Healing tips (ps4)

[Bixby]

There's a lot more to macros (especially for healers) than just combining multiple abilities. There's <mo> healing, <t>/<tt> for hostile spells, various uses of <f>, party announcements for CDs, swapping hotbars/actions when you summon one faerie or the other or swap Cleric Stance, etc.

It's possible to do silly things that are bad ideas with FFXIV's macro system. It's also possible, especially for healers, to make vast improvements to play style/comfort with them (if not always performance).

[Roxinova]

There's a lot more to macros (especially for healers) than just combining multiple abilities. There's <mo> healing, <t>/<tt> for hostile spells, various uses of <f>, party announcements for CDs, swapping hotbars/actions when you summon one faerie or the other or swap Cleric Stance, etc.

It's possible to do silly things that are bad ideas with FFXIV's macro system. It's also possible, especially for healers, to make vast improvements to play style/comfort with them (if not always performance).

This. I get a lot of flack for it, but I MO heal. It's so much easier to just hover my mouse over a player in party frame to heal them. My SO does tab targeting on friendlies and it sometimes messes him up, even when he click targets them. You lose so much time. It works for him because he does everything on the keyboard, but I come from MMOs where you put everything on the mouse: point, click, heal. I have my CDs on my bar, but other than that, I don't waste my time trying to manually target everyone.

[Defteros]

I play from a PS4 so MO macros are a big giant NO for me...

I started using <tt> macros with my SCH for helping me with DPS, but with tanks always swiching targets on large pulls, I botched Bane so many times that I lost count xD
so I went back to the sweet old "target one mob-bio/miasma/bio2-bane-back to heal target"

[Audri]

I can't stand those raise macros. I see them break far too often. Hitting two buttons takes barely longer than hitting one button, and honestly, the chance of a raise not going out and wasting my swiftcast is not worth the miniscule amount of time it saves by using a macro. Macros aren't for everyone, and personally I can't stand them. For sch yes, they have their place because the pet AI is kind of...dumb, but for whm, I don't find them at all necessary.

The biggest thing for me as a healer on a PS4 is making sure I only have two cross bars to switch between. My bars are a tad messy, with dps and healing skills scattered about, but as I have the locations of everything memorized to the point of muscle memory changing anything is very difficult. Just make sure your bars are comfortable, and make sure you know where your most important spells are.

[Estellios]

Swiftcast also shouldn't be 100% only for raise either. Keeping people alive is more beneficial than getting them back up quickly and usually a swiftcast Medica or Cure II is all you need to prevent a death, not to mention it lets you do said spell while on the move.

You'd want a separate Swiftcast for that reason and since you are going to have 2 swiftcasts on your bar anyway you might as well separate it from Raise...

Multi-tier action macros (the ones that have, say, /ac Cure <t> and /ac Cure <tt> on consecutive lines) also have a chance to screw up if you mash the button while the GCD is almost up as the GCD may be down for the first line but come up for the second line so the second line would activate instead of the first. This is why some peoples' Blunt Arrow macros fail if they have a party message that gets displayed before Blunt Arrow in their macro.

[VanilleFang]

snip

This. What she said.

As a WHM I find macros pointless, and also only use two cross bars on PS3. And speaking of speed.. I don't even think Casting Swiftcast then Raise takes any long than a macro. Especially if you keep hitting Raise until it goes off after you use Swift cast.

I don't really like when people tell others they HAVE to use macros. I have never used a macro before. Ever.

[Roxinova]

Snip

Fyi, you can set up the macro so that if you hit it once, it only casts swiftcast, then you can cast whatever else you want afterwards. You don't have to hit it the second time and use it for raise, there is no reason it needs to take up two slots. I have also never had an issue with my macro going off like so many of you are complaining about. Sounds like user error to me.

[Mimilu]

This guide helped me with my scholar stuff when I was first getting started:
http://forum.square-enix.com/ffxiv/t...d-Only-Edition