Quote Originally Posted by Renathras View Post
I somewhat agree with this. It's long been amazing to me that WoW had such differences between their healers with them still being relatively well balanced and viable outside of some weirdness here and there (I remember in Vanilla/BC when Disc was "the leveling spec" for Priests until they could respect to unlock Shadow Form because it increased wand damage -and yes, you read that right. Mage was like that with Arcane, and there was even a meme in a machina video at the time, and I quote, "I'm gonna...WAND you to death!!!"). They all feel different, but generally good.

I think part of that is due to the raid size, though. When the game is tuned to encounters where you have 4-7 healers (and the number can be kinda variable based on party, team, encounter, etc) AND where players can easily swap specs (so healers can quickly swap over and DPS or Tank on fights then swap to Healer on the fights they heal), where it can be assumed you have all of them at the table together in most encounters, it's probably easier to balance than if you have only 2 and you have to balance based on (most) combinations of the two.

Though I really do agree that it would be nice to get more diversity between the Healers. There's no reason they should all have the identical "rotations" they do today.
As we agree on one thing, I think one important difference to be pointed out is just how healing works technically. WoW always had a pretty good makro system that had to be reigned down quite alot in its past actually and was always open for addons, which it will occassionally adapt, which lead to mouse over healing becoming pretty much the norm for WoW. It should be a standart feature. Having to regularily switch targets manually is just not comfortable and the shorter gcd makes healing actually more flexible. Then there is stuff like Damage profiles, damage is far more frequent but individually usually smaller in WoW, which makes regen healing more valuable because it serves the purpose of overall smoothing out the parties health bars. And in modern WoW, healing is really a maintanance and management game, one important aspect of WoW Healing is maintaining your healing tools on the party, with healer dps, often synergizing with the way Healers heal or being enabled by their healing style.

FF14 healing is not only extremely streamlined because differences in healing toolkit aren't that distinct, its also extremely clunky. Not to forget that it is counter intuitive. While Sage can teach some basic, especially White Mage by its design teaches inefficent, bad healing. And by virtue of being the only level 1 healer job and being the most iconic FF healer, this will most likely affect most beginner healers. Its even worse since FF14 lacks any dedicated skill system or anything like that, so there isn't even that to encourage new players to look into outside ressources.