Quote Originally Posted by Dearche View Post
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?
Yes, fair enough. But one of the current advantages of shields over "pure healing" is that shields can be effectively used on players even at full HP. By using shields you can raise the player's "effective HP" above their maximum HP. If you take that away, then shields may have little point. Ultimately, effective HP is all that matters. If shield-healing and pure-healing were to affect effective HP in essentially the same way, then it's not clear that there would even be any real difference anymore.