The thing that completely got rid of my healer anxiety was actually pretty weird: I was in Vanaspati, and we wiped 3 times in a row to the final boss because I tunnel-visioned trying to heal up the tank when he was low and got hit by mechanics and died. I apologized in chat, and the team was very understanding, plus I got a great piece of advice from one of the DPS: "Remember, if we die you can resurrect us, but we can't resurrect you". Something clicked in my mind and I realized that as long as I was still alive as a healer it was technically possible with good play to turn around a lot of situations to avoid a wipe, and now my brain interprets every time I avoid dying to a mechanics as a healer as a big success, which makes it way easier to not be anxious about it. Don't know how helpful this is to other people, but it worked wonders for me. That said: Hint 4 from the video is so important. It's so much harder to play healer if you constantly overheal. Think of damaging enemies as healing damage that they'd otherwise do. The less a pull lasts, the easier it is on you. My little Vanaspati thing got rid of the last of my healer anxiety, but figuring this out was by far the biggest chunk I ever took out of it.
That is an excellent point! A fight completely changes if the healer dies, especially if no one can raise them up again! So simply surviving yourself is crucial!
For me the thing that made it go away was rembering back to when I played tank, how no matter how scary it seems your death will be a slow one if you die at all. I then started to put more faith in passive healing and it worked, and now I main sage.
@@Brass319 it's kinda funny to me how in dungeon boss fights almost all my healing as a WHM is passive. Regen and Medica II ftw. Knowing a fight so you can anticipate when you will need more because of tank busters or room-wides helps a ton, but otherwise it's embrace being a Glaremage and manage my MP.
@@skooterboyle1991 for sage it's just: 1. put kardion on the main tank 2. pew pew pew 3. anticipate party wide attacks w/ aoe shielding 4. weave your free healing buttons into the mix so you don't run out of mp and hopefully nobody goes down 5. possibly swap kardion to someone in need of healing if you know the tank's gonna be alright 6. repeat until victory
One important thing to not forget is, keep yourself alive too. You can't heal anyone if you let yourself be pushed out of the map by Titan for example. So keep an eye on those mechanics!
Yup the order of priority for keeping people alive, is you, the other healer, the main tank, then if you have time maybe the DPS but even then it will probably be an AoE and not really targeted at them is more a beneficial side effect than anything else. The number 1 priority is keeping the healers alive because the whole thing goes to shit when the healer drops.
Confidence was a major key is overcoming my healer anxiety. I love having the power to deny failure (i.e. boss hits a group hard, and I cast a heal, say “no” undoing the damage completely). But the fear of failure is too real. I practiced with duty support, figured out my priorities and habits, and feel very comfortable now. The worst I face is my anxiety in general and large groups like raids, which I face the best I can in whatever job I am playing. Castrum Abania is where I had a run in which everyone nearly got destroyed from messing up boss mechanics, but because I stayed calm and kept them alive through it all, the tank stopped after and said “hold up, we agree healer gets comms right? That was incredible.” The dps agreed and I was stunned by the kindness of it. That was months ago and I still think about it. I barely remember times I messed anything up, because it barely mattered. Nobody was a tryhard or being mean, we could have wiped and be right there again in a minute. But I stepped up to try my best, it did something, and from then on only mechanics worried me. I am the healer. I heal you. I heal the party. Tanks love me, *bosses fear me.* Humor and anecdotes aside, FFxiv players are some of the best humanity has. Sometimes people are a headache, but most are cool. When I’m a dps (dragoon main) I will cheer you on. When I am a tank, I will cheer you on. Sometimes seeing in the chat that people are happy to see you doing your best disarms that anxiety because they’re chill “nothing” makes you think they’re judging you, when they’re usually thinking “no big deal, keep trying buddy. I’ve been there.” Anytime I see someone new to something, struggling with mechanics, dying a lot, I’m always ready to step up for you and help. I’m not unique in that regard, people are way more kind than you may be prepared to handle. Healer is a great role to play and if I see you in my roulettes, you got a friend cheering you on and knows what you’re feeling. You can only do your best, and the party can always help. It’s in their best interest to help, and is rewarding to do, so people will help.
Former DPS main turned Healer main here! The thing that got me into healers was AST specifically, as I asked my friends then what would be the most complicated job in the game at the time, since I gravitate towards complicated jobs in the first place. Everyone said AST, and I rolled with it. The first few days as a healer was super nervous -- I picked the most complicated healer after all -- but the more I realized that I *don't* have to heal all the time, the easier time I had with dungeon pulls. That and realizing that it's not entirely your fault if your team wipes because it's the job of everyone involved to get through a pull, which helped my Healer anxiety go down a lot. What finally removed it was being able to heal Aurum Vale without dying. That really did solidify that I knew what I was doing, and is the turning point from my being DPS main to a Healer main. A majority of my group has the same Healer anxiety, but I help them through it by just telling them that you have so much time to heal before, during, and after a pull. If the tank is alive, you're doing your job, it doesn't matter if they're 10% hp or 100% hp. And overcoming that sudden challenge where the tank suddenly drops in health and you *have* to bring them back up gives me a dopamine rush I haven't experienced in any other class in this game. EDIT: Sorry if I sound scattered through this whole comment -- I really love healing in this game and I could go on and on about it really. I want everyone to enjoy the same thing I've enjoyed with healing, it's just sometimes disheartening to hear people say "man healing is hard because if you wipe it's my fault" or "I can't handle that responsibility" when the massive majority of the community wouldn't even be mad if you wipe. Healing is fun, y'all. And if you get berated by a random DPS that blames you for the wipe? Remember that you hold their life in your hands, and have this nifty little ability called Rescue to have fun with them a bit.
i want to be a good healer but i struggle with BADDDD healer anxiety, i just made it to level 60 with my white mage and no matter how much i read and practice...this CANT be the same brain that got me through college lmao😅 i love being a healer but when i have to revive someone, its like i freeze and forget where my swiftcast and revives are ;_; and im scared of being a liability aaaa
Do raids, trials, alliance raids. Anything that involves a second healer. A lot of the anxiety goes away when you know you have someone there to help. I surprisingly also found learning Savages and Extremes from my FC to help teach me the intricacies of when to use certain abilities. Really nice having a more experienced healer to tell you about what you could use during this raid wide or that tank buster.
The best way to deal with healer anxiety is to ask a good tank (either in your FC or even try the PF, or even use Trusts) and choose a low-level dungeon, get practice that way. Then move up in the dungeon level. Aurum Vale is pretty much that one dungeon where many healers (and tanks) stumble. I overcame my own healer anxiety by using Trusts. Then I just went on Roulettes to see how I would fare in a "real" situation. I got a lot of praise for being an excellent healer. Sadly I have since stopped healing because of some bad experiences recently.
I don’t experience healer anxiety at all, but I do experience tank anxiety. Obviously everyone is different but I don’t really get why you would. Healer is the job I go to whenever there is a first clear I need to do in a dungeon. I feel like I can just slip into the background as a healer while if I am a tank I have to be front and center, lead the party, know boss mechanics, etc
One more thing that is very important for healers is learning the power of Regens or Barriers depending on the healer. If you're a pure healer, your regens are extremely powerful and will give you more opportunity to do damage or will smooth over a lot of damage over time. If you're a barrier healer your job is a little unintuitive to healing as you want to be putting your big heals out BEFORE the damage goes out. This quirk to barrier healers makes them harder to just "pick up" as most people tend to play healers reactionary. The important thing with healer is to remember that while damage is important, every other member of the team technically does more damage per GCD than you, and keeping everyone alive is significantly more important than doing damage. The best time to check health bars is when the boss is casting anything, or "50%" hp. I can't stress this enough either but show HP bars during combat rather than "when not 100%" will also help you keep an eye on the health bars without having to look at party list.
@@CaetsuChaijiCh The damage loss of a death is significantly more damage than a healer can do, it's never worth to prioritise your own damage as a healer. Overhealing, however, isn't something to be avoided at all costs either - especially for WHM and SGE as they get a lot of free value if they use their guage so they don't overcap. I was just offering my 2 cents.
Maybe this is just me, but I've always felt that throwing myself in the deep end has been the best way to learn any job. I push myself as far as I can go and then step it back if I need to. I also have a complicated relationship with duty support. On one hand, it's ultimately a good feature. On the other, I feel like it contributes to a lot of people's tank/healer anxiety. When I spent more time in Novice Network, I saw a pretty significant number of sprouts say they were scared to swap from duty support to playing with other people. Side note: they really just need to make Cure I/Benefic I upgrade into Cure II/Benefic II instead of having them as separate actions. At the very least, completely removed Free Cure. These cause such weird sticking points for so many sprouts I encounter and it makes them perform much more poorly than they could be and thusly causes much more stress than is necessary.
This is true in a way: some of those tanks and healers may never have tried the roles if not for duty support, so they are of course scared of switching out of it. On the other hand, regardless of this, the jump from duty support to real players is pretty big, and there isn't really any way to properly bridge this gap! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Duty support is the underlying cause of all this anxiety. You wouldn't be scared of learning by wiping in dungeons if you did it all throughout your leveling experience without having access to a "safe space". People don't expect much from you if you're in ARR duties and you preface by saying "bear with me, I'm learning"
@pointlessmike every person is different, and what makes them afraid of doing something new can vary from person to person. Some may get too comfortable with the safety of duty support, but others simply desire a place to safely fail for a bit, which duty support also offers 😊
I started WHM recently and seeing a video say "completely ignore cure 1 unless you can't afford anything else" made me wonder what the hell was going on. Yeah, get rid of it. Replace it with an AoE DoT so we can get back to spamming stone.
I'm a brand new to FFXIV and currently main scholar, but have a lot of support experience from other mmo's. Most of that experience was pvp related so my biggest challenge has been adapting to the fact that "if not full hp = dead soon" is no longer true and that outside of wall to wall pulls, at least in the lv50 dungeons, there isn't enough pressure to actually need heals. Yours, among others, guides to classes and dungeons are also a huge help to know what to expect and what mechanics I need to actually worry about, since as long as I don't die to mechanics there isn't much threat from bosses
Yeah, ffxiv being very different in how you approach healing can take a bit if you have a lot of experience from elsewhere! I'm glad you have found guides helpful as well! 😄
To anyone who wants to try healer there is very little to stress about until you start doing high level end game stuff because your DPS is a benefit but it's wholly not needed prior to the harder content so if you just error on the side of caution on when to heal vs DPS you will be completely fine. Mechanically healer is pretty simple to play and the role is more about being aware of the situation so you can decide how much you can DPS than any kind of difficult rotation or anything. Don't stress about it healer is one of the most chill roles you can play especially once you get used to the heal vs DPS balancing act.
Great video! For this type of video usually I have to add something when I share it to new players. But you covered every topic that I might add, like showing how to practice healing or even point out that non-dpsing healer will have harder time in handling mob pull later on which is opposite of what new healers might think. Well done!
Been healing for so long i have the opposite problem: I want things to go wrong, I want people to make mistakes, I want to FEEL something! But my biggest tip is that it is not your SOLE responsibility to heal and mitigate, you are the biggest contributor but tanks and dps have tools at their disposal to brush off most small mistakes and to reduce potential dmg. True that those are things you cant control and cant anticipate people to use in a random party but knowing that other roles have tools to both keep themselves and the party alive can help with the pressure of healing.
Haha I feel this, as another long time healer across many games, I am having the most fun when absolutely everything is going wrong. I want to be whipped into an absolute state of panic, using the full extent of my kit just for survival.
I was feeling super comfortable healing up until SHB. At level 70 onwards everything hits really hard and I felt like I couldn't keep up and it started to be frustrating. Then I realize that I leveled up all the way to level 80 with garbage equipment wich probably made my life harder. Also I was being to harsh on myself because I only had like 1 wipe and a couple of thanks dead in pulls.
I started my XIV experience as a healer, I spent all of ARR as a WHM and never really felt the anxiety outside of the very last MSQ boss (MP mismanagement mostly caused that, but the DF party were really cool about it). But that kinda changed as I went through the levels, as content got more difficult and tanks started to pull more aggressively I kinda lost my faith in my ability to actually keep everyone alive. It's hard to sometimes feel like it's not your fault when a tank is trying to wall-to-wall and you don't seem to be keeping up. I think some of it is just the switch to being a green DPS rather than taking "Healer" literally is quite a change in mindset that the game doesn't really teach you very well. Weirdly I never had tank anxiety. I just kinda clicked that as long as my mitigation is there I should be fine. And I tend to be more aware of the signs a healer is still learning or struggling thanks to my experiences. Now I'm working back in to my WHM slowly as I do miss healing. Working out the flow of doing damage and slipping in heals where I can actually makes things a bit easier. Higher level stuff where I can use OGCDs actually makes the anxiety nearly completely go away. Knowing I have heals that are reactive rather than planned if things go south compared to mid-level dungeons probably helps a ton. Getting a grasp of how much your various tools heal and knowing that as long as their health bar isn't empty, you're able to save them took time to just start becoming second nature. Level 50 dungeons as WHM is a struggle. "Know your kit" is honestly some crucial advice. Apologise and move on when you make mistakes. Ask for help from your party. Ask for raid parties to warn you of anything to watch out for before the pull so you know what's likely to need a big heal. The worst that can happen is some toxic loser leaves the party.
Going through ARR as WHM is rather rough, it is easily the worst out of the four healers due to its weakest MP management (SCH and SGE have their resources at lvl 45, AST has cards at lvl 30 and Astrodyne at lvl 50, and WHM gets... nothing, until Assize and Thin Air in HW). It's only once you're in HW that WHM starts to actually feel good imo, Assize especially is so good. Besides that, I basically never use Cure/Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis below lvl 30, though there are extreme niche use cases like Physicking a dragon add in Shinryu Ex when I'm out of Aetherpool and my Emergency Tactics is also on cooldown.
Telling party members that you're a noob healer or you're new to a duty helps a lot in letting your tank know how fast they should pace a dungeon. You'd find yourself being in a considerate and reassuring group most often. 😊
The main thing that had helped me level healers is a playing/understanding other roles. By playing other roles I can tell when it’s actually my fault or not as well as understand the abilities/capability of classes and roles. If the tank barely uses mitigation, people stand in aoes, etc. then you’re going to have to sweat. Knowing the mechanics to a fight is probably the most important though. As a tank you can stand in stuff and usually not die , or just get rezd if you’re a dps. But if you die as a healer it will usually just be a wipe. If you don’t know the mechanics or are doing a trial, dungeon, w/e for the first time. Just follow what everyone else is doing. Wesk Alber on RUclips arguably makes the best leveling guides for each class. He fully breaks down abilities, rotations, and gives advice on what to use on a class by class basis generally. Oh, and keeping up with your gear is super important, otherwise your heals just do less.
I know I mentioned this in the tank anxiety video but I think it bears repeating here too. Watching what other players are doing in the content can help a lot. It's generally easier to keep a tab on the tank compared to the healer. Though another thing which might help more with healer is adjusting the UI so the party menu is easier to look at and react to accordingly. I also recommend that you use the focus target command on your tank in light parties or on the main tank in full parties. This gives you another copy of the tank's health bar separate from the entire party where you can get a percentile of the targets(aka the tank's) health and allows you to keep a closer eye on it to better switch between damage and healing. If a boss is only dealing several percentage damage in auto's it becomes far easier to understand that damage window you have(of course, you need to take into account of other unavoidable damage) but if the boss isn't doing any abilities, or you have a boss where the ability's are minor and doesn't alter the damage dealt a lot it allows you to far easier predict the healing needs of the tank. Hopefully the dps aren't off in Narina(but if they are, don't feel bad about using rescue to force them into healing range. as long as you aren't pulling them into a hole or aoe puddle). And while overhealing is generally not considered a good thing, I've chatted with enough tanks in roulettes who prefer a healer being over cautious in their healing compared to sweating because they feel like their healer is a bit too busy glaring. Most people aren't going to get upset with you over-healing unless your just standing there and only healing. Assuming lower level content until a healer is more confident, there's generally three brackets of health percentage that I tend to pay attention to as semi-healer main. 75%, generally this is ignorable unless there's some big dps coming the tanks way, a tank buster for example and if nothing big is being casted, feel free to keep dpsing. 50% depending on whether a shielder or a pure healer here I tend to deviate a bit. if running ast or whm this is when my pure dps wheels come off and I start paying more attention like being more focused on keeping my hot up. as a shielder this is when I tend to more proactive with keeping a shield up on the tank, so the dps wheels are still spinning(mostly keeping an eye on my dot and getting some damage spells out inbetween the healing) but the healing wheels come online. 25% is rarely encountered, outside of a non-paladin tank using their invulnerability but this is generally the point of focusing on keeping the tank above 25% health. Sometimes how each healer can regen their own mana is class specific, but never forget lucid dreaming is there for every healer class. Don't be afraid to smash it if you feel like your in a spot where your burning through mana harsher than before. The goal is to keep everyone alive not perform perfectively.
One good way to combat heal anxiety, is to learn how each of the tanks should be using their CDs. when you see them doing it VERY wrong it will help you realize that mistakes you make are not as serious. I've had 2 or 3 tanks recently that double stacked Rampart and thier 30% and the END of a mob pack and didn't use any mitigation (never even saw arms length on them). DRK that use TBN by itself at the beginning of the pull but with no shadow wall or rampart or even.....what ever the new 10% one is...just.... relay show that many people are bad at this game. people who want to heal but have heal anxiety are usually going to be the better ones because they care about being good at it.
Indeed, the players that get anxious about a role is almost always going to be better simply because they care! And as you say, learning what indicates a bad tank can help you to know when at least it isn't your fault!
I think another good tip for new healers, when it comes to bosses, is to learn to use the Focus Target function. I personally never use it outside of being a Healer, specially since we are usually always targetting the boss as a Tank or DPS. But as a Healer, where you move a lot between targets (the boss, your tank and other party members when needed), it makes such a HUGE difference to have the Focus Target being on the boss, so you're always aware of what they are casting regardless of if you're actually targetting it or not. When I was starting as a Healer, I had so MANY instances where I was healing the Tank and we got hit by an AOE that didn't have a big telegraph (as in, the boss itself didn't do anything visually before hitting us with it) and I got caught by surprise, whereas when I have the boss Focus Targeted I can see the AOE coming even if I'm healing or buffing someone, so I can prepare better for the incoming damage. It might sound like an "advanced technique", but it was such a game changer for me, personally. I have Focus Target keybound, so whenever I'm getting close to a boss I select them and immediately put them in Focus Target. Maybe it'd be nice to explain that function in a video, more in-depth for newer Healer players, what do you think? If you haven't done it already, of course.
my big moment was realizing how much damage healers actually do, if you consider each GCD to be limited, as in 'you only have 100 gcds this pull' it becomes easier to use the big cooldowns and every part of your toolkit for the situation, and that in turn became 'use ogcds for heals, dps with gcds' and it was so much faster, smoother and easier.
Some great advice here (particularly from the perspective of a healer main as of EW). I don't think it can be stressed enough how a simple "mb" after a wipe can start a whole conversation about others trying to take fault or saying it happens all the time or something else to "mitigate the damage". Even if you do not think it's your own fault, being open to it just drops the stress potential so much. I always like to add, whatever role I'm playing, that "You never know how far you can push it until you push it too far." FFXIV players tend to appreciate that the most in dungeons -- that even if you fail, you're trying to do your best. One thing I think that's important for people trying out healing is to not discount what you can learn about a dungeon or trial when you are NOT healing particularly for W2Ws because those quite frankly are the most challenging healing situations outside of extreme/savage content. When you DPS a dungeon, if you're mindful about what is going on you can watch for how many packs a tank can pull, what packs cause the most trouble, where tanks will stop a run, where to drop your "bubble". You can learn from those without actually having to do the healing and quite frankly the loss in party DPS because you're trying to pay attention instead of mindlessly DPSing is negligible. This can be really helpful because some dungeons have a hard "heal check" on the very first pull (I'm thinking Aurum Vale and Bardam's Mettle just off the top of my head). Others like The Dead Ends are just a challenge the whole way and require a lot of management of ability recast timers. That last point just shows why your advice about how important it is to learn your lowest level skills first and work your way up -- knowing how hard they hit, what they actually can do, and how/when to use them -- is so important. Along those lines, tho, I think it's also important for WHMs, SCHs, and ASTs to know that how you heal will change over the course of HW specifically. A new ability (usually NOT a spell) every two levels and I know at least for WHM it completely shifts your healing from casting GCD spells to managing oGCD abilities. I think that when things get a bit dicey, it can be important to have priorities in how to handle things. I have this "list" for dungeons specifically: (1) heal myself, otherwise there's no point, (2) heal the tank, because I know with the two of us up I can almost always recover a situation, (3) do damage because dead mobs = damage not taken = the best sort of healing there is, (4) heal the dps. And as you mentioned, when there are those toxic players who just are determined to cause problems for the party, my list becomes (5) do more damage and (6) heal the toxic people and refer to point #2. I don't forget them or intentionally refuse to heal them -- it's just that there should be no reason that anything more than Medica II should be needed to keep DPS doing their own jobs properly alive. I have higher priorities than people who consistently and repeatedly mess up the party flow and so they can wait their turn, and if they don't know how to manage their own self-heal(s) and damage mitigation they need to look to themselves first for blame. TL;DR here is that you've come up with another great guide -- thanks so much!
I personally dont think a skilled healer friend helps with tank anxiety. I do believe a skilled tank friend helps with healer anxiety. When I leveled warrior not long ago, I had a sprout healer in Sirensong Sea. They would spam cure 3 and always have mp issues. We helped them learn their skills better and I would pull a bit more as they got used to it. They never got it 100% at the end, but I could tell they were getting better by the last boss.
Indeed a skilled healer friend might have a too easy time covering invisibly for a tanks mistakes, so if the tank is aware of it, that might just make them more anxious about it. This is also why I recommended if possible to pair up with someone of similar skill to yourself so you can learn together! Nice about the sirensong story though!
I have to say as a tank main that started playing as one, that having a Skilled healer as a friend teaching you not to freak out while being low HP is fine (since he enjoyed playing limbo with me) if you die after popping your mitigation its not your fault. Which goes to a big tip that helped me in both tank and healing anxiety , if you know that you did what you could, what happens next do not have to bother you, you mitigated/healed in the best way you thought, its not your fault or entirely your.
@@AXEL9000able wish my friends were like that. The ones I know would always want me to go faster and I learn nothing. Skilled friends will always be good if they know what they are doing, but it can be a very slippery slope in my personal experience
@AXEL9000able this is also true. If your healer friend is skilled enough, they might be able to determine whether it was yours or their fault when something goes wrong. And knowing you did what you could can help a lot. Getting feedback as to what you could do differently can also help!
@@bobseesallwell as a side note they threw me directly in savage raiding right after finishing the msq, to the point that the first time i did a “in-content” extreme i was astonished by what a breeze it was (Golbez btw), like an asian mom teaching the hard thing first
i remember maining whm until stb. i absoluetly loved playing healer! but at some point i got really scared of messing it up and stared playing reaper, i found it really fun and since i just had to focus on dodging mechanics it was waaay easier. i brought a job skip for astro and i regret it a lot since i have no idea how to play it lol, looking back im kinda suprised i did the crystal tower raids as a white mage seeing as i had zero clue on what alliance raids were. i really want to main astro cause i find it so fun!! its honestly not as hard as people make it out to be, it just has a bit more spells than whm which can make it kinda intimidating. anyway my biggest tip if your trying out healing for the first time is to to trials were theres another healer so you wont feel like all the responibility is on you. and to just stick to a dps if youre scared! like literaly, follow another player around so you know what to do.
As someone who started on BLM, picked up PLD, and now plays every role, it is wild to me how healing went from panicking about when to heal to wondering "Do I _really_ need to heal that, or will natural regen and an oGCD do the job?" I've never seen such extreme disparity in how I play between when I started playing a role and when I got comfortable with it.
I used to be have bad healing anxiety with scholar since I only leveled it through SMN and my main healer was AST. Watching your guide and finally understanding the toolkit helped a TON. Now it’s my favorite healer. The Critlo is too addicting😂.
I'm glad to hear that you overcame the anxiety! 😄 I feel it is more common for this to happen with Scholar because of how you can accidentally end up with a level 90 job you have never had a chance to play before that 😅
There should be many more content creators talking about these kinds of topics. Very often we forget that, although this is a game, there are real people behind the PC. Thanks ❤
Any mistake you make can be traced to you, and guess what, every one of your teammates mistakes affects you, so you can hate them and they can hate you, it’s perfect
This could just be me, but I find that my Healer Anxiety is not nearly as bad when I play in Raids, but in a Dungeon I feel more scrutinized. Conversely I find my Tank anxiety is not as bad if I am the only Tank like when you do dungeon and alliance raid content, but in normal raids or trials I'm not very good at working with my other tank cause it doesn't feel as obvious. But regardless, I have been trying to find ways to push through it cause I have been playing solely DPS (Ninja/Bard main) for so long now I just wanna renew my interest with finally sucking it up and trying the other 2 roles and seeing if I enjoy them. And so far I find I enjoy Scholar the most as a Healer and Gunbreaker as a Tank so I have been focusing on playing those jobs as well as I can in any environment. These tips have been a nice help because I don't have regular friends playing 14 to try my new jobs with to lessen the judgmental feeling that may or may not actually be there.
I can see how the difference makes sense: In a raid, one healer dying isn't a massive issue, so all the burden isn't on you. But as a tank, there might be specific expectations of you regardless of whether you are main or off tank. And that can be scary! I'm glad you have found some jobs to enjoy the roles with!
Love the video! Great job Caetsu and thank you for making this! A lot of your wording do make me feel at ease and understood (eventhough I main healer). I hope lots of other ppl do feel the same as I did and enjoying the experience of healing in ff14♥
Healer anxiety is so strange to me. I do of course get it from an intellectual standpoint but i started as SCH, then AST and mained SGE since 70. Sage is my absolute comfort job. If i go blind into something, its usually sage. I just have so many tools to keep everyonen alive, and pretty much all of them are oGCD, so i can keep the GCD rolling on damage. Sage might lack an "oh shit" button, but between all my shields, regens and mitigations, that's rarely needed. Often i don't even need to use my full kit
Indeed, Sage especially has so many options! I think part of what can cause this is people panicking in the moment, and locking up! As a healer if you stop acting, it can cause everyone to fall, so there's a lot of responsibilities that follow with the power!
It's my second week into FF, really maximizing my time with Free Trial and I like being able to fill The three roles, as it stands today, I have SAM at 70, RDM at 64, AST at 70, and DRK at 62 the first time healer jitters were intense the first hour of playtime and I picked the most arduous class to try, but gimmicky classes really appeals to me so I tried it, by hour three or four, my rando party members were positively pushing me to get used to it by pulling huge mobs, it weirdly worked, cuz rather than OVER thinking, I just let instinct kick in and basically let my hands go on auto-pilot now, The Aetherochemical duty is amazing for me, it's actually really tight cuz two boss mechanics and everyone might die. Out of all the three roles, I can confidently say Healer gives the most adrenaline rush out of every role, as a tank I can just hurl 100% of my trust that the healer has my back when I'm pulling with mitigation and arm's length, as a DPS I just KILL KILL KILL- and try my best not to get hit by a boss mechanic- Healer's just, HOLY FUCK- also... I like helping people naturally, so when I can res or heal peeps in trouble outside of Duties, it really makes me grin eye to eye xD
I would also add learn what the tank mitigation icons look like. I typically use regens abilities when tank is well mitigated and save bursts for when they dont have as much.
When I played my first healer, I went into a grand company party, so that I could take my time to figure out everything I needed to learn controls and timing. After that it was just learning each healer. Sage was the hardest for me to start, but now it's my main and preferred healer. One time, queued into leveling roulette, and got Stone Vigil. When we got in the tank told us that it was the Scholar's first time being a healer, so we were a bit slower and gave your two cents to help them improve. Dont be afraid to just tell your party. Most people are understanding and can adjust, and if they give you grief, thats on them.
The thing that gave me the most anxiety for healing was that I started with AST. And having the most to do in between heals with the card system was scary, but also that AST's AOE requires a target while the rest of the healers do not. As every other healer, you can target the tank and cast AOE's, but AST requires you to untarget the tank to deal damage, which was scary to me when I was a new player.
What helped a lot was just jumping in and failing sometimes. The fact that overall the community is really cool helps ease the anxiety. When i play a different roll i always let people know its not a big deal after a wipe happens. Realistically whats the worse that happens? You lose a couple minutes. If theres advice to give i will.
seriously, the only way I've found to overcome healer anxiety, tank anxiety, etc? And man, I used to have, physically shaking and shit, seriously.. is to do LOTS of content. over and over again. just charge in, queue, expect jerk to be critical, and let it go. then queue again. repetition makes it trivial in time!
This is absolutely true. Part of what can make it scary is how much value you put in the individual run. But if you have done hundreds, then each one is not particularly important at the end of the day, so it can make it a lot easier to handle!
I was one of those healers who had dps anxiety like that little disclaimer in the beginning. I started ffxiv as an arcanist, and when I unlocked sastasha, I went and power-leveled conjurer up to 15 so that I could be a healer instead, because I thought it would be fewer buttons to keep track of and therefore easier for me. I was right, it was.
I started as a whm. I had healer anxiety until the arr patch quests, lol I didn't switch jobs or roles, but I would only do the bare minimum of duties to progress the msq I think I finally got over it when I started spamming all the level 50 dungeons to clear the quests off my list. Just forcing myself to do it more really helped me to finally get comfortable with the role
The biggest thing that's helped me over the years in various MMOs I've healed in is simply, you can only correct your own mistakes. There's tons of ways your party members can die, good observation can tell you whether you were to blame or them. People are always getting hit by attacks that are easily avoidable and while a good healer can usually compensate, if they end up tanking the floor, it's not your fault. Making mistakes has always been the fastest way to learn so fearing them will only drag the process on long than it needs to.
I'd say to start avoid duty roulette and pick your dungeons and watch a guide it can help to start knowing where tank busters and raid wides are coming and never fear asking the tank to do smaller pulls, the trouble with duty support is they can ignore mechanics, I always try to make a joke if we wipe, we all had to learn and make mistakes
I love that as time goes by tanks get more party mits and heals. They can pick up the spot-heals of other players' mistakes and relieve some of that pressure on new healers. Hope we get more in DT.
i just can't deal running dungeons with actual ppl in this game as a healer this is why im so glad squaderons/Duty support/Trust are a thing id rather do things at my own pace and be happy then team up with acctual ppl and stress the hell out
5:12 I was just about to suggest this. It’s going to be difficult due to not all jobs starting out low lvl and losing skills due to low level. But most likely you’ll be playing with sprouts or people who need a refresh/other leveling or learning their jobs. I would say this is a prime area to mess up and not worry about wiping the party. Also it’s good to shove yourself into harder healing dungeons/duties. This will help you gain speed and learn to think fast. But I personally would wait for you to have the basics down. Also try diffrent healing jobs and see the ones that stick/mesh with you better. Ex: white mage did not vine with me but scholar vibe with me better. And don’t forget that player with end raides wipe too and they also can recover from wipes while figuring things out. If they whipe due to a mistake why can’t you also whipe from a mistake? Side note: I sometimes heal my chococbo when out fighting things. It helps me get learn to multitask with no worry with others. As I can suck with that.
something that helped me with healer anxiety was looking at other people healing in dungeons, and how often they make mistakes that lead to deaths. it happens, even at the highest levels, and you fucking up with some randoms you will never see again does not matter. after healing for so long, i get more anxiety playing a dps and not feeling in control of the heals than i do when i am in control of the heals.
An excellent point! Seeing how others play and realizing it doesn't have to be perfect can also be quite effective! 😁 And yes I also tend to lean more towards tank and healer in groups simply because it gives more control!
Me me! I'm an anxious mess who had tremendous healer anxiety, to the point I got every job in the free trial to 60 minus the healers (not even scholar who I never unlocked) but I then found a video about controller targetting that mentioned soft targetting and decided might as well try, because it was bothering me a bit that I had almost everything at 90 while not having unlocked any healer. So I picked AST. SCH and SGE were too high level to start, WHM was TOO low level at 1, but AST was 30 and had a lot of weaving I could practice on early on with the cards `+ essential dignity. I was a nervous wreck and for all my early runs I mentioned I was a new healer and to be patient with me, but as I leveled up I became more confident and now not only I ahve all jobs at 90 but ended maining AST, using it to learn every new content, savages, and ultimates. I guess a bit part of it is that I overcame many levels of anxiety in levels. I first started as lancer and entering my first dungeon with people (before duty support) had me also an anxious mess, but as I played the game that anxiety went down. Next step was the tankciety and altought I did indeed had a bit of a breakdown after my first *sastasha* run, as time went on I also became more confident. By the time it was time to hit healer I had overcome already many hurdles and became more confident in myself, by the point I hit healer it was a much smaller wall than if I had started as conjurer that very first day.
I just started like 3 weeks ago and queueing into ANYTHING makes my legs start shaking, it’s probably just a generalized anxiety. I need to learn that it’s not such a big deal. I actually started leveling white mage because I feel more in control with heals, that’s how it was in Team Fortress 2. Just did the first three squadron dungeons over and over and over again to get a basic gist of healing.
Yeah also if you just started, remember that the sprout icon for most players already gives you a lot more slack! So try your best to relax! I am sure you will do great!
its almost ALWAYS better to respawn as a tank or dps and run to catch the healer. Respawning resets cooldowns and prevents the raise debuff as a bonus. This also lets the healer focus on healing/stabilizing those already alive instead of how to get a raise out. A dps or the healer will likely not survive a whole global spent on raise where as a healer might be able to keep a dps alive in bigger pulls with significant healing spam and a little skill from the dps. As a dps, it could be wise to switch to single target as thinning the mobs will reduce their damage and help the healer stabilize. My "healing" anxiety was when AST was released I thought it looked cool, but i heard it was notoriously difficult to learn, and I was too nervous to switch for a while. I was watching my friend play the job one day and it didn't look as bad as I expected so i just...switched and kind of bit the bullet. It taught me in ffxiv that the best thing you can do to get over those nerves is to just say "**** it lets go" and just expect failure knowing you will be smarter and stronger after each wipe. It's not always a great feeling, but AST was as fun as i thought it might be and to this day it's my absolute favorite job.
I have found healing the duty support and forcing wall-to-wall pulls. The NPCs attack one enemy at a time, so mobs take forever. If you can heal that, you can heal anything.
One of the hardest skills for me to master has been learning when (not) to resurrect DPS. Often as a healer there's an impulse to rez somebody as soon as they fall. After all, getting/keeping people on their feet is the whole purpose of healing. However, if you've got a spicy pull and it's not going well for some reason then spending the resources (time, MP, Swiftcast) on a dead DPS rather than the tank can cause that tank to hit the floor themselves and now you're out those resources AND don't have a tank. Remember that as a healer your priorities are yourself, your co-healer, tanks, and then DPS. And DPS, if you die during a dungeon pull it's often more helpful to just respawn and try to catch up than it is to wait for revival. You won't suffer the weakness penalty and you save your healer 2400 MP.
Honestly being a healer in dungeons like Aurum Vale are some of the only times when I actually feel something when doing regular, daily content in XIV. There's something appealing about the limited tools that you have compared with high mob pack DPS that just disappears over the course of Heavensward and Stormblood.
i main healer in most games, but for some reason i was scared to heal in this game. but i forced myself to play SCH (for RP reasons) and even though i didnt really know what i was doing at first, Selene really helped that first level 30 guildhest i did. after i did my first new dungeon as healer and got advice my anxiety was gone. i loved it. what i hate is when someone says they are new to tanking/healing then ignores all advice given. i dont understand how people can say they are new to their job and then just ignore everyone most or all of the dungeon got a DRK tank in Haukke Manor who had never tanked before and said so up front. they forgot their stance so we mentioned it. they pulled a second pack, ignored us during the pull which i also then said turn Grit on and AOE to keep aggro, they then said sorry and turned it on but then... never used AOE at all during the dungeon or paid any attention to the mobs attacking the rest of the party, which we also were telling them to pay attention to.
Yeah anyone that outright ignores advice in that way always gets quite grating! That particular story sounds familiar, and the worst part is that I've seen max level tanks doing something similar 😣🤣
How to deal with it? You queue the F up. I'm an experienced healer, started a shield healer and left a trail of dead bodies behind me when leveling sch. Tank died? team wipe? Oh well, run back and keep pulling. Team complains? "shit happens, pull".
The nice thing with FFXIV's player base is that the vast majority of players are fairly chill about a wipe or two,especially when you apologize for making a mistake (assuming you're even the one that made the mistake). I've leveled every single Healer to 90 on my main,and as such have had countless wipes due to making mistakes. And when I apologized the Tank often ended up saying something to the effect of "nah,that was my bad". I've had a few salty DPS players here and there,but in the years I've been playing this game that's maybe around 20 people out of the thousands of others I've queued into content with. This game's players are much more forgiving than one might initially think,so don't worry too much about the ones that aren't.
I have healer anxiety and a little bit of tank anxiety because I'm afraid of my mistakes ruining everyone else fun but I really want to give them both a go. I think I might just try it with npcs to get more comfortable.
Queue up with friends, have fun, laugh when you wipe but always try not to. After 1-2 bad runs you will realize it's not a big deal and this will help you when going solo. Another thing is to remember that a swift raise is a heal as well. Don't try to save everyone when things go wrong. Focus on your tank and yourself and then heal others if you can. Otherwise, it's not bad to be ready to raise instead of healing a dps. Even the tank might die on a pull and all you have to do is raise them and heal the dps and the pull will still be okay. I have seen a lot of healers panic and thus take too long to raise someone.
As a healer/tank enthusiast, I can agree with DPSxiety. That being said, I have played DPS often enough to be, more or less, comfortable with the jobs.
To be fair, the game's MSQ literally has that part of the quest chain in Gridania where a group are berating their healer, Edda, for letting the tank die. Not very encouraging to new healers.
Genuinely, a good way to get into healing is to start a character as a healer (which means CNJ and WHM). A lot of early content, due to item sync, resulted in it being extremely forgiving to the healer; everyone, including the healer, can tank some mobs out to Haukke Manor (the last dungeon with a level below 30). I had zero experience with MMOs (PC gaming wasn’t feasible for me until college), and when I started, I chose CNJ/WHM because I perceived healing as the easiest role. Conceptually, I was right, but I was less correct in practice. But, with the early game forgiveness, it led to me learning how to heal in a (relatively) safe environment. Not only that, not long after, I picked up RDM, and in a run of Hallowed Halls against the last boss, our WHM went down. I had a singular healing spell with the experience of doing the last expansion as a healer, and thus proceeded to do a full-on shift to a healer to carry the GNB and NIN far enough that the GNB could put down the boss before we went down. And we succeeded. NIN went down before me because I had to prioritize myself and GNB to succeed, but they got us down to 40%, and I proceeded to survive until about 10-15%, having ended all DPS to maintain MP for healing (Vercure is basically 1000MP to heal like the WHM's 400MP Cure1, and all I had to regain MP is Lucid and MP ticks). But by the skin of their teeth and my past experience as a healer, we made it through. Even now, I appreciate healing because it taught me party awareness. Sure, I slip up sometimes, or react too slow sometimes, but it's taught me to be mindful of the others here to the point where I still assist healing people as RDM, and will put shields/heals on others as tank (I don't do Ultimates, so being unoptimal is fine if it means the struggling healer has to struggle less)
i actually messed up an extreme so bad i got invited into the party's discord server and they were all russians yelling at me till i learned to heal right it was great and it got rid of my healing and social anxiety forever
The main things I learned when I tried healing: 1) Stick near the tank in dungeons, when the tank uses sprint you sprint that way they can never avoid your heals. 2) Learn to love your party list make it big if it helps 3) To all you new WHM players HOLY IS A HEAL!!! Six seconds of stun is six seconds of not needing to heal the tank. 4) If it helps look at HP as a resource the only point that matters is the last one.
I got rid of my healer anxiety by spamming Hall of the novice healer role tutorial then practice being a healer for my chocobo for hours on end, then started spamming dungeons till I was confident starting with Sastasha only moving on till I was confident. Make sure you do it with a pure healer as well.
I hail from WoW, where i didn't play a healer due to how you just get 1 class per character, so never I bothered and chose to tank/dps playing it in FF14 and "needing" to level up healers gave me a neat oppertunity to try these healing aspects, which wasn't bad I'm still on free trial, so can't speak for higher levels, but I have found it much easier to play as a healer than it is to tank Since most tanks tend to wall pull and have mechanics to deal with, my choice of "play it safe and steady" does not mesh well with the speed people are used to I've found Scholar to be the most fun and easiest to learn, while at first not having as many heals as white mage, the shield aspect really gives alot of leeway to dps more often I do agree though on the aspect of DPS axiety in terms of fear of being called out for under performing or parsing badly I take the time to learn rotations, what abilities to use and so on, but i do not bother sing those 2min cooldown or abilities since I feel i'm doing fine without And my mentality is far more casual and may not be aiming for savage or ultimate raiding
I can also add that outside of savage raids and the like, nearly no one will call someone out for bad damage unless it is absolutely horrendous! As long as you use your cooldowns every so often, hardly anyone's going to notice! 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Playing on a controller makes it a bit wonky for certain jobs and button placement Right now on 66 dragoon I'm unable to easily get to Spineshatter or Dragonfire dives as easily as I was at 60 ;w; But it's all about muskill memory in the end and getting used to changes and pruning every few levels xD Stuff taht I should worry about when I'm at max level anyway but no harm in building habits early if possible x3
What worked for me was to play WHM. I leveled SGE to 90 only to realize playing it stresses me way out and made me avoid the role. Went back to WHM and problem solved.
i want to be a good healer but i struggle with BADDDD healer anxiety, i just made it to level 60 with my white mage and no matter how much i read and practice...this CANT be the same brain that got me through college lmao😅 i love being a healer but when i have to revive someone, its like i freeze and forget where my swiftcast and revives are ;_; and im scared of being a liability aaaa i have to keep my inhaler at hand as im freaking out people are super nice (maybe bc im a lala and a sprout) but i wanna not get yelled at or judged. im def trying to do my best
I'm actually one of those healer mains with DPS anxiety... All stems from my wow days where I was forced to swap to dps in a new expansion, taking hunter which turned out to be underperforming and then getting complaints about not pulling my weight... No one wanted to help me gear and pugs didnt want hunters either... I was recruited as a tank so it felt real bad and dont want to experience that again...
Thats a terrible experience! It's also just incredibly rude to recruit you as one role, force you to change and then be surprised when you are having a hard time adjusting :(
meanwhile me casually causing a couple of wipes as a sprout healer because of bad decisions (choosing to dps during moments where i shouldve started spam healing)... i am only glad that the ppl ive played with have been supportive or at least not outright blaming me (even though i know it's my fault) lol granted these were one of the first few arr dungeons which i guess isnt as serious still... but i always feel bad when my tank dies
My main bit of healer anxiety is honestly just from wall pulls when there are a bunch of autoattacking mobs because it genuinely feels like add pulls (my mind always goes to the Ice Sprites in stone vigil normal) hurt so much more than bosses. So my advice to new healers is that yes definitely learn how much you need to heal so you're not wasting healing on boss pulls (a simple regen or Eos will keep a tank okay during boss autoattacks) but don't be afraid if you end up having to spam heal on big add pulls because that's honestly normal. Adds like doing a lot of damage in my experience.
i think my biggest issue is dat im generally a bad player so playing healer or dps stresses me out. i used to play way back in ARR as a WHM main. when i returned i skipped story and mained tank. now every time i play dps or healer i die a lot due to a lack of knowledge of mechanics. on healer or dps i just follow around others, and on tank it didnt matter much if i mess something up cos i could mit or live with 4 vul stacks at time. i tried to start thinking for myself now to understand mechanics and not just follow people around so i die a lot now. and dats kinda giving me anxiety about healing/dpsing (i play astro, reaper and dark knight). its not dat i dont know how to heal, ive mained healers for 10 years in mmorpgs, but rather i think the overwhelming amount of new content to me with new mechanics is just to much. i started a new character now and will play the story from heavensward onwards so hopefully it will help me learn game mechanics/knowledge dat im lacking.
I do recommend practicing the dungeons in duty support then! That way you can have all the tries you need to learn a mechanic and get acquainted with what to do about it, without anyone else complaining! 😊
I recently ran msq roulettes as a tank, and healer let us drop to the brink of extinction, lol. They actually forgot they were a healer, not a DPS (their own words). Nobody gave them hard time for this, ofc. But as healer main I can totally emphasize, because the only thing I kind of dislike about ffxiv healing, is the DPS meta. Makes things more difficult and boring at the same time (for me personally). Anyway, rant aside, my sprout healxiety manifested in me having a chat macros “I’m sorry, guys, my bad =(“. I totally got more comfortable with time, but I still feel inferior in healing, because every single healer I meet is so competent and amazing at their jobs
Actually noticing how well the healers are performing certainly tells me that you are paying attention to the group, so I am sure you can become a great healer if you aren't already! 😊
My tip will be: you don't need to heal alone. If you have friends willing to do dungeons with you, have them play summoner in low level dungeons (for lvl 4 physick and lvl 12 resurrection), then bard (lvl 35 Warden's paean), gunbreaker (lvl 45 Aurora), Paladin (lvl 58 Clemency) or Red Mage (lvl 54 vercure and lvl 64 verraise). If you have four friends, you can even get a blue mage. These jobs will be able to take the slack as you learn to heal. I saved dysfunctional roulette parties with summoner, paladin and red mage. If you don't have friend, try your spells with the Guildhests, which are short and low level, then trials and raids in which you are 2 or 6 healers. You can also solo heal the main scenario roulette, which are quite predictable and nice to nail the base of your rotation.
i used to be really anxious when playing healer, i first started out as scholar and i never knew what were barrier healers and pure healers, and i remember getting wiped in a trial multiple times and i blamed myself. we eventually finished it but i felt so ridiculous how we managed to defeat it with only 2 people barely scraping it by, and thought i wasn’t doing enough pure healing. there was also another time where my friend mocked me for healing less than them (me as a lvl 90 scholar using emergency tactics+adlo and them a lvl 80 astrologian using a benefic 2) and then also telling me my healing will never match up to their warrior healing. i almost quit playing the game then and there. overtime i learned to realize that everything has their limits, it would make sense that their astrologian would do more PURE heal than a scholar trying to use a pure heal, even when there’s a level difference. and warrior will always heal more than scholar or practically any other healer in the matter, but that’s not my job as the healer to care about, because in the end, whether they mock me for not being able to heal as much as them self healing, my role as a healer is to help the PARTY and not only 1 person. the lessons and advice i’ve learned was knowing limits. each healer was designed different and unique, it’s not an issue if a scholar or sage can’t pump mega heals, it’s just by job design that they can do other things besides mega heals better and vice versa for white mage and astrologian. also for any new healers that worry and get stressed whenever someone dies, we have a resurrection spell for a reason 🤪 damage comes and goes, if someone makes a mistake and you can’t heal them in time, slap a quick ressurect spell on them and then continue blanking out 👍
If you die, sometimes the best you can do is just acknowledge in chat why you died. Usually, if it's bc it's your 1st time or you forgot a mechanic, someone will explain how something works.
Honestly when I first played I got sick of not getting pops as a BRD so I said screw it I'll heal and went to WHM. The most fun I've had with essentially playing god.
Been a healer main since mid HW. Somehow, everytime I take a break of any amount of time, I have to battle this anew, despite more often than not, nothing has changed and I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just struggle to press that queue button. No idea why, but it's kinda lame
I'm not sure I ever had healer anxiety...but my first MMO was WoW back in 2004, and since druid looked cool I ended up being a healer (but pvp server so I still got to play with the other aspects of druid even if they weren't optimal!) At the time I simply didn't know that I *should* have anxiety, and it's kind of always been like that, cause you quickly learn in WoW that everything and everyone is anxiety inducing so you might as well just block it out if you want to play the game. (it didn't stop me from having tank anxiety when I came to this game though T_T) Now 20 years of online games later where I have tended to fall into heal/support/tank roles, and this game is easiest the chillest game of its kind to play, at least in the casual still hasn't gotten to the last two expansions sense. I have no idea if it has something to do with the data center I'm on or something else. But the most toxic person I've encountered is a DPS asking my healer if it was ok for the tank to go faster then getting annoyed and calling it "cringe" when it was pointed out that the tank (me) was going slowly for the healers benefit. And the worst they could do was just...not dps. Like OK my man, if you want the dungeon to go even slower, be my guest. I don't care, the healer prefers it, and the other dps also does not care. I don't know if it's a bad take or not, but I feel like folks hopping into the leveling queue shouldn't get mad if things aren't being run the way they "prefer". I know that rushing is How We Do Things Around Here, but I think there is a critical place in learning to play this game or any game, where using the bot party is no longer helpful, but getting thrown directly into wall to wall can be particularly difficult or even off putting for a new healer. The only thing that "scares" me as a happy and confident healer is those situations where the whole party wholeheartedly believes that we just survived something that we absolutely *should not have* and then the tank decides that it is now time to start limited testing themselves (and by extension me). It is *fun* cause I always end up figuring out something new but it is also exhausting even when its a competent tank that knows what they're on about. Well and tanks that forget about bee's...but every tank I've ever had that forgot about the bee's was a good sport about it so its fine.
if a dps dies, its fine. sometimes, rezzing them means you use less of your ressources than desperately trying to keep them alive while your focus should be someone else. the debuff from getting rezzed isnt bad enough in most content to try to avoid it at all cost. the living first: if someone dies, dont make it your highest priority per default. if you rezz and two others die while youre rezzing, the rez wasnt worth it^^ you are your #1 priority: if you die, no one gets any more healing. if someone else dies, you can still heal the others and rez. dont ignore your own hp bar!
Just need to have thick skin honestly. When l was new healer, l think l wiped 2 hours on zodiark and 1.5 hours on hydaelyn. What happen is that people voted to abandon, not to kick me. Yes, it was the story mode, not extreme.
If the groups wipe for that long without any significant progression, it is often not just one person who is to blame either, so it would be weird if they kicked one individual as well! Right when zodiark was new I also didn't get him down until the second session! 😊
Most annoying thing I have ran into has to be someone tanking with such an ego that after another player said a thing just as a tip, they take it weirdly personal and as an insult or something and then say something like "you want to tank?" or stuff in those lines. It is very sad that as a tank you instantly take an actually helpful tip or advice as an attack at your own gameplay and then get pissy because of it throwing a temper tantrum like a child. Thankfully this doesn't happen often and I can only remember 2 or maybe max 3 times someone has done this in my parties xd
Yeah it's always great when they act like that. It's hard to say what's the best approach but I dunno, if I was in that situation and it was severe enough I might just say "no, thats why you're the tank. I'm just guiding you, because it seems you also don't want to tank!" 😂 Good that they are rare indeed!
Healing is actually pretty chill once you realize that people don't drop from 100 to 0 in an instant and you learn to take your time. You also need to realize that it's not your fault if people die to avoidable damage. Im not saying that you should never heal people who stand in crap. But there is no need to panic if your whole group is low due to unavoidable raid/group damage and there is no new unavoidable damage incoming. Focus on the tank because he will be pummeled by the boss and make sure that you stay alive. Your DPS can dodge mechanics until you have time to heal them. Often a hot is enough to get them back up slowly.
I tried being a white mage.. it was stressful. Im not a fan of it. That said, as a Red Mage, i like being able to support heal and high speed rez. That feeling when i rez a whole party in a major fight. or enough so the actual healer can get get the rest of the party after i rez them.... while the boss squishes me to paste
That is quite interesting! I would imagine it more common to be afraid of healing something you don't know! But it makes sense to be most confident in the role you have the most experience with! ^^
Honestly, I think it's mostly because I just feel most comfortable with the Scholar and Astro toolkits. I love Dark Knight, but healers just feel so much more intuitive for some reason.
healer is actually the most chill role unless your whole party decides to not do mechanics and eat floor AoEs for breakfast. i have more anxiety playing tank than healer tbh. tanks have to lead the way in dungeons and have to set a good pace or else the dungeon becomes excruciatingly long.
A scary thing with switching to barrier healers is that they are a lot different from pure ones in that they are (ironically) a lot more about maintaining the tanks hp rather than burst healing it. They also rely more on efficient use of cooldowns so there are more ways to "mess up". However I am sure you will get it with enough practice! On the channel my guides to sage (as well as my short on it) introduce a bunch of ways you can construct a cooldown order that maybe can help you with learning to deal with big pulls on the job! 😊
Same, SGE in level sync content feels waaaay weaker to heal with than the other 3 healers, not sure why exactly 🤔 Yet LV90 max level can heal with just kardia and ability heals without a care ez mode barrier healer lol
huh, i'm in the opposite boat. i main sage, and am now touching whm last, and struggling with it. i feel like a pure cure 2 bot, so much healing is on the gcd, and i feel lacking in damage and mobility.
it's amazing how much I refuse to believe that dungeons are the most effective way of leveling xD I don't want to spam dungeons with other players because I'm too weak a healer for it to be an enjoyable experience, and doing them with bots is stupiditly long. And here I am having WHM and AST to level up yet...
It is a quite effective way at least and also allows you to practice many of the things you will be doing as a healer 😅 but it is of course not the only way!
For me I think if you can wall to wall heal in lower level dungeons you are doing really well. for me lower level dungeons as a healer are harder than endgame dungeons. And if you have friend who is playing as paladin go run couple of wall to wall pulls in under lvl40 dungeons that will teach you a lot. (No hate to paladins xD its just that low level paladins dont have that much self healing compare to other tanks. So as a healer when you are running low level dungeons with palading you really need to do your job. ALSO if fail to keep party alive its NOT just your fault maybe the tank is also new to the job and dont really know how to rotate mitigation and if the dps in your party is new he/she might not really know his/her job that well so the pulls take longer and you might have to heal way longer in one pull than you expected EVERYONE has a role in FFXIV remember that and practice makes wonders for the anxiety the more you know about your job the less anxiety you will have SO GOOD LUCK AND REMEMBER TO HAVE GOOD TIME!)
Man I just have anxiety. I missed a button press and didnt actually cast ruin when I wanted and instead cast it a couple seconds later? I am the worst player who has ever existed and everyone knows I messed up.
I'm sorry to hear that! I don't know if it is any comfort, but if I see someone make a mistake, I am often a lot more interested in how they recover from it or resolve it, than actually being mad they messed up 😊 At least you are actively attacking! 😁
What kinda confuses me. I started as a Healer. I have no problem healing. I have no problem wiping and trying again. But when i try and touch tank anxiety kicks hard for some reason. So far in every game i played i was a tank main Healer secondary.
![[FFXIV] Five Mistakes Healers Make!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/h0vBZGWTCq0/mqdefault.jpg)
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![[FFXIV] How do you deal with Tanking Anxiety?](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/uT_0jjJ-7iE/mqdefault.jpg)
![[FFXIV] How Healers Work But From a Tank's Perspective](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/PNhWwTHjXCU/mqdefault.jpg)
![KSI - Dirty [Official Visualiser]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VoDh1h1dPUE/mqdefault.jpg)
Dont deal with it, have a panic attack, wipe the party, cry
Oh No! Don't do it like that! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh 🤣
me but figuring out what button my tank stance was 1/3 through dungeon *insert loading sound effect here*
KOKO NOOO
Very New Astro here, who's been playing Paladin since ARR.....
YES. I get you, my friend....
The thing that completely got rid of my healer anxiety was actually pretty weird: I was in Vanaspati, and we wiped 3 times in a row to the final boss because I tunnel-visioned trying to heal up the tank when he was low and got hit by mechanics and died. I apologized in chat, and the team was very understanding, plus I got a great piece of advice from one of the DPS: "Remember, if we die you can resurrect us, but we can't resurrect you". Something clicked in my mind and I realized that as long as I was still alive as a healer it was technically possible with good play to turn around a lot of situations to avoid a wipe, and now my brain interprets every time I avoid dying to a mechanics as a healer as a big success, which makes it way easier to not be anxious about it. Don't know how helpful this is to other people, but it worked wonders for me.
That said: Hint 4 from the video is so important. It's so much harder to play healer if you constantly overheal. Think of damaging enemies as healing damage that they'd otherwise do. The less a pull lasts, the easier it is on you. My little Vanaspati thing got rid of the last of my healer anxiety, but figuring this out was by far the biggest chunk I ever took out of it.
That is an excellent point! A fight completely changes if the healer dies, especially if no one can raise them up again! So simply surviving yourself is crucial!
omg I am proud of you!!! You did a very good job !!!
For me the thing that made it go away was rembering back to when I played tank, how no matter how scary it seems your death will be a slow one if you die at all. I then started to put more faith in passive healing and it worked, and now I main sage.
@@Brass319 it's kinda funny to me how in dungeon boss fights almost all my healing as a WHM is passive. Regen and Medica II ftw. Knowing a fight so you can anticipate when you will need more because of tank busters or room-wides helps a ton, but otherwise it's embrace being a Glaremage and manage my MP.
@@skooterboyle1991 for sage it's just:
1. put kardion on the main tank
2. pew pew pew
3. anticipate party wide attacks w/ aoe shielding
4. weave your free healing buttons into the mix so you don't run out of mp and hopefully nobody goes down
5. possibly swap kardion to someone in need of healing if you know the tank's gonna be alright
6. repeat until victory
One important thing to not forget is, keep yourself alive too. You can't heal anyone if you let yourself be pushed out of the map by Titan for example. So keep an eye on those mechanics!
Absolutely! It can be easy to forget, but in terms of healing priority, yourself as the healer is by far most significant in nearly all situations! 😊
Yup the order of priority for keeping people alive, is you, the other healer, the main tank, then if you have time maybe the DPS but even then it will probably be an AoE and not really targeted at them is more a beneficial side effect than anything else. The number 1 priority is keeping the healers alive because the whole thing goes to shit when the healer drops.
Confidence was a major key is overcoming my healer anxiety. I love having the power to deny failure (i.e. boss hits a group hard, and I cast a heal, say “no” undoing the damage completely). But the fear of failure is too real.
I practiced with duty support, figured out my priorities and habits, and feel very comfortable now. The worst I face is my anxiety in general and large groups like raids, which I face the best I can in whatever job I am playing.
Castrum Abania is where I had a run in which everyone nearly got destroyed from messing up boss mechanics, but because I stayed calm and kept them alive through it all, the tank stopped after and said “hold up, we agree healer gets comms right? That was incredible.” The dps agreed and I was stunned by the kindness of it. That was months ago and I still think about it. I barely remember times I messed anything up, because it barely mattered. Nobody was a tryhard or being mean, we could have wiped and be right there again in a minute. But I stepped up to try my best, it did something, and from then on only mechanics worried me. I am the healer. I heal you. I heal the party. Tanks love me, *bosses fear me.*
Humor and anecdotes aside, FFxiv players are some of the best humanity has. Sometimes people are a headache, but most are cool. When I’m a dps (dragoon main) I will cheer you on. When I am a tank, I will cheer you on. Sometimes seeing in the chat that people are happy to see you doing your best disarms that anxiety because they’re chill “nothing” makes you think they’re judging you, when they’re usually thinking “no big deal, keep trying buddy. I’ve been there.”
Anytime I see someone new to something, struggling with mechanics, dying a lot, I’m always ready to step up for you and help. I’m not unique in that regard, people are way more kind than you may be prepared to handle.
Healer is a great role to play and if I see you in my roulettes, you got a friend cheering you on and knows what you’re feeling. You can only do your best, and the party can always help. It’s in their best interest to help, and is rewarding to do, so people will help.
Former DPS main turned Healer main here!
The thing that got me into healers was AST specifically, as I asked my friends then what would be the most complicated job in the game at the time, since I gravitate towards complicated jobs in the first place. Everyone said AST, and I rolled with it.
The first few days as a healer was super nervous -- I picked the most complicated healer after all -- but the more I realized that I *don't* have to heal all the time, the easier time I had with dungeon pulls. That and realizing that it's not entirely your fault if your team wipes because it's the job of everyone involved to get through a pull, which helped my Healer anxiety go down a lot.
What finally removed it was being able to heal Aurum Vale without dying. That really did solidify that I knew what I was doing, and is the turning point from my being DPS main to a Healer main.
A majority of my group has the same Healer anxiety, but I help them through it by just telling them that you have so much time to heal before, during, and after a pull. If the tank is alive, you're doing your job, it doesn't matter if they're 10% hp or 100% hp. And overcoming that sudden challenge where the tank suddenly drops in health and you *have* to bring them back up gives me a dopamine rush I haven't experienced in any other class in this game.
EDIT: Sorry if I sound scattered through this whole comment -- I really love healing in this game and I could go on and on about it really. I want everyone to enjoy the same thing I've enjoyed with healing, it's just sometimes disheartening to hear people say "man healing is hard because if you wipe it's my fault" or "I can't handle that responsibility" when the massive majority of the community wouldn't even be mad if you wipe. Healing is fun, y'all.
And if you get berated by a random DPS that blames you for the wipe? Remember that you hold their life in your hands, and have this nifty little ability called Rescue to have fun with them a bit.
For a second I thought that edit was going to get a lot meaner 🤣
It's always great to see someone who really loves their role! 😁
i want to be a good healer but i struggle with BADDDD healer anxiety, i just made it to level 60 with my white mage and no matter how much i read and practice...this CANT be the same brain that got me through college lmao😅
i love being a healer but when i have to revive someone, its like i freeze and forget where my swiftcast and revives are ;_; and im scared of being a liability aaaa
Do raids, trials, alliance raids. Anything that involves a second healer. A lot of the anxiety goes away when you know you have someone there to help.
I surprisingly also found learning Savages and Extremes from my FC to help teach me the intricacies of when to use certain abilities. Really nice having a more experienced healer to tell you about what you could use during this raid wide or that tank buster.
The best way to deal with healer anxiety is to ask a good tank (either in your FC or even try the PF, or even use Trusts) and choose a low-level dungeon, get practice that way. Then move up in the dungeon level. Aurum Vale is pretty much that one dungeon where many healers (and tanks) stumble. I overcame my own healer anxiety by using Trusts. Then I just went on Roulettes to see how I would fare in a "real" situation. I got a lot of praise for being an excellent healer. Sadly I have since stopped healing because of some bad experiences recently.
I don’t experience healer anxiety at all, but I do experience tank anxiety. Obviously everyone is different but I don’t really get why you would. Healer is the job I go to whenever there is a first clear I need to do in a dungeon. I feel like I can just slip into the background as a healer while if I am a tank I have to be front and center, lead the party, know boss mechanics, etc
One more thing that is very important for healers is learning the power of Regens or Barriers depending on the healer.
If you're a pure healer, your regens are extremely powerful and will give you more opportunity to do damage or will smooth over a lot of damage over time.
If you're a barrier healer your job is a little unintuitive to healing as you want to be putting your big heals out BEFORE the damage goes out. This quirk to barrier healers makes them harder to just "pick up" as most people tend to play healers reactionary.
The important thing with healer is to remember that while damage is important, every other member of the team technically does more damage per GCD than you, and keeping everyone alive is significantly more important than doing damage. The best time to check health bars is when the boss is casting anything, or "50%" hp. I can't stress this enough either but show HP bars during combat rather than "when not 100%" will also help you keep an eye on the health bars without having to look at party list.
The value of a GCD is a very good point! Investing a GCD in saving someone can be worth way more damage than you could possibly imagine! 😁
@@CaetsuChaijiCh The damage loss of a death is significantly more damage than a healer can do, it's never worth to prioritise your own damage as a healer. Overhealing, however, isn't something to be avoided at all costs either - especially for WHM and SGE as they get a lot of free value if they use their guage so they don't overcap. I was just offering my 2 cents.
Maybe this is just me, but I've always felt that throwing myself in the deep end has been the best way to learn any job. I push myself as far as I can go and then step it back if I need to. I also have a complicated relationship with duty support. On one hand, it's ultimately a good feature. On the other, I feel like it contributes to a lot of people's tank/healer anxiety. When I spent more time in Novice Network, I saw a pretty significant number of sprouts say they were scared to swap from duty support to playing with other people.
Side note: they really just need to make Cure I/Benefic I upgrade into Cure II/Benefic II instead of having them as separate actions. At the very least, completely removed Free Cure. These cause such weird sticking points for so many sprouts I encounter and it makes them perform much more poorly than they could be and thusly causes much more stress than is necessary.
This is true in a way: some of those tanks and healers may never have tried the roles if not for duty support, so they are of course scared of switching out of it. On the other hand, regardless of this, the jump from duty support to real players is pretty big, and there isn't really any way to properly bridge this gap! 😅
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Duty support is the underlying cause of all this anxiety. You wouldn't be scared of learning by wiping in dungeons if you did it all throughout your leveling experience without having access to a "safe space". People don't expect much from you if you're in ARR duties and you preface by saying "bear with me, I'm learning"
@pointlessmike every person is different, and what makes them afraid of doing something new can vary from person to person. Some may get too comfortable with the safety of duty support, but others simply desire a place to safely fail for a bit, which duty support also offers 😊
I started WHM recently and seeing a video say "completely ignore cure 1 unless you can't afford anything else" made me wonder what the hell was going on. Yeah, get rid of it. Replace it with an AoE DoT so we can get back to spamming stone.
I'm a brand new to FFXIV and currently main scholar, but have a lot of support experience from other mmo's. Most of that experience was pvp related so my biggest challenge has been adapting to the fact that "if not full hp = dead soon" is no longer true and that outside of wall to wall pulls, at least in the lv50 dungeons, there isn't enough pressure to actually need heals. Yours, among others, guides to classes and dungeons are also a huge help to know what to expect and what mechanics I need to actually worry about, since as long as I don't die to mechanics there isn't much threat from bosses
Yeah, ffxiv being very different in how you approach healing can take a bit if you have a lot of experience from elsewhere!
I'm glad you have found guides helpful as well! 😄
To anyone who wants to try healer there is very little to stress about until you start doing high level end game stuff because your DPS is a benefit but it's wholly not needed prior to the harder content so if you just error on the side of caution on when to heal vs DPS you will be completely fine. Mechanically healer is pretty simple to play and the role is more about being aware of the situation so you can decide how much you can DPS than any kind of difficult rotation or anything. Don't stress about it healer is one of the most chill roles you can play especially once you get used to the heal vs DPS balancing act.
Great video! For this type of video usually I have to add something when I share it to new players. But you covered every topic that I might add, like showing how to practice healing or even point out that non-dpsing healer will have harder time in handling mob pull later on which is opposite of what new healers might think. Well done!
Been healing for so long i have the opposite problem: I want things to go wrong, I want people to make mistakes, I want to FEEL something!
But my biggest tip is that it is not your SOLE responsibility to heal and mitigate, you are the biggest contributor but tanks and dps have tools at their disposal to brush off most small mistakes and to reduce potential dmg. True that those are things you cant control and cant anticipate people to use in a random party but knowing that other roles have tools to both keep themselves and the party alive can help with the pressure of healing.
Haha I feel this, as another long time healer across many games, I am having the most fun when absolutely everything is going wrong. I want to be whipped into an absolute state of panic, using the full extent of my kit just for survival.
I may only be lvl 50, but queuing up for ex trials is the most fun thing to do ig for me 😁
I was feeling super comfortable healing up until SHB. At level 70 onwards everything hits really hard and I felt like I couldn't keep up and it started to be frustrating. Then I realize that I leveled up all the way to level 80 with garbage equipment wich probably made my life harder. Also I was being to harsh on myself because I only had like 1 wipe and a couple of thanks dead in pulls.
I started my XIV experience as a healer, I spent all of ARR as a WHM and never really felt the anxiety outside of the very last MSQ boss (MP mismanagement mostly caused that, but the DF party were really cool about it). But that kinda changed as I went through the levels, as content got more difficult and tanks started to pull more aggressively I kinda lost my faith in my ability to actually keep everyone alive. It's hard to sometimes feel like it's not your fault when a tank is trying to wall-to-wall and you don't seem to be keeping up. I think some of it is just the switch to being a green DPS rather than taking "Healer" literally is quite a change in mindset that the game doesn't really teach you very well.
Weirdly I never had tank anxiety. I just kinda clicked that as long as my mitigation is there I should be fine. And I tend to be more aware of the signs a healer is still learning or struggling thanks to my experiences.
Now I'm working back in to my WHM slowly as I do miss healing. Working out the flow of doing damage and slipping in heals where I can actually makes things a bit easier. Higher level stuff where I can use OGCDs actually makes the anxiety nearly completely go away. Knowing I have heals that are reactive rather than planned if things go south compared to mid-level dungeons probably helps a ton. Getting a grasp of how much your various tools heal and knowing that as long as their health bar isn't empty, you're able to save them took time to just start becoming second nature. Level 50 dungeons as WHM is a struggle.
"Know your kit" is honestly some crucial advice. Apologise and move on when you make mistakes. Ask for help from your party. Ask for raid parties to warn you of anything to watch out for before the pull so you know what's likely to need a big heal. The worst that can happen is some toxic loser leaves the party.
I feel like if the "toxic loser" leaves that's actually a good thing! 😂
I'm glad you've had a mostly positive journey even starting as healer!
@@CaetsuChaijiCh it's definitely the best outcome for them to leave thinking of it haha!
Going through ARR as WHM is rather rough, it is easily the worst out of the four healers due to its weakest MP management (SCH and SGE have their resources at lvl 45, AST has cards at lvl 30 and Astrodyne at lvl 50, and WHM gets... nothing, until Assize and Thin Air in HW). It's only once you're in HW that WHM starts to actually feel good imo, Assize especially is so good.
Besides that, I basically never use Cure/Physick/Benefic/Diagnosis below lvl 30, though there are extreme niche use cases like Physicking a dragon add in Shinryu Ex when I'm out of Aetherpool and my Emergency Tactics is also on cooldown.
Telling party members that you're a noob healer or you're new to a duty helps a lot in letting your tank know how fast they should pace a dungeon. You'd find yourself being in a considerate and reassuring group most often. 😊
The main thing that had helped me level healers is a playing/understanding other roles. By playing other roles I can tell when it’s actually my fault or not as well as understand the abilities/capability of classes and roles. If the tank barely uses mitigation, people stand in aoes, etc. then you’re going to have to sweat. Knowing the mechanics to a fight is probably the most important though. As a tank you can stand in stuff and usually not die , or just get rezd if you’re a dps. But if you die as a healer it will usually just be a wipe. If you don’t know the mechanics or are doing a trial, dungeon, w/e for the first time. Just follow what everyone else is doing. Wesk Alber on RUclips arguably makes the best leveling guides for each class. He fully breaks down abilities, rotations, and gives advice on what to use on a class by class basis generally. Oh, and keeping up with your gear is super important, otherwise your heals just do less.
I know I mentioned this in the tank anxiety video but I think it bears repeating here too. Watching what other players are doing in the content can help a lot. It's generally easier to keep a tab on the tank compared to the healer. Though another thing which might help more with healer is adjusting the UI so the party menu is easier to look at and react to accordingly. I also recommend that you use the focus target command on your tank in light parties or on the main tank in full parties. This gives you another copy of the tank's health bar separate from the entire party where you can get a percentile of the targets(aka the tank's) health and allows you to keep a closer eye on it to better switch between damage and healing. If a boss is only dealing several percentage damage in auto's it becomes far easier to understand that damage window you have(of course, you need to take into account of other unavoidable damage) but if the boss isn't doing any abilities, or you have a boss where the ability's are minor and doesn't alter the damage dealt a lot it allows you to far easier predict the healing needs of the tank. Hopefully the dps aren't off in Narina(but if they are, don't feel bad about using rescue to force them into healing range. as long as you aren't pulling them into a hole or aoe puddle). And while overhealing is generally not considered a good thing, I've chatted with enough tanks in roulettes who prefer a healer being over cautious in their healing compared to sweating because they feel like their healer is a bit too busy glaring. Most people aren't going to get upset with you over-healing unless your just standing there and only healing.
Assuming lower level content until a healer is more confident, there's generally three brackets of health percentage that I tend to pay attention to as semi-healer main. 75%, generally this is ignorable unless there's some big dps coming the tanks way, a tank buster for example and if nothing big is being casted, feel free to keep dpsing. 50% depending on whether a shielder or a pure healer here I tend to deviate a bit. if running ast or whm this is when my pure dps wheels come off and I start paying more attention like being more focused on keeping my hot up. as a shielder this is when I tend to more proactive with keeping a shield up on the tank, so the dps wheels are still spinning(mostly keeping an eye on my dot and getting some damage spells out inbetween the healing) but the healing wheels come online. 25% is rarely encountered, outside of a non-paladin tank using their invulnerability but this is generally the point of focusing on keeping the tank above 25% health.
Sometimes how each healer can regen their own mana is class specific, but never forget lucid dreaming is there for every healer class. Don't be afraid to smash it if you feel like your in a spot where your burning through mana harsher than before. The goal is to keep everyone alive not perform perfectively.
Very good tips! And especially as you said last: the goal is to keep everyone alive! 😁
One good way to combat heal anxiety, is to learn how each of the tanks should be using their CDs. when you see them doing it VERY wrong it will help you realize that mistakes you make are not as serious. I've had 2 or 3 tanks recently that double stacked Rampart and thier 30% and the END of a mob pack and didn't use any mitigation (never even saw arms length on them). DRK that use TBN by itself at the beginning of the pull but with no shadow wall or rampart or even.....what ever the new 10% one is...just.... relay show that many people are bad at this game. people who want to heal but have heal anxiety are usually going to be the better ones because they care about being good at it.
Indeed, the players that get anxious about a role is almost always going to be better simply because they care! And as you say, learning what indicates a bad tank can help you to know when at least it isn't your fault!
I think another good tip for new healers, when it comes to bosses, is to learn to use the Focus Target function. I personally never use it outside of being a Healer, specially since we are usually always targetting the boss as a Tank or DPS. But as a Healer, where you move a lot between targets (the boss, your tank and other party members when needed), it makes such a HUGE difference to have the Focus Target being on the boss, so you're always aware of what they are casting regardless of if you're actually targetting it or not. When I was starting as a Healer, I had so MANY instances where I was healing the Tank and we got hit by an AOE that didn't have a big telegraph (as in, the boss itself didn't do anything visually before hitting us with it) and I got caught by surprise, whereas when I have the boss Focus Targeted I can see the AOE coming even if I'm healing or buffing someone, so I can prepare better for the incoming damage. It might sound like an "advanced technique", but it was such a game changer for me, personally. I have Focus Target keybound, so whenever I'm getting close to a boss I select them and immediately put them in Focus Target.
Maybe it'd be nice to explain that function in a video, more in-depth for newer Healer players, what do you think? If you haven't done it already, of course.
my big moment was realizing how much damage healers actually do, if you consider each GCD to be limited, as in 'you only have 100 gcds this pull' it becomes easier to use the big cooldowns and every part of your toolkit for the situation, and that in turn became 'use ogcds for heals, dps with gcds' and it was so much faster, smoother and easier.
Some great advice here (particularly from the perspective of a healer main as of EW). I don't think it can be stressed enough how a simple "mb" after a wipe can start a whole conversation about others trying to take fault or saying it happens all the time or something else to "mitigate the damage". Even if you do not think it's your own fault, being open to it just drops the stress potential so much. I always like to add, whatever role I'm playing, that "You never know how far you can push it until you push it too far." FFXIV players tend to appreciate that the most in dungeons -- that even if you fail, you're trying to do your best.
One thing I think that's important for people trying out healing is to not discount what you can learn about a dungeon or trial when you are NOT healing particularly for W2Ws because those quite frankly are the most challenging healing situations outside of extreme/savage content. When you DPS a dungeon, if you're mindful about what is going on you can watch for how many packs a tank can pull, what packs cause the most trouble, where tanks will stop a run, where to drop your "bubble". You can learn from those without actually having to do the healing and quite frankly the loss in party DPS because you're trying to pay attention instead of mindlessly DPSing is negligible. This can be really helpful because some dungeons have a hard "heal check" on the very first pull (I'm thinking Aurum Vale and Bardam's Mettle just off the top of my head). Others like The Dead Ends are just a challenge the whole way and require a lot of management of ability recast timers.
That last point just shows why your advice about how important it is to learn your lowest level skills first and work your way up -- knowing how hard they hit, what they actually can do, and how/when to use them -- is so important. Along those lines, tho, I think it's also important for WHMs, SCHs, and ASTs to know that how you heal will change over the course of HW specifically. A new ability (usually NOT a spell) every two levels and I know at least for WHM it completely shifts your healing from casting GCD spells to managing oGCD abilities.
I think that when things get a bit dicey, it can be important to have priorities in how to handle things. I have this "list" for dungeons specifically: (1) heal myself, otherwise there's no point, (2) heal the tank, because I know with the two of us up I can almost always recover a situation, (3) do damage because dead mobs = damage not taken = the best sort of healing there is, (4) heal the dps. And as you mentioned, when there are those toxic players who just are determined to cause problems for the party, my list becomes (5) do more damage and (6) heal the toxic people and refer to point #2. I don't forget them or intentionally refuse to heal them -- it's just that there should be no reason that anything more than Medica II should be needed to keep DPS doing their own jobs properly alive. I have higher priorities than people who consistently and repeatedly mess up the party flow and so they can wait their turn, and if they don't know how to manage their own self-heal(s) and damage mitigation they need to look to themselves first for blame.
TL;DR here is that you've come up with another great guide -- thanks so much!
A lot of great additions as well, thank you! 😄
I personally dont think a skilled healer friend helps with tank anxiety. I do believe a skilled tank friend helps with healer anxiety.
When I leveled warrior not long ago, I had a sprout healer in Sirensong Sea. They would spam cure 3 and always have mp issues. We helped them learn their skills better and I would pull a bit more as they got used to it. They never got it 100% at the end, but I could tell they were getting better by the last boss.
Indeed a skilled healer friend might have a too easy time covering invisibly for a tanks mistakes, so if the tank is aware of it, that might just make them more anxious about it. This is also why I recommended if possible to pair up with someone of similar skill to yourself so you can learn together!
Nice about the sirensong story though!
I have to say as a tank main that started playing as one, that having a Skilled healer as a friend teaching you not to freak out while being low HP is fine (since he enjoyed playing limbo with me) if you die after popping your mitigation its not your fault.
Which goes to a big tip that helped me in both tank and healing anxiety , if you know that you did what you could, what happens next do not have to bother you, you mitigated/healed in the best way you thought, its not your fault or entirely your.
@@AXEL9000able wish my friends were like that. The ones I know would always want me to go faster and I learn nothing. Skilled friends will always be good if they know what they are doing, but it can be a very slippery slope in my personal experience
@AXEL9000able this is also true. If your healer friend is skilled enough, they might be able to determine whether it was yours or their fault when something goes wrong. And knowing you did what you could can help a lot. Getting feedback as to what you could do differently can also help!
@@bobseesallwell as a side note they threw me directly in savage raiding right after finishing the msq, to the point that the first time i did a “in-content” extreme i was astonished by what a breeze it was (Golbez btw), like an asian mom teaching the hard thing first
i remember maining whm until stb. i absoluetly loved playing healer! but at some point i got really scared of messing it up and stared playing reaper, i found it really fun and since i just had to focus on dodging mechanics it was waaay easier. i brought a job skip for astro and i regret it a lot since i have no idea how to play it lol, looking back im kinda suprised i did the crystal tower raids as a white mage seeing as i had zero clue on what alliance raids were. i really want to main astro cause i find it so fun!! its honestly not as hard as people make it out to be, it just has a bit more spells than whm which can make it kinda intimidating.
anyway my biggest tip if your trying out healing for the first time is to to trials were theres another healer so you wont feel like all the responibility is on you. and to just stick to a dps if youre scared! like literaly, follow another player around so you know what to do.
As someone who started on BLM, picked up PLD, and now plays every role, it is wild to me how healing went from panicking about when to heal to wondering "Do I _really_ need to heal that, or will natural regen and an oGCD do the job?" I've never seen such extreme disparity in how I play between when I started playing a role and when I got comfortable with it.
I used to be have bad healing anxiety with scholar since I only leveled it through SMN and my main healer was AST. Watching your guide and finally understanding the toolkit helped a TON. Now it’s my favorite healer. The Critlo is too addicting😂.
I'm glad to hear that you overcame the anxiety! 😄 I feel it is more common for this to happen with Scholar because of how you can accidentally end up with a level 90 job you have never had a chance to play before that 😅
There should be many more content creators talking about these kinds of topics. Very often we forget that, although this is a game, there are real people behind the PC. Thanks ❤
Any mistake you make can be traced to you, and guess what, every one of your teammates mistakes affects you, so you can hate them and they can hate you, it’s perfect
And don't forget you can control their Lives 😂
This could just be me, but I find that my Healer Anxiety is not nearly as bad when I play in Raids, but in a Dungeon I feel more scrutinized. Conversely I find my Tank anxiety is not as bad if I am the only Tank like when you do dungeon and alliance raid content, but in normal raids or trials I'm not very good at working with my other tank cause it doesn't feel as obvious.
But regardless, I have been trying to find ways to push through it cause I have been playing solely DPS (Ninja/Bard main) for so long now I just wanna renew my interest with finally sucking it up and trying the other 2 roles and seeing if I enjoy them.
And so far I find I enjoy Scholar the most as a Healer and Gunbreaker as a Tank so I have been focusing on playing those jobs as well as I can in any environment. These tips have been a nice help because I don't have regular friends playing 14 to try my new jobs with to lessen the judgmental feeling that may or may not actually be there.
I can see how the difference makes sense:
In a raid, one healer dying isn't a massive issue, so all the burden isn't on you.
But as a tank, there might be specific expectations of you regardless of whether you are main or off tank. And that can be scary!
I'm glad you have found some jobs to enjoy the roles with!
Love the video! Great job Caetsu and thank you for making this! A lot of your wording do make me feel at ease and understood (eventhough I main healer). I hope lots of other ppl do feel the same as I did and enjoying the experience of healing in ff14♥
Thank you so much Fila! And I am glad to hear that! 😄
A big tip too is utilizing the vote kick function for people who get too pissy and toxic in dungeons.
I'mma send this video to someone who wants to learn healing. There's so much great advice from this.
Good luck to your friend! And thank you! 😊
Went from Tank main to a healer and man, definitely knowing fights in order to focus on the macro vs micro is super fun. I wish I made the jump sooner
Healer anxiety is so strange to me. I do of course get it from an intellectual standpoint
but i started as SCH, then AST and mained SGE since 70. Sage is my absolute comfort job. If i go blind into something, its usually sage.
I just have so many tools to keep everyonen alive, and pretty much all of them are oGCD, so i can keep the GCD rolling on damage.
Sage might lack an "oh shit" button, but between all my shields, regens and mitigations, that's rarely needed.
Often i don't even need to use my full kit
Indeed, Sage especially has so many options! I think part of what can cause this is people panicking in the moment, and locking up! As a healer if you stop acting, it can cause everyone to fall, so there's a lot of responsibilities that follow with the power!
It's my second week into FF, really maximizing my time with Free Trial and I like being able to fill The three roles, as it stands today, I have SAM at 70, RDM at 64, AST at 70, and DRK at 62 the first time healer jitters were intense the first hour of playtime and I picked the most arduous class to try, but gimmicky classes really appeals to me so I tried it, by hour three or four, my rando party members were positively pushing me to get used to it by pulling huge mobs, it weirdly worked, cuz rather than OVER thinking, I just let instinct kick in and basically let my hands go on auto-pilot now, The Aetherochemical duty is amazing for me, it's actually really tight cuz two boss mechanics and everyone might die. Out of all the three roles, I can confidently say Healer gives the most adrenaline rush out of every role, as a tank I can just hurl 100% of my trust that the healer has my back when I'm pulling with mitigation and arm's length, as a DPS I just KILL KILL KILL- and try my best not to get hit by a boss mechanic- Healer's just, HOLY FUCK- also... I like helping people naturally, so when I can res or heal peeps in trouble outside of Duties, it really makes me grin eye to eye xD
I would also add learn what the tank mitigation icons look like. I typically use regens abilities when tank is well mitigated and save bursts for when they dont have as much.
When I played my first healer, I went into a grand company party, so that I could take my time to figure out everything I needed to learn controls and timing. After that it was just learning each healer. Sage was the hardest for me to start, but now it's my main and preferred healer.
One time, queued into leveling roulette, and got Stone Vigil. When we got in the tank told us that it was the Scholar's first time being a healer, so we were a bit slower and gave your two cents to help them improve. Dont be afraid to just tell your party. Most people are understanding and can adjust, and if they give you grief, thats on them.
The thing that gave me the most anxiety for healing was that I started with AST. And having the most to do in between heals with the card system was scary, but also that AST's AOE requires a target while the rest of the healers do not. As every other healer, you can target the tank and cast AOE's, but AST requires you to untarget the tank to deal damage, which was scary to me when I was a new player.
What helped a lot was just jumping in and failing sometimes. The fact that overall the community is really cool helps ease the anxiety. When i play a different roll i always let people know its not a big deal after a wipe happens. Realistically whats the worse that happens? You lose a couple minutes. If theres advice to give i will.
seriously, the only way I've found to overcome healer anxiety, tank anxiety, etc? And man, I used to have, physically shaking and shit, seriously.. is to do LOTS of content. over and over again. just charge in, queue, expect jerk to be critical, and let it go. then queue again. repetition makes it trivial in time!
This is absolutely true. Part of what can make it scary is how much value you put in the individual run. But if you have done hundreds, then each one is not particularly important at the end of the day, so it can make it a lot easier to handle!
I was one of those healers who had dps anxiety like that little disclaimer in the beginning. I started ffxiv as an arcanist, and when I unlocked sastasha, I went and power-leveled conjurer up to 15 so that I could be a healer instead, because I thought it would be fewer buttons to keep track of and therefore easier for me. I was right, it was.
I started as a whm. I had healer anxiety until the arr patch quests, lol
I didn't switch jobs or roles, but I would only do the bare minimum of duties to progress the msq
I think I finally got over it when I started spamming all the level 50 dungeons to clear the quests off my list. Just forcing myself to do it more really helped me to finally get comfortable with the role
The biggest thing that's helped me over the years in various MMOs I've healed in is simply, you can only correct your own mistakes. There's tons of ways your party members can die, good observation can tell you whether you were to blame or them. People are always getting hit by attacks that are easily avoidable and while a good healer can usually compensate, if they end up tanking the floor, it's not your fault. Making mistakes has always been the fastest way to learn so fearing them will only drag the process on long than it needs to.
I'd say to start avoid duty roulette and pick your dungeons and watch a guide it can help to start knowing where tank busters and raid wides are coming and never fear asking the tank to do smaller pulls, the trouble with duty support is they can ignore mechanics, I always try to make a joke if we wipe, we all had to learn and make mistakes
I love that as time goes by tanks get more party mits and heals. They can pick up the spot-heals of other players' mistakes and relieve some of that pressure on new healers. Hope we get more in DT.
i just can't deal running dungeons with actual ppl in this game as a healer this is why im so glad squaderons/Duty support/Trust are a thing id rather do things at my own pace and be happy then team up with acctual ppl and stress the hell out
5:12 I was just about to suggest this. It’s going to be difficult due to not all jobs starting out low lvl and losing skills due to low level. But most likely you’ll be playing with sprouts or people who need a refresh/other leveling or learning their jobs. I would say this is a prime area to mess up and not worry about wiping the party.
Also it’s good to shove yourself into harder healing dungeons/duties. This will help you gain speed and learn to think fast. But I personally would wait for you to have the basics down.
Also try diffrent healing jobs and see the ones that stick/mesh with you better. Ex: white mage did not vine with me but scholar vibe with me better.
And don’t forget that player with end raides wipe too and they also can recover from wipes while figuring things out. If they whipe due to a mistake why can’t you also whipe from a mistake?
Side note: I sometimes heal my chococbo when out fighting things. It helps me get learn to multitask with no worry with others. As I can suck with that.
Good tips! Thank you for adding them! 😁
something that helped me with healer anxiety was looking at other people healing in dungeons, and how often they make mistakes that lead to deaths. it happens, even at the highest levels, and you fucking up with some randoms you will never see again does not matter. after healing for so long, i get more anxiety playing a dps and not feeling in control of the heals than i do when i am in control of the heals.
An excellent point! Seeing how others play and realizing it doesn't have to be perfect can also be quite effective! 😁
And yes I also tend to lean more towards tank and healer in groups simply because it gives more control!
one general tip i have is to change dps role tag color to pinkish so that you can easily differentiate between enemies and allies
A good tip if you can't see the difference yes! 😁
Me me! I'm an anxious mess who had tremendous healer anxiety, to the point I got every job in the free trial to 60 minus the healers (not even scholar who I never unlocked) but I then found a video about controller targetting that mentioned soft targetting and decided might as well try, because it was bothering me a bit that I had almost everything at 90 while not having unlocked any healer. So I picked AST. SCH and SGE were too high level to start, WHM was TOO low level at 1, but AST was 30 and had a lot of weaving I could practice on early on with the cards `+ essential dignity. I was a nervous wreck and for all my early runs I mentioned I was a new healer and to be patient with me, but as I leveled up I became more confident and now not only I ahve all jobs at 90 but ended maining AST, using it to learn every new content, savages, and ultimates.
I guess a bit part of it is that I overcame many levels of anxiety in levels. I first started as lancer and entering my first dungeon with people (before duty support) had me also an anxious mess, but as I played the game that anxiety went down. Next step was the tankciety and altought I did indeed had a bit of a breakdown after my first *sastasha* run, as time went on I also became more confident. By the time it was time to hit healer I had overcome already many hurdles and became more confident in myself, by the point I hit healer it was a much smaller wall than if I had started as conjurer that very first day.
I just started like 3 weeks ago and queueing into ANYTHING makes my legs start shaking, it’s probably just a generalized anxiety. I need to learn that it’s not such a big deal. I actually started leveling white mage because I feel more in control with heals, that’s how it was in Team Fortress 2. Just did the first three squadron dungeons over and over and over again to get a basic gist of healing.
Yeah also if you just started, remember that the sprout icon for most players already gives you a lot more slack! So try your best to relax! I am sure you will do great!
its almost ALWAYS better to respawn as a tank or dps and run to catch the healer. Respawning resets cooldowns and prevents the raise debuff as a bonus. This also lets the healer focus on healing/stabilizing those already alive instead of how to get a raise out. A dps or the healer will likely not survive a whole global spent on raise where as a healer might be able to keep a dps alive in bigger pulls with significant healing spam and a little skill from the dps. As a dps, it could be wise to switch to single target as thinning the mobs will reduce their damage and help the healer stabilize.
My "healing" anxiety was when AST was released I thought it looked cool, but i heard it was notoriously difficult to learn, and I was too nervous to switch for a while. I was watching my friend play the job one day and it didn't look as bad as I expected so i just...switched and kind of bit the bullet. It taught me in ffxiv that the best thing you can do to get over those nerves is to just say "**** it lets go" and just expect failure knowing you will be smarter and stronger after each wipe. It's not always a great feeling, but AST was as fun as i thought it might be and to this day it's my absolute favorite job.
The tip about just running it back as tank is very good, and the healer being able to focus on keeping what is still alive up is also a great point! 😊
I have found healing the duty support and forcing wall-to-wall pulls. The NPCs attack one enemy at a time, so mobs take forever. If you can heal that, you can heal anything.
One of the hardest skills for me to master has been learning when (not) to resurrect DPS. Often as a healer there's an impulse to rez somebody as soon as they fall. After all, getting/keeping people on their feet is the whole purpose of healing. However, if you've got a spicy pull and it's not going well for some reason then spending the resources (time, MP, Swiftcast) on a dead DPS rather than the tank can cause that tank to hit the floor themselves and now you're out those resources AND don't have a tank. Remember that as a healer your priorities are yourself, your co-healer, tanks, and then DPS.
And DPS, if you die during a dungeon pull it's often more helpful to just respawn and try to catch up than it is to wait for revival. You won't suffer the weakness penalty and you save your healer 2400 MP.
Honestly being a healer in dungeons like Aurum Vale are some of the only times when I actually feel something when doing regular, daily content in XIV. There's something appealing about the limited tools that you have compared with high mob pack DPS that just disappears over the course of Heavensward and Stormblood.
i main healer in most games, but for some reason i was scared to heal in this game. but i forced myself to play SCH (for RP reasons) and even though i didnt really know what i was doing at first, Selene really helped that first level 30 guildhest i did. after i did my first new dungeon as healer and got advice my anxiety was gone. i loved it.
what i hate is when someone says they are new to tanking/healing then ignores all advice given. i dont understand how people can say they are new to their job and then just ignore everyone most or all of the dungeon
got a DRK tank in Haukke Manor who had never tanked before and said so up front. they forgot their stance so we mentioned it. they pulled a second pack, ignored us during the pull which i also then said turn Grit on and AOE to keep aggro, they then said sorry and turned it on but then... never used AOE at all during the dungeon or paid any attention to the mobs attacking the rest of the party, which we also were telling them to pay attention to.
Yeah anyone that outright ignores advice in that way always gets quite grating! That particular story sounds familiar, and the worst part is that I've seen max level tanks doing something similar 😣🤣
How to deal with it? You queue the F up.
I'm an experienced healer, started a shield healer and left a trail of dead bodies behind me when leveling sch.
Tank died? team wipe? Oh well, run back and keep pulling.
Team complains? "shit happens, pull".
The nice thing with FFXIV's player base is that the vast majority of players are fairly chill about a wipe or two,especially when you apologize for making a mistake (assuming you're even the one that made the mistake).
I've leveled every single Healer to 90 on my main,and as such have had countless wipes due to making mistakes. And when I apologized the Tank often ended up saying something to the effect of "nah,that was my bad". I've had a few salty DPS players here and there,but in the years I've been playing this game that's maybe around 20 people out of the thousands of others I've queued into content with.
This game's players are much more forgiving than one might initially think,so don't worry too much about the ones that aren't.
I have healer anxiety and a little bit of tank anxiety because I'm afraid of my mistakes ruining everyone else fun but I really want to give them both a go. I think I might just try it with npcs to get more comfortable.
I am sure with some practice you'll be able to do it with players without needing to worry! 😊
Queue up with friends, have fun, laugh when you wipe but always try not to. After 1-2 bad runs you will realize it's not a big deal and this will help you when going solo. Another thing is to remember that a swift raise is a heal as well. Don't try to save everyone when things go wrong. Focus on your tank and yourself and then heal others if you can. Otherwise, it's not bad to be ready to raise instead of healing a dps. Even the tank might die on a pull and all you have to do is raise them and heal the dps and the pull will still be okay. I have seen a lot of healers panic and thus take too long to raise someone.
As a healer/tank enthusiast, I can agree with DPSxiety. That being said, I have played DPS often enough to be, more or less, comfortable with the jobs.
To be fair, the game's MSQ literally has that part of the quest chain in Gridania where a group are berating their healer, Edda, for letting the tank die. Not very encouraging to new healers.
Genuinely, a good way to get into healing is to start a character as a healer (which means CNJ and WHM). A lot of early content, due to item sync, resulted in it being extremely forgiving to the healer; everyone, including the healer, can tank some mobs out to Haukke Manor (the last dungeon with a level below 30).
I had zero experience with MMOs (PC gaming wasn’t feasible for me until college), and when I started, I chose CNJ/WHM because I perceived healing as the easiest role. Conceptually, I was right, but I was less correct in practice. But, with the early game forgiveness, it led to me learning how to heal in a (relatively) safe environment.
Not only that, not long after, I picked up RDM, and in a run of Hallowed Halls against the last boss, our WHM went down. I had a singular healing spell with the experience of doing the last expansion as a healer, and thus proceeded to do a full-on shift to a healer to carry the GNB and NIN far enough that the GNB could put down the boss before we went down.
And we succeeded. NIN went down before me because I had to prioritize myself and GNB to succeed, but they got us down to 40%, and I proceeded to survive until about 10-15%, having ended all DPS to maintain MP for healing (Vercure is basically 1000MP to heal like the WHM's 400MP Cure1, and all I had to regain MP is Lucid and MP ticks). But by the skin of their teeth and my past experience as a healer, we made it through.
Even now, I appreciate healing because it taught me party awareness. Sure, I slip up sometimes, or react too slow sometimes, but it's taught me to be mindful of the others here to the point where I still assist healing people as RDM, and will put shields/heals on others as tank (I don't do Ultimates, so being unoptimal is fine if it means the struggling healer has to struggle less)
i actually messed up an extreme so bad i got invited into the party's discord server and they were all russians yelling at me till i learned to heal right it was great and it got rid of my healing and social anxiety forever
That is certainly a case of being thrown right into the thick of it! O.o I'm glad it somehow ended well?!
The main things I learned when I tried healing:
1) Stick near the tank in dungeons, when the tank uses sprint you sprint that way they can never avoid your heals.
2) Learn to love your party list make it big if it helps
3) To all you new WHM players HOLY IS A HEAL!!! Six seconds of stun is six seconds of not needing to heal the tank.
4) If it helps look at HP as a resource the only point that matters is the last one.
Honestly just by healing. More you do it the less anxiety you'll feel. It works with almost every form of general anxiety
I got rid of my healer anxiety by spamming Hall of the novice healer role tutorial then practice being a healer for my chocobo for hours on end, then started spamming dungeons till I was confident starting with Sastasha only moving on till I was confident. Make sure you do it with a pure healer as well.
I hail from WoW, where i didn't play a healer due to how you just get 1 class per character, so never I bothered and chose to tank/dps
playing it in FF14 and "needing" to level up healers gave me a neat oppertunity to try these healing aspects, which wasn't bad
I'm still on free trial, so can't speak for higher levels, but I have found it much easier to play as a healer than it is to tank
Since most tanks tend to wall pull and have mechanics to deal with, my choice of "play it safe and steady" does not mesh well with the speed people are used to
I've found Scholar to be the most fun and easiest to learn, while at first not having as many heals as white mage, the shield aspect really gives alot of leeway to dps more often
I do agree though on the aspect of DPS axiety in terms of fear of being called out for under performing or parsing badly
I take the time to learn rotations, what abilities to use and so on, but i do not bother sing those 2min cooldown or abilities since I feel i'm doing fine without
And my mentality is far more casual and may not be aiming for savage or ultimate raiding
I can also add that outside of savage raids and the like, nearly no one will call someone out for bad damage unless it is absolutely horrendous! As long as you use your cooldowns every so often, hardly anyone's going to notice! 😊
@@CaetsuChaijiCh Playing on a controller makes it a bit wonky for certain jobs and button placement
Right now on 66 dragoon I'm unable to easily get to Spineshatter or Dragonfire dives as easily as I was at 60 ;w;
But it's all about muskill memory in the end and getting used to changes and pruning every few levels xD
Stuff taht I should worry about when I'm at max level anyway but no harm in building habits early if possible x3
What worked for me was to play WHM. I leveled SGE to 90 only to realize playing it stresses me way out and made me avoid the role. Went back to WHM and problem solved.
i want to be a good healer but i struggle with BADDDD healer anxiety, i just made it to level 60 with my white mage and no matter how much i read and practice...this CANT be the same brain that got me through college lmao😅
i love being a healer but when i have to revive someone, its like i freeze and forget where my swiftcast and revives are ;_; and im scared of being a liability aaaa
i have to keep my inhaler at hand as im freaking out
people are super nice (maybe bc im a lala and a sprout) but i wanna not get yelled at or judged. im def trying to do my best
I'm actually one of those healer mains with DPS anxiety... All stems from my wow days where I was forced to swap to dps in a new expansion, taking hunter which turned out to be underperforming and then getting complaints about not pulling my weight...
No one wanted to help me gear and pugs didnt want hunters either... I was recruited as a tank so it felt real bad and dont want to experience that again...
Thats a terrible experience! It's also just incredibly rude to recruit you as one role, force you to change and then be surprised when you are having a hard time adjusting :(
meanwhile me casually causing a couple of wipes as a sprout healer because of bad decisions (choosing to dps during moments where i shouldve started spam healing)... i am only glad that the ppl ive played with have been supportive or at least not outright blaming me (even though i know it's my fault) lol
granted these were one of the first few arr dungeons which i guess isnt as serious still... but i always feel bad when my tank dies
My main bit of healer anxiety is honestly just from wall pulls when there are a bunch of autoattacking mobs because it genuinely feels like add pulls (my mind always goes to the Ice Sprites in stone vigil normal) hurt so much more than bosses.
So my advice to new healers is that yes definitely learn how much you need to heal so you're not wasting healing on boss pulls (a simple regen or Eos will keep a tank okay during boss autoattacks) but don't be afraid if you end up having to spam heal on big add pulls because that's honestly normal. Adds like doing a lot of damage in my experience.
Also Scholar SEEMS to have an easier time with this than white mage for some reason, but that might just be memory bias on my part
i think my biggest issue is dat im generally a bad player so playing healer or dps stresses me out. i used to play way back in ARR as a WHM main. when i returned i skipped story and mained tank. now every time i play dps or healer i die a lot due to a lack of knowledge of mechanics. on healer or dps i just follow around others, and on tank it didnt matter much if i mess something up cos i could mit or live with 4 vul stacks at time.
i tried to start thinking for myself now to understand mechanics and not just follow people around so i die a lot now. and dats kinda giving me anxiety about healing/dpsing (i play astro, reaper and dark knight). its not dat i dont know how to heal, ive mained healers for 10 years in mmorpgs, but rather i think the overwhelming amount of new content to me with new mechanics is just to much.
i started a new character now and will play the story from heavensward onwards so hopefully it will help me learn game mechanics/knowledge dat im lacking.
I do recommend practicing the dungeons in duty support then! That way you can have all the tries you need to learn a mechanic and get acquainted with what to do about it, without anyone else complaining! 😊
YOU ARE AMAZING. Ain't no way you are worse than me hahaha
What i did was that i just forced myself through the anxiety and i was mostly fine lol 😂
I recently ran msq roulettes as a tank, and healer let us drop to the brink of extinction, lol. They actually forgot they were a healer, not a DPS (their own words). Nobody gave them hard time for this, ofc. But as healer main I can totally emphasize, because the only thing I kind of dislike about ffxiv healing, is the DPS meta. Makes things more difficult and boring at the same time (for me personally).
Anyway, rant aside, my sprout healxiety manifested in me having a chat macros “I’m sorry, guys, my bad =(“. I totally got more comfortable with time, but I still feel inferior in healing, because every single healer I meet is so competent and amazing at their jobs
Actually noticing how well the healers are performing certainly tells me that you are paying attention to the group, so I am sure you can become a great healer if you aren't already! 😊
Awesome and helpful
I'm glad to hear that! Thank you!
My tip will be: you don't need to heal alone. If you have friends willing to do dungeons with you, have them play summoner in low level dungeons (for lvl 4 physick and lvl 12 resurrection), then bard (lvl 35 Warden's paean), gunbreaker (lvl 45 Aurora), Paladin (lvl 58 Clemency) or Red Mage (lvl 54 vercure and lvl 64 verraise). If you have four friends, you can even get a blue mage. These jobs will be able to take the slack as you learn to heal. I saved dysfunctional roulette parties with summoner, paladin and red mage.
If you don't have friend, try your spells with the Guildhests, which are short and low level, then trials and raids in which you are 2 or 6 healers. You can also solo heal the main scenario roulette, which are quite predictable and nice to nail the base of your rotation.
i used to be really anxious when playing healer, i first started out as scholar and i never knew what were barrier healers and pure healers, and i remember getting wiped in a trial multiple times and i blamed myself. we eventually finished it but i felt so ridiculous how we managed to defeat it with only 2 people barely scraping it by, and thought i wasn’t doing enough pure healing. there was also another time where my friend mocked me for healing less than them (me as a lvl 90 scholar using emergency tactics+adlo and them a lvl 80 astrologian using a benefic 2) and then also telling me my healing will never match up to their warrior healing. i almost quit playing the game then and there. overtime i learned to realize that everything has their limits, it would make sense that their astrologian would do more PURE heal than a scholar trying to use a pure heal, even when there’s a level difference. and warrior will always heal more than scholar or practically any other healer in the matter, but that’s not my job as the healer to care about, because in the end, whether they mock me for not being able to heal as much as them self healing, my role as a healer is to help the PARTY and not only 1 person. the lessons and advice i’ve learned was knowing limits. each healer was designed different and unique, it’s not an issue if a scholar or sage can’t pump mega heals, it’s just by job design that they can do other things besides mega heals better and vice versa for white mage and astrologian. also for any new healers that worry and get stressed whenever someone dies, we have a resurrection spell for a reason 🤪 damage comes and goes, if someone makes a mistake and you can’t heal them in time, slap a quick ressurect spell on them and then continue blanking out 👍
As somebody with no patience, the way I got over my healer anxiety was with my DPS queue time anxiety.
If you die, sometimes the best you can do is just acknowledge in chat why you died. Usually, if it's bc it's your 1st time or you forgot a mechanic, someone will explain how something works.
You got the priority wrong. 1st Priority is keeping yourself alive because if you're dead Youre Party has in the worst case no one who can pick up
That is of course also true 😊
Honestly when I first played I got sick of not getting pops as a BRD so I said screw it I'll heal and went to WHM. The most fun I've had with essentially playing god.
Been a healer main since mid HW. Somehow, everytime I take a break of any amount of time, I have to battle this anew, despite more often than not, nothing has changed and I know exactly what I'm doing, but I just struggle to press that queue button. No idea why, but it's kinda lame
I imagine it's a fear that you might have forgotten how to, but once you're in it, things go fine! 😊
I'm not sure I ever had healer anxiety...but my first MMO was WoW back in 2004, and since druid looked cool I ended up being a healer (but pvp server so I still got to play with the other aspects of druid even if they weren't optimal!) At the time I simply didn't know that I *should* have anxiety, and it's kind of always been like that, cause you quickly learn in WoW that everything and everyone is anxiety inducing so you might as well just block it out if you want to play the game. (it didn't stop me from having tank anxiety when I came to this game though T_T)
Now 20 years of online games later where I have tended to fall into heal/support/tank roles, and this game is easiest the chillest game of its kind to play, at least in the casual still hasn't gotten to the last two expansions sense. I have no idea if it has something to do with the data center I'm on or something else. But the most toxic person I've encountered is a DPS asking my healer if it was ok for the tank to go faster then getting annoyed and calling it "cringe" when it was pointed out that the tank (me) was going slowly for the healers benefit.
And the worst they could do was just...not dps. Like OK my man, if you want the dungeon to go even slower, be my guest. I don't care, the healer prefers it, and the other dps also does not care.
I don't know if it's a bad take or not, but I feel like folks hopping into the leveling queue shouldn't get mad if things aren't being run the way they "prefer". I know that rushing is How We Do Things Around Here, but I think there is a critical place in learning to play this game or any game, where using the bot party is no longer helpful, but getting thrown directly into wall to wall can be particularly difficult or even off putting for a new healer.
The only thing that "scares" me as a happy and confident healer is those situations where the whole party wholeheartedly believes that we just survived something that we absolutely *should not have* and then the tank decides that it is now time to start limited testing themselves (and by extension me). It is *fun* cause I always end up figuring out something new but it is also exhausting even when its a competent tank that knows what they're on about.
Well and tanks that forget about bee's...but every tank I've ever had that forgot about the bee's was a good sport about it so its fine.
if a dps dies, its fine. sometimes, rezzing them means you use less of your ressources than desperately trying to keep them alive while your focus should be someone else. the debuff from getting rezzed isnt bad enough in most content to try to avoid it at all cost.
the living first: if someone dies, dont make it your highest priority per default. if you rezz and two others die while youre rezzing, the rez wasnt worth it^^
you are your #1 priority: if you die, no one gets any more healing. if someone else dies, you can still heal the others and rez. dont ignore your own hp bar!
At every beginning of the dungeon , I always have the Healer Anxiety especially when my TANK forgot to turn on Tank Stance and start to SPRINT😅
Just need to have thick skin honestly. When l was new healer, l think l wiped 2 hours on zodiark and 1.5 hours on hydaelyn. What happen is that people voted to abandon, not to kick me. Yes, it was the story mode, not extreme.
If the groups wipe for that long without any significant progression, it is often not just one person who is to blame either, so it would be weird if they kicked one individual as well! Right when zodiark was new I also didn't get him down until the second session! 😊
Most annoying thing I have ran into has to be someone tanking with such an ego that after another player said a thing just as a tip, they take it weirdly personal and as an insult or something and then say something like "you want to tank?" or stuff in those lines. It is very sad that as a tank you instantly take an actually helpful tip or advice as an attack at your own gameplay and then get pissy because of it throwing a temper tantrum like a child.
Thankfully this doesn't happen often and I can only remember 2 or maybe max 3 times someone has done this in my parties xd
Yeah it's always great when they act like that. It's hard to say what's the best approach but I dunno, if I was in that situation and it was severe enough I might just say "no, thats why you're the tank. I'm just guiding you, because it seems you also don't want to tank!" 😂
Good that they are rare indeed!
Healing is actually pretty chill once you realize that people don't drop from 100 to 0 in an instant and you learn to take your time. You also need to realize that it's not your fault if people die to avoidable damage. Im not saying that you should never heal people who stand in crap. But there is no need to panic if your whole group is low due to unavoidable raid/group damage and there is no new unavoidable damage incoming. Focus on the tank because he will be pummeled by the boss and make sure that you stay alive. Your DPS can dodge mechanics until you have time to heal them. Often a hot is enough to get them back up slowly.
I tried being a white mage.. it was stressful. Im not a fan of it. That said, as a Red Mage, i like being able to support heal and high speed rez. That feeling when i rez a whole party in a major fight. or enough so the actual healer can get get the rest of the party after i rez them.... while the boss squishes me to paste
Well that red mage paste was very helpful at saving the group in the moment! 😁
I will heal anything blind, but going in blind as a tank or DPS - ehhhhhhh. I need to feel confident for that.
That is quite interesting! I would imagine it more common to be afraid of healing something you don't know! But it makes sense to be most confident in the role you have the most experience with! ^^
Honestly, I think it's mostly because I just feel most comfortable with the Scholar and Astro toolkits. I love Dark Knight, but healers just feel so much more intuitive for some reason.
healer is actually the most chill role unless your whole party decides to not do mechanics and eat floor AoEs for breakfast. i have more anxiety playing tank than healer tbh. tanks have to lead the way in dungeons and have to set a good pace or else the dungeon becomes excruciatingly long.
My buddy tricked me into swapping to healer then queued. Luckily, it was Sastasha and I was drunk.
That sounds like your friend put themself in danger more than anything else! 😂
Sage is the last job I need to level to 90 and while I heal fine on white mage and ast I just can't heal well on sage. 💀
A scary thing with switching to barrier healers is that they are a lot different from pure ones in that they are (ironically) a lot more about maintaining the tanks hp rather than burst healing it. They also rely more on efficient use of cooldowns so there are more ways to "mess up". However I am sure you will get it with enough practice!
On the channel my guides to sage (as well as my short on it) introduce a bunch of ways you can construct a cooldown order that maybe can help you with learning to deal with big pulls on the job! 😊
same, I’m a WHM main, and Sage just gives me mad healxiety 💀 Not easy to shift those mental gears to shield healing.
Same, SGE in level sync content feels waaaay weaker to heal with than the other 3 healers, not sure why exactly 🤔
Yet LV90 max level can heal with just kardia and ability heals without a care ez mode barrier healer lol
huh, i'm in the opposite boat. i main sage, and am now touching whm last, and struggling with it.
i feel like a pure cure 2 bot, so much healing is on the gcd, and i feel lacking in damage and mobility.
it's amazing how much I refuse to believe that dungeons are the most effective way of leveling xD
I don't want to spam dungeons with other players because I'm too weak a healer for it to be an enjoyable experience, and doing them with bots is stupiditly long.
And here I am having WHM and AST to level up yet...
It is a quite effective way at least and also allows you to practice many of the things you will be doing as a healer 😅 but it is of course not the only way!
For me I think if you can wall to wall heal in lower level dungeons you are doing really well. for me lower level dungeons as a healer are harder than endgame dungeons. And if you have friend who is playing as paladin go run couple of wall to wall pulls in under lvl40 dungeons that will teach you a lot.
(No hate to paladins xD its just that low level paladins dont have that much self healing compare to other tanks. So as a healer when you are running low level dungeons with palading you really need to do your job. ALSO if fail to keep party alive its NOT just your fault maybe the tank is also new to the job and dont really know how to rotate mitigation and if the dps in your party is new he/she might not really know his/her job that well so the pulls take longer and you might have to heal way longer in one pull than you expected EVERYONE has a role in FFXIV remember that and practice makes wonders for the anxiety the more you know about your job the less anxiety you will have SO GOOD LUCK AND REMEMBER TO HAVE GOOD TIME!)
Man I just have anxiety. I missed a button press and didnt actually cast ruin when I wanted and instead cast it a couple seconds later? I am the worst player who has ever existed and everyone knows I messed up.
I'm sorry to hear that! I don't know if it is any comfort, but if I see someone make a mistake, I am often a lot more interested in how they recover from it or resolve it, than actually being mad they messed up 😊
At least you are actively attacking! 😁
What kinda confuses me. I started as a Healer. I have no problem healing. I have no problem wiping and trying again. But when i try and touch tank anxiety kicks hard for some reason. So far in every game i played i was a tank main Healer secondary.