Tank and Healer that Always Play Together Have a Lot of Overlapping Skills? Should We? Which Ones??

Athyrium93

Me and the Tank I always play with have a lot of overlapping skills, which seems kind of wasteful of the slots, so my question is, what skills should we both be running? Which skills to double up on, which skills only one of us needs to run?
We are both around CP200 (Give or take a few, and going up a few CP a day) I've got a Templar Healer (Breton) and the Tank is an Argonian DK. We are trying to get geared up to start running Vet Dungeons, we aren't looking to do Trials for the foreseeable future (once we get a Vet gear/ monster sets/ a good group to play with we eventually will) so in the interest of making our transition to Vet content as painless as possible we are tying to optimize our skills. We aren't having any issues with content now, but we could of course be doing better.

The tank is following Dottz's Eternia Tank build, but isn't fully geared up, he's got Ebon Armory and Tourugs currently and is planning to get Lord Warden as soon as we start Vet stuff
https://dottzgaming.com/build/eternia-dragon-knight-tank-pve-build/

My Healer is following Alcast's Reliever build, and again, not fully geared (or even really geared well- I had Mag DPS gear so I put it on her) She's got Mother's Sorrow and Julianos right now, and will have SPC as soon as I can get one more piece to drop. I still haven't decided on her monster set yet.
https://alcasthq.com/eso-magicka-templar-healer-build-pve/

So from those builds the overlapping skills are-
-Warhorn
-Energy Orbs (I have been running shards, but some builds say to run both)
-Elemental Blockade- both Blockade of Storms (I know off balance is good, but do we both need it? should one of us use fire or frost instead?)

These characters are really only played together because they are soooo slooowwww at killing things in overland content, and we both have alts to play, so we want to optimize these two to play together as well as possible, the dps rolls are usually pugs so we can't plan our builds around them too.

Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!

FakeFox

With support builds you can not just take the exact setup out of a guide and expect it to be perfectly working. Almost everything about those builds is content and group dependent. You have a certain amount of redundancy, because certain things need or can to be used by multiple players, but generally you want to avoid it, if it doesn't serve a clear purpose. From your examples, running multiple warhorns makes sense, as the skill will have enough downtime to use multiple in a group. Orb generally makes sense on healers no matter what as it also heals or does damage depending on your morph, on tank it's not that great unless nobody else has it. And stacking lightning blockades makes sense to some degree, even if it not strictly needed having more helps with inconsistent uptimes and having fire or frost doesn't really do anything.

WrathOfInnos

Warhorn is definitely good for both of you to have, and coordinate when you each use them since one Warhorn can not provide full uptime. The tank probably doesn’t need Orb, unless they are running it just so the healer can restore resources.

For wall, you should both use this skill to activate your enchants. I’d recommend one of you put Infused Crusher on your destruction staff, and the other Infused Weakening. You only need one Wall of Storms for off-balance, so you can do one of 2 things:
- Healer changes to Wall of Fire for more damage
- Tank changes to Wall of Frost for more survivability

Athyrium93

@FakeFox Should Healer be running Shards and Orbs? Specifically in Vet dungeons? I've heard arguments for one or the other or for both, what is your opinion?

I've just been running Shards and at least the tank has had no resource issues, no idea about the DPS because they almost never use shards or orbs when I drop them, at least in normal.

@WrathOfInnos I definitely need to go fire then, we've been getting pugs with stupidly low DPS lately, and I hate lightning staff animations, and Tank is basically immortal as long as his resources are kept up

WrathOfInnos

In pugs you can use Blazing Spear to help with group damage too, assuming the tank doesn’t need the secondary resource return from the Luminous Shards morph. If you’re not already, slot Elemental Drain or Restoring Aura to help everyone’s Magicka sustain. Ritual of Retribution is also great for healing + damage. If you want to take the hybrid heal/damage role even further then try Mystic Orb instead of the healing morph. Illustrious + Combat Prayer + Ritual should be more than enough healing for most content.

Athyrium93

I started with the build linked above, but in pugs where we need the extra damage I've been playing around with

Solar Barrage / BoL
Illustrious Healing / Unstable wall of Fire
Combat Prayer / Ele Drain
Radiating Regeneration / Luminous Shards
Ritual of Retribution / Purifying Light
Crescent Sweeps / Aggressive Horn

I very rarely have an issue keeping people up, and actually end up over healing a lot so procing SPC shouldn't be an issue
I have Sweeps for the 10% crit damage and to keep the burning light procs up but never use it
Solar Barrage to have Empower basically forever and to keep illuminate up for the minor sorcery for the group
Purifying light is just fun, but doesn't always get used, tried running Radiant Oppression here and loved the damage but the channel time was annoying when someone needed an emergency BoL. (side note- has anyone tried Ritual of Rebirth instead of BoL? I know it's way more expensive, but it always seems like the idiot standing behind me is the one that always needs the "Oh Sheet" heal, and I can't always locate them in time to get the cone for BoL on them)

I can hit 14k-15k dps while healing most of the time (if the dps have more than 12k health) but it's a ton of LAs while waiting for DoT's and HoT's to run out

WrathOfInnos

I can’t comment on Ritual of Rebirth, but last time I checked the secondary heal on BoL could hit behind you, it’s just the primary that’s frontal.

r3turn2s3nd3r

Not entirely on topic but Olorime > SPC. If you can get into some nCR farms it's a far better set. nCR is a piece of cake, so don't be afraid to join a pug from zone if you're not in guild that sets up runs.

Athyrium93

@r3turn2s3nd3r Olorime is better than SPC.... but you have to have at least SPC to be allowed anywhere near a trial or so I've read; I've been kicked from normal freaking dungeons for not having SPC yet, I can't imagine how awful people would be if a healer showed up for a trial without at the minimum SPC and a Monster Set... Maybe a good guild would carry me through, but I unfortunately haven't found one of those yet.

r3turn2s3nd3r

Athyrium93 wrote: »

but you have to have at least SPC to be allowed anywhere near a trial or so I've read; I've been kicked from normal freaking dungeons for not having SPC yet,

Yeah, that's just bad groups then, SPC is certainly not required for normal content. Very little is outside a competent build. If you were on PS4 NA, I have a couple guilds that run normal trials all the time no restrictions. There's surely some on PC you just have to find them.

idk

Warhorn has a short duration. It is common with well-organized groups in many trials to have both tanks and both healers running War Horn. The duration of the most significant buff is only 10 seconds. The healer should have either Nova and Elemental rage available. One should be on their back bar.

Energy orbs, tank can provide a synergy and Magicka to the healer. Ofc, the healer needs to run it.

WoE, probably the one skill that does not need to be run by both in most situations. Though, with both running it the group is ensured that it will be down 100% of the time.

However, in the context of the content OP is looking to do none of this is really needed. In saying that, it is good practice to use such skills and coordinate WHs for when OP and their friend do choose to run trials.

FakeFox

Athyrium93 wrote: »

@FakeFox Should Healer be running Shards and Orbs? Specifically in Vet dungeons? I've heard arguments for one or the other or for both, what is your opinion?

Well, technically you need one player with orbs in the group and that's it in terms of the synergy. However both Orbs and Shards are otherwise really good damage skills, so I usually run both in dungeons. Additionally there is not much benefit to not having them, as there really isn't that much else you could use in a dungeon.

I personally also see very little value in using shards specifically for the synergy outside of very specific situations. Orb can be used by multiple groupmembers, which means you can simply keep it up in a standard ten second rotation, while you would need to trow a shard to every player every twenty seconds.