FFXIV Healing Guide For New Healers
So you want to heal in FFXIV, but are not sure where to start. Hopefully, this FFXIV Healing Guide can give you a rough start and get you ready for your first dungeon or piece of content as a healer!
What healer should I play in FFXIV:
There are 4 healers in FFXIV and I would say some are much more approachable to new healers, whereas others are much more advanced. Healers can be split into 2 categories:
Shield healers focus on putting up big shields to protect from incoming damage.
Pure healers pump out huge heals bringing parties from near-death to max health.
Unlock: Take conjurer in Gridania at any level, turning to white mage at lvl30
Scholar: (Shield Healer, easy to learn hard to master): Scholar has simple shield heals and a pet which handles normal healing. This makes it very easy to pick up as a new healer. But there is a lot to manage at endgame/difficult content.
Unlock: Take arcanist in Limsa at any level, turning to Scholar at lvl30
Sage: (Shield Healer, medium difficulty): Sage is new to Endwalker, and combines shields with combat healing, where a player gets healed when you deal damage, similar to Disc Priest in WoW.
Unlock: Unlocks in Limsa, requires you to already have a lvl70 job and purchased Endwalker.
Astrologian: (Pure Healer ish Hard): AST uses mitigation and timed heals to prevent and recover. AST has one of the strongest healing toolkits in the game, but required knowledge of the fight and planning to be at its best.
Unlock: Unlocks in Ishgard, requires you to have a lvl50 job and completed A Realm Reborn
Based on the above, my advice in this ffxiv healing guide for healers would be to try out a white mage if you want to try a pure healer or scholar for shield healing, as they are very beginner-friendly, especially in the early levels.
What is my role as a healer?
It’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking healers just spam heals and keep everyone at 100% but that’s really not the case, healers have the following tasks in dungeons/trails/raids:
Healing: Your main role of course is to keep everyone alive, and make everyone stays alive.
Mitigation: Most healers have a ton of mitigation such as shields, damage-reducing abilities and even being able to rescue people out of AoE’s, your job is to make sure if big damage is about to hit that people are as prepared as possible.
Damage: Believe it or not, healers are called green DPS for a reason, if everyone is above 75% health and things seem stable, you should be attacking. Generally at endgame, you should be damaging as a priority and healing when necessary.
Resurrecting: Every healer has a revive, make sure people are alive, if your team has a summoner or a red mage, you can also pass this responsibility on to them.
Cleansing: When you see a poison or other debuff that can be healed (small line through it) this can be cleansed, make sure if your parts are taking damage over time to clean these.
Tips To Get Better At Healing In FFXIV:
So hopefully you have a rough idea now of what type of healer you want to be and what you should be doing, I want to cover some tips in this FFXIV healing guide that’ll turn you from a sprout novice healer to a pro ready to push savage or extreme content.
Tip 1 – Don’t overheal:
If someone is at 99% hp and you heal them, any health over their max is overhealing, which is a waste, instead of healing, you could be dealing damage. So make sure not to panic heal, people have self heals and players heal over time anyway, so generally unless there is huge damage incoming, wait until they really need healing. As you get more comfortable healing you’ll feel safer letting people drop below 50% before even thinking about healing.
Tip 2 – Heal off of GCD:
The global cooldown system is around 2.5 seconds in FFXIV, meaning you get to use one ability every 2.5 seconds, this can be reduced with material and some healers will do this. A term you will hear is “weaving” this is using abilities that are outside of the GCD window between your GCD moves. as a healer, a good thing to focus on is dealing damage every 2.5 seconds, and then throwing out a heal white your attack is on cooldown between attacks.
Tip 3 – Always be casting:
We talked about healing off the GCD, but the main way to get the most damage/healing is to always be casting. Always have your GCD on cycle. If you have to run from a boss, throw out an instant heal or instant attack on the way. healers such as AST can use “lightspeed” to make all attacks instant for a period, healers like scholars have a casted attack and an instant attack, so try to always be doing something.
Tip 4 – Mana Management:
Some classes burn through mana much faster than others. As you start adding material that reduced your GCD, your mana can really take a hit. Simply needing to ressurect can hit your mana hard. So try and manage your mana, always use the spell “lucid dreaming” to regen mana. Also, Be mindful that if you resurrect another healer they resurrect with very little mana, so you may need to help heal until they stabilize.
Tip 5 – Take time to learn your class:
Healers have some of the most confusing and complex combinations and rotations and it can feel like you are very weak if you don’t understand your class. My first time playing Sage, I thought it was awful, after taking time to learn fully what everything does, it feels really fun and powerful to play!
This FFXIV healing guide should hopefully give you some basic tips to get started!
Gear and Materia:
Gear and materia are so important as a healer, it can change a small little heal, to a giant crit heal that takes someone to full HP. It’s really important to understand at endgame what stats are best for your class. For example, I play Astrologian with an almost full spell speed set-up, massively reducing my GCD window, meaning I can get more attacks per fight.
Other healers benefit from crit, so their shields/spells crit often and both deal huge heals and trigger other combos that require a crit.
An overview of the below stats to think about:
Mind – this is your main stat for dealing magic damage, vital!
Piety – This is your mana regeneration. Make sure you have enough to get through fights, but too much is a waste (as you could have damage/healing increases).
Critical hit – Crit chance and crit damage. healers generally want a lot of this. Huge heals and huge shields are so important.
Determination – Increases healing and damage and is your go-to filler stat. If your gear is capped on crit, determination is usually a good option
Spell speed – reduces your GCD timer. so you cast a spell 2.5 seconds later you can cast it again, spell speed could reduce that 2.5s to 2.3. This is huge for healers and in Endwalker a lot of healer builds are seeing heavy spell speed melds. Be wary with more spell speed mana will burn faster.
Direct hit – increases damage. On paper not great for healers but it has its uses and can be a good filler in some builds looking to max out damage on difficult raids.
This can seem very confusing and I highly recommend as a new player just to use a guide that tells you what material to use for your class. Then as you learn and adapt you can switch materia to your needs. Struggling with mana – add piety, feeling slow – add spell speed, feeling weak – add crit/det.
If you’re looking to press into challenging content I highly recommend the balance discord, they do all the research for you and tell you what to aim for, including openers and rotations for peak performance:
Have Fun:
Healing can seem stressful and overwhelming, people start dying and you start panicking. But try and enjoy healing. It can be so fun dealing damaging, healing your team, throwing out buffs and support, and those epic healer moments when you save the day. I find healing the most fun role in FFXIV and I want to help get more people into it, so my main piece of advice is to enjoy it and have fun.