Which healing job are they gonna gut for Sage?

[Nethereal]

...Why are we assuming that the only type of shield that could ever be coded is one that would be utilized irrespectively of relative damage value?

If you provide a buff to an ally that absorbs up to 500 potency worth of damage and is consumed based on each attack's would-be damage relative to the target ally's remaining HP, and thus is scarcely if at all reduced by auto-attacks prior to a tankbuster... does that just stop being a shield?

Maybe it's the coding but shields would have tons of uses if they didn't have actual hp potency and only shield potency, but once again the designers stray away from that because a 400 potency shield in content that doesn't hit hard enough creates a balance issue. They also don't want to deal with the intricacies of what it means to have shields not actually have any hp potency.