Healing in WoW is a bit more "evened out" overall, I feel, and it's actually why I'm shelving my healer for a DPS in XIV instead.

Healing in XIV has two situations: either "Maytag Repairman levels of boredom", or "OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT!!!" and there's usually not all that much of a gradient between the two.

In WoW, damage is more gradual, but also more consistent, meaning a healer can generally be constantly pushing buttons to be HEALING instead of dealing damage. This, in turn, makes designing raid encounters all around easier because factoring healer DPS into the equation is probably the biggest nightmare the devs have had with XIV.

And it compounds upon itself: if a healer doesn't need to heal, it's because their raid group is experienced enough to know the mechanics and avoid all of the avoidable damage, which in turn frees up a LOT more of the healer's mana and GCDs to devote to DPS.

This means that good groups will do a LOT better and so-so groups will do a LOT worse, making the raiding difficulty "curve" into more of an "S" shape than a parabola.

And I hate to say it, but the other key difference is WoW's 1sec GCD vs. XIV's 2.5sec GCD. This means that damage in XIV generally NEEDS to be spikier due to the amount of time between each spell a healer can cast, otherwise the damage won't even be worth healing up.

The end result is that everyone is sitting at full until suddenly someone is at half health or below and you need to fix that immediately or else the next hit will kill them.

It's a level of whack-a-mole that I've not seen in other MMOs' healing systems and with healer DPS being super simplified in SB, I'm hanging up my globe for something more fun.