Indeed, healers usually run a lot of armor to survive (which makes sense), while shield WP/DoK have to stack Strength just to have even minimal healing.Mvl130 wrote: Fri Feb 13, 2026 12:42 pm Regarding shield healers, what I notice in scenarios, is for example Runepriests stacking armor talismans, despite remaining in the backline, and greatly out-healing shield spec.
While with your shield spec, you are forced to invest into full strength talismans, because otherwise your healing output is non-existent. And despite this investment, you now deal low damage, because of this base heal change they made. You have as such lower defenses than backline healers, who heal for more while taking less risk : their healing output is more consistent, because they are not susceptible to kiting, snares or parry stacking do not affect their ability to heal, and receive less knockbacks and stuns because they are away from the melee train
There is not a single thing shield specs do better than backline healers, you die all the time, your healing output is weak and inconsistent, you no longer have assist damage, you steal a guard slot ; any WE hitting you with healing debuff poison is enough to make you 100% worthless, and it's easy for them to do so, because you are forced to be in melee
I mean what the hell is this
As a curious data point: in my most recent shield scenarios, and according to the killboard/scoreboard, roughly 30% of the healing I did was spent keeping myself alive; whereas other healers typically had self-healing closer to around 10%. And even then, with a 3+3+3 armor setup (to maximize Strength, Weapon Skill, and Wounds), my survivability was still low, my damage was negligible and my heals was very low.
Not to mention that Divine Assault was healing for 400 ticks, when on a 2H DPS build I can easily get 1000 ticks.



