So you want to play a healer? Nepe's guide to healing
A few people have requested my healing build, so I thought I'd make a guide on healing. Hope you like it!
1. OVERVIEW OF FAE DRUID / MENTALISM
www.gorgonexplorer.com/build-planner/1855
1.1 STRENGTHS
Raw healing power:
On paper, a fae running mentalism/druid has the highest healing output of any class combination in the game.
Passive AoE heals:
Most of your heals affect everyone around you in a 'cast and forget' fashion. This makes the chaotic nature of battle far more manageable, often completely healing people you can not afford to spend a global cooldown to keep alive.
Strong buffs and debuffs:
You have a tool to enhance nearly every situation in terms of survivability. Lowbie getting smacked? Increase their max health and reduce their damage taken. Boss evading everyone's attacks, decrease its evasion while buffing everyone's elemental damage
1.2 WEAKNESSES
Positioning:
2 out of your 3 passive heals require you to stay within a 20m radius of where you drop them while your 3rd passive heal requires you to constantly be finding the epicenter of your group so that everyone can benefit from its amazing effects. This makes kiting and healing on the go more difficult.
Healing while being damaged:
Our passive heals have fairly low hp when dropped and are susceptible to getting nuked by aoe fire/stun attacks. Extra caution must be taken when and if using a passive healing ability during times of high aoe damage.
Non-friendly party stacking:
Our 3rd passive healing ability does not stack with psi healing waves cast by another mentalist. That lowbie in the group just pick up mentalism and wants to help out with an unmodded rank 1 healing wave? They are actually wrecking their own healing! (as well as everyone else affected by it)
No relief from stuns/roots/slows:
Druid/mentalism has no way to counteract stuns/roots/slows. Party members affected by these must wait out the full duration. Annoying but rarely affects your chances of success due to your healing output.
Fae are strongly affected by knockback:
This... is.. so... annoying.
But fae gota have some downsides amiright? ;)
I can't tell you how many times I've cast some passive or AoE healing ability only to be hit by knockback before it goes off, setting me way out of position for effective healing. Don't forget your Nimble shoes, my friends.
2. HEALING ARSENAL
First, a few concepts to clarify.
As a healer, we have passive and burst healing.
Passive healing are the 'cast it and forget' heals namely fae conduit, healing sanctuary, psi healing wave, and sigil scripting; while, burst healing is essentially everything else. In general, passive healing will always outperform burst healing.
Passive healings one weakness though, is that it heals at set intervals and sometimes those intervals may not proc when you need them most. This is where burst healing comes into play, filling in the gaps between passive healing's time delays.
2.1 PASSIVE HEALING
fae conduit: 90 hp / 47power every 5 seconds
healing sanctuary: 138 hp / 80 armor / 32 power every 5 seconds
psi healing wave: 3 x 49 hp every 4 seconds
average regen per tick: 375 hp / 80 armor / 79 power every 4-5 seconds
regen over 1 minute of combat:
fae conduit: 720 hp / 0 armor / 376 power
healing sanctuary: 1656 hp / 1120 armor / 384 power
psi healing wave: 2757 hp / 240 armor / 0 power
total passive regen per minute: 5133 hp / 1360 armor / 760 power
Passive healing will be your bread and butter for healing and is what will set you apart from other healers. It gives constant incremental healing which is crucial for giving you the time needed to wait out the cooldowns of your burst healing and as well as global cooldowns.
*note - you may want to use healing sigils to boost your passive healing even more but keep in mind that 1) giant hairballs required to make healing sigils are difficult to find and costly to buy 2) healing sanctuary counts as 1 of your max of 2 sigils
2.2 BURST HEALING
minor heals
pulse of life: 302 hp + 160 hp over 15 sec / 142 armor/ 15s cooldown
revitalize: 301 hp / 142 armor / 12s cooldown
major heals
reconstruct: 336 hp / 112 armor / ~20s cooldown
regrowth: 380 hp / 112 armor / 30s coolldown
first aid: 200 hp / 112 armor / 30s cooldown
misc heals
patch armor: 0 hp / 225 armor / 30s cooldown
fill with bile: 304 hp / 152 armor / 60s cooldown
energize: 260 hp / 194 armor / 110 power / 60s cooldown
This comes down to approximately 20 burst heals every minute, (assuming you time the cooldowns perfectly) with nearly every heal giving 300 hp and 100-200 armor!
These are the 'fill in' heals you'll be using, they are largely listed in the order you'll want to use them when the corresponding cooldown is up (start with minor heals, progress to major heals, etc.. going back to minor heals when the cooldown is up). The only exception is fill with bile, as this will be used on the 2 lowest health party members or whoever is taking damage at the time and the tank (usually Arquin for our guild). Fill with bile has a 60 second cooldown but lasts 3 minutes.
*note - pulse of life is arguable the best heal in the game with a nice hot on its own, as well as a powerful elemental damage reduction. I usually heal with this first even though it has a slightly longer cooldown than revitalize.
2.3 DAMAGE MITIGATION
psi healing wave: 56 damage reduction (acid, nature, electric)
revitalize: 60 damage reduction (psych, nature)
pulse of life: 18 damage reduction (fire, cold, electric)
reconstruct: 48 damage reduction (all damage)
heart thorn: 45 damage reduction (all damage, single target)
energize: 20% damage reduction (crushing, slashing, piercing up to 200)
These are the abilities that you'll want to use when someone is seriously dying (aside from heart thorn, keep that on cooldown), you'll be amazed at how tanky someone becomes after slapping a reconstruct / pulse of life on them, just be aware that the damage mitigation wears off after 10 / 15 seconds respectively and their health may quickly drop to 0 if you're not expecting it.
2.4 BUFFS/DEBUFFS
fairy fire: -50% evasion (all evasion types, single target)
fae conduit: +80 damage every 5 seconds (fire, cold, electric, stacks to 480)
fill with bile: +152 max hp for 3 min
healing sanctuary: +12 melee accuracy
minor heals: -20% damage taken (next hit)
hunter's stride: +3 movement for 1 minute
*note - since fill with bile is only being used to heal and buff, it's recommended to cast the rank 1 variant. This will save you ~40 power or so, not that you'll be short on power as a healer but in those clutch moments it may be what you need to save a party member.
*ABSOLUTELY IMPORTANT!*
2.5 ARMOR
You may have noticed that the majority of burst healing spells heal armor as well as hp. That's because the most important role of a healer is not to heal hp, but armor!
Armor effectively doubles the amount of healing you can dish out and is also the first thing to be depleted in combat. Take great care when someone has reached 0 armor, as they are highly susceptible to being 1 shot. If you're following this guide, you're sure to be a great healer, but 1 shot KO's are a weakness that will mess you up no matter how prepared or badass your healing is.
It follows then that the thing you should be looking at is not the health bar, but the armor level of each group member. Armor is an amazing indicator in telling you who's going to be taking a lot of damage soon.
Have you ever noticed that at the beginning of a boss fight, nothing seems to be happening? That's because high levels of armor dramatically reduce incoming damage, as armor gets chipped away, more and more damage can get through to the boss. In fact, some bosses can't even begin to take substantial damage until their armor reaches 0!
The same logic can be applied to our party members but in reverse. At the start of a fight, it seems like no one is really taking damage but pay close attention to the armor bars. If someone is missing 1/3 of their armor, you may want to toss out a revitalize to top them back up to full thereby recreating that 'slow-motion combat' feeling similar to the first few moments of damaging a boss with full armor. This is an amazing tactic that I use all the time to heal the badasses in guild I run with on a daily basis. Try it for yourself and you'll be amazed at its effectiveness!
2.6 VITAL MODS
Now that the best keep secret to healing is out, what mods do we need to pull off this magical feat of armor healing?
head: Major Healing abilities also restore 136 Armor
legs: Minor Heals restore 87 Armor
hands: Signature Support abilities restore 96 Armor to all allies within 20 meters
ring: Minor Heals restore +41 Health and reduce the damage of the next attack that hits the target by 20%
neck: Psi Health Wave Healing +15
offhand: Minor Heals restore 87 Armor
These mods are non-negotiable, they are an absolute must for any healer
*note - mods will also affect sidebar skills such as first aid. Psi health wave healing only applies to mentalists obviously.
3. HEAL OVER TIME SYNCING
One detail I'd like to point out as to why mentalism and druid pair so well together is that the healing over time for druid is every 5 seconds while mentalism is every 4.
This might not seem like a big deal but you may notice that your passive healing for mentalism always seems to stack, healing as a unit, no matter when you cast them. I believe that this is due to how the game regulates healing (and damage) over time abilities by using the in game clock to determine the 'tick' timing of your hots.
(It could also be that the cooldown is every 20 seconds which is a factor of 4, the same as the tick rate of healing wave and so it would make sense that they always seem to stack mathematically. But this also seems to be the case even when you don't cast them perfectly every 20 seconds.)
So to illustrate, if you cast healing wave once, the game will heal at let's say time 6:02:00, then again at 6:02:04, then again at 6:02:08, and so on.
Casting a second wave seems to stack with the 1st cast, so even if you were a second or two late (I could be wrong on this but it always seems to be the case whenever I try to test it), both hots will heal at the same time; ie. 6:02:20 and then again at 6:02:24
Conversely, druid's hots are on a 5 second timer. So using the previous example, casting healing sanctuary will heal at 6:02:00, then again at 6:02:05, one second after your psi healing wave procs. Then again at 6:02:10, 2 seconds after your healing wave and so forth.
This is an amazing property because it means your passive healing is constantly chopped up into little pieces which is important because of our next topic....
4. OVERHEALING
Overhealing is usually considered a bad thing in these kinds of games. In Project Gorgon though, overhealing can actually be a good thing but only up to a point. Let us consider the different categories of heals that you have at your disposal, burst heals and passive heals.
For passive healing, we want mega fucking overhealing every tick. That's simply because 1) there is literally no downside not too and 2) we want everyone to be at full health immediately, all the time. We want our healing per second so god damn high that each partial tick brings our team from the brink of death to full every time. So to achieve that, we prioritize every possible mod to increase passive healing on our gear.
For burst healing, overhealing isn't quite as much of a priority. Sure we'll be using burst healing to rescue the people most closely teetering on the abysmal edge, but we will be more selective in what bonuses we choose to keep for those abilities. There are few things worse than using a big heal to save your friend, only to have them ticked up to full health right before casting, wasting your heal and cooldown.
As a general rule for burst healing, the longer the cooldown, the fewer mods we're going to use on it. Why? Because if you have a badass heal, say 600 hp with a 30 second cooldown, you'll use that heal 1 time and probably waste the majority overhealing your target and then have to wait another 30 seconds to use it again.
Meanwhile... congratulations, your group has just wiped :3
Now clearly, this is a bit of an overdramatization, but there have been many times in my younger healing days where this very scenario indeed happened. One could make a strong case arguing that this was an ineffective choice for investing their mods.
The bonus healing that makes your heal so beefy would be FAR better used buffing your so-called "minor heals" which only have a 10-15 second cooldown. This will always be the case, shorter cooldowns = more use = better healing (even if they heal less) = receive more mods. I typically like to buff my minor heals so that they have around 300 healing, the same as a slightly buffed major heal.
5. DOING DAMAGE
This brings us to our next topic, dealing damage as a healer.
So you may be asking yourself; Nepe, healings great and all but what about the DAAAAMAAAAGEE!?!1!? You may be tempted to spec into some damage abilities, and while that's perfectly acceptable, here are some things you may wish to consider.
5.1 LIMITED RESOURCES
Every ability you put on your bar for damage is one less ability you have for healing. I can not count the moments I've had in group when I've used every available heal and sidebar skill on cooldown to prevent a group from wiping.
There are absolutely occasions where you must spam burst heal after burst heal to keep someone up. As a healer, you are not limited by the magnitude of your heals, but by the cooldown of the abilities that you use. Having more heals alleviates the bottleneck effect that using heal after heal inevitably creates.
Aside from limited bar space, damage abilities are notoriously good at using up power. Damage dealers often complain of running out of power in their damage rotations. If you're spending too much time damaging, you may run the risk of not having enough power to heal the group when the time comes!
5.2 COMPETITION WITH GLOBAL COOLDOWNS
So at this point in your PG experience, you may have noticed that every time you use an ability, there is a slight delay from using another ability, usually 1-2 seconds.
This is our friendly neighborhood global cooldown. And by 'friendly' I mean 'annoying bringer of death that ruins the most clutch of healing moments'...
But it isn't all bad. Monsters are also subject to the same foul beasts of global cooldowns. So this means that when mobs attack, they usually do damage in a 1-2 second predictable pattern.
This is actually an incredibly beneficial bit of knowledge that can help us anticipate when damage is incoming; or in other words, how much of a window you have to get a heal in before your beloved teammate dies.
That being said, if for instance, you are spamming damage skills, it is highly likely that you will be under the effects of a global cooldown. And if you happen to be human like me, you may accidentally spam an attack immediately AFTER a mob has inflicted grievous wounds upon your tank. This means that because you accidentally elected to attack, rather than heal, the mob will finish their global cooldown faster than you, which ends in a scenario with the tank dying.
Therefore, it's absolutely imperative that you spend global cooldowns intentionally as to not lock yourself in a sequence that can only result in death.
5.3 CALLING FOR HELP
One final thing to consider when doing damage is that when attacking monsters, especially in a scenario of spamming attacks, is that often times you may attack a mob that has yet to be hit by anyone else in your group.
This is bad for 2 reasons
1) You are now at the top of the agro list for that creature, and there are times when no one in your group is doing any damage to your accidental target and therefore you're stuck with a new friend that wants to become extra 'acquainted'.
2) Oftentimes, tagging a fresh target will call for help, meaning that you are now on the top of the agro list for multiple creatures, all of which now also want to become extra 'acquainted'...
And if healing isn't rough enough on its own, healng a group while you're being pounded/stunlocked/knockbacked is even worse!
5.4 DAMAGE ALTERNATIVES
So this is not to say that damaging as a healer is bad, far from it. It's just that as a healer you have extra responsibilities that are more likely to be messed up by you attacking. If you're mindful of your targets, hack away!
One of the ways that I personally increase my damage output is by synergizing my basic attack, Mindreave, with a mod that turns it into electric damage.
That way, I benefit from the bonus electric damage my fae conduits produce. The end results increase my basic attack to around 700 damage per hit! Which is pretty nice for a healer with no damage abilities /puny healer damage flex
6. HEALER TIPS AND STRATEGIES
6.1 PULLING
Something that you may want to keep in mind is that as a healer, your effective role is to reduce downtime; be that through preventing deaths, increasing group damage, or reducing mob evasion. One avenue you may wish to explore instead of dealing damage as a healer is to pull for the group while everyone is focused on killing the mobs.
Mob respawn time can be a serious issue if your group is struggling to finish a dungeon. The more you can keep your DPS using their abilities the faster you'll progress, and the less likely you'll have to worry about respawns wiping your group.
One of the benefits of having such powerful passive healing is that for mild encounters, your passive heals can do the healing for you long enough to pull the next mob to the group. This takes tremendous pressure off the tank so that instead of trying to navigate the dungeon, pull, and run back to the group; they can just prioritize generating threat and dishing out damage.
Not only that but when pulling, you're able to heal through some incredible damage long enough until someone takes over the agro.
Pulling is by far best suited for healing classes :)
*note - You must gear accordingly for this, Evasion leather works wonders here
6.2 RANGING YOUR PASSIVE HEALS
Another pro tip for this build is planning out where to drop your passive healing abilities, namely fae conduit and healing sanctuary.
As mentioned earlier these abilities have a relatively small health pool, and so die easily to area of effect attacks (I'm looking at you Droaches!). Part of your success as a healer, specifically for druid/mentalism specs, is that you can keep constant passive healing out to the group. If your passive abilities get wrecked immediately after being deployed, it's going to seriously derp your healing output.
To counter this annoyance, we can use proactive positioning for our passive healing deployment. For instance, knowing what AoE abilities to watch out for in advance, we can skillfully deploy both just outside the area of effect, but just close enough so that the group is covered by your passive effects.
This is done by targeting the suspected AoE-inducing troublemaker and holding Alt. Done properly, you should see a distance value appear next to their name. This is the distance you are from your target! Knowing this we can now skillfully keep our distance from unpleasant effects while healing our group at maximum efficiency.
Mobs with troublesome area of effect attacks:
Ogres; 10m
Droaches; 15m
Elite Tacticians; 15m? (might be 20)
Lightning Droaches; 20m
Minotaur Boss; 20m
So for instance, Droachs are kind of difficult for undergeared druids to heal through. Using this strategy, you can sit anywhere within 20-15.1m and safely drop your healing sanctuary. I would actually sit around 16-17m due to sudden shifts in movement, lag issues giving inaccurate distance reading, as well as dropping your passive heal can sometimes be dropped slightly in front of you at times. Any of these issues can ruin your distance planning so hedging back a bit will compensate for this nicely.
For things like ogres and tacticians, it's not likely that they will 1 shot your passive healing abilities, but the stun/silence can absolutely wreck your group.
Staying outside the minimum AoE distance will allow you to continue being an effective healer. Nimble shoes are incredibly useful for this.
6.3 PROPER UI SETUP
Setting up your UI to minimize the amount of 'eye traveling' between finding damaged teammates and quickly seeing your heal cooldowns, will have a huge impact on how effective you are as a healer.
Ideally, you want your party frames close to the center of your screen, and your target right next to your spell bar so you can easily assess what skills you have available and how much longer you need to wait before a cooldown is up.
It can be super convenient to make a toggle UI frame lock/unlock button so that you can move your displays around to your liking. This can be hard to figure out when not in a party so I'll often do this during group run to get everything just right and lock them in place.
Another UI consideration is where to move your looting screen in relation to your party frames. During a dungeon run, you'll be doing a lot of looting, and your looting screen will often cover up your party frames. This can be disastrous if your party is suddenly attacked and killed while you're looting.
https://i.imgur.com/3ecvTun.jpg
How I typically set this up is to cycle through my 'noncombat targets' with Alt + E to target a corpse, then press my 'Use target' with E, loot screen comes up next to my party's health bars, rinse and repeat all while maintaining effective healing ability!
6.4 Q TABBING
One final tip I'd like to include is something I affectionately call Q tabbing.
If you're familiar with other MMO's, you may be well versed in a popular targeting mechanism called 'tab targeting'.
For the uninitiated, this is a phenomenal way to quickly and easily target/cycle through to nearby monsters by pressing the tab key. As a healer though, it can be tough to quickly replicate the same ease of access to a nearby teammate.
Sure, we have macros that allow us to target nearby teammates, or that can target a specific party member, but I'm not talking about that. What I'm referring to is the ability to at a moment's notice, without any extra brainpower or reactionary processing, press a button and immediately target who is likely to take damage next.
Notice, I didn't say who is already taking damage but who is likely to as it's very easy to see who is already hurt on your party health bars (nonparty member healing excluded). This is an amazingly powerful tool for intuition as you can be ready at a moment's notice to counter premeditated incoming damage with your healing.
This is done by mapping 'Select Target of Current' to Q. You can use any key you like but I'd suggest something close to your movement keys. Also using Q makes it extremely easy to tab target and then press Q to find who they're planning to murder next, no clicking required!
For instance, the trolls/minotaurs/bears in WT like to change targets after attacking, and also have a nasty habit of near 1 shotting whoever they hit with their rage attacks. Every time the mob attacks, Q tab afterward to see if they change target. Q tabbing makes warding off their major attacks trivial, generally topping people back up to full health within fractions of a second. And because mobs are equally affected by being locked out of their attack by global cooldowns, we can easily Q tab back to the aggressor, Q tab again and see who is next on the list well before they can dole out the damage again.
Q tabbing is truly what makes reactive healing viable. This is also the primary way to heal someone (or another group) who is not within your own group. Try it out and see for yourself how much more efficient and stress-free your healing becomes.
6.5 DON'T BE TOO HARD ON YOURSELF
Healing can be really stressful, like really stressful. But that's ok. The key is to have fun and just realize that the fact that you're in the group is seriously taking a lot of pressure off everyone even if you guys are still horribly dying all the time.
Here's something that may help console your woes during trying times. Generally, it's the healer's job to make sure that the team can survive the 2nd hit onward, it's the player's job to make sure that they can survive the 1st hit. After all, no one can be saved if they're being 1 shot.
This is a team sport, and everyone has to do their part to ensure the success of the run. Tanks need to make sure they can hold threat, and have adequate hp and armor to take the beatings (don't get me started on the invulnerable builds of staff/shield, there's a good chance this will likely change in the future. From a healers perspective, this is the most boring gameplay ever)
Dps need to be mindful of AoE tagging mobs if they can't take the attention it inevitably brings, be mindful of your damage and plan your build accordingly.
Make sure you bring the proper consumables, cheese making will do wonders for your survivability, and the proper gear set will dramatically increase your ability to evade attacks.
7. FINAL THOUGHTS
In closing, there are many ways to effectively heal in Project Gorgon, this is just the strategy that I prefer. Every class will have some sort of strength and weakness that will set it apart from other healing classes.
For example, bard healers are amazing at healing while taking damage. They actually heal for more depending on how often they are attacked. Priests can achieve full immunity to burst attacks, effectively giving the middle finger to stuns, droach fire, instant death mechanics... nuts I tell you! Others focus on damage prevention by significantly increasing group member's evasion rates to extreme levels.
However you choose to heal is perfectly wonderful :)
Anyways, I meant to quickly display my build but this devolved into some serious healer meta ranting. In any case, I hope you had a good time. See you in game!
Sincerely,
Nepe
