Hmm. So, coming from a guy who never really played wow and understands healing in that game even less so, how was healing in that game any different than just clicking buttons to make hp go up? Was it focused on popping cooldowns for the right phases of incoming damage, using the right spells at the right times?
Real talk it kind of confused me at first why people would choose to be healers because the role in general always seems so... unsatisfying. Maybe that's just from what I know in XIV because healing most content as a dedicated healer and not dpsing is super boring because of infrequent damage, like you said. I'm just wondering how other games would break up the monotony of spamming the same healing spell over and over.
I mean, in a lot of ways, it wasn't anything but clicking buttons to make HP go up. But that seems awfully reductive, you could say DPS is just clicking buttons to make HP go down.
The two biggest things separating this game's healing is the frequency of damage combined with how big the toolkits are for the healers. In this game you basically heal for specific spikes and then DPS, and furthermore MP management is often based around controlling your damage output rather than healing. Sure there are things like the inefficiency of heavy spamming medica or cure II but it's not a significant aspect. In WoW it was kind of the opposite, most of your time was spent spamming various heals on different people due to constant damage. MP management was anywhere from crucial to meaningless depending on what era you played in, but when it was important you had to pick the right heals for different situations. Most commonly the choice was between fast inefficient ones and long cast but much better on your MP, but sometimes was about smart heals early so that you could not cast at all and regenerate (at one point this was called the 5 second rule, if you made no casts for 5seconds you would begin to regenerate MP as if you were out of combat, this eventually got removed)
There's another big, fundamental, difference to this game in general too. GCDs were shorter (1.5s base), so combat was more fast paced.. Heal casts could be quite different, like it's been awhile but if I remember right Holy priest had 3 main heals that were something like 1.5s, 2.5s, and 3.5s on top of their regens, aoes, and special one-off buffs. The first was really bad for your MP but sometimes you needed that quickness, the last was powerful/good for MP but so slow that if you tried to cast it wrong time could mess you up as a lot could happen in that time span (like tank dying)
All of this is not particularly fun to everyone (see cranky robot above), but in a general sense it had a very different style of play compared to DPS or healers in this game. Most of the fights were in some ways fighting against your party, trying to frantically keep them going/buffing them so they kill the boss. Has also been described as playing whack-a-amole with health bars. But all of that was part of the appeal to some. I personally got burnt out on that style eventually and went shadow pew pew lasers when that became, actually like, good, but I can still appreciate how it worked. It did feel monotonous after a time or in easy content, but at the same time it could be exciting because of how intense it would sometimes be trying to keep up with everything that was going on. If you dps'd or sat on GCDs the to the degree you can here, people would just die.
