Decided to go with the second option, which is to say switched over to Conjurer/White Mage to continue the main questline… and yet again I hit level 50 before finishing it. After the level 41 quest this time.
The healer role is quite a bit more involved than the DPS role. Rather than simply attacking the weakest target(s) until they die while trying to avoid telegraphed attacks, you have to watch your party’s status while at the same time hopefully getting in a few hits of your own. Moreover, unlike DPS which mostly just has to worry about accidentally drawing too much aggro, the healer has to worry about both the tank and DPS classes drawing too much aggro.
There’s nothing quite so annoying as a tank running ahead to pull 6+ enemies and getting themselves killed in less than 5 seconds. Seriously, how exactly am I supposed to react to that?
On the positive side of things there really does seem to be a dearth of people playing healers, as the mandatory party quests (in addition to the ones I mentioned earlier, there are more at levels 24, 28, 32, 34, & 41) launched almost instantly this time around. It’s also pretty easy to rake in player commendations so long as you display the slightest bit of competence.
- My strategy as a White Mage ended up being quite simple:
1) Cast Regen on the tank and any melee DPS.
2) Cast Aero on any enemies.
3) Cast Cure on the tank if necessary, otherwise use Stone if it’s a boss/miniboss.
4) Repeat from the top.
You’ve got to watch out for unavoidable AOE attacks of course and the lack of fast mana regen can certainly be an issue if you spam Cure II too much (Lucid Dreaming helps). This is the reason to not bother casting Stone on basic enemies in the dungeon; the DPS classes should be able to handle them fine (especially with Aero support) and that mana may be necessary to spam Cure II or Medica if the tank gets overzealous.
All that aside, since I just hit 50 again it seems time to switch to another class. Arcanist is all that’s left of the basic magic classes, and interestingly enough it has both a DPS and a healer specialization. Which fits quite nicely into this character‘s theme.