Quote Originally Posted by EaMett View Post
At the same time, you rarely need to use them preemptively. And when you do the 30s shield duration does give you enough room to place them early (when hp bars aren't full).

I don't feel like it's as much of an issue as say... The fact you don't need shields in the first place. Shield healing in ff14 is as much of a developer fantasy gameplay as "healers shouldn't dps". I'm really curious to see what 6.0 is made of but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same thing. That is, shield healers actually pure heal 99% of the time, usiung shields effectively 3 times per raid tier.
Part of the reason for that is most mitigation cooldowns already solve the same niche Shields are meant to solve. They’re more efficient on singular hits than shields are (assuming of course that hit would one shot). To me, the conversion to pure shields is simply necessary just to make them viable within their one niche irrespective of item level.