How can I reach my full potential as a healer?

[Kaiya-Gray]

Hi, I'm looking for some advice from those very proficient healers out there. So a bit of my experience first. I'm an i94 and i92 WHM and SCH respectively and also have i84 drg. I've mained WHM for over 3 months now and have gotten SCH to 50 within this last week. I enjoy playing them equally and am proficient in both. I've beaten Garuda and Levi EX and am working on T5.

I use Eos on manual %95 percent of the time and Selene only when you need to time her buffs and I move them around the battle field accordingly. For WHM I use a macro and hotbar (ps3) combo where all of my cure I's and II's, regens and esuna's are macro'd to players 1 to 8. I do this by having my cures on hotbar 3 with my expanded controls set on it. ( pulling and holding RT and then LT will bring up the right side of said hotbar, and reverse for LT to RT ) I have my regens and esuna's on hotbar 2 and my hotbars are set to only cycle through 1 and 2 when pressing R1.

[Kaiya-Gray]

I really want to improve my healing game and become one of those healers who; know how to seriously work the niche of their class, react calm and fluently to shit hitting the fan, transcend into healer god hood. What sort of skill combos should I use in what situations? What mindset should I go into new content with? How powerful can I become? What is the white mages number game? Thankyou very much for your advice and I can't wait to get schooled in the art of healing.

[Empressia]

I really want to improve my healing game and become one of those healers who; know how to seriously work the niche of their class, react calm and fluently to shit hitting the fan, transcend into healer god hood. What sort of skill combos should I use in what situations? What mindset should I go into new content with? How powerful can I become? What is the white mages number game? Thankyou very much for your advice and I can't wait to get schooled in the art of healing.

Sounds like u wanna play WHM solo healer on t9? GOOD GOOD GOOD, if thats the case then build gearwise like a SCH

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

if thats the case then build gearwise like a SCH

Don't do this. Assuming Empressia is assuming the crit-scholar build (most popular meta).

White Mages don't need crit. In fact, it's more of a terminal disease for white mage than anything. In most cases, a crit cure will overheal for the amount you gained from the crit. In the case you use a Cure II and fully benefit from the crit, you're healing way too late and the tank might actually be dead already.

Tranquil mentioned this before:

I would say that being able to sort of have a feel for the incoming damage and the internal timers of a given fight is paramount, as this allows you to mindmap the encounter, plan for precasting, buffer tanks when need be, cruisecontrol and multitask when possible - stuff like that. To get to that point, you need to: 1) have at least some experience in the fight. 2) be of the type who analyzes fights in full in one's head.

Do those three and you will have no reliance on crit as a white mage
Do those three as a scholar and your white mage can easily pick up the damage alone after big hits (Death sentence, Bahamut's Favour etc.). Allowing you to do other things.

[Taika]

White Mages don't need crit. In fact, it's more of a terminal disease for white mage than anything. In most cases, a crit cure will overheal for the amount you gained from the crit. In the case you use a Cure II and fully benefit from the crit, you're healing way too late and the tank might actually be dead already.

I disagree. In many if not most cases, crit will only overheal if the WHM is already overhealing. Crits can help with keeping tank up with only Cure 1s and regens and they're a blessing with rare AoE heals and Medica 2 regen ticks. I personally feel crit helps my MP management as I aim for minimilised healing in all fights I do. I do not have enmity or MP issues. My secondary stat priority is DET > CRIT > PIE > SS, but I don't have my BiS set yet.

Aaaand it was pretty cool to see my cure 2 land with 5710 HP on tank! Of course some of it was overhealing (tank had a bit under 6k of 9,7k and SCH hit adlo at the same time), but I don't think anyone can make each of their healed points count. And hits like that able me to heal with mostly Cure 1 and regen otherwise.

As for topic, to be an excellent White Mage, I think most important thing is to know the fights well and plan your healing accordingly. Be aware of how much damage is coming through and how to get through it with least possible MP spent while keeping everyone safe. A great WHM is able to heal effectively and pre-emptively, land their stoneskins just before a big hit lands and their cures right after it has landed. I take videos of my healing when I'm learning the fight and plan my healing based on what I actually see happening, not how I imagined it went (I tend to be very tunnelvisioned while learning new fights).

What is more difficult is being able to deal with unpredictable damage and deaths at the same time, caused by party members making mistakes. That's also a big part of being a great healer: being able to pay attention to your surroundings and other party members and make fast decisions to save the day when things go wrong.

Another important thing is communicating with your cohealer and tank(s), other party members too of course. Coordinate your heals, buffs and cooldowns so that you support each other and work in synergy. If you heal everything as if you'd be solo healing, or if both healers focus on only AoE healing while tanks are going down (or the other way around), it's not effective healing.

And finally, maybe the most obvious one: know your abilities and use them effectively. Especially Shroud of Saints, Divine Seal, Eye for an Eye and Virus should very rarely be off cooldown. Presence of Mind is great for situations that need fast healing, stoneskining whole party in T9 or casting Stone II / Holy to help with damage. Benediction should rather be used too often than too seldom. Surecast and Fluid Aura are the only abilities I don't really use regularly, but they aren't useless either.

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

I disagree. In many if not most cases, crit will only overheal if the WHM is already overhealing. Crits can help with keeping tank up with only Cure 1s and regens and they're a blessing with rare AoE heals and Medica 2 regen ticks.

If crit isn't overhealing, then you're reactively healing or you're late with healing. If you Cure 1 for 1300, a crit will heal for 1950. That's nearly 2000 hp worth of damage on the tank. Unless that's from some big spike damage (T6 swarm, T8 lasers), you're reactively healing. If the tank took that much damage, the fairy will be throwing an Embrace at the tank as well for 700-800 recovery. Then there's only 1200-1300 recovery remaining, perfect for one Cure 1. A crit would mean overheal for you or the fairy, which is equally useless. Even more overhealing (and mp/gcd waste) if the scholar throws in an adloquium or physick as well. Even with full crit build you'll have roughly 25% crit ratio with average healing of 1299 (1461 crit corrected). In a determination-piety hybrid build (roughly 15% crit rate) you'll have an average healing of 1329 (1428 crit corrected). Full crit has a -slightly- better crit corrected average healing for each mp spend, but is unreliable and doesn't even occure that much more frequent than a det-piety hyrbrid build (source). Det-crit hybrid build? Possible. But with less crit and more det, your crit becomes less reliable. There's no obvious benefit from crit as a white mage either, unlike scholar. (it's not like stoneskin crits for double effect or medica crits for double duration).

tl;dr: Control and plan your heals. Crits are cool to see, but not something you should plan or rely on. Piety, however, gives you a reliable mp sustain (which also means happy bards that don't have to ballad)

[Tranquil]

You are asking some general questions here. Nothing wrong with that, but healing is variable-based way moreso than the other two sides of the trinity, so instead of telling you "do this and that in X encounter's Y -phase", you should be mechanically aware as a player and understand how skills work - tank cooldowns and their icons, paying attention to your healing partner and trying to synergize, paying attention to the amount of incoming damage roughly and acting accordingly. Things like that.

I would say that being able to sort of have a feel for the incoming damage and the internal timers of a given fight is paramount, as this allows you to mindmap the encounter, plan for precasting, buffer tanks when need be, cruisecontrol and multitask when possible - stuff like that. To get to that point, you need to: 1) have at least some experience in the fight. 2) be of the type who analyzes fights in full in one's head.

Beyond that, if you understand this game's aggro mechanics, pay attention to what tanks do (their cooldown icons, etc.) and try to synergize with your healer partner and sharing responsibilities - it's mostly just finetuning. Not sure how I would give you "numbers" or any encounter-specific tips, unless you have some specific questions in mind.

[Lyrica_Ashtine]

Tranquil pretty much pointed out the fundamentals for you. I'll just be all philosophical and stuff and I'll have a go at it about "synergy" :P

You need to figure out what kind of healer you are and the other healer is.
As a white mage:
Are you the careful type that conserves MP? This does strain the scholar to heal more
Are you the kind that's healing intensive? This allows the scholar to do other things (more common kind of "filler" would be casting DoTs)

As a scholar:
Are you the kind that sets up everything for the white mage? This helps the white mage conserve MP (but potentially cause a lot of overheal if the white mage isn't adapting to you)
Are you the aggressive kind that lets the white mage heal a bit more? This allows you to direct some attention to other issues or cast some DoTs (also lessens overhealing in most cases)

It's not as black and white as this, however. You could imagine a bar for each healer that ranges from "conserving" to "omnipotent" (white mage) and "supportive" to "aggressive" (scholar). But there's no "golden rule/ratio" concerning this, figure out what you find the most comfortable to heal as and to heal with. Synergy, as Tranquil mentioned, is key.

[Anova]

Healing is both a battle of mechanics and an art. There are some phases in fights where you simply have to time the use of your skills. For example, using cure3 when players are grouping up to avoid a Titan stun or a Medica2 after the Extreme Primal LB attack are pure and simple mechanics. You can predict them and it's just a matter of practice to get the timing down.

The other half is learning to quickly recognize the limits of your tank and partymembers. That way if they fail to dodge or take an unexpected spike in damage, you are flexible enough to respond with the most appropriate heal. Scholars have to see even further to preempt those spikes with adlo or succor, so they are more likely to memorize the timing of certain skills (whether it is dependent on seconds or on hp%). The best way to hone this aspect is to expose yourself to as many playstyles as possible. You'll develop an innate knowledge and intuition of how to respond to these differences that way and be better prepared when the shit hits the fan and you have to solo heal an EX fight.

[SeraviEdalborez]

It's impossible to give a blanket statement for reaching full potential because honestly the ability to do so depends very heavily on how good/bad/awful your co-healer is in 8-man content and, to a lesser extent, the tanks. If you have to pull all the weight healing-wise and are consistently ~1.5k to 2k MP behind them at a given point in the fight with 0 deaths, either you are vastly overhealing or they are vastly underhealing and you need to identify what's going on.

One important thing is knowing when you can afford to let Regen / Medica 2 / Whispering Dawn do its work and not waste MP with Medica, Cure 3, or a Succor that won't absorb anything. A lot of new WHMs will use Medica 2 after a big full party AoE hit and immediately chase it with Medica. Now everyone is at full HP with 25+ seconds of regen on them doing... nothing.

There is also some widespread misconception that healer DPS "doesn't matter" or "isn't required". Which it isn't, but consider that the faster something dies, the less damage it does. If you have an excess of MP and there is little damage (or enough for one healer to handle it for a time), there is nothing to lose and everything to gain by throwing on some more damage.

The worst that can happen is somebody dies and you learn "ok that was too much" for one of many reasons (other healer wasn't prepared to solo for a bit or it was legitimately too much on your part). Live and learn.