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[Drekor]

From what I can see, the only separation between the two is one is: on-demand shields on the GCD (shield healers) with weaker on-demand heals, whereas the other is on-demand heals on the GCD (pure healers) but no on-demand shields. oGCDs are equalized more or less in effective potency with slight nuances between each healer.

It sorta makes sense, having too many shields on a shield healer means you can stack them and ignore mechanics, which is something game devs want to avoid.
On the alternative side, shield healers having shields that can't stack but also having little to no way of recovering raw hp means if you screw up your shielding at one point or because the DPS eats heavy dmg, there's no way to recover, other than physick-level heal spam. This issue is largely mitigated by having oGCD heals, even if they are somewhat weak or are regen.

Finally, the third thing - probably if both shield healers have a lot of shields that can't stack in each individual kit, but can stack with other healer's kits, it might make them more meta-comp than 1 pure healer & 1 shield healer. Though... that may change based on encounter design the next expansion. They are... giving a lot more mobility focus to almost every job. Either raidwides are going to be more heavier / frequent that necessitates dodging avoidable AoEs, or there will be more mechanically heavy fights that require movement, which makes it a lot easier to mess up and require frequent healing bursts.

Hopefully I'm not being Copium.

There is a fair bit of copium there.

Few things to address. First the "on-demand" shields is kinda pointless for a few reasons. Most healing is done off the gcd so having your only shields for a "shield" healer sit there and get used 5% of the time doesn't really fit the theme. Second the shields are usually half heal and half shield which means they are only an efficient GCD if the target has already taken damage and will taken damage again shortly, this is surprisingly not as common as you might think outside of tanks. Using it purely for the shield is just a straight waste unless the boss is not targetable(transition) or your party will literally die without a shield in which case... just bring an AST they are keeping neutral sect so they can shield anyways(and better than SCH).

As for having too many shields being able to ignore mechanics... that's not really the case. time is time. Whether you spend the GCD(or oGCD CD) before the damage or after it you still spent the time to deal with the damage. And you can already stack AST and SCH shields now and you'll probably still be doing it in EW.