Some Questions About FFXIV vs. WoW

[EaMett]

Most of your questions have been answered I'm just going to touch on a couple of points that haven't been thoroughly addressed yet.

First of all we expect healers to see an overhaul in the next expansion (in 3 months time) so everything that follows is the current set of affairs:

White mage is essentially going to be your druid equivalent. Has party wide HoT, single target HoT, one shield on cooldown, an aoe HoT, and comes with some bonus powerful heals all around (single and multi target). With that said, Astrologian offers pretty much the same toolkit with the added bonus of multiple player/party buffs with their card system. You can find many resources around the net introducing all three healers so I won't go into detail (here's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fs3zVWS6tGs ).

As far as healer gameplay goes here's the catch. Healers in FFXIV are expected to DPS during their downtime. And as you optimize your play you will get A LOT of downtime. It gets to the point where you will rarely ever use a GCD skill in dungeons/raids. All your healing will be done with ogcd skills.
Healer DPS is not negligible here. In dungeons, it isn't rare to top the charts as healer, and in raids two healers combined are worth one dps (roughly).

This leads me to macros. Like mentioned before you can't queue skills server side with macros. This, however, is very rarely an issue with healing skills because you use so little of them. So it's fine to mouse over macro your healer skills, it won't keep you from keeping your party alive or even keep you from being able to parse in the top percentiles. You however never want to macro your dps skills because queuing is crucial for good dps.

When it comes to healer macros however, never EVER (caps for emphasis) use multi-action macros. Unless you understand exactly what you are doing. Because of how things are set up in FFXIV, in pratice, the order of your actions within a single macro is NOT guarantied. So if youu take the second macro from the post above, it is both possible and likely that you will heal yourself or your hard target instead of your mouseover target. The first macro in the post above is the correct way of doing things.

Feel free to ask if you have any questions.