Overwhelmed by mechanics, healing and dps

[Kniteroad]

Yes, with AST you can set up macros for giving cards to each party member so you don't actually have to switch targets in order to give them out. Mine looks like this:

/macroicon "Play"
/ac "Play" <1>

And I have 8, one for each party member. I have them on a hotbar vertically next to the party list, so I can just click the one next to the name of the person I want to give it to and it gives them the card without me having to switch off my target. I was doing it manually for years, but once I started doing that it made it a lot easier.

This! AST is my main healer and this helps so much. However i would suggest using a mouseover macro instead of a numbered macro. This creates a lot less clutter. Assuming you play on PC, you can just put your mouse arrow over the part member you want to buff. If you play on PS4 or PS5 i don't know how it works and maybe someone who knows can chime in. I do this for both Play and Minor Arcana. The macro looks like this.

/macroicon "Play"
/ac "Play" <mo>

/macroicon "Minor Arcana"
/ac "Minor Arcana" <mo>

[RinaB]

I main tank but have an alt WHM. Theres a lot of more experienced healers in this thread but using a focus target macro on bosses helps me a lot especially with tank busters and standard aoe party dmg abilities. /focustarget is it. Basically you can watch the boss while having a party member selected. It sounds like more to watch for and it kind of is but it gives you the upper hand when you aren't allowed mods

[Roeshel]

I am reading guides and these forums, they seem full of people saying healing is too easy and I am just left scratching my head.

Healing is easy when everyone plays it right. If the dps dodges all the mechanics all you would have to do is just heal through the aoe. When I was doing the Eden runs for the first time I too wasted a lot of time resurrecting people for the 2nd,3rd and 4th time and then I wondered why my dps is so low. If you don't have swiftcast rezzing dps party member is overall a dps loss. They will be raised up and dead in the next 10 secs most probably.

If you are looking for high dps parsing, spam your dps spell and let your co-healer bother with the dead dps.

[BlueMageQuina]

Healing is difficult to prog because as a healer, you’re always doing more personal mechanics: healing, DPS, utility and the fight mechanics themselves.

To be honest, it took me a while to get into the groove of it as well. As every has mostly come to the consensus, I agree with them: you just need practice on your class. And don’t think practice means practice on every single fight. The way I became better is by spamming the fight I found most difficult for each kind of content: a dungeon, a trial, an alliance raid, a normal raid. By spamming them, I was able to understand the timing of my spells and of raid buffs, the typical order of mechanics, which mechanics will require that I sprint to avoid any PS4 latency that normal movement would get me snapshotted.

It’s just practice and I think if you try, you will succeed. But don’t let any failures along the way deceive you.