In the beginning, healing was a dance. Healers had a larger library of attack spells--mostly DOTs--to supplement healing downtime with something more engaging--something that had a gameplay loop. At the same time, you more often needed to stop your DPS in order to heal, because OGCD healing methods were limited, or nearly non-existent (if we're talking about ARR). ARR White Mage had exactly 1 OGCD heal: Benediction on a 5 minute cooldown. That's not to say that more OGCD healing wasn't a healthy step forward for healers, because the added cooldowns provided by HW were a really good addition to each healer, as that gave them more flexibility in things like mobility, MP management, and DPS windows to meet their healing goals. But the problem with constantly adding more and more OGCDs is that the demand for healing has not scaled to meet the increase in healing powercreep we've seen from one expansion to the next. This has been very unhealthy to that balance between offense and recovery that was once the star of healer gameplay and what set FFXIV healing apart from WOW healing.
