Levelling Healer

[Ghishlain]

1) Because it's such a big whine point on THIS forum - You DO NOT have to DPS, no matter what anyone says. If they make a stink of it, you are better of leaving because they have no faith in their own DPS. Your job is Healing you, the tank and the DPS last.
1a) The worst healers are those who queue as healers just to get a faster queue, you will see this more typical of SCH, who then do little or no actual healing*, or let the fairy autopilot.
*If you get a SCH in a pre-level 30 dungeon, they don't have any SCH abilities to use. Just the fairy, so it's no different than ACN or SMN in those dungeons.
1b) The worst tanks will be those that don't turn on their tank stance immediately. Second only to those not wearing Tank gear in all left-hand slots.

I am going to expand on this point.

Healer's primary function is to heal - keeping the party healthy and capable of fighting. An average healer will do just this and only this. This tends to lead to high amounts of idle time in high gear situations.

An exceptional healer will find means of maximizing their GCD-usage and doing "something efficient" with all their GCDs. This can mean many things such as:
(1) Healing harder if the group is taking an exorbitant amount of damage
(2) DPSing to ensure mobs / bosses die faster thus decreasing actual dungeon time and also decreasing actually healing time needed

Kisa Kisa is notorious on these forums for being on the anti-DPS train as a healer. While I do agree that healer's aren't expected to DPS, I also believe healer's should understand the dynamics of the fight and contribute as efficiently and effectively as possible to a party without putting the party health at risk.

7) New Tanks ... and DPS tend to stand in AOE's. Not-new tanks will purposely stand in AOE's to be lazy, let them die once. If they overpull, let them die once. Your job is to heal, not compensate for laziness or incompetence. Which means...

8) Tanks and Healers want to be treated like princesses and it's better off to grin and bear stupidity from them than to create an argument that will just waste time. Don't take grief from DPS though. DPS players can be replaced, usually instantly. Tanks and Healers tend to vary from 90 seconds to 20 minutes to be replaced, depending on time of day.

Please don't let your tanks die. They might be a crap tank, but being openly hostile towards them is just going to breed more toxicity and just drive everyone nuts. I personally just consider it a challenge, as a good healer is an adaptable healer. Being able to handle any situation (whether it be a dungeon mechanic gone awry or just piss poor play) is the mark of a good healer. Being able to grin and bear the bullcrap associated with the drama just puts you on a morally higher ground as well.

9) The Healer often has to do more AOE dodging dances than the DPS. This has to do with Enmity tables, where the healer will tend to be the highest priority target any time the Tank isn't generating enmity.

Factually false. Healer's have more to deal with because they have to deal with mechanics of a fight while keeping their group healthy - a particularly difficult task for some fights. However, mechanics that specifically target healers or not are different from each fight. For example, Earthshakers in T13 only target the DPS or the OT - never the healer (unless quite a few people are dead).

Now, if the healer's have the dodge more often due to poor enmity control, that could be the fault of either the healer (spamming Cures too hard) or the tank (unable to snap aggro effectively), but this is an entirely different discussion. You will run into moments where a low geared tanked won't be able to hold hate on a high geared healer or DPS due to the gear disparity. In fact, OP, you might even see this already as you do main BLM.

Please take any advice with a grain of salt.
Much you will read is biased by personal playerskill and bad/good experiences.

I applaud the effort Kisai has put into this reply, but some things, especially about the SCH play, low level dungeons and solo play may be true for him/her but they are nowhere near facts.

^ This

I m afraid this is going the usual "do or do not dps". Sigh.

Yeah, while it's a discussion that happens frequently, it's important for a new healer to understand the pros and cons of both and know what steps they can do to improve. If it attracts the die hard "OMG NO DPS" crew, I'm willing to fight that front for the sake of helping a new player get better.

Call me a masochist at heart~