WHM Questions

[Teraluna]

As a couple of posters have said: As you're starting out - heal. Dps can be introduced when you get more familiar with the class.

But I'll also add dps is only secondary. If you're unsure about the group and there's been a couple of sticky moments - then forget it.
The role is to keep the group alive in the order of their roles - Tank then anyone else you can manage. That's it.

When your group has successfully finished, others won't care less about your dps ranking.
1. Heal first
2. Dps only if you are comfortable with 1
3. If anyone moans let them heal themselves.

[Cinno]

I can suggest a few macros that I personally use as a WHM, and they've made my life a BILLION TIMES easier.

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This first one has made attempting combat so much easier and less stressful. I've applied it to ALL of my combat spells.

/macroicon "stone iii"
/action "stone iii" <tt>
/action "stone iii" <t>

What this does, is this allows you to dps while still keeping the tank targetted. The <tt> line means <Targets Target>. So in this example, say you have the Tank targeted, and the tank is targetting a cactuar. If you use the skill, it'll direct the attack to the target of your target, which is the cactuar. If you were to target the Cactuar instead, it would skip over the <tt> line, as you cant cast the spell on the cactuars target (the tank), and it would go to the <t> line, meaning the cactuar would be hit with the spell still. So it works for both party play where you have to keep the tank targeted, and solo play.

This i find is really handy because in cases where theres a lot of damage going out to the tank frequently, you dont have to worry about switching your targets. You can keep the tank targetted, pop on cleric stance, fling out a few Stone's or Aero's, then pop cleric back on in between the gcd, pop a cure or two, then drop cleric and go right back into dpsing. For trash pulls this is fine, and for mechanics where you have to down a specific enemy, the macro still works fine if you target the enemy.

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Here we have that raise macro everyones been talking about.

/macroicon swiftcast
/action swiftcast
/wait 1.0
/action raise
/party Swiftcast Raise <t>!

You're going to want to be sure to set the macro icon to swiftcast, that way it'll show the swiftcast cooldown. You'll also want to have another macro for regular raise without swiftcast (for when its on cd) so that you can still let the other healers know who you're rezzing. That's very handy to avoid wasted rez spells in 8 man content.

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This last one wont really matter to you until you get your whm leveled up much much higher. Asylum comes late in the game, but it's an extremely useful spell.

/macroicon Asylum
/action Asylum <t>
/action Asylum

This ones simple, Asylum is a ground target aoe spell. This macro lets you cast it under your target, instead of trying to fiddle around with casting it on the ground. It's not a big deal if you play with a mouse, but it can be a hassle with a controller. One thing worth noting though is that this isnt always the best way to do this. Take the Ozma fight in weeping city for example, when the tank is standing on the right corner of the platform. If you cast it on the target, it'll put itself centered on the tank, and may not reach the bulk of the party standing on the opposite side. So knowing when to just fling it under your target, and knowing when to deselect your target and manually aim it is vital to this.

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I hope some of these help you a little. I know these macros may not work for everyone, and you may not like them, but they've made my time healing a billion times easier.

[Normalizer]

1/ you should have the mindset that both healing and dpsing are your role in dungeon. While keeping your party alive is top priority, dps when possible comes really close to it. Try to heal efficiently so you can dps a lot. Also while learning to maximize your dps you will eventually learn to heal better. IMO a healer who never dps don't really know the limit of their skills and often do not utilize them at all which is really wasted. Low level dungeons are a good chance to practice stance dancing (switching cleric stance on/off) cause they are easy and things don't hit very hard. Take a look at the tank for the first few pulls then decide how much healing is enough, how low HP you can let him be before you need to heal him, how long you can stay in cleric safely etc.

For example in early dungeons when i go as AST my ED can bring tank from 15% HP to full, so i tend to stay in cleric for a long time. As WHM i need to get out sooner already when his HP at about 50% to start casting heal, and as SCH my Eos can handle it all so i never leave cleric. Learn your limit then decide (Note: Brayflox and Stone Vigil, Aurum Vale, and Vault are the dungeons where the healing difficulty spike up, be more careful when you get there)

Start learning to dps only till late dungeons is counter productive IMO, cause when you reach much higher lvl dungeon or endgame dungeons, tanks will generally do the "pull-all-till-wall" and if you never dps by then it would surprise you too much you may not even have the courage to turn on cleric


2/ Unless you go SCH, you don't/shouldn't really need macro. Especially macro-ing your dps-skills is a dps loss cause you cannot queue up the skills. I do macro some of the buff though so i can put them on tank or boss while dpsing the boss. Also i'm negative about cleric macro. Cleric without macro already mess up sometimes (by lagging or mistakenly spamming them), putting in macro only make them worse.

Some of my macros are below, put in spoiler cause they are long. I repeat them to use all 15 lines in macro, it helps prevent the case that the macro just doesn't work as intended sometimes when you click them too soon.

Eyes for an eyes: try to put it on target first, if not put it on target's target (which normally will be MT when i dps boss/mobs):

/merror
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <t>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/ac "Eye for an Eye" <tt>
/micon "Eye for an Eye"

Virus:

/merror
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <t>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Virus" <tt>
/ac "Virus" <f>
/ac "Virus" <f>
/ac "Virus" <f>
/ac "Virus" <f>
/micon "Virus"

Disable (equivalent of Virus on AST) use the same as Virus macro, just replace the name of the action.

Raise macro:

/merror
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/ac "Raise" <t>
/p Raise <t> <se.2>
/micon "Raise"

I leave swiftcast out of the macro cause i got strange behavior from it sometimes. If you want to put it in i recommend replace the first 7 lines of /ac "Raise" <t> with /ac "Swiftcast".


Synastry (AST buff), try to put it on target, then target's target, then try to put it on MT or OT:

/merror
/ac "Synastry" <t>
/ac "Synastry" <t>
/ac "Synastry" <t>
/ac "Synastry" <t>
/ac "Synastry" <t>
/ac "Synastry" <tt>
/ac "Synastry" <tt>
/ac "Synastry" <tt>
/ac "Synastry" <tt>
/ac "Synastry" <tt>
/ac "Synastry" <2>
/ac "Synastry" <3>
/micon "Synastry"

[Taika]

I would also advise against using macros on healers. Especially for healing or DPS abilities, since macro removes the ability to queue them. The only macro I use on my healers is Virus / Disable (so I can use it on my focus target while I'm healing without changing targets).

[Astraxus]

There are some great suggestions here. I'll throw mine in to:

1). I personally would not use the swiftcast + raise macro, as you lose the flexibility of a powerful insta-heal which may prove invaluable to the parties' survival. That's not to say you shouldn't use them together (in fact, the majority of the time it makes sense) but you should react accordingly if the situation requires a slow rez or not.

2). As a WHM, your HOTS are...well, HOT! While the HOTs are active you can deal damage without worrying too much. Before every (significant) pull, your opener should be something along the lines of: Stoneskin (on tank) -> Eye 4 Eye (worth getting imo). Then it's pretty much:
Divine Seal (you must get use to popping this bad boy a frequently as possible) -> Medica II (do not cast this until the Tank has suitable hate) -> Asylum (a brilliant spell) -> Tetragammton (only if required as a top up heal - this is one of the best heals in the game, imo) -> Regen (on Tank) -> Cleric Stance -> Stone III (for single target) or Holy -> Aero III -> Holy...-> Assize (for multiple targets).

3). Cross Bars. I used to macro Cleric Stance to swap out Cross Bars (i.e. Bar 1 for healing spells and Bar 2 for DD spells). I decided to try the new W-cross bars and I don't think I could go back to bar swapping. The main reason is I found stance dancing with a controller generally OK until when I got the timing wrong and had to manually swap out of the stance. With the W-cross bar, I can keep my DD spells and Cleric stance on the periphery Bar set so that I do not have to worry about mis-firing and then traversing (in a panicked way) my bars to find the right icon. Definitely worth a try.

4). Use your cooldowns frequently as this will allow you to DD effectively. Divine Seal is one a 60 sec timer, it should rarely be off cooldown. Presence of Mind is an incredible skill, which I usually pop after Cleric stance is enabled for the Stone III goodness. It can be used to get out of tricky healing situations too. Assize is a useful offensive spell under Cleric as it hits harder than a non-crit Stone III plus giving you back MP.

5). If you want to DD (and you really should be), you should be prioritising gear with Piety over other secondary stats. Meld for Accuracy cap and perhaps Vit, not for Pie. The bigger your MP pool the more effective Shroud of Saints and Assize become and therefore increases the number of spells your can cast.

[Tint]

The bigger your MP pool the more effective Shroud of Saints and Assize become and therefore increases the number of spells your can cast.

Shroud isn't affected by piety. it always heals the same amount of mana, based on your lvl. i think it was 1/3 of your max-base-MP (without any gear on).


one macro i use is:

/ac "Asylum" <t>

because even without being able to queue it, it is still faster than placing the ground effect by hand (especially since i am playing with controller).

[Astraxus]

Shroud isn't affected by piety. it always heals the same amount of mana, based on your lvl. i think it was 1/3 of your max-base-MP (without any gear on).

To be fair, I did know SoS does not scale with PIE and, although I probably worded it badly, I did not say they did. To clarify, those spells are more effective because passive mana regen does scale with PIE; therefore, when you pop one of these spells the end result is that the overall effective mana regeneration is greater, albeit not because of the direct properties of those spells. In any case, I didn't know that it was 1/3 of your base MP pool, so thank you for educating me on that point

[lulunami]

If you are newbie healer, focus on healing. Being a good healer is your primary job. Understand how to be efficient at healing with respect to MP, global cooldown usage, and time.

Once you are efficient with healing and gain more experience, you learn where you do not have to heal. That is where more experienced healers recognize where they can add damage. Improve your foundation of healing fundamentals, and then branch off into damage afterward if you decide to.

With regards to macros, try to restrict macros just to basic stuff like Eye for Eye and maybe Benediction macro for Living Dead on Dark Knight. Macros can be unreliable so just be aware and test out the macros you decide to use. Macros are just for quality of life, so do not go too overboard on it.