Raid Healer Dilemna

[Moonfox]

I´ll be straight. Alex Savage is brutally challenging- even if you don´t have latency issues. Doesn´t matter whether you play as a Whm and focus mostly on "healing , managing your mp and dodging" or you play as a Sch and focus mostly on "dps+ dodging with some healing to top it off" - i played it with both sch and whm (main) on AS1+2 and either way there was little room for errors (Ex primals seem like a fun ride now).
If you want to do regular content including Alex normal - just buy the sch weapon and go.Tho i do think every healer should help as much as they can - it´s not mandatory to dps for normal content.So do it in your own pace - Tyla´s advice seems good if you´ve never dpsed as a healer before.
As for the summoner - get a decent weapon and look up some good rotations. Dont let other people spoil your fun - we all started somewhere. Atm the summoner is a great choice if you want to play dps. Just work on getting better and ignore the people who are toxic and unhelpful.

[Risvertasashi]

Pretty much what Moonfox said. If by "raid healing" you mean things like Crystal Tower or the coming Void Ark, and Alex Normal... not the end of the world if you lag a bit or struggle to multitask. Don't really need healer DPS at all for those.

Savage is an entirely different ballgame and if you can't act with swift precision in all things (including but not only stance dancing), you're not going to get far.

[Amiaze]

I have latency issues, which I’ve somewhat fixed by using WTFast.

I definitely know where you're coming from. I was a WHM on PS3 *with* additional latency issues, and it made certain fights (Titan EX, Leviathan EX, T5, T9) incredibly painful. But I still cleared them all.

The best advice I could give you would, honestly, be to just stick with SCH. I've learned that the class you love to play is the one you'll be best at, and that you're more likely to find ways around issues. I initially started healing to speed up my queue times, not because I wanted to. But I fell in love with WHM and, by the end of 2.55, could solo-heal most raids, heal through dungeons with no tank, and eventually found ways to work around latency. I can't speak so much for Alexander Savage, but I learned that there were places I could stand where I was less likely to get hit by an attack that I didn't see, and that I could watch other party member's movements or try to remember the order/percentage in which attacks were executed so that I could move earlier than needed.

As far as DPSing goes, I don't think you'll have an issue with that, either. DPSing as a healer, especially with latency, is just something that's going to come with practice. I recommend going into earlier content that you've already cleared and practicing switching between healing and DPS there so that you can get a feel for it. I know that, with WHM, there were little gaps in which I can pull off an emergency heal while moving or cast an offensive spell really fast to help with DPS, then switch out of Cleric Stance. I'm not quite sure how it works with SCH and your pet, but I'm certain you can do it. It all comes with practices.

Best of luck!

[White-Magic]

Like Amiaze mentioned, I'd also recommend going with the class you enjoy most. Being comfortable healing with that class would at least ease the stress of keeping everyone alive and allowing you to focus on other things. Once you get your WHM up there, see which of the two you prefer more and go from there.

Don't let latency choose the class for you though! I'm quite far from my data centre and have a natural ~200-250+ ms delay, so I know how it feels when dodging unforgiving mechanics like landslides.. The best advice I could give you is to be mechanically prepared - since most of the mechanics have been scripted, they're predictable and will allow you to ready yourself for the upcoming mechanic you need to dodge, heal, etc. In TEX, I had to make up for my latency by knowing when plumes would spawn and sprint out of that immediately after the previous mechanic finished.
Focus on the mechanics of the raid first, then worry about dpsing later. Once you're comfortable with the mechanics of that particular raid/instance, you'll be able to worry less about mechanics and slowly contribute to dpsing in the raid.

Few others have already mentioned this, but you can get away without dpsing at all in normal content raids. That being said, this is a good place to also start practicing on both dpsing and healing once you're comfortable with healing part.