Playing as healer for the first time.

[Connor]

My advice to new healers is:

I hope you like dealing damage lol

As you level you’ll find yourself needing to heal less and less, and eventually you’ll have millions of powerful oGCD heals, meaning by the time you hit level 80 you can now comfortably spend the vast majority of your time on DPS. Also not spending all your time on dps will likely draw the ire of others.

I mean personally I say don’t worry about that and just heal. Like, not that you shouldn’t dps, but I think the best advice for healing is to do what you think is right then worry about the extras like damage or resource usage. The worst thing you can do is panic; i think it’s good to be confident in your healing and to be able to say ‘I know that I have the tools to resolve this situation’

Like, maybe you used Aspected Helios instead of Celestial Opposition. It’s worse for dps, but everyone is healed and has regen/shields, so as long as you’re not in savage it’s not going to be a huge deal if you miss out on some damage (not all). I feel the same about overhealing. Like, obviously it’s not great if you’re doing Benefic II on a target at 99% HP. But it’s not the end of the world if you find yourself throwing out more healing than necessary, since the way I see it more is better than none. And if you do put the party at like 100% HP by mistake with overhealing, you also have more time to deal damage (than if they were at 70% after healing), so you can try to cover for the mistakes you do make. Mistakes definitely matter, but I guess what I’m saying is to not beat yourself up about it too much if you do find yourself saying ‘I used that gcd heal instead of an ogcd’, or ‘I used Aspected Benefic but the target will still get healed once they hit 100%’. I mean, you have to make mistakes to learn from them, so if you do feel like you could have done things differently, just keep them in mind for next time and gradually you’ll find them happening less and less.

As you just do content everything will start to fall into place and make sense. Picking the right heal for the right time, not overhealing, doing all your healing with oGCD, etc. I think more than anything just trying it out and experiencing it for yourself is the best way to learn healing. Personally I also like running random content as dps and watching what the other healers do then comparing it with how I’d handle things to see if there’s things I can improve on or do differently.

I find that I come across a lot of healers that do totally fine when the fight is just standard striking dummy fare and they can heal by using their oGCDs at set times for set things, and focusing on dealing damage. Which is great and is ‘good play’, but then the second something goes wrong, like a tank taking tank buster with 3 vuln up stacks. Like yes, by all means continue to Glare, but at least give the tank Divine Benison or a Regen or something lol. Or when there are 4 dps and a tank dead, and you see them running in circles trying to cast Glare instead of a heal or a raise lol. Of course they shouldn’t have died in the first place, but they did, and as a healer it’s kind of the whole point of your role to help people out when they need it (to heal them lol). I guess what I mean is that you should try and think about how to ‘improvise’ your heals, so that if things actually do hit the fan (not that they regularly do), you can be confident that you can still resolve the situation using whatever tools you have left.