Welcome to the game! I’ll try to offer some general tips to get you started regarding your primary question. If you have any questions, FYI in these forums if you use @username in a post it will flag that person to come back and see your response...so if you have any questions on my post, respond with @davey1107 in your response and I’ll get a flag.

Okay, so the first thing is to make sure you’ve chosen an appropriate race. You want to be a healer in the long term, so you want to focus on a magic build. The different races have powerful passive abilities that incline them to a role. Good magic races are Altmer, Breton, Argonian our Dark Elf. If you’ve chosen a stamina race - Khajiit, redguard, orc, Wood elf, then these races wouldn’t make a great healer...they’re inclined to be stamina Templars. Now is a good time to make sure you’ve matched race and your long term goal correctly...it’s a pain and/or expensive down the road after putting tons of work into a toon.

Once you’ve rolled the toon you want to level, I’ll offer some general leveling tips and what you’ll want to focus on with your magic Templar soon-to-be healer.

- spend skill points freely. There are so many skill points in the game now that you don’t need to ration them. Feel free to unlock and play with any ability, and spend on any passive that sounds helpful. You will not wreck the character or paint yourself in the corner. Unlike when the game was released, you instantly get access to most of the map...so if you ever run short of skill points, there are a bazillion sky shards in reach.

- level your class lines. The first three skills in your menu are your class skills (Aedric spear, dawns wrath and restoring light for Templars). During your adventures you will unlock a majority of these abilities and spend in most every passive. These lines level by having an ability from the line on your active bar while earning xp. So if you kill a monster with an aedric skill ability slotted. The line gets a little xp. If you have two slotted, the line gets twice as much. Tip: during non-vet leveling, ALWAY slot one skill from each class line so they keep working up, even if it means slotting an ability that isn’t your first choice.

- in the weapon lines, magic Templars should level destruction staff, and restoration staff for sure. There are also some instance where they can use 1h and shield, so you could level this if you like. Like class skills, weapons level by earning xp with an ability slotted. It MUST be an ability from that weapon line...just carrying a weapon type doesn’t level the line.

- in armor, you’re going to want to level both light and heavy. Oftentimes players like to throw on a piece or two of heavy for more protection, so it’s good to level this as well. Do this by just wearing those armor types. While you work to vet, try to wear 5-6 light and 1-2 heavy.

- work your Legerdemain to 16. This allows you to reduce your sneak cost...helpful later on, especially in pvp. The reason I mention it now is that it can be a slow grind. Every once in a while go to Daggerfall City, jump on the two ships and load up with crap from containers...then fence it all. Just do this once or twice a week and legerdemain will get up there...this isn’t a high priority.

- level mages guild. This levels by picking up these blue lore books lying around, which are organized into collections. Learn this system and work on this every once in a while. As a healing Templar you might decide to work up to mage guild 10, which is a LOT of book hunting.

- Don’t stress about leveling this stuff quickly, and remember that once you ge to vet there’s an XP CATCHUP MECHANISM. I put this in caps because sometimes new players get stressed about leveling specific lines or abilities that they grind and grind one specific thing. Don’t spend endless hours doing this unless you know it’s necessary. When your character gets to vet (level 50), you’ll get a daily dose of super-charged xp called “enlightenment.” You don’t need to understand how that works now, just be aware that as a vet you get as much enlightenment xp in a week that you do during the eeeeeeeeeentire journey to level 50. So if you have skill lines or abilities that fall behind, when you get to vet it’s pretty easy to catch them all up.

So, that’s a brief overview. It’s a lot...but don’t stress. Like I said, you can’t “mess up” a character, and you don’t need to rush. During your first 20 or so levels, focus on how your bar works, how abilities function and what sort of damage they do. How does gear affect both how protected you are, and how much damage you do? How does wearing a set compare to not, and what is a gear set?

Then just get out, explore and kill things. Lol.