Overwhelmed by mechanics, healing and dps

[Djinn101]

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.

[ItMe]

I am a few months in
[...]
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.

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~

[GrimGale]

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.

[Djinn101]

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

[Mesarthim]

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.

[ASkellington]

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.

[Doozer]

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

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.

[Rilifane]

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.

[Djinn101]

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

[misterbill]

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.