Why you should play a healer!

[Littlegreen]

I avoid healing due to the stress lol. It's a game, so I want to have fun and relax. There is nothing relaxing to me about healing, especially when an overgeared tank pulls adds wall to wall and I'm still lvling up. I'm just not ready for that sort of thing. A lot of the time when I say that, the tank ignores me and does it anyway, telling me to 'git gud'. You still have like 200+ more of an ilvl than I do, it isn't a matter of skill at this point. >_>

I've finished certain dungeon runs and am left shaking. I know it sounds so stupid and pathetic, maybe I am haha. But...well, it is what it is. It gave me an appreciation for healers though so I commend them more often than I once did. Maybe I need more practice, maybe it will never be for me. I used to be very nervous about tanking as well, but that went infinitely better for me than healing. Guess I just can't handle it =p

I remember feeling very stressed starting out this game as a healer. Normally I play rogue/thief characters but wasn't aware of NIN, so I picked up CNJ on a whim. I felt SO MUCH PRESSURE going into every single new dungeon/trial all the way through the 1-50 msq. I made all the new healer mistakes: casting cure for every tick of damage the tank gets, trying to dps back when stance dancing was a thing and not switching back to heal the tank before he died, pre-pull regen, all that stuff. I remember shaking my first time going up against Ifrit. Never been so nervous in my life.

Now? I raid with SCH and do roulettes as WHM when I feel like being lazy. I feel so good throwing in tetras between my holy spam to keep the tank alive and spreading a CritAdlo on every Maniacle Probe in V2S and being the key figure to the party, throwing out my own dps between heal checks and using my resources effectively to not go OOM. It's still stressful sometimes, but in the way that I go "damn, should have saved Deployment tactics for THIS raid damage to keep everyone topped off for the next attack" or "shoot popped Indom way too early" rather than "wait, you DON'T want me using Fluid Aura?" or "idk what I'm doing so I am now a heal turret"

Meanwhile, I got my DRK to 60 and can now use him for cracked clusters and I STILL hesitate clicking on the lvl roulette because at best I am an adequate tank (meaning I can hold hate and sometimes deal proper dps)

[Kabzy]

I avoid healing due to the stress lol. It's a game, so I want to have fun and relax. There is nothing relaxing to me about healing...

I don't know if it's because I'm used to it from playing SCH since I started but I find playing an actual DPS a lot more stressful. If I'm ever playing a DPS and running questionable software which we will not talk about, I'm always finding myself comparing my DPS to others. And when that is all your job does, I find it more stressful if I'm lagging behind while technically hitting everything I should be.

At least on SCH if my DPS is lower than normal I usually have an excuse. "I had to ress" or "I had to heal through this" blah blah blah. You still need to optimise, and at the highest level healing is definitely a lot harder. But the actual healing requirements, outside of things like V4S, really aren't that difficult in the first place.

[gumas]

Almost instant queue, this point alone make me play as healer.

[Seoulstar]

It's simple, it's fun and you can play god~

[Zojha]

The answer to every "why you should try..." question is: Because you just might like it.

If you need a power argument, do some raid parses with a group without a healer, then do some raid parses with a group with a healer and realize that the gaping difference between the two is a direct result of healer power (It has to be - you kept everything else the same after all).
The power healers have is pretty nuts, albeit largely invisible to the healer and it unfortunately can't be stacked either - more healers only spread that power among more heads, they don't add to it.

It's similar as with raise. On first glance, raise seems like a very bad spell, but it's actually hugely powerful, because the person raised would simply have zero further contribution if not raised and everything they do after being raised can be directly attributed to the raise and thus its power. Preventing people from dying in the first place works on a similar principle - Everything they do after the point where they would have normally died can be directly attributed to the heals they received. And like with raise being useless if nobody dies, heals are useless if nobody would die without them.

Still, with unavoidable damage, people are bound to die at some point and that's where healers cash in hard in the power department.

[miraidensetsu]

Great points. Congrats for the blog post. I would add that I always heal because I like to help (and healer classes/jobs are the best for it) and I don't like to worry about my HP when leveling.

The best moments for me is when I actually have to use all of my toolkit or even improvise to keep the party alive. After the party survive a situation like that, I feel myself like a hero.

[Clouse_Cleyra]

I still dont understand why people get stressed about healing, whats so hard about it? Cast cure, repeat. If its a big pull, cast cure, some OGCD, repeat.
If people dies well too bad, next pull I bet it wont be big and dungeon will go as normal, if someone tells you get good, why do u even care of what a internet guys says about you >.<

Relax, its a game!

Well to stay on the post

I start the game as a SMN and did the scholar quests so I could have both, back on the old days when the game just started. I got bored of quees and went as sch on my first dungeon "Stone Vigil" nothing special, even boring (dungeons as healers I dont feel any pleasure) but the quees was making me keep doing it.
Then I had to grind darklight armor (i think this was the name, ilvl 70), so again quees where a lot better to spam wanderes palace.

Then something came that change my world, Ifrit, Garuda ad specially Titan HM, omg raiding as a healer is SO MUCH FUN! You have a lot of control on the party, i remember everybody dying on titan hm and me healing it alone, was so much fun and challenging.
After that first coil appeared and was the same feeling.

I just love raiding as a healer! and thats my motive.

The sad thing is that doing dungeons is very boring so I just try to go on as dps or tank.

[NoahG]

The problem isn't the difficulty of healing, healing in dungeons is easy enough, the problem is people's expectation from a healer... You're not just supposed to heal you have to DPS as well which is perfectly fine except when the tank is undergeared/doesn't use CDs/Stays in offensive stance/Eats every AoE and pulls the whole dungeon... That's where things get messy and when the tank dies because of any combination of the above reasons it's the healer who is a scrub and responsible for it all.

Though even when that happens if you are SCH it's still generally easy to do huge pulls with Fey Union/Excog/Adlo.

But yes unless your party is incompetent healing is pretty easy until you get to Raids/Ex Primals which is where the real fun/stress begins.

[Gemina]

I still dont understand why people get stressed about healing, whats so hard about it?

It's not the difficulty, or what you perceive to be a lack of it that is stressful. It's the expectations we carry, even in DF. If we DPS, we get told to heal. If we heal, we get told to DPS. If the PT wipes, it's our fault. Tanks pull wall to wall before even gauging if we're capable of handling it. These are just a few examples without the mention of the enormous amount of pressure we put on ourselves to perform.

Cast cure, repeat. If its a big pull, cast cure, some OGCD, repeat.

Comments like this always make me want to throat jab someone. There is so much going on in a healer's thought process before they even toss out one single cure. Healers do not have a set rotation. Even their openers are subject to change. Sure, you can sit there and just focus heal, but it is on the healers to challenge themselves by optimizing their entire toolkit while keeping the party going until the clear. In order to do this, a number of checks are made in a matter of microseconds before they cast or use a skill.

Things are easy for everyone when the going is smooth. The experience or inexperience of a healer shines bright when something decides to toss a wrench at "cast cure, repeat. Big pull, cast cure, some oGCD, repeat."

Relax, its a game!

You are correct, but that doesn't mean to be complacent. What you do affects the experiences of those who are playing with you.

[Cynfael]

Things are easy for everyone when the going is smooth. The experience or inexperience of a healer shines bright when something decides to toss a wrench at "cast cure, repeat. Big pull, cast cure, some oGCD, repeat."

You aren't wrong, but it's also true that healing tools are incredibly powerful and that the healing Jobs themselves are mechanically simple. Personally I experience very low stress as a healer except in the odd situation you describe, where everyone else is conspiring to make your life difficult by failing mechanics left and right. Even then, if they are doing so poorly that I'm challenged to keep them alive, I am at peace with their accomplishment should they actually manage to die.

For me I suppose it comes down to this: healer gameplay is the most forgiving and least stressful in execution (even for a true "ABC" healer), but other players are more likely to be a source of stress since they may be inclined to blame the healer regardless of where fault actually lies. If this happens to a player frequently enough, or if they are fairly sensitive to criticism, the healer role could become stressful pretty easily.