Healer Guide

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

Offense

Healers in Final Fantasy 14 are expected to use their offensive spells and deal damage. You should not follow in Sylphie's steps in only wanting to heal.

But I don't want to do more! I want to heal! I'm good at healing! You can't make me do those other things!

— Sylphie

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Good healers are able to keep party members alive while dealing damage. Compared to equally-skilled players, healers are able to do about 50% of the damage of a DPS role. By contributing to damage, you are helping the party and yourself in making engagements shorter, creating a possible feedback loop:

• 1 Tanks will only need to tank for shorter amounts of time, which in turn saves some of their mitigation abilities and resources for the next encounter; defeated enemies cannot deal damage.
  • 0 By prolonging an engagement, more of their abilities will be on cooldown, which may result in them having less tools to aid in their survival, which will make your attempts at healing them harder and more strained.
• 1 Similarly, you, the healer, will need to spend less of your MP and cooldowns for the engagement. Your next engagement will be easier if you have more tools available at your disposal.
  • 0 By prolonging an engagement, you and the tank may not even have enough resources to get through the trash pull, which may result in the tank being KO'd.
• 0 While DPS have multiple cooldowns that deal great amounts of damage, will eventually run out and resort to doing much less damage. This may also misalign their cooldowns and resources which will disrupt their rotations and pace, slowing down future encounters.

Remember to Always Be Casting – it is as simple as ABC; do not stand around doing nothing. Keep casting offensive spells until you need to heal someone. All healers have a very, very simple rotation, consisting of one to two offensive spells. There is no excuse to not be attacking if you are able to.

• Every healer has a damage-over-time (DoT) and a basic attack spell. Keep your DoT active on the boss at all times, and spam your basic attack spell.
• Every healer has an area-of-effect (AoE) spell. Spam it on mob pulls.
• Some offensive abilities don't cause you to go on a global cooldown ("oGCD"). These should be used as much as possible. (WHM: Assize, Afflatus Misery, SCH: Chain Stratagem, AST: Earthly Star, cards).
• To maximize the amount of time you are able to spend damaging enemies, prioritize using healing abilities, skills that can be used in between spells, over spell-based healing.

Healing

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

• The worth of a healer is measured in how much damage they deal while keeping the party alive. For this reason, you need to maximize the use of healing oGCDs:
  • Healing GCDs (e.g. Cure II) are spells that put you on the global cooldown, thus costing your party one cooldown's worth of your damage.
  • Healing oGCDs (e.g. Tetragrammaton) are abilities that do not delay your spells (besides their animation, known as "clipping") and do not cost MP; so you should use them as much and as efficiently as possible.
• Heal without waste: If you heal someone at 90% of their max HP for 30% of their max HP, you've wasted two-thirds of your heal. Instead, you should keep damaging the boss and only heal them when they are lower, unless they would die otherwise (e.g. tankbuster/special mechanic).
• Learn to rely on regeneration since regeneration spells always have the highest total potency.
• Be aware of the range of your healing, which usually means staying near the middle of the arena.
• Using Swiftcast on a heal to save someone in a pinch is not ideal, but it'd certainly better than having to resurrect someone.

• Know your tank's ultimate cooldowns, known as "invulns":

Job	Action	Effects	Tips
Paladin	Hallowed Ground	Simply makes the paladin invincible for 10 seconds.
Warrior	Holmgang	Prevents the warrior's HP from going below 1; they may still be damaged during the duration.	Unless below level 58, warriors can entirely heal themselves with Raw Intuition / Bloodwhetting. Heal them, otherwise.
Dark Knight	Living Dead	Upon the dark knight reaching 1 HP, they will grant themselves a powerful self-heal based them dealing damage. They are unable to be KO'd, but can still take damage. Upon healing an amount equal to their HP, they lose the self-heal.	Do not heal the dark knight if they are stuck at 1 HP for a while. They should eventually heal themselves instantly to max in dungeons. If against bosses, they may need an extra heal.
	Superbolide	Reduces the gunbreaker's HP to 50%, and makes them invincible. If already under 50% HP, their HP is not affected.	Functionally identical to Hallowed Ground apart from the HP adjustment.

Helping your party

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