Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

[SWB]

Eos and Kardia would provide 340 potency heal to MT every gcd that sages and scholars don't have to spend on casting regen/aspected benefic.

they can alternate sacred soil + sage varient for 100%uptime on damage reduction and Hot effect.

Sages 45 sec cd 10% damage resistance stacks with scholars sacred soil (but not their own)

There's a lot of damage mitigation and synergy between them that makes them a really powerful combo. Gcd shielding is really only needed for scripted damage anyways. Just choose who does it since they don't stack (Should be scholar since sage loses 170 kardia potency heal for every heal they manually cast)

[Saefinn]

Well, shield healers rarely ever used gcd shields anyways. Which made the whole Pure vs Shield healer this expansion a really weird choice. But here we are. So I the end, there's no change there. Not for SGE, not for SCH

SGE gameplay is a lot about maintaining at least 10% mitigation on the party and buffing 10% healing on the party or up to 30% for specific players. Pneuma covers a lot of the pure healing scenarios you need and panhaima sheilds/heals covers all other outgoing damage (or they can be used together). Everything stacks with other healers and players (tank, dps mitigation) so honestly, half the time you have little to heal and the remaining ogcds are enough.
Of course, we have yet to see Savage, so we'll see. But so far the damage output has been as expected from extreme so I don't expect much change in savage. If anything, our kits are even more overpowered so it feels like even less healing is required. On SGE I'm constantly throwing unnecessary heals out for the mana because I would otherwise overcap my resources constantly.

There was once a mythical time when they did make good use of shields, the days when you did not have very many oGCD's. One would hope their declaration on having shield & pure healers would be their intent to return to said mythical time. But to hear SCH/SGE be such a good pairing worries me and I hope they patch it in 6.05 or 6.1 because I feel like it'd just undermine their stated vision.

Being honest though, I've yet to hit this "oGCD's suffice, don't use GCD's heals" phase of play SGE. Am I just playing it wrong? Maybe I am using 5.0 SCH as too much of a base? But I am in better gear now doing Expert roulettes and cleared the first of the EX fights today.

That said...do I want to even play it right if that's what it gets reduced to?

To be honest, I think this is especially weird, since 95% of the time you only use oGCD heals. That means that pure healers tend to use shields more than the shield healers while the shield healers use regens more than the pure healers.

Disregarding my above above comment, I figure you're not wrong. This is something I remarked in 5.0 having levelled both AST and SCH. I felt like I was more of shield healer on my Diurnal Sect AST than I was on my SCH, which was mainly due to Celestial Intersection and the situations where I might need more, Neutral Sect sufficed.

[yay4indigo]

I know we shouldn’t necro but this thread is so bizarre to me lol. Is no one else tired of talking about what’s “optimal” instead of fun? What healer WANTS their skills to be useless - esp if they happen to be their favorite skills? (Eg, Succor is mine)

The solutions in this thread is telling the shield healer to simply … not… use their shields… why even play a shield healer then? Haha. Let’s be Regen or Mitigation healers since what’s “optimal” is not using your shields.

I don’t get people. Tbh, if I wanna Adlo and deploy, I’m gonna. Y’all can just get out of my way haha. I don’t care what’s “optimal.” I care about what’s fun for me and why I choose to play an (alleged) “shield healer.”
For the *gasp* yellow health bars.

[yay4indigo]

Enjoy being a shield healer!
But also 50% of the queues you won’t be able to use a shield.

[Rein_eon_Osborne]

I know we shouldn’t necro but this thread is so bizarre to me lol. Is no one else tired of talking about what’s “optimal” instead of fun? What healer WANTS their skills to be useless - esp if they happen to be their favorite skills? (Eg, Succor is mine)

First things first: fun is subjective & it’s such a pointless errand to debate about it. You like those shields? Go ahead and use it—nobody cares, 99.99% of time. Some folks here derives fun from being useful to their party, hence why they like to be optimal. Let them have it.

Seeing your shield not consumed 90% of time is not my personal definition of fun. It only serve to crowd your buff bar and making it harder to track certain timers. It’s a common knowledge that healing is binary, period. You either heal to survive, or you don’t & people drops dead. If I can get away from not using those shield & help the group clear faster through other means? I am sure as hell will do that.

The solutions in this thread is telling the shield healer to simply … not… use their shields… why even play a shield healer then? Haha. Let’s be Regen or Mitigation healers since what’s “optimal” is not using your shields.

You can thank whoever designs the encounter & jobs for this. We’re just players adjusting to those changes.
• They made lower end contents healing requirement either redundant or almost non-existent to the point you can run plenty of them without healers. Some higher end content also suffers from this.
• They made the game heavily DPS-centric. Casting healing spells causes you to fall behind in that regard. Simply put, all healers have arsenals of toolkits for an encounter design that never existed in this game.

I don’t get people. Tbh, if I wanna Adlo and deploy, I’m gonna. Y’all can just get out of my way haha. I don’t care what’s “optimal.” I care about what’s fun for me and why I choose to play an (alleged) “shield healer.”
For the *gasp* yellow health bars.

I will agree with you if you’re referring to lower end content, because DPS checks either do not exist or is pushover enough to be of any worries nowadays. If my cohealer spams shield, regen, whatever they have, then I will spam more Glaroilfisis. They can handle the healing as much as they want to and I'll only step in if they make oopsies.

Higher end content though? Expectations & stakes are higher. That’s when such playstyle becomes more frowned upon. You are expected to know to a certain degree what benefits the group more as a whole.

I certainly wouldn't be cool to have a school group & is given a group project that requires us to browse internet to make sure we can finish it conveniently before the deadline, but then that Timmy says "I don't like internet!! I prefer to do it traditionally by going to public library cause I think it's more fun!!". Can it work? Probably. What's almost guaranteed is, that Timmy will very likely slow down the group.

[RayneBoemir]

FFXIV has a completely different approach to combat than SW:TOR, WoW, SOLO and similiar games and they doubled down on this over time. And that is a huge problem with current healer design: it doesn't reflect encounter design AT ALL.
Damage is predictable, with large gaps between two hits and generally fairly low - yet healers are designed in a way that would be fitting for a game with constant damage, random spikes, heavy heal checks and so on. The absolute majority of my hotbar is filled with so many heals I never or rarely have to use because there is just not enough damage incoming.
It has been like this for years, the vocal community wanted to see it changed for years yet in EW we got more of the same and are still left with an overabundance of heals while encounter damage is laughably low compared to what we can do.
Our toolkit would work beautifully in games with high and sustained damage but only a handfull of savage or ultimate bosses ever test it in that way and if so, it's the or one of the last mechanics that gets skipped. And in DF you never see anything like it and are left with too many and too powerful heals that are for the most part disconnected from one another.

Almost like w2w pulls and players making mistakes is when you use most of your kit lol

[RayneBoemir]

I am not bothered in casual content about shields not stacking other healers don’t notice or seem to care that I just dropped a ridiculously good AoE heal over time for the party and we could both dps. They just heal the party to full wasting my HoT.

[Chopstix]

barely-survivable tankbusters

what now? every single buster is survivable comfortably with the tank's own kit

GCD shields do not stack because it has no CD and would completely trivialise massive raidwides along with the double mit capability from SGE+SCH (even the latter is busted af tbh)

but y in the world would u ever GCD shield outside of ultimate after prepull? oh i remember now, because PF tanks suck in this game in reclears, even on tuesday night u have to scream at them to use their mits on raidwides so that the rest of us dont get obliterated (they also like using reprisal on busters lmao)

[Lazariah]

Scholars have been dealing with this for years. Two WHMs in a group? No problem. Two ASTs? Non issue. Two SCHs? Now we're in trouble. It's not about if you can get through the content just fine, it's more that now the healers have to tip toe around each other, not utilizing their kit, not having fun, and worrying they'll overwrite each other's shields. It's awful. I don't know why you're getting so much pushback from people on this. It is literally not fair.

Honestly I think the devs are just scared how powerful double shields would be.

[AnotherPerson]

Scholars have been dealing with this for years. Two WHMs in a group? No problem. Two ASTs? Non issue. Two SCHs? Now we're in trouble. It's not about if you can get through the content just fine, it's more that now the healers have to tip toe around each other, not utilizing their kit, not having fun, and worrying they'll overwrite each other's shields. It's awful. I don't know why you're getting so much pushback from people on this. It is literally not fair.

Honestly I think the devs are just scared how powerful double shields would be.

To be fair, two ASTs also don't get value on Neutral sect as much either. Shields would still overwrite each other.
Raw heals and regens are no problem though, but that also applies to SCH.

If double shields weren't nerfed, why would you ever want to bring a non-shield healer? You can just block any lethal damage by stacking 2 shields to guarantee survival (~1000 potency shield single target, ~600 potency on AoE). Doubly so if it crits. Imagine 2 Recitations + Crit Adlo + Deployment. Then, we're left with the point on having more mechanics that just directly deletes the party and make shields useless - which means healing would be largely redundant as no amount of mitigation would do any purpose.