Why is the healer class basically a one spell dps class?

[Corbeau]

I started in ShB, so I didn't get to see first-hand what was lost. I came from WoW, and healers in ShB were profoundly disappointing compared to Legion... or hell, even BfA, where the appalling pruning of depth (one reason I quit) still left healers in a better state than they are in ShB.

"Utility" in XIV seems to mean one thing: party damage buffs. It's alien coming from a class that had, in Legion:

- Spirit Link Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that temporarily made a stack of players have (effectively) one collective health pool, capable of pre-emptively preventing individual deaths and/or making AoE healing more efficient.
- Wind Rush Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that granted a large movement speed boost to any player coming nearby.
- Ancestral Protection Totem, a persistent ground-targeted ability that would grant an immediate free rez to the first player to die nearby within the totem's duration (in XIV terms, imagine a rez that had to be cast and targeted before the death but didn't add damage down).
- Earthbind Totem, like Wind Rush but a debuff to enemy speed instead of buffing ally speed.
- Capacitor Totem, a ground-targeted ability that would deploy an AoE stun after a few seconds of charging.
- Dispel, like Esuna except oGCD and regularly written into encounters.
- A ranged interrupt that was constantly relevant.
- Purge, allowing you to dispel buffs on enemies - not quite as commonly relevant but still saw regular use.

I honestly started playing SCH expecting Eos or Selene to act a lot like totems, acting as the placement point for various utility buffs, and it turned out that there was nothing. Nothing at all. I think Esuna and Rescue are the only abilities that SCH has that'd even qualify as utility to me. The game engine and encounter design are just so, so limited with no room for abilities that break rules. PLD's Cover is the closest I've gotten to the game-changing abilities I learned to love back in Legion. And hell, both the healer damage and healer healing kits were deeper too, even post-BfA prune. There's a reason why I don't play healer in this game despite loving the support role in every game genre.

e: To elaborate on the DPS kit, Restoration Shaman's laughably bare-bones kit consisted of:

- A generic but mana-intensive damage spell.
- A worse damage spell that cost no mana (relevant in the resource-based healing model).
- A DoT whose ticks could proc free instant-cast uses of your generic damage spell (max. 2 stacks of free casting).
- An AoE damage spell.

Simple, yet you were rewarded for upkeeping your DoT with procs to change your rhythm or save for movement. There was some thought in whether it was best to burn stacks asap or if you needed to save them for use during mechanics, and even if you were just burning 'em as they came in it was more interesting than pressing your core DPS spell over and over again during downtime (which was itself much less common due to higher and less predictable healing requirements). And this was still much shallower than the Monk healer I switched to in early BfA; fistweaving, building/playing to maximize DPS in order to generate healing through kit synergy, was an absolute joy and I probably wouldn't have quit so soon if it had been the meta build for more progression.