New healer: Sage. Barrier healer.

[Videra]

Unfortunately for SE, that is the only way for shields to become valuable, to make it so you have to actually SHIELD damage. Until that day comes, they will be struggling with shields being useful. As much as they don't want to take the dive, we know that to fix their woes over healers worrying about doing damage, they have to actually make it so healers have to worry about damage.

They've already proven they're willing to do it with BLU healing. BLU tanks take enough damage fast enough to where they can actually die. Gobskin is insanely valuable there due to that reason both for party shielding and helping the tank survive a little longer (all the parties I was in the other healer would spam Gobskin while I had to focus on Pom Cure until we unlocked Strotam).

BLU is an outlier and frankly isn't grounds for anything. To the main point, however, the problem is not healers worrying about doing damage - it's how healers have been simplified to the level of absurdity. The loss of debuffs, dots, buffs like eye for an eye. These are the issues plaguing healer design, and the things that could be fixed. Making content do more damage is something that the dev team will NEVER realistically do. So a return to the old class design is what people should be focusing on requesting.

[Liam_Harper]

I'm suspecting they'll attempt to up the amount of damage we take again. Though if I were them, I'd make all raidwides and tank busters Max HP percentages. Large ones at that. Imagine if the raidwide always did 80% of the party's health unless mitigated. Suddenly, shielding is way more important. Imagine if that tank buster did 110% of the tank's Max HP. You'd need shields and mitigation on them, heavy doses, to keep them up. Things like that which suddenly turn shields from jokes to mandatory to survive. As a side effect, burst healing becomes needed more often.

Scaling raidwides is problematic because it ignores gear. So if your healer is near the min ilv and half the team are BiS, the 80% of a health bar they'd be taking would be comparatively larger and far harder to heal. It also acts as a sort of punishment for reaching BiS in general because you take more damage. They tried this on e1s and it wasn't very popular.
Making shields vital sounds good in theory but only giving half the healers shields just forces comps. What happened to playing the class you prefer or enjoy? Can you imagine if they suddenly made it so only GNB and PLD brought any raidwide mitigation and DRK/WAR had more damage, so bringing a GNB+PLD or a DRK+WAR was a big downgrade or possibly not even viable. That's what's happening.

2. I see it more as a potential positive because now you only have to balance healers within their specific niche. Before they needed AST to be on par with WHM and SCH, now it theoretically only needs to be on par with what WHM does. This does of course only work if barrier healers actually have their uses and aren't just relegated to bench warmers once prog is over.

I'm skeptical they'll manage it, but very interested in the case of WHM and AST.

Diurnal AST is by far superior to WHM in almost every way. It's not even close. Free weaves, full mobility, abundant oGCD's, raid buffs, stronger versions of many abilities. To balance AST and WHM where WHM is actually a decent pick for the pure heal slot, they'd need to either:
a). Absolutely butcher AST's mobility, weave and toolkit.
b). Redesign WHM's identity and give it significant buffs in at least weaving, mobility and maybe damage.
They've been very stubborn that WHM must have some clipping and no mobility, so there's a good chance they'll either butcher AST, or WHM will yet again become the rejected healer of the expansion.

Sage vs SCH will also be interesting. If they do not fix SCH's ghosting issues, Sage is likely to be the superior shield healer because it's a simple case of a class with smooth oGCD's vs a class with half their oGCD's tied to a clunky ghosting pet that vanishes for 30 sec windows.
Hopefully they also won't pull a Bard/Dancer and give Sage the smoother gameplay and better toolkit to make the new class more appealing. Bard is among the the least popular classes in the game now.

[Rilifane]

I'm suspecting they'll attempt to up the amount of damage we take again. Though if I were them, I'd make all raidwides and tank busters Max HP percentages. Large ones at that. Imagine if the raidwide always did 80% of the party's health unless mitigated. Suddenly, shielding is way more important. Imagine if that tank buster did 110% of the tank's Max HP. You'd need shields and mitigation on them, heavy doses, to keep them up. Things like that which suddenly turn shields from jokes to mandatory to survive. As a side effect, burst healing becomes needed more often.

The reason why double regens are so strong is mainly because damage is spread out and scripted, giving healers all the time in the world to let regens do their thing.
You often have patterns like: damage - 30s of nothing happening - damage.
e11s Cycles and e12s Diamond Frost are outliers and have more frequent damage, making shields nice to give you more breathing room at lower ilvls but pretty much all other mechanics in e9s-e11s can be comfortably healed with regens because there is so much time between raidwides.

So even if they made it % based, punishing healers that have lower ilvl than the rest, as long as they're not frequent to force more burst heal and shields, it will change nothing.
And if they did, you'd just trade one 1button spam for another. Wether you spam Malefic/ Broil/ Glare or Medica/ Succor/ Helios when oGCDs don't cut it doesn't really make a difference.

Making shields more important works in other games where damage is high and frequent, you have the guarantee that they get absorbed and regens serve as a constant baseline healing you need to stay on top of things instead of the most efficient thing ever to take care of almost all of the healing.
But the way fights are designed here will never put shields above regens without signifcantly buffing their potencies and opening up the way for too much mechanic cheese.
I'd welcome higher incoming damage (please not just at the last boss of a tier, thanks) and the 4th healer and equally dividing them may open them up to increasing it but I have my doubts.

[Laphicet]

For better or for worse, healer balance is decent right now. All three healers are being used and no one job is neglected.

WHM is used more than the other two healers combined and easily more than twice as much as AST, if not three times as much. I would not say their usage is balanced by a long shot. And such can be traced back to their awful 5.0 changes that gutted the lore-based gameplay of AST and made SCH a frustrating mess with most of its unique dps kit stripped away.

The healers were actually used much more evenly in stormblood. each one seeing 30% usage at least.

[Gemina]

Unfortunately for SE, that is the only way for shields to become valuable, to make it so you have to actually SHIELD damage. Until that day comes, they will be struggling with shields being useful. As much as they don't want to take the dive, we know that to fix their woes over healers worrying about doing damage, they have to actually make it so healers have to worry about damage.

Let this go. It's not happening. I'm sorry, but optimization of skills and encounters needs to be taken out of the equation. Content is not designed around healers needing 100% DPS uptime in order to clear it. It's designed in a way where the more DPS a healer can contribute, the easier it becomes to clear it. Content will never be designed where healers MUST mitigate in order to prevent death, so current optimizing SCHs are already using shields in a way that is in contrast to their design.

Majority of SCHs are going to use shields to prevent damage. It does not matter that this is not optimal to these SCHs, and you can tell them they are playing inferior to other SCHs all day. They won't care, and they won't listen. Prevention of death is done more often by restoring a player back to full HP in order to be able to soak an unavoidable, even if a portion of that HP gauge is in yellow. This conversation is headed in a direction where it is being brought to light that barriers aren't really needed at all. Any attack that does not hit a player for at least 100% of their current HP simply doesn't need a shield because chances are likely that player will not get hit by anything else unavoidable before a regen or ogcd heal can patch them up. If regens are this powerful (and they are), expect them to be nerfed next expansion.

For shields to become viable for all SCHs, the SCH needs to be either rewarded for using them, and/or punished for not using them. I have no doubt that with two true barrier healers in 6.0 things are going to change a bit, just not in a way where healers have to deal with more incoming damage. The downscaling of values is going to be interesting in this regard, and it is always fun to speculate. While using a barrier only to prevent death and pulling it off is commendable, I know the devs don't want barrier healers using shields in this manner.

[Rilifane]

WHM is used more than the other two healers combined and easily more than twice as much as AST, if not three times as much. I would not say their usage is balanced by a long shot. And such can be traced back to their awful 5.0 changes that gutted the lore-based gameplay of AST and made SCH a frustrating mess with most of its unique dps kit stripped away.

The healers were actually used much more evenly in stormblood. each one seeing 30% usage at least.

WhM has a long history of being the healer people flock to whenever they have to go for the green icon.
It's the first healer you can unlock, it's simple and straightforward; you push button, HP bar goes up. The reason why SB had a more even distribution was mostly because WhM was just outright bad compared to the other two... but with the huge amount of people naturally gravitating towards WhM, it made for an even distribution rather than WhM being barely played.
By usual standards, WhM saw a hefty decline in players though.

AST has a reputation of being the high APM healer with lots of stuff to manage, SCH as the tactical healer with a pet that requires more planning. Wether that's true or not is debatable but that alone keeps many people from playing them. WhM is as accessible as it can get. And that means people who dabble in savage on healer will more likely go for WhM first before they try themselves at the "more difficult" healers.

They are decently balanced right now in terms of output although AST is ahead of both of them. AST was even further ahead pre 5.3, the strongest healer by a clear margin yet was least played. Not only because AST veterans left out of frustration but also because it has a reputation of not being as accessible as WhM.
People will always gravitate more towards certain classes even if they objectively worse than others.
Like BLM has been the least played caster for the whole expansion because many people can't/ don't want to deal with the turret gameplay although it has the highest dps potential in all fights and is extremely well-designed. RDM on the other hand is simple and straightforward, very comfy in most settings and has nice utility, so after the first buff it saw a huge increase in players.

[Kabooa]

For shields to become viable

It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up.

Shields are valuable because it's health you don't have to heal, but if the shield stops less than a standard heal brings back, that's when we're in the realm of "shields are pointless" unless something will outright kill you.

With the exclusion of stacking shields from most sources, shields can afford to be stronger and cheaper than an equivalent heal, but the source of the shielding (Aka the healer) then needs less ability to heal what actually comes through, or rather, less ability to deal raid wides. There obviously can be some amount of overlap, but given how damage is tuned in the current patch for most content, the Barrier class shouldn't ever need to cast a point of HP restoration in casual content, and that should be a sticking point for them when they actually have to heal it up - That it's more difficult to do so, so mitigate it instead.

[Rilifane]

It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up.

Shields are valuable because it's health you don't have to heal, but if the shield stops less than a standard heal brings back, that's when we're in the realm of "shields are pointless" unless something will outright kill you.

With the exclusion of stacking shields from most sources, shields can afford to be stronger and cheaper than an equivalent heal, but the source of the shielding (Aka the healer) then needs less ability to heal what actually comes through, or rather, less ability to deal raid wides. There obviously can be some amount of overlap, but given how damage is tuned in the current patch for most content, the Barrier class shouldn't ever need to cast a point of HP restoration in casual content, and that should be a sticking point for them when they actually have to heal it up - That it's more difficult to do so, so mitigate it instead.

I'd be down for a healer that really, truly relies on shields to the point they're screwed if they have to resort to burst healing. But I think many people would have a hard time with that because they think low HP bar = danger even if there's a huge yellow bar slapped over it.
The concept of eHP seems too difficult for some to grasp that SE would design a healer that's more efficient at preventing damage than healing it afterwards. It would make for nice comps though. Shields would give regens more time to tick even with the next raidwide coming up while regens have high potencies in total. But I can already see the barrier healers topping people with regens on up instead of shielding the next damage, so not only are the regens wasted but their more efficient tools don't get used. Because low HP bars make too many people nervous, no matter how big the shield they have is.

[Gemina]

It needs to be less efficient to heal up than it is to shield up.

Shields are valuable because it's health you don't have to heal, but if the shield stops less than a standard heal brings back, that's when we're in the realm of "shields are pointless" unless something will outright kill you.

Even then they are pointless because there is another condition that you did not mention, which is the current HP of the player about the be killed. If a restorative GCD will prevent their death because they don't have enough HP to survive an unavoidable, then it is better to use that instead of a shield. Right now, the only time a shield is viable is to prevent one shots at near or max HP.

If really trying to optimize, then shields can also be used to prevent over healing in those kind of situations. However, I should also mention that ST cure bombs is something SCH is lacking. They don't have an answer for things Essential Dignity and Benediction, which is a big reason why a SCH will use shields to prevent damage, not death. It just depends on their own situation, and the competence level of their co healer. It becomes a matter of the SCH keeping everyone above a threshold that prevents their panic, and has nothing to do with optimization. I can also pretty much guarantee that Sage also will not have an answer for Essential Dignity and Benediction in the form of a giant ST cure bomb as well. Those kind of skills will undoubtedly be reserved for the pure healers.

Shields are valuable because they add HP to whatever HP the player(s) currently have, even if at max. They lose value because that is health that isn't needed to survive. This is what has to change if the devs want to invest on a barrier/pure healer set up.

[Rilifane]

Even then they are pointless because there is another condition that you did not mention, which is the current HP of the player about the be killed. If a restorative GCD will prevent their death because they don't have enough HP to survive an unavoidable, then it is better to use that instead of a shield. Right now, the only time a shield is viable is to prevent one shots at near or max HP.
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No, they would not be.
The current HP of a player literally does not matter as long as their actual HP + shield value exceed the amount the next damage would hit for. That's eHP.
If you bring them above the required threshhold by shielding them, they will survive just as much as if you head healed them above threshhold.
You could, theoretically, let a player sit at 1 HP for a whole encounter. As long as you slap enough shields on them that they don't break from damage, they will not die.

So if a barrier healer is designed in a way that the shields have higher potencies than their burst heal, you're better off shielding the next incoming damage than healing it at less efficiency. As long as everybody survives, it does not matter how you achieve it. Wether by shielding them or healing them.

Shields are valuable because they add HP to whatever HP the player(s) currently have, even if at max. They lose value because that is health that isn't needed to survive. This is what has to change if the devs want to invest on a barrier/pure healer set up.

The reason why shields lose value is because they have less potency than regens/ burst heals on ever single healer. Which makes healing the damage afetrwards more efficient as long as you survived it somehow.
Were it reversed and shields had more potency than burst heal, then it would be more efficient to shield people regardless of wether they would survive without that shield or not because it's less damage you have to heal back up before the next aoe. It really only comes down to potencies once you know people are going to survive the next hit.