Aetherial Shift vs Smudge - Please Explain

[TRMeowth]

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

[Chyro]

Certainly wouldn't expect a dev to respond lol. Was more so curious to get with the community and see if there WAS anything more than "eh, flavor". I'm a Tank main and otherwise play RDM or RPR because healing is frankly too much responsibility for me lol. So was mostly just curious if someone who plays the role more might know something. "It wouldn't make sense / would be too much if, X" ya know?

The one thing I could think of when comparing white mage vs pictomancer gameplay - picto gets more value out of dashes to increase dps uptime. For a healer the dash may be a 'oh shit' button when caught in a wrong position and dashing to safety, or during dungeon pulls when falling too far behind tank. For picto as a caster dashing to a safespot instead of walking means they can go back to casting more quickly. Of course you could say healer gets the same out of that, but for heal the dps uptime is secondary and a lot of heals can be used insta-cast while on the move. For a heal 3sec of walking to safety isn't much of a loss, while for a dps caster it can matter (in high-end content).

In short, optimizing uptime is more prominent in dps caster gameplay than in healer gameplay which could be the reason for the difference in cooldowns.