Please Nerf Shield Healer Pure Heals

[QooEr]

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.

the only other way is to add mechanics that do something bad like a damage down or a huge bleed unless you take 0 damage, which would necessitate a shield. Sounds kind of forced but yeah

[Grimoire-M]

the only other way is to add mechanics that do something bad like a damage down or a huge bleed unless you take 0 damage, which would necessitate a shield. Sounds kind of forced but yeah

There are a few other alternatives, the safest option being maximum-HP penalties akin to the vit penalty on Weakness in the past, likely on avoidable sources. That would flip the situation from needing raw heals after the fact to shields beforehand based purely on context during progression. Similarly, you could have mechanics which kill you if you're over a certain HP threshold (similar to Min HP on Gavel, but it applies a doom effect if you screw up the condition during it) and design damage during that phase to require shielding at specific points and regens could also be layered in to handle a sustained darkness damage source (since that bypasses shields and mitigation already), while raw heals are used sparingly to avoid over-healing.

Two things that could help from a scaling perspective would be to give Piety a boost to healing action potency at a rate that's notably stronger than Det or Crit, and squishing down the vertical progression a bit by making best-in-slot Savage gear equal to the next tier's Normal and Crafted sets, with Tome, Extreme, Alliance, and Savage gear being the only item level bumps till the patch cycle comes to another tier. Between all of those sources it is gradually used to fill out gearsets across the board for any player's needs, but the item level squish itself has the knock-on effect of reducing the effect of mitigation from gear. Those in tandem can then be tuned so that a minimum Piety threshold actually matters for min-ilvl situations in Savage, and therefore makes picking up Piety gear more attractive. I doubt it would actually affect the first two fights in a tier but the goal would be to lower the gap between min-ilvl and Best in Slot enough to make it affect the third and fourth fights in a tier consistently till you're comfortable with the content, and as a secondary benefit it would give Savage players their reward of having BiS for world first prog without needing to craft up a storm (though crafting would remain extremely helpful for filling in gaps or getting a new player or alt-class up to speed quickly).

[QooEr]

you also reminded me, that there could also be bleeds combined with 1HP mechanics. that also necessitates a shield

[Hysterior]

I am really concerned about the need for a shield healer at all...

While they are super useful for progression, once you have things on farm, people know what to do and you get better gear, what would be the point of bringing a shield healer? Hope they have more DPS than the pure healer then... otherwise I think you are wasting a team slot...

That will really boil down to DPS I guess...

[Saefinn]

I am really concerned about the need for a shield healer at all...

While they are super useful for progression, once you have things on farm, people know what to do and you get better gear, what would be the point of bringing a shield healer? Hope they have more DPS than the pure healer then... otherwise I think you are wasting a team slot...

That will really boil down to DPS I guess...

It is capable of existing as a healing style, just like Disc Priest in WoW is (from what I hear). But I'd argue it hasn't existed as one in FFXIV since ARR but instead in the form you describe. Hence my request to nerf heals (and boost shields if needed). With its current use I don't think it'll be fit for purpose. I think they're trying to recreate that 2.0 dichotomy that WHM and SCH had, which worked really well. but the jobs have evolved and changed since then and if the jobs don't get adjusted to accommodate this approach then it's going to be redundant.

And I fear they won't make the adjustments needed because it will create this perception that the jobs will no longer be as approachable (although I disagree - and I think if anything, better teaching tools mitigate that)

[Kabooa]

Too many of you are thinking about this from "Shields are only good for one-shots". This is because your shield options are weaker than your heal options.

When your shield options are stronger than your heal options, this is the reverse. This is why Saefinn specifically is requesting a nerf to raw healing on the Shield specialization jobs.

Ultimately though, there is also a need to reduce / shift the potency of on demand burst healing into Shielding, Regen, and other non-permanent HP restoration. High Burst HP healing should not only be expensive, but not nearly as readily available as it is.

One could argue we should also remove in-combat natural regeneration, as though it is minor, is still upwards of 10-15% of HP restored in a given fight.

[Grimoire-M]

Too many of you are thinking about this from "Shields are only good for one-shots". This is because your shield options are weaker than your heal options.

When your shield options are stronger than your heal options, this is the reverse. This is why Saefinn specifically is requesting a nerf to raw healing on the Shield specialization jobs.

Ultimately though, there is also a need to reduce / shift the potency of on demand burst healing into Shielding, Regen, and other non-permanent HP restoration. High Burst HP healing should not only be expensive, but not nearly as readily available as it is.

One could argue we should also remove in-combat natural regeneration, as though it is minor, is still upwards of 10-15% of HP restored in a given fight.

To me it’s not about making shields stronger than raw heals, it’s about making shields able to replace multiple mitigation sources with a singular fallback button. Mitigation already has its place as a tool to deal with heavy sustained damage. And Regens and Raw heals can compliment mitigation in that scenario through higher potency or better MP economy. I do agree that Raw healing and shielding should go down overall, but then we run into the issue of mitigation being the only thing that matters for burst as it is now, which necessitates nerfing it as well, which detracts from the overall goal of making it so some combination of GCD shields and mitigation, and follow up heals are required for burst scenarios. The overall tuning goal is to make shields the go-to option for preventing one shots, Mitigation and regens for sustained damage, and raw heals as supplementary burst when necessary to conserve resources. GCD Shields in particular need to go up relative to where they are now. Raw heals need to be more efficient in other ways, but ideally they are better on WHM/AST’s toolkits than on SCH/SAG.

[LeonKeyh]

I'm going to preface this with the fact that I only dabble in healing with SCH. I've leveled everything to 80, but definitely don't know anything about healing high level content. I do love theory crafting and crunching numbers though.

I'm trying to figure out what the ultimate goal of nerfing pure heals is. I'm assuming that we want to push SCH/SAG to actually use their shields instead of how right now SCH mainly uses oGCD aetherflow pure heals? If that's the goal, with how the game works right now, those shields would need to be oGCD heals. That's basically it. I feel like people use Illustrate and Indom because they can continue to DPS not because they're necessarily "better."

I also thing that the "Pure Healer" vs "Shield Healer" are somewhat misnomers. It's more like "Shield Healer" vs "Regen Healer" as it is balanced currently (and as they seem to want to do).

As for differentiation on how shield heals work, there are a few options, but I'm not sure that they would make for fun game play for the shield healers:

1. Implement shield degradation - Shields tick down as they sit on people, losing efficacy the further from the point between putting the shield on someone and them getting hit. With this setup, SCH's Emergency Tactics could maybe consume the shield to go a full heal to that point instead, as was discussed by a few others.

2. Shield Specific Mitigation - Shields have their own armor value, so damage dealt to shields may be higher/lower than the damage that would be dealt to straight up health. This would make shields stronger on low armor classes.

3. More effects for broken shields (a la TBN) - Have different shields which, when broken, give different effects to the person the shield was put on (or the caster who put the shield on them). Shield that, when broken does a small AE heal to everyone around the person, one that gives the person a X% mitigation boost for X seconds, restores X MP to the caster, gives the caster a buff that allows them to use another ability, etc.

4. Lower duration on shields (plus maybe "bonuses" for shields 'running out') - Have shields be 8-12s long or something, if the buff runs out while some shield is left then there's a bonus (e.g. shield's duration runs out it does a normal heal on the target, gives the caster MP back, basically the stuff above), also, make them stronger to specifically deal with burst damage. Then you have regen being strong for sustained damage and shields available for burst damage (as long as you can preemptively shield).

[EaMett]

When your shield options are stronger than your heal options, this is the reverse. This is why Saefinn specifically is requesting a nerf to raw healing on the Shield specialization jobs.

Your shield options will never be stronger than your heal options because your heal options will be your co-healer. It'll just be meta to only pitch in when they're out of ogcds.
Not that we don't already do this to some degree. ASTs get heal priorities etc.. But it'll just be flat out pure healer vs shield healer.

[Kabooa]

Your shield options will never be stronger than your heal options because your heal options will be your co-healer. It'll just be meta to only pitch in when they're out of ogcds.
Not that we don't already do this to some degree. ASTs get heal priorities etc.. But it'll just be flat out pure healer vs shield healer.

This is why I also said there needs to be a shift / reduction of free on demand burst healing.

For single healers, it should be minimizing GCDs to healing by properly using your tools.

For double healers, it should be minimizing GCDs to healing by properly using both of your tools.