Healing Progression Guide

 

Introduction

Being able to carry the party through the mechanical mistakes is one of the most powerful aspects of raiding as a healer. Specifically in progression, enabling your team to practice through mechanics by recovering over and over, will generally improve the consistency of your group to get through a completely new fight. That, and being able to recover and staying alive just long enough to explore new mechanics. In this guide, we will attempt to cover all angles with some examples and deep-dives to help you improve your progression mindset!

This guide will cover the core topics of developing a progression mindset, recovery and survival tactics, what to prepare for before progression, and general tips and tricks. By the end of this guide, you should have a clear understanding of all the above.

Progression Mindset

Having a progression mindset means that it is needed to have the consciousness to act upon a certain set of priorities. Mainly, survivability, and safety. These priorities are expected to be common across all of your team members during progression.

Communication

• Communicate with your co-healer on your cooldown management.
  For example: A WHM will inform their SCH co-healer of their Temperance cooldown usage and will request additional mitigation somewhere else to spread it out. The SCH will confirm Sacred Soil’s usage during certain mechanics to avoid unnecessary overlapping of mitigation. When healers’ cooldowns are properly mapped, it will show the potential opportunities to map out the other party mitigation cooldowns such as Reprisal, Shake it off, Passage of Arms, etc.

• Communicate with your party regarding party buffs and mitigation.

• Try to add value by contributing to the strategy-solving session from a healers' perspective. Enable your party to have more DPS uptime, but also try to speak up if a certain strategy is heavily influencing your DPS uptime, think of solutions.

• Calling out raises and setting up a raise priority system.

General Precautions
 

• Make sure your tanks are communicating on how they are using their self and party mitigation. This enables you to map your resources for when they don’t have cooldowns. The same applies to your other party members’ mitigation tools. 

• Don’t move your planned cooldowns without informing your party members, especially your co-healer!! Damage variance will always be noticeable and it will cause inconsistencies. Inform your party members if you wish to shift your kit's mitigation or healing cooldowns. 

• Take the lead and be responsible for mapping your party’s mitigation for raid-wides. Your party’s mitigation and utility are yours to optimize on. Healers understand the incoming damage more than any role in the party, therefore, they are the most suitable role to demand party cooldowns at specific times.

• Know your kit and be cost aware! Always take it into consideration when you are prioritizing your heals. While it is imperative to be cost aware, in a progression setup this can become highly situational as you must take the cost/values of safety into consideration. For example, holding onto powerful oGCDs like Benediction for emergency purposes and healing with GCDs instead can be a viable strategy when learning a fight, as the potential value from saving a run may outweigh the cost of a few Cure II’s. 
   

  Optimization During Progression
 

• Get into the mindset where your default state should be spamming Glare/Broil/Malefic/Dosis when you are comfortable on the fight, or generally going for the kill.

• Try to reduce the amount of safety heals over time and communicate it with your co-healer or party. The point is to increase your DPS GCDs without wiping your party.

• Slidecast and pre-positioning for mechanics. 

• Contribute to the strategy-making to improve your GCD uptime where possible and reduce your movement. 

• Start working on your buff and pot usage when you are more comfortable with your GCD uptime. Avoid using Ethers when going for clears because they share a recast timer with your Mind pots!

• Replace your GCDs with better oGCD planning as oGCDs help reduce the DPS loss.

Party Recovery

Your general healing priority begins with yourself as a healer, firstly to survive and secondly to recover. Next, you need to keep the tank alive to prevent any further aggro problems that may result in the enemy going on a rampage and killing everyone. Finally, the DPS, which have the lowest priority. So, the minimum requirement is to have at least 1 healer up, 1 tank up, and a caster that is able to raise.

Party Raise Recovery

 

• Consider the timing of casting a raise to avoid a total party wipe. Casting a raise will consume a GCD, you need to question if that GCD is a priority over healing the party. Will anyone else die when you spend that GCD to raise someone? Timing isn’t the only constraint, but the place you chose to raise matters too, eg. casting raise in a location where the player might end up baiting a mechanic or they will spawn on the wrong side of a mechanic potentially causing a wipe.
  Accepting the Raise timing is a whole other important topic to discuss as well.

• It is also highly recommended to save your SC in progression to when an instant raise is required. 
   

• Communicate your raise priorities within your party.
   

• The default raise priority:
  - When learning new mechanics it is best not to tax healers’ MP, Swiftcast, or GCDs on raises -- specifically when they need to heal. Therefore, casters have the very first priority on raises.
  - During clears or when all mechanics are all known, healers are likely to get the priority on casting raise. This is because at this point healers should be able to manage their MP and are aware of when to time their GCD heals. They should also enable their casters to comfortably DPS. While this is situational, healers should always call out raise targets and request assistance when needed.

Timing Healer LB 3

Timing a healer LB3 to keep the party from wiping is the most efficient use. It is not recommended to delay its usage when 3 or more party players are dead, especially when no raise resources are available. Do not hesitate to pop LB3 prior to an upcoming mechanic where it requires all party members to be alive.
 

General Topics

Party Composition

Utilizing your party's defensive and supportive kit will give you much breathing room during progression. It is essential to understand how their kit works.
 

Once you are aware of your party’s kits, it will make it easier to call out what is needed. For example, your co-healer died and you cannot afford to delay the raise due to an upcoming mechanic, one of the possible solutions would be to have your PLD Clemency themselves or a party member.
 

Casters for example, have Addle, which is a 10% magic damage mitigation, while DNC has Shield Samba (10% mitigation) and MNK increases the group’s HP recovery via healing actions by 10% with Mantra. Communicate with your group regarding the most optimal usage of these abilities during progression.

 

Gearing

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Prior to progression, your choice of gearing is important due to several factors prioritized below:

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VIT
 

• Survival is the most important part of progression, as it allows you to experience mechanics and see through them, and progression is all about moving forward through the fight. HP (VIT) /defensives determine survival; These specs increase with your item level, hence when attempting to prog, your item level will always be your highest priority.
  
  
  MIND
   

• Recovery is your main challenge as a healer. To prevent wipes and to keep going and experience more mechanics. Your main job is to stay alive, first and foremost, then to help others. This includes your ability to continuously cast (Piety) heals or damage spells without running out of resources. This also includes the value of your outgoing heals (MIND), which is your main stat.
  
  
  Sub Stats
   

• Dealing damage as a healer-- while not as impactful as the first two priorities, it is vital when the fight is met with DPS checks. Helping your party pass DPS checks by optimizing your casts’ uptime and melds is important.

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Other General tips

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• Memorize cast names and their effects also, and pay attention to the enemy’s animations.

• Fights will repeat mechanics and they typically have the same name. Know which mechanics have what sort of effect.

• Check new buffs on the boss and new debuffs on allies. Lots of new mechanics have unique and interesting buffs/debuffs, and hovering over them to read their description is often a good way to learn their effect (sometimes they will outright tell you their resolution).

• Bring Super-Ethers for MP recovery. 

• Precast heals/shields depending on the mechanical queues. Learn to time your precasts to perfectly land before or after the incoming damage.

• It is important to know the cause of your party’s deaths as a healer to learn from and to cover for others’ mistakes or help them sort it out.

Invulnerability post-resurrection.

Finding the time to accept the raise is very important during an encounter. This simply due to the invulnerability buff that you acquire after your resurrection. This buff lasts for a while as long as the player takes no action.