A nervous healer needing some tips

Hello

So I just started healing on Conjurer, after years and years just playing as a DPS I finally took the plunge and tried healing.

I'm a nervous healer but I have been doing alright so far, until Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak I was able to judge when to DPS and when to heal quite well and keep the tank alive when they did big pulls. But Tam Tara Deepcroft is when I started having problems, I joined a party in progress, so the previous healer had left for what ever reason. We got to the last boss and omg everyone was getting hit and the tank went down so fast I had no time to think. I panicked when I saw everyone having poison and everyone getting hit.

Admittedly I then left rather quickly after that convinced that I would get blamed I was much too nervous to see what they would say, which is silly really I think the pressure got to me, after all I'm used to being a DPS with the only job of hitting stuff til it dies.

I do enjoy healing, I just need some tips for it and a little bit of help. :)

1.) Don’t give up.
2.) Keeing your tank on their feet is a higher priority than removing a debuff from a DPS.
3.) Watch the tank’s HP and the rate of incoming damage - generally, keep your tank around 50% - 75% of their HP total. If the incoming damage is fast, stay closer to full. If it comes in slowly, you can leave them with a bit less.
4.) If your DPS is around 50% health, a regen should do (but Tank still has priority).
5.) If everyone has acceptable health levels (or has regens ticking away to get them there), then DPS. Do as much DPS as you can until you have to heal again. If you’re not comfortable judging for yourself, do to GCDs of DPS, look at everyone’s health, and if you’re still good do 2 more. If they’re NOT good, heal some and then go back to DPS.
6.) Remember to dodge.
7.) You got dis!

That particular instance sounds like the tank may have been undergeared. At the start of dungeons, it's worth checking how geared your tank is so you will know what to expect (right click > examine on the tank).

And just to be safe, be sure to keep your own gear up to date too (weapon is most important, then the rest of left side). Brayflox is the first real gear check IMO, where if the tank or healer are undergeared you're going to have a bad time. But it can happen earlier, especially if the tank had empty slots and/or simply never upgraded from level 1/level 5 gear.

As for party poisons, well, just try not to panic. Cast medica occasionally to top people up, the rest of the time just focus on keeping the tank up. And good luck out there!

Sorry I typed in the wrong name of the dungeon it was Tato-Rak that I got stuck on, so I'm level 24. Juggling DPS and healing is something I want to learn quickly as I know it's super helpful if a healer does DPS, I also like to push the roles that I play outside of the box, to reach it's maximum potential.

I didn't think of the tank being under geared, I have a problem of over healing at the moment, so I thought it was weird that he went down so quickly.

Thank you for the tips :)

That dungeon has a lot of poison and adds which can get out of hand very, very quickly. First of all is to make sure you're out of trouble. Don't greed positioning or move late, pre-empt movement to avoid aoes. Since regens aren't an option you just gotta spam that cure 1 and medica. Use Lucid Dreaming early and often to make sure MP is up. If you have any spare MP pots use it here (but don't bother if you don't have some already). If things go wrong don't bail immediately. Just as healers can adjust, so can the rest of the party. Work out positioning in advance to make healing and dodging easier, or tell the magic DPS to prep their erase in case of dots, maybe have melee stun the boss at critical timings, etc... There are ways to clear without trying to do everything yourself. Say you're new to healing and work as a group! Good luck.

I totally understand the feeling. I main as a healer and still get nervous, as it can feel as though the entire weight of the party is on your shoulders.

I’ve never had a bad response to being open with my party at the beginning about being new to role (my experiments with Tanking for the first time, yikes), though it sounds like you didn’t get a chance for that in this case.

Coming from DPS to healing, Scholar is an easy transition as Arcanist really sets you up for a balanced DPS/Heal balance when you become a Scholar, but it sounds like you’ve invested some time in conjurer.

The biggest shift for me was that as a DPS, my focus was always on enemies, how many, what order, how much HP left, should I switch targets, etc. But as a healer you have to train your brain to take that same approach with the party. Use the tactics of bringing down a mobs hp in reverse to your party.

Once that becomes muscle memory, you’ll be able to multi-task the DPS stuff between heals, but it can only be effective when you can heal in your sleep. It’s sort of like driving, most drivers can drive while adjusting the radio or ac, but the first few times you sit behind the wheel you have to just focus on the most important part, building that primary muscle memory.

TED talk over. Sorry for the long winded reply!

start from the basic, dont skip stuff.

- if you are still nervous between healing and dps, just stick with healing first.
- once you get used with it, you can try put some dps on certain situation like boss fight or when there is only 1-2 enemy only.
- always tell the party if you are still new being a healer, they probably wont give you response but at least they know their situation.
- this is my personal suggestion but, dont slap regen on tank outside combat, the moment tank aggro 1 enemy, the others will start running to you. nothing harm but sometimes tank (especially new tank) can get panic.
- dont forget you have lucid dream to refill your mp

remember that you are healer first and foremost, keeping your party alive and well is your main job, dps is secondary. i've seen many healer let their party die just because their holy/gravity is already in the mid of casting, if your party going to die, cancel whatever dps skill you cast and start heal them asap.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Anya_Synia

Sorry I typed in the wrong name of the dungeon it was Tato-Rak that I got stuck on, so I'm level 24. Juggling DPS and healing is something I want to learn quickly as I know it's super helpful if a healer does DPS, I also like to push the roles that I play outside of the box, to reach it's maximum potential.

I didn't think of the tank being under geared, I have a problem of over healing at the moment, so I thought it was weird that he went down so quickly.

Thank you for the tips :)

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You have a good mindset for things! Don't listen to people trying to talk you out of it.

It's best to learn how to incorporate each spell or ability you get as you level up, be it for dps or healing. Don't ignore using your dps spells just because you're still learning or you'll teach yourself some very bad habits. Doesn't sound like this is your plan but I see it being suggested and if you want to ever be a strong healer (even outside of things like Savage) it's bad advice.

In the same train of thought you have to evaluate what each ability does as you get it and see where it fits within your healing kit. You start with Cure and then get Cure II - Cure II is more expensive but only costs one GCD to use so you're basically trading potential dps for mp efficiency when you use Cure over Cure II. There are good times to do that! Especially early on where you don't have all of your mp management tools. Later on you'll find that using Cure is mostly a waste of time.

For AoE healing you start with just Medica which is similar to Cure - lower cost, less efficient. You'll get Medica II and Cure III later on, they're both AoE heals that are generally better than Medica when you use them but (just like the discussion of Cure and Cure II) they're situational. Most of the time you want to avoid using Medica once you have other abilities but, like Cure, it still sees some use sometimes.

The biggest part of healing is knowing what you need for a given situation. Know what you've got to rely on and use it as best you can. As long as you start off that way and keep it up as you level you'll do just fine, just look at each skill and make sure you understand it's intended/potential applications.

Good general advice here.

Damage is good, and minimizing necessary healing to output more damage is indeed how we optimize, but no need to jump fully head-in. Ease your way into it if it's making you uncomfortable, and do your best to gauge a tank's squishiness in the first few pulls of a dungeon. You'll have some more options as soon as you get Cure II and Regen to help the decision making process of 'Do I need to dump a lot of healing into this tank?' When it comes to damage, feel free to start small. Toss an Aero in here and there (multi-dotting is your best AoE damage till holy comes into play). It's instant and you have mobility during it. You may want to only nuke with stone when you feel the party looks like it'll live for at least 5 seconds, maybe 10 seconds - whatever feels comfortable for you to react to at present and start healing. Your comfort and ability to push damage will naturally come over time with more experience to gauging outgoing damage. You'll make mistakes during this, and that can suck, but it's how we learn our limits. Gotta take those chances to see if it's safe to nuke or not.

I wanted to mention Thousand Maws in particular, though. Thousand Maws has a ton of melee-range AoE poisons that can go out, and with some pulls you'll see the whole party with 2-3 poisons if everyone was in melee. These are extremely weak poisons, though. Scholar used to have no Esuna-effect for Thousand Maws, Haukke Manor, and Brayflox so they just had to heal through and it wasn't a big deal. It's very good that you're already aware enough to be looking at those debuffs, but don't need to panic for all of them, especially in these dungeons. It's very rare that removable debuffs in dungeons are going to be much of a factor; at worst paralysis/silence/slow annoy people and these are typically good to remove, but typically an annoyance more than anything else (It's worth carrying echo drops to remove any silences you end up getting, although it's rare). You could get caught in a vicious cycle of trying to Esuna 10 debuffs and by the time you're done, most would have worn off and the enemy is about to re-apply them while you haven't healed. You don't see too much more of this at higher levels unless people are failing at mechanics (and they do), but you shouldn't need to worry about 700 red debuff icons sending you into panic mode if things are going relatively normal.

Some other things to consider trying:
- Focus target the boss if you haven't been. You'll see casts of tankbusters and other things like AoE abilities before they happen, leaving you less surprised when they happen 2 seconds later. This leads to pre-healing, another source of optimization in healers.
- Consider tampering with your UI if you haven't. It's not necessary by any means, but a lot of healers in various games try to centralize everything so it's easy to keep an eye on your own character while looking at party health and/or cooldown timers/procs. For instance, I've got a Cure 2 icon near my party bars so I can see a Freecure proc (chance from Cure 1 to cause next Cure 2 to be instant) easier. We hardly use Cure anymore for various reasons in expansion content, but it's good to know how long you've got left on your swiftcast, lucid dreaming, largesse CDs, etc without even looking if you're not already set up like that.

You're in a very good mindset so keep it up and good luck!

You should have seen me when I first played healer. And this was back when I was new to MMOs and didn't know what enmity was.

It's a "practice makes perfect" type of thing. Pretty much every situation must happen for you to get fully used to the role:

1. The tank is undergeared.
2. The tank is not using cooldowns properly or at all.
3. The tank pulled more than he/she can handle.
4. The tank is not holding enough aggro.
5. You are running low on MP midfight.
6. A DPS dies.
7. A tank buster is coming.
8. A heavy room-wide AoE is coming.
9. Party members are getting hit by avoidable attacks.

These are just some of the things that you will go through. Healing can be tough at first because your experience will vary depending on your party as well as mechanics, and you might not know how to act when something unexpected happens. But like it was for me, the more these things happen the more you'll learn how to adapt.

Definitely do not give up because it will eventually become such a mindless thing; you'll almost want something to go wrong just to make things interesting.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Anya_Synia

Hello

So I just started healing on Conjurer, after years and years just playing as a DPS I finally took the plunge and tried healing.

I'm a nervous healer but I have been doing alright so far, until Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak I was able to judge when to DPS and when to heal quite well and keep the tank alive when they did big pulls. But Tam Tara Deepcroft is when I started having problems, I joined a party in progress, so the previous healer had left for what ever reason. We got to the last boss and omg everyone was getting hit and the tank went down so fast I had no time to think. I panicked when I saw everyone having poison and everyone getting hit.

Admittedly I then left rather quickly after that convinced that I would get blamed I was much too nervous to see what they would say, which is silly really I think the pressure got to me, after all I'm used to being a DPS with the only job of hitting stuff til it dies.

I do enjoy healing, I just need some tips for it and a little bit of help. :)

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I'm going to echo what others have said: This sounds like the problem was the team, not you.

Try not to let this kill your confidence. There was probably a reason the other healer had left.

That's the biggest help I can give you: You don't know yet when something is your fault and when it's not. But it's safe to assume this wasn't your fault, and you can't be blamed, especially as a new healer.

In these types of situations, you have to slow down your DPS or not DPS at all. There have been a few low level dungeons recently where I've needed to stop DPSing to conserve my MP because the tank was struggling and the DPS didn't know their rotations.

You can't learn how to play at the highest level when you are with people who play at a much lower level. c:

Everyone has made great points so the only thing I could add would be this: Don't feel that you have to lock yourself into Conjurer if you want to heal. Try out Scholar and Astro too because you may find one fits your play style better or it just 'clicks' in a more satisfying way. I got White Mage to almost 70 before I decided to go back and really feel out the others and I'm really glad I did because I found that I LOVE how Scholar plays. It's shields feel more proactive to me (no need to heal if you can negate damage!) which clicked and play with more confidence.

Conversely my friend who is one of the best healer mains I know prefers how Astro plays (with White Mage sitting at #2) over Scholar. So give them all a try and have fun healing! It can be challenging, but incredibly rewarding once you're comfortable with it.

If the dungeon in question was Maws and the tank's HP was depleting quickly, he was likely pulling too many enemies while being undergeared. If it was during the last boss, he was probably standing in the poison puddles the boss leaves behind. The poison stacks from the exploding pods don't tick for a whole lot, but they can be a nuisance if everyone has stacks and you have to resort to using Medica to keep up HP bars. The tail of that boss needs to go down asap or he will leave the truly threatening poison puddles all over the place.

As a healer in that fight, stay far away from the exploding pods while keeping yourself in range to heal the group, especially the tank. You don't have regen at this level so keep using Cure 1 to keep the tank up while staying out of the bad stuff. If you do take damage, prioritize yourself over everyone else. If another player dies, try not to panic. Make sure your health and the tank's health are ok, breath easy and use Swiftcast; target the player that is KO'd and then cast resurrect. It will take a few seconds for the player to rise, and get a little health back. Use those few seconds to toss a GCD or two curing the tank, and then cure the resurrected player. The player you bring back will get a buff that grants them about 5 seconds of immunity so long as they don't take an action, so you do have some time to top them off.

The last boss of Maws is one of those bosses where you want to focus on healing, especially when you're starting out. Don't feel bad about holding off on offensive skills during this particular fight. Adding in DPS while healing comes with your comfort level. You will likely over heal a good bit while establishing this comfort, but it will come around when you get better at gauging HP bars and how quickly they go down along with how much HP your abilities restore.

It's good you are taking things slow, and that what these kind of dungeons help players get used to before things get a little more serious. CNJ/WHM is a good class to progress with and learn the in and outs of healing as you don't need to focus on micro managing a fairy and cards like SCH and AST do.

You'll be fine, trust me. Just don't give up and try not to get too discouraged when bad things happen. Keep us updated with your progress as you progress through more dungeons, and we will help anyway we can. :)

The best advice I was giving when it comes to getting into a new role: do every dungeon until you're satisfied with your performance.
The very first time I did Toto-Rak back in ARR I was in a similiar situation: the tank dropped pretty fast, the group took a lot of damage and add to that that my positioning wasn't always on point and I didn't get everyone with every Medica. So I ran it again. Healers have really short queue times, so leveling them by spamming dungeons is pretty fast and teaches you a lot.

Right now I'm getting more into AST and though I already know all the dungeons from playing WHM, sometimes I feel like I underperformed. That doesn't even has to mean someone died or something. Things like not drawing on time, having CDs left unused too often or handling a mechanic not as well as I could have is enough for me to run it again. There are plenty of mechanics and different bossfight designs across the low-level dungeons so they're pretty neat to get used to lots of dots flying around, unavoidable party wide aoes, add handling, interacting with objects etc.
While the toolkit and gameplay of WHM doesn't change much at lower levels it's still a good idea to go back into a dungeon below your level with certain skills locked until you are comfortable with all the previous skills.

Things you should focus on improving:
- general overview of the fights, how everyone is positioned etc.
- using your cds, don't fall into the into the trap of saving everything for "oh shit"-situations. Prevent them instead of reacting to them
- recognizing and healing according to damage patterns instead of hp % alone. Some tanks drop faster and 40% is already a critical threshold, others drop super slow and are self-reliant, so even 20% isn't worrying
- balancing resource management vs gcd efficiency. Potent spells are more expensive but if you have more than enough mp, use them. No use in hoarding them. On the other hand know how to go back to mp efficient healing if fights take super long and you're running out of mp
- and of course balancing healing vs dpsing

There will always be hiccups, either because you lack routine or because someone in your group screwed up. Doesn't mean you're a bad healer. I recently ran a whole dungeon without Sect on my AST. Completely forgot about turning it back on after I ran a <30 dungeon and it was disabled. That was one hell of a facepalm moment when I noticed it during endboss fight.

Also, I found it easier to get into new jobs by having every skill already on my hotbars with their final hotkey, but that's up to personal preference.
Even if they are locked and will be locked for another 40 levels, I put every skill the class has and uses on a slot where I intend to keep it. Prevents a lot of "whoop misclicked" when learning new skills and reorganizing your hotkeys every few levels, it also gives you a good overview of how many skills you will have to handle and wether you can reach them easily enough according to their importance. I leave an empty spot for role actions as they can't be added before you unlock them.

If you are updating gear I can almost promise it will be an issue with others not updating their gear. For example, I was leveling my AST in a 40 dungeon and I immediately noticed the tank was being auto hit for about 15-20% per mob. They weren't cycling any 60-90sec defensive cooldowns each pull. I had to spend 90% of my ocd/gcds on healing not actually DPSing, so everything went slower as well. I was using MP regen tools constantly. Then I examined them and saw they had like 20 levels lower gear.

Then you get a dungeon where the tank does the opposite, you only have to throw an off heal and you can help the rest of your GCDs with DPSing and making the run faster/smoother. Tanks updating their gear at least every 5-10 levels makes a HUGE impact. Also DPS should pretty much be taking no damage on trash mobs, if you're stressing healing them all the time don't worry, it's them not moving out of aoe/standing in front of mobs etc.

Also if you're learning a new healer, there are heaps of 10-15min videos on youtube. I watched one on AST while I was healing a dungeon and picked up a few tricks/insights. The card system with 3 different withdraws seemed confusing but after a day or so reading/playing now it seems like second nature.

To give a bit of an anecdote. I wiped my party in Ghimlyt Dark last night. It's a dungeon people characterize as easy because the pulls are gated and the bosses are gimmicky. But it has about three mechanics that can take you by surprise.

I've actually died to all three of them.

There are various reasons for why, too. Some of them have nothing to do with the mechanics themselves.

I feel pretty invincible on WHM. Sometimes I forget to look after myself because 99% of the time we can kind of lol at things and not worry too much. Parties tend to panic, and then I mother them too much, fall out of position, etc. And then... poof. Floor Mage.

It doesn't happen often, but when it does happen, it's easy to blame myself.

Last night was practically the first time ever that I've been the sole reason we've wiped. Which I say with a giant asterisk -- if people weren't taking damage or moving too far away from me to be healed, I may not have wiped us. I take responsibility, though, because I still failed the mechanic!

Really, just no one was available to save me when I made a mistake.

Stuff like this is going to happen. You're everyone's safety net, but you have none of your own without a SMN/RDM in the party.

If I were a DPS, it wouldn't even be worth talking about. If I were a tank, I would've used Hallowed Ground and been like, "I'm really good at my job." (Not a shot at tanks! I'm growing to main PLD! Just a lot of mechanics are easier when you can... ignore them. xP)

Being a healer comes with a lot of added pressure, but everyone I've encountered has been super understanding. No one really seemed to care that I went "braindead" last night (which was actually a combination of nervousness, everyone else being out of position, trying too hard to mother everyone, and not figuring out a mechanic in that time!)

I have edited this post so many times. More editing, for the sake of teaching what I want to teach properly and giving an honest look into the day-to-day of a DF healer. x-x

So I didn't give up and this time went back into it with my fc it was so much easier this time I realised the previous party were failing mechanics.

I am not nervous because of trying to dps, I main Summoner so that has taught me to think outside the box, the most exciting memories of being a summoner is summoning Titan when the tank has left or raising the healer and replenishing their much needed mp. I get nervous of the responsibility, it's alright to die as a dps but it's a wipe if you die as a healer.

I have gotten to 35 and practiced Titan a few times now taken on the tip to run dungeons a few times. Titan hits hard and got critised for not rezzing someone who fell off, I told them I couldn't target them. But thanks for the tips of starting casting before a big attack I'm quite ok with Titan now.

I'm now starting to now purposefully not say I'm new so I can practice bigger pulls since the community is so nice they give me little ones, but I want to push myself to improve. Ofcourse if we die I will mention it.

I'm now a little nervous about getting to aurum vale I think I will call on my fc to help with that one.

Thank you for all the tips I do stay calm now and try not to panic and focus more on healing myself and the tank first.

Oh yeah, you'll always hate Aurum Vale with PUGs. It's fun with FC though.

My suggestion is if first time heal the tank in a instance and they can't keep agro off you leave. Today did msq roulette and heal one of the 2 tanks and every mob there attacking comes after me and you get killed. When that happens just leave the party means tanks don't know how to hold there enmity.

Wait til the Vault.

:)

edit: Do not regen the tank before a pull.

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Originally Posted by Anienai

Wait til the Vault.

:)

edit: Do not regen the tank before a pull.

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Placing Regen on the tank is fine if the tank has taken damage.

The WHM plants themselves on top of the tank as they Swiftcast Holy. Everything is stunned. The WHM is fine. The tank can easily take aggro.

The problem here isn't Regen during the pull, it's the WHM's positioning being bad. The WHM needs to understand that Overpower is a cone and work with you. They also need to run with you.

Edit: Thinking about it... I'm not sure if that's what you meant? It's still worth putting out there, at any rate!