White Mage DPS Rotation for Healers — Dawntrail 7.1

This guide is designed to teach new White Mages how combat works at Level 100. If you want to see how the rotation changes as you level, then check out the leveling guide below!

If you want more information on how to heal as a White Mage, check out the Healing Guide instead.

When your White Mage reaches Dawntrail's level cap of 100, you should start learning and practicing the standard opener. The standard opener is what actions you begin every duty with, and, whenever needed, make adjustments to. By using a standard opener every time you begin a fight, you can make a consistent plan for mitigation and movement later in the duty.

The following explanation discusses the factors that go into the standard opener, and how adjustments are made when needed. This guide will not cover every possible situation, but it will teach you the concepts needed to resolve most situations.

Like all other healers, you should keep the following in mind:

• Progression and Optimization are two very different concepts.
  You should always prioritize a progression mindset over optimization when first learning new mechanics, such as keeping the party alive, until you are more comfortable.
• Though your primary job is to ensure no lethal damage is taken, working together and resolving mechanics successfully is more MP efficient and better for duty progression.
  Most 8-player content will provide you with a cohealer to work with. Cohealers can use each others' tools to help each other heal and mitigate more efficiently.
• If there is no damage about to go out, you do not need to pre-heal a lot. Try to heal whenever is necessary, so your MP can be conserved better across the whole fight.
  Your strong healing spells generally cost a lot of MP, so using too many heals or raising too often will eventually cause your MP to hit near 0.
  If you run out of MP right before a heavy raidwide, you may have nothing available to mitigate the damage properly.
  Understanding your MP Positive tools, such as Lucid Dreaming, Thin Air, and Lilies, is important for resolving emergencies or stressful situations.
• If you are having trouble with healing or mitigation, try to communicate with your party and assess the situation first.
  If you think you or your cohealer is healing too much (or not enough), communication will help clarify where adjustments can be made, even with other party members.
• Your "bread and butter" damage filler spell has a shorter cast than recast time, allowing for slight movement every cast.
  This utility helps with your general movement around the area, and should be used as much as possible (along with your other movement tools).
• Tincture of Minds improve your output for both damage and healing.
  While potion optimization prioritizes increasing your damage, you can also use it for extra healing in progression if necessary.

While this guide will mostly focus on White Mages in 8-player raid content, remember that a support is never alone!
You will always have a tleast one Tank with you, and a standard raid party composition has two pairs of Healers and Tanks. Especially at Level 100, there is always enough mitigation across all players that can help make raids easier to progress and clear. Understanding what mitigation tools your party has, and learning how fights work, can help increase both yours and the party's damage performance. It can ensure you spend less time healing, covering for mistakes, or doing nothing at all.

In White Mage's pre-pull, we use the damage filler spell (in our case, Glare III) to gain some extra damage in the fight.

Depending on your Spell Speed, your cast time may be different from the Standard Opener. You should use the in-game cast time for Glare III to determine when your opener should begin. For example, if your cast time is approximately 1.5 seconds, you may want to begin casting close to 2.0 seconds left on the Pre-Pull timer (to account for latency). This will ensure you do not grab too much enmity (or at all) before the Tank begins their opener and rotation. We consider this to be the 'Pre-Pull', because players can gain an extra action (or more) before the duty fight actually begins.

As a White Mage, there is not much to prepare ahead of time, unlike the other healers. You can consider using mitigation actions, such as Regen, Medica III, Divine Benison, or even Temperance, to prepare for early instances of damage in the fight. However, this is highly dependent on the duty timeline, party composition, and what tools are available during the cooldown period.
For example, using Temperance too soon means that you must wait another 120 seconds for the cooldown to reset. In that timeframe, you may find a better use for Temperance than where you originally planned it for.
Another example is that Medica III is good for fights that begin with a raidwide that causes damage over time. However, White Mages have a lot of regen abilities by Level 100, such as Liturgy of the Bell, Divine Caress, and Asylum, which will last longer (and therefore, heals more) than doing a pre-pull Medica III.

Therefore, realistically, you would not need to do much in Pre-Pull, other than preparing to cast Glare III. If you find that the Tank is taking too much damage at the start of a fight (maybe due to lower stats), consider using Regen and Divine Benison to help mitigate the first few auto-attacks. This is because Regen has a low MP cost and heals more than Medica III, and Divine Benison has a low cooldown timer. Both will not impact your overall mitigation for fights significantly.

Healers use Tinctures of Mind to increase their Mind stat, which affects damage and healing output. As a result, for most levels of content, White Mages will align their Tincture of Mind so that most actions within the Tincture window deal extra damage. In difficult or challenging content, such as during raid progression, players can also consider using their Tincture of Mind for increased healing instead.

If you find that you run out of MP during raid progression, such as during a heavy raidwide, players can also consider using a Super-Ether instead. Super-Ethers are handy, as they can provide 1,400 MP upon use (1,800 MP when High Quality). This will enable healers to use another strong healing spell. However, they share the same cooldown period as your Tincture of Minds, and as a result, are not recommended unless you really need the MP. They are recommended only in exceptional situations, where the extra MP can recover a sudden emergency. However, the best way to improve MP economy for healers is to discuss ways to mitigate efficiently, so MP-heavy spells (such as Cure III and Medica III) are not overused. You can also consider using Lucid Dreaming or any of your Lilies more efficiently as well.

Like all other healers, White Mage has a very simple damage toolkit, consisting of only a handful of spells and abilities. It has:

• One Damage Over Time (DoT) spell: Dia
• One Single-Target filler spell: Glare III
• One Area of Effect (AoE) filler spell: Holy III
• One AoE ability: Assize
• A Personal Haste buffing ability: Presence of Mind

White Mages also has two powerful AoE spells that are resource-dependent:

• Afflatus Misery, which requires a Blood Lily (gained after 3 Lilies are used)
• Glare IV, which requires Presence of Mind to be used

Your Single-Target priority actions are as follows:

1. Use Presence of Mind on cooldown or with the rest of your raid buffs after the opener.
2. Use Assize on cooldown after the opener.
3. Maintain Dia on the boss as long as the boss will be active for at least 15 seconds.
4. Use Afflatus Misery in raid buffs, for movement, or before using additional Lily heals to prevent overcapping red Lilies (see note below).
5. Use Afflatus Rapture or Afflatus Solace to prevent overcapping blue Lilies, or for healing or movement.
6. Use Lucid Dreaming on cooldown below 8,000 MP to maintain MP.
7. Use Glare III whenever you have time to cast it and do not need to GCD heal.
8. Use Dia for movement outside its natural refresh if you do not have Lilies or Swiftcast.

Mostly, your rotation will consist of maintaining Dia on your target while using Glare III between refresh times. We call Glare III your 'filler' spell, because it is what should 'fill' the periods between DoT refreshes. Your DoT will take a while to expire, so you should try to fill your rotation with as many Glare III as reasonably possible.

Players should be refreshing Dia whenever it is just about to expire. When possible, try to refresh it within your party buffs, as the buffs can apply and increase your DoT damage for the refresh period. However, keep in mind that if you refresh too early, you may experience a damage loss over time.

Other than Glare III, White Mages should be using Assize, Afflatus Misery, and Glare IV as soon as they are available.

In the Standard Opener, your Presence of Mind is delayed a few GCDs to ensure Dia refresh is easier to align with buff windows. As well, it also ensures your reduced recast time catches most of the party buffs (which may require a build-up time). This can be adjusted throughout the fight, depending on when party buffs are being applied.

For the opener specifically, we delay the use of your first Assize so that party buffs can apply and increase its damage potency. The same can be said for Glare IV, which you gain 3 charges of when you use Presence of Mind. However, you can also hold Glare IV for movement as needed; keeping in mind to use all charges before the charges or your party buffs expire. This ensures you use all your strongest actions within buffs, and can align with subsequent burst windows in the fight.

As you cannot use Afflatus Misery before 3 blue Lilies are generated, it is not shown in the Standard Opener. However, for subsequent burst windows, this should be your first priority spell within buffs, as it is the strongest damage spell in your kit. The build-up of using blue Lilies and Afflatus Misery is potency neutral with Glare III, so there is no reason to save your third blue Lily aside from an upcoming heal or movement opportunity. As such, you should try to avoid overcapping your Lilies as much as possible, so your Afflatus Misery does not drift outside of burst windows.

This is the standard window that is always reliable and does not risk an early use of Swiftcast. The only downside is that weaving Assize under Presence of Mind can risk clipping in pings above ~100ms, though usually the effect is extremely minimal. A higher-ping friendly opener can be found below (also known as the Swift Rotation).

If you need movement that does not require Swiftcast, you can consider using Aetherial Shift.

Players should follow up the rotation example with Afflatus Misery and Glare IV when available.

As mentioned above, weaving under Presence of Mind can cause clipping at higher pings. This opener uses Swiftcast to weave Assize and Presence of Mind in a single GCD for a slightly more high-ping friendly opener. Keep in mind that if you need Swiftcast early in the fight for movement during a mechanic, then you should use the standard opener above instead.

Players should follow up the rotation example with Afflatus Misery and Glare IV when available.

Sustained multi-target fights are very rare in FFXIV, and most of your multi-target damage will be large enemy pulls in dungeons or an 'adds' phase in a high-level encounter duty (such as Criterion Dungeons, Trials, Normal and Savage Raids, and sometimes Ultimate Raids).

1. Presence of Mind should still be used on cooldown.
2. Assize can be held to hit additional targets; eg. using Assize on three targets vs one target is worth losing a one-target Assize.
3. Use Afflatus Misery when available. Prioritize over other spells.
4. Use Glare IV when available.
5. Holy III is a damage gain over Glare III at three or more targets.
6. Using Afflatus Rapture or Afflatus Solace to build Afflatus Misery is worthwhile in uptime on two or more targets, but Lilies are still better spent for movement or healing than raw damage when possible. Avoid overcapping Lilies.
7. At two to four targets, maintain Dia on all targets assuming they will live the full DoT duration.
8. At five or more targets, avoid using Dia and instead spam Holy III.

A large majority of the damage you do is simply based on global cooldown uptime (also known as your GCD uptime), maximizing the amount of time you spend using Glare III on the boss. Extended movement is the enemy of uptime, but you have several tools to deal with these.

1. Slidecasting
   • "Slidecasting" involves moving before a cast has completed without interrupting the cast. The slidecast window in FFXIV is quite large compared to other MMOs. The exact timing depends on your ping, but it generally starts about 0.5s before the cast bar is finished. Between the slidecast window and the ~1s between Glare III casts, you can be quite mobile all the time and easily preposition for most mechanics.
     As long as your cast time is faster than your recast time, you can slidecast in the game legitimately.
2. Aetherial Shift
   • With the addition of Aetherial Shift in Dawntrail, players can move 15 yalms in front whenever there is a weave window between GCDs. Along with its short cooldown, this means that you can move and do mechanics without dropping your GCD.
3. Afflatus Rapture or Afflatus Solace
   • Lily heals can be used for movement outside natural Dia refreshes, but should be prioritized for healing when necessary.
   • Afflatus spells are all instant cast and either deal damage directly or heal and contribute towards charging an Afflatus Misery.
   • Afflatus Misery deals 1,240p damage and takes three Lily heals to generate, meaning over four GCDs, it deals a total of 1,240 potency. This is equal to four Glare III at 1,240 potency.
   • Lily spells should always be considered in sets of four GCDs. Once you use one Lily, you are instantly down 310 potency, but using the next three gains 1,240 potency back (through Afflatus Misery). This is equal to all the lost GCDs.
4. Afflatus Misery
   • If you already have a Afflatus Misery available and none of the above tools to deal with a movement, Afflatus Misery is a great movement tool.
5. Glare IV
   • If you already used a Afflatus Misery and none of the above tools to deal with a movement, Glare IV is a great movement tool. However, as this is tied to your Presence of Mind, you can realistically only use this for mobility during burst windows.
6. Swiftcast
   • Swiftcast makes your next spell instant cast and can be used on Glare III to give a GCD of free movement. This is not advisable in progression and can be dangerous when playing in other unoptimized situations when you may need Swiftcast for use with Raise.
7. Dia
   • Dia is instant cast, so you can use your natural DoT refreshes to freely move during mechanics or to preposition yourself. Try to not force early DoT refreshes to move though, as you have many other tools at your disposal that are better suited for movement.