Restoration staff skills aren't actually particularly magicka-efficient. Grand Healing is considerably less efficient than Healing Ritual, Steadfast Ward is as costly as Rushed Ceremony but weaker (although it's a very different skill it has a similar purpose). Regeneration is indeed quite magicka-efficient but it's also not a true healing skill.

The most efficient healing skill is Healing Ritual, although it has its own drawbacks in cast time and range.

I wasn't actually referring to Siphon Spirit with regards to magicka management, although that helps too. It's the fact that Force Siphon is a magicka-cheap way to provide consistent healing (at least when fighting against a single target: I definitely don't recommend using it in PvP for example), relieving the need to cast other healing spells.

Restoring Spirit works with Dawn's Wrath skills only I believe, and even if it worked with all skills there's no reason you cannot have it with other sources of magicka. You can never have too much magicka.

Rushed Ceremony is a single target emergency heal, it has a very different purpose to skills like Regeneration and Force Siphon which provide what are essentially long-duration health recovery to cover for minor and/or accumulating damage. You use Regeneration while your allies are still quite healthy so you won't have to heal them as often as combat progresses, you use Rushed Ceremony when an ally has taken a serious hit and cannot afford to wait for Healing Ritual or Grand Healing.

Rune Focus and Rite of Passage only work for yourself, they provide no mitigation to allies.

You don't need the Restoration staff as a Templar, I just pointed out reasons you may want it.

It could very well be that some used light armor and others not. Light armor passives make all the difference at least early on.

The optional use of the Rest Staff is one reason why I prefer healing as a non-Templar. I love the NB powers and greatly prefer not having an entire skill tree wasted on healing that a staff can manage. Obviously the Templar benefits by being able to use a non-staff and heal. It is the variety of builds that make this game great.

Good point. I did almost every quest, and I'm a console guy playing on a low def PC. Since all of my close buddies are getting ESO for XBox I had zero friends online in the Beta. I think my way of playing increased the level of difficulty for me a lot.

I'm nothing without my controller! Haha.

Oh, and I used all heavy armor and put all 10 skill points into health. That usually gave me about 3 heals per magic bar before I had to wait for a refill.

I think most Templars who complained about magicka issues were not "pure" healers, and generally mix in tanking and DPS roles. As a light armoured, magicka-focused Templar I had very little issues with magicka (in dungeons), though I do attribute a large part of my efficiency to liberal use of Rapid Regeneration.

I actually didn't have that much of an issue as a templar and I had a mix of light heavy and armor for the most part. From enchantments, to buffs from potions, or to armor already having the stats on them, theres a lot of way to up your magick. In fact, I had overcharged magick and magick regen with mix armor sets. I really don't see that much of an advantage of just having one type of armor because of of the soft cap and the many different ways to get the stats you want anyways.