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Covering everything you need to know about the White Mage healing job in Final Fantasy XIV. For first time players to savage raiders, this guide covers introductory topics and a bit of theory to understanding why you make your gameplay choices!
White Mage plays drastically different while leveling up than it does at level 80. Some core healer principles are still a struggle while you don’t yet have access to your full kit. You’ll notice more issues with MP, and you’ll rely on GCD heals a lot more the lower your level.
Updated for 6.05
Make sure to grab piety to comfort first!
What about piety? It complicates things. Read more about gearing up healers.
Once you have access to your full kit here are some fundamentals to make sure to follow:
Use Divine Benison on cooldown where you can, and generally do not save Benison for tank busters. Tanks should not need a benison to survive a buster; if they’re in a situation where the small 500p shield is the difference between life or death, something has gone seriously wrong, although in that sense it’s may help you with first time progression of a fight. Tanks have plenty of personal mitigation tools in their kit to work with, and no buster is designed to ever need a shield from a healer. You will get much more healing out of using bension frequently, thus saving you other single target heal casts, than you would by sitting on it during a fight.
Most importantly,
For a simple and easy-to-remember rule of thumb for lilies, try to get it to do two of the following three things:
Which doesn’t mean “don’t use lilies if you don’t meet two of these” (especially if one is the heal!), but multi-purpose is your goal.
What will actual be optimal in any given moment will likely come down to encounter specific rotations anyways.
Nope. Unlike most oGCDs, you don’t need to nor want to aim for the most number of uses of this in an encounter. It’s better to pair it with your highest mp use windows than it is to use it on CD, even if it results in losing a use.
Some math to articulate, assuming it covers 4 GCDs: Let’s say you used it on cooldown on glares: Covering 4 Glares is 1600mp saved. Used twice, 3200mp. Let’s say you hold it for a high burst heal spot, but lose a use: A Medica II is 1300mp, add a Cure III of 1500mp and you’re at 2800mp saved. Assuming the last two GCDs you got off under thin air are just glares, that still puts you at 3600 mp saved, which is more than using it on straight glares TWICE.
Healers overall don’t have a ton of damage buttons, but your main action, in our case
Moving and weaving is a challenge on White Mage more than just about every other job in the game currently. You do have a few tools to try and use to make moving (and weaving!) less awful. There’s a bit of a priority system you can follow, but as always, it’s heavily subjective to the fight and the situation!
Try to follow this priority order:
Every other one, starting with your first, should naturally line up with Dia. for the ones that don’t you have a few options:
No, use it on cooldown every 45s for damage (and mp!)
Why?
First, remember that healing is very subjective, so while the following applies in MOST situations, there are exceptions to every rule.
Let’s compare using assize for damage vs. holding it to heal. Assume when we blow it on damage we have to use any non-afflatus GCD heal to compensate the “lack” of a heal. (Ignore for the moment heal potencies, just assume one heal, assize or a GCD, in this example is enough).
If you were to hold Assize to heal for long enough in a fight that you lost a use, you lose that 400p. If you compare it to not losing a use but having to use a single GCD heal to compensate for the heal, you come out DPS neutral even if you hard clipped the assize. I.e. -300p from the lost glare and -100p from the hard clip, vs. -400p from the lost assize.
THAT SAID, if you know you won’t lose a use, holding for a small bit of time to heal and DPS is absolutely okay. Fights with long transitions make this a lot more comfortable, for example 8s going into and out of adds, 7s also has a long set of downtime around its add phase, 6s has some short downtime bursts when the bosses change and fuse, plus right before conflag’s cast. 5s arguably has the fewest windows this tier. So, try and plan accordingly rather than yoloing it! The “right amount” of time it’s okay to hold for is super fight and kill time subjective.
Keep in mind while you might clip every other one if you can’t weave it, those other assizes should still be properly weaved with dia. Meaning, over the course of the fight misalignment with dia creates much larger DPS loss potential if you’re clipping to use it for custom timings.
Realistically, you won’t be making this consideration for EVERY assize use; it’ll be a small few over a fight where it’s even a consideration. In that case the gain potential is bigger because you’re not sitting on it and losing use(s), and when used properly, you’ll likely be clipping less and gaining that way.
Use Presence of Mind as close to on cooldown as you can without clipping to apply it if you do not know your expected kill time.
If you do know your expected kill time, to calculate if you can safely hold PoM for raid burst alignment, calculate the difference between your expected kill time and the nearest “on cooldown” window (below) that’s less than your kill time and subtract 15s for the buff duration.
Timeline windows:
On cooldown:
0 | 2:30 | 5:00 | 7:30 | 10:00 | 12:30
Holding for 30s:
0 | 3:00 | 5:30 | 8:00 | 10:30 | 13:00
Holding for 60s (held 30s, twice):
0 | 3:00 | 6:00 | 8:30 | 11:00 | 13:30
So, if I expected to kill a fight at 8:30, the nearest natural window is 7:30. 8:30-7:30 is 60s and subtract 15s more for the duration of the last use, to get 45s. That means for an 8:30 kill time I can only hold for upwards of 45s before losing an entire use of PoM (and to correctly use would want to align for the 3:00 burst only.
Afflatus FAQ No, building blood lily stacks and using misery is a loss over straight glare casts.
Glare | Glare | Glare | Glare = 4 GCDs for 1200p
Rapture | Rapture | Rapture | Misery = 4 GCDs for 900p
and Misery ?Please consider giving the full guide a read to understand the afflatus mechanic more in depth!
DISCLAIMER
All of the below is subject to being in the middle of the fight! Meaning, these priorities and considerations change when you’re in the first 30s of a fight (therefore no lilies to use) or are in the last 90s of a fight and have to determine whether or not you can resolve misery or not! So take everything with a grain of salt!
It is okay to sit on three black “healing lilies” if you do not need the heal. It is not okay to use a black healing lily heal when you’re fully capped on blood lily stacks. If you need to use an afflatus heal while capped on blood, use misery first, and then the other lily heal.
The DPS benefits of Afflatus heals go down the drain if you never get the misery off. That said:
Using one lily heal and zero others and not resolving misery is a DPS loss equivalent of using a single GCD heal. So if you’re nearing the end of the fight and won’t fill up enough to use misery, but need a GCD heal, don’t feel bad about using one, as it’s still 0mp and lets you weave after.
Using two lily heals and not a third (and then misery) is pretty bad comparatively – so try not to be in this situation After using three lily heals you do not need to immediately blow Misery. You can and should sit on Misery for any of the following uses as the fight allows for:
And as a final note, when you’ve used a single lily, you’ve commited to losing 300 DPS over glare spamming. In a vacuum/low healing situation this means it’s relatively irrelevant to for you to force two other unneeded lily his and then hit misery vs. spamming glare. Do whichever makes more sense for the encounter. (i.e. not bothering to resolve misery may be just as easy at the end of a dungeon that needs no more heals)
Do reach for lily heals before other GCD heals like cure II and cure III. Lily heals vs. oGCD heals will depend on how much healing potency you need, and if you’re going to clip to apply them. I.e. if you need only one 700p single target heal on a tank and your choices are Solace or clipping Glare to apply tetra, then make sure you’ll likely have useful (not wasted) uses for the remaining black healing lilies in your set, if you won’t, you’re better off with tetra.
Burning black healing lilies in downtime to get blood stacks is very optimal in fights! Where resolving misery currently results in a 300p loss over straight glares, using lily heals while a boss is untargetable will net you 300p per lily back when you use misery. This will generally always be a gain or a break even compared to replacing them with straight GCD heals, however if you end up needed one when a boss resumes for healing and movement and weaving, it may not be intrincally worth. – Subjective as always!
Do try to time Misery uses with add phases in fights! It’s a very comfy gain even if you have to blow wasted lily heals to get it.
Dungeon lilies are completely different!
Raids are single encounter fights, however dungeons have both multiple periods of being engaged and being out of combat as well as multiple packs of monsters. For dungeons you want to try your best to have misery prepared for AOE packs, and not to use it on bosses (except the last one, if you have some number of stacks built going in). Let your black healing lilies build up, and try and blow them during downtime and/or while running to the next set of monsters, and using lilies on packs! You can even build up three black healing lilies and three stacks of blood, and on a large pack, use one misery, burn the three black healing lilies on solaces, and then use another misery on the same pack! This is a huge DPS gain!
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