Having a hard time understanding party dynamics.

[Raldo]

Sounds like the people in your group sucked at keeping adds off the healer. If somebody needs healing and nobody is paying attention to the links, then it's not your fault.

If you're in a party that's pulling links (and you should be, links directly give additional exp!) then someone needs to be paying enough attention to hold hate on the adds.

Only a few pieces of advice I'd give directly to a healer:
1) Don't over-cure. Enmity is tricky with adds, you'll get yourself killed if you overdo it. People can heal themselves a bit, so keeping people at 100% isn't required.
2) Stoneskin is a very low-enmity way of preventing damage, meaning you have to cure less, meaning you pull less hate. AOE stoneskin is great for sapping up the minor damage that the rest of the group takes.
3) Unless they've changed something since pre-1.20, Curaga is a HUGE amount of enmity and should be avoided except for emergencies or when not in battle.


I'm not even going to try to get into party setups, since I've seen so many different ones work in exp parties, including some with no dedicated tank at all. Setups will get thrown for another loop once 1.21 comes along with the job system.