I played TSW for some time, before the announcement of SWL.
Hesitant at first, but I transferred my character over. I played for a short amount of time, as my friends decided to stop.
Two years later I’m back, and can’t remember a damn thing about the build I was working on.
I’d love some suggestions on both a healing build, and a soloing build, for Blood/AR. And no, I probably won’t change weapons anytime soon (I’m addicted).
Thank you for your time and consideration, in this matter.
I have played many builds of blood and AR for healing. With blood, it’s focused a lot on creating barriers. Due to the mechanic whereby if you apply a barrier to someone who already has one, it’s converted to healing instead, that makes abilities like Sanctuary doubly useful. With regards to blood’s mechanic, you want to keep your martyrdom level high as much as possible without giving yourself too much damage, so have an ability that reduces it (such as Reap) when there’s a lull in the amount of healing required
With AR offhand for healing, I would probably use Unveil Essence (as it has a higher chance to load a grenade than Vital Shot) paired with either Anima Canister or Essence Grenades (which have less healing over time but also allow you to support with some damage as well as applying debilitated, which in turn will reduce the amount of damage your team takes)
The only thing I would suggest you is to consider to switch things around and use AR as primary and Blood as secondary.
AR is not the best healing weapon but its the most versatile and allows you to go from 100% healing to Healing and x% dps very easily.
You will soon find yourself healing mostly with your basic and using the power skill to dps and proc IG grenades.
Blood offhand gives you a good out of fight spammable power heal plus a great Elite that group heals and cleanses.
Which weapon you are going to use as mainhand is only important when deciding which weapon signets to level, so maybe test it out beforehand.
When making a pure dps build, which you will have to make sooner or later, AR and Blood have the problem that are both best as mainhand weapon and only AR can somehow be used as offhand, but this is another story.