I feel in general there's a gloss-over of utility in this thread, with a focus on how much healers DPS in FFXIV compared to WoW. I cannot speak for anything past Cata, though.

My utility mattered a lot more in WoW than it does in FFXIV. Between roots, cyclone, bear form taunt/bash, cat form stun, warstomp, cat form sprint, battle rez, there were simply more things I could do in a fight that the game didn't necessarily just make mobs immune to. Even innervate could be tossed wherever when druids just had too much regen, and I wouldn't necessarily always use it on myself to begin with if it helped the fight more on a priest or even a mage for a tight check.

Same thing with my resto shaman totems, or all their shock spells.

While I wasn't typically expected to DPS (as much - our DPS still mattered in certain fights but not really to the extent we have here), I had more choices in reacting on the fly to different scenarios.

Here, can pretty much pop divine seal or presence of mind and just turret myself into spam heal mode and hope for the best, add in a swiftcast if needed - and my spam heals are boring, too, in comparison. There is occasionally use for fluid aura, holy, and now stone 1 for the heavy, which feels great, but those times seem very limited in comparison - and the holy is always pretty costly down the road, heh.

My observations in tanking and remembering my brother tanking in WoW leads me to a similar conclusion. Way fewer options for controlling the battlefield here, with more focus on how much DPS you can get away with. There's only so much any particular player can do to try and get creative on the spot.