A nervous healer needing some tips

[Anya_Synia]

Hello

So I just started healing on Conjurer, after years and years just playing as a DPS I finally took the plunge and tried healing.

I'm a nervous healer but I have been doing alright so far, until Thousand Maws of Toto-Rak I was able to judge when to DPS and when to heal quite well and keep the tank alive when they did big pulls. But Tam Tara Deepcroft is when I started having problems, I joined a party in progress, so the previous healer had left for what ever reason. We got to the last boss and omg everyone was getting hit and the tank went down so fast I had no time to think. I panicked when I saw everyone having poison and everyone getting hit.

Admittedly I then left rather quickly after that convinced that I would get blamed I was much too nervous to see what they would say, which is silly really I think the pressure got to me, after all I'm used to being a DPS with the only job of hitting stuff til it dies.

I do enjoy healing, I just need some tips for it and a little bit of help.

[SpiritualOcean]

1.) Don’t give up.
2.) Keeing your tank on their feet is a higher priority than removing a debuff from a DPS.
3.) Watch the tank’s HP and the rate of incoming damage - generally, keep your tank around 50% - 75% of their HP total. If the incoming damage is fast, stay closer to full. If it comes in slowly, you can leave them with a bit less.
4.) If your DPS is around 50% health, a regen should do (but Tank still has priority).
5.) If everyone has acceptable health levels (or has regens ticking away to get them there), then DPS. Do as much DPS as you can until you have to heal again. If you’re not comfortable judging for yourself, do to GCDs of DPS, look at everyone’s health, and if you’re still good do 2 more. If they’re NOT good, heal some and then go back to DPS.
6.) Remember to dodge.
7.) You got dis!

[Risvertasashi]

That particular instance sounds like the tank may have been undergeared. At the start of dungeons, it's worth checking how geared your tank is so you will know what to expect (right click > examine on the tank).

And just to be safe, be sure to keep your own gear up to date too (weapon is most important, then the rest of left side). Brayflox is the first real gear check IMO, where if the tank or healer are undergeared you're going to have a bad time. But it can happen earlier, especially if the tank had empty slots and/or simply never upgraded from level 1/level 5 gear.

As for party poisons, well, just try not to panic. Cast medica occasionally to top people up, the rest of the time just focus on keeping the tank up. And good luck out there!

[Anya_Synia]

Sorry I typed in the wrong name of the dungeon it was Tato-Rak that I got stuck on, so I'm level 24. Juggling DPS and healing is something I want to learn quickly as I know it's super helpful if a healer does DPS, I also like to push the roles that I play outside of the box, to reach it's maximum potential.

I didn't think of the tank being under geared, I have a problem of over healing at the moment, so I thought it was weird that he went down so quickly.

Thank you for the tips

[Zeromon]

That dungeon has a lot of poison and adds which can get out of hand very, very quickly. First of all is to make sure you're out of trouble. Don't greed positioning or move late, pre-empt movement to avoid aoes. Since regens aren't an option you just gotta spam that cure 1 and medica. Use Lucid Dreaming early and often to make sure MP is up. If you have any spare MP pots use it here (but don't bother if you don't have some already). If things go wrong don't bail immediately. Just as healers can adjust, so can the rest of the party. Work out positioning in advance to make healing and dodging easier, or tell the magic DPS to prep their erase in case of dots, maybe have melee stun the boss at critical timings, etc... There are ways to clear without trying to do everything yourself. Say you're new to healing and work as a group! Good luck.

[jkoi]

I totally understand the feeling. I main as a healer and still get nervous, as it can feel as though the entire weight of the party is on your shoulders.

I’ve never had a bad response to being open with my party at the beginning about being new to role (my experiments with Tanking for the first time, yikes), though it sounds like you didn’t get a chance for that in this case.

Coming from DPS to healing, Scholar is an easy transition as Arcanist really sets you up for a balanced DPS/Heal balance when you become a Scholar, but it sounds like you’ve invested some time in conjurer.

The biggest shift for me was that as a DPS, my focus was always on enemies, how many, what order, how much HP left, should I switch targets, etc. But as a healer you have to train your brain to take that same approach with the party. Use the tactics of bringing down a mobs hp in reverse to your party.

Once that becomes muscle memory, you’ll be able to multi-task the DPS stuff between heals, but it can only be effective when you can heal in your sleep. It’s sort of like driving, most drivers can drive while adjusting the radio or ac, but the first few times you sit behind the wheel you have to just focus on the most important part, building that primary muscle memory.

TED talk over. Sorry for the long winded reply!

[gumas]

start from the basic, dont skip stuff.

- if you are still nervous between healing and dps, just stick with healing first.
- once you get used with it, you can try put some dps on certain situation like boss fight or when there is only 1-2 enemy only.
- always tell the party if you are still new being a healer, they probably wont give you response but at least they know their situation.
- this is my personal suggestion but, dont slap regen on tank outside combat, the moment tank aggro 1 enemy, the others will start running to you. nothing harm but sometimes tank (especially new tank) can get panic.
- dont forget you have lucid dream to refill your mp

remember that you are healer first and foremost, keeping your party alive and well is your main job, dps is secondary. i've seen many healer let their party die just because their holy/gravity is already in the mid of casting, if your party going to die, cancel whatever dps skill you cast and start heal them asap.

[Veis_Alveare]

Sorry I typed in the wrong name of the dungeon it was Tato-Rak that I got stuck on, so I'm level 24. Juggling DPS and healing is something I want to learn quickly as I know it's super helpful if a healer does DPS, I also like to push the roles that I play outside of the box, to reach it's maximum potential.

I didn't think of the tank being under geared, I have a problem of over healing at the moment, so I thought it was weird that he went down so quickly.

Thank you for the tips

You have a good mindset for things! Don't listen to people trying to talk you out of it.

It's best to learn how to incorporate each spell or ability you get as you level up, be it for dps or healing. Don't ignore using your dps spells just because you're still learning or you'll teach yourself some very bad habits. Doesn't sound like this is your plan but I see it being suggested and if you want to ever be a strong healer (even outside of things like Savage) it's bad advice.

In the same train of thought you have to evaluate what each ability does as you get it and see where it fits within your healing kit. You start with Cure and then get Cure II - Cure II is more expensive but only costs one GCD to use so you're basically trading potential dps for mp efficiency when you use Cure over Cure II. There are good times to do that! Especially early on where you don't have all of your mp management tools. Later on you'll find that using Cure is mostly a waste of time.

For AoE healing you start with just Medica which is similar to Cure - lower cost, less efficient. You'll get Medica II and Cure III later on, they're both AoE heals that are generally better than Medica when you use them but (just like the discussion of Cure and Cure II) they're situational. Most of the time you want to avoid using Medica once you have other abilities but, like Cure, it still sees some use sometimes.

The biggest part of healing is knowing what you need for a given situation. Know what you've got to rely on and use it as best you can. As long as you start off that way and keep it up as you level you'll do just fine, just look at each skill and make sure you understand it's intended/potential applications.

[Erakir]

Good general advice here.

Damage is good, and minimizing necessary healing to output more damage is indeed how we optimize, but no need to jump fully head-in. Ease your way into it if it's making you uncomfortable, and do your best to gauge a tank's squishiness in the first few pulls of a dungeon. You'll have some more options as soon as you get Cure II and Regen to help the decision making process of 'Do I need to dump a lot of healing into this tank?' When it comes to damage, feel free to start small. Toss an Aero in here and there (multi-dotting is your best AoE damage till holy comes into play). It's instant and you have mobility during it. You may want to only nuke with stone when you feel the party looks like it'll live for at least 5 seconds, maybe 10 seconds - whatever feels comfortable for you to react to at present and start healing. Your comfort and ability to push damage will naturally come over time with more experience to gauging outgoing damage. You'll make mistakes during this, and that can suck, but it's how we learn our limits. Gotta take those chances to see if it's safe to nuke or not.

I wanted to mention Thousand Maws in particular, though. Thousand Maws has a ton of melee-range AoE poisons that can go out, and with some pulls you'll see the whole party with 2-3 poisons if everyone was in melee. These are extremely weak poisons, though. Scholar used to have no Esuna-effect for Thousand Maws, Haukke Manor, and Brayflox so they just had to heal through and it wasn't a big deal. It's very good that you're already aware enough to be looking at those debuffs, but don't need to panic for all of them, especially in these dungeons. It's very rare that removable debuffs in dungeons are going to be much of a factor; at worst paralysis/silence/slow annoy people and these are typically good to remove, but typically an annoyance more than anything else (It's worth carrying echo drops to remove any silences you end up getting, although it's rare). You could get caught in a vicious cycle of trying to Esuna 10 debuffs and by the time you're done, most would have worn off and the enemy is about to re-apply them while you haven't healed. You don't see too much more of this at higher levels unless people are failing at mechanics (and they do), but you shouldn't need to worry about 700 red debuff icons sending you into panic mode if things are going relatively normal.

Some other things to consider trying:
- Focus target the boss if you haven't been. You'll see casts of tankbusters and other things like AoE abilities before they happen, leaving you less surprised when they happen 2 seconds later. This leads to pre-healing, another source of optimization in healers.
- Consider tampering with your UI if you haven't. It's not necessary by any means, but a lot of healers in various games try to centralize everything so it's easy to keep an eye on your own character while looking at party health and/or cooldown timers/procs. For instance, I've got a Cure 2 icon near my party bars so I can see a Freecure proc (chance from Cure 1 to cause next Cure 2 to be instant) easier. We hardly use Cure anymore for various reasons in expansion content, but it's good to know how long you've got left on your swiftcast, lucid dreaming, largesse CDs, etc without even looking if you're not already set up like that.

You're in a very good mindset so keep it up and good luck!

[griffinborn]

You should have seen me when I first played healer. And this was back when I was new to MMOs and didn't know what enmity was.

It's a "practice makes perfect" type of thing. Pretty much every situation must happen for you to get fully used to the role:

1. The tank is undergeared.
2. The tank is not using cooldowns properly or at all.
3. The tank pulled more than he/she can handle.
4. The tank is not holding enough aggro.
5. You are running low on MP midfight.
6. A DPS dies.
7. A tank buster is coming.
8. A heavy room-wide AoE is coming.
9. Party members are getting hit by avoidable attacks.

These are just some of the things that you will go through. Healing can be tough at first because your experience will vary depending on your party as well as mechanics, and you might not know how to act when something unexpected happens. But like it was for me, the more these things happen the more you'll learn how to adapt.

Definitely do not give up because it will eventually become such a mindless thing; you'll almost want something to go wrong just to make things interesting.