Quote Originally Posted by Bitmoar View Post
Not gonna lie, when you started talking about Star Rail, I thought you'd bring up Preservation and Abundance. It would be kind of cool if Scholar and Sage made a hard turn to shields and mitigation on their OGCDs instead of pure healing. But within current encounter/battle design, and considering SE's philosophy, I think it's more likely that they'll just blur the lines even more and eventually backtrack completely from the distinction so they don't have to worry about it when they add another healer.
I mean yeah, we can see a much clearer example of what healer vs shielder looks like with Preservation and Abundance, but it was more the concept of how barriers are almost non-existent on barrier healers, existing only on their most basic heal buttons that very rarely get used, if even, and a couple of powerful, yet long cooldown abilities. Meanwhile the heart of their healing gameplay is really about healing over time, either with literal HOTs, or Eos/Kardia.

Fu Xuan would be a really interesting type of character to imagine a FFXIV job out of. She has a permanent passive damage reduction aura effect on the party, has a very large HP pool, and redirects over half the damage taken by other party members to herself, then automatically heals herself when her HP drops below a certain point. Imagine healer/tank hybrid like that who soaked damage away from the party and healed themselves.