I appreciate the advice. It's definitely helping me consider my options. As another side note, is it a good idea to use a 2h or dw for the increased spell damage to help boost healing. I see a lot of people running mag builds with those weapons

Warden are currently the only real viable Stam healer that can pull it off well. It takes prep though and you need to level up Psijic line.

My templar healer uses it and I use sun shield as well with 30k+ health. I think it's great for pugs and it's perfectly fine for veteran dlc dungeons and even for PvP. Being a tanky healer like that saved me and the group lots of times. Being able to survive from heavy hits while blocking is just too good. Sometimes i slot a taunt too just in case when the tank is overwhelmed and adds targeting dds.

Just keep in mind that you are still providing buffs to the group thru your gear sets. Scorion's Feast and Magma Incarnate are my favourite ones recently. I pair them with Mhytic Ring of Majesty and Olorime/Winter's Embrace. You can swap Winters/Olorime for a heavy armor support set like Automated Defense or Arkasis’s Genius which are very useful for your group. (if ofc the tank doesnt already wear them) Heavy armor is just fine because recovery is usually more than enough anyways.

Everything else is same as normal healers do, just keep providing spears, orbs and HoTs to the group on your restro bar.

It's really like Paladin style and actually it performs very good in harder contents.

Logandus wrote: »

I appreciate the advice. It's definitely helping me consider my options. As another side note, is it a good idea to use a 2h or dw for the increased spell damage to help boost healing. I see a lot of people running mag builds with those weapons

Dual Wield on magicka for PvE tends to be dagger/dagger, and the main goal is to maximize crit chance on that bar.

Nightblade healers and Sorcerer healers in part require a lot of their own critical hits/heals to give group buffs. Light attack damage now scales off of whichever stat is higher, so you won't necessarily lose a lot of personal damage.

There are benefits but also significant trade offs for the extra crit rate.

I use dual wield for a Nightblade (dungeon) healer, outside particular bosses.

Your ability to heavy attack for Magicka won't work on the dual wield bar -- heavy attacks will restore Stamina instead.

Your skill choice on that bar becomes very important, as you're limited mainly to class and guild skills for healing/support. Can't use Restoration Staff skills or Destruction skills if you're not using the appropriate staff.

The dual wield also encourages a much more melee position to keep up your light attacks, which can be difficult to maintain especially if you're not used to having melee characters. In fights where enemies are very mobile, or there's otherwise tons of mechanics, you might find it hard to keep yourself in melee range and also to keep your group in line of effect for abilities.

Ranged attacks are much simpler to point and click where you want without getting right up in an enemy's backside, and allow you to stand behind the entire group to feed heals in a straightish line. Being ranged also helps visibility for secondary tasks like interrupting or snaring troublesome adds.

You mentioned the tank uses an ice staff, that doesn't mean you can't also use an ice staff. Keeping Brittle uptimes is always useful, and ice staves are still semi-defensive in nature. Dual-wield is not especially defensive at all outside slotting and using the Stamina Deadly Cloak line for Evasion.

Dual wield does at least allow you to have a ranged interrupt with Hidden Blade line, so you can slot that sometimes.

Assuming your party has someone dropping an ice wall of elements with crusher, you will probably provide the most to your group using a lightning staff for off balance, and dropping lightning wall for the most with another enchant that debut enemies.Is the S&B okay? sure but it really doesn't nothing if you're tank is holding agro, if you are in light armor you would probably be safer with harness magics shield.

Its not ideal, but I have a Templar offtank that is basically a heavy armored healer and he is very versatile. However, not as tanky as my DK tank in terms of raw damage reduction (though higher resistances), and I don't have as many group-support skills on my bars that my pure healer would have.

Its a good build, especially for running content 3 DPS/ 1 tank, but you also need to keep in mind that some content is just going to be nearly impossible for you to perform BOTH roles well. For some encounters, there is just too much going on for you to be able to drop block and reset your hots or burst-heal the group.