As a PVE player I can only offer a PVE perspective. A good healer, in my opinion, has 2 jobs - keep everyone alive and buff group DPS.

Keeping everyone alive involves good HOTs, quick reaction times on burst heals, and debuffing the enemy's power at critical times. The best healers are very aware of the mechanics and anticipate when the tank needs heavy healing.

Buffing group DPS involves obvious buffs like combat prayer, but also orbs and shards to help sustain, synergies every 10 seconds for the Alkosh proc, and good communication for maximum War Horn up-time. Buffing group DPS (especially in a trial) is much more important than the healer providing their own DPS (assuming the group's DDs are decent).

As a side note, coms ability on a healer is super important. Not just trading War Horns, but also directing other players when needed and coordinating buffs/debuffs with other support roles.

Well, this game has a lot of meta going on in PvE which ofc includes optimal healing setup for different dungeons + trials etc and it changes over time. What's expected from a healer now wont necessarily be expected in 2019.

So in general, I think a skilled healer is a person that's reactive, aware, flexible and able to adapt to the group, their builds and needs. Because that person will still be a good healer like hundred updates into the future.

While a healer that refuses to adapt and flip skills or even gear so the team can complete, because "my playstyle or gtfo" is gonna be a terrible group mate regardless of meta.

When it comes to PvP, a skilled healer is someone that knows how to stay alive long enough to actually heal allies lol. Because you get focused hard if you heal in PvP without hiding behind a zerg.

FrancisCrawford wrote: »

Liofa wrote: »

The amount of Orbs, Combat Prayer and good reaction time on flash heals. That's literally all I want from a healer. I don't want Springs, if I see Springs at the top of my Healing Received, it's obvious that the healer is wasting their time overhealing unnecessarily. I wanna see Orbs at the top, followed by Combat Prayer, followed by Mutagen. That's all the healing you need to do as a healer and fast flash heals when necessary.

I'm a skeptic about Combat Prayer in dungeons.

It gives 8 seconds of Minor Berserk to non-nightblades who are in its path, which is a 5%+ boost to DPS for 8 seconds, which is something less than 1/2 second of DPS. So if it hits the whole team and they're not nightblades, it's reasonably worth the GCD but not necessarily worth the magicka. Are the heals or resistances that important?

@FrancisCrawford It’s a fair point about nightblades, and I have seen some groups stop using combat prayer if they have all or all but one Nightblade DPS. I still think it’s worth using though, since it basically gives a free Monster Helm set to any non-nightblades in group (since without combat prayer Sorcs, Wardens and Templars should be wearing Slimecraw). This 5% DPS increase doesn’t sound like a lot, but if you cast it on 2 50k DPS in a dungeon that is more than 5k group DPS (since it affects your damage skills too). In trials it will hit 6 players per cast, so easily worth 15-20k DPS.

It also reduces the incoming damage on your group by about 3%, which is about half the effective defensive buff of something like the Ebon set. All this on top of an AoE burst heal make it a very effective tool for healing.

They can keep me alive on a Sunday morning pledge after a rough night out