Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[Liam_Harper]

The more you look at it, the more flawed the idea of "Shield healer" as an identity in ff14 is. The game design just doesn't really support it in a way that can be balanced.

-Between 1hp tank immunes, Doom mechanics and Savage fights where you have lulls then several hard hitting mechanics in a row, burst healing is needed. Since shields need to be weaker than pure heals, this ends up with shield healers getting strong pure heal burst too.
-Shields can cheese key debuffs like Vulnerability and Damage Down, pushing them into a corner where they can't make multiple shields stack or give them too much potency.
-Shields need to be weaker than regens to avoid making them obsolete. Thus shields lose their use and endgame bosses need raidwides that can outright kill a group on prog to make them useful. But this in turn makes shield healers mandatory on that content.
-"Pure healer with shields" are hard to balance against plain Pure healers, because one simply has more utility. WHM is straight up inferior to the other healers at endgame. But if you give the pure healer good free heals, it ends up like Diurnal vs Noct, where Diurnal is miles better.
-Because shields can't be too good due to cheese or pushing regen aside, raid heals like Succor, Celestial Opposition, Consolation or Asp Helios can only be part shield/part heal. But shields by nature are pre-emptive while heals aren't unless the group is already damaged, which results in some awkward situations where you waste the heal component to prep the noodle shield.

What I'm most interested in is how they've thought all this through and plan to address it. If they have no plan and they're taking SCH and WHM as a core to design around, it's going to end up worse.

[Deceptus]

-Shields need to be weaker than regens to avoid making them obsolete. Thus shields lose their use and endgame bosses need raidwides that can outright kill a group on prog to make them useful. But this in turn makes shield healers mandatory on that content.

The fact that Regens stack and Shields don't will always make Regens better than shields in any content you won't be one shot. Read: Non-Prog fights.

[Allegor]

What I'm most interested in is how they've thought all this through and plan to address it. If they have no plan and they're taking SCH and WHM as a core to design around, it's going to end up worse.

AST is already literally WHM but with cards, specially now that noct will be gone entirely, I'd be sorely disappointed if Sage is just SCH but with guns