How would you feel if shields had no upfront healing?

[ty_taurus]

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.

The thing is, no one is shutting down the value that barriers have before fights and in-between phases. It's just that those examples are a fraction of the total fight, and during the entire rest of the battle, most of the barriers in this game just aren't really worth using because they take away your DPS. In SCH's case, they have such a vast library of OGCD healing that they almost never ever need to even think about Adloquium or Succor even in some of the most challenging content the game has to offer. There is a value to those barriers as well as Nocturnal AST's barriers when progging new content since you probably will be forced to resort to those heals, and that added endurance provided can help your party last longer and learn more from the encounter, but that's a short-lived experience. What most of us want is for tools like Adloquium and Succor to always have value, not just when we're challenging new fights.

The common example is having attacks that demand a barrier in order to survive. This is because that's the most straightforward example of how to force value out of utility that otherwise is unnecessary. I feel like there are people on the forums that feel like barriers are being attacked by the majority of us, but that's not the case. We all want barriers to feel good to use, but they just aren't in the majority of circumstances outside of Divine Benison and Diurnal Intersection.