Improving for Savage as a Healer

I’ve always wanted to try Savage, and I just cleared my first one. Before anything else, I’m not going to complain about the raid’s difficulty it’s my first Savage, so I honestly have no point of comparison.

Same thing for job difficulty. That’s not really the issue here.

After a few pulls, we managed to kill Vamp Fatale, but when I checked FFLogs and Tomestone afterward, I realized I performed really badly. During some phases especially the flails I felt completely overwhelmed. The tanks were taking huge damage, we had to kill the flails quickly, there were raid busters to handle… it felt like everything was happening at once.

That’s when I really understood what Savage difficulty means.

I’ve basically only done Normal content before, and as a healer I never had any issues there. I felt useful, comfortable, like I was contributing properly. In Savage, though, I mostly felt like a burden especially for my co-healer, as you can see on tomestone : https://fr.tomestone.gg/character/40...ivity/77353025

Now I’m not really sure what to do. I’d like to continue doing Savage, but I don’t want to repeat the same catastrophic performance. At the same time, doing Normal doesn’t help me improve for Savage at all. It feels way too easy, and the mechanics are completely different compared to Savage.

Any advice on how to actually improve as a healer for Savage content?

I think the gap between normal and savage is insane for a healer player, Like you jump into a insane amount of healing from none at all bassically.

Normal needs to have a decent heal check to teach newer players and warm them up for harder content rather then holding their hand through it, where you can toss out a ogcd once in a blue moon and not really actively think about when your healing.

Also Tanks and dps to a lesser degree NEED TO ALSO CONTRIBUTE COOLDOWNS. A lot of the time it's not even the healers fault, its everyone's responsibility every job even the "selfish" ones have at least one form of mitigation.

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Originally Posted by Ulrac

Any advice on how to actually improve as a healer for Savage content?

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It's great that you're asking. You'd be surprised how few even care to improve so you're off to a good start.
You can use xivanalysis to plug in your clear and it'll provide a "checklist" of ways in which you can improve. Based on that recent clear of yours, here's what it says:

Always Be Casting
It's better to always be casting (rolling your GCD) > vs clipping and not casting just for the sake of doing your rotation "correct."
Your uptime was around 85% so increasing that uptime will help.

Dot Uptime
Dia uptime was only about 50% so you'll want to remember to keep this up at all times.

Weaving
Poor weaves cause your gcd to delay. You had "8 instances of incorrect weaves." For example at 18 seconds into the fight, you tried to double weave benison and aquaveil with no swiftcast. Your glare might be 1.5, but the recast is 2.5, so if you're going to double weave, you need to use something instant prior, like say rapture into benison and aquaveil.. or swiftcast glare then double weave. 1 weave is better than 2 w/clipping.

Minor things
You could try to use more of your kit, but it's not the end of the world really. Aquaveil had 5/10 possible casts, Benison was 8/20, Asylum 4/7. This one is harder to gauge in a vaccum because the other healer could've been use things so you probably felt it wasn't needed (which is often the case given our bloated our kits now imo).

TLDR
Keep your dia up, always be casting, single weave > double weave if you think you'll clip your gcd.

Bookmark xivanalysis. Anyway, I hope this helps

So firstly, you can't necessarily help how you performed, because the raid tier has been out for weeks and many people have max item level. What that means is you are being compared to people with more gear than you can possibly have yourself, and therefore they will do more damage than you - no matter what you do, probably.

The second thing is that you should keep your DoT up (Dia) 100% of the time. Aim to refresh it when it's about to expire. While you will no doubt be distracted and that's the entire challenge of DoTs, you can optimize your /hudlayout to have your focus target bar near hotbar and /focustarget the enemy at the start (can /keybind this or macro it), and adjust the settings to display only your own debuffs. That way, you will see when your Dia has expired. If you wipe to 1% enrage, just remember that could have been changed by a healer keeping their DoT up.

The third thing is that (like most people) you will have got too far from the bat when following the bats. It is very hard to avoid this, because it is not just avoiding Sanguine Scratch, but also keeping close to the bat, and honestly a lot of people in clear parties can't do it consistently either. You can try to improve it over time: watch for direction bat travels, then move 1 (move 2 if you had to park opposite side of direction it travels in). Move 2. Then you can move 1, then move 1 again.

So you have to move 2 at some point, and you may have to at the start as well or it'll likely create too much distance, giving a damage down.

If you get hit by the chainsaws, you get a Damage over Time, so got to try and avoid their path while healing. Tanks can handle theirs with an invuln or other actions so are less priority if they get one. Planning which heals to use when is a massive part of Savage for healers. I've sometimes sat through whole conversations between healers about what to use and when, while everyone waits for them to discuss it, because it can make or break the run especially for frequent damage mechanics like that. Occasionally tanks will need to be part of this discussion, because they can contribute their raid-wide mits and Reprisal, and DPS can use theirs. But mostly tanks juggle these anyway so healers have to have their whole heal use worked out.

Being overwhelmed at first in SS2 is normal. I think everyone was when they first did it. Even the normal mode version of SS and SS2 wiped parties in the first week. It is just genuinely a lot of stuff until you get used to it.

I think Bryson covers up pretty much the major takeaways, so I'm just going to scratch more regarding uptime. More specifically, the rule of "Always Be Casting (ABC)".

I don't know the mechanic enough to give specific pointer as I haven't done any savage from this tier, but in general when it comes to keeping uptime, there are two crucial thing casters (yes, healers are casters too) need to pin down to get better:

1. Slidecasting, for obvious reasons.
2. Mechanics. This is another equally important aspect to understand - more specifically, have a spatial awareness of where you are and where you need to be in X timeframe by the time next mechanic happens. You'll be asking questions in your head like "Can I reach my clock position from where I am by just slidecasting glare and use oGCD to handle healing?; Do I need to use my Swiftcast and risk having to hardcast raise in the next 40s?; Can I move my Lily usage around to take advantage of its mobility and weaving properties? (WHM specific); Do I need to sprint+slidecast?; Does this coincide with my DoT refresh so I can make use of its mobility window?".
   
   You can't slidecast effectively if you don't plan ahead where you should be by X seconds. What you end up doing is simply reacting to mechanic by running toward your next location without casting anything, hence it hurts your uptime the more this happens.

The more often you see the heal intense phases, the more routine you will get and the easier or more comfortable it will feel.

In the end, if noone plays poorly and gets hit by unneccessary dmg, you can perform a heal rotation like dps perform a dmg rotation
There will always be the same dmg income in the same moments (unless people forget about their mits)

just give it some more time and dont give up

It doesn't look terrible, your gear is pretty behind at this point if you don't have any savage pieces, so you are competing against much better equipped players. I've pretty much been a shield healer main for a while now and the advice I'd like to give is to be consistent about your big abilities such as bell and wings. Keep in mind that plenary is a mit now too. This helps your co-healer plan around you. Also, it’s better for you to focus on being a good reactive player than a good damage player. WHMs are known for being glare mages, where they will absolutely refuse to stop what they're doing to cast a GCD heal because it’s a damage loss. Don't do that.

The other day I had to hard cast raise someone in during ultimate weapons before the raid wide and we were at about 80% HP and the whm? glare... glare... glare...

They were literally mid glare cast when we died to it. Like the lack of awareness was truly something to behold, don't be like that. This is the reason healers have trust issues.

But besides that, don't overheal, if you have nothing going on don't drop those damage spells. As an example on the other side of the coin I've had regens just constantly GCD heal spells to the point it throws me off because I don't have to do anything and I'm not used to that. It's not a good sign either because your dmg is going to tank hard and the pros don't outweigh the benefits. A raid is performed best when healers know how to use their abilities and OGCDs effectively to always keep damaging, and dropping damage when something doesn't go according to plan. One healer focused only on damage, and one only on heals will not be as effective as two healers complimenting each other.

i dont play healer in harder content but what helps me with stuff in general is just watching Clear POV's of fights on youtube