Differentiate pure heals and shields?

[P0W3RK1D]

kinda just chit-chat, right now there is not enough distinction betweene shield and pure healers, but come 6.0 hopefully we are given justice ,honest opinions, how would you guys decide to make pure heals and shield work differently from each other, and yet keep their effectiveness, or have a different advantages in use?

I think some nice ways would be to leave pure heals and regens as they are, but make shields act differently -- like making shields a whole lot more effective (like , big enough to be a second health bar), but actually giving them a bigger cooldown, or forcing them to be channeled instead of casted -- preventing damage to the target, at the cost of the caster's MP.

any ideas?

[inhaledcorn]

Channel attacks are very unpopular in this game. Anything that forces GCD clipping feels awful to use, and, for the most part, you can trick the server tick into keeping the defensive part of the channel for the only part of the attack that you need. Just look at how people use Collective Unconscious. If they want to make shields more effective, then the half-and-half heal + shield needs to be converted to just raw shields, probably also being HP% based. Also, there needs to be more oGCD shield skills and more ways to weave it. And, if we want shields to be really effective, then we need less dark attacks that ignore them.

[ksuyen]

Maybe a bit off topic but I always focus target boss when in sch/noct. I think most shield healers do. The diff is we learn and memorize all the boss attacks so when we see the casting bar moving, it's time to shield up before the big attack. Whether it's single shield to tank or aoe shield to group, it all the same. Pure healers is more relax. I just heal when I see your hp less than 50%.

[NobleWinter]

Shields have a delay before they activate so waiting for a cast bar to start to apply shields has left me with useless shields far too many times. I normally end up using more reactive healing on my first time in an encounter and then once I learn it Im shielding far in advance. I know Scholar has a lot to set up with Sacred Soil, Seraph and Consolation, Deployed Critlo, and Fey Illumination. It's a mess trying to use all those well reactively. If anything I hope they change shields to have a permanent or just longer duration. If they cost so much to use I should get more than 30 seconds out of them and then I wouldn't worry about wasting them.

[LeonKeyh]

Not sure it necessarily needs to be differentiated more than it already is. Shields have extra value because you can make it so that people can take more than their maximum amount of HP in damage, but the downside is that you need to be proactive with them (it's not much of a downside given the length of time that shields stay on party members). But, there are a few ways that I've seen other games differentiate shields from pure healing (all of which would be a balancing nightmare):

1. Implement shield degradation - Shields tick down as they sit on people, losing efficacy the further from the point between putting the shield on someone and them getting hit. With this setup, SCH's Emergency Tactics could maybe consume the shield to go a full heal to that point instead. Shields would decrease about the same rate as regen heals, so shield + regen would be fairly strong (unless they're already at max health)

2. Shield Specific Mitigation - Shields have their own armor value, so damage dealt to shields may be higher/lower than the damage that would be dealt to straight up health. This would make shields stronger on low armor classes. e.g., if you have a 1,000 shield on a BLM and a PLD, an attack that deals 500 damage to the shield would deal that damage to both of them, personal armor would be ignored. This would make shield healers either incredibly powerful before gearing up in a tier, or nearly useless after gearing up though.

3. More effects for broken shields (a la TBN) - Have different shields which, when broken, give different effects to the person the shield was put on (or the caster who put the shield on them). Shield that, when broken does a small AE heal to everyone around the person, one that gives the person a X% mitigation boost for X seconds, restores X MP to the caster, gives the caster a buff that allows them to use another ability, etc.

4. Lower duration on shields (plus maybe "bonuses" for shields 'running out') - Have shields be 8-12s long or something, if the buff runs out while some shield is left then there's a bonus (e.g. shield's duration runs out it does a normal heal on the target, gives the caster MP back, basically the stuff above), also, make them stronger to specifically deal with burst damage. Then you have regen being strong for sustained damage and shields available for burst damage (as long as you can preemptively shield).

None of these things really fit with the game though, and as I said, would be a nightmare to balance. I feel like it's better that we look at the balance as Regen vs Shield, not "Pure Heal" vs Shield.

EDIT: Was reminded of another way of differentiating:

5. Absorption Rates - Shields have a percentage absorption rate. For example, a 50% shield would result in half of the damage dealt to shields and half to health.

[ItMe]

3. More effects for broken shields (a la TBN) - Have different shields which, when broken, give different effects to the person the shield was put on (or the caster who put the shield on them).

These are all neat ideas, but this one... it sounds so obvious! Why doesn't SCH already have something like this? Would be super cool to see, and super funny if they added it to an AoE shield. Maybe if it pops for a short buff people will QQ and come in for heals more lol.

[Deceptus]

Channel attacks are very unpopular in this game. Anything that forces GCD clipping feels awful to use, and, for the most part, you can trick the server tick into keeping the defensive part of the channel for the only part of the attack that you need. Just look at how people use Collective Unconscious. If they want to make shields more effective, then the half-and-half heal + shield needs to be converted to just raw shields, probably also being HP% based. Also, there needs to be more oGCD shield skills and more ways to weave it. And, if we want shields to be really effective, then we need less dark attacks that ignore them.

Yeah, with latency and the bad code the way it is, channels would be a nightmare.

[AnotherPerson]

They can even add shields that apply a buff - it doesn't shield until after a certain duration of time passes or when the healer uses the skill again (like Earthly Star and Horoscope), but the longer the buff stays active, the stronger the deployed shield would be.
I figure this should have been what deployment tactics should have been changed to since you can no longer deploy on faerie anymore.

[Rongway]

1. Implement shield degradation - Shields tick down as they sit on people, losing efficacy the further from the point between putting the shield on someone and them getting hit. With this setup, SCH's Emergency Tactics could maybe consume the shield to go a full heal to that point instead. Shields would decrease about the same rate as regen heals, so shield + regen would be fairly strong (unless they're already at max health)

This one suggestion is particularly problematic. Shields are, by design, already numerically inferior to regens. This is an intentional design decision because shields allow you to survive a hit that would have killed you, whereas a regen would not prevent death even though the overall numerical effect is higher when the regen ticks for its full duration. Deflating shields over time would be double penalizing unless the initial shield potency is far far greater than we have now; however, increasing initial shield potency higher than we have now would trivialize many mechanics because healers would just get better at timing their shields to cast as late as possible, negating far more damage than the devs ever intended.

[inhaledcorn]

This one suggestion is particularly problematic. Shields are, by design, already numerically inferior to regens. This is an intentional design decision because shields allow you to survive a hit that would have killed you, whereas a regen would not prevent death even though the overall numerical effect is higher when the regen ticks for its full duration. Deflating shields over time would be double penalizing unless the initial shield potency is far far greater than we have now; however, increasing initial shield potency higher than we have now would trivialize many mechanics because healers would just get better at timing their shields to cast as late as possible, negating far more damage than the devs ever intended.

The only way shield degradation would be okay is if the amount the shied lowers goes into healing, making it both a shield and a regen effect.