Overwhelmed by mechanics, healing and dps

I am a few months in and have levelled up a tank, a Monk and an Ast. The healer I enjoy the most, but as I am doing Eden and the Alliance raids (I have completed all on normal a couple of times through the DF) I am finding my self just overwhelmed by everything and wondered if this is usual?

I have a parse running and when I survive I find my dps parse is a fraction of everyone else's, but my heal parse is often double everyone else's.

Most others seem to be calmly moving where they need to be while maintaining a constant stream of casting, while I am using every bit of my 20 years gaming to frantically respond to all the mechanics, cast heals as people get hit, fire the odd nuke and then somewhere in and amongst drop cards on all the wrong people. It feels like i am playing a platform game like sonic whilst trying to at the same time play my healer and keep everyone alive.

I am reading guides and these forums, they seem full of people saying healing is too easy and I am just left scratching my head.

My guess is that I need to do the fights more until they are like clockwork, so I don't feel so pressured. But at this point i feel like I would be a liability in the harder versions of Eden and have avoided them as not to let others down. I am ok to acknowledge I need more experience and time to get used to the game, but am looking for any pointers or reassurance that this experience is normal.

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Originally Posted by Djinn101

I am a few months in
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My guess is that I need to do the fights more until they are like clockwork, so I don't feel so pressured. But at this point i feel like I would be a liability in the harder versions of Eden and have avoided them as not to let others down. I am ok to acknowledge I need more experience and time to get used to the game, but am looking for any pointers or reassurance that this experience is normal.

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Knowing the fights like clockwork will def help, but the biggest change will be when you know your class like clockwork, and that takes a bit.

Nothing you are experiencing is strange or wrong.
Good luck and keep learning~

It is normal, especially for AST. It's the busiest healer for a reason. You have three layers of personal mechanics to deal with, including Healing, Dpsing and Buffing, as opposed to the other two healers who only Heal and DPs.

Astrologian is the worst healer when it comes to target management. You're constantly switching back and forth from boss for damage, to party members for cards, to tanks for healing, all while juggling encounter mechanics and positionioning yourself. That can leave you disoriented especially because your eyes are constantly moving back and forth between your party UI and the battlefield. (More so than other healers.)

It does get better, and you'll probably find yourself feeling the other healers become stale and repetitive without the card system in the end.

Both responses are reassuring to read, thanks. I will keep chipping away. I do feel to be making small improvements all the time and most importantly it is a lot of fun

2 years ago or so some people dragged me to do Alphascape 1.0 Savage. I was panicking because I didn't know what attacks came and in what order.

I ended up needing to switch to tank since we needed another and let me tell you, sometimes a different perspective helps you learn a fight too. It's easy to study what the boss does when the party's hp bars isn't your primary concern. Though I'm more along the lines of knowledge is power. I don't panic nearly as hard if I know what attacks the boss uses.

To add on to what was already said, one thing that helped me specifically for AST was changing my UI around.

My left side of the screen is cluttered to the seventh hell and back to a lot of people, but it helps me do my job: I can see the map, hp bars, buffs, timers on said buffs, and all my abilities in one spot instead of looking all over for it.

I even had an entire hotbar dedicated to the cards and when Divination/Sleeve Draw was on/off CD.

I doubt anyone needs my set up, but changing your UI to suit your needs helps alot.

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Originally Posted by ASkellington

I even had an entire hotbar dedicated to the cards and when Divination/Sleeve Draw was on/off CD.

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Yes, with AST you can set up macros for giving cards to each party member so you don't actually have to switch targets in order to give them out. Mine looks like this:

/macroicon "Play"
/ac "Play" <1>

And I have 8, one for each party member. I have them on a hotbar vertically next to the party list, so I can just click the one next to the name of the person I want to give it to and it gives them the card without me having to switch off my target. I was doing it manually for years, but once I started doing that it made it a lot easier.

It's normal, I wouldn't worry about it.
FFXIV is all about memorising everything about the fight and your class. Until you did both, some fights can seem overwhelming but once you got some practice you will probably do many things on auto pilot. AST is the busiest of all healers and if you're doing it in PF, you usually also have to deal with a noticable lack of mitigation and people outranging heals/ not respecting healer bubbles.
There are not just guides but also timelines with precise timestamps for when exactly mechanics start to cast and when an effect goes off. Taking a look at them helps immensly if you're still feeling overwhelmed or are caught off guard by specific parts of a fight.
The first tier is the most difficult one because you still need to get a feel for how raiding in general works here. But in the second tier you already recognize mechanics and know the general flow of fights. It usually takes a tier to demystify endgame raiding but after one tier you'll notice there isn't as much to it as it feels now.
All the feeling of being overwhelmed usually comes from panicking because everything seems to happen too fast, to sudden when in reality, it's not. You have huge gaps between mechanics, between HP bars needing to be filled and plenty of time to plan ahead.
But the ability to do so only comes with a bit more practice.

There is some great pieces of advice here, the comments about lining up vertical hotbars by the player names is something I stumbled onto a couple of weeks back and I am finding really helpful for cards and the 2 single target OGCds it really us a huge help. Rilifane it is interesting to read your point of view, after I had read the first comments I did a couple of raids last night with a much calmer outlook and the difference was remarkable. I also noticed that what I perceived as people knowing what they are doing, isn't always the case. A couple of players were often out of place and I am covering them with heals, which in turn is leading to the pressure on me.

I intend to practise the normal raids daily for a few weeks and then see where I am at.

I was told prior to joining the game that FF14 had a more supportive community, which definitely seems the case based on the comments here, I was expecting at least a couple of troll responses to learn to play properly and the like, but glad to see patience and players willing to give new players the time of day. Cheers

Do lots of casual content and build muscle memory for AST. spam same normal raid over and over. some asts just card themselves in casual content until they are used to it if even that is too hard. re-adjust hotbars as needed if anything feels too hard to execute.

once you know your job well savage becomes more about memorizing mechanics and keeping up with healing dps.

have a habit of mashing dps and slidecasting more (cast and inch your way to where you need to be during OGCD/card casts then roll your next gcd right away)

dont feel bad about writing mechanics into an echo macro and posting them in a chat for you to remember what mechanics come up next, or write it down/have a timeline open. since savage is completely scripted with a little rng here and there, so pre-positioning for mechanics makes it way easier.

gl, ast is imo the hardest healer to learn the role with but you can do it.

If you really want to learn the ropes with healing WHM is by far the easiest to manage because the class is so straight forward and dead simple compared to AST and SCH.

AST tends to be a bit more complex, and if you're getting overwhelmed, may be better to start simpler and return to AST later one when you feel confident with WHM.

I can't comment on SCH because I'm better at murdering teammates than healing them =D

If your healing parse is so big, I can't imagine your overhealing tho. if you look how fights goes, there's generally an aoe, a tank buster (generally in that order, can be reversed) then random mechanics where damage can be dodged or a few people will be targeted, then again an aoe, a tankbuster. (even in dungeons)

So between 2 mechanics there's generally a huge time, like 30 seconds (how many time do you see more than 2 or 3 aoes in a 3 min boss fight in dungeons). 30 seconds is 12 GCDs. And in most occasions, you only need 1 or 2 heal at worst to heal your group back to full (don't forget you aint alone in 8+ man content).

The biggest mistakes people do when beginning healing is: the tank must be full hp all the time. if you dont attack or heal you ll see the speed that its hp goes down, outside of tankbusters, every heal that put them over 100% is basically a waste, so just aim for 90% and heal them when they get under 50 or smth unless you see a tankbuster (if you're an ast, you can easily weave a dignity, and if you have a scholar with you, they ll probably get very pissy if you dont let their excog pop by not letting the tank goes under 50%).
The second one is to have regens always on (aoe regens or on tank) "just in case": everything on this game is scripted/timed. if you do the same fight 100 times, unless there's two patterns (but then it's the same, just x2), everything will always be at the exact same second in the fight, nothing is "a surprise" even if you don't know the fight, an aoe just happened? there's two solutions: the boss cast a second one back to back, or he wont for a while.
And the third one is: if there's a regen, let the regen do it's job. if you put an aoe regen, then heal again on top of it, the regen was a waste and thats a second gcd you could have used to dps.

Those are generally the most basic mistakes and advice I can give. People wont die by a random thing, and if they die because they did a bad, it's their fault? as a healer your job is to heal the mandatory damage, not the oopsies of a dps that isnt doing their job. I think when people begin to understand that, they begin to be less stressed about healing and they get better naturally. I generally only look at the hp bars when a mechanic or aoe damage happens, the rest of the time I m just pressing 1.

(there's other things like never move more than you need to when there's an aoe, if you move 1meter further than the line, that's a dps loss, if your GCD isnt constantly rolling, it's a loss, etc)

When you’re learning a fight don’t worry so much about dps, your job is to heal, focus on that, play your cards, maybe throw out some DoTs and maelfics when you feel like there’s some downtime in the healing, but for the most part you’re a healer and outside of savage content your dps doesn’t mean that much.

Once you’ve got the fight down and you know what damage is coming when and you know when and where to move for mechanics, then you can start to optimise your healing and focus more on dps. I like to think of healers as a manual car slowly shifting gears as you get more comfortable with the fight.

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Originally Posted by Cabalabob

When you’re learning a fight don’t worry so much about dps, your job is to heal, focus on that, play your cards, maybe throw out some DoTs and maelfics when you feel like there’s some downtime in the healing, but for the most part you’re a healer and outside of savage content your dps doesn’t mean that much.

Once you’ve got the fight down and you know what damage is coming when and you know when and where to move for mechanics, then you can start to optimise your healing and focus more on dps. I like to think of healers as a manual car slowly shifting gears as you get more comfortable with the fight.

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This. DPS is something to work in when you're comfortable with content. Focus on just keeping yourself alive by doing mechanics and healing the party of course, and let the dps come when you're comfortable.

Having healer dps is all well and good, but not if you're stressing yourself out or stretching too thin while getting used to thing.

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Originally Posted by Bright-Flower

This. DPS is something to work in when you're comfortable with content. Focus on just keeping yourself alive by doing mechanics and healing the party of course, and let the dps come when you're comfortable.

Having healer dps is all well and good, but not if you're stressing yourself out or stretching too thin while getting used to thing.

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Hard disagree. Mindlessly mashing Glare/Broil/Malefic is a healer's default action and should be automatic until a healing action is needed. Even in Savage it's almost always safe to wait one or two or five GCDs before healing. There's plenty of time to assess the situation while casting.

Dropping a cast to move or not renewing a dot in time is normal while figuring out the fight's cadence but there's no excuse to stand idly while learning because spamming a singular offensive spell has no cognitive load. It's arguably harder to actively look for opportunities to attack than to do it by default. Press '1' until [mechanic/dot refresh/personal CD] is dead simple.

Edit: Dealing damage seems a lot more complex and intimidating than it really is. In truth it's not much more difficult than jumping. You can test this for yourself. Grab a couple of friends to run a dungeon, and just endless mash the space bar to jump. Stop jumping when you need to heal, then continue jumping. You'll see that after a couple of dungeons it doesn't take any thought at all to jump continuously. Dealing damage as a healer is the exact same thing. Spam one key, stop to heal, then continue spamming it.

They really compared healer dps to jumping continuously and it was both compelling and accurate. Give yourself more time and everything will fall into place. One day you'll chuckle about how scary healer dps was.

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Originally Posted by Jaelommiss

Hard disagree. Mindlessly mashing Glare/Broil/Malefic is a healer's default action and should be automatic until a healing action is needed. Even in Savage it's almost always safe to wait one or two or five GCDs before healing. There's plenty of time to assess the situation while casting.

Dropping a cast to move or not renewing a dot in time is normal while figuring out the fight's cadence but there's no excuse to stand idly while learning because spamming a singular offensive spell has no cognitive load. It's arguably harder to actively look for opportunities to attack than to do it by default. Press '1' until [mechanic/dot refresh/personal CD] is dead simple.

Edit: Dealing damage seems a lot more complex and intimidating than it really is. In truth it's not much more difficult than jumping. You can test this for yourself. Grab a couple of friends to run a dungeon, and just endless mash the space bar to jump. Stop jumping when you need to heal, then continue jumping. You'll see that after a couple of dungeons it doesn't take any thought at all to jump continuously. Dealing damage as a healer is the exact same thing. Spam one key, stop to heal, then continue spamming it.

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Different players learns their way to better at different pace. That being said, I still agree that the minimum expectation of healer DPS is: "Press 1 button until somebody needs healing."
At the very least, keep that Glare/Broil/Malefic rolling as much as we can. Nevermind keeping DoT uptime on spot nor even trying to manage stuffs like SCH's Aetherflow and AST's cards. Those can wait until they're used to keeping their dmg spell rolling. One can be surprised with the increase in their numbers from just keeping that one button jammed!

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

Different players learns their way to better at different pace. That being said, I still agree that the minimum expectation of healer DPS is: "Press 1 button until somebody needs healing."
At the very least, keep that Glare/Broil/Malefic rolling as much as we can. Nevermind keeping DoT uptime on spot nor even trying to manage stuffs like SCH's Aetherflow and AST's cards. Those can wait until they're used to keeping their dmg spell rolling. One can be surprised with the increase in their numbers from just keeping that one button jammed!

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I tend to recommend the opposite, start with popping dots and start spamming nukes as you get more comfortable myself.

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Originally Posted by Brandedblade

I tend to recommend the opposite, start with popping dots and start spamming nukes as you get more comfortable myself.

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I used to do this until I met few players who actually just flat out early on Friday refresh their DoT everytime they have to make a tiniest movement. At that point straight Galre/Broil/Malefi would flat out over the early refreshed DoT. Hence mine suggestion.

crap I’m on phone and cannot edit those typos out lol
I was meant to say this:

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Originally Posted by Rein_eon_Osborne

I used to do this until I met few players who actually just flat out early refresh their DoT everytime they have to make a tiniest movement. At that point straight Glare/Broil/Malefic would flat out win over the early refreshed DoT. Hence mine suggestion.

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Originally Posted by Doozer

Yes, with AST you can set up macros for giving cards to each party member so you don't actually have to switch targets in order to give them out. Mine looks like this:

/macroicon "Play"
/ac "Play" <1>

And I have 8, one for each party member. I have them on a hotbar vertically next to the party list, so I can just click the one next to the name of the person I want to give it to and it gives them the card without me having to switch off my target. I was doing it manually for years, but once I started doing that it made it a lot easier.

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This! AST is my main healer and this helps so much. However i would suggest using a mouseover macro instead of a numbered macro. This creates a lot less clutter. Assuming you play on PC, you can just put your mouse arrow over the part member you want to buff. If you play on PS4 or PS5 i don't know how it works and maybe someone who knows can chime in. I do this for both Play and Minor Arcana. The macro looks like this.

/macroicon "Play"
/ac "Play" <mo>

/macroicon "Minor Arcana"
/ac "Minor Arcana" <mo>

I main tank but have an alt WHM. Theres a lot of more experienced healers in this thread but using a focus target macro on bosses helps me a lot especially with tank busters and standard aoe party dmg abilities. /focustarget is it. Basically you can watch the boss while having a party member selected. It sounds like more to watch for and it kind of is but it gives you the upper hand when you aren't allowed mods

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Originally Posted by Djinn101

I am reading guides and these forums, they seem full of people saying healing is too easy and I am just left scratching my head.

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Healing is easy when everyone plays it right. If the dps dodges all the mechanics all you would have to do is just heal through the aoe. When I was doing the Eden runs for the first time I too wasted a lot of time resurrecting people for the 2nd,3rd and 4th time and then I wondered why my dps is so low. If you don't have swiftcast rezzing dps party member is overall a dps loss. They will be raised up and dead in the next 10 secs most probably.

If you are looking for high dps parsing, spam your dps spell and let your co-healer bother with the dead dps.

Healing is difficult to prog because as a healer, you’re always doing more personal mechanics: healing, DPS, utility and the fight mechanics themselves.

To be honest, it took me a while to get into the groove of it as well. As every has mostly come to the consensus, I agree with them: you just need practice on your class. And don’t think practice means practice on every single fight. The way I became better is by spamming the fight I found most difficult for each kind of content: a dungeon, a trial, an alliance raid, a normal raid. By spamming them, I was able to understand the timing of my spells and of raid buffs, the typical order of mechanics, which mechanics will require that I sprint to avoid any PS4 latency that normal movement would get me snapshotted.

It’s just practice and I think if you try, you will succeed. But don’t let any failures along the way deceive you.