Quote Originally Posted by Cyrocco View Post
Maybe I should be more clear what what my idea of totem healing and item healing would look like in a practical sense. If we look at the recurring ability, Mix, there's an entire kit we can make out of that. Items, henceforth, heals, can be prepared in advanced, ingredients can be changed to get a different heal depending on the situation, ultimate it could work like Ninja's mudras, albeit in a heal format.

Totems, functionally, could be anything from placing an AoE heal that goes off around a player, to having a powerful heal centralized around a designated area, much like Earthly Star.
None of these are niches. Your item idea will still combine into one of: direct heal, absorb, or even a HoT.

Healing can be applied to a player in very limited ways: direct healing, HoTs, absorbs, on damage taken. Usually Absorbs are vastly superior to the remaining three, while HoTs have high requirement on encounter design and player health pools/damage taken.
Then you have mechanics that apply this healing effects: single-target heals, caster centered AoE heals, target centered AoE heals, jumping heals, range restricted heals, AoE ground circle, a totem/pet doing it's stuff, etc.
Some of these mechanics are inherently inferior, e.g. an AoE ground circle will always be bad if people can not stack and stay in it due to encounter, while a target centered AoE heal might still be able to heal all targets.

Lasty, you also have to look at number of keybinds: Healing inherently requires little buttons, healers will never get many DPS buttons. FFXIV usually wants you to have ~25 keybinds from your spec. WHM doesn't reach that number (while still having hideous stuff like Fluid Aura and the generic healer raise). AST reaches it because of hald a dozen of card modifying abilities, SCH reaches that number due to ACN carry overs and Aetherflow ability overkill. Healers get the least number of buttons, yet they also use the lowest % of the buttons they get... brilliant design.