FFXIV – Conjurer, Part 1

During the time I’ve been waiting in FFXIV endgame queues for my Bard, I’ve leveled all my other adventuring classes to 15 through a combination of FATEs, levemetes, and hunting log completion. (You’d think leveling to 15 would be easy, but in reality the time it takes to get from level 10 to level 15 seems endless.)

My goal was to get all the classes to 15, then pick one to dive into and level the rest of the way to 50. At the time of this writing, the winning class is Conjurer, which I have gotten to 27, mainly in dungeons.

Conjurer is one of the healing classes in FFXIV. I’m not an especially great healer, so it’s a challenge for me right off the bat. I tend to buckle under the crushing weight of responsibility that I feel for the safety of the party. As a healer, if you make one mistake at the wrong time, you could literally get the whole party killed. At least, that’s how I feel. It would be fine if I was always running with a party of nice people, but you never know what you’re going to get in a PUG.

The Conjurer basically has one single-target healing spell: Cure. It has an insanely long cast time, so you have to plan ahead with your casting. That’s in addition to the rather lengthy global cooldown in FFXIV, by the way, and the occasional spikes of 1-2 second lag. It’s a little nerve-wracking. ‘Oh crap, the tank’s health is dropping really fast, I better cast a heal. Oh look, now his health is plummeting straight down to zero, but my cast bar is still only half full. Oh, now everyone’s dead.’ (That’s a slight exaggeration. In reality that only happens if the tank is really bad and over-pulls, or a DPS pulls threat on everything at once.)

There’s also an AoE heal called Medica, but it’s an even slower cast-time, and costs a whole lot of mana, so I don’t use it much. (I have to assume it’s more cost-effective at level 50 because I see WHMs casting Medica II almost exclusively.)

The other major skill is a dispell called ‘Esuna’ for some reason, which is a relatively fast cast but so far when I’ve needed it, I’ve needed to cast like nine of them in a row (in I think it was Toto-Rak when everyone gets poisoned).

And that’s pretty much it, unless I’m totally missing something in my noobness. At the start of the dungeon, you cast a Protect on everyone, then you follow the tank around casting Cures. If you have a good tank, it’s a pretty easy ride. But that’s the trick, isn’t it? Getting a good tank.