How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[BungleBear]

I think some people may be underestimating the utility of shields even in their current incarnation. Shields can be useful (if not strictly necessary) even in situations where they do not prevent otherwise fatal damage. Shields allow you to "pre-heal" damage. With ordinary "pure" healing, you cannot heal damage until after it occurs. If you cast a pure heal on someone who is already at full HP, this achieves nothing. But shields let you heal damage before it occurs. Shield-healing can raise a player's effective HP above their maximum HP, but pure-healing cannot.

Pre-healing is useful in various scenarios. Perhaps the most obvious is pre-pull and during periods of downtime. At these times, you can apply shields for free, easing the burden of healing damage that will occur later when healing isn't free. Another scenario is when there are two successive heavy-hitting raidwides with little time to heal up in between. Again, you can ease the burden of healing between the raidwides by pre-healing some of the damage from the first. A final scenario is when raidwide damage occurs during mechanics that force the party to be widely spread out, making it difficult to heal everyone after the damage occurs. Shields enable you to heal some of this damage before it happens, while the party is still grouped together.

[IceBlueNinja]

I think some people may be underestimating the utility of shields even in their current incarnation. Shields can be useful (if not strictly necessary) even in situations where they do not prevent otherwise fatal damage. Shields allow you to "pre-heal" damage. With ordinary "pure" healing, you cannot heal damage until after it occurs. If you cast a pure heal on someone who is already at full HP, this achieves nothing. But shields let you heal damage before it occurs. Shield-healing can raise a player's effective HP above their maximum HP, but pure-healing cannot.

Pre-healing is useful in various scenarios. Perhaps the most obvious is pre-pull and during periods of downtime. At these times, you can apply shields for free, easing the burden of healing damage that will occur later when healing isn't free. Another scenario is when there are two successive heavy-hitting raidwides with little time to heal up in between. Again, you can ease the burden of healing between the raidwides by pre-healing some of the damage from the first. A final scenario is when raidwide damage occurs during mechanics that force the party to be widely spread out, making it difficult to heal everyone after the damage occurs. Shields enable you to heal some of this damage before it happens, while the party is still grouped together.

You are correct and I agree but uh after saying it a few times myself I let it be. I believe people know shields are good but most claim contents dont force em to be a most over regens. Though like you I really love shield heal over pure and shields sadly but true allows you to some what cheese mechs which tbh I like, if also just feels more engaging than regen healing and less stress. I hated regens for two reason. They dont tick enough and 15 secs is ugh. It also can be nice for mechs like twinning boss 2 where people have a nasty habit to clomp up on the spot you pick causing over stack and can usually be major or instant death damage if no shield. Another one is amarout those nasty dark sprites who do heal down debuff. pop a shield and if 0 damage no debuff lol. Last even some bosses knock backs can get block by shields like E3 levi

[Grimoire-M]

If we follow SE’s track record, shields have only served two functional purposes, debuff prevention, and one shot prevention. Of those, debuff prevention is infrequently utilized and rarely necessary, while the other is common but able to be supplanted by party mitigation. To me Shields need more potency just to keep up with HP creep and serve as functional replacements for two of those mitigation cool downs at any given point. I would only apply this change to GCD shields too, as I feel the stacking nature of our current cooldown-based shields requires them to be weaker (or given the Galvanize treatment) for game health in the long run. The potency ballpark I would put it in though is 600 for Adlo equivalents and 400 for Succor equivalents. Half that if it’s a cooldown. I would likely nerf Divine Benison a smidge, but given WHM’s sheer lack of options I think it’s actually balanced on their kit, though I do wish it would share a collective cooldown with Tetra to add some tension to its use.

[Absurdity]

I feel like people sometime forget about how insanely powerful was spread critlo and why he doesn't exist anymore.

Was it though? Sure, it could completely mitigate the need to heal the next mechanic...or you could entirely waste 6 GCDs and get absolutely nothing.
Even right now, in ShB, with the ridiculous amounts of crit rating we have, you can still end up spamming Adlo 6 or 8 times and not get a single crit out of it.

[Shurrikhan]

To me Shields need more potency just to keep up with HP creep

Wouldn't the easier solution be to just stop giving such a large increase in Vitality per ilvl, and thus reduce HP creep?

Or would that make Savage too accessible when its enrage timers are fairly lenient, as there'd be less of a gear impact?

[Aelin_Ashryver]

I think it would be cool to have an emergency shield almost like a benediction on reaaaally long cd. That would be fun to use in clutch moments hehe

[Shurrikhan]

I think it would be cool to have an emergency shield almost like a benediction on reaaaally long cd. That would be fun to use in clutch moments hehe

If Benediction and invulns have taught us anything, it's that such wouldn't be saved for clutch moments as an "emergency" shield...

[AnotherPerson]

Wouldn't the easier solution be to just stop giving such a large increase in Vitality per ilvl, and thus reduce HP creep?

Or would that make Savage too accessible when its enrage timers are fairly lenient, as there'd be less of a gear impact?

They are lowering all gear stats from lv 50 onwards so the ilvl difference will not be so huge per expansion - this includes your HP bars.

[Grimoire-M]

Wouldn't the easier solution be to just stop giving such a large increase in Vitality per ilvl, and thus reduce HP creep?

Or would that make Savage too accessible when its enrage timers are fairly lenient, as there'd be less of a gear impact?

I suspect retuning the HP on gear would make Stormblood and Shadowbringers Savage and Ultimates less accessible at minimum item level in the long run. Not ARR/HW where it wasn’t balanced around what we have now to begin with. Given the stat squish I’d agree this is more timely, but I think we’d both agree that shields require some amount of precision that makes tuning their potency directly the easier vector to act upon in general.

In contrast, I would expect that tweaking Piety to add healing potency would have that effect on healers as a whole. Simply because those optimizing for damage output wouldn’t make full use of the stat beyond minimum item level or world first situations, while it would enable casual or pug healers to raise the overall floor and ceiling of healing in all content they participate in if they choose to use a piety heavy set. It’s effect on older content compared to now in a manner akin to the effect Direct Hit had on replacing Accuracy. Though I would agree that likely matters less than Direct Hit on the whole. I also don’t think the developers would tune such a change to influence their savage fights that much. In Ultimates it might effect what they do going forward.

[elioaiko]

Wouldn't it be cool if Emergency Tactics turned all current Shields into a heal, even Divine Bension, Celestial Intersection? That would give SCH some synergy outside of just casting shields and letting it fall off.