Can we let shields stack?

[Transient_Shadow]

So I was running the Jade Stoa when I noticed that both Galvanize and Divine Benison could stack. Now this really rustled my jimmies. Why because for the longest time SE refused to let shields of sch, and ast stack period. But now whm gets a shield and it stacks with everything except another Divine Benison.

Square can you make up your bloody mind? Ill admit it this time I'm pretty damned salty. Regen spells can stack for days but god forbid a shield get a stack. It's a double standard and needs to stop. It hinders the synergy of mitigation classes and it has NO mechanical reason to exist since every other healing spell in ast and whm kits stack! hell even chocobo healing stacks.

[Ferth]

Divine Benison interacts with shields from SCH and AST the way stoneskin used to. This is nothing new or out of the ordinary.

[Tridus]

It hinders the synergy of mitigation classes and it has NO mechanical reason to exist

Divine Benison can only be on one person every 24 seconds, at best. Being able to stack shields on an entire party means significantly more damage mitigation. Shields can do something that HoTs can't: cause someone to survive an attack that would have otherwise killed them.

That is why shields don't stack.

[Kurando]

Having both an AST and SCH shield active would be OP in any instance, as losing one shield still means there is another one right behind it, kinda defeats the need of ever having Regen honestly.

However the only thing that maybe worth adjusting is allowing a shield with the highest HP restored amount to stay active even if another one is tried to be casted over it. For example a crit Galvanize shouldn't get overwritten by a weaker AST shield, so the stronger one should stay active until it is destroyed. I suppose this would be rare as any SCH/AST pair shouldn't be overwriting each others shields but it can still be annoying, especially in 24man situations when someone from another alliance gets involved and sabotages your buffs.

[Risvertasashi]

Tank shields stacking as is is pretty OP. But they're on a CD, at least.

Letting on demand GCD shields stack would be very very broken.

[Sylvain]

You can't make shields stack (especially aoe) for a very and simple good reason, it highly raise effective hp. One of the difficulty of new savage content is to survive burst (tank or aoe or transition). This is why worldfirst often meld vitality, because it raises their hp by the tiny bit needed to survive better
By allowing sheild to stack you can effectively negate many mechanics such as tank buster.
Same goes for the weakness debuff, they basically are a death sentence if you don't have enough gear to mitigate, allow shields to stack and weakness debuff would be much less of a threat.

The comparison between Hot is bad because hot don't prevent death.
Let say you have 50k hp, you could have 7 WHM hots, if the boss does 50 001 dmg in one hit. You die
If you have a shield absorbing 2 dmg, you survive.

Divine is a special case because it's a single target skill that has a cd. If I'm right TBN also stack too.

If you think double hots is so great, just do something like Shinryu with min ilv with WHM in diurnal stance, tell me how it goes and how open those stacking hots were (small hint, without perfect use of tank aoe mitigation and AST bubble, all your squishes will die)

[zuzu-bq]

They can't let all possible shields stack or else you can simply cheese a lot of stuff by taking 0 damage. Essentially breaking the game in some aspects.

[loreleidiangelo]

Tbh this is why shields in general are a concept that is difficult as hell to balance and why I cringe seeing how mandatory they are for Savage content, because it guarantees a raid spot for this one particular healing mechanic alone that SE will be forced to constantly incorporate into new jobs so that SCH isn't a "must-take" for raids. Making raid content require shields severely limits potential healer design going forward, tbh. Disc Priests are no more mandatory for raid prog than Holy Priest despite Disc having shields as their primary mech - it's because Disc shields in a way compensate for their slightly poorer HP recovery - if you didn't prevent the damage as Disc, it's harder to get those bars back up. Meanwhile SCH just rips a Lustrate or Indom.

Now, I don't expect SCH's recovery tools to be diminished at any point in the future, but I'd love to see their shields made a little less "requisite" for progging Savage content, even at min item level. In my ideal world though SCH's single-target shields would be beefed up a bit, making them great tank babysitters but they'd either lose their AOE shielding/some really strong recovery stuff like Indom or it wouldn't be required to survive big raid busters like Almagest at min ilevel, opening the door for future recovery-based/AOE-oriented healers to be created without worrying about "we don't have enough shield healers to compete with SCH's raid spot".

tl;dr binary pass/fail AOE raid damage present in virtually every endgame raid boss thus far means SE always has to make new healers with SCH's shielding in mind, severely limiting new potential healing design, and I dislike that immensely.

[VanilleFang]

I agree with what pretty much everyone else has said. Having AST and SCH shields stack would be broken. It wouldn't only make WHM obsolete but it would also make fights even easier.

[Ametrine]

It would also severely twist the AST/AST sect sharing issue. Someone has to go Diurnal.

Really, everyone would start running SCH/SCH comps. It would be a mess.