I’ve been raiding in Savage in Final Fantasy XIV for nearly 2 years now. It’s not a long time, and it correlates with Endwalker’s raid scene exclusively, but it has been an interesting two years of learning and developing skills.

I’ve played all of the game’s roles in Savage, with at least one boss kill on each of the roles – but I’ve spent the most time in Endwalker healing, in Asphodelos Savage through Party Finder as Sage (and a mix of White Mage and Astrologian helping my now-main static), with Abyssos being me primarily as Sage and Anabaseios seeing me get all my kills as Sage (with some time goofing around on Astrologian and White Mage with my second static). The process of learning raid healing at the level of actual difficulty in Final Fantasy XIV is…interesting. The role is often dunked on by players as being the most straightforward and thus boring, but I think there’s actually a lot to it that I enjoy. Healers get more decision making capabilities, have more ability to clutch out a win from a sure defeat, and there is a lot of extra context to optimizing a healer that simply doesn’t exist for DPS or tank roles. In the DPS and tank spots, your optimization exists strictly around your rotation and how you contour it to fit the encounter, your group comp, and your mitigation plan, since DPS and tanks have raidwide mitigation roles to play here with Reprisal, Feint, and Addle. For healers, you have a lot of varied choices in making a mit plan, including progression optimizations like placing GCD-cast healing spells as well as the real meat of optimizing, which is seeing how little healing you can get away with while blasting on your DPS buttons, few though they are.

So while I would hesitate to call this a guide (I don’t feel I have the domain authority to offer that for Savage yet!), this is a little bit of what I’ve learned so far in (nearly) two years of Savage healing in FFXIV.

You’re Green DPS Now, Pal

My basis for MMO raid healing was in World of Warcraft exclusively prior to FFXIV, and WoW is fundamentally a different beast in that regard. WoW focuses much more on, well, healing – healers primary role is to keep the raid topped off or at least triaged, and WoW employs much more spiky and rapid damage to keep healers suitably engaged. As WoW has modernized, healers have more toolkit around doing damage and better serve their raid teams if they can keep a reasonably-high level of healing throughput while using downtime to do as much damage as possible, but for most raid teams and most content in WoW aside from Mythic, tuning of things like enrage timers is built assuming that healers aren’t always going to be contributing damage.

On the other hand, FFXIV explicitly balances raid boss enrages for healer DPS and a lot of it – the assumption is around 15% of total boss health exists to be chipped away by healers! This changes the role quite a bit, and is the basis of one the game’s most common jokes – that tanks and healers are just blue/green DPS roles. While for tanks, damage serves other roles (maintaining threat, cycling a combo for HP/MP regen), for healers, damage is filler – but it is also the most important thing to do. Every job in the game has some way to heal themselves or protect themselves, even selfish jobs like Black Mage, who can shield with Manaward and mitigate with Addle – so in a well-oiled raid team, the goal is to balance where the healer needs to intervene against where the raid can self-sustain. This is done in a few ways, but the most common methods are optimized use of off-global cooldown healing abilities by the healers coupled with a raidwide mitigation plan that aligns who is going to use what abilities where to save the raid. Mitigation planning in FFXIV, compared to WoW, is an entire-raid endeavor, because you need to plan where every use of a big ability goes – what DPS should be feinting/addling/physical ranged defensive abilitying a given mechanic, how tanks will swap off Reprisal for raidwide mitigation, and how healers will use their big oGCD buttons to ensure safety.

This level of planning and detail is to allow the healer to spend their time, most of it, doing DPS. While the healing rotation is simple for damage (every healer has a 30-second duration DoT effect that consumes 1 GCD to put up and a single-target damage spell that casts in 1.5 seconds but triggers the full 2.5 second GCD), there are particulars for each job in the healer category around optimization – how you manage movement, if you have big buttons that offer more damage like Sage’s Phlegma or White Mage’s Afflatus Misery, and, most-importantly, how you keep the basics of healer DPS gameplay while managing the raid’s health – keeping your DoT rolling without clipping the duration or letting it fall off, maintaining full GCD uptime while still moving for mechanics and to position effectively for healing range, and staying on top of your MP while you do it all.

So while DPS isn’t your most impactful contribution overall (in a well-played raid team, healers should generally be the bottom two DPSers on any given pull), it is also the basis of how most healers are judged, to the point that healing parses don’t matter and no one cares about or compares healers on HPS but instead on DPS. White Mage and Sage have generally higher personal DPS and are the “selfish” roles of the healers, while Scholar and Astrologian are lower personal DPS but evened out by rDPS because of their buff contributions (SCH brings Chain Stratagem while AST brings Divination and the card system for single-target DPS buffs). Keeping your DPS as high as you can while meeting healing and mitigation checks is the name of the game and how you optimize for that is a fun and fascinating part of the game.

But Did You Die Though?

Speaking of optimization, one of the parts I’ve found the most fun lately is optimizing around passive healing.

In FFXIV, unlike in other games like WoW, passive health regeneration continues while in combat, at a rate of 1% health per 3 second server tick. Because of this, the actual feel of healing in FFXIV takes on a different light as you realize this and start to work within it to optimize your gameplay. Early on in healing in FFXIV, you’ll be tempted to cover every health shortfall, no matter how small or large, and sometimes even with cooldown-locked bigger buttons. The logic, coming from WoW, is sound enough – no one will regen health without a healer acting on shortfalls, so blast them for some healing – but in FFXIV, the logic falls apart.

Optimizing healer gameplay in Savage boils down to knowing when to not heal, and knowing when to not heal involves a mix of knowing when players have certain healing effects on them (knowing what each of the different HoT effects and shields look like) and knowing how long before the next major damage event. If someone is down like 20% of their health but you have 15 seconds before the next major mechanic and they have a HoT effect, you know they’re likely to be full just off the HoT alone, much less the 5% max health passive regen coming in during that time. Having a mitigation plan is a major part of this, as knowing when you’ll be committing your major buttons (/salute) alone defines a big part of what you’ll be pressing and when, but there is room in most mit plans for wiggle in the event of an emergency, and of course you always have short-cooldown stuff that may not be committed in the mit plan every time it’s available as well as falling back into GCD healing if you absolutely need the shot in the arm.

So optimized play in FFXIV Savage raiding looks more like triage and functionally is, because your goal is to not hit a healing button unless it is pre-planned, absolutely necessary, and won’t be outstripped by existing regen effects on players including passive, natural health regeneration. And like other elements of FFXIV’s design, there’s something about it that can feel weird if you don’t understand it conceptually going in.

The Efficacy of Healing

When you first learn a healing job in FFXIV, the contour of that role feels like it trends towards GCD healing, and in fairness, the early content prior to Heavensward and even prior to Stormblood endgame skews in that direction. Short of maybe 1 or 2 off-global skills, everything in a healer kit early on is GCD-locked, castable heals. They also cost MP and a fair bit in many cases, so there is an accompanying sense that they must be really good if you’re spending a chunk of MP on them and losing a damaging cast – right?

Well, no.

When you do the math, GCD healing ends up being among the worst healing choices available to you, not just because of damage loss, cast time, or the like, but because it’s not very efficient. Right now, as an example, my Sage set is item level 654 average. My standard AoE GCD heal, Eukrasian Prognosis, heals and puts a shield on everyone in range. It heals for around 27,192 total combined from all 8 raid members and shields a total of 87,014 damage. That’s pretty good, right? Everyone gets a shield for slightly-over or near 10% of their total health and is healed for around 3% of their health, not awful – but it costs me 900 MP, 9% of my pool, and I won’t regen that amount of MP back until 15 seconds later, assuming no other casts. Kerachole, on the other hand, is a basic, 30-second cooldown ability that uses 1 Addersgall gauge, which I get every 20 seconds, and it puts a 10% damage reduction on everyone in range (and as of 6.4, that range will cover an entire raid arena almost from anywhere within it) and it puts a 15-second regen effect on the entire raid. That regen’s total healing? 135,960 points of health across the full raid. So for 15 seconds, I reduce all incoming damage by 10%, heal the raid for more than the combined total of shielding and healing from my GCD-cast AoE spell, and, cherry on top, spending an Addersgall gives me 700 MP, so I heal for more, reduce a potentially-higher amount of damage (10% can be lower than an E Prog shield, but because Kerachole doesn’t break on damage, it shields a consistent 10% for the full duration), and the use of this ability is MP positive!

Consistently in just about every healer’s toolkit, this holds up – oGCD healing abilities are just flat-out better as first-line options – they cost less, do more, and keep your MP economy positive or neutral while letting you continue to pump damage into the boss. Having said that, there are, of course, exceptions. In specific kits, Scholar generally has better shielding from their GCD shield spells and White Mage’s lily-spenders are all GCD-locked spells you need to be casting in order to get to Afflatus Misery. For everyone, GCD healing is still necessary at points in some fights, like Harrowing Hell on P10S where relying solely on oGCDs will mean not using them for up to two minutes prior to the mechanic and then dropping them all during this one mech and still likely needing more healing. Also, in most progression scenarios, casting a GCD heal to keep things rolling is always better than taking a chance on someone’s survival and losing, especially when you’re progging week 1 or in minimum item level gear.

Learning this kind of blew my mind and opened it up more to an aggressive, oGCD-based healing style. It feels like a safe assumption to say that a spell costing both a damage cast and MP should, innately, be better than most oGCDs, but it just isn’t the case most of the time. GCD heals are supplemental, useful for filling gaps in a mitigation plan or covering unexpected emergency scenarios, but outside of that, there’s far less use for them in current high-end content than you might expect as a fresh-faced noob. The thing that has most improved my healing gameplay in Savage is leaning less on GCD healing and explicitly optimizing around doing damage. When I was scrambling to have top HPS, I would often double my cohealers in healing throughput in both of my Savage raiding statics, and I would get frustrated that I was carrying the healing to meet healing checks. And in truth, sometimes that was happening but a lot of times, I was less prepared for the overall damage profile because I was blowing big buttons for small health gaps and leaning on GCD heals to keep everyone’s health bars full when I should have been leaning on big buttons for major checkpoints, more frequently-available oGCDs for most other damage, and passive regen/triage when there is a gap between mechanics where people don’t need to be topped up immediately. Responding to every damage event like an emergency, a habit I was trained on in WoW where raid damage is often rapid-fire and requires immediate response, was actually making me a worse healer in FFXIV because I was using too many of my good tools out of place and losing damage output to covering the gaps with GCD healing.

Healer Identity Kind Of Doesn’t Fit

FFXIV has, as of Endwalker, segmented the healing jobs available into two camps – regen healers and barrier healers. White Mage and Astrologian both are regen healers, with their kits revolving around heals that bestow health regen effects, and Scholar and Sage are barrier healers, with their kits centered on heals putting shields on their allies that absorb incoming damage. You take two healers to a run, so one of each and done, right? Well, yes, but there’s an interesting note here.

While the regen and barrier distinction holds for the GCD kit of all 4 healing jobs, what is funny is that all of the jobs have toolkits that include both regens and barriers. White Mage can place Divine Benison on single targets to absorb damage and offers damage reduction by a percentage on the whole raid via Temperance and on a single target via Aquaveil. Astrologians can place single-target shields with Celestial Intersection and can add shielding to their core GCD heals through the cooldown Neutral Sect. Scholar’s core faerie ability, Whispering Dawn, is a HoT, and their core raidwide mitigation ability Sacred Soil also gives a HoT while you stand inside it. Sage has Physis which puts a HoT on the raid, Kerachole, which puts a Hot up starting at level 80, and while they are shielding abilities, both Haima and Panhaima have a stored healing component that releases after a duration if the shield stacks are not fully consumed. In terms of the “identities” of these roles, they only apply to GCD heals, which, as we noted previously, are less significant than your oGCD abilities, where everyone is sharing in both roles to some extent!

What this functionally means is that while you likely still want a raid to have both a regen and barrier healer, they are going to both have aspects of the other “role” they can cover with some abilities, so if you happened to have both a White Mage and Astrologian in a group, you could still have shields from both (and shields that don’t overwrite each other at that), and likewise a Scholar/Sage raid has about the same number of regen effects available to it. In fact, at varying points in Endwalker, a healing comp of Scholar and Sage together has actually been a good strategy, because of the number of added shielding and damage reduction effects you can get coupled with a number of different, readily-available regens.

So while healing identity is a thing and does matter to a point, it also has a lot more crossover than the naming convention might suggest.

Moment-to-Moment Gameplay Can Be Dull At Times

One of the common critiques of the healer role in FFXIV is that green DPS, in a world where every healer is down to basically two DPS buttons with some fluff, is kind of boring. As much as I want to say that it isn’t true, it definitely can be – if all you are getting to do is hit your DPS rotation with nothing else going on, it can start to feel a little monotonous. What I like about the healer role is optimizing around the times when things aren’t smooth sailing – when people take extra damage, die to a mechanic, or the learning process of progging a new fight. Healers have a big role in the progression process in a group, because the healers you have, their mit planning, and how they respond to issues can push a group to success or longer prog. That’s where interesting dilemmas pop up like when to cast GCD heals for safety or how to move cooldowns around to accommodate for your group. Sometimes that process is fun (making a breakthrough in mit planning that makes a hectic mechanic more manageable) and sometimes it gets frustrating (your cohealer being a Glarebot through a mechanic they’ve never seen before that has a heal-check component so everyone dies just to not having enough HP), but that is a part of the process and it makes it more dynamic and fun, in my opinion. DPS as a role tends towards a lot of repetition – sure, you get more buttons to press on average but you’re also pressing the same buttons in the same order on a loop in every encounter, and tanking, likewise, gets to be kind of formulaic (personal mitigations being the only real interesting part that changes fight to fight while the rotation and overall gameplay outside of that end up being similar on all fights), but healing has more dynamic stuff going on.

The problem with the healer role is this – when a raid knows what they are doing and plays reasonably well, the healer has no variance to their role short of the DPS buttons they press, where the game fails to provide much of interest for the sake of keeping the kit focused on healing. Even Sage, the “damage-dealer-healer,” has only a few flourishes the other jobs don’t get, and they amount to an extra big AoE damage button (in the same vein as WHM Afflatus Misery) and their big level 90 AoE heal is also a damage ability (which is also true of Astrologian as-is). In the past of FFXIV, healers had to optimize around damage in other ways – A Realm Reborn and Heavensward as current content had Cleric Stance, which swapped your Intelligence and Mind stats since it used to be that INT was for damage spells and MND for healing, so committing to damage (and mit planning in general) was done to not just optimize the number of damaging spells cast, but also to keep the healers in Cleric Stance as long as possible so they did more damage per DPS spell cast. The game has also reduced the DPS toolkit of healers over time, taking away AoE DoT application, multi-DoTting, and arrived at the current state – one DoT, one nuke, 1-3 other damage spells you can use situationally or for movement, and that’s it. I agree with the sentiment that healers would be more interesting if optimizing for damage had a knock-on effect for healing, like being able to empower a heal or gain resources to use some super heal, or if the toolkits of healers were built more with healing challenge in mind, because as it stands, most healers can top-off a full raid group with 1 oGCD and then maybe a GCD cast if the oGCD is a weaker one.

For me, I like the healer role because for the groups I play with, there’s always enough external challenge to navigate – raises needed mid-combat, extra damage that can be covered with smart applied healing, and the attendant MP management that comes with that. I can see how, at the high-end, healing could become dull since it boils down to a predictable mitigation plan and players not taking extra damage while also using their mitigations and self-defensives optimally. The fun thing is that Ultimate raiding often turns the role on its head again, because Ultimates have very different design with downtime and transition phases and those mechanics create a different landscape for healing. But I generally agree that healers need a little something in Dawntrail to set the role back to a more interesting state – whether that comes down to needing to manage healing more strictly, forcing more GCD healing requirements, or a more complex DPS rotation with incentives for use.

Overall

Nearly two years deep, my Savage journey in FFXIV has been a lot of fun and remains enjoyable to me. Pushing to raise my average parse, to better understand the healing role, and the process of feeling out maybe starting in on Ultimate raiding (a video guide for the Omega Protocol fight is 55 minutes long, just as a fun data point), all of these have made FFXIV more engaging than ever to me. Even as WoW came back into rotation in my MMO play, FFXIV has remained interesting and engaging because of pushing Savage, wanting to push into Ultimate, and feeling my way through the process of growing and developing as a healer in a game where healing takes a very different shape. I’m excited to close out this tier, gear all my jobs to BiS, and push into Dawntrail to heal through the entire expansion in a new set of Savage fights!