Quote Originally Posted by loreleidiangelo View Post
You could conceptualize it that way, yeah, but to be honest those healer archetypes (maybe minus the shielding thing) have been in MMOs as old as EQ. Shaman was a HoT healer and a mezzer, and Clerics had bursty heals and beat people with hammers. They're not schticks limited to just one game. Maybe reusing those archetypes isn't appealing to everyone, but I find the homogenization of abilities we have in this game even less appealing, so I was just offering my opinion.
I mean part of it is that there are only so many ways to make a number go up. Slow, fast, adding onto the number before it's subtracted from, there's not exactly a lot of ways to play around with healing so long as the focus of healing is playing tug-o-war with an HP bar and doesn't involve something else such as mitigation which is instead given to tanks for the most part.