First time healing (AST) - what should I know?

[Tiva]

Unpopular opinion- go play conj. Start with sastasha. Get comfortable healing and dpsing in there. Move to he next dungeon. Etc. These ppl advising you to focus on healing and not dps at first are the reason why so many healers get to 60 and have no idea how to anticipate incoming damage and respond. They play reactionary. Dpsing as a healer is primarily what forces you to learn to play proactively and anticipate damage.

Theoretically you can do this if you start as Astro and just go level synchronize into baby dungeons. But since you will need 34 (?) conj anyway for stone skin you might as well learn that first. If you start as a low level healer you will have an easier time tbh. One of the greatest crimes on this game was allowing ppl to start a tank or healer at level 30 without requiring they already had a healer at that level. What you miss is the foundations. And these foundations are what you need to build your skill off of at higher levels. It is much much harder to try and dps later in content that requires more healing and you have a more complicated rotation. The easiest way is to start from day 1.

From you comment "what little damage I can do" I feel like you don't parse. This is a big misconception about healer dps from people who don't parse. If the healer has any understanding at all of thir dps rotation, they can do very considerable damage. Enough that in dungeons and 24mans its equivalent to adding another dps. It's is very substantial. But you need to work at it and the time to do that is in the easiest content of the game - the starting dungeons and then work up from there.