Barrier VS Heal

** What purpose should Barrier and Heal have to work as 2 different spells? **

Morello has been a little silent about the Barrier/Heal issue lately, and, considering the latest patch on PBE, Heal will probably go unchanged or lose the Grievous Wound cleanse feature on 4.7 patch cycle.

From my point of view, the issue with Barrier and Heal is that at the moment they are redundant, with barrier being slightly better in certain stages and facing ignite, and Heal working better in duo lanes (especially when facing kill lane support like Morgana who often runs ignite+Flash).

Morello proposed something along the lines of a "small intervention" replacing Barrier.

I liked that idea, because it differentiates the use, instead of making one spell better than the other in 90% scenarios, reducing the variety of the viable spells.

The question the player should ask himself when picking either Heal or Barrier should be **"What, or who, do I want to defend myself from?" ** . Because, of course, if he wanted to be aggressive he'd run ignite.

Heal should be a duo lane oriented spell, since it shares the Heal with their fellow laner,and the ignite cleanse looks like an interesting feature. However, it has a redundancy with Barrier as , currently,** they both just flatly increase your health , even if barrier only for a short duration.**

I think the "Permanent health from Heal" is not a valid argument to differentiate them. On the other hand, a %Damage reduction for a short duration would make Barrier look different and work better in different scenarios , and separate the "best case use" from heal and Barrier.

For example, I often saw fed assassins like and bursting squishies from 100 to 0 regardless of barrier . with this change, Barrier would work better against assassins , and worse against sustained damage dealer, like Ryze or Kayle, in which case you'd rather take heal to survive and run from them.

However, there was one thing that bugged me a little: Morello proposed a 100% Damage reduction that would make Marksmen lategame a little too strong , especially if paired with Black Shield, since when the target cannot take damage , the Black Shield cannot be broken. A better solution would be a % damage reduction, not total, that still ignores true damage. Darius and Cho'Gath would still be able to nuke squishy with barrier, and it create consistency with Exhaust that also doesn't affect true damage with it's 50% damage reduction. One could also argue that, since True damage on the two aforementioned is on their ultimate, Barrier shouldn't reduce that damage for consistency with Cleanse that also ignores suppression (ultimate on WW, Malzahar and Urgot).