Well, where are you connecting from? Are you on wired or wireless? If other games play just fine and only XIV is the problem, your connection to SE's datacenter might be very poor. SE doesn't have control over that- your ISP does. And the farther away you are, the more likely you are to have issues. You can try posting in the Technical Support forums to get some troubleshooting tips from the Community Reps that monitor those boards if you want to.
I feel like this thread got derailed somewhat, but... healing in this game is super strong. I like challenging myself to be as efficient as possible with my healing but a lot of the time that means I am a "green DPS". I don't want to be stuck healing forever in this game since there aren't very many interesting decisions for me to make, but I think the balance can be tilted a bit more towards the "need to heal" side without dramatically increasing difficulty.
Also, they can take as long as they want to on Blitzball. I hated it in X and have no burning desire to see it anywhere else any time soon.