Do people in this game not comprehend the concept of shield healers?

[Eien713]

I've been playing this game for a very long time, and in this very long time, I can probably count on one hand the number of shield healers I've come across and who were actually doing their job properly. At least 99% of shield healers treat it like normal healing, casting their shielding spells after the attack hits, which is pretty pointless. I'm really confused. Does the game not explain anything about how shields work? When I play WHM and get paired with a SCH or Noct AST (RIP in 6.0), I die a little inside each time I see those pointless shields thrown around. Now with Sage on the way, I really hope people will finally grasp the concept of how shield healing is supposed to work (though I highly doubt it).

[ZedxKayn]

Well, when most healers don't know how to heal in the first place, expecting good shield usage is hopeful

[Blindheart]

Do you have helpful advise to provide? Your saying how they are doing it wrong but are not explaining what to do right. I spam group heal/shield on SCH if i do it after an attack the shield gets applied, and if they get healed to full health they still have the shield up. Its not always mana efficient to keep shields up for an entire fight. Some fights have random mechanics that you cannot always predict when a shielding spell will be needed. Some players just don't do mechanics and can loose shields even if applied “properly”. They still get full benefit of full shield if they are healed at 10% health or 100%. The shields do have a timer so again they are had to just keep on an entire fight.

If they change shields to last until they are used up and not run out after 30 seconds it might change how people use them.

[RyuDragnier]

To explain why from a SCH perspective, we don't take enough damage to worry about shielding combined with abundance of oGCD heals. Back in ARR and HW, shield healing was used a lot because people took a lot of damage from everything. Tanks had a lot of cooldowns and had to rotate them, because not having one could result in a death easily, just as how not having a shield for any raidwide or tank buster could lead to the death of the party. We had very little oGCD heals too. This was the case until SB, when damage taken for players was lowered as part of a setup to help lower skilled players out. We haven't taken enough damage in most content since then to require shielding, and have only gotten more and more oGCDs allowing us to never touch our shielding to begin with.

[Katie_Kitty]

I'm assuming you're speaking in reference to mainly casual content (dungeons/normal raids and trials etc) in which case *shrug*

Most people are terrible at the game. It's not just shield healing, 90% of the playerbase don't follow basic concepts like ABC and generally they don't even know what all of their skills do. Game is designed for normal content to be accessible to everyone even if they can't read and don't hit their buttons so not much we can do about that.

[Ilenya]

Timing and fight knowledge also tend to have a lot to do with it. It's hard to put up Adlo for that big tank buster if you don't know when it is or if your GCD happens to be slightly off the mark.

Always going to find it amusing that SCH, the "premier" shield healer, is the only one that doesn't have an instant cast shield, but that's just how things are.

[MPK]

waste of gcds tbh fam very situational

[Roeshel]

I've been playing this game for a very long time, and in this very long time, I can probably count on one hand the number of shield healers I've come across and who were actually doing their job properly. At least 99% of shield healers treat it like normal healing, casting their shielding spells after the attack hits, which is pretty pointless. I'm really confused. Does the game not explain anything about how shields work? When I play WHM and get paired with a SCH or Noct AST (RIP in 6.0), I die a little inside each time I see those pointless shields thrown around. Now with Sage on the way, I really hope people will finally grasp the concept of how shield healing is supposed to work (though I highly doubt it).

SCH's AoE shields are pretty insignificant. If they didn't have the Catalyze buff, they might as well just made them a regen healer. If I am not mistaken you have only Succor which is 125% of 180 cure potency. And at level 56 you get to spread once every 120secs Adloquium you've cast by using Deployment Tactics on your tank (most probably) to everyone around IF everyone is around. The synergy is actually quite awful. Shields take like 1 - 2 seconds for the game to realize that they are there. So if you cast Adloquium and then immediately use Deployment Tactics nothing will happen. To play your shields optimally you need to start the casting of a shield 4-5secs before the AoE hits.

In most cases, even if they play their shields right, you would still have to cast medica II, which has a total of 700 cure potency which is > 3x succor's shields. So basically using succor in advance purely for the shield value is just a waste of gcd. It is pointless to cast it before and after. They should just use whispering dawn and spam ruin.

[Allegor]

To be fair, it's harder to be proactive than reactive when you don't even know what's going on. Assuming they're new, that is.

[Recon1o6]

Its a combination of factors

Incoming damage is so low that in many cases, the aoe heal from the shield aoe is enough. Consequently players dont pre shield

skill level and skill requirements have plummeted across the board over shb and sb. A lot of players barely perform at minimum. Sage is gonna get complaints its too hard regardless of its actual difficulty for this reason

shields in shb really suck, half the time they aren't worth the effort