I wish, I miss a great deal of my WoW addons.
...and hear I thought the OP meant healbot like a very healing-focused healer. Well. Guess I've learned.
Some things that help in XIV:
- Party members are keybound to F1 - F8 by default. You are always party member F1 so that becomes the self target. Tanks are usually F2-F3, although which ones are main tanking will depend on what they decide on the fly. F4 is usually your other healer, and F5-F8 are your DPS.
- You can focus target on the boss and see attacks that have a cast time, and be prepared for either a single target cure on the tank or AOE heals as necessary. Many AOEs also have a visual broadcast as well.
- You can have emergency macros set up to use "target's target" and this lets you keep your primary target on the boss but lob heals on the main tank. The downside of this is that the actions cannot be "queued" so you risk clipping your GCD, but that really only becomes a problem at the highest endgame raid levels.
I saw a friend healing in WoW and to be honest even with the UI stuff she was doing, I was not sure I could have done it. Healing in XIV is much more relaxed in comparison.
How is healing done here? Do you have to click them in the party list to target, then hit a key or mouse button if bound to cast the spell?
HI OP. I’ve recently started playing this game as well. I’m a healer in a US 23 wow Guild. Don't listen to people here thinking an addon can heal for you or “do the work” for you as some say. That’s silly! The addon is basically mousing over allowing you to keep your dps target. And saving you a precious click. I was also wondering about addons as well when I first started. It’s a natural thing after spending 17 years in another game.
We’re 5/10 M Sanctum of Domination now and the dmg patterns are so fast and crazy, the combat in general is just way faster with dmg patterns off the charts. As soon as my Guild is done with SoD I'll be transferring data centers here and raiding with a friend that’s doing Savage/Ultimates in his FC. If I can even level up anytime soon.
I agree it’s a little different getting use to having to click. But most people I’ve watched clear the higher stuff here just use F2-F8. As a few here said, the dmg patterns are pretty predictable and you know when somethings gonna hit.
When I watch streams and videos of high-end healing in this game, it looks pretty fun. You basically get to dps, which is kinda cool imo. When I review ff-logs, healers here can really contribute to dps checks. Your dmg matters and is needed. I honestly think it’s going to be way more fun healing in this game at a high level. And more relaxing for me.
And the UI, even though I miss weak auras, is pretty nice. I wish they would add in the ability to add triggers to spells, like flash on CD or with 10 secs left, etc. Maybe they do and I have yet to find it. I also wish in the key-bind area they had a small check box that allowed you to turn the spell (Bind) into a native mouse-over.
As a new white mage here's what I have been doing so far:
Hit medica 2 when it's quiet but too quiet and I worry big damage is coming
Fat finger beneison on myself when I meant to cast stone when trying to dps (also thought it was benediction till this moment)
get cure 2 procs when there is no healing needed till it expires
blast cure 1 on people that lost a sliver of health and not trust natural regeneration
Well, that's not the whole picture.
I myself suffer from a disability that makes my hands a bit shaky, which makes my aim (as you may guess) suck a lot, specially in stressful situations that requires some sort of quickness or fast reactions.
On small groups i can handle that by just setting some keybinds to target party members, and having a G600 makes it doable even for a 8 man party, but on raids is a different story, and this is where having an addon like healbot has been helping me a lot over the years, since it allowed me to make the party/raid frames on any size and shape i wanted and freed me from multiple hard to press keybinds (like Ctrl+5 which i miss sometimes), something the default FF14 interface doesn't let me.
The default FF14 interface is very intrusive in terms of space needed when you want to make it bigger as well as being a bit confusing to read sometimes, and i still haven't find any workaround that, or at least other than just going crazy with key binds and hope to remember each one when looking at the frames.
So, honestly, if we have to keep the non addon mentality will it hurt to at least provide some tools to further customize how these frames are displayed and look?
No, they don't really have any legal mods or anything. If there were to be something created, it would be against ToS and likely not spoken up much here. That said, the game is pretty straight forward and groups small enough that it's not needed. I always had used Healbot and other things in WoW just because it was easier to monitor health bars. But here in FFXIV, you can modify your HUD in so many different ways that it's easy to set up for you to see names, health bars, etc. You can toggle between group members with your F keys.
That said, you can create macros that will let you have MouseOver. For example, /ac "Cure" <mo> will cast Cure on whoever you're mouse is over. So you'd create a macro and assign it to a button. Then you'd put your mouse over the player's name and hit your keybind to activate the skill and cure that person. So in this aspect, it can serve much like Healbot did. The primary difference in that you won't have the bars change color based on their health and they don't let you do it in smaller grids. I mean, it would kind of be nice if they let you put Party menu to look like Raid one does, but it's not an option yet.
But yeah...that's about the closest you'll get.