Can we stop punishing shield healers for playing together?

[Lazariah]

To be fair, two ASTs also don't get value on Neutral sect as much either. Shields would still overwrite each other.
Raw heals and regens are no problem though, but that also applies to SCH.

If double shields weren't nerfed, why would you ever want to bring a non-shield healer? You can just block any lethal damage by stacking 2 shields to guarantee survival (~1000 potency shield single target, ~600 potency on AoE). Doubly so if it crits. Imagine 2 Recitations + Crit Adlo + Deployment. Then, we're left with the point on having more mechanics that just directly deletes the party and make shields useless - which means healing would be largely redundant as no amount of mitigation would do any purpose.

Sounds more like an encounter issue to me. Honestly FFXIV's encounter design is shit for healers in general.

[SweetestLily]

If you're having trouble making sge/sch work then youre most likely playing the combination wrong. Currently progging DSR as sage/sch with my cohealer and we find that the mitigation is stupid broken and by far its the best comp in there for mitigation checks. I never have to gcd heal at all either as the sage and mechanics that were leaving us almost dead before are only doing about half the damage they used to. If they made gcd shields stack the comp would be over the top broken and everyone would be able to cheese tankbusters/mechanics. Its fine as is.

[Eorzean_username]

You could just fuse a form of Emergency Tactics/Pepsis natively into the GCD shield actions.

ie: If you cast a GCD shield on an already-GCD shielded target, it converts automatically into a direct heal for that amount of 'lost' Shield potency instead, based on a formula of how much shield remained when you overwrote the previous shield.

ie,
• No shield applied (other shield remaining potency was larger than your application attempt) — All of your cast's shielding potency converted to healing potency

• Full shield applied (other shield remaining potency was smaller than your application attempt) — Apply a heal equal to the remaining potency of the previous shield when it was overwritten

This prevents GCD shield-stacking but allows for getting full potency out of shield GCDs when they're being flung around and overlapping from multiple sources.

Not really a "strategy" for Savage or anything, but instead just QOL for situations where you don't have comp control, like Alliance Raids.

[LeonKeyh]

You could just fuse a form of Emergency Tactics/Pepsis natively into the GCD shield actions.

ie: If you cast a GCD shield on an already-GCD shielded target, it converts automatically into a direct heal for that amount of 'lost' Shield potency instead, based on a formula of how much shield remained when you overwrote the previous shield.

ie,
• No shield applied (other shield remaining potency was larger than your application attempt) — All of your cast's shielding potency converted to healing potency

• Full shield applied (other shield remaining potency was smaller than your application attempt) — Apply a heal equal to the remaining potency of the previous shield when it was overwritten

This prevents GCD shield-stacking but allows for getting full potency out of shield GCDs when they're being flung around and overlapping from multiple sources.

Not really a "strategy" for Savage or anything, but instead just QOL for situations where you don't have comp control, like Alliance Raids.

I wonder why this isn't a thing. I would say that what you do is change shields to "If shield is overwritten (or duration ends?) it heals the target for its remaining value"

That IS a fairly significant change though and I feel like you'd really need to rebalance shield healers if something like that would be done. I think it "makes sense", but I also have heard that double shield healer isn't really that bad as-is.

[Elesh]

Before EW there was WHM which was a HoT healer, SCH which was a shield healer, and AST which could choose between either. I played WHM and AST, because that allowed me to always fully utilize my kit. If I was on AST and got paired with an SCH, I'd choose diurnal to avoid shield overlap, otherwise nocturnal.

How we have SGE which is a shield healer, and AST is permanently diurnal. Any combination of SGE and SCH will be handicapped because their shields don't stack. SGE is even worse off than SCH due to addersting. I don't know how exactly it works with another shield healer, but chances are the stack is not granted if the shield from Eukrasian Diagnosis is ovewritten by another shield, because that would be exploitable to gain stacks quickly and even out of combat.

Some time ago SE removed the damage type specific debuffs from dps jobs to make more combinations viable. Could something be done about healers so any combination works?

PS. I realize that duty finder content where I'm randomly paired with another healer is easy enough that suboptimal performance won't matter. But I also have a friend who plays SCH and I'd love to be able to use SGE when playing with her without either of us feeling like we're stepping on the other's toes.

I'm just curious why you think sage/scholar isn't a viable healing combination for savage content?

Just... don't use the handful of skills that overlap or coordinate who is going to use them when.

Sage/scholar was, for a bit, the meta healer comp because of how good sage's pure healing was.

[elioaiko]

Tbh SGE and SCH besides the GCD shields work well together.

They even have enough pure healing to bypass the need for WHM or AST not to mention that SGE isn't punished for using Addersgall and having an AOE regen every 30s and then another one every 60s.

They can be top tier together if AST wasn't an rDPS/healing monster.

[Deceptus]

Right now the simplest solution is to have SCH apply Galvanize on all of their shields (including crits) and Sage to apply Cauterize on all of their shields.

Allows for stacking and doesn't allow Sage to overwrite SCH shields with their weaker versions (Weaker Sage shields replace stronger SCH shields).

WHM/AST regens stack so should SCH/SGE shields. The standard, non crit shields shield for less than 10% of a tanks hp. There's no reason to not allow it. Just tone down the crit multiplier.

[LeonKeyh]

Right now the simplest solution is to have SCH apply Galvanize on all of their shields (including crits) and Sage to apply Cauterize on all of their shields.

Allows for stacking and doesn't allow Sage to overwrite SCH shields with their weaker versions (Weaker Sage shields replace stronger SCH shields).

WHM/AST regens stack so should SCH/SGE shields. The standard, non crit shields shield for less than 10% of a tanks hp. There's no reason to not allow it. Just tone down the crit multiplier.

Problem with allowing for shields to stack is that it can invalidate a lot of current mechanics and would be TOO powerful.

I definitely think the better solution would be to have the shield being overwritten heals the person its on for the rest of its value. That ESSENTIALLY does the same thing as allowing stacking while also limited the maximum amount of shields that can be added to a person.

[Deceptus]

Problem with allowing for shields to stack is that it can invalidate a lot of current mechanics and would be TOO powerful.

This always keeps getting trotted out as an excuse but that's all it really is. It can be circumvented by a small change to the system where a shield can't invalidate a mechanic (debuff), the mechanic is always applied regardless.

But that only really happens in the case of Shields that Crit. And that can also be mitigated by lowering the after crit shield value modifier.

Right now the standard Adlo is less than 10% of a tanks max HP. More like 7-8%. That's not going to invalidate anything. And Sages don't have time to be fishing for shield crits mid fight.

[Liam_Harper]

Problem with allowing for shields to stack is that it can invalidate a lot of current mechanics and would be TOO powerful.

If they simply made it so mechanics that apply debuffs like Damage Down, Doom or Vuln will still apply even if you took 0 damage, I can't see how it would be too powerful.

You can already stack Neutral Asp Helios with a Reci-Spread-Adlo for some rather huge GCD shields every 2 mins, but even if you added Shake, Divine Veil, lots of mitigation and reduced some mechs down to 0 damage, no one does it because it either doesn't work overall or it's simply not worth the waste of resources.
It was used once back in e10s to simplify one mechanic but all it did was buy a few GCD's uptime on something that wasn't even too difficult.

Shields only have value on a mechanic that would otherwise kill you without a shield. There is no mechanic that needs 2x shields. Stacking a ton of crit GCD shields is still less potency than a regular shield and some pure healing.