Help a newbie?

[Cenerae]

I decided I'd try to get into PvP some with The Feast coming out. But I've been having a miserable experience trying to heal groups.

When the burst starts to fly, I feel completely powerless. Tried a premade 4v4 with some FC members and allies were dying from full health with stoneskin and a shield from nocturnal sect in the span of a single GCD (and I wish I were exaggerating).

How precisely am I supposed to cope with that sort of thing?

Thank you for any advice.

[Anzuul]

Don't worry, it's overwhelming when you are healing in pvp for the 1st time, I felt the same.
I would suggest you to try to practice in 8v8 parties where you have another healer to help you, where you can discover the map as many of players here are for now newcomers. 4v4 is mostly filled with veteran players premade (not always but mostly). They are prepared, they know their jobs and have a nice synergy.
In 8v8 you can only tag as a party of 2 players so you won't get stomped by premades. Practice is the main advice i can give you. Practice and don't panic. It happens and it's not only your fault.
Sometimes a party member focused by the entire enemy team will die anyway, even if you use all of you CD to save them.
Read your pvp skills, they can be really useful. Pvp healing is nothing alike pve healing. It's just an habit, don't wait for you teammates to lose HP to start casting a heal, don't only spam Aspected Benefic, use your lightspeed and use Benefic II if your mate is getting rekt.
Btw i'm healing in pvp as a whm but some stuff are in common, i just hope i'm not telling you BS since i rarely play my ast.

[Cenerae]

I've put the PvP abilities on my bar already - though I guess it goes without saying that I'm not really sure when the best time to use them is. I forget the name of it, but the aoe skillspeed slow move seems especially hard to use since the radius is pretty small. I've been using that to help myself out when I've been getting tunnelled mostly. Probably not what its for.

As for the healing itself, in the few solo queue games I did, it was pretty much aspected benefic spam. I can't get casts off with melee sitting on me the entire time and it feels like it's the only option outside of cooldowns. Though I guess this is hardly a unique and special problem for AST, heh. (at least I *have* a spammable instant heal, right?)

The only game I managed to win though was one where the enemy team ignored me and let me freecast for the entire match. This tells me I must be doing something wrong on a fundamental level, but I really don't know what. (I know you say it isn't always only your fault as the healer but my current track record is 7 losses and 1 win.)