FFXIV: I don't like "Proactive" and "Reactive" 

Every healer is absolutely proactive with (ideally) the ability to reactively fix player error or recovery situations. I agree; like you mentioned, Astro is the most proactive healer in the game; it requires the most pre-planning to play effectively despite being a "reactive regen healer". A good approach to healing in general on all 4 jobs is to heal proactively, and then reactively fix issues when they arise

always remember the 4 rules of planning 1: Make the plan 2: execute the plan 3: expect the plan to go off the rails 4: throw away the plan your plans are only as good as your ability to improvise.

That's my secret. I have no healing plan. Resumes smashing keyboard.

I was afraid of playing scholar for the whole proactive reason until I saw just how much healing the class actually does. Yes sacred soil and succor should go down before a raid/party wide but most everything else in the tool belt is a raw heal

I've always thought of the reactive vs proactive as less of the difference in pure vs shield and more of beginners vs experienced healers like you've said. When I first healed, I thought i just healed when everyone's HP dropped. Now I can plan cooldowns and focus on DPS. There's a balance of knowing when incoming damage is coming out and having a plan for when shit hits the fan.

My plan as WHM always includes gratuitous Holy spam.

As an AST I feel this in my bones, tf you mean I'm reactive I'm setting up two heals before the boss even deals damage because burst is coming up and I have zero weave slots for like 10 seconds when that comes up, at best!

Wow I never really thought of healing this way. I always just accepted the shield healer (proactive) and pure healers (reactive) phrase on surface value. Makes me want to try getting better to astro again

the way you killed that poor hrothgar at 1:14

Well, it will be like everything in the world, "people like short answers." Many people don't like to read the long answers when people trying to explain how each healer works, so some people just say in general terms like if more than 50% of the toolkit is meant to be used after people took damage, yeah, people use the word you hate. And if more than 50% of the toolkit is meant to be used before people take damage, then the other word you hate will be used. But of course, there is no 100% of one side, or that healer will have a hard time healing people properly.

a lot of it comes down to learning a fight and knowing what comes where, like i know a lot of places are going to open up with group/raid wide so depending on which healer i am at the time ill react accordingly but i also know that if things hit the fan i can usually recover unless things are just completely spiraling

Lol, it's funny you mentioned the Mt.Gulg god pull, I queued up in my leveling roul as whm expecting something simple, then I got a tank who randomly pulled every single pack each time to the end IN MT.Gulg. Luckily I was on my most comfy healer, or we would of had a bad time.

The stuff about new players taking things too literally is real. The amount of times you would ask a new tank to use mitigations when they w2w, they go "Oh, mb" then immediately use all of them on the one pull at the same time proves that. We gotta provide more when we try to give advice.

I swear AST feels like the most proactive healer a lot of the time

Proactive vs Reactive heal-ING vs Proactive vs Reactive heal-ERS That's how I would break it down for term usage. If I'm talking resources (healing), I would describe the kit emphasis as proactive vs reactive between the two healer types. If I'm talking about game play (healers), I would describe experienced vs newer players as proactive vs reactive. It would simply come down to the context of the conversation for me.

I don't really join in on discussions and what not, but as a healer main I see where you're coming from with the proactive and reactive. It truly is a mix of both. If you're playing a pure healer like white mage, you find yourself being proactive by weaving in your heals when you known the big damage is coming. When it comes to Scholar and Sage, it's easier to be proactive because you're generally just putting your shields on everyone anyways just to keep them topped off. I also find pure healers to do the reactive part much better than the shield healers because their heals are typically heftier. I also 100% agree that 90% of the time, the plan you have will just get thrown right out the window because someone messed up, and a good healer will know how to react to any situation instantaneously, like casting Surecast on yourself so your rez doesn't get interrupted if quickcast is down.

i think they are more so for the bare bones of what the jobs do, not the overall scope. SCH level 50 has Adlo and Succor for shields, and Lustrate/Whispering Dawn for HP....and i guess physick if you wanna be that type of person lol. so a little bit of both WHM has....no shields at all below 50 (idk when they get their shields) Lustrate and Whispering Dawn arent both always available unlike Adlo/Succor so having available shielding constantly makes them a 'shield' healer for proactive play yes once you get to higher levels with more tools the terms arent as set in stone for each healer. but as an entry? i think the terms are perfectly fine

This is a great video and speaks to me well. I actually find that shield healing is much easier for me. It's not because of proactive or reactive, I just find it easier to deal with health depleting if it's doing so slower. Some people prefer to do so by simply healing when health is low. The proactive and reactive conversation really confused me as a healer. This is a great video for those that are trying to encourage Newbies to heal.

One way to make proactive healing easier is using the f1 keys if you are playing on the pc because it auto targets the selected party number based on which f keys above the number buttons on the keyboard you select. If the tank is beneath you on the party menu, if its one space down, you need to press f2 to auto target the tank or you can just click the tanks name on the list but i think using the f key's are easier. For all white mages that have just started out, you are going to love the spell benediction, it fully heals a target & then it goes on a cool down where you need to wait for it to be used again.

I do planning with every healer. Even as WHM, I do as much as I can to do as little gcd healing as possible (it'll slightly change once I'm out of free trial, accordingly with me being given the Blood Lily).

As a healer main, I agree so much with these points. There is so much overlap and it definitely helps to improve at any level to keep this in mind.

I been playing a tank a lot lately. (finished levelling Gunbreaker and now switched to Paladin.) there is a lot of Mt. Gulg and Bardam's mettle I have noticed how healers are sometimes too reactive when I get them in levelling roulette.

interesting video. honestly i have lots of trouble with shield healing. the abilities for shield healers feel so different from direct healers and often results in those heals feeling way underpowered to me. This generalization between proactive and reactive healing as well made me not like shield healers either. I was always under the impression that I had to make sure some kind of shield was up to mitigate damage because a shield healers options for direct healing felt limited to me by a lot, yet the shields themselves were also very limiting where it felt like it took way too much mp for a single shield and compared to other healing effects didn't mitigate as much damage as those others restored. Maybe I just don't understand shield healing though but for example i often compare a regen to a basic shield from SCH. the regen heals back roughly 50% more hp than the shield mitigates plus heals not counting for crits. yet a regen costs 400 mp and adlo is 1k. so in my mind it put this extra pressure on me to need to really know a fight to use those shields properly and I still severely struggle to do this even when i know the fight.

Great topic! This is so akin to how tanks use their invulns. Yes they can be used to some effect as an oh crap button, higher play sees it as a preemptive tool to set up otherwise impossible pulls

Played at the most basic level, all healers are reactive, though Scholar and Sage less so. The higher and higher you go, though, the more proactive they become. And while certain jobs may have more proactive or reactive tools in their toolkit, all 4 healers should be approached with a proactive mindset. Spending a lily on a raidwide or a tankbuster is technically "reactive", but if you know it's coming then you should be planning in advance to use that Lily, which sounds pretty proactive to me. When it comes to healing I'm a diehard Scholar, but I have to react to shit all the time. Sometimes a DPS gets trucked by mechanics just before a raidwide so you need to put a crit excog on them instead, meaning you don't have recitation for a crit adlo for the upcoming tankbuster. Luckily Scholar almost always has some fairy gauge pocketed, though, so you can throw aetherpact on the tank. While you can technically categorise healers and tanks and even DPS in a lot of very valid ways, they all have their own quirks, and the categories are really just a rough guideline. You should take the generally applicable skills you've learned, and figure out what it is that makes that specific job tick.

Funnily enough, I used to think SCH was the most reactive healer because Aether Flow heals allowed quick and weavable mistake fixings, while WHM was the least because I felt I had cast heals before someone took the consequences of their mistake.

Hes cooking

Anyone else see him just yoink that reapers bubble at 1:16 and get them killed?

The funny thing, too, is people don't seem to realize how much reactive healing SCH/SGE have (Physis + Zoe + Pneuma + Eukrasia Prognosis Pepsis; this heals for a TON), or they think "that requires CDs". But fights don't tend to throw "heal to 100% or KO" Dooms out left and right. AT BEST, you get one in a fight, and many fights don't do that at all. Raw healing that much isn't really necessary. Not to mention Cure 3 isn't super spamable (due to its cost) so you can't sit there and cast it for minutes straight anyway, and AST doesn't have it. Cure 2/Benefic heal for a lot, but Adlo/Eurkasia Diagnosis heal for a comparable amount with their shields, and that is relevant to dealing with incoming damage. Not to mention, speaking of REacting to damage, that SCH and SGE both have very quick, very strong oGCD heals between Lustrate/Durochole (people laugh, but these are not far from being as strong as Cure 2 and get out immediately, Taruochole is nearly as strong and mitigates, and Excog IS as strong), and tend to have several oGCD heals they can layer very quickly; faster than WHM can GCD cast if forced to it. So in terms of "instantly healing before next mechanic", SCH and SGE have the healing they need. And if it's "heal to 100%", they don't really have to burn more than 2-3 CDs to do that, and encounters so rarely call for it. It'd be one thing if there was a Doom every 20 seconds, but there isn't. People sleep on them, but Lustrate/Durochole are extremely responsive tools for "Oh, that one random dude got clipped and is going to die now" situations. Every bit as responsive as Tetra and Essential Dignity, and you can slap someone with 3x of them if you really need to (though if that were the case, you could probably also use a Excog/Tarochole).

❤

- Heal/Hots/mitigation has a sligth delay on them. - The game will priotize incomming DMG over any incomming HEAL (in same timeframe). - FFXIV is heavy scripted game, by learing the dmg pattern : you can pretty much plan your big heal cds in advance. with a lot of expereince you also learn where all the possible " oh shit" moments can occur...and will have cds for that too. I would say ALL healers gain more value out of their tools by playing both proactive and reactive --> based on their abilties!.. LIke always pre cast like: HoTs(heal over time) / mitigation right before dmg . Burst healing is best used AFTER dmg, (unless you need top someone off before a dmg hit that is). 2 abilities from AST as an example: [Collective Unconscious] Gives 10% mitigation, and also gives a HoT. (best used proactive) [Celecstial Opposition] it's a hot, BUT it is also a direct aoe heal. this one is best used AFTER dmg. ( best used reactive)

Yeah... One of the things that irks me is when a WHM doesn't use the proactive parts of their kit like Regen and Benison, or seems to be spamming Glare and Holy when they could counteract some incoming damage with weaving in some Lily healing (especially with the fact that it allows them to burst with Blood Lily eventually) Then again, I tend to be Proactive as a healer regardless of the job, so that may just be me XD

Dropping a medica 2 during an aoe cast in a lvl 50 dungeon is not reactive. All healers just have different tools for keeping group health over 0hp.

As a tank I would say, I just ACT. I get aggro, I try to not overburden myself or the healer. I wait until everyone is ready to follow. I try to position myself and the enemies as properly as possible. I reduce damage, if I know, that I can't evade it, AND if I know, what will come next. That's what I do, and that are my objectives. What I will not accept, is, if a DD thinks that he has to set the pace on pulls and charges headfirst into every mob group, NOT even bringing them to me, making my aggro management really REALLY annoying.

Earthly Galaxy? I love you

I just miss the idea of healing intensive classes like other old mmos. Aion and WoW come to mind. Healing becomes the sole focus and becomes a challenge in itself. Healer on ffxiv for the most part can get boring very fast. I started as a healer main in most mmos but ffxiv has made me leave that role due to it not being how I remembered other games healing. Which I mean is fine since its a different game but forsure a let down since ffxiv for the most part follows the holy trinity.

Whenever people say pure healers are reactive I just laugh at them in astrologian

Agreed, this terminology has always been odd to me. It makes sense on one level...while also making no sense if you actually understand healing. Calling AST a reactive healer is utterly insane to me. WHM is the only healer that can work that way (and, indeed, only has one partywide mitigation on a long CD; BLM, SAM, and MCH have effectively more party mitigation than WHM against targetable bosses, which is a bit silly that WHM doesn't have Protect/Shell at this point as a 6-10 sec damage reduction) with Cure 3/Medica 2/Rapture/Plenary, but even then can't be too much.

One of my biggest issues with teaching a friend of mine to heal is that he almost never took any of my advice at face value. I would tell him "X in this situation isn't very useful, try to use some of your other tools more often" and he would end up just doing both. He could never get over using Medica II all the time and using Holy way too late into pulls for it to be actually effective.

It mostly goes to show how few people have any idea how to play scholar. I mean, just like the rest of the healers, you shouldnt use your gcd heals unless absolutely neccesary, _and those are the only heals with shields._

I play sch and ast as my healers and, honestly, ast feel more proactive than sch most of the time

I've been leveling scholar and I've been absolutely flabbergasted at how little I had to cast shields for dungeons bosses. I totally expected to get a kit that gives me shields and shit but I'm level 89 and I have like 2 shields???? wtf??? THE shield class is just a more mobile WHM if you're not pushing end game content

Casting a regen pre-pull is proactive healing so I never really understood why people said some healers are Proactive v. Reactive

proactive WHM: has Regen on, starts a heal cast so it goes off 1/10 sec after the hit lands, has instacasts ready. I've never used the 'reactive/proactive' terminology when helping in NN.

good video

People taking "proactive" and "reactive" in this game 100% literally when it comes to healers feels kinda like a them issue... I get it if some newbie is learning the ropes of how to become a decent healer, but I feel like this terminology was made common because for some reason, the average player in this game doesn't like to read - so if you give them a very brief summary of how a job is supposed to be played, it hopefully steers them in the right direction, without needing to go in depth. A lot of us are not sitting in a duty to teach someone how to play their job correctly or easier, and sometimes if we do, it is a coinflip of how receptive they are to advice. (Generally ignoring sprouts because they understandably lack experience) FFXIV as simple as it is, genuinely just has problems with players mentally tapping out of self improvement if they don't want to study for even a LITTLE while for ONE job.

FF XIV is overall a "proactive" game for all roles because it has a lot of patterns that you need to remember and has very little random. In comparsion to game like WoW where a lot of random moments and the HP bar jumps like crazy all the time.

Hot take. The separation of shielder and regens is incredibly dumb. And this division ruins the general experience of playing a healer. Due to low damage early game. AND only having 2 jobs per pf slot in the late been my personal biggest peeve

I feel this Proactive/Reactive conversation is wasted on people who don't want to understance nuance. It works to get over the basic point that regen healers want to restore health that's lost, and barrier healers lose more of their value if the shields don't mitigate damage. The nuance of the argument is less "Proactive/Reactive" it's whether the healer themselves is actively engaged with their job or not. Every healer has things they want to get out before damage goes off - OGCD barriers, damage reductions and even regends depending on the circumstances. The problem is with healers being taught to prioritise their damage over learning how to maximise their healing, and that's a case of learning how to heal less from overhealing so you can do more damage reliably and not what I typically see a lot which is do damage until people desperately need healing. Healer damage is important to push threshholds, but your healer dps is worthless if someone, anyone dies. I'm not asking for healers to heal only, but I will state that in normal content all the way to progging the highest tiers of content overheal first, then work on pushing damage.

I think the way we typically see those words used is very surface level. I don't think it's completely wrong, but it does really fail to grasp the individual skills of each healer.

For me one of the best, and im leveling him at the moment, are the "proactive" spells from the WM Regen, Medica II and special HOLLY. yes the regen spells you can use after dmg come in. but i liek to use them bevor a aoe comes in and i can then play with the regen effekt the keep them alive and diden need to spam anything. and everyone who playd WM over level 45 knows how good holly is as a anti dmg spell and i 100% agree with Wesk theat you nened to know when you need to use wich skill in a pro or reactive use theats how you can impove as a healer and good mmo player

While we're on the topic of healer semantics, I'm not a fan of the phrase "pure healer" either. For one, it implies that the other archetype of healing is somehow "impure", despite that not at all being the case, and for two, it conveys the wrong idea about what those jobs do. "Pure healer" gives the idea that they "purely heal", a contrary sentiment to the community-wide knowledge that healers are expected to do damage when time allows. I much prefer calling WHM and AST "regen healers". This highlights the real differences between the archetypes, as regen healers don't have shielding GCDs, and shield healers don't have regen GCDs. It's also just more direct. To the uninitiated, calling something a "pure healer" begets the question of what "pure" even means. In the same way that "proactive vs reactive" is unhelpful and misleading, I dislike the nomenclature of "pure healer" and much prefer "regen healer".

All healers are ideally proactive. Whm lean towards the reactive since theyre free to spend their Blue lillies ANYWHERE as long as theyre not overcapped hence theyre reactive and highly flexible when paired with ANY healers with ANY mitplans. Even if the cohealer ended up screwing up the mits plan, if its turned up nonlethal, WHM could reactively cover that mistake with their cooldowns. When they have no resources and cooldowns THEN they start pressing gcd heals. WHM have more burst healing cds compared to any other healers so idk what youre talking abt Ideally you wouldnt need tetra to "be pressed proactively on the same mechs" if the mits plan wether its party mits for raidwide or tb/dungeon pulls for tanks is correct + youre pressing benison and aquaveil proactively Tetra is mostly for ohshitwtf moment, if youre out of tetra as a whm you still have so many other kits to reactively cover nonlethal mistake Tho talking abt mistake, barrier healer on the other hand can reactively cover for that. Example is tanks might be missing one or two of their mits on a TB, you can single gcd barrier them on top of giving them your single target cooldowns which is also well designed for that to make the tank survive a lethal damage. Could whm do that? No 😔 Saying that giving regens before every pull define the class to be proactive is just so wrong. Barrier healers also gcd barrier before every pull wether its a dungeon, or an ultimate Putting WHM on reactive is already correct.

It’s accurate enough to get a new player started on the path Give them an idea of what healing Job they want to master From there, they learn by doing They play the Job, and figure out how to plan their kits And how best to adapt those kits when shit hits the fan When it comes to the idea of “it might set someone up for failure” I’d argue that anyone who takes that at face value is as much responsible for their own failure FFXIV does a VERY good job of teaching people where to look for what actions as you progress through the MSQ The dev team has given the players everything they need to succeed. It’s on the players to utilize those tools to their fullest extent. Every individual player needs to pull their weight at higher end content. The chain is only as strong as its weakest link. If the weakest link is pulling their weight well enough to finish, then I don’t see the problem, outside of what the individual feels needs fixing If the weakest link drags the rest of the team down because they don’t understand their own kit, then they need to learn and do better And that is true of EVERY role and EVERY Job. Not just healers. But when it comes to the nuance of “proactive vs reactive” healing, that’s something you either learn by doing or aren’t gonna learn at all. If you can’t pickup that by just playing the game, then maybe you should play a different role.

I don't mind if you make a rant video, but maybe put the word rant in it. I feel like this was mostly a waste of time that could have been summarized as "Healers should be as proactive as possible and then react as needed, regardless of job. Job just determines how good your tools are for either situation." This could have been an email.

Second!

For a similar reason I actually really dislike "shield healer" and "pure healer" as a distinction, and prefer mitigation healer, and aoe healer. Sure every healer can mit or put out a group heal if they need to, but sage and scholar both have dr on command without the gcd, while white mage and astro have big group heals that can be spammed. It's not "who has these tools" but rather "Who is less inconvenienced using them in an emergency. Do I expect a white mage to pop wings for any given raid wide? No. Do I expect sage to bubble? Yes, and then the white mage can lily after. "Shield healer" and "pure or even regen healer" imply that you should be using your gcd's a lot more than you ever actually need to.