"Barrier Healers" aren't barrier healers

[Gemina]

Barrier healer in FFXIV simply means these healers have greater access to shields opposed to HoTs. What this essentially means is that healers like SGE and SCH have GCD/on demand access to HP extending shields, while only being able to access HoTs through abilities with cooldowns far greater than the GCD. In contrast, the Pure healers WHM and AST have GCD/on demand access to HoTs, and limited access to shields that are on CDs much longer than the GCD. How often the healers actually utilize these abilities is kind of redundant, especially when taking into consideration that using the GCD for anything other than damage is generally frowned upon regardless of the content difficulty. All four healers have a pretty balanced skillset of oGCD abilities that direct heal, shield, or provide a HoT and generally rely on these to do all of their healing/shielding, essentially making them all play the exact same. If you were to show graphs of AST and WHM, I guarantee how their skillset is disseminated will be nearly identical to the barrier healers.

tl;dr? barrier/pure healer sub roles is a ruse.