Playing as healer for the first time.

Heyo guys

Today I started playing as a healer for the first time in my mmo life, always played as dps but now I try something different.

Choose astro and playing some low level dungeons but I feel like I kinda did overheal the tank the whole time XD.

Also switching between healing and doing some dps is soo hard cause I tend to tunnelvision on one of them.

Sooo any advice from you guys?

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Originally Posted by foussi

Heyo guys

Today I started playing as a healer for the first time in my mmo life, always played as dps but now I try something different.

Choose astro and playing some low level dungeons but I feel like I kinda did overheal the tank the whole time XD.

Also switching between healing and doing some dps is soo hard cause I tend to tunnelvision on one of them.

Sooo any advice from you guys?

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Welcome to the green role. Coming from other roles, it can be hard to adjust to not tunnelvisioning, but it gets easier with practice.

My main suggestion is to move the party frame closer to the center of the screen, or anywhere you look a lot. It will still take practice to keep an eye on it while managing everything else, but it does, IMO, make it a bit easier.

I won't give much details since you're starting the role, but here are few tips :

You need to understand the power of your heals, to "visualize" in the health bar.
You can safely let the tank drop a bit and see with Benefic for example.
Then, let him drop a bit more and then see with Benefic II.
There's no big one shot at this point so it's okay.
This way, you won't "overheal" but just heal what need to be healed to prevent mana loss and panic heal.
Dpsing will come later, precisely when you will be able to see the power of your heals (okay, he lost x% HP, this ability will restore him x%)... ect
Also, Essential Dignity is a short CD that get more powerful the lower your target has HP so that's a safe bet.
Just throw some combust (your dot) to begins with. It's safe damage on one gcd and you won't "tunnel vision dps". Malefic spam will come later as I said previously.
If you already unlocked aspected benefic (under diurnal, a regen), be sure your tank has it on.
It's more potent over time than spamming Benefic/Benefic II (and less mana consuming)

Try understanding your healing kit first, don't bother too much with the dps aspect, it'll come naturally as you get confortable with the job.
And even if people die because you made a mistake or a miscalculation, that's part of learning, so don't worry.

I'm not gonna repeat what was already said, just gonna say a few things from personal experience

If during already familiar dungeons I'm afraid to get carried away with DPSing and forget that the tank is not invinsible I focus target them
So if you are familiar with the dungeon and don't really need to focus target anything else this could be helpful to easily see the tank's HP :'D

As for healing itself I normally would let tank's HP drop to maximum 50% before topping them off and returning to doing some damage, but that's something you need to figure out for yourself, see what you're comfortable with. Just don't let it drop too low unless you have some instant spells off CD to save them :P

Everyone has their own way of doing it, so don't take what i say as the solution. It's just what i'm comfortable with when playing heal.

First, the UI :
- When playing heal, i spend a lot of time looking at the party window, that i have somewhere on the top left of my screen. This is especially true during 8-men raids and trials, since most of the time all the other players aren't in my line of sight.
- Under the party window, i have the enmity list, which i use to switch to the next target when the current one is about to die.
- On the right of the party window, i have my focus target. Like i said, since in 8-men content i spend more time looking at the party window than the actual fight, i need to know which attack the boss is about to cast, to avoid being surprised and (maybe) die.

Regarding healing itself :
- If the tank is the only one taking damage, i will not heal them as long as they're above 50% health.
- When everyone gets hit by an unavoidable AoE attack, i usually AoE heal straight away. Even though this is not necessary, sometimes a DPS might get hit by something else afterwards, and die (whereas if they are close to 100% health, they will survive most attacks outside of high difficulty content). Especially when playing AST, i try to avoid using rezzes as much as possible because they cost a lot.
- When i know the damage is manageable, i like to let the tank drop to around 20% health, and then use Aspected Benefic + Essential Dignity. This usually brings them back up around 90% health and gives them the regen, which most of the time is enough to finish the current pack of mobs without using anymore healing.

As KDSilver and Lumivyory said, first you have to understand the power of the kit you are working with and find your comfort zone. Everything that i wrote above is only the result of me experimenting again and again, until i found my playstyle.

I hope you will have fun with the healer journey ! It is one that i personally still enjoy to this day :)

It's as simple as keep playing. You brain will sort it out.

Practice helps a lot. Overhealing and less DPS focus as a new healer playing it safe is absolutely fine, I say sod if anybody kicks off about that, everybody has to start somewhere, just as we has DPS with poor damage, or struggles to main DPS with mechanics coming their way and tanks with safe pulls, everybody has their learning curve. As long as you don't throw yourself into the deepend with high end content whilst still finding your bearings.

With practice you start to learn his certain healing spells work together. You've chosen probably the most complex of the three healers, but is absolutely fine starting out with it.

I like to think that FFXIV is great for beginners in that a lot of the lower end content gives more room for mistakes so that you can learn and build from there

My advice to new healers is:

I hope you like dealing damage lol

As you level you’ll find yourself needing to heal less and less, and eventually you’ll have millions of powerful oGCD heals, meaning by the time you hit level 80 you can now comfortably spend the vast majority of your time on DPS. Also not spending all your time on dps will likely draw the ire of others.

I mean personally I say don’t worry about that and just heal. Like, not that you shouldn’t dps, but I think the best advice for healing is to do what you think is right then worry about the extras like damage or resource usage. The worst thing you can do is panic; i think it’s good to be confident in your healing and to be able to say ‘I know that I have the tools to resolve this situation’

Like, maybe you used Aspected Helios instead of Celestial Opposition. It’s worse for dps, but everyone is healed and has regen/shields, so as long as you’re not in savage it’s not going to be a huge deal if you miss out on some damage (not all). I feel the same about overhealing. Like, obviously it’s not great if you’re doing Benefic II on a target at 99% HP. But it’s not the end of the world if you find yourself throwing out more healing than necessary, since the way I see it more is better than none. And if you do put the party at like 100% HP by mistake with overhealing, you also have more time to deal damage (than if they were at 70% after healing), so you can try to cover for the mistakes you do make. Mistakes definitely matter, but I guess what I’m saying is to not beat yourself up about it too much if you do find yourself saying ‘I used that gcd heal instead of an ogcd’, or ‘I used Aspected Benefic but the target will still get healed once they hit 100%’. I mean, you have to make mistakes to learn from them, so if you do feel like you could have done things differently, just keep them in mind for next time and gradually you’ll find them happening less and less.

As you just do content everything will start to fall into place and make sense. Picking the right heal for the right time, not overhealing, doing all your healing with oGCD, etc. I think more than anything just trying it out and experiencing it for yourself is the best way to learn healing. Personally I also like running random content as dps and watching what the other healers do then comparing it with how I’d handle things to see if there’s things I can improve on or do differently.

I find that I come across a lot of healers that do totally fine when the fight is just standard striking dummy fare and they can heal by using their oGCDs at set times for set things, and focusing on dealing damage. Which is great and is ‘good play’, but then the second something goes wrong, like a tank taking tank buster with 3 vuln up stacks. Like yes, by all means continue to Glare, but at least give the tank Divine Benison or a Regen or something lol. Or when there are 4 dps and a tank dead, and you see them running in circles trying to cast Glare instead of a heal or a raise lol. Of course they shouldn’t have died in the first place, but they did, and as a healer it’s kind of the whole point of your role to help people out when they need it (to heal them lol). I guess what I mean is that you should try and think about how to ‘improvise’ your heals, so that if things actually do hit the fan (not that they regularly do), you can be confident that you can still resolve the situation using whatever tools you have left.