Evening Everyone. The Shadowbringers video is basically done but we needed this one to go out today so that video will be up on Sunday for y'all. In other news, Preachcon tickets go on sale tomorrow evening at 7pm BST so make sure to drop by the stream if you fancy hanging out with the team and the community. Finally we also have a PVP tournament coming to FF14 on 25th June - I hope you all enjoyed the silly little animation I made for it; a nice little homage to the Overwatch league/world cup visually. The tournament is only for the Crawlers this first time around, but we welcome you all to come and watch the craziness.

can't help but feel I've seen part of this before...

Mike the MSQ watching RP healer. This is a weird timeline

It's interesting how part of improving as a healer in FF is figuring out how much not-healing you can get away with.

One of the cool things about FF is that its insanely easy to just play another class, so eventually most players will play all classes at least a little bit. That makes it a lot easier for ppl to branch off into play styles they wouldn't otherwise have tried, because of the investment needed.

It's interesting hearing Mike talk about healers as a veteran healer. Cause yea, when you first learn to heal, its super fun. Unfortunately, I feel like healing just gets more boring the better you get at it, and every fight devolves into "1 button spam with the occasional OGCD." Hearing a new healer's perspective makes me want to somehow recapture that feeling.

The kwestalline conflict graphics were so good! I’m actually excited to watch it!

That announcement animation makes me want to see JoCat and Pint form a team together XD

Damn, the PVP tournament is sponsored and everything? I didn't think it would be so grand! I'm excited to see it, I love FF14's pvp, that was a really well designed intro graphic that gets me excited!

Will Brian Ricardo be helping to Cast the Pvp Tournament? hes one of the top pvp players and Pretty much been one of the major faces of FF14 Pvp

I hope Mike will stream his savage raids. It would be awesome watch

loved it Mike! great video!

I rolled CNJ leading into WHM for my levelling experience in FF14, primarily so I got instant queues for dungeons and trials. Did that all the way to 90 and loved it. I've levelled a few more jobs since then and, while I may go with something else for future MSQ levelling, I'm still dead keen on WHM. There's nothing quite like running into the middle of a huge trash pull with the tank and popping Holy. It's frikkin awesome in pvp, too! I'd advise anyone with healer anxiety to try it, because I can pretty much guarantee your anxiety will vanish.

That ad for the tournament looked SO GOOD!!

Preach Con, where babies are made

Yo Preach you should give PLD a try, very supportive tank. Line up Divine Veil, a health shield, with healer buffs like physis, timing and lining up your passage of arms, and the ability to provide intervene or cover to save specific raid members. Plus the DPS rotation of PLD is genuinely fun with constant engagement

Seems lit I’ll tune in to watch

Loved hearing an actual comparison of how healers play differently between the two games! Also role specific mechanics really start up in savage, P3S and P4S play very differently if you swap between healing and not. Hope we get more in the future instead of "apples to oranges my guy".

Loved the PvP intro with the statues. Well done

I want to reiterate a comment I made on a previous video: it is so enjoyable watching you experience and analyze the different facets of FF. You're always fair about it, which I respect. If something is bad, you say it. If something is good, you say it. But they you give your very well deeply observed analysis to explain why, and it has been SO accurate every time. Thanks for all your content, Mike.

PvP tournament despite me not enjoying FF's PvP style sounds amazing. Everyone who snags a ticket to PreachCon enjoy yourselves.

Has Preach ever gone back to his "guess what's happening" videos to see how wrong/right he was in them now that he has actual game experience under his belt? If he hasn't, it would be interesting to see him go back to those videos and watch them again for the contrast.

Love healing for these reasons too yes ^^ I've mained heals my entire ff life :p This is why mentor roulette can be fun too, more challenging as a healer. You'll learn how to actually adjust and save people. A test of your reflexes :3

I had a similar experience to Mike here. I hated healing in WoW for the most part (holy paladin in Cata clicked with me for some reason), and when I moved to FF as my main MMO, I expected more of the same. My main is unquestionably Sage now, I love playing it so much!

Thanks for the 5 minute preview of this video on twitch, even though it wasn't intentional lmao

When you discussed your priest healing and how you enjoyed predicting damage made me realise that’s what I love about Sage in ffxiv. Definitely recommend learning that role as you branch out in ff jobs ✨😊

holy shit, the intro-trailer for the tournament is cooool.

One of my favorite things was solo healing DR. Knowing when the damage spikes came, and how to deal with them, was so much fun. Especially considering the whole Doom mechanic in that place.

That Titania EX video was really satisfying to watch.

When it comes to healing, how you explained it, might be the same exact reason I love to heal too. Hadn't really thought about why I liked doing it so much, lol.

You know it's very exciting to see you do Titania EX after all this time. I remember seeing you watch this fight having to guess the mechanics in a video a while back.

I really like your perspective on both. With 14, you're doing a dance and if done correctly, not much goes on and it all seams easy. But when shit hits the fan, it REALLY hits the fan and you se the good players from the bad players REAL quickly

I'll be tuning into that PvP contest for sure. You guys doing custom matches? If so, it would be cool to know who's competing.

Well shit, I wasn't expecting ol' "I chose mage because it doesn't have a healing offspec" Preach to actually love healing in FF, what a pleasant surprise!

Glad you're liking healer! Sage should be really fun for you as well .Scholar was my first class and is still one of my favorites.

How was it for you to do the fight yourself apart from the time when you blind reacted to the fight? Seems like you had a lot more fun doing it yourself. :D

Scholar is my favorite healer to play! It’s really such a fun and rewarding class when you are in the zone with it.

I've had the opposite experience with FFXIV Tanking/Healing. I healed in WoW for 10+ years (Holy/Disc priest) and loved it. Tried healing in FFXIV and it felt different. Harder or more clunky. Recently, I started my first Tank, Paladin, with no intention of ever actually tanking a dungeon, leveling via squadrons, sidequests, and leves. But I recently dipped my toe into party tanking around 68, and I enjoy it. Never thought I'd be a Tank; it scared the hell out of me in WoW.

I love that Preach has done more variety but I feel like the channel is just never the same since he left WOW. All his WoD and Legion beta videos were my lifeblood that got me through the work day for years qq

Hey mike, nice to see you talking about healers! Been playing as a healer main in FFXIV since 2.X, and it's definitely my favorite aspect of playing the game as well. For the most part, I think you've described the general feel of playing a healer pretty well. Ultimately, the role in FFXIV comes down to resource and crisis management. What do you use at what times, and how do you deal with strenuous circumstances. However, I did want to leave a post going into a bit of some of the specifics about how I personally think of healers in FFXIV. As someone who's never played WoW, it might give you a bit more of a perspective un-affected by the influence of WoW. The main aspect I wanted to talk about is resource management. You placed a lot of emphasis on MP in this video, and while I won't claim that MP doesn't matter at all in FFXIV, it's often not much of a concern for most healers operating at higher end content, I find. Healers these days tend to have enough tools to keep their MP up so long as you hit the "give me my MP" button (Lucid Dreaming) whenever you're at 50-75% MP. Of course, raises and things going *really* bad changes this, but that's really in the worst-case scenario, and even then, if you're playing half-decently (IE, doing damage instead of spamming GCD heals) you'll probably be fine. I think that the most valuable resources, and really the only one's worth being concerned about, for healers in FFXIV are their GCD, and oGCD spells and abilities. Like you said, Healers in FFXIV are more like sub-DPS that make sure the party doesn't die. Doesn't matter how low the party goes, if they have 1 HP, the healer's going their job. Since healer's role in a party is sorta binary (live or die, nothing in between), the difference between a good and bad healer in FFXIV is pretty much decided by DPS numbers alone. As such, a healer's theoretical max performance is if a healer has 100% DPS GCD uptime (SCH technically also needs to spend all their aetherflow on Energy drain for max performance but... well... there's a reason I'm not a fan of SCH, lol). This essentially means that the fewer GCD heals that a healer performs, the better, which then puts much more of an emphasis on a healer's oGCD abilities. That's the gist of it anyway, and you can probably already see some of the issues with this just by reading the explanation I've given, such as "well then why do I have all these SCH shields if being the best SCH means I never use them except as a last resort or to save a GCD for later?" This is the problem with a lot of healer design that I think the FF team needs to solve, because it's a really common issue for healers. Except in down-time with nothing to attack, I very rarely ever need to use a GCD heal as any healer. Savage and Ultimate is more likely to get you to press those buttons but dungeons in particular don't require any. I always have tanks double-pull, and I often never need to GCD heal unless someone messes up bad as long as I'm on my A game. I also think that the FFXIV devs still don't quite understand how to intergrate damage into the healer playstyle. For years they refused to make DPS an expected part of a DPS's kit in content, and now that they are starting to embrace it, results have been... mixed. Toxicon, for example, is pretty much useless outside of the time between dungeon pulls, and they've had a really hard time making Energy Drain (which they tried to remove at one point) fit well into SCH. I'm also a bit salty about the buff to Afflatus Misery as a WHM main. It's made WHM way too easy, and taken a lot of the fun out of the lily system. Sure, the job is better in terms of numbers, but it's much more boring to play. Anyway, those are some of my thoughts on healers. Agree or disagree with them, I hope they give you something to think about. Regardless, glad to see you hop aboard the green DPS train.

those statues are awesome!!

hope you enjoy sage, so good imo

Not sure if you know, but Spriggan once had a pvp tournament before. It was run by STORM when it was still headed by Cat Lover, and it was a collab between several FCs who each had a chosen representative. It was a 1v1 tournament held at Wolves Den pier. It was live streamed, but it had a few issues; there was such a large audience that the pop-in meant people couldnt actually see the combatants. :D Your idea of using the crystalline conflict seems like it'd be much better, not sure how you'd get people able to view it though.

I completely agree! After trying out healing in Stormblood, I started maining it and never looked back. There are just much more interesting decicions to be made when you're a healer in ffxiv!

@14:00 Geez, you actually reminded me of MOP when I and my raid leader would coordinate Spirit Shell and the like. He actually rerolled Disc Priest because I was one of the first in the world to exploit it in Mogu'Shan Vaults. We got SO good at coordinating it and finding ways to take advantage of MOP's tendency toward "Do bonus damage" encounters, it was a very rewarding experience. Funny thing was I was set up as Shadow for us, I flexed into it when we were falling a bit shy of both the healing needed and dps needed on the quillin. When I cheese the heck out of Elegon, that's when we realized this was a potent tool for us. Aaaand then Acti-Blizz ruined all Caster and Healer design from WOD onward. :(

Preach is going to LOVE sage

Very interesting, your take on healers is great, but skewed more towards shield healers (sch/sage) I feel Regen healers (especially whm) actually mitigate a lot of what you said about when things go wrong (i.e whitemage being able to cast a rezz for 0 mana if they know what they're doing) but are a bit worse at doing the stuff you like , the setup and all that. Probably natrual you gravitated towards SCH tbh, in a good way.

I have to say, as a SCH playing well, and knowing the fights, really allows your toolkit to shine. Personally, SGE, while still a shield healer, really does allow you to maintain shields and react more as opposed to SCH where your playstyle is more predicated on knowing when to use what. I find that design philosophy fantastic with the healers in FF XIV. AST is a treat!

If you haven't already, check out playing on legacy controls. if you swap to that and put turn left and right on your strafe buttons it controls *about* the same on legacy as it does standard, but you also gain being able to "backpedal" at full speed while facing the camera in any direction, in that your character will actually turn to move in the direction you're inputting, relative to the camera's direction. Only big catch to playing on legacy is that holding just right mouse won't turn your character in addition to the camera so if you're used to doing that for avoiding gaze attacks without moving you have to adjust a bit, but I generally prefer the control style for playing on casters/healers due to the more "unlocked" feeling movement.

If you want a fun tank experience, Gunbreaker is a blast. It's basically a melee DPS rotation with all of the Off GCD abilities you use for damage during your burst window every 60 seconds. Along with having to use all of your tank cooldowns either personally or throwing on the other tank / using raid wide defensives.

Are you coming back to wow for dragonflight

I'd say that tanking becomes really interesting/tight when you go up to Savage level difficulties. You'll be needing to plan out your defensive cooldowns even more importantly, and timing things out with your co-tank on who should tank and mitigate what because of your individual cooldowns and such. It's a totally different experience from dungeon and even extreme trials healing, and I hope you get to try it out too sometimes.

I had the exact same experience. Been a tank my whole life, couldn't get into it in ff, now a healer.

ever get that feeling of deja vu?

I love healing in FD, but I wish there was more to do other than "keep dot up and spam single target" during most non- savage fights.

I always had the long term goal of getting all jobs to max level but my anxiety held me back from actually playing tanks or healers in dungeons so I leveled them mainly with fates, quests and leves. Then Bozja came around and I thought to myself "why not level my healer there".... Castrum and Delubrum, man. I went in with zero practice as a healer in group content and afterwards I was never afraid again to do dungeons as a healer. xD

THE KWEHSTALINE CONFLICT!? 🤣🤣🤣

Super curious - how are you going to match pvp people in FF14? As its (sadly) pretty random atm?

I have beaten every extreme and savage raids in FF14 since 2014. The best way to describe the raid is when things go right, it's like synchronized swimming. Everyone has their own thing to do that may overlap you. But you know exactly when that happens so you can act accordingly. My friend jokingly said the FFXIV could use metronome. But we realized that it may actually help you raid better in FFXIV.

In which Preach turns to RP, housing and now healing this is a mad timeline

I got really into healing during Shadowbringers. I've also been doing a lot of Tanking. I decided to main Paladin for Endwalker and it's been a really good experience. I've lost a lot of my Tanxiety. and I actually like both. White Mage is a Pure healer. Very much big heals, and heal over time, Astro is also in a very good place right now. It's more mobile than White Mage at the very least. Scholar is the preventative measures, same goes for Sage which is literally made to be a combat healer. As far as DPS jobs go, I main Bard for ranged, Red Mage for Magic and though it isn't capped yet, I am really loving Ninja. All of the mobs I enjoy most share a common thread: Utility and versatility. Bard will keep your fingers busy like no other job I know. MCH has a much more strict rotation. DNC also has a fair bit of button play, and can be flourishy - darting in and out of melee range for AOE spam. It's also supportive as all get out. Honestly, the reason I don't prefer this over Bard is I've been playing Bard longer and it's finally in a good place.

Two big differences between WoW and FF14 healing 1) in FF14 health regens during combat while it does not in WoW 2) in WoW there more small, constant raid wide damage going out. This leads to a situation in WoW where there is more damage going out and mostly only healers can deal with it.

4:52 This diversion away from WoW's raiding style into something unique to FFXIV really started in Stormblood, and that's why I'm stoked to see Asmon finally experience it soon. He's only seen raiding content up to Heavensward, which was when they were just starting to change their dungeon and raid design.

I'll be very interested to see the video where Preach tries out Sage now that he's fairly experienced on Scholar, especially with his predilection towards Discipline Priest from WoW. Scholar has, of course, asserted its dominance in the meta once again this expansion but Sage is still really fun to play and my go to healer this expansion thus far even though I've leveled them all twice now.

POOOOOOOG PREACH OUR PREACHER DOOOOOOOD

Would be interesting to see you talk to Jeath about Healing, because afaik he thinks its really boring, mostly because like a lot of endgame raiders he feels like the dps rotation of a healer does not account for the amount of time you press your dps buttons, like when you press dps buttons 90%+ of the time having one dot a spammable and like 1 off global isnt really exciting. Never really played wow so I dont know how it feels there, but he seems to enjoy healing a lot more in wow.

Being able to be the party's course-corrector as a Red Mage who manages their mana correctly and raises anyone who dies is so satisfying. Sometimes I even raise players who aren't even in my party in Alliance Raids. As someone who prefers to DPS I love the hyrbid DPS/healer design of classes like Red Mage and Balance Druid because it lets me be useful. I've been wondering lately if Devastation Evokers will be in the same niche due to the new talent trees although I still haven't decided if I'll go back to WoW at all yet.

bruh are you kidding? the intro with the statues looks fucking amazing

You really should give Sage a try. I think you will really love it!

Mike. Try warrior tank please. When you get to level 82-90 you can actually try doing dungeons without a healer because bloodwhetting is hilariously good. Its really fun.

I wanna see Preach do current savage, either p1s-p4s now or p5s-p8s when 6.2 drops.

When is Preachcon? Can't seem to find a date anywhere!

it's interesting to me, how different people's approaches to levelling are; i've recently taken to kind of equally nudging up all the classes using the same stat so i can get rid of some of that levelling gear, which means i actually levelled white mage for a bit and, to be perfectly honest, until past level 50, the healing side of it plays very [Default Healer]. it honestly baffles me how past me managed to main the class when i played back during ARR, but hey, to each their own. i might update my impression of the class once i decide to get my healers to 60.

I love healing in FFXIV. I've mained a White Mage since I started.

Thank you! I've been saying that forever to people who shy away...healing is fun in 14. I've been a WHM ever since I beta tested the game back in the day and I've learned there are different ways you can have your own kind of healing style the way you play. If you find a way you think it's fun AND you can keep people alive cause you know you're a healer, go for it! 😏🤣

Your hair looks amazing, holy shit

Scholar is probably the best job for playing healer in the big brain, planning moves ahead way that you talked about

YEEESSSS!!

Healing is fun during prog because everything goes wrong. But during farm it's boring af cuz you just press 1 button for 70% of the time. Even for ultimates it's the same. After progging for a while, every CD becomes set in stone & people start dying less & less, you'll turn back into a 1-button dps eventually. As Jeathe said, you either make the encounter forcing you to heal more, or you make the healer's dps rotation more interesting. XIV is a combination of both the encounter requiring little to no GCD heals at all AND 1 single button for dps-ing. It's extremely easy to fix but unfortunately SE just cater too much to the casuals that they don't want to do anything about it.

You might really enjoy playing Sage if you like the proactive healing playstyle. Flashy and fun

8:57 I find it perplexing that preach says he doesn't like wow healing because you just learn the script and plan your cooldowns without much room to maximize. That's literally what happens in high end healing in FF14 - The fights follow a rigid script and you end up mapping out where you use each mitigation and heal, and as a result, you spend 80%+ of your global cooldown spamming your one singular damage button.

I hope you get around to sage, some time. I started playing ff14 mid SHB and did MSQ as white mage. Was super fun but I took to sage super quickly and it's been straight addicting to play. Especially as you said you loved disc priest (I know sch is the same kinda idea, but yea).

I think one thing it's important to consider in FFXIV raiding is that there really are two very, very different ways to go about it. If you approach raid content purely through the lens of it being blind prog, then healing is an absolutely blast, and if the dps rotation was any more complicated I think it would make things an utter mess. Doing blind prog you're trying to figure out optimal rotations, when and where you need to be and who needs to be healed. When you need to mitigate, when you need to spend cds. There are a ton of moving parts and it's a massive puzzle to work out how to keep yourself and the team alive, or even just how to keep the tank alive long enough to see more mechanics. While ultimately it will be a dance fight, during blind prog you don't know the dance - you're choreographing the thing as you go. It's usually less obvious to work out the rotations than what Tanks and DPS need to do. The second kind of raiding is the mechanical challenge. It's not choreographing the dance, it's simply performing the steps to something already solved. Healing is... less exciting here. It's all been worked out, and you're most likely doing nothing but oGCDs heals at fixed times weaved between a boring DPS rotation. Remember that Mike is approaching raiding purely from the lens of blind prog. He's not going back and farming anything. He's not using guides to "learn the steps" beforehand. He's working out the fight as it's happening, and once he gets the clear he's moving onto the next one. The majority of players do not blind prog the hardest content. They watch a guide, or have an experienced player (who probably watched a guide) walk them through it. So when he is talking about how amazing healing is in FFXIV raiding, he's absolutely correct from where he's sitting doing blind progs - there's a lot going on, a lot to work out, and a ton of personal responsibility - for most fights it's more than the Tanks or DPS roles in terms of how clutch you can be for making the difference between a clear and wipe which is what I feel Mike enjoys.

Wish I could go to preach con, buy I’m in the states.

I’m one of those rare players who love support roles and wow healing was what I loved to do, I haven’t got there yet but I’m hoping ff14 end game healing is fun for me.

Remember your ABC’s Preach, always be casting

I absolutely HATED healing in wow; I even started the game as priest because I had intended to be a healer but just ended up being shadow forever. But I play xiv now and I main sch for savage and ultimate content and it is my absolute favorite, pretty much for all the same reasons you gave!

ASTRO is my love. It's one of my favorite classes. I love gunbreaker too but ASTRO is just so fun

I take umbrage with something Preach said in this. The bit about healers being built from the ground up to do DPS. This was true once, but hasn't been for a long time. They do not have a multitude of DPS spells, and in fact, many people wish they had more, because the healer DPS situation is so dire. One single-target, one AoE, and one DoT does not equal a multitude. WHM gets one extra, AST gets an extra but it depends on RNG, and Scholar doesn't get anything extra, I think. No idea about Sage, haven't played it yet. Healers are expected to do DPS, but they are absolutely braindead whenever that's the only thing they do in a fight. Just endless spamming of one ability, while refreshing a DoT every 30 seconds.

I healed mythic in wow for a time now and then last year went into ffxiv as a healer too. After doing a some savage before endwalker and then the whole EW savage tier i then went back and tried wow again... But something was missing when i healed again, like it was not as fun. I really didn't understand why dps in wow was more fun than healing all of a sudden...Until now when u nailed it in this video!

Only went towards healing when aspho released, because i was like "let's have faster queues here." Welp, now here i stand, a sage main, having the basolut best synergy with my old wow guildmate, mister whitemage main

I'm definitely biased but I feel like healing really shines in ultimate. DSR was definitely a test of healing prowess.

Mike should really try some savages. I get that he doesn't like to stream countless hours of prog, but savages in general don't require that much prog. Heck, some are even easier than extremes.

Healers in ff are just green dps xD so they need to deal with a lot of mechanics. It shocked me at first how many more things you have to deal with in ff as a healer but it is super fun for me.

There's nothing but late night trial roulette that goes to shit and you save it as a healer.

One of the weird things about FF14, is that outside of a few specific fights (and generally, even in those fights, only specific parts), a good group is essentially 8 DPS characters, due to the design of the game. This is often counterintuitive to a lot of players, and is one of the biggest reasons some people actively dislike it when they run into healers that don't DPS at all. A lot of people think that healer DPS doesn't matter, but when you look at things, they can generally be hovering around 10-20% of the total DPS for the group (depending on if you're in an 8-man or 4-man party, respectively). That's a LOT of damage to miss out on, if the healer isn't attacking at all. Back in the days when we had the toggleable Cleric Stance on healers, a good healer basically *was* a third (or fifth/sixth) DPS job in the party, if the rest of the party wasn't standing in fire all the time. Particularly Scholars, since pet potency wasn't really affected at all, so you still had a pretty large amount of passive healing potential compared to the other healer jobs. Even now, in dungeon runs, most of the healer jobs can do similar (or even more) DPS on trash packs, due to how strong their AoE skills are. Things even out a bit for the whole run due to the boss fights, but I know for myself, it's not uncommon to have my average DPS on a full dungeon run be equal to what the actual DPS jobs do. Tanks are somewhat similar, but as actively doing damage is necessary for keeping agro (less so now than it used to be, sure, but still important) they never had as much of a reason to *not* be DPSing. Currently, things are actually a bit lopsided for tanks (in my opinion), as some of their burst damage is actually on-par with or even exceeds that of some DPS jobs, which is kind of silly. Yes, I realize there are exceptions, and that's assuming a group of relatively equally-skilled players. But it's definitely one of the more strange aspects of FF14 as compared to almost every other MMO out there.

Ya know what's so strange is that I'm the reverse of Preach in raiding role preference by MMO. I love healing in wow and dislike tanking there (though I've done it plenty), but I love tanking in XIV and dislike healing.

Hit the nail on the head about Tank and Healing, you're doing the dps job but just get extra stuff to do so it's more involving. It's why I'll never main a DPS.

Always played DPS in games and was nervous to play healer. I finally got the nerve a few years ago and made a white mage and what do ya know I've been a white mage main ever since! Love healing in FFXIV!

I 100% agree about healing, i never managed to enjoy healing in wow, whereas in FF14 i switched to Astro on Shb and i haven't looked back. And same things with Tanks and Dps, i hate combo classes, so most tanks/dps are a nono on FF14.