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What is healing like in comparison to WoW?
Squishydew
Member UncommonPosts: 1,107
Please don't be upset! I realize theres probably plenty of people that dislike WoW, or are tired of comparisons.
I have quit WoW and don't enjoy it anymore, but i did for a long time, so It's an easy baseline for me to use.
I'm a healer by heart, and i haven't been able to find a fun healing game for a long time, so I'm wondering what healing in FFXIV is like in comparison to WoW, is there anything to make it stand out, whats different, whats the same?
I'm not looking for praise or bashing on either game, just a balanced opinion preferably from someone that enjoyed both games 
Thanks a ton!
Comments
First off, I'm not 50 yet, so I don't have all the abilities yet. That said, healing on whm is very similar to most mmos including wow. So far I have:
Cure - small heal (efficient, procs free cure 2)
Cure 2 - big heal (less efficient)
Regen - HoT
Esuna - Cleanse
Medica - AoE heal
Virus - debuff from arcanist
Healing plays as: Cure 1 until Cure 2 procs. Cure 2 if needed. Medica for AoE. Keep Regen on Tank.
Pretty standard stuff. I can't speak for scholar though.
You should look up some posts by mtibbs. He is a raid healer and has a lot of experience healing in this game. He wrote up some stuff about it recently. If you look up his post history you should be able to find what you're looking for
I agree with Izanon. I have been playing a White Mage since Beta 2, and its a lot different than playing a Priest in WoW (something I did for about 6 years). In addition to everything said above, you also have to watch your mana like a hawk because you don't have many mana regen abilities and you can run out before you know it if you just blast big heals out all the time. You will find yourself throwing a lot of little heals out waiting for a proc so that your big heal costs no mana, which is a HUGE benefit when you are healing boss encounters.
It's challenging for sure and you feel quite accomplished when you can save a party from death. You can also rez people in battle when you get to a certain level and that can be the difference in the fight, but it takes a long time to cast, so you have to make sure everyone is topped off before even attempting that because by the time the rez animation is done, most likely the tank will be pretty beaten up.
You can also Swiftcast it, but the mana cost is still quite big.
Scholar and whm work amazingly well together.
Yes, you also don't need to let the game decide for you that arcanist can't be the healer. Of course you will need to make the party yourself, but in all honesty, 3 dps and an arcanist can beat the three starter dungeons.
I know this because I was both the main tank + main healer in the last two of them.
Keep the tank up with cure and throw some dots or nukes inbetween. It's easy enough.
Absolutely. In early dungeons you tend to just cast cure on the tank some with very little in the way of fight mechanics to distract you from just standing there casting. Then it gets more difficult as you get higher level.
Unlike WoW (can't speak for last couple expansions, but its what I remember) where most of the leveling dungeons were very easy, then suddenly big jump of difficulty into raid content, there's more of a balanced progression here as you levelup. Once you dip into the mid range mechanics are slowly added to bosses that require more thought, with more mechanics being added as you head towards 50. Several of the high level (but sub 50) 4 man dungeons are relatively difficult compared to what people might be used to from other non max level dungeons in other games.
There's quite a few bosses in 4 man content that are comparable to raid bosses in other games in terms of amount of mechanics to deal with. After you clear the newbie dungeons there'll be very little in the way of clean tank and spank.
Game does reasonably well at easing you into it though as you go along. The main story will have you go through most of them once as quest objectives as you level up.
Currently playing - FF14ARR
Previous games - SWG, World of Warcraft, ShadowBane, Warhammer, Age of Conan, Darkfall, Planetside Asheron's Call, Everquest, Everquest 2, Too many.
If you want different then you should level Scholar. It's very different style of healing. Very active, you can add DPS by throwing out dots while not healing and you have great damage mitigation skills.
Personally i find Scholar healing much more fun than the simple WHM Cure > Cure II > Medica II spam.
I'd say it's roughly comparable but maybe slightly more difficult on average. Not a big difficulty increase but it is there. Tank healing I would say is easier (standard boss melee in this game doesn't hit tanks overly hard in many fights compared to WoW) but with more mechanics requiring healing the rest of the group on average than in WoW.
There's a large amount of boss mechanics that people really need to avoid but can be relatively difficult to actually avoid in practice at a 100% rate for the entire group. Getting these people back on their feet and/or healing them when they were hit for 90% life while maintaining the standard healing normally required anyway is where some extra challenge lies. There's a great deal of "don't stand in the fire" in this game.
Your ability to carry the group to success is probably a little higher in this game vs WoW as well when the rest of the group plays suboptimally, which can be neat.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
From a tank's perspective, healing and aggro are fairly different from what WoW is currently. It is closer to early EQ1 in how healing draws massive amounts of aggro. A tank needs to constantly do threat building skills on every non CC'd target to keep aggro off healers. Healing before the tank has established aggro on everything will result in a mob pealing off to you. This tends to put the tank behind the 8 ball because he has to build aggro on an off target to get it off you, and risks loosing the main target to a DPS.
The 2.5 sec global cooldown presents a different approach than you see in WoW for both tanks and healers.
I have not raid healed yet, but it seems to be the pace is a bit slower and less frantic than WoW, which is nice.
Part of me loved the frenzy of spam chain healing a 25 man raid as everyone's hp was constantly dropping from 100% to 10% every other second, but it was also pretty absurd in another way.
In FFXIV, there are some fights where people will take spike damage like that, the Ifrit fight is an early example, but it's usually less random and more predictable, which is good since your heals are generally on the longer GCD - you wouldn't really be able to spray and pray heal in most cases...
Another thing I noticed is that the difficulty curve for healing is really strange in this game. The first several dungeons you do are very easy unless your group makes a major blunder...then you get to the final boss of Thousand Maws of Toto-rak, the 4th dungeon (I think) and you find yourself in a situation where you will probably need to use your limit break to win without any deaths (at least, that is my experience, it may be because I had groups that didn't know the fight well both times I did it)...then things go back to being pretty easy again for awhile. I haven't done Titan yet, and the last few dungeons I did, though they went smoothly, I can see having been challenging if I didn't have a knowledgeable/competent tank there to explain the fights beforehand. It seems like things will start getting tougher from here on (mid 30s).