides is problematic because it ignores gear. So if your healer is near the min ilv and half the team are BiS, the 80% of a health bar they'd be taking would be comparatively larger and far harder to heal. It also acts as a sort of punishment for reaching BiS in general because you take more damage. They tried this on e1s and it wasn't very popular.
Making shields vital sounds good in theory but only giving half the healers shields just forces comps. What happened to playing the class you prefer or enjoy? Can you imagine if they suddenly made it so only GNB and PLD brought any raidwide mitigation and DRK/WAR had more damage, so bringing a GNB+PLD or a DRK+WAR was a big downgrade or possibly not even viable. That's what's happening.

2. I see it more as a potential positive because now you only have to balance healers within their specific niche. Before they needed AST to be on par with WHM and SCH, now it theoretically only needs to be on par with what WHM does. This does of course only work if barrier healers actually have their uses and aren't just relegated to bench warmers once prog is over.

I'm skeptical they'll manage it, but very interested in the case of WHM and AST.

Diurnal AST is by far superior to WHM in almost every way. It's not even close. Free weaves, full mobility, abundant oGCD's, raid buffs, stronger versions of many abilities. To balance AST and WHM where WHM is actually a decent pick for the pure heal slot, they'd need to either:
a). Absolutely butcher AST's mobility, weave and toolkit.
b). Redesign WHM's identity and give it significant buffs in at least weaving, mobility and maybe damage.
They've been very stubborn that WHM must have some clipping and no mobility, so there's a good chance they'll either butcher AST, or WHM will yet again become the rejected healer of the expansion.

Sage vs SCH will also be interesting. If they do not fix SCH's ghosting issues, Sage is likely to be the superior shield healer because it's a simple case of a class with smooth oGCD's vs a class with half their oGCD's tied to a clunky ghosting pet that vanishes for 30 sec windows.
Hopefully they also won't pull a Bard/Dancer and give Sage the smoother gameplay and better toolkit to make the new class more appealing. Bard is among the the least popular classes in the game now.