If you’ve played Final Fantasy XIV for any length of time, you’ve probably come across a dungeon or trial. The first dungeon players can access, Sastasha, is a good introduction for how the rest of the game will play out — a group of players venturing into unknown depths to complete a quest. This cannot be achieved without a healer, the cornerstone of any party.
Perhaps you want to give healing a try, but are confused on where to start or whether you have the basics down. Perhaps you’re a veteran coming back from a break and want to brush up on the best practices. Or perhaps you are curious but intimidated; after all, the role comes with a lot of responsibility — arguably the most out of any other role in the game. If you want to get started, this is the place to do it. Welcome to our comprehensive guide on being a healer.
Choosing Your FFXIV healer
Healers come in two flavors: barrier healers (Sage and Scholar) and pure healers (White Mage and Astrologian). The key to understanding the differences can be boiled down to a single choice: do you want to focus on protecting the party from damage or healing the party from damage inflicted? The choices aren’t mutually exclusive, as all healers can do a bit of both, but the core mechanics of each job lean toward one of the two specialties.
Astrologian starts at level 30 and is available once you have reached Heavensward, and Sage is available if you have another job at level 70 and have purchased Endwalker. To see a description of all of the healer jobs in more detail, check out our guide on which job you should pick. All four healing jobs can handle every bit of content in the game, so it really comes down to what feels good for you to play. If you are aiming to do harder content, such as Savage raids, playing something that feels naturally fun for you is important.
Micromanaging Your Expectations
I’m not going to sugarcoat it — this is, in terms of on-screen things to worry about, the most demanding role in FFXIV. All jobs have to worry about positioning, enemy attacks, rotations, and boss-specific mechanics, as well as personal cooldowns — but healers have to do all that while also keeping people alive. While certainly not the only way to do this, I will outline how I play healers, starting with the UI.
One of the best ways to improve your healing output is to rearrange your UI in a way that highlights the most important thing — your Party List. This is how you will be able to see the health of your teammates the easiest and how you will mainly be healing. By clicking on the party member you wish to heal via the Party List, you’ll be able to quickly select who needs healing and change targets on the fly. It’s a good idea to place the Party List near the center of your screen so that you can easily see your team’s health bars (and also see any incoming fire you’re supposed to avoid).
In the screenshot above, I can clearly see around my character while retaining easy access to my Party List. This provides the most information while not cluttering up your screen too much. Gamepad players can utilize a similar set-up to reduce onscreen clutter while being able to monitor health bars.
The next step to being a more efficient healer is to arrange your Action Bars (or hotbars) in a way that is comfortable and makes sense to you. I play with mouse and keyboard, but this applies to gamepad players, as well. Using my setup above, everything is centered around the WASD keys — allowing me to piano my keys to use the right tool when I need it, while still being able to move around. However you place your actions, make sure you practice where they are so that you’re not accidentally casting Cure III instead of Medica II, for example. Memorizing the placement of your heal buttons allows you to focus on avoiding dangerous attacks, so make it as comfortable as possible.
(For help on how to best setup your keyboard and mouse, be sure to check out our FFXIV hotbars and keybinds guide.)
One more option that could improve ease-of-use would be to use keybinds to target specific party members. Be aware that this could create hotbar button bloat depending on how you arrange your keys. But setting keybinds to target specific party members before casting a spell can be more efficient for some players. By default, party targeting is set to the F1 through F8 keys. Regardless, be mindful of how your party is always arranged on the list by default:
- Player 1 = Yourself
- Player 2 = tank 1
- Player 3 = DPS 1 (Light Party) / tank 2 (Full Party)
- Player 4 = DPS 2 (Light Party) / healer 2 (Full Party)
- Players 5 to 8 = DPS 1 to 4 (Full Party)
Keep in mind that, if you’re using macros, you should never put spells that affect the global cooldown into a macro, as this prevents you from queuing up spells — and this will kill your party. Targeting party members, however, works just fine.
Now that your initial set-up is complete, let’s get into the meat and popotoes of healing — crisis management and triage.
Don’t Panic, Except When You Need To
If you’re new to healing, you will likely start out by playing healers in a very safe manner — watching health bars like a hawk and being on it the instant even a slight pixel is missing. This is, sadly, not a good use of your time or resources. Instead, you should be focusing on dealing damage and healing only when you need to.
The biggest reason for this is that if you are not following your ABC’s — Always Be Casting — you are missing out on damage. healer damage is significant in FFXIV, and at the upper levels of play, can account for a hefty 10% of a bosses total HP. In short, if you aren’t doing damage, you are causing the fight to last 10 percent longer. It is good practice to get in the habit of dealing damage while monitoring your Party List, and healing/shielding when necessary.
The key to healing properly is responding properly, and that’s where a “triage mindset” can come in handy. Triage refers to assigning mental values, or grades, to your party members as they get damaged. If your Paladin eats a tankbuster, but had mitigation up and is only missing 30% of their health, a small heal is all that is required to get them back into the safe zone. But if your Black Mage gets swiped accidentally and is at critical health, that requires a much bigger, and more immediate, response. We’ll go over those responses now, starting with a few key abilities from each healer job and their Role Actions to help illustrate what you can do.
Healing Smarter, Not Harder
Healing is a role based around using the right tool for the job. You don’t use a sledgehammer to hang pictures up on walls, and you wouldn’t use Benediction to heal someone from an auto-attack. Spacing out your heals and not overreacting allows you to deal more damage, conserve more MP, and overall be more effective at healing.
Ideally, for non-raid healing, you want your non-tank party members at or around 80% before deciding to heal them, depending on what is coming next in the fight. Your tank can sustain a lot of abuse before needing a heal, so they should be prioritized only if a tankbuster is about to come out or if their health falls to around 60%. Meanwhile, your other party members cannot take abuse as readily, so they will need healing earlier. If you’re only healing incidental damage, a simple Medica II-style spell is all you really need. If a tank just beefed it and is sitting at 30% life, that’s when you need to use your bigger tools, like Benediction, Essential Dignity, or other similarly potent heals.
Best Practices for Healers
Healing is a role that, as mentioned earlier, involves monitoring a lot of moving parts in the most efficient way possible. Here’s a list of things to keep an eye out for while you practice keeping your team alive:
- Wall-to-wall pulling: This is when a tank pulls all the mobs from where you are currently to where progression of the dungeon stops.
- If you are a new healer, wall-to-wall pulls can be tough to handle. If you feel you can’t handle it, there’s nothing wrong with telling your tank you are new or might not be able to deal with it yet.
- Positioning for AoE abilities: Attempt to position yourself between the tank and your ranged DPS, if applicable. Your AoE heals have a maximum range, so you don’t want to accidentally miss healing the Bard at a critical point. However, boss mechanics come first, so if you have to move out of position to avoid wiping the party.
- Having Swiftcast handy: Swiftcast is primarily used as an “oh shit” button to immediately cast Raise on a dead party member. Starting out, there is nothing wrong with stockpiling it until you need it. However, as you get more proficient at your job, you will learn when you can Swiftcast a different spell for more efficiency.
- Raise priority: Make sure you keep your tank alive, then use Raise on healers first, tanks next, then DPS with the Raise ability (Summoner and Red Mage), and then everyone else.
- When to use Limit Break: Finally, in raids, you do not use your Limit Break outside of a specific circumstance — when a majority of the party is dead in an eight-player party and you are one of the few people still alive. LB3 revives and fully heals the entire party, but at the necessary cost of a damage-dealing LB3, so use it only in dire situations.
With practice, you will soon be able to breeze through dungeons and raids with ease, only periodically glancing at your party list. And remember: a good healer gets the party through the Dungeon, but a great healer does so while speeding up the dungeon run with excellent DPS. It might be stressful at times, but you’ve got this.
