Advice on choosing a healer

[Mandeville]

Hello! I'm a fairly new player, I played for a few months earlier in the year, my friend boosted an AST for me because they looked fun and we needed a healer. I really enjoyed the utility variety with the cards, but the new system feels extremely dull by comparison.

Do any of the healers have interesting kits in 5.0? With AST at least, the healing is really basic. I'm coming from WoW for reference, where I was playing a resto shaman with things like healing rain, spirit link totem, bloodlust, interesting interactions between the basic heals, etc.

I love the game, but worried that I'm not going to find a healer that engages me again. What makes SCH and WHM engaging to you?

[Alisi]

Just go WHM. They're the top dog this expac.

[fantasticm]

If you're not engaged by AST, which arguably has the most to do outside of healing, neither WHM nor SCH are going to cut it for you.

[Mandeville]

If you're not engaged by AST, which arguably has the most to do outside of healing, neither WHM nor SCH are going to cut it for you.

What about the healing spells specifically, are they all essentially the same? Heal, big heal, aoe, big aoe, etc.

[fantasticm]

What about the healing spells specifically, are they all essentially the same? Heal, big heal, aoe, big aoe, etc.

You have the gist of it, yes. There are some differences of course, but the core of what you're doing isn't going to change - especially thanks to Shadowbringers.

[FunkYeahDragons]

SCH has a little more variety, but if you're playing daily roulettes, there's a ceiling to how complex anything's going to get (although, your party might change that!).

I'm still in the process of leveling it myself, but it has some interesting abilities in Shadowbringers through the new pet, Seraph, which includes shields. There's still several interesting mitigation abilities. My complaints are that you have too many stacks of Aetherflow for much of the content now that they're only for healing, and the DPS rotation has been trimmed.

[Magnedeus]

White mage is for beginners and is the best healer right now. SCH was gutted and is very bad right now. And i don't know too much about AST so i can't say anything about them.

[Saefinn]

Sadly you've come at a time where there is salt with healers and where overall people aren't happy with where they are. That is to say it doesn't mean you can't find enjoyment in them because for you they'll be new and fresh and you'll have a different perspective to old timers (and there is a share of people who are happy, so don't let us moaning on forums deter you). Hey, I never really played AST much until now, so in a way, that's what I'm going through with that job at the moment.

In terms of "healing" spells, AST perhaps has fewer if you view them in terms of them picking a stance, but out of the 3 healers they have the most to do & variety. Once you are confident at healing you'll find you will have downtime in healing and this was typically filled by DPSing, which has gotten a little dry with the recent changes. However, AST still at least has cards to make their downtime a little more interesting. However, their healing from what I understand is the weakest of the three at the moment. As a result AST is going to be the most difficult of the three to play. WHM as Magnedeus says will be the easiest to heal with.

I was always a SCH healer. What drew me to it was the fact it's a healer who is more focused on damage mitigation, nowadays just through shields, to aid their healing. Since 3.0 their pure healing ability has been pretty good, so you can rely less on a shield focus than when I started and the have a couple of things now that help more with the pure healing side of things to get people's health up quicker than they were doing. However, I've always found the idea of a shield healer to be interesting, because it can create a different dynamic to the healing experience, where you can prevent people from taking damage to avoid the need for stronger heals.

White Mage is much more in tune of the idea of pure heals and Regens and therefore get the big heal numbers. And of course AST is meant to be the balance of both approaches. However, ultimately in practice, due to how well weaknesses are patched between jobs, they end up feeling very similar to heal with because you handle each situation in more or less the same way. If there's a spell you like on AST, there's a very good chance you'll find a SCH or WHM equivalent. The differences are more in the flavour and less in how they are used. That said, I cannot say from experience of higher level Shadowbringers content as I expect it utilising the tools available more, but of course, you've got to get there first. That's my main gripe with it, they could make the content in Shadowbringers well tuned to the changes of the job, it's the rest of the content I feel it can suffer.

Nowadays, they all have some form of mitigation, a heal, a big heal, an AoE heal, a big AoE heal, an oh-shi AoE heal, more than 1 oh-shi heal, Regens and big dome healer thingy. The way it was back when ARR was released, was that there was plenty different to how you played SCH and how you played WHM. Whilst some of their original identities exist, I feel much of it has been patched up to be less important/significant than what it was in favour of maintaining balance. So I think by the point, your choice on 'healing' could be more on what flavours you prefer and level of difficulty as opposed to mechanics differences and each job will still flow differently regardless.

Scholar offers an advantage in that it is tied to Summoner and they share EXP, which means when you're levelling you can swap to a DPS job, because SCH has very little to their DPS and if you're soloing stuff or working on story, SCH's damage tool kit is minimalist and SMN has so much more. White Mage however, offer the most DPS of any healers, which may be a consideration if the idea of playing/gearing 2 jobs in unattractive.

[KittenMittens]

Just play White Mage for now, not only is it the easiest of the three, but it's also now the best by a pretty noticeable degree.

[LegoTechnic]

The initial reason I went SCH is because SCH and SMN are joined, so leveling one levels the other. While the SCH class quests are pretty blah, the SMN questline is epic and well worth playing for its neat event bosses, and options are always nice.