Quote Originally Posted by Beddict View Post
Or mechanics that require shields to survive. A low damage AoE with a knockback that can't be ignored with Arm's Length but can be blocked if you take zero damage because of a shield, or a two part AoE where the first hit deals low damage and applies a Vuln Up Debuff that needs to be blocked by a shield to survive the high damage second hit. There's some things they could do to make shields mandatory, but the frequency of damage is low enough that I wouldn't be surprised if Seraph and Shake It Off handle such mechanics, assuming SE even bothers to create such mechanics in between the various stack/spread/protean.
In theory, there are lots of situations in which barriers could be extremely helpful if not mandatory. That said, there has never been a situation where barriers were intentionally required to survive (there was that whole midas issue, but that was due to poor testing and was quickly nerfed). Also, many of the barrier interactions we've had in past content have failed to make any reappearances in recent content. It's pretty unlikely at this point to assume that anything like that will actually be utilized, though. They're pretty dead set on keeping the game as approachable as possible. I won't say it's impossible, but I'd say to not raise your expectations in that regard at this time.

Who knows, maybe I'll eat my words. They did drastically increase the amount of barrier actions and usage across all healers and tanks, so it's entirely possible they're preparing us more more barrier-intensive mechanics, but it could also just be more fluff without actually matching the content to the level of our support options. We'll just have to see come November.