Quote Originally Posted by ty_taurus View Post
The only example of where I could see these sub roles actually mattering is in wanting at least one Barrier Healer during the early stages of Savage or Ultimate prog where having an AoE barrier on the GCD can help the party endure mechanics longer and thus learn the fight more quickly, but that's it.
Or mechanics that require shields to survive. A low damage AoE with a knockback that can't be ignored with Arm's Length but can be blocked if you take zero damage because of a shield, or a two part AoE where the first hit deals low damage and applies a Vuln Up Debuff that needs to be blocked by a shield to survive the high damage second hit. There's some things they could do to make shields mandatory, but the frequency of damage is low enough that I wouldn't be surprised if Seraph and Shake It Off handle such mechanics, assuming SE even bothers to create such mechanics in between the various stack/spread/protean.