A question about healing!

[Saefinn]

Hello =D I was wanting to try healing, but I was told that I needed to be able to dps and heal at the same time, which kind of makes me nervous, especially in higher dungeons. I was also wondering when I should use Cure 2 over Cure on my White Mage (I don't have the healer I want yet, Astrologian)

Hello!

The healing & DPS thing I'd say take it at your own pace, it's not a huge deal if you don't feel confident mixing the two to begin with, it's good practice for later and can make runs go quicker, but is not real requirement until much later, meaning you can learn at your own pace. The priority is that everybody is alive and if you have space where you're doing nothing throw in some DPS spells. The good news is, especially for a lot of lower dungeons the healing requirement is low and your variety of abilities is low so you have less to think about whilst you get the hang of it. My usual advice is to start small and build on it rather than try to learn everything at once. The main reason people pick up on healers that don't DPS is because there's often big gaps where you don't need to heal and people prefer their healers to be not sit back and do nothing during that periods. So I wouldn't worry to much about if you struggle with the balance as long as you keep healing your number 1 priority. With time you'll get better and more confident with it.

When the healer & DPS balance becomes most important isn't until you're in high level content, by which point I'd expect you'll have got the hang of it by the time you're trying to heal there.

With regards to Cure/Cure II, Cure II is your big heal. Cure I will gradually become more and more redundant as you level. The main downside to Cure II is that it uses more MP, but WHM is generally good for MP management. So at a lower level you might want to use Cure I before Cure II in the chance you trigger a free Cure, but the moment Cure I feels laborious to get people's health up start using Cure 2 more.

Eventually you'll probably remove Cure I from your kit entirely.

Something else to consider is that your journey learning to play a healer might be a little odd, because of how healing jobs have evolved. To begin with you're going to learn you core spells that make up your bread and butter. Cure, Cure II, Medica, Medica II, Regen. Then you'll find you'll get nifty abilities that make up your filling like Assize, Asylum you Afflatus spells, Divine Benison and so on - all your oGCD's.

You will start to find that your core spells become secondary to your oGCD's, you might see this this 60-80 but mostly in 70-80. oGCD's give mobility and can be weaved between abilities, which will likely be between DPS moves. That's something for later to think about, but main thing. Learn your core abilities and build from there.