Healer Guide

This is a simple guide to some of the basics of healing. Remember: Keeping your team alive is only the first of your responsibilities. There's much more you can do!

Offense

The golden rule of healing is: Do as much damage as you can while keeping your team alive. Compared to equally-skilled players, you should be able to do about half of the damage of a DPS. That's a large chunk of damage you don't want your party to be missing. A dead enemy is an enemy that can't damage your party.

• Always Be Casting (ABC): Do not stand around doing nothing. Keep attacking until you need to heal someone.
• Every healer has a damage-over-time (DoT) and a basic attack spell. Keep your DoT ticking on the boss (cast it right before it falls off) and spam your basic attack spell.
• Every healer has an area-of-effect (AoE) spell. Spam it on mob pulls.
• On PC, you can press T by default to switch to the target of your target. This lets you switch between damaging a boss and healing the main tank, for example.
• Some offensive abilities don't cause you to go on a global cooldown ("oGCD"). These should be used as much as possible. (WHM:   Assize,   Afflatus Misery, SCH:   Chain Stratagem, AST:   Earthly Star, cards).
• To maximize the amount of time you are able to spend damaging the enemy, prioritize using oGCD healing over GCD healing.
• Don't forget   Lucid Dreaming, especially for SCH and AST.

Healing

On all healers, damaging the enemy is easy but healing efficiently/optimally is complicated. In other words: mindlessly spam your attack buttons while keeping a close eye on your party's health bars, the boss, and your abilities' cooldowns, and know what to do next.

• Heal without waste: If you heal someone at 90% of their max HP for 30% of their max HP, you've wasted two-thirds of your heal. Instead, you should keep damaging the boss and only heal them when they are lower, unless they would die otherwise (e.g. tankbuster/special mechanic).
• Use all healing oGCD abilities to their fullest. Try to minimize how their animations delay your spells ("clipping").
• Learn to rely on regeneration since regeneration spells always have the highest total potency.
• Be aware of the range of your healing, which usually means staying near the middle of the arena.
• A new player thinks of oGCD abilities (e.g. WHM:   Tetragrammaton, SCH:   Lustrate, AST:   Essential Dignity) as their emergency healing ("oh shit" healing). An experienced player knows that GCD abilities (e.g.   Cure II) are for emergency healing.
• Know your tank's unique cooldowns:
  • WAR:   Holmgang. Their HP can't go below 1 for 8 seconds. You should definitely be healing them during this time because you don't want their HP to be 1 when the duration ends.
  • PLD:   Hallowed Ground. No damage taken for 10 seconds. Heal them to a reasonably high HP (if they weren't already) and they'll be fine. Useful for big pulls.
  • DRK:   Living Dead. For the next 10 seconds, if they would die, they will not die but gain the "Walking Dead" status for 10 seconds. During "Walking Dead", they cannot die (they still take damage), but they must be healed to full during this time to remove the Walking Dead effect or Walking Dead itself will kill them.
  • GNB:   Superbolide). Sets HP to 1 but no damage taken for 8 seconds. Heal them to a reasonably high HP and they'll be fine. Be still my beating heart. Useful for big pulls.
• Using   Swiftcast on a heal to save someone in a pinch is not ideal, but iy'd certainly better than having to resurrect someone.

Helping your party

• Use   Swiftcast to   Raise dead party members. If Swiftcast is not available, carefully consider whether or not it is possible for you to stand still for 8 seconds doing nothing to raise them. Prioritize raising at least one tank, then the other healer(s), then the rez mages (Red Mages and Summoners).
•   Esuna is a very useful tool for healers. It removes any status effect that has a white bar under its icon. Esuna'ing party members is high priority especially against Doom.
• Usually, what causes a party to wipe against a boss is the healers' death. You have a greater responsibility than others to know the content and avoid damage. Always prioritize preserving your own life.
•   Rescue can sometimes be useful to save a party member.
• Your Level 1 and Level 2 Limit Breaks heal party members and do no damage, so they should never be used. Your Level 3 Limit Break (available with an 8-man party) heals and resurrects everyone nearby to full without resurrection weakness, and it can be useful to save a run. Put it on your hotbar.
• Some mechanics reduce your party's HP to 1 and applies un-esuna-able Doom to them. This is a healer check: heal them to full to remove Doom.