Skipping the shields on FF

This is some epic forum trolling. It has to be. The position here is too indefensible to be serious. And just to be clear, I'm talking about the claim that bringing healing to a team, especially a heal as long-activating (and both slow and single-targeted as Aid Other) is more generally valuable than softcapping the team's defense.

Teammates at the defense softcap avoid, on average, all but 10% of the damage thrown at them. Someone who can already comfortably withstand, say, 150 points of incoming DPS due to their resists and +regen can sustain an average of 1500 points of damage if they are at the softcap. Let's say another character survive that 150 DPS because they have 25% defense - if you move them from 25% defense to 45%+ with your shields they would go from being able to survive 150 DPS to 300 DPS. In both cases that's a whole shipload of damage you no longer have to run around healing. Moreover, if they are still taking enough damage to kill them after you apply your shields, the benefit of any healing you give them healing is magnified compared to the damage foes are spitting at your team.

You say teams don't "need" this. Ignoring how you keep making reference to the Stone Tanker or other edge cases, I think the teams you're talking about could do better with bubbles. If they don't "need" to be softcapped, they aren't running combat at as fast a pace, or on as high a settings as they could with more defense. So, sure, they don't "need" shields to cap them if they don't care about doing those things. If they would like more reward faster, they could sure put them to good use. Better use than heals alone, unless they all come with their own softcapped builds, or Stone Tanker levels of layered mitigation. (And the people who bring high defense builds before getting bubbled would still likely benefit more from +DR shields than heals.)

At lower incoming DPS heals will be better, and at higher DPS the shields will be. There's a breakover point somewhere in there. No one I play the game with plays in ways that keep the DPS that low, because we push it hard.

Edit: A lot of teams ask for "healers" because, generally, the people asking for that have past experienced with other MMOs, where proactive mitigation in the form of buffs are far, far weaker than they are in CoH. In those environments, heals are often the strongest survival tools that support characters can bring to a team. Here, under high incoming DPS situations, heals are better used to shore up buffs like Defense and DR. Those folks usually aren't aware of how CoH's mechanics are different from those other MMOs. To not put a fine point on it, they're ignorant of this game's mechanics.

(Case in point: Go try to "pigpile" the Freedom Phalanx at the end of the RSF with just a healer. Then try it with just softcapped characters. Repeat each a few times, and see which one generally goes better.)

All I have left to say on this topic is this, take a gander at the 'other' games forums and search for a 'certain' person and brush up on their posting history, and everything should be clear.