Healer Looking For Tips [Feast]

Hey everyone I'm an Astrologian playing in the Feast (Chaos) looking to improve. I'm currently yo-yoing up and down the 1600-1850 rating and used to breeze through matches quite easily, but I don’t feel as impactful as I used to. While I expected matches becoming harder going from unranked to platinum, my win rate this week is about 45% and my overall win rate slowly declined from 70% all the way back to 50%. I feel I reached the point where I'm holding back my team and that it doesn’t seem to get any better.

Information about PvP is scarce and usually outdated so I added some points I’d like to exchange ideas on below. It’s a long post, but if you have any tips/tricks/guidance, please do share, I’d be very grateful.

1) Delays
I'm fully aware that the servers are weird with their 3 second ticks and that damage is favoured over healing but most of the time my it feels like this:
http://i.imgur.com/ucwCNW5.png

I’m pro-actively healing and usually have a good feeling of who is going to be focused. However in higher-tiered matches people get smarter; they switch targets with coordination and time CC/burst better. The tableflips happen when I shoot an Essential Dignity right after a critical Benefic 2 and both animations land, I think the guy is safe but am left in disappointment. This is usually followed by that awkward passive-aggressive “…” from the guy who died an untimely death (sorry bro :<!).

I feel there’s nothing I can do. In retrospect, the matches I win are where my heals land in time and the ones I lose is where I’m halfway my second heal on an already-dead target. It feels like a coin flip every time, is there any way to circumvent this?

2) Line of Sight
Healing in FFXIV is possible as long as the following two rules are respected:
#1 There’s no paper-thin object standing in between you and the target.
#2 There’s no need for you to see your target… by facing them.
Better known as logic.

Anyway this is what I’m currently doing to prevent falling behind on heals when my line of sight is broken:
- Make sure a HoT is ticking on important targets at all time.
- Move at the end of my cast, in the window of time where your cast will still finish if you move.
- Activate Sprint + Lightspeed and rush to wherever I can see my teammate (only to have them run back to the other side as soon as I get there).
- Prepare Swiftcast and cast a heal as soon as the game allows it, followed by an OGCD heal (Essential Dignity in my case)
- Try to position myself as seen in the picture. My usual positions are the red dots and the walls I struggle with are circled in orange.
http://i.imgur.com/020ca46.png

Most of the time, it’s hard to get back in control of the situation, especially when another CC interrupts my cast. How do you guys prevent breaking the line of sight?

3) Purify
When is the best time to use it?
I usually use Purify in the following scenarios:
- Sleep is cast on me (4-8 seconds + no tank/dps derping out waking me up)
- Stun is cast on me (3+ seconds)
- Full Swing is cast on my dps and they don’t purify it themselves after 3 seconds

Scenarios I’m unsure of but Purify anyway:
- Full Swing is cast on me, I’m actually never sure about this one, I think I can outheal the burst that follows, but I’d rather not take the risk with the random delay mentioned in Point 1.
- There’s a tonne of dots on my teammate.

4) CC-chains
Following up on Purify, I’m struggling with CC-chains, by that I mean multiple Stuns and Silences being launched one after another. Any tips?

5) Surecast
http://i.imgur.com/j5B9CFK.png
*Except when you’re CC’d

Should I even bother with this? I feel like it doesn’t do what I’m expecting of it and will just save me time if I deny its existence.

6) Dying and retreating
Should I aggressively spam a ‘Retreat’ macro when I die or a dps does? I’ve always wondered about the reason as to why people stick around to keep fighting. At the same time, I feel like it’s everyone’s own responsibility to adjust to a new situation and I just follow my team around wherever they go.

When I die, I won’t be healing anyone for a while and Iif someone else dies I sometimes still get “…” “HEALER?” and “hope you and your family get *fill in any disease here*” like Eos was supposed to spawn at my corpse as a substitute.
When a dps dies, I’m not sure if it’s worth sticking around either, our team lost at least 33% of our damage output while the enemy team has at least 50% more than we do. Furthermore, the enemy healer receives less pressure and if it happens to be a White Mage I can smell the foul magics being cast my way.
Note that I’m not talking about the scenario when any of the enemy players are low on HP and are about to die, I’m talking about them being topped off and our team just not having the damage output to leave a dent.

The thing I feel really bad about is when they do run back to base and I’m preparing ED + Swiftcast/Lightspeed > Benefic II and Point 1 happens or they’ve reached safety and run up the stairs where I still can’t heal them because Point 2.

7) The Culling
What is the best way to heal through this? Often when the Culling starts I already blew through most of my cooldowns and even if I do manage to keep people alive…

http://i.imgur.com/q9K7WHQ.gif

Sometimes my team manages to kill someone and sometimes it goes up to 4 stacks and I’m not sure what’s expected of me at that point.

Thank you for your time.

As far as I remember you have been playing noct ast? If this still the case I recommend switching to diurnal sect. It's far superior to noct. A synestry buffed a.benefic with a.helios on the focus target. That target shouldn't die (you can time dileation the buffed hots if they stay focused on that target.

Try to extend your light speed using celestial opposition. 10s extra. Which is roughly 4 additional insta casts.
Best use for disable on mch/bard ... (bard is easier to see burst. Disable when you see them pop barrage. Focus target the bard and keep an eye on when they used hawks eye it will be followed by barrage. Here you have to disable or his target is dead. Pot disable on macro. For mch I would recommend disable when you see them use rapid fire.)
Don't waste your cc -_-. Only use retro when people are popping buffs, you can remove all sorts of buffs with it. Raging strikes. Hawks eye. Rapid fire. ... etc. it ruins a lot of bursts.

For purify. As a healer the only time u should ever use it is to remove full swing. And/Or a stun during full swing. That's it. Your teammates should purify you from sleeps.

If you're 1600-1800 rating you seem to be on the right path. One thing you need to consider when you're fairly high rated is that if you queue up vs a lower tiered healer, they _most likely_ will have higher tiered DPS on their team. This tips the scales greatly in terms of win percentage.

Thanks for posting :D! I switched to Diurnal about 2 weeks ago and I'm familiar with the combos.
What macro do you use to put Disable on the BRD/MCH? I currently have one that puts it on my target's target or do you mean a different one?
About Retrogradiation, I prefer to use it defensively to remove debuffs from my teammates (binds/sleeps etc.) than to try and remove enemy buffs as I feel I have less control over what gets stripped.

Turning back to healing in general, higher tiers leave a lot less room for error and while the mode is completely designed to have players spontaneously combust I'm looking to improve so it won't happen to my teammates. In other words, how do you deal with the pressure exerted by higher tiered enemies and only having access to limited amount of cooldowns?

You are a decent healer, I swear you rarely lose when I'm playing against you, but often lose when in my team, so it's rather a problem of inexperienced, casual players like me who are holding the team back. As a healer you can carry only so much and survive only so long, but if there are no kills there's nothing you can do. It's inevitable for win rate to decline as your own rating rises, as matchmaking will try to balance your team with lower ranked and weaker players more often. I'm healing myself sometimes and it's certainly a big difference when you are pressured by Diamond tank and dps comparing to Bronze tiers who just tickle.

Sort of random tip, and this is something that I *think* I noticed a healer doing to me the other day. If you set focus target to the enemy ranged dps, keep an eye on their buffs and when you see them starting to pop their burst cooldowns (raging strikes, barrage, hawkseye etc) you can then quickly hit "target current focus target" and then "target the target of your current target" (yo dawg, we heard you like targets...). Unless they're actively trying to counter this (doubt its common enough for that to be worthwhile) that'll almost always give you at least a bit of time to proactively shield whomever's about to get hit.

Hello, while I've been playing DRG this season I played WHM last season and have a few suggestions that might help:

With regards to point 1):
You basically just have to be one step ahead... if you notice that DPS are switching off of your synastry target, you just have to plan around that. Most of healing through burst is just about staying caught up which can start going bad if you even spend 1 GCD casting Cure II(or Benefic, whatever you guys use) on the wrong target.

As far as animation delay, as a WHM only thing I can say is to try and use the ability early based on your prediction of how fast the target's HP is falling. Better safe than sorry (most of the time). For example on Benediction, its not uncommon at all for me to activate the ability when my teammate has 50% HP left and it actually hit when they're at ~30%.

Point 2):
Line of sight is a 2-way street. If your DPS is chasing targets around walls/pillars and is getting focused themselves (a lot of ASTs do this if you aren't already, you are the best kiting healer so you should be pulling the enemy melee/tank for a long, hard chase), it's their fault if they aren't actively trying to get back into your LoS. You shouldn't have to chase your DPS. That said, this is solo Q where these things are going to happen 90% of the time anyway. You can try and chase them around the wall or spam a {Pull Back.} macro or something similar. IMO it's usually more the DPS' fault here for getting baited into a LOS and then stunned/focused. But yeah, do your best to keep up.

I would strongly recommend against standing in the middle. It opens you up to being bursted while not providing much LoS yourself. It's typically better to stand near the corner of a wall/pillar so that you have quick access to LoS the enemy ranged (or healer if its a WHM) and can easily start kiting dps that switch to you.

Point 3):
Those are all good times to purify really. Full Swing should almost always be purified (hopefully by the person its on or your friendly tank) immediately but if you think you can out kite it/esuna it off feel free to try. One thing I would recommend is having a call-for-purify macro if you don't already. Tanks should be using purify on everyone but themselves (remind them of this at the beginning) for most of the match so let them know if you're in trouble (we all know how bad most SoloQ players are though, even at the higher ranks so don't be surprised when you don't get one).

Point 4):
Your AoE stun can be a good way to interrupt chain CC (MNK spamming Silence/if you can purify the first stun of a PLD's stun lock before he starts the 2nd). You can try having a macro that lets people know you need peels/support/purifies but again not likely to get much from that in SoloQ. Besides that, not really much you can do outside of not getting caught as easily (remember that AST is the best kiting healer!).

Point 5):
So, if you didn't already know, any attack that does ~15% of your HP will automatically interrupt any cast (usually this comes from crits). Surecast prevents that from happening. It does not prevent Stuns/silences/knockbacks from interrupting your cast. This ability is generally useful when you're kiting and are preparing to stop and cast a spell. General sequence of event is: Kiting 2-3 enemies --> pop Surecast while running away --> stop to begin casting Bene/Bliz II or w/e --> enemies catch up and hit you hard --> Surecast makes sure the spell goes off anyway (assuming you don't get stunned or something). It can be useful and I'm not sure what if anything you can really take over it.

Point 6):
You should start spamming your "Retreat" macro the moment you know you're going to die. This might be when you pop Attunement with 200 HP left. It might be as you're getting stun locked with 25% health. The earlier people start getting out, the less likely the enemy is to get a chain kill off your death.

You're right that is advantageous to pull back when one of your teammates dies as the enemy will put extra pressure on you. Getting people to pull back is the hard part. You also need to be cognizant if any buffs are about to spawn in mid (e.g. Attack buffs) that you might be able to get even without your 4th teammate there.

Point 7):
Nothing really changes from Non-culling. You do your best and hope your DPS kills one of them before they kill one of you.