In the common parlance of FFXIV discussions and advice, there are the terms proactive and reactive. The terms mean what you think they mean, but the way they are applied is wrong. Or at least, that’s my feeling. I wanted to take a few words to give my thoughts on it.
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As an AST I feel this in my bones, tf you mean I'm reactive I'm setting up two heals before the boss even deals damage because burst is coming up and I have zero weave slots for like 10 seconds when that comes up, at best!
Second!
the way you killed that poor hrothgar at 1:14
❤
I was afraid of playing scholar for the whole proactive reason until I saw just how much healing the class actually does. Yes sacred soil and succor should go down before a raid/party wide but most everything else in the tool belt is a raw heal
This is a great video and speaks to me well. I actually find that shield healing is much easier for me. It's not because of proactive or reactive, I just find it easier to deal with health depleting if it's doing so slower. Some people prefer to do so by simply healing when health is low.
The proactive and reactive conversation really confused me as a healer. This is a great video for those that are trying to encourage Newbies to heal.
I think the way we typically see those words used is very surface level. I don't think it's completely wrong, but it does really fail to grasp the individual skills of each healer.
One of my biggest issues with teaching a friend of mine to heal is that he almost never took any of my advice at face value. I would tell him "X in this situation isn't very useful, try to use some of your other tools more often" and he would end up just doing both. He could never get over using Medica II all the time and using Holy way too late into pulls for it to be actually effective.
While we're on the topic of healer semantics, I'm not a fan of the phrase "pure healer" either. For one, it implies that the other archetype of healing is somehow "impure", despite that not at all being the case, and for two, it conveys the wrong idea about what those jobs do. "Pure healer" gives the idea that they "purely heal", a contrary sentiment to the community-wide knowledge that healers are expected to do damage when time allows. I much prefer calling WHM and AST "regen healers". This highlights the real differences between the archetypes, as regen healers don't have shielding GCDs, and shield healers don't have regen GCDs. It's also just more direct. To the uninitiated, calling something a "pure healer" begets the question of what "pure" even means. In the same way that "proactive vs reactive" is unhelpful and misleading, I dislike the nomenclature of "pure healer" and much prefer "regen healer".
Hes cooking
always remember the 4 rules of planning
1: Make the plan
2: execute the plan
3: expect the plan to go off the rails
4: throw away the plan
your plans are only as good as your ability to improvise.
i think they are more so for the bare bones of what the jobs do, not the overall scope.
SCH level 50 has Adlo and Succor for shields, and Lustrate/Whispering Dawn for HP….and i guess physick if you wanna be that type of person lol. so a little bit of both
WHM has….no shields at all below 50 (idk when they get their shields)
Lustrate and Whispering Dawn arent both always available unlike Adlo/Succor so having available shielding constantly makes them a 'shield' healer for proactive play
yes once you get to higher levels with more tools the terms arent as set in stone for each healer. but as an entry? i think the terms are perfectly fine
That's my secret. I have no healing plan. Resumes smashing keyboard.
I've always thought of the reactive vs proactive as less of the difference in pure vs shield and more of beginners vs experienced healers like you've said. When I first healed, I thought i just healed when everyone's HP dropped. Now I can plan cooldowns and focus on DPS. There's a balance of knowing when incoming damage is coming out and having a plan for when shit hits the fan.
– Heal/Hots/mitigation has a sligth delay on them.
– The game will priotize incomming DMG over any incomming HEAL (in same timeframe).
– FFXIV is heavy scripted game, by learing the dmg pattern : you can pretty much plan your big heal cds in advance.
with a lot of expereince you also learn where all the possible " oh shit" moments can occur…and will have cds for that too.
I would say ALL healers gain more value out of their tools by playing both proactive and reactive –> based on their abilties!..
LIke always pre cast like: HoTs(heal over time) / mitigation right before dmg .
Burst healing is best used AFTER dmg, (unless you need top someone off before a dmg hit that is).
2 abilities from AST as an example:
[Collective Unconscious]
Gives 10% mitigation, and also gives a HoT. (best used proactive)
[Celecstial Opposition] it's a hot, BUT it is also a direct aoe heal.
this one is best used AFTER dmg. ( best used reactive)
Every healer is absolutely proactive with (ideally) the ability to reactively fix player error or recovery situations. I agree; like you mentioned, Astro is the most proactive healer in the game; it requires the most pre-planning to play effectively despite being a "reactive regen healer". A good approach to healing in general on all 4 jobs is to heal proactively, and then reactively fix issues when they arise
I don't really join in on discussions and what not, but as a healer main I see where you're coming from with the proactive and reactive. It truly is a mix of both. If you're playing a pure healer like white mage, you find yourself being proactive by weaving in your heals when you known the big damage is coming. When it comes to Scholar and Sage, it's easier to be proactive because you're generally just putting your shields on everyone anyways just to keep them topped off. I also find pure healers to do the reactive part much better than the shield healers because their heals are typically heftier. I also 100% agree that 90% of the time, the plan you have will just get thrown right out the window because someone messed up, and a good healer will know how to react to any situation instantaneously, like casting Surecast on yourself so your rez doesn't get interrupted if quickcast is down.
Lol, it's funny you mentioned the Mt.Gulg god pull, I queued up in my leveling roul as whm expecting something simple, then I got a tank who randomly pulled every single pack each time to the end IN MT.Gulg. Luckily I was on my most comfy healer, or we would of had a bad time.
The stuff about new players taking things too literally is real.
The amount of times you would ask a new tank to use mitigations when they w2w, they go "Oh, mb" then immediately use all of them on the one pull at the same time proves that. We gotta provide more when we try to give advice.
Well, it will be like everything in the world, "people like short answers."
Many people don't like to read the long answers when people trying to explain how each healer works, so some people just say in general terms like if more than 50% of the toolkit is meant to be used after people took damage, yeah, people use the word you hate.
And if more than 50% of the toolkit is meant to be used before people take damage, then the other word you hate will be used.
But of course, there is no 100% of one side, or that healer will have a hard time healing people properly.
I swear AST feels like the most proactive healer a lot of the time
a lot of it comes down to learning a fight and knowing what comes where, like i know a lot of places are going to open up with group/raid wide so depending on which healer i am at the time ill react accordingly but i also know that if things hit the fan i can usually recover unless things are just completely spiraling
Whenever people say pure healers are reactive I just laugh at them in astrologian
My plan as WHM always includes gratuitous Holy spam.
Casting a regen pre-pull is proactive healing so I never really understood why people said some healers are Proactive v. Reactive
I feel this Proactive/Reactive conversation is wasted on people who don't want to understance nuance. It works to get over the basic point that regen healers want to restore health that's lost, and barrier healers lose more of their value if the shields don't mitigate damage. The nuance of the argument is less "Proactive/Reactive" it's whether the healer themselves is actively engaged with their job or not. Every healer has things they want to get out before damage goes off – OGCD barriers, damage reductions and even regends depending on the circumstances. The problem is with healers being taught to prioritise their damage over learning how to maximise their healing, and that's a case of learning how to heal less from overhealing so you can do more damage reliably and not what I typically see a lot which is do damage until people desperately need healing. Healer damage is important to push threshholds, but your healer dps is worthless if someone, anyone dies. I'm not asking for healers to heal only, but I will state that in normal content all the way to progging the highest tiers of content overheal first, then work on pushing damage.
I've been leveling scholar and I've been absolutely flabbergasted at how little I had to cast shields for dungeons bosses. I totally expected to get a kit that gives me shields and shit but I'm level 89 and I have like 2 shields???? wtf??? THE shield class is just a more mobile WHM if you're not pushing end game content
I just miss the idea of healing intensive classes like other old mmos. Aion and WoW come to mind. Healing becomes the sole focus and becomes a challenge in itself. Healer on ffxiv for the most part can get boring very fast. I started as a healer main in most mmos but ffxiv has made me leave that role due to it not being how I remembered other games healing. Which I mean is fine since its a different game but forsure a let down since ffxiv for the most part follows the holy trinity.
Great topic! This is so akin to how tanks use their invulns. Yes they can be used to some effect as an oh crap button, higher play sees it as a preemptive tool to set up otherwise impossible pulls