Templar Healer Tips

Arakfalas

Hello,

I am level 11 on my templar healer, and want to get myself set for dungeons. What I am getting kind of confused by is if I am supposed to be in heavy armor and be more of a paladin like class, or should I be solely basing my decisions on stats and magicka? Any other general tips to be a good templar healer (prefer not to tank), please let me know. Really liking the game so far.

Thanks!

dreamfarer

For a healer, you'll definitely want to be in Light armor. Light armor supports people who rely on Magicka for their abilities and healers function entirely off Magicka.

As a templar, you have some great heals from your class and can augment that with heals from a Restoration Staff. Pretty much as long as you have Magicka you can keep the party alive.

The catch is heals eat up Magicka quickly so you want to invest heavily into having more magicka, making your heals stronger so they're more efficient and reducing the cost of the spells so that you can keep casting over and over again.

Heavy armor looks good because of the protection it offers, but it gives you nothing to make your casting better or more sustainable (and the protection from armor has a much smaller effect on incoming damage than you might guess it too - ex: having 5,000 resist vs 10,000 resist does not mean you'll take double the damage.

In general for a templar healer, the big powers to watch for are:
- Breath of Life : Bread and butter heal for a team of 4.
- Shards : Either morph has uses but the big reason for these is to feed Stamina to your tank as needed.
- Repentance: A morph to work towards. It's a free to cast power that heals and restores Stamina from dead bodies. SUPER useful in all kinds of content and especially dungeons

Also, the Mages Guild is all kinds of useful for a healer. From Inner Light (a morph of Mage Light) which increases your Magicka and gives a crit bonus (and yes, heals can crit too) to Structured Entropy that gives +Spell Damage (which also increases heal strength) to one of the better ultimates in the game for when you need to go offensive, it is a really good skill line to build up.

Oreyn_Bearclaw

You picked the right class to heal, and that was all good advice. I will chime in with a couple of things. Resto staff is not a great way to solo things. You are going to need to do some damage to level your character. While any class can have a complicated damage rotation for max DPS, the beauty of a Templar is that they have a very simple rotation for solid DPS (puncturing sweep, shards, radiant destruction). I would start using resto staff on your back bar once you unlock it.

The Dual Wield line is worth leveling right away. In fact I would run with this on my main bar until vet. Destro staff also works, but DW is better. You wont use any of the skills from Dual Wield because they are stam based, but equipping them makes your spell damage higher for whatever reason, especially when you put points into the very last passive.

You can complete the entire main quest (and heal 90% of group content) with the following bar:

Dual Wield: Puncturing Sweep (AoE/single target damage and self heal), Radiant Destruction (your single target execute when enemy is below 30% health), Shards (either morph, great for giving stamina in group play, but also a great AoE), Breath of Life (your go to heal for soloing or 4-man content), Inner Light (this gives extra magic and spell crit, pretty much all PvE magic based characters run this on both bars because it is a toggle you want to leave on).

Adding a resto staff allows for some more heals and flexibility, but you really dont need it until you run group stuff. For example, I usually run Shards on my back bar so I can slot structured entropy on my front bar for more health and the spell power buff. Really the only skill you need from Resto staff is Combat Prayer unless you are healing trials (12-man). Then you probably also want healing springs and maybe siphon and rapid regen.

For what its worth, my bars look like this 95% of the time. I recently did a speed run of vICP with this the other day:

DW: Puncturing sweep, radiant destruction, structured entropy, BoL, Inner Light, Comet (mages guild ultimate)

Resto Staff: Combat Prayer (cant stress how good this skill is for group play), Shards, Repentance (or BoL if single target boss fight), Channeled Focus (or rapid regen), Inner Light, Aggressive Warhorn (you need a bit of PvP for this skill, but virtually mandatory for any competitive group at end-game).

Your best crafted gear while leveling would be 5 piece seducer (sustain) or Kagrenacs (damage), plus 3-4 pieces of magnus. Warlock jewelry is great for low levels, but dont kill yourself to get it. I recommend wearing 5 light, 1 medium, 1 heavy at least until all your armor skills are maxed. You will also want the 5/1/1 setup once you max your undaunted passives.