New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[RyuDragnier]

Well I hope they make shields relevant again? Aside from week 1 and some parts in ultimate, shields are useless

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.

[Absurdity]

Imagine if the raidwide always did 80% of the party's health unless mitigated.

That would change exactly nothing unless they happen in fast succession. 20% HP left still means you're not dead and can be healed up easily with regen and direct healing, provided healers have enough time.


The same goes for 110% hp tank busters, that is not nearly enough to kill you through personal mitigation so they would have to happen so frequently that you literally had no cooldowns available to mitigate it yourself.

[RyuDragnier]

That would change exactly nothing unless they happen in fast succession. 20% HP left still means you're not dead and can be healed up easily with regen and direct healing, provided healers have enough time.

The plan is unavoidable damage often, forcing healers to have to do their job fast and often.

[Videra]

The plan is unavoidable damage often, forcing healers to have to do their job fast and often.

This is something Square Enix will not do, and you know it as well as I do.

[RyuDragnier]

This is something Square Enix will not do, and you know it as well as I do.

Unfortunately for SE, that is the only way for shields to become valuable, to make it so you have to actually SHIELD damage. Until that day comes, they will be struggling with shields being useful. As much as they don't want to take the dive, we know that to fix their woes over healers worrying about doing damage, they have to actually make it so healers have to worry about damage.

They've already proven they're willing to do it with BLU healing. BLU tanks take enough damage fast enough to where they can actually die. Gobskin is insanely valuable there due to that reason both for party shielding and helping the tank survive a little longer (all the parties I was in the other healer would spam Gobskin while I had to focus on Pom Cure until we unlocked Strotam).

[Videra]

Unfortunately for SE, that is the only way for shields to become valuable, to make it so you have to actually SHIELD damage. Until that day comes, they will be struggling with shields being useful. As much as they don't want to take the dive, we know that to fix their woes over healers worrying about doing damage, they have to actually make it so healers have to worry about damage.

They've already proven they're willing to do it with BLU healing. BLU tanks take enough damage fast enough to where they can actually die. Gobskin is insanely valuable there due to that reason both for party shielding and helping the tank survive a little longer (all the parties I was in the other healer would spam Gobskin while I had to focus on Pom Cure until we unlocked Strotam).

BLU is an outlier and frankly isn't grounds for anything. To the main point, however, the problem is not healers worrying about doing damage - it's how healers have been simplified to the level of absurdity. The loss of debuffs, dots, buffs like eye for an eye. These are the issues plaguing healer design, and the things that could be fixed. Making content do more damage is something that the dev team will NEVER realistically do. So a return to the old class design is what people should be focusing on requesting.

[Gemina]

Unfortunately for SE, that is the only way for shields to become valuable, to make it so you have to actually SHIELD damage. Until that day comes, they will be struggling with shields being useful. As much as they don't want to take the dive, we know that to fix their woes over healers worrying about doing damage, they have to actually make it so healers have to worry about damage.

Let this go. It's not happening. I'm sorry, but optimization of skills and encounters needs to be taken out of the equation. Content is not designed around healers needing 100% DPS uptime in order to clear it. It's designed in a way where the more DPS a healer can contribute, the easier it becomes to clear it. Content will never be designed where healers MUST mitigate in order to prevent death, so current optimizing SCHs are already using shields in a way that is in contrast to their design.

Majority of SCHs are going to use shields to prevent damage. It does not matter that this is not optimal to these SCHs, and you can tell them they are playing inferior to other SCHs all day. They won't care, and they won't listen. Prevention of death is done more often by restoring a player back to full HP in order to be able to soak an unavoidable, even if a portion of that HP gauge is in yellow. This conversation is headed in a direction where it is being brought to light that barriers aren't really needed at all. Any attack that does not hit a player for at least 100% of their current HP simply doesn't need a shield because chances are likely that player will not get hit by anything else unavoidable before a regen or ogcd heal can patch them up. If regens are this powerful (and they are), expect them to be nerfed next expansion.

For shields to become viable for all SCHs, the SCH needs to be either rewarded for using them, and/or punished for not using them. I have no doubt that with two true barrier healers in 6.0 things are going to change a bit, just not in a way where healers have to deal with more incoming damage. The downscaling of values is going to be interesting in this regard, and it is always fun to speculate. While using a barrier only to prevent death and pulling it off is commendable, I know the devs don't want barrier healers using shields in this manner.

[Kabooa]

For shields to become viable

It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up.

Shields are valuable because it's health you don't have to heal, but if the shield stops less than a standard heal brings back, that's when we're in the realm of "shields are pointless" unless something will outright kill you.

With the exclusion of stacking shields from most sources, shields can afford to be stronger and cheaper than an equivalent heal, but the source of the shielding (Aka the healer) then needs less ability to heal what actually comes through, or rather, less ability to deal raid wides. There obviously can be some amount of overlap, but given how damage is tuned in the current patch for most content, the Barrier class shouldn't ever need to cast a point of HP restoration in casual content, and that should be a sticking point for them when they actually have to heal it up - That it's more difficult to do so, so mitigate it instead.

[Deceptus]

Let this go. It's not happening. I'm sorry, but optimization of skills and encounters needs to be taken out of the equation. Content is not designed around healers needing 100% DPS uptime in order to clear it. It's designed in a way where the more DPS a healer can contribute, the easier it becomes to clear it. .

You need to let this outdated mindset go. Current savage tier (and past ones) were literally un-clearable without a decent amount of healer DPS. It didn't need to be 100% DPS, but it could not be cleared without healer contribution.

Now, after everyone gears up, yes, healer dps matters less because geared DPS picks up more of the slack but in new tiers healer dps is essential for a clear.

[Rilifane]

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.

The reason why double regens are so strong is mainly because damage is spread out and scripted, giving healers all the time in the world to let regens do their thing.
You often have patterns like: damage - 30s of nothing happening - damage.
e11s Cycles and e12s Diamond Frost are outliers and have more frequent damage, making shields nice to give you more breathing room at lower ilvls but pretty much all other mechanics in e9s-e11s can be comfortably healed with regens because there is so much time between raidwides.

So even if they made it % based, punishing healers that have lower ilvl than the rest, as long as they're not frequent to force more burst heal and shields, it will change nothing.
And if they did, you'd just trade one 1button spam for another. Wether you spam Malefic/ Broil/ Glare or Medica/ Succor/ Helios when oGCDs don't cut it doesn't really make a difference.

Making shields more important works in other games where damage is high and frequent, you have the guarantee that they get absorbed and regens serve as a constant baseline healing you need to stay on top of things instead of the most efficient thing ever to take care of almost all of the healing.
But the way fights are designed here will never put shields above regens without signifcantly buffing their potencies and opening up the way for too much mechanic cheese.
I'd welcome higher incoming damage (please not just at the last boss of a tier, thanks) and the 4th healer and equally dividing them may open them up to increasing it but I have my doubts.