An interview with Yoshida and his thoughts on healers in 5.0

[ReiMakoto]

The main problem is there are only limited ways you can actually heal people and have them be different in the current healer set up (direct healing), so the only way to diversify healers would be to change how they dps, which they'll never do while the dev team maintains the attitude that healer dps is optional.

[Kalise]

The main problem is there are only limited ways you can actually heal people and have them be different in the current healer set up (direct healing)

Direct Healing
Healing Over Time
Reactive Healing
Shields
Channelled Healing
Healing from dealing Damage

Compared to what? DPS?

Cast a damage
Slap a damage
Shoot a damage
Uhh... Damage over time
???

Healing is only limited by the way that Green DPS Healers are set up. Which is where healing throughput is jacked up to high heaven so people rarely need to use GCD heals and instead rely on oGCD instant healing (Which is limited in how it can be designed and still function)

Fun Fact:

WoW has had the above mentioned Healing designs incorporated into that games 4 healers for years.

Holy Paladin has been the class that traditionally focused on direct healing (With Beacon working similarly to Synastry allowing them to heal 2 targets. Making them excellent Tank healers)

Restoration Druid has been the class that is focused on HoTs. With them having even their main heals at times having a portion of its output being backloaded into a HoT effect, with a lot of synergy with multi-HoTing (Such as AoE healing spells that affect only allies with your single target HoT active on them)

Restoration Shaman has been the class that is focused on reactive heals as well as splashing (Heh, puns) out into HoTs and direct healing. Its most notable skill being Earth Shield which procs heals when the target affected takes damage (Ahh, I remember the days of running Heroics in WotLK where I'd just put Earth Shield on the Tank, /follow them and then go watch TV and come back 20 minutes later to a completed dungeon...)

Discipline Priest has had 2 different paths over the course of the game. The primary one being a focus on applying shields to absorb damage, with heals to back up because of CD's between shield application (A debuff on the target of a shield so you can multi-shield people but can't spam onto one person and make them invulnerable). The secondary one was healing by dealing damage, where you'd pump out DPS and smart healing would occur to heal the lowest health target for a significant portion of your DPS.

Holy Priest has been another direct healing based healer, only with a HoT along with their kit. Their main focus was how they could shift between an "AoE Heal" stance and a "ST Heal" stance making them the most flexible healer.

Mistweaver Monks have, like Disc Priests, 2 different paths in the game. The first being a channelled healer where their main heal was channelled on a target. With other things like a HoT that bounces around to random targets to multi-HoT (As well as heals that consume these HoTs to heal a bunch on said targets). Their second path was that of a melee DPS healer, where they went and punched things and did some healing based on damage as well as weaving in instant healing skills using combo points.

FFXIV having Shield healer, HoT healer and "Lel I do both" healer is not exhaustive of design space for healing, much like how DPS haven't exhausted their design space either.

so the only way to diversify healers would be to change how they dps, which they'll never do while the dev team maintains the attitude that healer dps is optional.

They can change how healers DPS, they can change how healers provide party support (AST has cards. SCH has a CD skill. WHM... Cries in the corner). They can change how healing is done to make room for healing differences (There's no reason that the framework for healing has to be: Smol heal, Big heal, AoE heal, Instant heal (w/ HoT or Shield)) an example is something like how Adlo is mostly a shield compared to Cure II/Benefic II which are just direct heals (For example, if one of them was a designated "HoT healer" then perhaps one could have some of its potency in a HoT effect after the direct heal).

They can maybe try and change how damage works so it's less predictable and less condensed into specific Tankbuster/Raidbuster skills so that it's less feasible to just use oGCD's to heal most things.

They can try and tie in damage dealing skills into healing output and vice versa.

There's so much they can do with healing that can diversify healing classes, even among the current systems of XIV.

[Hustensaft]

WoW has had the above mentioned Healing designs incorporated into that games 4 healers for years.

That was MoP/WoD healer design - and several of those have shown, while fun to play, to have signficant downsides.

Absorbs - and we're seeing the same in FFXIV - generally make the game less fun for other healers (= you have far less to heal when the big stuff is absorbed) and make encounters vastly less dangerous (you just use whatever big absorb you have before dangerous stuff). WoW signficantly reduced all absorb healing due to that.
Melee healing puts rather difficult encounter mechanic restrictrions on the melee healer. Monks (and Paladins) were essentially immune to any healer/ranged mechanic - if they weren't, you'd either nuke melees, or if they require movement, just be unable to heal. Both are two not workable states for a healer.

Even with that, we still have Direct Healing, HoT Healing, channeled healing and dps-to-heal in WoW... with 6 healing specs that all play differently enough.

FFXIV on the other hand slapped the base healing toolkit on all classes - which is mostly unused - healing is taking care by off-GCD abilities (which are rather similar for all classes). Rest of the time is spent casting Broil, Malefic and Stone, yay.

[Shurrikhan]

Direct Healing
Healing Over Time
Reactive Healing
Shields
Channeled Healing
Healing from dealing Damage

Compared to what? DPS?

Cast a damage
Slap a damage
Shoot a damage
Uhh... Damage over time
???

This. The basic classifications only barely scratch the surface of differentiating gameplay and capacity, and we still have most of the basic differentiators left to go anyways.

[Selova]

snip.

FFXIV does not have a HoT healer, they have healers with HoTs attached to a few abilities which is a big difference. The only 2 healing play styles in this game are shield healer and pure/direct healer. I imagine they are trying to figure out how to introduce a new kind of healer that wouldn't completely break the game, with the way combat is designed and damage is dished out a Resto Druid-esque healer would be completely broken.

It's obvious how much work coming up with a brand new type of healer that doesn't fall into the pure healer or shield healer category and they would honestly rather focus on trying to balance the current roster of healers rather than adding another one into the mix. Let's at least hope it doesn't take them another entire expansion to figure out how to balance the current three.