Healing Focus or DPS Focus

[HappyHubris]

Yes, healer damage is still optional (save for 3 specs) and is still lower than an actual dps, but my point is they can deal damage at all now. Before Legion or so, you would barely even be able to quest as a healer, you were worthless outside the kitchen dungeons/raids.

In other words, XIV is molding their healers into a playstyle that even WoW is expanding out from.

You're omitting that WoW has had dual specs since Wrath, so no one is questing in healing spec.

And healing spec absolutely could do damage at all and quest successfully, just more slowly. I leveled my first character resto 1-60, before further improvements to healer damage output. Indeed, WoW healers have always had a stronger DPS toolkit than FFXIV ones. It's just that FFXIV isn't tuned to require healing, so the community fixates on damage output from healers instead of passing healing checks. Which makes the "one dot and single nuke spam" even more egregious.

FFXIV healers wish they had WoW's healer damage toolkits. Like my druid can literally turn into a cat and start a full DPS rotation, where my FFXIV healers just spam the 1 key.