AST Questions

Hi all. It's been a minute since I've been a healer main (was WHM way back when) and I have some questions about AST's group healing. At level 90 we have considerably more group heals than single heals. Healing one person is fine but I feel like I'm either A) not optimizing my group healing resulting in overheals or B) not choosing the right ability for the right situation.

Do you AST mains/enthusiasts keep every AOE heal on your hotbar? Do you even use Helios/Aspected Helios? We have so many buttons and if I panic, the button bloat surely doesn't help.

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Originally Posted by Marxel

Hi all. It's been a minute since I've been a healer main (was WHM way back when) and I have some questions about AST's group healing. At level 90 we have considerably more group heals than single heals. Healing one person is fine but I feel like I'm either A) not optimizing my group healing resulting in overheals or B) not choosing the right ability for the right situation.

Do you AST mains/enthusiasts keep every AOE heal on your hotbar? Do you even use Helios/Aspected Helios? We have so many buttons and if I panic, the button bloat surely doesn't help.

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Reduce your visual hotbar space to see skills you only need to track (skills with a cooldown attached), and group them based on skill effect if you feel like you are overwhelmed with figuring out the right ability for the situation. Don't worry so much about overhealing from AoE. The point of healing using oGCDs is to ensure you don't have to spend a GCD to heal. As long as your healing oGCD rotation lets you continually cast a DPS skill on every GCD, you're doing fine. The same ideology applies to SGE - who starts out with Physis II + Kerachole to upkeep a tank's HP during dungeon pulls while kardia heals chip damage and a new addersgall starts generating. The extra AoE healing will be wasted on the DPS who aren't taking damage, but it's still a decent chunk of healing potency that you would've lost otherwise on a tank if you didn't use it.

I don't keep Helios / Aspected Helios on my visual hotbar because they're on the GCD and on demand, so they have no cooldown attached. I keep it keybound in case I do need it on the condition that I have to GCD heal and have to buff up the healing with Horoscope / Neutral Sect / Synastry. If all else fails and you have to dip into your GCD heals, at least stronger GCD heals means less GCD spent on healing and faster recovery.

I keep everything on my hotbar except like undraw and benefic 1.

It just takes practice and muscle memory. Like just go to a training dummy and just press all your aoe heals one by one (weave ogcds in a gcd) and then all your single target heals and then malefic until it comes off cd and keep doing that. And then just play a lot, especially things that are chaotic and people mess up like msq trials, lv 90 normal raids, pf clear parties, etc.

Don't worry too much about avoiding overheal or using the optimal skill until you are at that level. Just keep people alive first, then focus on uptime, then focus on using your buffs correctly and only last is optimizing healing