Quote Originally Posted by Saefinn View Post
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.
The major caution here that I'm sure has prevented them from making shields ultra powerful in the past: what do you do in the event that you have two non-shield focused healers in content that will outright kill you if you don't have shields? Just die? If that's the case, then they also need to design content that requires burst healing that the shielders aren't capable of.