Looking for Tips, Tricks, advice for beginner healing and Scholar-specifically

[EmmetOtter]

Looking to get some helpful tips, tricks, pointers for healing in FFXIV.

I've only done healing once before, years ago in WoW (as a Shaman in Legion), and it wasn't my thing, but after re-rolling from BLM to SMN I remembered I could do SCH too and thought "why not?"

I've been playing FFXIV for 1.5-2 months (tried FFXIV years ago and it didn't click but came back for 5.3) and I do understand FFXIV in general (I'm a 80 BLM and done casual raids) but clearly not a FFXIV veteran. Currently level 31 in SCH/SMN.

--EDIT: snipped out original questions--

Please see my latest post in this thread.

[Laphicet]

Not sure if bait... But if it isn't. I would say just don't bother with healing as it is something that grows more boring the better you get at it, and in the end just boils down to spamming one button and occasionally using an OGCD, for casual content at least, for harder stuff you have to do marginally more healing but still just end up pressing your one DPS button and occasional DoT most of the time.

Now if you're still insistent on boring yourself to death, let me answer your questions.

1. VERY important to do damage as healer, you often do damage comparable to if not more than a tank can put out, even while still healing. Do not neglect this, it's better to overdo it on dps vs healing than not do dps at all.

2. Healer can't do such things anymore, interrupts are a tank thing now, though repose can be used to interrupt very specific enemies weak to sleep in lower-level content. And WHM does get a stun on their AOE which makes it a free hallowed ground at the start of every pull, as the mobs become unable to inflict damage for rougly 8 seconds due to the consecutive stuns.

3. There is no difference between the two faeries now, I won't go into rants as to how that's dumb as that's off topic here. However, if you only are going to use one of the faeries then only put one of the skills on your hotbar.

4. No, you cannot do such, suck it up and deal with the laggy fairy skills, we all have to and so do you, it seems.

5. No comment on this as I don't move the hud around, do whatever makes you comfortable in regard to this, but know that the fae gauge you get at 70 is basically worthless and doesn't need to go in the middle of the screen, and in fact you don't need to look at much at all as the healing abilities tied to it are kind of trash.

6. Focus targeting the tank is fine, in the case of 2-tank parties focus whoever is the Main Tank.

7. NO! MACROS! EVER! do not use them, as they cannot be queued and using them will cause your gcd to drift which ruins dps.

8. healers are very important in PVP, almost disgustingly strong on their own and in 1v1 situations, too, as they can easily heal more than incoming damage from a single dps, healer, or tank, so they are often focused down.

9. Don't play healer, just don't... save yourself the boredom and frustration with your fellow players due to their mistakes and blaming you for them, and the devs due to the current awful iterations they have put healer and are going to keep them in cuz of deciding to appeal to the lowest common curepsamming denominator, just play SMN instead since you've leveled ACN already. As for other advice, don't be nervous and don't be afraid to take risks, the only hp that matters is the last one and the outgoing damage in this game is pitifully low.

EDIT: and as a final note, just because the number on a skill is higher does not make it better... though this is more of a problem with WHM and how cure III is an aoe. on Scholar, Ruin II does less dps than ruin, but allows for freedom of movement and easier weaving (you can use OGCDs between GDCs, this is called weaving), only use ruin II if you have to move or have to weave a skill, otherwise use ruin I/Broil.

Edit 2: some spelling corrections, and a final bit of advice, DO YOUR JOB QUESTS, no, seriously, do them, as soon as you get them, especially the ARR and HW ones, as abilities are locked behind them, don't be that guy going into a dungeon with only half your kit because you neglected to do said quests. This is especially important for healers as several important traits are locked behind said quests and will result in your abilities either being lacking or important class mechanics being missing.

[EaMett]

You can use mouse over macros for your single target heals. The macro should only contain one action line surch as :

/micon Physick
/ac Physick <mo>

And that's about as useful as macros get. You can't use multiline action macros as there is no guarantee on the execution order of each line. And you shouldn't macro anything else (especially not dps skills) for the reasons posted by the previous comment. Single target heals are the exception because you won't use them often enough to impact you in any meaningful way.

If you mouseover you can just keep your ennemy as your target and not worry about swapping targets to heal. So there's a significant advantage there.

[EmmetOtter]

Thank you EaMett. I appreciate your response.

Laphicet, while you provide some great answers to my questions which I genuinely appreciate, its unfortunately ruined by the negativity mixed into it. Hopefully that's not your usual "you" but just you having a bad day and it leaked out in an unintended way. I've had those days and leaks myself. I will raise my glass of wine and toast to you and wish you a better day tomorrow, and yes I know that sounds hokey but I just did it.

Whenever I see a statement like this I always feel its important to test it especially when the test is simple to do.

You can't use multiline action macros as there is no guarantee on the execution order of each line.

That sounded like you were suggesting the order of execution is random and I decided to test that against the trio of striking dummies next to the Summerford Farms teleport in Middle La Noscea with the macro below:

/ac Ruin <mo>
/ac Ruin <f>
/ac Ruin <t>

If I had a valid mo, 100% of all attacks went against the mo. If I didn't have a valid mo, it hit the focus 100% of the time. It only hit the target if there was no focus or mo. If I changed the line ordering, it always executed top-to-bottom in a predictable fashion.

The only way I could see that as "random" is if the <mo> or <f> was untargetable: like out of range or or no LOS. That kind of "random" is still a strong reason to use just 1 line macros like you are suggesting though.

I would like to hear from others.

Thanks in advance.

[Canadane]

I would like to hear from others.

Don't use macros because they cannot use the native skill queuing. They'll sooner fail than save you.
Macros are made intentionally to be worse in battle. They are best used for slower things, such as crafting rotations.

[Semirhage]

Thank you EaMett. I appreciate your response.

Laphicet, while you provide some great answers to my questions which I genuinely appreciate, its unfortunately ruined by the negativity mixed into it. Hopefully that's not your usual "you" but just you having a bad day and it leaked out in an unintended way. I've had those days and leaks myself. I will raise my glass of wine and toast to you and wish you a better day tomorrow, and yes I know that sounds hokey but I just did it.

Whenever I see a statement like this I always feel its important to test it especially when the test is simple to do.

That sounded like you were suggesting the order of execution is random and I decided to test that against the trio of striking dummies next to the Summerford Farms teleport in Middle La Noscea with the macro below:

/ac Ruin <mo>
/ac Ruin <f>
/ac Ruin <t>

If I had a valid mo, 100% of all attacks went against the mo. If I didn't have a valid mo, it hit the focus 100% of the time. It only hit the target if there was no focus or mo. If I changed the line ordering, it always executed top-to-bottom in a predictable fashion.

The only way I could see that as "random" is if the <mo> or <f> was untargetable: like out of range or or no LOS. That kind of "random" is still a strong reason to use just 1 line macros like you are suggesting though.

I would like to hear from others.

Thanks in advance.

He sounds grouchy, but I echo the sentiment that healing is frightfully boring this expansion. Fortunately for you, it won't get that way for a while. Healers this expansion have some glaring design problems, not least of which is the "reward" for getting better at healing is pressing one button over and over again. Don't read too much into this though, this only becomes apparent as you near the skill ceiling.

As for macros, it's not that they get executed in a random order. Abilities executed in macros don't use the skill queuing system, so you can't use them as smoothly as you would outside a macro. You know how you can press your next spell around half a second before your previous finishes, and it queues up the next? This doesn't happen with macros. If you press a macro like that, it doesn't execute like you'd hope.

Also, the lines in the macro execute very quickly in succession, which can lead to wacky behavior sometimes with multi-line macros. If, for example, you activate a macro a fraction of a second before you finish your previous spell, it might try the first two lines, fail because you're otherwise occupied, and jump to the third even though that's not what you intended.

[Urthdigger]

1: Very important. A healer can easily do over half as much damage as a dedicated DPS, so adding their damage goes a long way towards making fights take longer, and ultimately making your job of keeping people alive easier (Mobs dying faster means less chances for mistakes, less chances for tank cooldowns to run out during trash pulls, etc.)

2: Outside of the stuns mentioned earlier, no. Sadly healer is the most basic of roles, the devs appear to have assumed that since keeping people alive is so important, healers need as few outside distractions as possible.

3: No.

4: /pac is just for the actions available on the pet hotbar, like Place and Heel. The only way to get your fairies to use their abilities like Whispering Dawn is to use your own version that tells them to do so.

5: Do what you can to simplify names, and turn on the hotbars over your party's names when they've taken damage. You can't just keep your eyes glued to the party list, you have to keep your eyes on the battlefield and especially on the boss to manage mechanics. You should try glancing at the party list every so often to make sure minor damage isn't wearing people down, but primarily keep your eyes on the monsters to get an idea of when to heal: If they do an attack that looks big and beefy, probably a tankbuster or AoE.

6: Focus target the boss. You already have easy access to your tank's HP, it'll always be the second (Or maybe third in 8-person trials/raids) person in your party list. Focus targeting the boss provides an easier way to see attacks the boss may be using.

7: No. The spell you should EVER make macros for is raise, and that's to add a simple line in party chat letting the other healer know who you're raising. As mentioned before, macros cannot be queued. Queuing is a system where you can use an ability shortly before your GCD is up, and it will be "queued" to go off as soon as your GCD is available. If you try to fire a macro off just a split second too early, it simply won't go off at all, and so you'll need to wait until the GCD is clearly up before hitting the button... it's far better to conventionally target the character first and use the action normally.

8: Healers are very important in PvP. I haven't done a ton of it, but I've generally found that as a healer you'll want to stay behind the melee and tanks so anyone who wishes to rush you will have to run past all your allies to reach you, while still being in range of the front lines to heal them. Do note that it will likely be fairly frustrating as melee DPS are somehow oblivious to the fact that heals do, in fact, have a range limit on them. Running off after someone plunging deep into enemy lines is a good way to get yourself killed.

9A: Ok, first off the most important thing ever: Your abilities (The actions with recast timers to them) are not for emergencies. Learn them, love them, use them. You can theoretically get through content without them, but they're powerful, do not cost MP, and go a long way towards allowing you to DPS your heart out. You could just DPS for a bit, spend a GCD casting a heal, DPS for a bit more, drop another GCD on healing... or you could weave your abilities between two DPS spells (Ideally after Ruin 2 or Bio) and spend ALL your GCDs on beating a monster's face in while keeping your allies healthy. Your longest cooldown is 3 minutes, which means it can still be used multiple times during a dungeon or trial. If you save them for an emergency, anything that feels like a proper "emergency" probably can't be resolved with those anyway, and if you find times where they'd be useful earlier, that can likely avoid an emergency situation down the road. Perhaps a better way to think of it is that you can keep a party alive using just your abilities most of the time: It is your healing SPELLS that should be broken out during an emergency.

9B: Next up, try to reduce how much you overheal. People don't need to be kept at 100% all the time, and a regen on someone who's already full or a shield on someone who won't take damage anytime soon are both wasted resources. Try to get a feel for how much each of your heals recovers, and try to just heal when people are below that threshold. You can let Whispering Dawn or even just your fairy's Embrace gradually heal up DPS who shouldn't take damage any time soon. Use your healing abilities wisely, and you'll find they can carry you far further than you originally thought.

9C: This relates a bit to the earlier points on macros: Get used to playing one step ahead... or alternatively, be coolheaded enough to be ok with putting things off for later. You generally shouldn't need to react to something that surprises you, and should have plenty of time to switch targets and queue up your next spell while you are casting your current one. For example, say I'm casting Ruin on a boss. I see that it's using an ability with a large cast time and looks like it's steadying itself for a big attack. When I see the cast bar is getting near the end that I won't get another spell off before it finishes, I target the tank while my last Ruin cast is still going, and queue up Adloquium. By playing in this fashion, I have over 2 seconds to change my target, and the tank actually winds up healed from the tankbuster faster than if I had reacted to their health dropping. This is just one example, but in general while you are casting one spell, you can use that time to assess the battlefield and decide "Ok, what will I do next spell?" This is a skill that will take practice to learn, but it will be your greatest asset.

[EaMett]

That sounded like you were suggesting the order of execution is random and I decided to test that against the trio of striking dummies next to the Summerford Farms teleport in Middle La Noscea with the macro below:

/ac Ruin <mo>
/ac Ruin <f>
/ac Ruin <t>

Sorry, I should have elaborated to make testing more straightforward. The reason the order isn't guaranteed is because the macro will always cycle through each line one at a time from the moment you press it. In effect the following scenario is what could happen with the macro above:

- You cast a spell, 2,5s GCD STARTS
- You use your ruin macro, /ac Ruin <mo> fails because gcd is in effect
- /ac Ruin <f> fails because gcd is in effect
- GCD ENDS
- /ac Ruin <t> runs

As you can see above, you could have had a valid <mo>, a valid <f>, and you still would be throwing a ruin on <t>. It actually becomes impossible to manage if you're a key masher.
Furthermore, like others have said, it's even worse with a spell like ruin/broil that you will cast over a hundred times as it doesn't queue after your other skills. (Aka your client won't run the skill right after the previous one ends, there's a small delay that once compacted over 100 times amounts to a significant loss)

And to clarify some of the negative comments about healers above. The healers in the current expansion display a significant flattening (in terms of cognitive flow) towards the upper tiers of skill. In other words, healers are easy to play and can be taken for a spin in content that is above the player's pay grade without too much anxiety, but they don't scale well with skill, and in the upper tiers they are pretty boring. With that said healers will serve you well as you work your way up that ladder. And once you do hit those upper tiers, you can just come here and complain with the rest of us lol. We'll greet you with open arms.

[Recon1o6]

I'd have thought after a little bit of time playing you'd have picked up a few healer things but in any event here are some answers to go with the others

1. This is your second main duty. If you aren't healing, you're doing damage. It is completely unacceptable to not use your dps buttons given how much faster they can make any encounter, you wouldn't tolerate a tank that put their stance on an auto attacked the rest of the encounter, and the same applies here. At minimum keep your dot up on the boss since once every 30 seconds is hardly anything to ask for. Currently the healing to dps cast ratio in most content is 20:80 to 35:65 depending on the duty in question.

2. Unfortunately the only one that can now is WHM since SE were hell bent on crippling healers this expansion. Selene had a silence and Ast had a stun every 2 minutes, both are gone now

3. Not anymore unfortunately. Usage of each fairy is down to personal preference

4. The lag appears to be an unintentional problem that came with SE putting the pets on the player's gcds. The community hasn't really found anything to improve it other than spamming the key while the gcd is on cd from another spell

5. Can't help you here I'm afraid, the only thing I done with my hud is adjust the size of the X-hotbar

6. Down to personal preference, some healers swear by it, people like me forget it even exists but we still perform competently. (I'm one of those rare people who prefers to break off than stand in ANY aoe)

7. No as others explained. There is one for astro that saves some clicking on the hud but that's astro and you asked for scholar

8. I hate pvp with a passion in this game so I can't comment. Pvp in ff14 is optional and for glamour only.

9A. General healing advice: topping off your party is reserved for when you mechanics that require it such as thundergod cid's cleansing strike or 5.3 trial's terror unleashed. You don't need to keep everyone topped off, just healed sufficiently the next roomwide aoe won't floor them

9B Don't be afraid to leave someone constantly dying, refusing to move out of aoes etc on the floor. Raises are expensive and time consuming and your time will be better spent keeping the competent players alive

9C If you want to get glamour that isn't robe/coat, there are a total of 4 sets as a healer that are armour.

9D General raise order is tank (if both tanks are down)>co-healer/rdm>smn>everyone else based on the group's competence

9E Healing is absolutely awful this expansion. If you start feeling bored as a healer, go play a different job immediately. Any healer worth a fraction of their salt (trust me, healers get real salty in ff14, especially in this expansion) has either quit the game, got a second job they play, or healing for specific duties only. Two threads in particular: Has anyone quit healing (70+) and A summary of Healer issues (19 pages, but very popular in likes for a healer thread)

9F Scholar specific, you are a shield healer, so you need to time your heals to be ahead of the attacks coming out

9G Dissipation is useless unless you absolutely need 3 stacks asap

[Liam_Harper]

7: No. The spell you should EVER make macros for is raise, and that's to add a simple line in party chat letting the other healer know who you're raising.

Mouseover macros are perfectly acceptable for healing. Decent healers hit orange logs in Savage with them all the time. I definitely agree you should never macro most GcD's or any of your dps and you should consider they're a little clunkier, only using them if the ease of mouseover gives you better performance than clicking between the boss/players.

I never understood how players are like "eh don't meld materia except in Savage, nah you don't need pots outside Ultimate, food isn't that essential, who care if the BLM is spamming Fire I it's only Normal mode", but then mouseover's are absolute taboo even though it's doubtful if they even lose you 0.5%.