Yay! Welcome to the healing club

Some tips from another healer:

1. Healing isn't actually all that important. Buffing your allies is. Skills like combat prayer to boost their damage, and sets like Spell Power Cure to boost their weapon and spell damage stats, are really important. The more damage your DPS team mates deal, the faster a boss dies, so the fewer big boss mechanics you have to deal with and heal through. This is also why you're expected to contribute to DPS where you can.
2. Sets/skills that restore resources for allies are also really awesome (like Symphony of Blades or Sentinel of Rkugamz monster sets), since more resources means more damage output.
3. You don't need to be magicka-based. The meta is a lie. My main is a StamSorc healer just because I can be, and I love healing in vet DLC dungeons. I always gravitate towards weird builds that seem difficult to pull off, and find a way to make them work. I don't like copy/pasting the same popular builds as everyone else just because on paper they're 3.6% better. There are plenty of great stamina sets for healers too, most notably Powerful Assault which buffs your party's weapon and spell damage whenever you cast Echoing Vigor - an AOE heal.
4. When taking on new vet dungeons you haven't been in before, take 5-10 mins out of the game to read/watch a quick breakdown of the boss fight mechanics you'll encounter. You can then be the super awesome friendly guy who covers the key mechanics quickly before each fight if you have a tank or DPS in the group who also hasn't been here before, and you'll save WAAAAAY more than those 5-10 minutes you spent researching as a result
5. DPS will stand in stupid. It is prophesized, and thus an inescapable fate for you to burn your resources trying to heal them through it. When your party wipes, keep your cool, don't rage quit, and ask politely for the DPS not to do that again. That's the only thing that stands a chance of breaking the chains of fate. It's not his fault - he is at the whims of the God of DPS Duncery and needs to be saved.

The healer role is grossly, grossly underrated.

Too Many people gets away with completing end game content spamming regen-heavy attack when it is sooo much more.

Ressources:
The healer Will add so much recovery to the team through CP perks, symphony/sentinel, orb, shard and other sustain sets such as worms/hircines. Sustain the team and your DDs will love you.

Damage boost:
Healers can add a ton of damage boost to the team. Minor and major courage through Olorime, SPC, Magma or they can boost crit with Catalyst or pure dmg with PA - which they can keep up with much Higher uptime than tanks, because they stand right behind the DDs and have mobility. You have minor berserks also. With a Templar/DK healer you also add minor sorcery/brutality.

Now add in major vulnerability from necro, minor vulnerability from Warden/NB healer and major Force from Horn.. it adds up.

Group tankyness:
Admittedly wardens do it the best with minor toughness for 10% more HP and AOE major resolve. Add in combat prayers minor resolve and you easily add almost 10k armor and 2-3k HP for having the Warden healer on the battlefield.

Need major evasion for the team to deal with AOE dmg, your healer Got you covered with Gossimer.

But there is more, if the team goes down you Got almost near instant Rez with Templars, and AOE Rez with necro ult. Or maybe a good barrier when thing are getting tight!

Healing:
Yes a good healer will do more than Heavy attack regen - stacking hots, keep your health topped off and great healers will proc burst heals on you faster than their Earthgore procs.

Raw damage:
Even if nothing above impresses you, a healer can wear 3 support sets for the team, and still go full DPS - easily parsing 50k+ on the 21 mill.

A good healer is worth its weight in gold.
A low effort healer can probably be replaced by Mirri.

Darkstorne wrote: »

Yay! Welcome to the healing club

Some tips from another healer:

1. Healing isn't actually all that important. Buffing your allies is. Skills like combat prayer to boost their damage, and sets like Spell Power Cure to boost their weapon and spell damage stats, are really important. The more damage your DPS team mates deal, the faster a boss dies, so the fewer big boss mechanics you have to deal with and heal through. This is also why you're expected to contribute to DPS where you can.
2. Sets/skills that restore resources for allies are also really awesome (like Symphony of Blades or Sentinel of Rkugamz monster sets), since more resources means more damage output.
3. You don't need to be magicka-based. The meta is a lie. My main is a StamSorc healer just because I can be, and I love healing in vet DLC dungeons. I always gravitate towards weird builds that seem difficult to pull off, and find a way to make them work. I don't like copy/pasting the same popular builds as everyone else just because on paper they're 3.6% better. There are plenty of great stamina sets for healers too, most notably Powerful Assault which buffs your party's weapon and spell damage whenever you cast Echoing Vigor - an AOE heal.
4. When taking on new vet dungeons you haven't been in before, take 5-10 mins out of the game to read/watch a quick breakdown of the boss fight mechanics you'll encounter. You can then be the super awesome friendly guy who covers the key mechanics quickly before each fight if you have a tank or DPS in the group who also hasn't been here before, and you'll save WAAAAAY more than those 5-10 minutes you spent researching as a result
5. DPS will stand in stupid. It is prophesized, and thus an inescapable fate for you to burn your resources trying to heal them through it. When your party wipes, keep your cool, don't rage quit, and ask politely for the DPS not to do that again. That's the only thing that stands a chance of breaking the chains of fate. It's not his fault - he is at the whims of the God of DPS Duncery and needs to be saved.

Thank you. That sounds like a bunch of valuable info that I will need to review a few times.
Right now, I am using a slightly modified version of this build from @Alcast
Instead of following the Gear Setup 2 Beginner as he detailed, I am using a Maelstrom Arena Destruction and Restoration staff and adjusted the other sets to fill in for the head and shoulders. It seems to work fine right now, but I am still getting used to the skills and build.

Grandchamp1989 wrote: »

The healer role is grossly, grossly underrated.

Too Many people gets away with completing end game content spamming regen-heavy attack when it is sooo much more.

Ressources:
The healer Will add so much recovery to the team through CP perks, symphony/sentinel, orb, shard and other sustain sets such as worms/hircines. Sustain the team and your DDs will love you.

Damage boost:
Healers can add a ton of damage boost to the team. Minor and major courage through Olorime, SPC, Magma or they can boost crit with Catalyst or pure dmg with PA - which they can keep up with much Higher uptime than tanks, because they stand right behind the DDs and have mobility. You have minor berserks also. With a Templar/DK healer you also add minor sorcery/brutality.

Now add in major vulnerability from necro, minor vulnerability from Warden/NB healer and major Force from Horn.. it adds up.

Group tankyness:
Admittedly wardens do it the best with minor toughness for 10% more HP and AOE major resolve. Add in combat prayers minor resolve and you easily add almost 10k armor and 2-3k HP for having the Warden healer on the battlefield.

Need major evasion for the team to deal with AOE dmg, your healer Got you covered with Gossimer.

But there is more, if the team goes down you Got almost near instant Rez with Templars, and AOE Rez with necro ult. Or maybe a good barrier when thing are getting tight!

Healing:
Yes a good healer will do more than Heavy attack regen - stacking hots, keep your health topped off and great healers will proc burst heals on you faster than their Earthgore procs.

Raw damage:
Even if nothing above impresses you, a healer can wear 3 support sets for the team, and still go full DPS - easily parsing 50k+ on the 21 mill.

A good healer is worth its weight in gold.
A low effort healer can probably be replaced by Mirri.

I wish I could hit agree more than once, and I say this as someone who has only played as a DPS (so far).

Nagastani wrote: »

That's good to hear.

The only thing I would offer is this:

- Healer's should be able to contribute to dmg anytime their heals are not required
- On some runs it takes good DPS to win... healing the Team will not kill the boss or save the group from a mechanic it can't do, which will end the run early
- Professional Healing is nothing to mess around with. So ok, if you go on certain runs, they expect you to have Sanctuary and everything else, rotations and all of it setup, ready to go and will drop you otherwise

This is why majority of groups I have encountered have their own dedicated healing built in (and used only as needed) but DPS either way.

I hate to say it, as I too have a healer/support build for PvP however someone who heals the group needlessly when they really need DPS is about as useless as a tank who aggros needlessly when the group needs DPS. DOTs matter.

I agree with part of this. Except with the challenging content, a healer should be able to do some DPS. What is challenging content depends on the group since for some it is vet HM trials. With others, it seems to be normal dungeons.

As for the tank doing damage, unless it is very easy content it does not make sense. I have seen some tanks set up to do damage and they essentially took way too much damage requiring the healer to do more healing instead of doing damage. Granted, these DPS tanks were probably not skilled enough to be able to do the damage and pay attention to the fight to see when they should block or move out of a telegraphed attack. They probably need to learn the basics of playing the game first as they seem to be biting off more than they can handle.

That is the issue with this game. For all of the talk of "customization", the only real choice is dps with a slight flavor of heal or tank.

I second the advice of playing a tank and dps to become better as a healer. You really do learn more about their concerns and needs and it gives you a better appreciation for providing resources. A dps who gets fed stam/mag really can produce more dps. And only by playing a tank can you fully appreciate giving a tank a shot of stamina after the fight so they have the juice to run to get to the next fight with full stam (they often finish a fight low on stam and regen it slowly).

I play a pug healer so she tends to eschew spells that require positional discipline by the group (no combat prayer) in favor of smarter and longer range spells like regen, ward, illustrious. She also strongly favors spells that help the group while doing damage (shards, reflective light, damage morph of orbs).

Have never seen a single vet trials group running a stamhealer but I suppose they exist.