Healer Question.

[Lilly32]

So been MMO hopping lately and FF14 is the only major MMO I have never played. Im kinda confused by the way jobs work though. Do you pick a base class at level 1 and then at a higher level change to an advanced job? I really only like to play healers so was mainly interested in them. I remember reading somewhere that one of them was about preventing damage so would that mean they are similar to a Disc Priest? My favorite healer in WoW and my main since Wrath was a Disc Priest. I know its always bad to compare classes in one game to those in another but if someone could kind of give me a TLDR on the healers that would be awesome. Also I will be playing on PS4 so I wont have a ton of keybinds like you do with a PC. I mean a PS controller has like what 8 buttons? So does that mean I want have the same crazy ability bloat I did in WoW when I had like 4 hotbars bound with stuff.

[RohanV]

You start with a base class. At level 30, you essentially get to "specialize" into a job. There are two healer classes:

Conjurer (becomes White Mage) - typical healer
Arcanist (becomes Scholar) - has a healing pet, and focuses a bit more on shields

Note that Arcanist by itself is a dps class, the game doesn't consider you a healer until you become a Scholar.

I would suggest starting with a Conjurer and just going through the game and story. FFXIV allows you to switch classes whenever you want, so you can switch to Scholar later.

[Remilia]

It depends on how you play when using a controller I guess. There's a decent amount of abilities for Scholar, which is the class you're talking about. Each layout has 16 hotkeys you can have.
My current set up is like this for the two hotbars I mainly use. There are 2 others but they're more minor I guess.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...014_163326.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...014_163333.png
I uhh... play very strangely I guess you can say. I don't really have a recording or anything of the like to show you atm on how my button presses are. If you're interested I can show you.
There are quite a bit of button combinations that aren't really shown.

Scholars are more preventative yes. They have a damage debuff, a damage reduction aoe that you plant onto the ground, "Eye for Eye" which has a chance to apply a damage debuff to the person you applied the buff to.

It's probably easier to just show the skill set.
http://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Arcanist
http://ffxiv.consolegameswiki.com/wiki/Scholar

The fairy pet is the best. <3

[Lilly32]

is healing fairly easy in this game? How do you target people to heal? Like in Rift and WoW I can just mouseover their name on my healing addon and cast spells depending on what button I mash.