ELI5: How are the current dungeons hard?

[TDawnstar]

Most of my healing experience comes from WoW, which uses a *wildly* different model in four key ways:

Having spent 14 years in WoW (and like 13 of them as holy pally), I agree completely.

1. They don't have oGCDs (at least not in the way we think about it in FFXIV)
2. Encounter design involves a lot more unavoidable individual (as opposed to raidwide) damage to party members other than the tank.
3. There are very few healing abilities that can heal an entire raid simultaneously.
4. A lot more variety in playstyle between healing specs

And 5) in FFXIV the raid can simply bunch up in one clump and be healed by something like Cure III (except the times when mechanics need to be resolved, of course). In WoW, there are fights where you need to be spread out most of the time (at least you used to have, no idea about now).
And 6) (or should I say 0): the ratio of healer to DPS in WoW allows the encounter to be tuned for a very limited healer DPS, unlike FFXIV where everyone is basically a DPS, otherwise it doesn't compute.
And 7) Mana is basically inexistent for all classes in FFXIV, including healers.

And yes, I think the point 2 is the most important one, but I don't know why it's so hard to throw more damage at the expense of running to resolve mechs.

I have fun with the DPS and tanking mechanics in FFXIV, but the healing just makes me feel sad because this is a place where WoW just flat-out does it better.

Yes, same here