[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Healers Make! 

When it comes to movement, the issue I tend to see with people is them not realizing distance itself is more often than not a PUNISHMENT not a benefit. This applies to healers as well. Besides AoE heals having limited range, enemy AoEs that aren't Boss Centered AoEs all basically encourage you to be no further away than a mid distance. If melees are at Max Melee range, you would want to be no further than max melee range behind those melee. Or you're Black Mage. Then lmao Leylines, have fun using Aetherial Manip

To add to the point about moving -- Chaeji's point here requires you to know the mechanics of a fight. If you are rusty or dont know them, staying close to the boss hitbox is usually a good idea as you'll already be in place to dodge donuts, half-room cleaves, and wide cone attacks by just taking a few steps, which wont interrupt your damage much if at all.

At 8:40 yes! I learned that I cannot build muscle memory on those “special” moves if I never use them. They save mp and make healing more fun when I just go ahead and use them.

I wanna mention raise priority, I see this a lot with less experienced healers but when raising it helps to raise dps that can raise. if you lost a lot of your party. after making sure that after both healers are up as well as a tank, but in an 8 man aim for raising red mages then summoners then the jobs that cant raise. this will mean that those raise jobs can potentially raise someone else so you have less mana committed to raising party members that red mages can get up with multiple dualcast more effectively. not saying that you shouldn't raise on swiftcast but give those dps that can help out a chance to make your job easier in a recovery situation.

It's an unwriten rule that as a White Mage you always save Benediction if paired with a Gunbreaker for when they decide to try and be funny with Superbolide. One mistake I haven't seen in the video is how Freecure (White Mage) and Enhanced Benefic (Astro) are traps, making some healers think they need to use their Cure 1 /Benefic 1 to proc those effects, instead of just casting Cure 2 / Benefic 2.

all the Dark Knights in your footages look so tanky that it felt so unreal

Biggest mistake new healers can make especially when they're inexperienced and make mistakes move often, is that you can't heal if you're dead. If it's between you and a dps getting your OGCD to keep one alive because you both got a vuln and a raid wide is coming, you have priority.

Really glad you continue to cover all roles. I think even players that don't intend to play a role themselves always benefit from knowing what the heck the other roles are doing. I've found that playing other roles has given me awareness and creativity to solve problems in my chosen role in ways that i wouldn't have if my perspective were still narrow

About point 2, my usual way to explain to new healer is "Think of GCD as a resource that regenerate every 2.5 second and if you do nothing you wasted it" it's cover a lot of thing like why spaming heal is not a good idea or why using Cure II is better than Cure or why we may choose to apply GCD regen when boss become untargetable.

The reason I play healer is specifically because it has the highest expected value of damage added to the party if I consistently play well. Bad healers are the only role that ends up with zero dps, or even negative dps if they cant cover the mistakes of their allies. Sure, a good tank can solo a dungeon but itll take 40 minutes. Good dps will consistently top the charts, but still run into slow instances if the healer/tank cant keep it together. A good healer has smooth dungeons every single time.

As a WHM who uses my DoT on everything it's been baffling the past couple months at how many other jobs completely ignore their DoT. I started playing a year ago and I used to see 6 or 10 DoT's/vuln on a boss in an alliance raid consistently. But something seems to have changed lately and it seems like everyone has forgotten they have DoT's. It's odd.

The most important thing about this game is that healers and tanks are incredibly similar in playstyle, tanks just generally do a better job at getting their intended playstyle across by ONLY having off global cooldowns to do their job, healers having some always available tools because "why wouldn't the healer have a heal button" can easily lead to people making the core mistake that almost all of these are branching from, healing too much. While a tank can overstack mits and run out, its much easier to see that and learn from it than some random curebot white mage terrified that something might go wrong possibly ever, or just, not reading/understanding their buttons. The number of (usually white mages but not always, it is just most commonly this job because its reputation for being simple draws this kind of player) players I see in dungeon packs spam medica 2 or cure 3 or some heal they should never be pressing there especailly not on repeat is way too high because of some baffling msiinterpretation of emchanics, this game really needs better healer tutorials built in.

One other good thing to add is knowing when to use "Sprint"... There are many Tanks out there who just pull a whole room and keep running. If they get out of range and drop, the healer can't gain ground if the Tank is sprinting doing this and the healer doesn't have theirs available. I typically blow my Sprint a few ticks after the tank does to make sure I never lose ground. Also, this is where Tanks need to be aware of a healers tool kit. There are many levels at which (especially a White Mage) has zero OCDs or instants and needs to stop to channel a heal.

"Oh right. I was supposed to be over there." Sounds like a Non-SGE problem. 😎 But seriously, that sort situational awareness is so important for almost every player and a nice example of why playing multiple classes can teach you so much. Trying to maintain uptime on melee DPS taught me everything I ever needed to know about pre-positioning and whole new world of safe spots.

Amusingly, this video actually did a little bit of mistake #1 for dungeons! (In a subtle way) On single target, assuming a tank is 2/3 dps, and healer is 1/2 dps, this is a total of 3.17 dps player's worth of damage, the healer doing 0.5 of this, for the correct 16% listed. But in AoE it is not uncommon to roughly match a DPS in damage, roughly the same for tanks too. A completely even spread in a competent party can have you push upwards of 25% during the packs, and a little over 20% over the entire run (based on the handful of dungeon parses I have lying around.) Additionally, that is at level cap. Below level cap, dps players don't have all their potential damage, but healer AoE is largely static from level 45 onwards, making healer dps even more prominent, and directly comparable to an actual DPS over the entire dungeon. Outside of that extremely minor and almost nitpicky gripe (I'm mostly emphasizing that healer dps is REALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD) I'm pretty sure I've said a lot of this verbatim to newer healers. I know when I first started this would have helped a lot because I did basically every one of these lmao.

Maintaining their DOTs is something I see healers needing to do more of. Especially Sage.

11:45 what a beautiful display by BLM, collecting all these Vuln stacks. mhmm so good.

I was helping people prog P9S with my tank friend who decided on a whim to take H2 as SGE. Around 3 minutes into the fight I notice that he had 1800 mana left and I asked him what he was doing with it. Turns out he was using Eukrasian Prognosis *before and after every mechanic* to help me heal (and to also get Toxicon stacks). I told him to just cast Dosis twice since it's a technical damage loss from Dosis (since you have to GCD shield and then use Toxicon). Didn't really believe me until we wiped and I made him read the Toxicon tooltip haha. Also told him to not overcap on Addersgall stacks because it's part of his mana economy because he keeps thinking he needs to keep them all for a rainy day -- a mistake which was mentioned on this video. Don't let those stacks overcap, y'all! Also, I told him that while it was appreciated that he helped me heal, having no mana when I *really need* his support topping people off was more important than casting GCD heals most of the time. SGE has so much resources to help (Holos, Panhaima, Pneuma, Ixochole, Kerachole, Physis) that sometimes you don't even have to cast GCD shields outside of Zoe E!Prognosis. One other mistake that I'm still working on myself is to sometimes just let people regen HP naturally even without the HoT when I know there's no raidwide after a mechanic. It's not really much of a mistake but it does save at least 1 or 2 GCD heals of time AND I get to keep resources. EDIT: I personally use Lucid when I'm below 9k mana as SGE and SCH, below 8.5k when I'm WHM, and below 7.5k as AST. AST mana economy is busted, it's great.

Its all about experience. As you run through instances, you start to understand movements, class rotations and common player behaviors, you can then optimize healing and dps.

Also the no lucid dreaming is so weird to me, because if you dont use it you will eventually run out of mp even as like sge or ast

I think you are missing one of the biggest mistakes that causes a lot of healers to form bad habits like some of the mistakes listed(primarily2, 4, and 5), and that is one healer tries to do all of the healing and does not trust thier cohealer to cover anything. I see it fairly consistently in party finder and even with my static cohealer and i have ended up reworking my entire cooldown usage to account for them more or less trying to cover everything and then having nothing for when they actually needed anything. This type of behaivior at least in my opinon leads to healers that basically only dps and have the other healer cover all of the healing, which is an overall loss of healer dps as one healer only dpsing cannot make up for the other dpsing much less in order to gcd heal to cover, conversely one healer only focusing on healing lowers their dps and the other healer only dpsing can;t make up for thier loss of dps. It is actually somewhat funny when you look at it through the lens of fflogs seeing the astro doing more dps(actual dps as well as rdps) than the sage and barely doing any less healing aswell.

Kind of specific to Scholar, but this mental math of Healing vs Damage is amplified for the job due to how Energy Drain works. While using Sacred Soil is technically a damage loss, it’s worth thinking about it in terms of potential future healing spells. Can a SS save you from using a healing spell? If yes, cast it. Also, EAT YOUR FAIRY ON COOLDOWN (unless you have a fight-specific reason not to). Even if you use none of the AF stacks for damage, the gain you get from a “free” Sacred Soil, Indomitability and Excog will outweigh the passive fairy heals if used correctly.

That last one is also a good rule for tanks, knowing when to use their cooldowns and not saving them as panic buttons

In the latest tier I'd say healers doing 1/2th the dps damage is at the lower end. At the higher end damage healers can be doing is around 9/13th, very close in (and sometimes beating) tanks.

When I first got to Soul of the Creator is when I started to need to learn to use lucid dreaming pro-actively. It wasn't that I didn't want to use it, it's just that I didn't usually need to till then so I kind of forgot that it even existed. I am really glad that people still do the low level raids, cause it really helped me figure out what things I need to think about and remember more. Edit to add And I would have had a really rough time in later dungeons if I didn't already have it baked in to use Lucid Dreaming, storm blood stuff feels like a lot more work to heal for than previous stuff) I don't understand the mindset of "Hah I *don't* need to use this tool I have, because it's a crutch!" like...using the tools available isn't cheating, life doesn't have to be all about suffering XD

Two videos in a week? My guy is doing overtime to water the sprouts 🌱 💦

Most tanks have enough self sustain and sharable healing sources like Aurora and TBN that a party of 3 can clear 90 content without a healer. That does not mean a healer is useless. It means the job of a healer is more nuanced than *just* healing.

It's nice to know that I do all the right things on a fairly regular basis (we all have bad days) while having played on instinct and learned from experience. Now I just need to settle on a crossbar set up. The biggest help you can have as a healer is knowing the battle content. Knowing what type of healer you are playing helps too (for example, Whitemage is mostly a reactive healer, or a healer that mostly heals in response to damage. whereas a Sage is a mostly preventative healer due to its shielding abilities and a number of regen/damage reduction effects.) A little something extra, I also "play the edges" of AOEs. Doing that limits how far you have to move to get out of one. Basically, move just outside the aoe instead of trying to put paces between you and that same edge. A good example that this comes in handy is when you have AOEs like the two part aoe in the great gubal librarys dungeon boss fight (where you have an outer circle and inner circle that occur one after the other) playing the edge allows you to clear both aoes in about a second after the orange area marker appears. You can combo that with the timing of slide casting to do a number of different things WHILE the enemy is busy attacking/casting. You will learn through trial and error what works in what situations.

Having made an alt in another server, I've noticed sprout healers who aren't used to healers doing more attacks in MMO, so I'd encourage them to do so. "Feel free to attack more" or "Use Aero often". I feel like they're worried the party might get mad if they don't heal all the time (to the point that it's overheal) so I try to speak out about it as politely as possible.😅

One I might mention is taking the statement "only the last HP of the tank matters " way to strongly to heart. Personally I prefer to think of it as use the minimum GCD heals. Having played a tank and healer I can say I much prefer the healer that uses OGCDs and the minimum GCDs to keep me at 50% to 90% health until the very end of the fight to the healer that let's me drop to 20% then does the same number of GCD heals and keeps me at 10% to 50% health the whole dungeon. Keep your tanks sane healers, please.

I started leveling my conjurer today as a tank main, so I can learn their perspective and so I have something I can level with my friend who is completely new to the game. But I have run into some tanks that sprint away mid pull, or just randomly decide to pull more, which causes them to take a lot of damage at once. At this level, as you mentioned in the video, I have no ogcds so I feel like I have to almost instantly swiftcast a heal once they do stop just to have them not die. Is there something else I could/should be doing?

Sooo a question. SCH, shortly before a boss and I just used Aetherflow or Dissipation the other ones on CD for a bit longer and a boss is coming up. Especially when it is Dissipation I sometimes resort to doing one Adlo on the tank because I inted to just pump all into Chain Strat + ED. Is that "optimal"?

one thing for adlo at low ish lvl is you get deployment tactics at 60? meaning if a adlo shield crits you can spread that big shield after. recitation guarantees a crit. and the shield has its own "healing" potency. meaning if a big raid wide is coming use fey ilumination boosts heal protraction boosts target hp and heals if you need to the fairy consuming one (more aethflow and boosts heals) then recitation deployment tactics for a party wide massive shield maybe if youre lucky or said so your rdm n monk have mantra and magic barrier up in time for even more heal boost and dmg resistance

As a White Mage main, I found that bosses were often very well designed at making a nice rotation of your Cooldown spells. The more cooldown AoE heals you have, the more often bosses attack the whole party with undodgeable attacks. Heck, right after getting the spell that heals extra for every attack you receive, almost all bosses start getting a multi-stack AoE attack. Square Enix is litterally giving you perfect situations to use every spell. So I feel a very important thing for high level healers is to figure out this spell rotation. I have my own "default" rotations for mass-pulling and party-wide attacks, use certain other spells for specific types of attacks, keep only a couple spells for panic moments, and if there's spells that I end up not using in a specific fight, I try to figure out what might be the optimal place to use it in my next attempts.

Honestly even as a healer main, when I found out Holy was centered on SELF, not target, I was a bit intimidated, but after the rush of spamming Holy onto mobs in dungeons or adds in boss encounters, the thrill of having some of the most reliable AoE DPS of any class, with a stun for non-boss enemies besides? Lemme tell you, it feels SO GOOD to roll up on fools as WHM.

I still struggle pretty hard with sage and scholar even though they are 90. So I frequently find myself not having the RIGHT abilities for a situation and not necessarily that I don't have abilities. This semi regularly results in me having no options but to spam shields for 10 to 20 seconds while I wait for something actually useful in the situation. It's an absolutely miserable feeling.

In a dungeon, the most important thing is to keep yourself, the healer, alive and the tank. Unless there's a red mage or summoner around. Forget the dps. In my experience, when you distract yourself looking at the dps, that's when you get ko'd. Content with co healers, hehe. Do whatever you want. In fact this is the best content to practise healing. Alliance, trials, normal raids. If in doubt pop big shields. Overhealing is fine when you're new. Use your abilities first. On a rainy day, that's when you spam casting spells. If you're new at the game I suggest not starting as a healer. You might get bored when you have to dps solo things. I personally, do not use lucid dreaming on cooldown only when I noticed I'm below 5000MP or after a raise. Usually it's not a problem. I do have super ether handy.

As a SCH main, I have a specific oGCD rotation for dungeons pulls. Pull 1: Excogitation (when first mob is grabbed), Sacred Soil (right on tank once everything is picked up), Whispering Dawn, Summon Seraph (and Consolation as needed) Pull 2: Excog, Sacred Soil, Whispering Dawn, Fey Illumination, Fey Union, top off the Union gauge with Lustrate, Indomitability, Excog, or Sacred Soil as needed, Fey Blessing once Fey Union wears off As most of SCH's healing comes from Eos and oGCDs tied to her, Dissipation is not useful during mob pulls except for spamming more Lustrates. I also sometimes switch up the order depending on how much Union gauge I have after the boss, as Fey Union on both pulls doesn't hurt. Fey Illumination is a decent magic mit that can help the tank since the second pull before a boss is always more difficult and boosts the potency of Adlo if I need to spam it.

To sort of expand on your points about "saving CDs for just the right time", it massively helped me improve as a healer player to start thinking about them as extra resources to dole out over the course of a dungeon in the same way a DPS player handles their bursts. So as a WHM, I might plan out to drop my Lilly Bell for the big pulls in the dungeon, front load Aquaveil on smaller pulls to help mitigate damage, and save Tetra in case I'm noticing the tank is making bad use of their own mitigation so I'm not stuck trying to GCD heal them from low HP. Edit: Or I guess the better way to put it is that you need to have some sort of plan for when cooldowns are going out, rather than just stockpiling them for a hypothetical use case. If you're holding things in reserve, you need to have a plan for when you would use them to supplement that plan. Also worth noting about healer damage: a dead enemy doesn't do any damage, so helping things die faster reduces the amount of healing you need to do in the long term. This is triply true in dungeon trash where it is very easy as a healer to be doing top DPS in the group just by making the most of your cooldowns, such as a SGE dropping all of their Toxicons on trash and replenishing them during boss fights.

for conserving CDs it's worth noting that your healing priority flips depending on whether you're in downtime or uptime. During downtime phases of fights, there's no damage opportunity cost to using GCD heals where possible, so if you can tide the party on those you can have more of your oGCDs available for when uptime resumes, which will in turn help keep you from needing GCD heals during uptime. The current unreal has a lot of this where I see SCH spreadlo or seraph the multihit knockback AOE -> big raidwide or I'll see SGEs holos or panhaima, but it's like, I can just med2 or c3 while there's nothing to target and then assize will take care of the rest for free in the reopener lol

The most common mistake I witness during big group contents is that healers play like they are the only one healer in the raid, applying regens/shields even tho the party already has effects from the other healer that perfectly cover them. Of course, understanding when your healing partner will use their spells is something you can only hardly predict during roullettes, with knowledge of the other class helping a bit. However when you are raiding with a static or maybe a party finder practice group for savage content, and therefore attempt a fight several times with the same healing buddy, it's very benificial to watch and learn when your partner is using their ogcd's. And of course, communication speeds up the progress significantly.

My biggest problem with being a healer is what damaging spells to use. Scholar especially, because I only use Art of War as my main attack as I didn’t know what spell to use.

2. Healing yourself and not the people actually getting hurt. 6. Losing your mouse and can't find it. 8. Running into some mechanic because you're smacking your head against your desk because of the (dragoon/red mage/black mage/tank). 3.33 (repeating of course). Queueing when you know you REALLY don't want to... so you let people die out of spite. Just go to the Gold Saucer or log out. Number 1 mistakes healers make is............................ Rolling a healing class!

I think one of the things this game doesn't have is a mode that regularly makes you rethink how you do cooldown usage. I play Mythic+ in WoW and I can say that I regularly cycle my cooldowns purely because it maximises their usefulness (eg. if you hold onto cooldowns excessively, in a timed run you actively made it worse for everyone instead of getting more cooldowns ticking). And if I hear a healer complain about mana while also not using Lucid Dreaming, well, that's on them I think (I use it every pack, or every second pack).

In 3 points this would be the usual healer guide: 1. ABC. Always be casting. If your attack does 1 point of damage and the alternative is doing nothing you better be attacking just in case you hit enrage. (Obviously as healer damage is not 1 point per gcd this is very important) 2. Avoid intentional overhealing. Funny to see sites like xivanalysis that tell you about overhealing when you use all the lilies or assize you have to in a fight. But this can be done by planning your fights (once you know them) first try to cover the heavy hitters with the big ogcds (multihit? Lilybell!) Then work from that. Gcd as the last option. Talk with your cohealer!! 3. Plan your movement. You have to be either W or N for the next mech? Stand (if you can) at NW then slidecast to the correct one. This can be done together with 2 if you plan to move with lilies during a movement-heavy heal check (i used it in act 4 or curtain call in P4S, or purgation in P7S). Great video explaining this in detail! Edit: some spelling mistakes, sorry!

Honestly, for any Healer beginner, just remember: Prioritise making sure you (healer), 2nd Healer and the Tank(s) stay alive. Sure, the fight might go slower if the DPS is dead, but as long as you don't wipe you won't have to re-start the dungeon/boss fight. Chip damage is better than no damage, and the finer details will come with experience and having run the dungeon/trials a few times to learn what to expect. Also, summoner/Red Mage... If you notice your healer(s) is struggling, for the love of everything holy, just help them with an extra heal or two. You win no prices by being an asshat pocketing away your healing and reviving "because you're DPS". It's always better to take the 3-5 extra seconds to help them out than having to restart the entire fight.

THANK YOU for making this vid, i'm gonna have less pocket healers now at least, healing my WAR and mainly AST not attacking at all

I think having a priority plan helps, i tend to not use Benediction simply cuz there are so many other ogcds (+ huge stun duration) that by the time i run out of other ogcds all the pulls are done. Benny often ends up as the panic button for tank forgetting def cds or standing in aoes. Regen is also very weird for WHM since you have this huge stun opener for the pulls that it often ends up not doing much since there is no dmg being done, but once pull gets immune to stuns, regen runs out and you don't want to cast regen over more aoe dmg. I'd love to say Regen(spell) is important but it often is not the case. Aspected Benefic ends up being more useful since Astro does not have the chain stun

My biggest tip to new healers. Trust in healing over time. I die inside whenever i see a WHM use Medica 2, than just cap the group with 2 raptures anyway. It's okay to let the group stay damaged if a HOT is on the party.

when i first started playing SCH, i constantly forgot to spend my aetherflow (and still do sometimes) before it comes off CD. but the more i played it the more i would remember. that being said, if im going into an instance ive never done before, i will tend to hold onto them past the 1 minute mark if i havent had to use them yet. i do this just in case something goes horribly wrong since i dont know whats coming up. is this the right play? probably not but it makes me feel safer having up to 6 uses at once for those new instances. the more i do an instance the more comfortable i will feel using them up

I’m a long time white mage and I’m pretty confident. I use all my abilities and cooldowns when needed with one exception which is plenary indulgence. With all my other abilities, spells, and cooldowns I never feel like I need this spell. I’m genuinely not sure when I should be using it as I feel like the rest of the whm kit is already so strong. I’m already already barely needing to actually cast a spell. For reference, I don’t do high end raiding (due not being able to find a consistent set of 8 friends) so maybe this is why. Any tips?

Here I was expecting to be called out lol. Guess I was wrong. I have to strongly agree that healers not using their defensives in pulls is common. Notably not seeing soil/kerachole where that 10% can add up to a significant amount of ehp. But yes, cooldown usage overall is a common issue.

Absolutely love the tip of not sitting on your big cooldowns. Don't save them for a rainy day. They're there to use! I love high level healing specifically because of having all these tools! Spreading abilities around to maintain group health is what keeps healing engaging for me Similarly, since it wasn’t specifically mentioned: you dont always have to save swiftcast for raise. I tend to use swiftcast proactively for movement in raid content and to keep tanks healthy in dungeon content. Dont have lilies and need to heal the tank quick? Better to swiftcast cure 2 and keep them alive than swiftcase raise and pick up the pieces. Swiftcasting a necessary healing spell while moving in raids or after needing an emergency heal is also better than picking someone up after death. I dont use it on cooldown because swiftcst raise may be necessary. But I prefer to use it to prevent a raise from being needed in the first place.

ahh yes nevma my fav spell 10:43 good video

as someone who's mained WHM since like Heavensward, at this point when I'm playing most dungeons I almost NEVER heal with GCD abilities, I almost always use OGCD, Medica II, and Regen to heal and of cource use the lilies to gather BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD LILLY!

"Man I haven't played ffxiv in two months and when I did I was a very competent Scholar, I'm gonna very intently watch a video about simple mistakes that new healers make"

I recently started leveling Scholar because I wanted to have a healer in case of need, he's 60 right now Also recently, in my little server, there are tons, and tons of new players. The experience to say the least, has been chaotic I always read that healers must dps when they have the time but the thing is, if I unlock my grip on the tank, sometimes I don't even have the time to attack, and its HP goes half with one swing of the boss or a pack of mobs It also happens that while fighting a boss, and adds appear, I lead them to the tank, but they didn't pick them, and I die [TLDR] Healing is fun with a good or experienced tank but otherwise it's stressful, it's quite understable why people don't like to do it, I'm questioning it myself

As a new healer (and also a returning player) I can honestly say that the only time I haven't used lucid dreaming is when I have forgotten to.....the downside to getting old lol

As white mage casting holy before the tank is done pulling so you stun the first group before you get to the second group. This is way more annoying with blue mage healers and rams voice. Also in a savage or ultimate planning out healing with your co-healer and being consistent with your healing plan is important.

With whm and astro, if I need to move, I like to use the regen heal if I don't have any insta casts

Not really a mistake more of an advice: practice slide casting. When you cast a spell (meaning your attack spell) there is a small window at the end of the cast time where you can move freely without the spell being cancelled. If you learn and practice this kind of movement you can avoid AOE damage zones without losing damage. Crystal Tower is in my opionion really good to practice slide casting: the raids don't have big or complicated mechanics and most of the bosses are just tank and spank so it's really ideal to practice here.

Doing Savage content has been the biggest help in learning when and when not to use big cooldowns on SGE. That and resource management. Sitting on a full stack for 30 seconds is just a use of mit wasted after all.

I always suggest to a new Healer, to play agressive with dmg spells until 80% of the Tank;s HP or lower like 60% at least and use first OGCDs to heal first to keep there Holy up for Aoe pulls. If they notice they don't do anything else then stand around waiting to cast Cure . Funny thing is most of the People i told this started to be more compftable as a Healer in general and started to look what they can get away with. I had a few days ago a healer that i gave this advice, they did feel more compfy with the Roll itself and with Dungeons because all They did until Endwalker content was waiting quietly to cast a Heal Spell soon as the Tank took dmg.

I think my tip is to have everything on your hotbar, even skills you don't think you'll need.There have been a bunch of times I've had to alternate spamming physik and adlo with a tank that has poor cooldown use. The rainy day skills IMO are the GCD heals, not the oGCDs.

I clear Savage as a SCH, do a lot of content with it, and I still usually end up sitting on a full gauge for union. In Savage fights, I tend to use it for specific areas of the fight if I end up using it, such as dot based TBs. In dungeons, I generally find excog generally does all I need these days. I pop a soil generally, and then excog while I am spamming AoW. Half the time Excog times out, the other half the time the pull is almost over. Lustrate usually picks up any slack after that. If the tank starts taking more damage, I'll use Whispering Dawn and Fey Union to help out. Typically if I am feeling like I need to cast adlo in combat at all. And a tank had to be REALLY bad/DPS just standing in shit for me to use Seraph on the AOE packs. I like to use Seraph more on boss AOEs as a oGCD pre-shield and then a post AOE heal, same as I would do for some stronger boss AOEs in Savage. Yet, sometimes on anything below EX/Savage, oGCDs get left on the table since they never have any use in a fight due to the limited damage going out. XD Oh and Dissipation can continue to not be on my bar at all. I know it is a dps loss, and I am somewhat ignoring 3 free stacks of aetherflow every so often. I do this with full knowledge it is inefficient and to most people silly, but I do not eat my fairy. >.

Super Ethers are underrated and underused.

I die a little every time I use a party HoT and my cohealer spams AoE heals until the party is full HP

On a personal preference, I would appreciate it a lot, if they could reduce the dmg potential of a support again. Since later phases in ultimates and such become an insane stress,while actually needing to aim for big Dps. For example Tanks are scratching Dancer Dps already. So it’s a necessity for tanks to Dps as hard as possible on Dps checks. Or rather every single class needs to put in the effort. Just that support has to usually manage more than just rotation .( mitigation ,Healing,mapping etc.)

I'm a main tank, but I sometimes play healer to silently judge other tank players.

Sometimes I end up sitting on my CDs cuz the tank is a skilled WAR and literally doesn't me xD. It may also be worth adding that, there's never a reason to put individual regens on every party member. I've seen some WHMs keep regens up indefinitely on every party member in ARR content instead of just waiting for raidwide damage and using medica. Also, spamming heals on full HP targets is pointless. If one absolutely refuses to touch a damage button, then doing nothing at all is better preferable to wasting the mp. I know that's obvious, but it's something I occasionally see. And my last bit: most aoe healing is centered on and emanates from you, meaning you can't be off to the side of the arena and expect to hit everyone with your aoes. The one exception I can think of is Cure III, which is centered on the target.

i just got to heavensward in the msq (i did level white mage to level 90 from playing it a lot and trying to improve XD ), and my dungeons are level 50 and under. in dungeons, i only have benediction and i use it as a panic button when i focused too much on doing damage and -now i messed up and my tank is dying! DX im a really anxious healer and i saw someone once be very angry about healers not doing dps and now i might have anxiously overcorrected and focus more on dps and trying not to get people mad at me. ;~;

Also, not changing your hud layout. The party list is the most important part of the hud, it should be somewhere you can see it without looking away from the stage and not squirreled away in the top left. I keep mine sized up a couple clicks and off to the right of my character so the health bars are front and center

I heal main but on the rare occasions I'm not healing, I've discovered that Cure 1 is my bane. I have had WHMs in Heavensward content spamming Cure 1 and refusing to change tactics because "it's faster", because apparently they never learned how GCDs work. I have had *mentors* tell me that Freecure fishing is valid as a desperation tactic when you're low on MP and Lucid is on CD. No. If you're under 1k MP while healing needs to be going out and Lucid isn't up, you're bad at MP management and should start carrying Ethers.

re: people thinking healer damage is negligible, yeah no, I still remember the time a _reclear_ party wiped TWICE to enrage on P8Sp2 with 0-1 deaths. Glanced over at the illegal magic abacus and found the WHM averaging 2.7k damage (for context, even a low grey parse healer averaged 4.8-5k DPS at the time). Went "ah" and just left.

I have noticed white mage has really good dps for a healer. Also, use regen right when the tank pulls so you will have medica II ready to be used for double regen so you can use cure I

its always a pet peeve of mine when i get stuck with healers that don't DPS. i get that they might not know(some might have the old MMO mindset Healers are there to heal not DPS), but it still drives me batty.

This may be for newbie content only but: in case everyone starts dying, keep calm, be selfish with your cooldowns. Use big shields or regens on yourself THEN start reviving people, better if you have swiftcast. Stabilize that person, pop lucid dreaming, and keep reviving the party taking care of maxing your HP bar. You can recover from big mistakes doing this

#4 is my absolute bane. I'm very, very bad about hanging onto cooldowns, and part of my journey through Endwalker (I wasn't as active in Shadowbringers) has been conditioning myself to just go ahead and use the damn things.

I main healers and my issue is, that I almost never heal myself when I mess up or end up low life through raid wides etc. I heal the rest of the group and completely ignore my own HP bar. Most of the time it is fine but I had situations where I died because of that. I don't even know why I do that.

a mistake i see many new sages make is not using kerachole for tanks in times where the rest of the group doesnt take any dmg, like in dungens in between bosses

Damage in dungeons is way higher then people think. When I play sage I can pump more dps then the dps on the mob packs. Especially from level 40 to 70.

so... I do basicly every mistake because I'm a very anxious healer xD I'm sorry Cae QwQ

playing as a sage, or even as a white mage when you first start out with the class, has lucid dreaming practice for its aggressive use! its there for a reason, use it, it has gcd and itll come right back again when you least expect it or when you expect it

I just started playing a week ago and decided to be a white mage, thank you btw for this guide. Im just noticing that most guides and contents around healers are obsessed with healers making damage, if I wanted to do dps shouldn’t I played like a black mage instead?

Cae-dono casually posting a vid like this will definitely not cause every healer in the entire world to take up all the pitchforks and begin a hunt train...

As someone who has a SO who is a healer main I got my advice from them; however, there was still my own issue of being too scared to use my new spells and what not when I first started healing. I was so scared of it I would end up doing nothing but panic healing as WHM. Then I got into SCH and had an easier time that is until I got above level 50 with it, and though it is now 90 thanks to SMN and it being linked. I can't wrap my head around any spell over its level 50. I've tried and just don't understand them at all. AST is the hardest for me to get into as it is just too much for me to deal with. I do have it to 90 as well but purely for certain glams that just look right for the class. My go to healer and the one I'm best at is SGE, and I argue that it is even easier to use than WHM or in the same boat. I compare the lily gauge to that of the addersting part of the Sage's gauge (here have a shield, make sure it breaks so I can have a bigger slap)

I realize I'm a bit late but couldn't find this particular tip after scrolling for a while. If someone's dead, know *when* to raise them. I've seen(and caused) a few too many wipes to the healers trying to rez people instead of healing up for mechanics. One dead dps is better then more dead dps after all. Speaking of, heal someone you just rezzed immediately. I know you shouldn't *need* to in many situations but far too many randos just immediately jump into doing damage again and waste their rez invuln. Said invuln also only lasts so long and I've died more times then I can count to being rezzed, not healed and then slapped in the face by a raidwide. Please just throw them something before they hit the ground again.

Pretty sure undervaluing attacks isn't a huge issue. A lot of people put a lot of stress on healer damage, which is strange as hell to me. I am glad you state that it's not a priority but I think what would be better wording is "filling void time with damage" because last 3 days I've been getting healers that only heal AFTER the fight. I'm sitting there, popping holmgang, vengeance, long arm, reprisal, rampart, thrill constantly , forced to only 2 group pulls because healers have this mentality their damage matters. It doesn't. It helps, but in the grand scheme, it doesn't when you're wiping the group because you want to damage. Making the group spend 2 minutes get back to where you were, recovering from a 4 minute fight, wasting 6+ minutes because you wanted to damage over heal. First priority - MAKE SURE PEOPLE DON'T DIE, Second priority - damage support. If people are dying, heal earlier to give yourself better timing for your heals. Tank doesn't care if they sit on 20% hp whole game, but when they die because you want to dps when they are at 20%, it's extremely toxic.

As a Sage main I focus on keeping at least 1 of several barriers on the tank at all times (except on a tank buster, then I drop a Ukrasian Daignosis & a Haima) because that lessens the damage they take which in turn allows my Kardia to keep them at full, My motto as a Sage is "If your hp is consistanly dropping below 80% I'm not playing Sage right", but I do use "most" of my skills, and the less healing me and the other healer has to do the more we can be attacking!

Rather than benediction at a given HP value, I would suggest (and practice) using it when a tank takes damage at a rate you can't control. I have ended up using benediction at 50% because the tank lost half their HP in under a second, it was a small oppsie on my part but better safe than sorry.

I find myself to be a..mediocre healer but at least none of this applies to me. I see my WHM as a DPS with healing being some secondary thing you do every now and then. 😂

First 30 seconds of video, glare mage confirmed best way to play healer

i say a big mistake i see is healers undervaluing DPS mitigations/ self heals (also dps doing the same to their own abilitys)

The one cooldown I struggle with is whether or not to use Chain Strategem on trash pulls in dungeons

Great vid! I think there’s a no.7 - don’t use rescue when absolutely necessary XD. New healers love it, but I can say in 90% of usage situations I encountered, the rescue just worth a single target 0gcd heal at most if better than nothing. Don’t use it on blm especially.

Keeping a shield on the tank is quite important for sages... Extra DPS and mor mobile DPS. Always necessary probably not... See boss fights lol.

You forgot one big one: incorrectly prioritizing reviving over literally everything else. I've seen inexperienced healers, while lacking swiftcast for some reason (may have used on a revive earlier), immediately attempt to hardcast revive a dead teammate while everyone alive has low hp, and they'll allow 3+ teammates to die for the price of reviving just 1 teammate. Congratulations, healer, you spent 2400mp and ~4 gcds of no dps or healing for the outcome of losing players. Even better if the healer's own hp is low and they die attempting to hardcast revive a player, so they actually quite literally accomplish NOTHING while, assuming they are later revived, they lose 10+ gcds of actions, their ogcds are sitting unused, they revive with low mp reserves, and their healing and dps efficacy are reduced by 25% (or 50% if from dying twice) for around 90s, and force the party to have spent 2400mp and a gcd to revive them in the first place. Last scenario: if a dead healer gets revived, they immediately attempt to revive a teammate, even though they don't even have 2400mp themselves (exception is a WHM who knows what they're doing and has Thin Air for revives.) They may immediately swiftcast, then find themselves standing there looking lost for a few moments before they realize that they just didn't have the mp. Or, they may barely have 2400mp, then they find themselves with 0mp after reviving a player... then, unable to heal anyone if they forget to ogcd heal, they may allow someone to die or may themselves die again and receive a more punishing 50% weakness if they get revived again.

I have conserved Lucid Dreaming because I was expected to die. Well, planning really. Fancy undersized group strats for E4S and SoS Ex :P

one thing i see a lot of healers neglect to do is use raid-wide abilities for trash pulls, e.g. physis, aspected helios (if needed), kerachole, stuff like that. they keep trying to reserve it specifically for raid-wides but don't realize the cooldown is effectively so short that by the time you do need it for raid-wides it's likely back up already. also, aspected benefic and aspected helios can stack. shield healers also really seem to feel more than pure healers that they need to keep the tank topped off at all times. viewing shield healing as "never-take-damage" healing rather than "stabilizing the rate at which damage is taken" can be almost a little frustrating to witness as a tank, ESPECIALLY as a warrior. when i play warrior it's a little exhausting watching the sge dump absolutely everything to keep me at full hp. i can do that anyway without your help, thanks, pls use your dps skills there's also a lot of whms i'll see not take advantage of the fact they can holy spam. they try to keep me topped off instead of using holy over and over to keep me from being damaged in the first place (until the stun wears off, obviously). honestly, unless it's really necessary i wouldn't even bother healing the tank at all when holy can still stun until it stops having that effect. i will say it's really hard to stick close to everyone for your aoe healing when the blm decided to sit right at the very edge of the arena while the bard is over on the other side. i hope more people talk about how the dps (ranged, anyway) should stick closer to the healer and unless they're dodging mechanics there's no need to spread out like that. for pure healers, don't underestimate how helpful divine benison and celestial intersection are. i think a lot of people get tempted to use it during the initial pull and never any time else but its cooldown is short enough and it's an ogcd so you can just sneak it in there in between aoes every so often which can help stabilize hp loss (and you'll likely have it back up by the time it's needed for a pull again)

Use Benediction on cooldown. It works with the same logic as the tank that uses their Invuln on big pulls. It's an OGCD, meaning it's a free heal when you need it, weavable into your damage rotation. Also weird take but if you're a good enough healer: You really don't need to use EVERY skill in your kit. This mostly applies to niche skills like Pepsis, which imo is trying to be Emergency Tactics on Scholar but doing a bad job since with pepsis you have to use a GCD to cast the shield, then use pepsis to I guess. . . Heal? By a very small gain, sure it was clunky getting to that heal. But anyway, yeah, it goes back to just reading your tooltips and knowing what you do/don't need at any given time.