Quote Originally Posted by Aikeiko View Post
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)
To be technical, healers possess very few skills that heal and damage at the same time. What you are really being told is that your GCDs should be used for damage when healing is not required. While this does apply to healing in general, it more or less refers to optimization of your kit and is emphasized at endgame.

The leveling experience can be, and will be different. Early on, you won't have access to all of your skills, which means you will have to resort to using GCDs to heal much faster, but this concept never changes throughout your entire time as healer in FFXIV. Only the amount of threshold it takes for you to resort to GCD heals.

If you are just starting out, the expectation of you should only be to keep everyone alive as best as possible. Keeping everyone alive while also dealing out a lot of damage is an expectation of experienced healers who have been doing it for a while, and have cleared various forms of content from easy to difficult. By difficult, I am referring to content that pushes YOU. You don't have to be Savage raider to be an experienced healer, but also know that running any form of PvE over and over again will create this expectation of you.

As for your specific question. Cure 1 is basically used until you either get Cure 2, or you don't have sufficient mana to cast Cure 2 (in which case you're likely screwed anyway). The idea of MP efficiency in regards to which heal you should be using is an antiquated concept in FFXIV, and it exists in the form of Cure 1, and the procs tied to it. You still need to keep it on your hotbars though in the case you are synced to a level below Cure 2 availability.