Healer/Tank Anxiety - Does it Ever Go Away?

[ronibosch]

Hey there, long time (?) poster/lurker on the General Discussion forums. One thing that has bugged me while playing FFXIV is queueing up for tank or healer roles, especially the latter. I'm a bit of a completionist, so a goal of mine is leveling every job to 100.

However, it's been a drag leveling my healer jobs via "asocial' means. I genuinely want to learn how to play every job well, but I'm always too scared to heal (or even tank) for others. I've never done a dungeon or raid as a healer, outside of trusts.

I'm interested to hear the stories or advice from my fellow players who understand what I'm going through, and have either overcome it or are still falling prey to performance anxiety in FFXIV.

DPS anxiety stories are welcome as well (like when you felt you didn't do enough damage or something).

[Larirawiel]

Tank is braindead easy. Just run into some mobs, spam AoE spells, and if you pulled more than two groups: activate some mitigation cooldowns. And bosses you just turn away from the rest of the party. That's it.

Healer is also very easy: give the tank a HoT, 1111111111111, give the tank a HoT, 11111111111111, use AoE heals, give the tank a HoT, 11111111111111 ....




Cheers

[Saraide]

Simply heal when people are missing HP and cast damage whenever that's not the case. This isnt an actual anxiety, you just havent learned how the game works.

During dungeons you simply heal when people have taken damage and deal damage whenever no one needs healing. If the tank is not trash they will have aggro on the mobs so you can kinda ignore the hp of the dps. If the tank has located their mitigation buttons, you will need to heal them less often. Mix in some aoe damage spells because those are pretty powerful on healers. Depending on which healer you are playing you will sooner or later get access to very powerful oGCD heals that should be used before you resort to using the much weaker cure2/benefic2/etc.
Keep in mind that the sooner a pull is dead the less resources you have to spend so healer contribution to trash damage is very important.

For bosses you can at the start kinda just heal whenever someone takes damage. As you get more experienced you will learn when you have to heal immediately and when you can simply let a regen handle the work. Dont be afraid of having people die though. Sometimes a viper will simply moth into every orange puddle on the floor. It happens, nothing you can do about it. Rez when the oppurtinity presents itself.

[Hallarem]

Theres nothing to warrant anxiety as a tank. You barely even need a healer in regular content. At best you can solo dungeon bosses.
Ive tanked with a gazillion vuln stacks and been totally fine. This game is more "dodging the mechanic anxiety" than any nuance of boss movement, kiting, positioning. Its an arena boss spamfest. At best its like. "Dont face the boss against the team?" Wooopdedoo. Just do the mechanics and do your rotation. Its why I havent really bothered with endgame that much, though blu-raiding was fun for a bit. Should prolly try and complete that.

[MrKusabi]

I was a bit anxious when I started tanking at first too. It does abate after you get confident in your kit.

In short, as a tank, you are the prettiest princess at this ball.

• Every eye better be on you (keep all aggro, steal it back from DPS/heals ASAP, face bosses away from others).
• You need lots of attention (pull as far as you can except on some early ARR dungeons).
• You want those eyes to stay on you (keep stance on, rotate your mitigation well, use your short shield often, don't just save your invuln for emergencies).

Healing, to me, is a bit more complicated because you're a bit more beholden to others. You've gotta keep a bit of an eye on everyone, rather than just you and enemies. If a DPS can't keep themselves out of the bad or a tank isn't mitting well, suddenly you've gotta babysit. That being said, as others pointed out, for a significant portion of duties you'll run, you won't really run out of ways to keep people up. The biggest things to remember are:

• The only HP that matters is the last one (don't bother keeping people at full, they just need to be upright and able to survive the next incoming damage)
• Your damage matters (if you aren't actively healing or out of things to kill, be attacking)
• Know your priorities if things go sideways (generally it's You > Your Co-Healer > Tanks > DPS that can raise > DPS that output the most damage > Anyone else; don't be afraid to lower someone in priority if they keep eating mechs).

[BabyYoda]

Tanks have nothing to manage so they give them a healer responsibilities.

Healers has this issue because of how Tanks are braindead

[ZephyrMenodora]

I've been healing for over 25 years (god EQ and I are getting old lol) and I still get some level of healing anxiety when I'm running new content. A lot of runs, when content is brand new, can fail if the healer dies and no one else can rez you. So you have more pressure not to mess up mechanics than everyone else on the team, because healers also have low defense and low HP and can die faster than everyone else too.

With current balance issues, PLD/WAR are effectively immortal so you usually have to worry a lot less about being in any real danger if you pick one of those jobs. The stress more involves leading and knowing any positional requirements for bosses. Leading has become simple since all dungeons / raids after ARR are just a straight line, and most bosses don't have real positional requirements that matter too much. Learning to mass pull and mitigate damage for trash is a skill to pick up, and once you learn that it's pretty similar in all content and you're golden.

[sylphlands]

I'm a healer main with horrible tank anxiety, and I found that it comes down to whether I feel more comfortable being right at the forefront (tanking) or working more behind the scenes (healer). For some reason healing doesn't stress me out at all, but tanking feels like too much attention on me and I make silly mistakes.

[Alice_Rivers]

In terms of tanking if you can W2W level 80+ dungeons with trusts then you'll be fine with players.

For healing, the only real way to know if you're good enough is to do it. The NPCs won't pull hard enough to really test you, as others have pointed out at level 90+ most tanks can basically fend for themselves so it's a safe place to test your basic competence. That or just start in the level 30-50 dungeons and work your way up.

Really though, the only way to overcome the anxiety is to do it. If you fail then you know what not to do again, if you succeed then you probably still have something to learn. For the most part you're only going to get complaints if you really suck and cause multiple wipes.

[AmiableApkallu]

Really though, the only way to overcome the anxiety is to do it. If you fail then you know what not to do again, if you succeed then you probably still have something to learn. For the most part you're only going to get complaints if you really suck and cause multiple wipes.

As I like to put it: In Duty Finder, I don't care if the party wipes, even if it's my fault. Let's just learn a thing and try not to wipe the same way again.