A summary of healer issues

[ty_taurus]

As a scholar I used stoneskin a lot in dungeons in battle. I would drop cleric stance, heal the tank, add adloquium and stoneskin, then go back into cleric stance. Stoneskin maybe wasn't the most efficient way, but it was safer and gave extra time between healing. But it's long enough ago that I'm not sure how much I might've needed to heal and how often. I think it was tough for white mage to use stoneskin in battle because of the MP cost, but scholar could manage very well with aetherflow and energy drain. But maybe your idea is also mixed in with that stoneskin II could only be used outside battle (I think?)

Scholar could probably manage the MP cost better than White Mage, but I think what the other person was getting at is that Stoneskin is otherwise a DPS loss if you're casting it over Ruin back in the day. The thing about shields is that they're only necessary when the target would take damage that would otherwise kill them, and it's the shield that prevents them from dying, so your strategy didn't necessarily help your target survive. There's possibly an argument for if that shield was able to net you an extra cast of Ruin that you otherwise wouldn't have, but I'm not sure if the shield was powerful enough for that purpose.

That said, I did find one incredibly useful niche for in-battle Stoneskin casting during Leviathan Extreme as a Scholar. I had my faerie obey and set a macro to have her use Embrace on the target of my Stoneskin. I could then use Stoneskin on the off tank without the range nerf you got from healing the target of Briny Mirror, or whatever that status condition was--the one that lowered your spell range when you healed that ally. It was a debuff that persisted throughout the fight, but it didn't effect Eos/Selene's healing. Stoneskin was a way I could command the faerie to heal that target without getting penalized myself.

[Lethros]

only necessary when the target would take damage that would otherwise kill them

I said in dungeons, and really meant outside bosses. Tanks die if you don't do anything (although with some single pull/low level exceptions). Healing one way or another, that was part of the way I liked to do it then (Heavensward when I started). I didn't mean healing in raids or trials. I don't think I really did any at-level extreme trials until Stormblood, definitely no savage until then, and maybe not even any normal raids