Quote Originally Posted by Deceptus View Post
And shields are used as little as possible because they're just not that effective and they have been nerfed into the ground. Outside of crit situations at most gear levels a single target shield is ~10% of a tank's HP and an aoe shield is ~5-8% of a tank's HP

Also, they generally involve overhealing. If you know an AoE is coming and everyone is topped up, shielding beforehand involves half of the healing being pointless overheal.
And I feel like this is fixable. As I say I think it shields need to be the central focus of shield healers. Nerf the pure heals, buff shields, maybe even have a shield that lasts longer (to cover cases where you put a shield up but your co-healer healer feels people to full, you can have it last long enough for people to take damage and not waste your cast). After all I see 2 advantages to shields from a game play perspective:
1) good pre-emptive approach where damage is predictable and you can mitigate it, FFXIV is a predictable game, so let your tools take advantage of this predictability, but your shields need to be better & more efficient than your pure heals because you can time your pure heals for predictable damage too.
2) They can act as a barrier/buffer to any further damage when somebody takes a hit. This if anything compensates our lack of pure heals, because that shield gives us more remove to breathe for getting their healing to 100% or for more skilled healers, to leave the health like that until such time is needed.

If they can take those points into consideration and make this the direction of their shield healers, then I think what they want is achievable.
If they can't or a unwilling. Give use rounded healers that instead play more heavily to other parts of their job identities in their flavour and in how they feel to play.