Healing on PS4?

[CxRob]

What is it like to heal on PS4? Right now I am trying to decide if I want to be a white mage or warrior for my second job. The only reason I am shying away from healing is the fact that I feel like it might be difficult to do on PS4 efficiently. Thoughts?

[Bixillarla]

Many people have healed on the PS3 with no problems, I would imagine it would be the same or easier on the PS4.

You can also use a Keyboard and Mouse on the PS4 if you want a more computer like experience on the PS4.

[Estellios]

It's easy to heal on gamepad. When you are in a party you just hit up/down to cycle through your party list.

The only thing that is difficult to do is targeting other people in FATEs which can easily be done with a target-of-target macro:

/target <tt>

[Gnova]

I started playing the game with the PS4 release and have been mostly leveling up the WHM job.
I'm in my mid 40's and haven't had any real issues healing instances.
My final opinion of healing will be once I am in larger partys. Cycling through four names is quick. Cycling through 8, or more, may be more difficult. I think that is where I will miss mouseover healing.

Macros are a real help though. A simple macro like:
/macroicon "Stone II"
/AC "Stone II" <t>
/AC "Stone II" <tt>

Will allow you to toss the odd DPS spell at the tanks target while still having the tank targeted.
The Bio version of the same thing is probably more useful.

Fates are more difficult to heal.
I've found having a /assist macro helps a lot since it allows you to cycle through mobs and once you see someone that needs a little healing you can /assist and heal them.
There is probably a better way to do it but this has worked pretty well for me.

[Estellios]

For Gnova:

You can arrange your party list in the social list menu manually or by using the automatic sort. My advice would be to use either of those to arrage the list so tanks are easy to get to. This should help out your targeting speed immensely especially if you get in the habit of hitting up to roll over to the bottom.

[Shmunkster]

Helaing as WHM is fine on PS. I have been doing it since Aug on PS3, and now on PS4.
When I reached lv50 (actually, arund ilv65), I did a major rehaul of my hotbars tho. I had 5 hotbars fulls of shite. Now, I only have two:
Heals - including all healing, Divine Seal, Protect, Stoneskin, SoS etc. Its my dungeon/raid hotbar
Normal - this is mostly dps and buffs (PoM etc). For when out and about on my own, and also for dungies were I can.

Key point, I have CureI and CureII are in the eact same place on both hotbars, tho - this ensures if I'm DPS and some one takes a hit I dont do a Hotbar panic, I can cure fine, and while cast is happening I can always flick back to my Heal Hotbar.

But, you will find what works best for you!

For sure, PS Healing is groovy.

[HEC]

Healing using controller (on both PS3 as well as PS4) is without any problems - I recommend to switch the crossbar to toggle or mixed mode. FOr quick selecting of the party members you can use F1 - F8 on the keyboard (for which you have plenty of time during GCD, once you fire up the spell you can switch to another target even before the casting is completed).

[sheepysheepy]

love it on pads, so much more relaxed than frantically moving a mousecursor all over the screen..

the gcd in the game means that although pads can be a lil bit slower you're not actually disadvantaged because you can't heal faster than the game allows anyway, this isn't starcraft by any stretch..

[vanityobscene]

I've been leveling a CNJ > WHM and I'm on the PS4. Selecting party members is easy-peasy. The directional pad is all you need. On the top left-hand corner will be the party list, and who you've got hard-selected will appear there (it should most often be the tank). Pressing up or down will cycle your soft-selections according to the order of the list. Once you've soft-selected hit the X button and you'll be hard-selected and can go ahead and heal. For the joys of one-handed greatness, I have all of my healing hotkeys assigned to the left trigger as well. So I'll select, hold L2, and then hit the up button for cure, or down for medica (medica's infrequently used, usually only when the whole party simultaneously take a load of damage from a boss). Left and right have raise and protect respectively, and everything else that's not essential to the flotsam of healing goes on the opposite hand.

With quick and fluid targeting that the controller provides, you don't need to scramble. However, if you're still having trouble with targeting you can go into your character settings and change your targeting filters. So if you're primarily playing healer you can filter weapon drawn targetting to only target party members, and you'll never have to worry about accidentals. This feature has been a huge help for me on my main class (GLD>PLD) as I was consistently suffering from accidental targets that delayed my ability to respond. So while playing GLD / PLD I filter everything that isn't an enemy target while my weapon is drawn so that I only smash what I want to smash, or only mark what I want to mark.

Seriously. Healing is fun. It's pretty chill most of the time, and because of that you get to watch the tactics of the other players and generally have more awareness of what's going on around you. Having said all of the above I strongly recommend getting a keyboard on your PS4 so that you can communicate to the rest of the party. For example, if the DPS players are mucking with the tank's job, which causes more burden on the healer (and unnecessary burden), or the DPS aren't doing what they should be doing during mini-boss/boss fights, you can quickly type it in to get them aware of it.

Anyway. Take it from a main tank, secondary healer, healing on the controller is worlds apart from tanking in terms of how easy it is. I've even commented a number of times to my fellow healer (who plays PC in the same room) that I'm a little bored because of how smoothly things are going.

Addendum: Since you're considering a healing role I'll offer one piece of advice about when to start healing your tank. A lot of people do a countdown from the first hit the tank deals. This is bad juju. We are on megaservers, and megaservers come with latency, particularly when party members could be from four corners of the world. What looks like solid aggro gain time to you might be hardly anything to your tank. So instead of the traditional countdown watch his health. Wait till it drops about 15-25%. That's a good butterzone to make sure that s/he's obtained aggro on the entire mob, or at least the tank and the dps have, which means you should be safe to heal. By the time you're hitting dungeons like Sastasha, 15-25% of their health should be cured within one or two heals, so long as you've kept your equipment up-to-date. The bottom line is that this is a far more solid way to ensure you do not pull too much aggro from your tank too quickly, which many healers accidentally do. As you go along you're also going to learn to predict damage, and heal accordingly.

Good luck!

[Velo_Vandore]

I wrote out some tips before on another thread explaining my PS3 targeting techniques as a white mage:

Hi, I play white mage with a gamepad on ps3 and here are a few targeting tips (some repeated from above):

1. Use target filters - I have L1+circle for all enemies, L1+X for only aggroing enemies (this can be handy when there are loads of enemies on screen), L1+square for players (in case I want to target someone not in my party) and L+triangle for All. I'm mostly in L1+circle (all enemies), targeting enemies with dpad left/right and party members with dpad up/down.
   
2. When there are many targets on screen, it can be easier sometimes to just press circle a few times to clear your current target and then face the new target and press X. I often use this method to just open a chest, flick a switch, or target a teleport without changing from the enemies filter.
   
3. Macro your damage and debuff skills to auto target fwd.

   Here's the macro I use:

   /macroicon "Aero II"
   /focustarget <tt>
   /ac "Aero II" <t>
   /ac "Aero II" <f>
   

   I do the same for Aero, Stone, Stone II, and Virus. The downside to macro's is that the skills don't queue, so I don't bother with this for heal skills. The way it works is that either line 3 or 4 will work and the other will fail, so it'll either cast on the targeted enemy, or the targets targeted enemy.
   
   The reason I set focus target in line 2 is that you get a little mini status bar for the focus target, where you can see that your Aero, or Virus actually got applied to the mob (note only 5 status icons can be displayed for focus targets, so there's still a chance the Aero, Virus won't show.

4. Keep an assist macro slotted on all your battle hotbars. This is possibly overkill if you already auto target fwd with macro's, but i still like the manual option there. One benefit to actually targeting the enemy instead of casting through the tank is that you get to see exactly how much enmity you have with that enemy. Also, if a tank likes to cycle targets, it's handy to actually switch to their first target then keep attacking that one, rather than attacking whichever target they're cycling through at the time. Healing comes first for healers and some will say don't try to deal damage, but I found that helping to eliminate a single target quickly will significantly reduce the overall damage the tank is taking, meaning less healing required, less aggro stealing, and lower repair cost for your tank
   
   The Macro I use is:

   /target <tt>
   /Focustarget OFF

   I add focustarget OFF just for a convenient way to remove my focus target (applied by damage skills macro above) after battle.
   
5. Re-arrange the party list like so:

   Healer (you)
   Healer
   DD (Ranged)
   DD
   DD
   DD (Melee)
   Tank
   Tank (preferably main tank)

   By having the tanks / healers at the top and bottom you can select them with less presses (from having no target selected). The reason I place ranged dd next to healers and melee dd next to tanks is that I can get a better idea of when to AOE heal. For example, I can quickly see if the ranged players have low health (top healthbars) and then medica if they're close by. If the bottom group of health bars are all low (melee's) It's probaly good time for Cure3.

Hope this is helpfull. Let me know any other tricks you come across

Hope it helps ^^