Healer Role Actions

There are six role actions that are shared between all healer jobs. For the most part, these actions are core functions that are vital to all healers, so it is important to understand how to use them effectively. These actions are unlocked as you level up your first healer job, but once you have unlocked them this way, you will always have access to them, regardless of level sync.

Repose is the least commonly used healer role action. It almost exclusively affects non-boss overworld enemies. Almost all enemies in dungeons and raids are immune to Sleep, with some exceptions in dungeons at level 50 and below. Even then, it is hard to find any real use for it. It is occasionally useful to avoid fighting enemies near quest objectives that you need to interact with in the overworld. It still places you in combat, though, so you will be unable to mount up or teleport away until the enemy wakes up and resets due to chasing you too far.

In an emergency, it may be used in low level dungeons, Deep Dungeon, and exploratory content like Eureka, Bozja, and Occult Crescent to interrupt an enemy's cast or take an enemy out of the fight to reduce incoming damage, provided that no one attacks it and wakes it up. This is mostly relevant against ranged enemies that are separated from the main group, or if the tank has died or lost threat. In reality, the use cases for Repose are so niche that it could be removed from the game and no one would notice. This is the only healer action that is genuinely unnecessary to even put on your hotbars.

Esuna allows you to remove one cleansable debuff from an ally (per cast). Cleansable debuffs are indicated by the small, blue/white line above the debuff icon. It is extremely important to pay attention to the buffs and debuffs displayed next to the party list so you can see debuffs that need to be cleansed. Not all debuffs are necessary to cleanse, but it is never wrong to remove a cleansable debuff. If you are unsure, just cleanse it.

The most notable debuffs to cleanse are Doom, Throttle, and various versions of Vulnerability Up. Doom and Throttle result in unavoidable death if they are not cleansed before they expire. Cleansable Vulnerability Up debuffs usually come right before a tank buster that will most likely be lethal if the debuff is not cleansed before the tank buster lands. That kind of debuff/tank buster combo usually applies four stacks of vulnerability over a few seconds, then follows with the tank buster a second or two later. The goal is to see the debuff accumulating and prepare yourself to cleanse it as soon as it reaches four stacks.

Note: Doom debuffs that do not have the cleansable indicator are often removed by healing the target to full HP.

Conditions that impede action or movement are also important to cleanse. These include Silence, Pacification, Amnesia, Concussion (the stun version), Sleep, Bind, Paralysis, Blind, and sometimes Heavy or Disease. These conditions impede attacking or moving. At best, it is a large DPS loss. At worst, it is a death sentence if it prevents someone from dodging an AoE or responding to a mechanic.

Other common cleansable debuffs are usually damage-over-time effects from being hit by avoidable AoEs. In most cases, those DoTs are too weak to be worth cleansing, and it is faster and more efficient to simply use an extra heal to make up for the small amount of added damage, especially if more than one person was hit and received the DoT. In most cases, the only DoTs that do enough damage to justify cleansing them cannot actually be cleansed with Esuna. There are a few exceptions where cleansable DoTs are extremely deadly, usually found in Alliance Raids, such as the DoTs applied by certain avoidable attacks in the Ivalice Alliance Raids.

Lucid Dreaming is your core MP management ability. It restores 550 MP per tick, for a total of 3850 MP over 21 seconds. It should be used as early as you can without over-capping your MP, then usually used as soon as it becomes available again for the rest of the encounter. Do not make a habit of trying to save it for when your MP gets low. Its cooldown is short. It should be used to make sure your MP does not get low in the first place. It is primarily a maintenance tool, not a recovery tool.

The general rule for when to use Lucid Dreaming is when you have around 7500 MP or less. Assuming you continue casting your basic damage spells without any downtime, you should never over-cap your MP if you use Lucid Dreaming at that threshold, after accounting for any other abilities that would restore your MP during Lucid Dreaming, such as Assize, Astrologian's Draw, Aetherflow, or any of Sage's Addersgall abilities.

The 7500 MP threshold is based on full-uptime casting of your basic damage spells over the duration of Lucid Dreaming. If you are going to cast more expensive spells such as GCD heals over the duration of Lucid Dreaming, you can use it earlier without over-capping.

There are some niche situations in which it can be valid to save Lucid Dreaming instead of using it as soon as it comes back up. If there is downtime in the encounter where you stop spending MP for an extended time, it can be worthwhile to save Lucid Dreaming if you already have so much MP that you will naturally regenerate back to nearly full MP before the end of the downtime.

While your group is still learning an encounter, it can be tempting to choose to save Lucid Dreaming in order to recover in case you die and get Raised. However, this is extremely niche. For the most part, consumables such as Super-Ethers should be used to recover from a death.

Swiftcast allows you to cast any single spell instantly. It bypasses the Cast Time of a spell, not the Recast Time, so it is still locked to your GCD. The most obvious use for Swiftcast is to quickly revive a party member with a spell like Raise. With Swiftcast, you can bypass the extremely long cast time to revive someone immediately.

Swiftcast is also commonly used to maintain GCD uptime while moving, though as a healer, you often want to save Swiftcast for Raises unless you are confident that no one is going to die in the next 40 seconds. Swiftcast may also be used to front-load a cast for immediate effect in a situation where you need the spell to go out at the start of the GCD instead of at the end of the cast time, such as a last-second heal before raid damage, or fitting in a final damage spell before an enemy dies or becomes untargetable.

Surecast's primary function is to negate knockback and draw-in effects in encounters to simplify mechanics or reduce movement requirements. Surecast is rarely strictly mandatory for resolving mechanics, but strategies for encounters with knockback mechanics are frequently built around the expectation of using Surecast. Keep in mind that some knockbacks go through Surecast. Such knockback effects are typically telegraphed with purple knockback arrows, rather than the normal orange arrows.

Surecast also prevents your casts from being interrupted by receiving damage, but there are very few things in the game that will actually interrupt your cast simply by damaging you. Leviathan's (the level 50 trials, and probably the Unreal trial variant) big phase transition will interrupt casts if it hits you before the slidecast window, and some boss auto attacks can interrupt casts, but that auto attack would also probably kill you, so this portion of Surecast is not really worth thinking about.

Rescue allows you to quickly drag a party member to your side from up to 30y away. While its potential for misuse has made it one of the most notorious abilities in the game, it is also genuinely one of the most powerful abilities in the game when used correctly. Rescue's potential to prevent deaths, solve mechanics, and save runs makes it one of the most impactful and satisfying abilities in the game. It simply requires familiarity and awareness.

There are a few important properties of Rescue that you should keep in mind when using it:

1. There is a roughly 0.5s delay between pressing the ability and the ability actually grabbing the target.
2. The target will be pulled to your side, not to your exact position. If you are standing just outside of an AoE and you Rescue someone, they will stop just in front of you, so you need to stand a little farther inside the safe area to pull them all the way into the safe zone.
3. The target travels in a straight line as if sliding along the floor. They will be affected by any hazards they pass through, and they will immediately fall to their death if pulled through a gap in the arena.
4. The target will be pulled just in front of where you were standing when you activated Rescue. If you use Rescue while moving, between the animation delay and the short travel time, you can easily be 5-10y away from where they land by the time they arrive, depending on how far away they were initially. By taking advantage of that, you can actually Rescue people into their own spread or clock spot position and still make it far enough away from them to not overlap AoEs, especially if you use Sprint or some other movement ability.

The most contentious use of Rescue is unfortunately the most obvious one: you see someone out of position, you think they are going to get hit by something or that they will not make it to the correct position in time, and you Rescue them in an attempt to make sure they are safe. Maybe they were distracted or did not know what to do, and you saved them. But, maybe they did know what they were doing and they were just maximizing their uptime, and now you have annoyed them by trying to help. Even if they did not know where to go, some people find it jarring or insulting to be unexpectedly yanked around by Rescue in those situations, as they do not feel like they are being given the chance to play for themselves and learn on their own.

This kind of Rescue is the one you should be most careful about. If you do not know the player, I suggest only using Rescue this way if you are extremely sure that they do not know what to do and they cannot make it to the correct position in time on their own. In particular, experienced Black Mages will often wait until the very last moment to move out of their Ley Lines with Aetherial Manipulation, and interrupting one of their casts during Ley Lines by Rescuing them can seriously ruin their day.

The safest situation for this kind of Rescue is during downtime, where there are no enemies to hit. This way, you can at least be certain that you are not interrupting anyone's rotation and costing them DPS by Rescuing them into position.

In some encounters, you can use planned Rescues to help a caster or your co-healer with movement and improve their uptime for a small DPS gain. This is especially easy to do on White Mage and Sage, which both have dedicated movement abilities that they can use to quickly get across the room and Rescue a caster or co-healer that may not have movement abilities or instant casts available. If there are two knockbacks that are too close together to use Surecast for both of them, one healer could Surecast the first knockback and Rescue their co-healer, and then the other healer could return the favor on the next knockback.

You can also use Rescue to help someone get into position immediately as they get Raised. You can Rescue them a bit earlier than they are able to move on their own, and Rescuing them does not cancel their invulnerability after getting Raised, unlike if they used Sprint or some other movement ability of their own. This allows you to safely get them into position for a stack mechanic or something similar much faster than they could otherwise manage.

Limit Breaks have extremely long animation locks, preventing the caster from moving for up to around 10 seconds for LB3, depending on the type of Limit Break. It can sometimes be hard to find a safe opportunity to LB3, but you can sometimes fit an LB3 cast into a much shorter safe period and Rescue the caster to safety during the animation lock, after the LB3 cast bar has completed. They will still not be able to act for the duration of the animation lock, but they can be forcibly moved to safety. It is especially useful to Rescue your co-healer to safety after they use healer LB3, as the people being revived will be able to act much sooner than the healer who used the LB3.

Like every other movement ability in the game, Rescue will actually cancel knockback and draw-in effects if it is timed precisely enough to land while the target is in motion from the knockback or draw-in. Intentionally using Rescue this way takes some practice, as there is a short animation delay before the ability grabs the target, but it is a uniquely powerful tool to have. Like other movement abilities, Rescue can even cancel out of the knockbacks that go through Surecast.

If you know a knockback is coming up, simply pay attention to everyone's positioning. If you notice that someone is out of position and is going to get knocked off the edge of the arena or into a hazard, you can attempt to Rescue them into the correct position right before the knockback or cancel them out of the knockback by Rescuing them right as the knockback hits. If they used a knockback negation ability like Surecast, no harm done, because those abilities also make them immune to Rescue. If you timed it right, you saved their life, or even the whole party from a failed mechanic. If you do nothing, they will definitely die, so you might as well make the attempt.