Differentiate pure heals and shields?

[Rongway]

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. Shields would decrease about the same rate as regen heals, so shield + regen would be fairly strong (unless they're already at max health)

This one suggestion is particularly problematic. Shields are, by design, already numerically inferior to regens. This is an intentional design decision because shields allow you to survive a hit that would have killed you, whereas a regen would not prevent death even though the overall numerical effect is higher when the regen ticks for its full duration. Deflating shields over time would be double penalizing unless the initial shield potency is far far greater than we have now; however, increasing initial shield potency higher than we have now would trivialize many mechanics because healers would just get better at timing their shields to cast as late as possible, negating far more damage than the devs ever intended.