Pure/Barrier Split is a failure

[Supersnow845]

I really don’t think it’s a good idea to try and make every healer functionally able to fill every niche; whether it be by actual skills that can fill every niche (like modern SCH) or a toggle that swaps actions to fill different niches (like nocturnal and diurnal sect), the healers should have defined niches that work better in some situations and work less well in other situations (I’ve always said the armoury system should encourage this sort of thing, if fight 7 favours SCH and fight 8 favours SGE you should swap for the two fights, not just make every fight clearable on every comp), the problem comes from the all or nothing encounter design (whether that be modern design that favours mitigation or older white hole design that favours pure healing)

I really don’t think the regen/shield split is inherently a bad thing; if anything giving particular niches to healers is a good thing, but they need to find a better way to make sure single healer content isn’t messing up group content

I could propose 2 things here
1) skills have different effects in solo healing content, for example succor only has a pure healing aspect in single healer content or indom can only crit with recitation in single healer content
2) make it so in DF duties with 2 healers you always get a regen and a shield healer (except maybe if you queue together and are willing to risk it), this avoids the “well how can we do white hole mechanics as double SCH without succor healing, critdom or ET

Then in group content they need to reduce the over reliance on pass fail mitigation checks and up chip damage, this gives both healers a niche, discourages SGE/SCH and makes it feel like both healers are genuinely contributing as an individual player rather than just contributing as one of the two faceless healers

[Aravell]

Before all of these, they need to revert the 'your Sacred Soil/Kerachole now regens the whole party for 500p over it's duration' trait. But yes, Mit will always come out on top over pure throughput. Why? Because the more damage hits the party, the more that 10% mitigation from Kerachole/Soil is going to mitigate. Take a Barbariccia style fight, where the damage comes in quick small blasts. If you increase the damage put into the party from 100k over a 15 second interval, to 150k, then that doesn't 'make Mit less effective' per se, as you go from mitigating 10k of that damage with your Kera, to 15k damage. As the damage goes up, the importance of Mit actually INcreases, not decreases. The only way to make pure healing 'more attractive' that has worked thus far, as far as I can see, is literal gimmicks, like the P3S Life's Agonies thing, HP-to-1 mechanics that give small amounts of time to heal up from, etc. And any time these have come up, there's been ways to get around them. LB3, ZoePneuma, RecitIndom, it's obscene how much pure healing the 'barrier' healers can do when they really need to. So rather than double down on the plan that has thus far not worked, and by design is exceptionally unlikely to work, I'd rather they take a different approach.

Yes, the regens on the mitigation is getting out of hand. I'm surprised they haven't slapped mitigation on Asylum yet. But I think they could design mechanics that have pure healing throughput shine, consecutive hits of moderate damage are a bane of SCH. But then the other designated shield healer is the issue, SGE has way too many tools to deal with anything. They have healing potency up, OGCD shield, mitigation, big burst heals, stacks of shields, spammable GCD shield and spammable pure healing. People think SCH can do everything, but SGE can also do everything. There does need to be a cut back on a lot of the pure healing aspect of the designated shield healers if they intend to keep the split.

As for the shield not healing and only shielding, it probably can't work on SCH unless they make Emergency Tactics a toggle instead of a CD. I think Eukrasian Prognosis/Diagnosis could work that way though, since they're a pure heal when Eukrasia is off, so there's no reason that the shields should have to heal as well.

I really don’t think it’s a good idea to try and make every healer functionally able to fill every niche

Personally, I think SCH being a jack of all trades and master of none is fine and kind of thematically fitting, but for it to work, it requires all the other healers to excel at a certain thing. It's just bad because none of the healers excel at anything, they all kind of do the same things, except WHM, who still has only 1 mitigation for some reason.

[ForsakenRoe]

...consecutive hits of moderate damage are a bane of SCH. But then the other designated shield healer is the issue, SGE has way too many tools to deal with anything.

As for the shield not healing and only shielding, it probably can't work on SCH unless they make Emergency Tactics a toggle instead of a CD. I think Eukrasian Prognosis/Diagnosis could work that way though, since they're a pure heal when Eukrasia is off, so there's no reason that the shields should have to heal as well.

Personally, I think SCH being a jack of all trades and master of none is fine and kind of thematically fitting, but for it to work, it requires all the other healers to excel at a certain thing. It's just bad because none of the healers excel at anything, they all kind of do the same things, except WHM, who still has only 1 mitigation for some reason.

part 1: I would tend to agree, if we were on about just SCH in a vacuum. But if we're talking about incentivizing playing Pure healers over running SCH/SGE as a comp (to preserve and enforce the split rather than give up on it), then we have to consider SCH and SGE together here too, and as you note, SGE is pretty cracked on what it can do. Even if we took the lowest hanging fruit of design, of a constant DOT effect for a fight (A11S fire floor as an example), it'd have to do more than 4k damage per tick for us to even care, because a SGE/SCH comp can rotate Soil/Kera with 100% uptime and the trait's regen would breeze through that. And yet, the thought of taking 4k damage per 3 seconds is enough for a fair few players in this game to keel over to, so it goes back to the needle-eye we have to thread of 'how much damage is enough to burden our kit, but not too much to cause players to quit cos 'too hard''

part 2: Another thing that comes to mind that I forgot to mention in the previous post is the nuance of what shielding skills do based on their tooltips. For example, while a skill that says 'applies a shield equal to a 500p heal' and one that says 'heals for 100p, and applies a shield for 500% of the healed amount' sound like they would apply an equal amount of shielding, the former doesn't get reduced by things like Infirmity. This would open the door to potential cheese issues, for example, the Heartless Archangel debuff in O8S prevented any healing from occurring. With that former skill, you could apply a shield regardless of the debuff, unless SE were to code the debuff in such a way that it constantly removes shields for it's duration (I know it does on cast), and IDK if they want the extra bother of having to check if that happens correctly each time it's used

part 3: I would also agree that 'niches' would be nice, but the game just isn't designed for that re: fight design. We don't have a way to have, eg, classic WOW's 'Holy Paladin is crazy good at tank healing, Resto Shaman is crazy good at AOE, Holy Priest flexes based on comp, Druid cries because Priest does everything better than it can and is only brought for the res'. Instead, I'd rather the 'niche' be in the gameplay, rather than their dynamic/'subrole' in the team. eg, instead of saying 'AST is the tank healer because it has Synastry to get both tanks at the same time for bleed-TBs', saying 'AST is the delayed heals playstyle healer'. Playstyles can always be functional (with balancing), but a whole assigned-by-devs subrole like 'the healer that is really good at healing the tank' can end up feeling left out if fight design doesn't accommodate. As a great example, take a 2healer team from Classic WOW, and drop them into FF. You either have HolyPal/HolyPriest, or HolyPriest/RestoSham, depending if you were Alli/Horde. Now, in any given FFXIV fight in recent days, it's entirely possible that the tanks just... heal themselves for the whole fight. So, as the dedicated 'I heal the tank real good' player, the HolyPala for example, you're just out of luck on getting to play your role, because the tank's doing it for you. Or maybe the fight is just very AOE heavy, and the boss hardly ever autoattacks. Instead, making the differentiation be 'I heal with HOTs' vs 'I build healing resources via melee strikes' vs 'I heal with sheer HPS throughput' vs 'I heal via dealing damage' is just more likely to be inclusive to all classes regardless of fight design, rather than running the risk of one being ostracized for not being suited to the fight

But maybe that's too much optimism that SE would actually create 4 distinct healing playstyles, instead of just WHM, WHM2, SCH and SCH-but-smoothbrain

The Refund Shield -> Healing is a uniquely SGE thing.
Instead, I think their Eukrasia Diagnosis/Prognosis should work similar to SAM’s 3rd Eye. Gives a damage reduction (say 2-3%) and if it mitigates damage, a regen is then placed.
You can even Pepsis the unused buff and also let it trigger the regen.
Less issue with SCH and SGE shield contention, but not overly broken if they stack their mitigation together. And keeps SGE unique to their style.

'When Eukrasian Diagnosis or Eukrasian Prognosis break, they leave a buff on that player called Second Opinion for about 5 seconds. When Pepsis is used, it consumes Second Opinion to heal that player for the amount of HP the barrier protected for. Essentially, if you ever played a Character Action game like Viewtiful Joe, Wonderful 101, whatever, and used the Ukemi (jump button right as you land, instantly heal back the damage you took), it's that with a bit more leniency. And it gives Pepsis a much more interesting use case.'

Something like that? I'm not on the game at the moment, and I've not healed with an E.Prognosis in a while, but from memory the shield (in BIS) would be equal to about 9-10k health? So this wouldn't heal for a massive amount (my not-in-party, no food HP on SGE is 74.4k), and requires a GCD-casted Shield to use, but it'd be something more for us to have 'some activity', and it's healing related (for the 'healers should heal more' players) which is a bonus. Numbers could also be tuned as needed (eg MP cost, CD, % of shield converted to healing, etc). Effectively, I guess we could consider it a 'Continuation' from GNB, but instead of our own skill, we 'Continuation' the enemy's skill?

[Aravell]

But maybe that's too much optimism that SE would actually create 4 distinct healing playstyles, instead of just WHM, WHM2, SCH and SCH-but-smoothbrain

I've always been an advocate of diversifying the healing side of the kit in addition to the damage kit. I can see the framework for a nice diverse set of kits for us to play with, but the devs appear to be deathly afraid of jobs getting locked out of content so they absolutely refuse to lean into any of these archetypes.

Like, for example:

WHM, the powerhouse. The only healer that can top the party off in 2 GCDs easily with no prior set-up. Straightforward, but slow.
SCH, the tactician. Strong utility but requires knowing the fight for maximum effectiveness. Maybe they can play with the concept of a single-hit strong mitigation that you have to time. Like a party-wide Third Eye.
AST, the future gazer. Strong regens with ability to manipulate it, either reduce duration for a more potent effect or lengthen duration for a lesser effect. Burst healing possible, but requires extensive set-up.
SGE, the specialist. Strongest shields, but requires a lot of set-up. Can play with the concept of stackable small shields or single-hit big shields.

I think the dev team needs to be less afraid of a job not being in the meta, as long as every healer is viable, it shouldn't matter that one (or two) of them cannot excel in a given fight, as long as they can clear it.