New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[Gemina]

No, they would not be.
The current HP of a player literally does not matter as long as their actual HP + shield value exceed the amount the next damage would hit for. That's eHP.
If you bring them above the required threshhold by shielding them, they will survive just as much as if you head healed them above threshhold.
You could, theoretically, let a player sit at 1 HP for a whole encounter. As long as you slap enough shields on them that they don't break from damage, they will not die.

So if a barrier healer is designed in a way that the shields have higher potencies than their burst heal, you're better off shielding the next incoming damage than healing it at less efficiency. As long as everybody survives, it does not matter how you achieve it. Wether by shielding them or healing them.

You quite literally just said the exact same thing I did, and just worded it differently. All that matters is the player has enough HP to survive an unavoidable. What I pointed out is that because shields do not carry the same return value as a standard heal, they are not what you should be using to bring a player above that threshold [i]unless you are trying to prevent an overheal. With this in mind, they become the inferior choice in nearly every situation, even in prog. Scripted damage just doesn't happen this way.

In order to talk about the viability of current shielding, we can't use optimization, or optimal scenarios, or optimal SCHs. There are some situations in high-end content where shields are the optimal choice, but they are few and far between. We instead have to talk about scenarios where ogcds and regens are not going to sustain the party, and these are not found in optimal scenarios. They are found when things go to the crapper. It's not like these situations are staggered either. They can happen anytime you join you a PUG, or allow randoms to fill the gaps in your static.

The reason why shields lose value is because they have less potency than regens/ burst heals on ever single healer. Which makes healing the damage afetrwards more efficient as long as you survived it somehow.

Shields are not designed in a way to restore lost damage. The intent behind them is to absorb incoming damage. They do restore some, but that is why their potency is less than burst heals and regens. They can't lose a value that was never assigned to them in the first place.

[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.

[EaMett]

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.

I still think some fights couldn't be cleared if both healers didn't dps, even if the rest of the party was parsing 100% at the time. Shiva during patch 5.2 looks like it even required about 15k dps out of it's healers for the clear (even with the rest of the party hammering). Though I might be reading that wrong.

[Rilifane]

You quite literally just said the exact same thing I did, and just worded it differently. All that matters is the player has enough HP to survive an unavoidable. What I pointed out is that because shields do not carry the same return value as a standard heal, they are not what you should be using to bring a player above that threshold [i]unless you are trying to prevent an overheal. With this in mind, they become the inferior choice in nearly every situation, even in prog. Scripted damage just doesn't happen this way.

No, I didn't.
You didn't read the post you were referring to properly. It was explicitely stated that "It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up." and then shields would in fact be the go-to choice instead of burst heal.
You tried to argue that the matter of player HP would still make them pointless which is simply not true. Should shields be ahead of burst heal in terms of potency, they would win. Plain and simple. That was the whole point we were argueing.

Shields are not designed in a way to restore lost damage. The intent behind them is to absorb incoming damage. They do restore some, but that is why their potency is less than burst heals and regens. They can't lose a value that was never assigned to them in the first place.

Shields, regens and burst heal all serve the same purpose: to bring the effective health of a player above the threshold to survive damage. Wether you do that by restoring or preventing damage does not matter at all. Both bring the effective health of a player up.
Wether burst heal, regens or shields have the higher potency is arbitrary and completely up to the devs. Shields could just as easily have more potency than burst heals; there is no reason for them not to as long as fights are designed in a way that doesn't allow for major cheese. It's not the law of the universe to give shields the lowest potencies of all.
You had several healers throughout various games that worked primarily with shields as their main source of healing and although in some it took a few patches to balance them properly, it isn't something inherently balance-breaking.
A healer having shield potencies on par with another healer's burst potencies but lower burst potencies, that's a completely viable design because shields would no longer be the nice extra they bring but rather their baseline healing.

[Gemina]

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.

Let me make this straight right here and now, I am not saying healer DPS is not needed to clear current savage. You want something to drop? Drop that right here and now. I am not about to engage in this stupid argument again. This has absolutely nothing to do with any points I am attempting to get across. In the post you quoted, I am clearly saying healers should DPS to make the encounter easier to clear. If this to you means that healers don't need to contribute, this is your own flaw in comprehension.

That is not what my posts or this thread is about. It is about the validity of using shields in PvE.

[Gemina]

No, I didn't.
You didn't read the post you were referring to properly. It was explicitely stated that "It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up." and then shields would in fact be the go-to choice instead of burst heal.
You tried to argue that the matter of player HP would still make them pointless which is simply not true. Should shields be ahead of burst heal in terms of potency, they would win. Plain and simple. That was the whole point we were argueing.

Incorrect. I stated that the only time a shield is viable over another healing GCD is in a situation where the GCD either won't cover it, or avoiding an over heal. There just aren't many situations where that is the case. You can say that it ultimately doesn't matter how getting a player to a sustainable status is accomplished, and I would agree. But if peeps want to throw optimization all over the place, then it does matter which heal you use. I would stop talking about shields in hypotheticals, because as of right now, shields are not ahead of burst heals or regens in terms of potency. There is no argument to be had here.

[Jukebox12]

Let me make this straight right here and now, I am not saying healer DPS is not needed to clear current savage. You want something to drop? Drop that right here and now. I am not about to engage in this stupid argument again. This has absolutely nothing to do with any points I am attempting to get across. In the post you quoted, I am clearly saying healers should DPS to make the encounter easier to clear. If this to you means that healers don't need to contribute, this is your own flaw in comprehension.

That is not what my posts or this thread is about. It is about the validity of using shields in PvE.

someone is being a bit aggressive here.

[SweetPete]

Let me make this straight right here and now, I am not saying healer DPS is not needed to clear current savage. You want something to drop? Drop that right here and now. I am not about to engage in this stupid argument again. This has absolutely nothing to do with any points I am attempting to get across. In the post you quoted, I am clearly saying healers should DPS to make the encounter easier to clear. If this to you means that healers don't need to contribute, this is your own flaw in comprehension.

That is not what my posts or this thread is about. It is about the validity of using shields in PvE.

I agree with you. Utilize your entire kit. If you have dps abilities in there then use them. I am a main healer and delved into dps and I remember I got a healer who did absolutely no dps the entire run and it lasted what seemed like forever. Healer dps definitely does help allot to clear dungeons faster. I’m a huge advocate for it. If you stand around just waiting for a little damage to happen or just spam heals on the tank then the dungeon is just gonna take longer. Out trust healers even dps allot lol. So they know we should dps too.

[Kabooa]

Shields are valuable because they add HP to whatever HP the player(s) currently have, even if at max. They lose value because that is health that isn't needed to survive. This is what has to change if the devs want to invest on a barrier/pure healer set up.

Unlike the average forum goer, I'm willing to paint out scenarios and give exact numbers to illustrate what I mean. I was busy grinding out a relic earlier but I'm taking a break from that, so lets talk about this more.

Let us say a player has 1,000 HP. An incoming attack will deal 400 damage.

A Regen/Burst Healer deals with this by healing 400 HP. The manner in which they do this differs among various games, but the one thing in common is that it is more desirable to have higher HP than lower HP. Even in heavy optimized settings, this is true. It is a better state to be in than lower in health, unless mechanics exist that incentivize having lower health.

There are none in FF14. All comparisons for what the GCD should be used for are done in the service of binary dead-or-not and the cost of DPS.

For the sake of the argument, we will say the Regen/Burst healers handle this in two GCDs. A 300 HoT applied over 15 seconds and a 100 burst heal.

A Barrier/Shield healer handles this by shielding X amount and healing the rest. Currently, the problem with the "Barrier" healer is that the barriers suck and their burst healing is far better. Why shield for 50 damage when your free OGCD party wide heal will heal for 350 damage?

What should happen is the shield healer handles this pre-emptively with one gcd for 300 absorption, and then handles the rest with a 100 heal. Failing to pre-empt means instead of taking 2 gcds to handle the damage, they take 4.

The two of them work exceedingly well together - Because the Shield Healer reduces the amount taken, and the Regen healer places a low but long lasting regen to heal up what gets though. They work in tandem.

Simple, right? Even if we go to the extreme and use FF14 optimization as the standard, this means that the player only needs 401 HP, and each healer would only need to contribute a single GCD together, rather than the shield healer falling flat for missing the shield, or the Regen healer not having the time to let Regens prop someone up.

This is in essence the design scheme of a triage system. One healer type excels in one situation but not another, and it is less efficient - The two work together and cover the weaknesses of the other.

The problem with shields now is that they are too weak on the shield classes, and by contrast the healing on them is also superior, so other than the extreme niche of beyond-maximum-hp death, they are indeed pointless, but we'd be singing a different tune if Indomitable was only 100 and Succor was a pure 300 shield.

The decision to design the content that stresses the battle system around one healer of each type is a controversial one. It is the hard 180 of the stance they have taken so far. It's the stance they have avoided backing away from the MT/OT designation, with removing heavily impactful job synergy between all the jobs and roles, and the distribution of valuable class original skills (RE: Homogenization).

But we've already been down this road at the start of Shadowbringers. It's up to them to design the content and follow through on the vague statements made that we'll hold them to.

[Ultimatecalibur]

A Barrier/Shield healer handles this by shielding X amount and healing the rest. Currently, the problem with the "Barrier" healer is that the barriers suck and their burst healing is far better. Why shield for 50 damage when your free OGCD party wide heal will heal for 350 damage?

The Scholar's shields are actually not that bad. Adloquium is 675 (300 heal + 375 shield) total potency or 1470+ (420+ heal + 1,050 shield) total on a Crit, Succor is 360 (180 heal 180 shield) total per target or 504+ (252+ heal + 252+ shield) total per target on a Crit and Excognition (a pseudo-barrier) is 800 potency or 1120+ potency on a Crit.

The problem the Scholar has as a Barrier/Shield healer (and both WHM and AST also suffer from even as Pure/Regen Healers) is more that most of the healing can be handled by ogcds and fairy heals. A Fight needs to deal on average 3k potency worth of damage to every member of the party every minute to exceed the "free" healing from Sacred Soil, Indomitability, Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing and Embrace and a Single target needs to take 6k to exceed the free healing from Excognition, Lustrate, Whispering Dawn, Fey Blessing and Embrace. 8 players fights need to deal nearly 3 times that to account for 2 healers ogcds as well as tank self-heals.