Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[Liam_Harper]

As opposed to now where it’s used to blow Earthly Star.

Earthly Star isn't even needed, you just pop it down up to 20 sec in advance for damage and let your shields + Horoscope handle it.

On topic, I'm curious if we'll see any "pure shields" in 6.0 now they've decided to make a distinction. One of the things I dislike about current Shield healing is unless you get a chain of raidwides, if you're prepping a shield for something that could kill the party you're often wasting the heal factor and spending the GCD just for the noodle 250 potency or such shield because you have to. Whereas if you got a raw 450 aoe shield with no heal (example), it's still weaker potency than a Medica II but you'll usually get full value out of it. The way shields are often split into both a heal and shield component makes them awkward to use pre-emptively.

[SoraLuna]

[...]
So what do you do then ?
Keep the barrier up full time ? the loss is absurd and nobody want that, i think.
Know all the fights to predict incoming damage ? that's an incredible skill gap needed there (if i consider memory a skill, i know mine is pretty low)

And what about mechanics that down your party (like cid from orbone or doggos from bosja, math robots) : your whole party is down to 1 hp and you have 3 cast max fo fill them back.
As a "pure heal", no problem, even if the second healer is down. In the same position, the devs can't doom your party if you've only got a single barrier healer.
that means a barrier have to be anle to tpe the party in 3 gcd ; tank included.
[...]

One solution could be a simple oGCD/Faerie Gauge spell to transform current given shields to pure healing, consuming the shield.

[Saefinn]

One solution could be a simple oGCD/Faerie Gauge spell to transform current given shields to pure healing, consuming the shield.

I suppose what they could do is make Emergency Tactics work in reverse. Your Adlo and Succor applies Galvanise then you can detonate as needed. It has the double benefit of making it less wasted. I'm sure many have been in the situation they think this is a good time use Emergency Tactics aaand your concealer is on top of it and you've just wasted your Emergency Tactics.

Doing it backwards means if the shield is needed it does its job, if it's not needed and there's still healing to be done, you can make it do it's job.

[Rilifane]

I suppose what they could do is make Emergency Tactics work in reverse. Your Adlo and Succor applies Galvanise then you can detonate as needed. It has the double benefit of making it less wasted. I'm sure many have been in the situation they think this is a good time use Emergency Tactics aaand your concealer is on top of it and you've just wasted your Emergency Tactics.

Doing it backwards means if the shield is needed it does its job, if it's not needed and there's still healing to be done, you can make it do it's job.

I'd prefer for shields to be pure shields by defaul but a button to detonate them would be nice. With how shields work there is no real reason to have split potency.
If you have a series of raidwides, both pure and split potency will most likely get full value and as long as HP + shield value exceeds incoming damage everyone is safe.
If you need to preshield, the healing is usually wasted.
Even if you definitely need raw healing on top of shields, all healers have plenty of tools and if both healers are completely drained of all resources, they did something seriously wrong. Right now Benison is the only healer skill that purely shields. Splitting the potency seems like a poor way to make using shields less punishing for people who don't get the concept of shields but in reality, it made using them even more punishing.

[EaMett]

Earthly Star isn't even needed, you just pop it down up to 20 sec in advance for damage and let your shields + Horoscope handle it.

On topic, I'm curious if we'll see any "pure shields" in 6.0 now they've decided to make a distinction. One of the things I dislike about current Shield healing is unless you get a chain of raidwides, if you're prepping a shield for something that could kill the party you're often wasting the heal factor and spending the GCD just for the noodle 250 potency or such shield because you have to. Whereas if you got a raw 450 aoe shield with no heal (example), it's still weaker potency than a Medica II but you'll usually get full value out of it. The way shields are often split into both a heal and shield component makes them awkward to use pre-emptively.

At the same time, you rarely need to use them preemptively. And when you do the 30s shield duration does give you enough room to place them early (when hp bars aren't full).

I don't feel like it's as much of an issue as say... The fact you don't need shields in the first place. Shield healing in ff14 is as much of a developer fantasy gameplay as "healers shouldn't dps". I'm really curious to see what 6.0 is made of but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same thing. That is, shield healers actually pure heal 99% of the time, usiung shields effectively 3 times per raid tier.

[Irenia]

The difference between shield healing and zero dps is that the devs can feasibly actually make shield healing a real thing, while the latter is quite unpossible.

[Grimoire-M]

At the same time, you rarely need to use them preemptively. And when you do the 30s shield duration does give you enough room to place them early (when hp bars aren't full).

I don't feel like it's as much of an issue as say... The fact you don't need shields in the first place. Shield healing in ff14 is as much of a developer fantasy gameplay as "healers shouldn't dps". I'm really curious to see what 6.0 is made of but I'm willing to bet it'll be more of the same thing. That is, shield healers actually pure heal 99% of the time, usiung shields effectively 3 times per raid tier.

Part of the reason for that is most mitigation cooldowns already solve the same niche Shields are meant to solve. They’re more efficient on singular hits than shields are (assuming of course that hit would one shot). To me, the conversion to pure shields is simply necessary just to make them viable within their one niche irrespective of item level.

[Alpheus]

Couldn't they just incentivize shielding by giving them different after effects once they pop? Hell they could even make them deal damage to the enemy at a scale and potency the devs have complete control over, or give buffing capabilities to SCH through such a hypothetical mechanic. They could even make a effect for when two shields hold hands because the party has 2 shield healers, nothing OP but something so that it's not a complete issue to have 2 shield healers. Particularly because they said they will adjust 8 man queues to account for a throughput healer and a shield healer so that 1 of each is present, that makes me think they're trying to say "they're different enough and the differences are impactful enough you want 1 of each" but is that really gonna be the future of queues? waiting for a throughput healer or shield healer? I'm still confused about that bit of info they mentioned in the announcement showcase tbh.

The reason I bring up after effects is because if they want shields to be a thing, with the math the community has done demonstrating that it in fact does not need to be a thing outside of specific instances makes me believe the easiest solution is for the devs to incentivize players in a way that doesn't increase the stress on healers, something the devs have been wanting to avoid as they even brought it up when introducing the Mon Hun savage difficulty boss at the time this is me paraphrasing: "We don't normally have savage level 4 man content till now because once the healer is down there's no way to save the run" which makes sense since the 2 classes with combat rez aren't healers and thus not occupying a required role and fights having to be made with any party loadout in mind rather than specific ones. They further demonstrated wanting to reduce healer stress by reducing the amount of pretty buttons they need to press to pump out damage when they sandpapered them down during ShB launch. if they want to have their cake of not stressing healers or designing content that requires lots of healing to combat boss DPS going out, and eat it and savor the delicious flavor of interesting job mechanics then the path of least resistance is to design incentives or rewards for doing something you should already be doing and they've done this before with BLM and SAM, keep that buff up long enough and you can fire out free nukes, burn those swordskill symbols/medallions to build up this other resource which lets u fire a shoha once you accumulate enough of it.

[Ultimatecalibur]

Couldn't they just incentivize shielding by giving them different after effects once they pop?

My suggestion for SCH is that Aetherflow become a primarily dps resource and that SCH shields would grant Aetherflow stacks when they pop. I posted the following in another thread:

• Max number of Aetherflow stacks increased to about 6
• Aetherflow(ability) would still generate 3 stacks when used.
• Adloquium's Galvanize and Catalyze each give an Aetherflow stack when they break (but not when they fall off).
• Deployment Tactics Galvanize shields maintain the 100% generation chance of Adloquium.
• Succor and Consolidation's shields would have a 20% chance of giving an Aetherflow stack when they break.
• Seraphic Veil shields would have a 50% chance of generating Aetherflow
• Excognition still costs one Aetherflow stack, but gives 2 stacks when it is triggered.
• Fey Union gives an Aetherflow each time it's target takes damage equal to 30% of their max hp.
• Sacred Soil has a chance of giving an Aetherflow when someone under its effect takes damage equal to 30% of their max hp,
• Dissipation would still give 3 stacks at the cost of loosing the fairy for 30s.
• New capstone gcd spell with a 60s or 90s cooldown that consumes all current Aetherflow stacks to deal damage based on Aetherflow spent

[EaMett]

Part of the reason for that is most mitigation cooldowns already solve the same niche Shields are meant to solve. They’re more efficient on singular hits than shields are (assuming of course that hit would one shot). To me, the conversion to pure shields is simply necessary just to make them viable within their one niche irrespective of item level.

The point is, one-shot mechanics that you can survive through are a dime a dozen. So you don't need shields most of the time. And when you do, like you said, mitigation tools from the party can cover a good amount of those scenarios. Removing party mitigation would be a pretty bad move in my opinion since it's one of the few party coordination skills left, so that leaves very limited options. Could they make more mechanics that require shields? Sure. Will they? I doubt it since even "ultimate" requirements are too low for pure shield healers and people already can't handle those.
Also, with pure shielders the meta gameplay will most likely be "pure healers heal everything, shield healers pitch in only when they run out of ogcds or a one-shot hit is going to happen".

So to recap:
- If they add enough one-shot mechanics to require a pure shielder then the healing gameplay suffers because there's no more nuance in healing. It's all big hits that you need to heal through the same way.
- If they remove party mitigation tools and slightly increase one-shot mechanics then it hurts party coordination and shield healers are relegated to secondary healers (which also hurts healer synergy)
- If they keep things as they are, shield healers will be pretty useless

Not a very interesting dynamic regardless of the scenario. Honestly, it's just lose-lose for the concept of a pure shield healer.

I'll wait and see what 6.0 is but my best guess is that the odds of them significantly changing the healing up are very low.