Good Morning Friends! I come to you with a glad heart because I have once again finished another new job. For the past week I have been working on Ninja and last night I managed to push it across the line and ding level 80. I’ve not spent a significant amount of time gearing it, but I did grab the artifact gear set and snag the resistance weapon from Gangos. This puts me somewhere in the neighborhood of 450ish with the gear I currently have equipped, which is not phenomenal but good enough for the moment. When I started down this path I did not fully appreciate Ninja as a job, but over the course of the last thirty levels, I have come to appreciate just how good of a class it can be. Granted I am nowhere near as competent as your average Ninja Main, but I took to heart some advice that I should focus on debuffing the target. The thing is… that seems to make a massive difference in how fast targets go down.
If we go to the character sheet that means I have finished leveling all of the classes that utilize dexterity as the main stat. This means that not only can I get rid of any unneeded Bard/Machinist/Dancer gear but that I can also get rid of any dexterity-focused jewelry. This leaves Monk and Dragoon as the last physical dps classes that I have yet to finish. I’ve largely left Dragoon open as a soak for any available clan hunts that I happen to have on a given day and am in no real rush to push it across the finish line. Monk is going to be an interesting journey because I do not love positional combat. What I feel like I need to work on instead is some of my healers because of all of the jobs in my list, those are going to be the largest lift for me on a personal level.
Something that you need to understand, is that I began my life in MMORPGs as a healer. I played a Dwarven Cleric main pictured above in Everquest, and technically this is the second rendition of this character after rerolling on a brand new server. Playing a cleric in Everquest left some permanent scarring I am afraid and I am not sure if it was the complete heal rotations, not being able to progress other than slow prodding root and nuke gameplay, or the fact that I would quite literally get called at all hours of the night to log in and come resurrect someone so they would not lose a level. Whatever the case I have avoided playing healers in any game moving forward apart from a brief stint in Everquest 2… also playing a Cleric, more specifically in Inquisitor.
A good portion of my time back in Final Fantasy XIV has been about breaking down mental blocks. Over the years I had built up this mental block against tanking for strangers, but the difference there is tanking is a role that I knew in my heart that I was good at. Healing is one of those things that I have long decided I was shitty at, and have thus been unwilling to put myself in the position of having the lives of the party in my hands. Granted as a tank I also very much have the lives of the party in my hands, but for some reason it feels differently. I’ve thusfar leveled Scholar through Palace of the Dead but in order to make my way through the level 60 plus grind… I am going to need to be willing to do the thing that I have been avoiding. That is queuing to heal random strangers. I know once I put myself out there I will do fine and start to feel my “sea legs” as it were, but it is really hard taking that first step.
So my goal for the weekend… queue for leveling roulette and try and make that work.
I was an extremely nervous player when it came to healer. I’d only DPSed for pretty much ever in all the MMOs I played.
Back in December, I decided to heal in FFXIV for the first time. I mean, I had all my healers to level 80 on my main (without doing group content). But this was the first time I brought a White Mage up from level 1 scratch, forcing myself to learn by doing group content every step of the way. I needed to start from the bottom and learn each skill. I also needed to learn how to read health bars and build up healer awareness.
My best friend is a White Mage main, but she also tanks. So she tanked for me all the way up till 50, where I started doing Alliance Raids with her as my co-Healer. I pretty much leveled White Mage all the way to 80 by doing an Alliance Raid each night. For me, it was consistently practicing in large group content that helped me learn.
I’m now at the point that I can heal all of the level 80 Alliance raids and do a fairly good job at it. I’m still not quite the healer my friend is (she has 8 years of practice on me), but I’m far better and more comfortable than I was back before I started. I’d still feel antsy about healing 4 man content in a PUG, however. But I have used healer as a means of insta-queing for Praetorium during the Moogle Tome Events. 🙂
I’ve also brought up a Scholar to 80 and plan on trying out Sage when it drops in Endwalker.
If cross-world travel was a thing, I’d be your co-healer. But since it’s not, grab a friend and have them tank/co-heal for you if possible. It makes it so much better to learn.