Quote Originally Posted by Gemina View Post
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.
Except I would argue that, even with your definition, HoTs are still more on demand and more easily accessible than barriers on barrier healers. Barrier heals eat through your MP. Regens don't. Both Scholar and Sage have access to a permanent, passive single target regen: Eos and Kardia. Both have access to potent regens with mitigation attached on a 30 second cooldown with a 15 second duration: 50% of the entire fight on the entire party. Both also have access to a similarly strong regen that lasts 22 seconds on a 60 second duration: roughly 35% of the entire fight on the entire party. If that isn't massively accessible, than I don't know what is, because you don't actually benefit all that much from having spammable HOTs since HOTs, by their nature, need time to actually do anything anyway.