Shield/Pure Healer Split Feedback

[Supersnow845]

When it comes to mitigation, in order for it to be effective utility, it needs to somehow translate to faster death to the opposition. It isn't death prevention. I strongly dislike this fact, but it is a fact nonetheless. If the ability is an oGCD, then there is no discussion to be had when it comes to their effectiveness, and there is nothing to compare the ability to. It is free mitigation every XX seconds, so there is no point to not use these skills. The true battle takes place with GCD mitigation, and whether to use them vs a straight heal via GCD (assuming you are exhausted of oGCD heals), or if you should be using it for damage.

In the case of a GCD shield vs a GCD heal, they both essentially do the same thing, and they provide HP to the target to prevent them from getting KO'd from an incoming attack. All that matters in this scenario is that the target has enough HP to survive the upcoming attack, making the shield completely irrelevant. We have to start to look at MP economy in order to make comparisons at this point.

In the case of GCD shield vs damage, the latter wins every time so long as the GCD being used for damage does not translate to a player dying because you did not heal them. In this case, it reverts back to GCD shield vs GCD heal.

What all this means is GCD mitigation serves no purpose in FFXIV, and the cases where it would actually beat out a GCD heal that does the same thing, or straight damage are so few and far between that it warrants being looked at by the dev team. Especially if they truly want to have a barrier/pure healer dichotomy. Right now, this line is so blurred it may as well not even be there. The good news about that is it leaves WHM in a much better place than some players will give it credit for.

Healing in FFXIV = (Enough HP to survive attack + 1)

I mean even if you ignore GCD shields in two minutes SGE has 5 instances of 10% group wide mitigation (of which you can stack 2 of these 5), SCH has 5 10% and 1 5% of which 2 of the 10% and the 5% can all be stacked, AST has 2 10% and WHM has 1 10%

So even coming from the perspective of “only free mitigation is useful” (and this is ignoring things like how spreadlo is free under dissipation because the energy drain refunds the cost of 1 broil) then WHM is still left far behind the shield healers and behind AST’s much more functional and flexible 2 times (to say nothing of AST’s shields), in comparison WHM offers nothing of benefit