Differentiate pure heals and shields?

[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.

[Shurrikhan]

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.

But then it's just halfing the very concept we want to differentiate, no?

Personally, I'd rather see shields reworked entirely to instead apply added (Magic) Defense that degrades over mitigation thus done, such that they have a total eHP increase across multiple strikes more similar to regen without being able to completely cheese mechanics (as they'd be able to if they absorbed all damage until drained and had that kind of overall strength). Both should be a sort of soft "they're covered; now we don't have to worry about them" with shields being the more preemptive but also the more quickly capped (shield effects shared and therefore merely replacing, rather than stacking, with each other) and/or expensive. At present, though, shields are so all-or-nothing that they're really only a single-blow maximum eHP increase that therefore has to be balanced so far down not to break mechanics that they're badly inefficient in not just mana, but potency per GCD.

@GrimGale

That's the direction I'd like to see healer designs go in as well: any and all ways of increasing eHP or better maintaining it when and on whom it's needed, not necessarily aimed at a pure healing / shield healing distinction, but just... diverse and interesting jobs.