Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[EaMett]

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.

The point is, one-shot mechanics that you can survive through are a dime a dozen. So you don't need shields most of the time. And when you do, like you said, mitigation tools from the party can cover a good amount of those scenarios. Removing party mitigation would be a pretty bad move in my opinion since it's one of the few party coordination skills left, so that leaves very limited options. Could they make more mechanics that require shields? Sure. Will they? I doubt it since even "ultimate" requirements are too low for pure shield healers and people already can't handle those.
Also, with pure shielders the meta gameplay will most likely be "pure healers heal everything, shield healers pitch in only when they run out of ogcds or a one-shot hit is going to happen".

So to recap:
- If they add enough one-shot mechanics to require a pure shielder then the healing gameplay suffers because there's no more nuance in healing. It's all big hits that you need to heal through the same way.
- If they remove party mitigation tools and slightly increase one-shot mechanics then it hurts party coordination and shield healers are relegated to secondary healers (which also hurts healer synergy)
- If they keep things as they are, shield healers will be pretty useless

Not a very interesting dynamic regardless of the scenario. Honestly, it's just lose-lose for the concept of a pure shield healer.

I'll wait and see what 6.0 is but my best guess is that the odds of them significantly changing the healing up are very low.