How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[Dearche]

Interesting idea. But then wouldn't shields be useless on players who are at full HP? For example, it's quite common now to shield the party pre-pull, but that would become pointless under your proposal.

That's like saying that normal healing is useless on someone that's at full HP.

Frankly speaking, it's the padded HP that's the issue in the first place. While yes, you could still have normal shields in addition to the covering shields, it's not necessary.

The point was for shield healers to continue existing and also feel different in play from pure healers. Changing up conventions isn't a problem in the slightest. We used to fish for a Crit-lo and deploy them to the party to ignore the first 30s of mechanics, but SE killed that hard. What's the difference with removing a pitiful 150 potency shield from the start of a raid aside from having an even smaller effect than what SE had already done?