We have an underutilized mechanic in “heal absorbed”. I have suggested that it could be used to fix this issue. It would allow for constant requirement to heal while also avoiding oneshots. Hell, it could even be used to help with smoothing out incoming damage!
The only downside is that by design it would require both the tank to monitor it to see if they can do a big pull and the damage dealers to help with it in the majority of cases.
My suggestion on the matter has been different:
Tanks get to have high mitigation, low damage, high control, low self-healing, 0 group-healing
Healers get to have low mitigation, low damage, 0 control, high self-healing, high group-healaing
Damage dealers get to have 0 mitigation, high damage, low control, low self-healing, 0 group-healing
How do you challenge a healer that can put really big shields? By increasing the damage. And if you fail somehow to place that shield, the player will 100% be 1-shot for sure.
Back to 1-shot mechanics. Fail == wipe.
You dont get the issue with all that:
We have to abandon this “set roll” you suggest. It simply dosent work.
It works in a game that is simple enough where the skill of players is relatively constant. The coordination of player is simple enough to be reliable. And where the difficulty of encounters is constant.
Aka: Vanilla WoW.
But this is 2025 Retail. All that above is simply not possible anymore. And not fun at all.
Unless something has severely changed since I last checked, Discipline cannot have 100% uptime on shields on the entire party; they also need to heal damage, not just prevent it. Heal-absorbs would force that healer to spend a lot of gcds on healing them up, effectively having less opportunities to use big shields.
Last season’s Disc Priest gameplay way degenerate.
What that means is that because shields exist, the Damage people could survive was WAY higher than with any other healer. And mind you, technically speaking, the HPS (including shields) a Disc was doing last season was not much higher than anybody else’s.
In lower keys, Disc Priest allowed people to be immortal. In the strict sense of the word. Because by having tank-level HP bars people could literally stand in a swirly and never die. That way you could ignore ALL mechanics in a dungeon. In high keys, people could survive literal 1-shots that were impossible to survive with any other healer.
Shields as a mechanic is that OP.
If you somehow gave shields to every healer, what that would create is a gameplay loop where the primary goal of all healers would be to overheal as much as possible, in order to make shields as big as possible such that everyone (especially in low keys) became immortal and never died.
If nobody dies, even if they ignore ALL mechanics and stand on every swirly out there… then dungeon damage needs to reflect that accordingly. And it needs to increase.
Its a nasty feedback loop. And we have been there before. In fact, we are exiting the 5th loop of “more healer power → more damage → more healer power… ect…”.
The point of my suggestions is to break that loop. We have to exit that stupid cycle because I know the consequences. The only way to break that loop is to dump extra “skill expression” into the bottomless pit of GCD which is DPS.