I've been back for about a month and healers have changed a lot since my ollo and morph days.
Started off Caretaker, moved to edgewalker (off-meta but it worked really well with my group/gs), and now i'm kind of stumped on what i should play.
I see a lot of vit/def/witch vit/song/aura vit/aura/def and the occassional vit/shadow/x vit/occ/x. Cloth/shield.
These builds have a lot of problems. Vit/def/witch, cool you have a lot of block and peels for yourself but the entirety of your magic defense is based off cloth and if a DR gets good rng(or runs enough focus) you literally die instantly as your pdef isn't actually high, your block rate is just extremely high. All that cc feels like really good peels but aura/battle breaks all of it.
Vit/shadow/x i'm really unsure as to why people play shadow. stealth is nice but the points to get stealth aren't nice. you get 1-2 instant heals every 9 seconds, 3 if you are using your freerunner that you can only use for 30s then wait a full minute to use again. healers get a pretty decent amount of cast speed reduction without even trying. It just feels like a completely wasted tree compared to what you could be getting out of it. i know fights end fast so having like "big" cds to keep everyone up in the moment is nice, but i watch healers casting with basically no cast times anyway so its not really a valid argument.
Vit/occ/x is a raid build. Pretty much the main reason this is still at thing is for the medium amount of cc (you lost telekinisis with killed it for me), shadowstep is ok, and of course MEND SPAM. If you're sitting there casting mend you're going to oom or get blasted.
Now onto the builds with significantly less problems.
vit/aura/song This build is great because you can play it with plate or cloth. You buff your allies and if you use ancestral skills get a nice bulwark going on yourself while having damage reduction on enemies, insane mobility. It lacks hard cc with the idea that you're just going to have amazing positioning and just make sure you have buffs/debuffs up to survive the cc. So if you're running cloth its kinda mandatory to swap aura to def making this build a lot worse for the same reasons def/witch sucked. so you should play it with plate/aura and when mages try to dive you 1.) then they're in the middle of your team 2.) you have % reduction from the skills so its a lot less threatening then hoping block happens. this is risk vs reward best build for everyone if you can play it i think.
vit/aura/def this is what happens when you decide songcraft sucks. but for some reason literally everyone is trying to run it. this you should play with plate/shield rely on blocks but when they don't go through you still have plate. aura to negate magic/pen. this is basically just a tank that is really annoying because they can heal. a lot less risk but also a lot less reward, very safe.
i'm currently playing vit/song/aura with plate/shield. idk people keep suggesting all these other classes and i don't see what they see in them. am i wrong? what am i missing? I know healers are getting nerfed soon so def should be considered a lot more heavily due to negating damage to prevent having to heal it back but im talking about right now. the absolute best risk&reward for healer playing perfectly and why. thanks :o
Started off Caretaker, moved to edgewalker (off-meta but it worked really well with my group/gs), and now i'm kind of stumped on what i should play.
I see a lot of vit/def/witch vit/song/aura vit/aura/def and the occassional vit/shadow/x vit/occ/x. Cloth/shield.
These builds have a lot of problems. Vit/def/witch, cool you have a lot of block and peels for yourself but the entirety of your magic defense is based off cloth and if a DR gets good rng(or runs enough focus) you literally die instantly as your pdef isn't actually high, your block rate is just extremely high. All that cc feels like really good peels but aura/battle breaks all of it.
Vit/shadow/x i'm really unsure as to why people play shadow. stealth is nice but the points to get stealth aren't nice. you get 1-2 instant heals every 9 seconds, 3 if you are using your freerunner that you can only use for 30s then wait a full minute to use again. healers get a pretty decent amount of cast speed reduction without even trying. It just feels like a completely wasted tree compared to what you could be getting out of it. i know fights end fast so having like "big" cds to keep everyone up in the moment is nice, but i watch healers casting with basically no cast times anyway so its not really a valid argument.
Vit/occ/x is a raid build. Pretty much the main reason this is still at thing is for the medium amount of cc (you lost telekinisis with killed it for me), shadowstep is ok, and of course MEND SPAM. If you're sitting there casting mend you're going to oom or get blasted.
Now onto the builds with significantly less problems.
vit/aura/song This build is great because you can play it with plate or cloth. You buff your allies and if you use ancestral skills get a nice bulwark going on yourself while having damage reduction on enemies, insane mobility. It lacks hard cc with the idea that you're just going to have amazing positioning and just make sure you have buffs/debuffs up to survive the cc. So if you're running cloth its kinda mandatory to swap aura to def making this build a lot worse for the same reasons def/witch sucked. so you should play it with plate/aura and when mages try to dive you 1.) then they're in the middle of your team 2.) you have % reduction from the skills so its a lot less threatening then hoping block happens. this is risk vs reward best build for everyone if you can play it i think.
vit/aura/def this is what happens when you decide songcraft sucks. but for some reason literally everyone is trying to run it. this you should play with plate/shield rely on blocks but when they don't go through you still have plate. aura to negate magic/pen. this is basically just a tank that is really annoying because they can heal. a lot less risk but also a lot less reward, very safe.
i'm currently playing vit/song/aura with plate/shield. idk people keep suggesting all these other classes and i don't see what they see in them. am i wrong? what am i missing? I know healers are getting nerfed soon so def should be considered a lot more heavily due to negating damage to prevent having to heal it back but im talking about right now. the absolute best risk&reward for healer playing perfectly and why. thanks :o
