Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

[ty_taurus]

And this would all be a moot point if they simply made Toxikon a DPS neutral action or near enough.

Make the initial hit 660 potency and it would cover the 2 GCDs needed to cast E Diag, and Toxikon, or keep it at 330 and make it an OGCD.

I would love for Toxikon to not be the shitty action that it currently is, however, just boosting the damage to 660 potency creates a very different issue where suddenly E. Diagnosis becomes a tool you want to use aggressively because, for an additional 100 MP, you get some healing, a barrier, and equal damage to 2 casts of Dosis III every time the barrier breaks, and it will break very quickly in harder content because of auto-attacks on the main tank. It probably wouldn't quite be E. Diagnosis spam, but it also gives SGE a significant advantage over every other healer because of the shear volume of free healing it receives.

Toxikon absolutely needs to be reworked, but it can't be constantly available, it needs to respect downtime exploitation, and it needs to respect buff windows, because these are things that the community will 100% exploit if not considered.

The problem with the really stupid direction the went on healers is that shield healers have to jump through several hoops of fire to do what a normal healer can do. Not only does it make the class incredibly annoying to play, it makes them decisively worse without having a pure healer with them. It even shows up in normal dungeons later on in the game when they start kicking up the damage scaling and you have to start using more abilities to do the same exact thing. Pure healers don't suffer the same way because in the end there isn't anything that hits hard enough to one shot someone, so they can just heal someone in reaction to taking damage rather than pre-emptively having to guess they are taking damage.

I mean I'm so glad they think this is a great plan in end game to make healers "unique", but it ended up gutting astro, made this abomination of a class called sage that is basically a freaking scholar without a fairy...

Edit: Also thanks for whoever pointed out toxicon is a complete waste of time. I was noticing that in dungeons and was like "why would I ever do this?"

What are these hoops you speak of and how on earth do you see any value in the "Pure Healer" archetype? SCH/SGE is the strongest healing comp that enables 100% uptime on party mitigation, SGE benefits greatly from Chain Stratagem, offers the highest total healer DPS output, and has so much free healing that their "lack" of burst healing is negligible. Quite honestly, because of the shear volume of low-cooldown OGCD pure heals and regen heals Barrier Healers have, they are better Pure Healers than WHM. AST is still good because its tools are ludicrous, but WHM has nothing on SCH or SGE, and AST, while still amazing, really lags behind in damage that it offers even with its buffs. AST is much better at the beginning of a raid tier where healers are often forgoing gear drops in favor of letting the DPS gear up first, something that hurts SGE and WHM since they rely entirely on personal damage.