"Barrier Healers" aren't barrier healers

[Deceptus]

The CBU3 job design team failed the "MT/OT" system so miserably they just gave up on it but still cling to this "regen/shield" healer thing despite it absolutely not working (Each type having multiple of the other)

[ty_taurus]

...I always saw the idea of a shield healer not in their efficiency of producing an HP barrier, but the availability of such and the frequency of how often their mitigation tools are available, especially cornerstone tools like Sacred Soil and Kerachole.

Except scholar and sage are very inefficient when it comes to producing barriers. Their GCDs have higher MP costs, and come at the opportunity cost of DPS. Nearly all of their pure heals and regens have no MP cost, no cast times, and mostly no DPS opportunity costs (Scholar’s Soil, Indom, Excog, and Lustrate do, though it’s far smaller than the opportunity cost of Aldo and Succor)

And right, the cornerstones of both their healing are Soil and Kerachole… two regens that are available for nearly every mechanic thanks to their short cooldowns, if not every mechanic depending on the fight. Scholar and sage radiate healing over time like giant heat lamps, but their barriers either have long cooldowns, limiting their a availability, or have opportunity costs that are nearly never needed because they are dripping with free, constant raw healing and regen healing.

[ForteNightshade]

The CBU3 job design team failed the "MT/OT" system so miserably they just gave up on it but still cling to this "regen/shield" healer thing despite it absolutely not working (Each type having multiple of the other)

I think it's less clinging and more they have absolutely zero idea what to do with healers and this split made it appear as if they did. Unfortunately, until they move away from extreme levels of accessibility, the healer design is stuck in a stagnate rut.

[Reinhardt_Azureheim]

Except scholar and sage are very inefficient when it comes to producing barriers. Their GCDs have higher MP costs, and come at the opportunity cost of DPS.[...]

...I always saw the idea of a shield healer not in their efficiency of producing an HP barrier, but the availability of such and the frequency of how often their mitigation tools are available, especially cornerstone tools like Sacred Soil and Kerachole.[...]

Please read it carefully, I am extremely certain I highlighted as one of my first points that I don't see their efficiency of shielding as the definition of a barrier healer because it is frankly quite terrible. By mitigation tools I specifically mean %-type mitigation, not HP shields.

I did not think it needed further clarification, but here we are.

[VentVanitas]

the Regen/Barrier split has always been unnecessary and just shows the total lack of creativity regarding the healer role. it at best gave us new fancy terms to refer to the healers with and at worst, put even more arbitrary restrictions on the role even after already being so restricted from the ShB changes. it just seems unimaginative and boring to box both SCH and SGE into this "shield healer" niche when the fight design doesn't make that difference anywhere near as potentially interesting as the differences between other sub-roles like DPS.

[Colt47]

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again if square wants the barrier/regen split to work then they need to force it in all 2 healer content and nerf the shields pure healing into the ground with contingencies for dungeons

SCH for example shouldn’t have access to blessing, it doesn’t need whispering dawn, indom shouldn’t be able to crit and should have a longer CD consolation should be entirely a shield and eos embrace should cast a sustained light mitigation rather than a heal, in exchange SCH should get access to 2-3 more mitigations so it can apply 1-3 mitigations on functionally every mechanic while the regen healer then proceeds to heal back up after the raidwide

So functionally the shield healer mitigates 40% of your health bar worth of damage and the regen healer heals up 50% of your HP that still got chunked so to speak

Without a nerf on shield healers (and I say this as a shield healer main) both healer balance and class fantasy fall by the wayside

At gear parity in leveling dungeons all the healers have to be able to use pure heals. if they really wanted to go into this whole shielding business they'd need an entirely separate role for it, the party size would increase to 5, and content would have to be readjusted just to handle the fact the party only has one real healer anymore in the pure healers.

In DnD a shield is really just a pool of temporary HP that drops after a time and is available on classes that are not even technically healers, and in truth I've never used any of them because the only point to having a shield is that you're predicting an attack is going to hit you for more than your maximum HP. How would we know that is going to happen? At what point would it be superior to just using damage reduction?

Temp HP does give another lever to mess with when balancing out a defense kit on a job, but its basically meant to be a worse damage reduction and should be used that way. The main use it has from healers in FFXIV from my observation, is to allow healing over time to recover the real HP while the fake HP is widdled away. All the points where we got to use shields with mits and full HP are are from over compensating attacks that shouldn't exist.

That also goes into the design decision where we are now supposed to use damage reduction and temp HP in response to an advertised attack, rather than rotating the damage reduction and temp HP to help keep the tank up through all forms of content. This whole change led to a massive amount of technical debt that is taking them years to fix, and even if they fix it, will likely make all new content feel stale very quickly. If it isn't possible to randomize when big hits happen and all big attacks must be advertised within the 2 minute window, then all fights are going to start looking the same. They can change the aesthetics, but they have no flex for timing. And with greatly simplified jobs that is going to make the game get boring rather quickly.

Difficulty of content is completely determined by the gear score someone is wearing, how much they obfuscate mechanics, and how many people have to participate in the mechanic, with all mechanics and attacks timed to a 2 minute window. That is the game we are playing, and likely the game we are going to be stuck with.

Also, I feel that all the changes made are to make healing less random and stressful because traditionally, healing even as a firehose healer in other MMOs is kind of a stressful babysitting job.

[Gemina]

At gear parity in leveling dungeons all the healers have to be able to use pure heals. if they really wanted to go into this whole shielding business they'd need an entirely separate role for it, the party size would increase to 5, and content would have to be readjusted just to handle the fact the party only has one real healer anymore in the pure healers.

In DnD a shield is really just a pool of temporary HP that drops after a time and is available on classes that are not even technically healers, and in truth I've never used any of them because the only point to having a shield is that you're predicting an attack is going to hit you for more than your maximum HP. How would we know that is going to happen? At what point would it be superior to just using damage reduction?

Temp HP does give another lever to mess with when balancing out a defense kit on a job, but its basically meant to be a worse damage reduction and should be used that way. The main use it has from healers in FFXIV from my observation, is to allow healing over time to recover the real HP while the fake HP is widdled away. All the points where we got to use shields with mits and full HP are are from over compensating attacks that shouldn't exist.

Bingo! You hit the nail dead center. Good luck convincing the playerbase that abilities like Adlo, Eukrasian Diagnosis, and the beloved TBN aren't actually mitigation tools. I've tried, and becoming the recipient of comments like "You don't know s**t about this game." is typically the eventuality.

At the end of the day, shields are just HP. The only time they are truly a shield is when they extend the maximum HP of the player. Otherwise it is no different than a heal. I cannot speak for savage or ultimate, but in all content through EX trials there is nothing unavoidable that requires a max Hp extension to survive it. This basically makes the idea of shields and by extension 'shield healing' completely redundant.

True mitigation reduces incoming damage, and healers do have access to such tools, and none of them grant an additional yellow bar of HP. They do, however, give those "shields" more life since they are taking less damage. If the dev team wants to have two sub classes of healer, they would indeed make certain healers specialized in damage mitigation, and the other healers specialized in damage recovery. Then they would have a true barrier/pure healers. What they have now is utter BS, and I hope I'm not the only not eating it.

[PyurBlue]

The differences between healers are more flavor than full on categories, but I still think they are distinct enough for the term barrier healer to have some meaning.

In terms of practical gameplay, shields do something that heals cannot, which is block status effects that require HP damage to be inflicted. This includes vuln stacks. This mechanic could make the distinction between healer types slightly more pronounced, but in practice it's not very noticeable in game. Casual content doesn't deal enough damage to make people care most of the time and higher difficulties will usually break shields.

In the very few instances where the shielding mechanic does apply, I like to use it, but getting other players onboard is difficult. I can completely negate some Expert dungeon mechanics with sage and I've tried announcing my intentions to do so in chat, but players still try to evade the AoEs even while I stand in them and suffer no ill effects because I can put a barrier too large to break.

At the end of the day, shields are just HP. The only time they are truly a shield is when they extend the maximum HP of the player. Otherwise it is no different than a heal. I cannot speak for savage or ultimate, but in all content through EX trials there is nothing unavoidable that requires a max Hp extension to survive it. This basically makes the idea of shields and by extension 'shield healing' completely redundant.

I'm in agreement with most of your post, but I think the ability of shields to negate status effects is an interesting difference. It exists now, but it seems like an unintentional fluke rather than something the developers really intended. I wonder if it could be expanded into something that is more noticeable in gameplay?

[Colt47]

The differences between healers are more flavor than full on categories, but I still think they are distinct enough for the term barrier healer to have some meaning.

In terms of practical gameplay, shields do something that heals cannot, which is block status effects that require HP damage to be inflicted. This includes vuln stacks. This mechanic could make the distinction between healer types slightly more pronounced, but in practice it's not very noticeable in game. Casual content doesn't deal enough damage to make people care most of the time and higher difficulties will usually break shields.

In the very few instances where the shielding mechanic does apply, I like to use it, but getting other players onboard is difficult. I can completely negate some Expert dungeon mechanics with sage and I've tried announcing my intentions to do so in chat, but players still try to evade the AoEs even while I stand in them and suffer no ill effects because I can put a barrier too large to break.



I'm in agreement with most of your post, but I think the ability of shields to negate status effects is an interesting difference. It exists now, but it seems like an unintentional fluke rather than something the developers really intended. I wonder if it could be expanded into something that is more noticeable in gameplay?

It starts becoming a guessing game if shields negating status effects is an intended behavior or if the game is simply coded to only apply a negative status if the player loses HP in response to the attack. The behavior is shared between invulnerability of the paladin as well as the grace period after resurrection.

[Gemina]

The differences between healers are more flavor than full on categories, but I still think they are distinct enough for the term barrier healer to have some meaning.

In terms of practical gameplay, shields do something that heals cannot, which is block status effects that require HP damage to be inflicted. This includes vuln stacks. This mechanic could make the distinction between healer types slightly more pronounced, but in practice it's not very noticeable in game. Casual content doesn't deal enough damage to make people care most of the time and higher difficulties will usually break shields.

In the very few instances where the shielding mechanic does apply, I like to use it, but getting other players onboard is difficult. I can completely negate some Expert dungeon mechanics with sage and I've tried announcing my intentions to do so in chat, but players still try to evade the AoEs even while I stand in them and suffer no ill effects because I can put a barrier too large to break.



I'm in agreement with most of your post, but I think the ability of shields to negate status effects is an interesting difference. It exists now, but it seems like an unintentional fluke rather than something the developers really intended. I wonder if it could be expanded into something that is more noticeable in gameplay?

I remember when I started playing the game back in late 2014, burning down the nails in The Bowel of Embers HM was a true mechanic that was facilitated with SCH succor to avoid the KB from Ifrit's eruptions. I specifically remember some close calls where if the SCH was not casting them, we likely would have not gotten them down in time. It made the EX version where there are more than double the amount of nails than in HM quite a daunting task. Without HP shields to absorb those blasts, we're talking interruptions to seven players and arms length/surecast wasn't a thing back then either. That is a ton of damage tied into those GCDs that also reduces the damage Ifrit receives even without the nails. Eruption also doesn't have a cast bar. Good times.

All gone now. As you said, there are still some isolated situations where shields can negate certain status effects, and even fewer where those situations can't be ignored completely. I know you want to believe there is a distinction between barrier and shield healers, and there is, but it's tied into their GCD abilities, which is negated by their oGCD skills. This game in terms of job and encounter design is so much different now than 10 years ago.