Healer question on Reddit sub was a mistake

So, I recently came back to the game and decided that, even though I'm almost exclusively playing to get through the story content, I wanted to stick strictly to a healer role. I have a WHM almost to lvl 50 and was just asking if that particular healer job was worth holding onto or if If a different healer job was better for focusing on solo content.

What a huge mistake that was. The amount of people that couldn't remotely fathom that I want to stick to a healer job was ridiculous. I don't know what the thought process is for people when they read "Which is the best healer job for solo content" and then somehow the only thought they can come up with is "YoU ShoUlD sWItCh tO a dPs".

I'll admit that there were a few responses from people that were incredibly kind and helpful, but MOST of them were not.

So, I figure I'll ask the same thing here. Other healer players: Which healer job do you prefer for solo content? Is one better than the others or are they all about the same? Thanks in advance.

You're going to end up casting one damage spell over and over and over and over and over again for the entirety of solo content. Yes, it's that boring. No, they're not significantly different. Maybe Sage for Icarus and two charges of Phlegma? That's about the only minute difference between them. I wouldn't recommend AST just for the slightly lower personal damage. Each enemy might require an additional cast of the single damage nuke to kill. Those add up.

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Originally Posted by Semirhage

You're going to end up casting one damage spell over and over and over and over and over again for the entirety of solo content. Yes, it's that boring. No, they're not significantly different. Maybe Sage for Icarus and two charges of Phlegma? That's about the only minute difference between them. I wouldn't recommend AST just for the slightly lower personal damage. Each enemy might require an additional cast of the single damage nuke to kill. Those add up.

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Thank you so much, that's the exact kind of information I was looking for.

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Originally Posted by Sotha

Thank you so much, that's the exact kind of information I was looking for.

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I can't exactly speak to your interests without knowing in more detail what it is you're looking for in your experience, but some other suggestions:

If you swap over to ACN, a DPS class, it offers two jobs at level 30: the DPS Summoner and the healer Scholar. Summoner is the simplest DPS, and later does gain access to a "utility phase" of sorts, which is still a part of your damage rotation, but provides a party regen and allows you to grant someone a target heal. Scholar is the strongest healer for raiding and also marginally more engaging DPS combo for soloing since you'll use your Aetherflow on Energy Drain since you won't need the heals while soloing, but both Summoner and Scholar share the same level, so if you level up as Summoner, your Scholar is also being leveled by the same amount. So you could have a bit more fun playing as Summoner and swapping over to Scholar for dungeons or other forms of group play if you really want to heal, or just have Scholar which offers a bit more to do during solo instances than White Mage or Sage realistically.

If you're open to exploring jobs outside of healers that offer sustain and utility, you're coming up on level 50 which will allow you to access the Red Mage. It's a caster that's fairly easy to get the hang of and gets access to a usable healing spell and a resurrection spell. You won't generally worry about healing others in group play, but you can help salvage a nasty run in a pinch and you can instantly revive players back-to-back better than even healers can. They also have magick barrier later which is a defensive ability that also increases how much HP your party receives from healing.

Dancer is available at level 60 as well and is a physical ranged DPS that has the ability to pick another player to dance with and provide them with buffs consistently throughout the fight, has a healing ability that heals both them, their partner, and everyone standing around the both of you, and later has an ability that puts a regen on nearby allies which you can then follow up with a barrier on the party immediately after. It's also one of the more simple attackers and very easy to understand. They have the lowest damage, but offer a lot of power in their ability to buff the party and make everyone else hit harder, especially their partner.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I can't exactly speak to your interests without knowing in more detail what it is you're looking for in your experience, but some other suggestions:

If you swap over to ACN, a DPS class, it offers two jobs at level 30: the DPS Summoner and the healer Scholar. Summoner is the simplest DPS, and later does gain access to a "utility phase" of sorts, which is still a part of your damage rotation, but provides a party regen and allows you to grant someone a target heal. Scholar is the strongest healer for raiding and also marginally more engaging DPS combo for soloing since you'll use your Aetherflow on Energy Drain since you won't need the heals while soloing, but both Summoner and Scholar share the same level, so if you level up as Summoner, your Scholar is also being leveled by the same amount. So you could have a bit more fun playing as Summoner and swapping over to Scholar for dungeons or other forms of group play if you really want to heal, or just have Scholar which offers a bit more to do during solo instances than White Mage or Sage realistically.

If you're open to exploring jobs outside of healers that offer sustain and utility, you're coming up on level 50 which will allow you to access the Red Mage. It's a caster that's fairly easy to get the hang of and gets access to a usable healing spell and a resurrection spell. You won't generally worry about healing others in group play, but you can help salvage a nasty run in a pinch and you can instantly revive players back-to-back better than even healers can. They also have magick barrier later which is a defensive ability that also increases how much HP your party receives from healing.

Dancer is available at level 60 as well and is a physical ranged DPS that has the ability to pick another player to dance with and provide them with buffs consistently throughout the fight, has a healing ability that heals both them, their partner, and everyone standing around the both of you, and later has an ability that puts a regen on nearby allies which you can then follow up with a barrier on the party immediately after. It's also one of the more simple attackers and very easy to understand. They have the lowest damage, but offer a lot of power in their ability to buff the party and make everyone else hit harder, especially their partner.

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All of this. Don't torture yourself by soloing as a healer. The most boring DPS job is head and shoulders more likely to keep you awake than the most complex healer.

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Originally Posted by ty_taurus

I can't exactly speak to your interests without knowing in more detail what it is you're looking for in your experience, but some other suggestions:

If you swap over to ACN, a DPS class, it offers two jobs at level 30: the DPS Summoner and the healer Scholar. Summoner is the simplest DPS, and later does gain access to a "utility phase" of sorts, which is still a part of your damage rotation, but provides a party regen and allows you to grant someone a target heal. Scholar is the strongest healer for raiding and also marginally more engaging DPS combo for soloing since you'll use your Aetherflow on Energy Drain since you won't need the heals while soloing, but both Summoner and Scholar share the same level, so if you level up as Summoner, your Scholar is also being leveled by the same amount. So you could have a bit more fun playing as Summoner and swapping over to Scholar for dungeons or other forms of group play if you really want to heal, or just have Scholar which offers a bit more to do during solo instances than White Mage or Sage realistically.

If you're open to exploring jobs outside of healers that offer sustain and utility, you're coming up on level 50 which will allow you to access the Red Mage. It's a caster that's fairly easy to get the hang of and gets access to a usable healing spell and a resurrection spell. You won't generally worry about healing others in group play, but you can help salvage a nasty run in a pinch and you can instantly revive players back-to-back better than even healers can. They also have magick barrier later which is a defensive ability that also increases how much HP your party receives from healing.

Dancer is available at level 60 as well and is a physical ranged DPS that has the ability to pick another player to dance with and provide them with buffs consistently throughout the fight, has a healing ability that heals both them, their partner, and everyone standing around the both of you, and later has an ability that puts a regen on nearby allies which you can then follow up with a barrier on the party immediately after. It's also one of the more simple attackers and very easy to understand. They have the lowest damage, but offer a lot of power in their ability to buff the party and make everyone else hit harder, especially their partner.

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Thank you, but I know all of that already. I understand that I can play as a DPS or tank instead or that I could level multiple jobs and switch as desired, but at the moment, I'm really just asking for information on the healer jobs.

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Originally Posted by Sotha

Thank you, but I know all of that already. I understand that I can play as a DPS or tank instead or that I could level multiple jobs and switch as desired, but at the moment, I'm really just asking for information on the healer jobs.

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For solo content, there's really nothing to heal, so all the healers are basically the same.

For group content like dungeons, trials, and raids on the other hand:

WHM arguably has a slightly more interesting "rotation" since it has the freedom to stop attacking to heal with its lilies, and there's some mild optimization on using the spell Afflatus Misery during burst windows. As a healer, though, WHM feels inferior to the other three. While it's not incompetent as a healer, there's really nothing WHM has that each other healer doesn't have a better version of. As far as healing is concerned, WHM is, with no exaggeration, diet AST. It's also very lacking in the ability to mitigate damage which has become a very important aspect of harder content. That said, none of this should matter in any real tangible way for casual content.

AST has a far more involved system of buffs to provide to the party which involves a lot of weaving OGCDs and single-targeted other party members which is a point of contention for some players. Its card system also feels quite convoluted for many, being 6 different ways of doing the same thing, and their gauge UI does offer hints to help you, but these hints are incredibly vague and lack strong visibility. In terms of healing though, It has everything WHM has, but better, and more on top of that. It also offers more mitigation for harder content, which as mentioned, is very important if that's what you want to get into in the future. As Sem said though, for soloing, it is quite slow since its personal damage is very low, but in parties, their ability to buff the party makes them more valuable than the higher personal damage of WHM.

SCH, as I mentioned above, is the best healer for raiding. It offers a lot of mitigation, an incredibly powerful combo that allows them to ensure a critical heal-powered barrier and then spread the bulk of that to the whole party--worthless in casual content since it's highly excessive, but very helpful when learning more challenging fights. They also have the strongest piece of utility which gives combat sprint to the entire party. Again, this is mostly worthless in casual play but invaluable during raids. Its damage output is middle of the pack, but also has a party buff that pushes them over the edge in offensive contributions overall. It also has a pet that heals, which makes solo content that much easier since you don't even have to worry about healing yourself when you make a mistake most of the time. That said, it has several tools that take away your ability to use other tools, like Dissipation removes your faerie and faerie actions and generally isn't worth the buffs in healing and is just used as a DPS resource on an unnecessarily long cooldown, but other than having some clunk in that regard, it's quite powerful.

SGE is less finnicky than AST and SCH and is very smooth to play as for a healer. Like WHM, it doesn't have any meaningful utility beyond mitigation, and its personal damage is good but not as good as the buffs AST and SCH provide, but it has the largest quantity of mitigation tools, which makes it quite powerful especially when paired with SCH, and it also has an incredible burst healing combo at level 90 in Zoe + Pneuma. It heals by attacking, though its offensive library is just as shallow as all the other healers, but it means using your GCD heals are even less valuable than with the other healers. In savage raids, you may still be forced to use them in some capacity, particularly in prog, but in casual content there's no reason you should ever need to stop attacking and can just weave heals between your attacks for 100% of most situations.

If you are going to remain on a healer, having soloed quite a bit of the MSQ on AST, I would say that it is rather painful but absolutely possible (as the dv team would say), however I did start out on the SCH path as I knew I would have the benefit of a DPS , an picked AST as you can easily level 2 jobs in the MSQ.

This was before the pure/barrier split, however that would be a consideration now- it's a good idea to learn both, and it is also a good way to see which one fits your own personal preference. Regardless of anyone who talks about a job being "clunky, finicky, complex, convoluted, etc" - these are personal perceptions, you may or may not share them, and you may end up liking it even if you agree.

WHM or SGE is your best bet if you want to do solo content as a healer.

WHM and SGE both have a skill that hits hard (Afflatus Misery / Phlegma), which helps speed things up ever so slightly. I say ever so slightly because all 4 healers have bare bones DPS kit in doing solo content. They're all bloated with healing skills to the point a big portion of your gameplay in doing solo content will end up feeling the same as every other healer - large amounts of time, you'd be pressing your main attack skill. In terms of smoothness, SGE wins out because of its mobility and sensibility with its toolkit. WHM and SGE has the higher nuke potency (main attack skill), so their sustained DPS is generally higher than the latter two, who relies on buffing the party instead. For solo play, WHM doesn't really benefit until lv 74+ because your entire gauge becomes fairly worthless for solo runs (no access to Afflatus Misery until level 74) when regen can mostly handle the job for open world content.

AST is the healer you would least likely want to pick for solo content because it has card buffs that work best with multiple allies and have the lowest personal damage out of the 4 healers.
SCH doesn't have any particular strengths to doing solo content. However, it does share a class with Summoner, so you can always choose to go SMN if you ever get sick of SCH for whatever reason. I wouldn't recommend SCH because its mobbing capability for AoE is one of the weakest out of the healers even if its personal potency is the highest.

Unfortunately, there's not much else to add, because all healers are really bare bones in terms of solo play potential.

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Originally Posted by IDontPetLalas

If you are going to remain on a healer, having soloed quite a bit of the MSQ on AST, I would say that it is rather painful but absolutely possible (as the dv team would say), however I did start out on the SCH path as I knew I would have the benefit of a DPS , an picked AST as you can easily level 2 jobs in the MSQ.

This was before the pure/barrier split, however that would be a consideration now- it's a good idea to learn both, and it is also a good way to see which one fits your own personal preference. Regardless of anyone who talks about a job being "clunky, finicky, complex, convoluted, etc" - these are personal perceptions, you may or may not share them, and you may end up liking it even if you agree.

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Well, SCH and SGE are pretty happy to pair with each other, so having one of either under your belt is probably a good idea if you want to play WHM and AST, because while SCH/SGE is a great combo, WHM/AST might really struggle with mitigation needs.