New to WHM, Any advice?

I've been leveling multiple jobs over the past week to see which I liked best, all I have left is healing and tank (Tank will be dead last, as I'm not very confident when it come to tanking..)

I got my WHM and I'm wondering what I should be doing in term of which spells to use. I just got Cure II.

Should I try using mouseover macroes?

It will all depend on the content you are healing, and if you have a co-healer.

In dungeons, your main tool is Regen. Having it on the tank helps when they take auto-attacks. You have two instants offGCD, Tetragrammaton and Benediction, that you can squeeze between two GCD spells. Asylum is a weaker Regen-AOE that you might want to place on the tank so it adds up with your own Regen. Then Cure or Cure II.
DPS-wise, Holy is a good helper in a pack of mobs as you will stun them, and your tank won't take damage for a short duration. This will come when you feel more and more comfortable to heal.

In raids (with a co-healer), same rules apply in general. Keep an eye your Main Tank with Regens, and try to pump out some DPS with your Aeros and Stone. You have good AOE healing spells two in Medica (a flat mild AOE heal), Medica II (same but with Healing over Time effect), and Cure III (a strong heal in a small radius around the target). Assize is an oGCD that is an instant AOE mild heal and DPS.

This will come handy when you reach around level 60. For now you will focus on Cure and Regen. My best tip would be to try as early as possible to get used to DPS as a healer, when you find your comfort zone in healing.

Regarding macros, I can't tell that much as it is up to everyone's preference. I don't use healing macros, I just select in my party list and heal like that. I have DPS macros though, that help you DPS while targetting the tank (or any party member).

Thank you! What are the DPS macroes? I'm still relearning the game as I've been away for over a year, and I'm not to familiar with macroes.

Do you play on controller or mouse and keyboard? If you're mouse/kb you can just assign a key to target a specific line of your party list (so by default tanks in 4man content are slot 2 and in 8man slots 2 and 3) and that way if you need to target them quickly you can just press that key and heal/shield.

Macros are generally not great in combat because they cause delay - they're unable to queue your skills for instant use at the end of the next GCD rotation. I would discourage their use for things they aren't really necessary for.

I use mouse and keyboard. I tried using a controller but it didn't go over very well. How do I go about assigning keys? That sounds pretty useful.

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Originally Posted by Aikeiko

I use mouse and keyboard. I tried using a controller but it didn't go over very well. How do I go about assigning keys? That sounds pretty useful.

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In your main menu (like where you would log off or do any of that jazz) there is an option for Keybinds. Go in there and if you click on the targeting tab some of the first options are "Target second party member in list" and so on.

My phrasing may not be perfect, I'm not at home to see but if you get into that menu you'll see it.

Just make sure to click Apply/Save before closing the window or everything you've done will just go away.

I only have two macros myself, one for E4E so I can stay targeted on the boss/adds and it hits the main tank. The other ties Raise to Swiftcast (but if Swiftcast is down can still be used).

General Advice
Heals in FFXIV are very very powerful. You can top off people very quickly within a few GCD heals. This means you can split your time between healing and DPSing relatively effortlessly once you get comfortable with your healing kit.

You're a healer first so HP bars are your first concern. Once the HP of your party is in a comfortable safety area, you can start to dish out DPS. A good priority against bosses is to apply DoTs then start to use your single target damage spell. In the case of WHMs, this means applying Aero then smacking things with Stone. Every healer eventually gets an AoE damage spell (more on this later).

Lucid Dreaming is a cross role you'll get on all healers at level 24. This acts as both an enmity dump and Refresh. Refresh is a buff that restores the user's MP over 21 seconds. You might have run into it if you've played RDM / SMN in the past and it works exactly the same way.

I would also advise against using Macros as they tend to be clunky to use and you shouldn't be using them for any of your main line heal or DPS spells.

WHM-specific advice
Early in the game, Regen is the highest efficiency spell in the WHM kit - it's an instant cast HoT. You'll want to combine this with Largesse when you can to maximize it's potency. Due note that HoTs (and DoTs) snapshot your buffs at the time of application. Even though Regen duration lasts longer than Largesse, it may be in your interest to try to reapply Regen again near the end of your Largesse buff to get maximum value out of Regen + Largesse.

50 and below, the only oGCD ability you have access to is Benediction so you'll be relying on Regen and other GCD heals to keep people topped off. It's usually best to use the largest GCD heal you have which is Cure II, though do keep an eye on your MP - especially if you're using Holy in large trash packs as that's a really fast way to run out of MP. Remember that Freecure exists, so don't be afraid to use more efficient Cure's to fish for Freecure to give you those free Cure II's when you're running dry.

On the topic of Holy, it's an AoE damage spell that also stuns all the targets it hits for 4s. This is usually useless against bosses but against large packs of trash monsters, this can act as a 7s damage immunity on your tank due to diminishing returns (4s + 2s + 1s = 7s). You should take full advantage of this when you can.

Cure III and Medica II are you high tier AoE heals. Cure III is a targeted but short ranged AoE that has the best burst AoE healing within a single GCD. Medica II is a small heal that has a HoT component attached and totals up to 700 potency. This is a very efficient way to top people up baring you (and your healing partner) give the opportunity to allow the HoT do it's business. This takes some fight knowledge to use efficiently.

Once you get past 50, the WHM kits gets much more diverse, building on a myriad of oGCD (Tetragrammatton, Divine Benison, Asylum, Assize, Plenary Indulgence) so you start to shift from GCD heals to oGCD heals. If you and your team plays properly, you'll basically have an oGCD heal for every part of a fight and never need to use a GCD heal ever again. You'll also gain access to the best MP tool in the game - Thin Air which essentially gives WHM infinite mana outside of massive amounts of Holy spam or dying repeatedly. I don't want to get too much further into this until you get higher level on WHM but WHMs main strengths is having a high effective MP pool and a large number of oGCD tools which allows you to keep a party going for a fairly long time as long as you can stay alive and there aren't any party / raid wiping mechanics going out.

Happy White Maging :)

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Originally Posted by Aikeiko

Thank you! What are the DPS macroes? I'm still relearning the game as I've been away for over a year, and I'm not to familiar with macroes.

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As other people said below, Macros are useful but can provoke a bit of delay so no one would recommend to rely on macros too much.
I only use two kinds of macro, one to indicate who I am raising (useful when you cannot communicate with the other healer or rezzers) and the DPS ones as I told :
For a White Mage, your main DPS tool is Stone, and you have two Damage over Time (DoTs) Aeros, so the macro looks like that, and then replace "Stone" by "Aero"

/micon "Stone" (so the icon shows the spell action)
/macroerror off (in case of error, a macro sometimes shows a chat message saying it failed, this turns it off)
/ac "Stone" <tt> (will cast stone to your target's target)
/ac "Stone" <t> (otherwise, will cast stone to your target)

The main use of this macro is that you can keep your tank as a target, and DPS through them. It's handy while learning to heal and when you play on controller, and there is little to no delay with them, you won't delay your next GCD.
Good thing to know is that, while leveling your DPS spells will get an upgrade (up to Stone IV, and then Aero II and Aero III as two distincts spells) : this macro won't change, because you will always be casting the highest upgrade available of your spell, and it works when you need to synch-down your level for some dungeons.
But if you play on mouse and keyboard, you can do as MoroMurasaki suggested and map keys for party members (by default I think it is F1, F2 and so on) when you need to heal them, then go back to the mob with Tab.

Leveling WHM and Raiding WHM play differently due to the tools they have access to. Main example : When leveling, you will be using Cure/CureII on the main tank to top them up. When raiding, you will hardly ever use Cure/CureII if the tanks use their CDs properly and your cohealer uses their oGCD heals properly.

That said, I can't really give solid advice on how to use specific gcd heals apart from : if someone needs a heal right now, heal them (use swiftcast on a CureII if you have to), otherwise let regens tick them up or heal then when an oGCD heal becomes available.

for personal macros, there's really only one I would recommend : Asylum. While I can't remember 100% it while not online, it was something like :

/ac "Asylum" <t>
/ac "Asylum"

This will allow you to cast asylum to be centered on whatever you are currently targeting, or let you set it normally if you aren't targeting something. The only reason why I would suggest this macro is because it's sometimes faster to just center it on a target with the macro rather than place the ground aoe.

Party oriented macros are to let your party know when you have specific cooldowns. such as:

/p Swiftcast ready in : <recast.Swiftcast>

WHM's biggest strength is it's regens (and overall high potency skills compared to the other healers). You will want to learn just how much healing your regens can do and learn to trust them. If the party is around half hp, has a newly applied medicaII regen on them, and won't be taking damage for a while, let the regens tick them up to full. Don't waste the extra GCD for a medica to heal them when it's not needed, that GCD could be a stone to the boss's face.

If you want to get into end-game WHM play, I'd be happy to give you specific advice and such. But otherwise, it's just a checklist to go through:
1) Am I alive and safe?
2) Is the tank alive and safe?
3) Is the party alive and safe?
4) Can I throw some stones cuz the entire party is fine?

I half expected to see the first post be "Best WHM Advice: Reroll AST"

Glad people have more class than that.

Onto the advice: I don't know if I have anything to add that those before me haven't already posted. But I can relay some personal tweaks and optimizations I use when in fights.

If you got Largesse on your bar, Largesse + Regen on a tank will usually mitigate any damage they're taking sufficiently enough for you to have 15-20 seconds of attacking going on before the tank needs to be touched again. At higher levels, if Largesse is down, Regen + Asylum will also work so you can continue hammering the mobs. Again for higher levels, once you're down to just Regen, and the tank is like 60% toss Divine Benediction (DB) with Regen and see if that will heal the tank up a bit so you can keep attacking. If not, pop Tetra on him and keep pounding. By that point, Largesse should be back up and the process continues.

When it comes to using Holy, everyones favorite eye blinding spell of spam, after the tank finishes pulling I throw on a Largesse Regen then immediately swiftcast the Holy. The tank is gonna take a huge damage spike by the time that first Holy gets off because all the mobs finally catch up to him, but Holy stuns, so he's perfectly safe for like, 4 seconds. This buys a lot of time for the DPS to hammer the mobs and help mitigate the damage to the tank. There's also plenty of time to oGCD a Tetra or a DB and start Hardcasting a second Holy as Regen takes care of him. Then you ramp up into the spam. Just keep casting it until you're out of oGCDs to save the tank in between casts or all the mobs are dead.

It's a bit risk reward. Part of WHM and healing in general is gauging how fast your tank's HP sinks during a typical 4-5 mob pull and if your Healing over Time (HoT) spells are enough for that. If the tank is really poorly geared, or over ambitious, you'll have to cut back on relying on your HoTs and start babysitting their HP bar with oGCD heals.

I decided to recently switch healer on my other main and wanted to give WHM a try. I want to thank everyone of their advices and maccros.

Before you heal a tank and especially before you use Regen, be sure the tank has aggro. If you Regen a tank as they are starting to pull things or are in the middle of gathering enemies the mobs will aggro on you. At higher levels good tanks can deal with this, even if it's annoying, but at lower levels, with new tanks, or with not-so-great tanks this is a disaster.

But at simplest the priority is:

1. Dodge AOE/do mechanics
2. Cast spells
2a. Healing/shielding spells/buff spells
2b. Offensive spells/debuff spells/weapon attacks

If don't need to dodge or do mechanics, I cast. If I don't need to heal, I cast damage spells. Anything higher on the list than what I'm currently doing that pops up immediately takes priority.

As for an (obvious) general rule I base my actions on how the party is handling things. For example when in DF dungeons:

Level 50: When tank has trash gathered, I prefer to Regen the tank. If the tank seems a bit squishy, I might add on Largesse to make the Regen ticks bigger. I then run near the mobs, cast Swiftcast, then Holy. That stuns the mobs and does damage. If the tank is doing OK, another Holy or three. If not, Cure 2 to top off. If the tank is desperately low I use Benediction, which restores 100% health. If I spam too much Holy or Cure II, I use Lucid Dreaming to get my mana back up.

Level 70: As tank is gathering trash, i use Divine Benison on the tank to reduce damage if the pull is large/takes a while, then the same as above for level 50. Except I have more off-global cool-down heals like Tetragrammton and Assize if the tank starts to get low. I can also use Thin Air to have my spells cast nothing for a short time. This goes well with Presence of Mind to cast faster while doing Holy spam. After the first Holy I might use Aero III to let it start ticking on the trash. I sometimes use the Asylum bubble on trash packs just to give more breathing room.

Below 50 it's mostly just Cure II and Regen and using Stone and Aero on trash and bosses alike.

Between 50 and 70 it's a mix of what I wrote above depending on which abilities are unlocked.

Also in dungeons trash packs a good tip is to use swiftcast + holy to stun and interrupt a telegraphed aoe attack. Taken that you still have at least 1 second of stun outside of the diminishing returns. Sometimes is also better to space out your holy spams, if the trash pack is too keen on AoEing, so you'll keep them with more downtime.

I’m surprised at all the negative macro information here. I also find it weird to say macros are delayed and then suggest dps macros when dpsing is 80% (90%?) of your uptime.

Macros for healing are absolutely fine unless you’re aiming for 100% parses (and even then). Macros for dps is doing it the wrong way around since you absolutely want your dps skills to queue.

Also when it comes to macros the general rule is to keep them limited to one action per macro (especially if you spam your actions in a fight). All those macros with multiple fallback targets are poison because the macro will execute instantly even if you’re still on the global cooldown (ignoring some of your target orders). If it’s a dps macro it’ll usually set you back a bit until you execute the macro again, but if you do this on healing macros you’ll just end up healing someone else.

I personally use single action mouse over macros for healing. That way there’s no need to select my heal target and I can keep monsters targeted while I heal. Spamable and the only delay is that of my ping which is unimportant given the fact that you don’t need to heal that much in this game. Plus most of the time you already need to account for server ticks so it hardly makes a difference.

Do you mind posting a sample mouse-over macro for me to adapt...am relatively new to FF14 healing but did some in WOW and used mouse-overs then; however I imagine it will be different text.

thanks

Code:

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/ac "Cure II" <mo>
/micon "Cure II"

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