General Healing Overview and Builds Guide

[Polin]

This guide will cover general builds for all viable healing weapon combinations, general healing strategy, as well as particular tactics required on some dungeon bosses, gadgets and offhand weapon options.

General healing weapons overview:

What can you heal with?

There are 3 options for mainhand healing weapon - Fist, Blood Magic or Assault Rifle. Out of those 3, Fist and Blood are clearly superior choices, but even AR can be employed effectively with some trade-offs.

What specific weapons should I look for for healing?

While you could heal with just a plain Item Reward bag Fist, Blood Focus or Assault Rifle with no extra passive, some specific weapons do have passive effects that can prove very useful for healing.

For Fist Weapon those weapons are (in descending order of usefulness):

Fist-in-Chains - gives you more Fury when your Invigorating Wrath expires, allowing you to reset it faster, thus giving you more healing.
Bladed Gauntlets - Gives you Fury passively over time in combat. Again, functionally shortens the “cooldown” of your Invigorating Wrath ability.
Surgical Steel - Makes your Invigorating Wrath sub-abilities do more healing.
Scalpel - Makes your normal abilities do more healing after Invigorating Wrath expires (functionally the inverse of above. Slightly less useful in my opinion because the effect occurs later).
Invigorating Razors - Make your Invigorating Wrath last 10% longer. Functionally gives your invigorating Wrath 10% more healing vs 21% bonus from Surgical Steel. Best looking fist weapon in my opinion though.

Special mention - Manticore Wrath Inducers. You might think that getting into Invigorating Wrath without equipping it is a great idea, but it really isn’t. Not only there are no particularly good abilities to fill that extra slot you’d get with, but being launched into wrath at random time can be at least annoying and at most wipe worthy if you can’t cleanse on time. Use only if you know what you’re doing.

For Blood Magic those weapons are (in descending order of usefulness):

Sanguinary Monograph - Gives you a stacking healing buff when you take self-inflicted damage from Martyrdom.
Compendium of Wards - Makes your shields stronger by a significant amount. Keep in mind that the shield strength increase isn’t necessarily a healing increase, hence the weapon’s lower rating.
Lost Tome of Lies - Most if its passvies are not particularly useful for healing, since you dont usually use Eldritch scourge or Reap, but Crimson pulse does have an effect on healing.

Special Mention - Chronicle of Purity. This blood focus actually reduces your healing output by draining your Martyrdom level with basic heals. This is a holdover from the time where excessive Martyrdom levels could kill you and serves not practical benefit now, other than making your healing functionally stuck at ~50% of your potential healing output. Avoid for any purposes other than unlocking a pretty skin.

For Assault Rifle those weapons are (in descending order of usefulness):

High-Yield Launcher - increases the amount of healing done by grenades
Whispered Desires - gives you some passives that are useful for healing
Orochi Medical Launcher - Buffs AR group healing
Orochi Tactical Carbine - Buffs AR healing in general for a short time

What weapon affix should I look for for healing?

Havoc - increases your crit power by up to 10% is the most useful one for raw healing output as it buffs every single crit heal you do.

Alacrity - best overall utility, as it allows you to kite adds, avoid being hit by AoE attacks and generally makes it easier to have correct positioning being in range of everyone in your group

Efficiency - Arguably useful in some circumstances if you spam your healing elite, this can help you bring it off cooldown several seconds earlier and can net you more healing that way. Since you almost never spam your elite I view this affix as being of dubious utility

Energy - Possibly the least useful affix since energy is half as valuable for healers as they have double the energy pool, and most of the healing is done with basic so that cost no energy either. Could have some effect on your healing if you have power single target heals in your build but generally has no effect on your healing.

Warding - Could potentially allow you to take more damage from some attacks and not die, but practically useless.

Recovery / Restoration - Practically useless since you wil heal yourself to full regardless.

What Gear should I use for healing?

For Best in Slot items for healing check the table in this guide. Generally you can heal with talismans used for dps set, the things that affect healing output the most are:

Head slot signet for Elite abilities cooldown (generic or weapon specific)
Neck and Finger slot signets for Power and Basic abilities respectively (generic or weapon specific)

Anything above that is just adding circumstantial effects that can be useful but shouldn’t be required.

Healing offhand options:

There are really just two options here - you either run shotgun offhand to provide Opening Shot buff and cleanse with Clean Up, or, if you’re using AR to heal you will be forced to have a healing weapon offhand on some bosses just to have access to healing. What kind of Shotgun you have in offhand doesn’t matter, two shotguns that would have any measurable (not noticeable) effect are The Redeemer (for buffing the group) and Ifrithian Despoiler (for buffing own crit power) and the only affix that does anything in offhand is Alacrity, as it allows you to move faster (provided you don’t already have alacrity in your mainhand)

What Supporting Agents should I use for healing?
For a full agent listing and where they come from check this table

Since the largest part of your healing is done via basic you want at least one +28% basic damage / 325 Healing Rating Agent, and your mainhand weapon +7% / 150 Crit Power agent. 3rd agent can be another 28% / 490 HP basic agent, or +8% power / 325 Healing Rating agent, or +20% elite / 325 Healing Rating agent, up to personal preference.

For Blood +7% / 150 CP agent comes from South Africa achivement, but Fist equivalent is only available from Agent Booster packs so a 2nd best option of +7% Fist damage / 490 HP is a solid choice.

Healing Builds:
Healing builds for Fist / Shotgun:

Healing Elite option for maximum healing:

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Potential adjustments include:

Replacing Overgrowth passive that gives you a stronger group heal with Second Wind passive that gives you more energy when you exit Invigorating Wrath. Second wind is more useful if you use Wrath more often, Overgrowth is useful if you rely more on group heal. Either is preference.

On bosses that don’t require cleansing you can replace Clean Up with Wild Surge fist ability to slow the adds and help the tank and dps. Alternatively replace it with Savagery to buff a single dps’s damage even further.

Replace Clean Up with Renewal (and, optionally, Overgrowth passive with Recuperate passive) for a higher single target heal - usually unnecessary.

Bombardment Elite for applying Expose:

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Same options apply to this build as the above one. On Darkness War dungeon boss #6 Combat Reload passive stops working, so if you desire to continue using Bombardment you should replace one of your shotgun abilities with Shell Salvage and replace Combat Reload with Salvage Expert

Healing Builds for Blood / Shotgun:

Healing Elite option for maximum healing:

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Potential adjustments include:

Since Blood doesn’t really have a way to CC enemies or Buff DPS there aren’t as many options you have here.

Replace Clean Up on bosses you don’t need an extra cleanse on with Sanctuary and replace Crimson Pulse passive with Haematopoiesis passive.

Replace Rites of Refuge or Absolution with Crimson Pulse if you don’t get Crimson Pulse from Lost Tome of Lies or if you think getting an extra Heal over Time is more valuable than making your group heals stronger.

Keep in mind that if you do not include Absolution passive, if you select yourself as defensive target, you will be stealing half the healing from the lowest % hp target, due to self damage from Martyrdom.

Bombardment Elite for applying Expose:

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Same adjustments as the build above, and same adjustment as described in Fist Bombardment build for final boss of Darkness War dungeon.

Healing Builds for Assault Rifle
Let me preface this by saying that I would not recommend using AR for healing over either of the other two options, but if you have dps signets for AR and have to heal something or if you just want to try something new here are some builds. They are not as good as the ones above but they should still work for everything.

Assault Rifle with Shotgun:

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Assault Rifle build with Shotgun offhand for cleansing / providing Opening Shot buff. Replace Anima Suffusion Elite and its passive with Bombardment Elite and Combat Reload passive if you have to apply Expose.

Assault Rifle with Shogun with Essence Grenades:

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Slightly different variant with a grenade that applies debilitate to reduce enemy damage output.
Build contributed by Dr-Levsky

Assault Rifle with Fist:

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Build variant with Fist offhand for situations when you can’t do group heal with AR due to being unable to hit the target, or Assault Rifle group heal being unable to outheal reflect dmg that dps smack themselves with.

Assault Rifle with Blood:

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Build variant with Blood offhand for situations when you can’t do group heal with AR due to being unable to hit the target, or Assault Rifle group heal being unable to outheal reflect dmg that dps smack themselves with.

Gadget Options:

Concentrated Anima Jet - Best healing gadget and a default choice unless you need something else on a particular fight

Purification Drone Model UW-0 - Extra cleanse, useful when you need an extra cleanse, and is required for the solo cleansing of the final boss in Hell Raised Dungeon.

Compact Catastrophe Shelter - AoE protection buff for everyone that stands in it, useful in Darkness War dungeon to mitigate damage dps take from add death hits or shield the tank, provided you can place it on them. Also useful for saving people (including yourself) who just can’t stay behind the rock on the final boss of Polaris Dungeon.

Electrogravitic Attractor / Mistress’s Bashosen - Impair gadgets - useful when there’s something to impair, like crawling adds on Hell Raised boss #5 or to knock down adds (with Bashosen) that would otherwise melee you to death on Polaris boss #5 or Darkness War boss #6

Electromagnetic Destabilizer - Extra purge if you need one.

Fey Line Stone - Can be useful to position yourself but largely useless.

Manticore Agitator - When you’re just tired of your tank’s shit.

[Polin]

How To Heal People So They Wouldn’t Die
Who Do I Target?
There are 3 options here, in ascending order of involvement:

1. Target yourself 100% of the time. Basic Heal goes on your defensive target and then doubles on the lowest health person in your group / raid, who is usually the tank. So for the purposes of basic healing you can just target yourself and not bother with ever targeting the tank. This is the laziest approach and has 2 drawbacks - 1st is that basic healing bounce has range, so if you’re too far from the tank you won’t actually heal them, and there’s no feedback other than just looking at the tank and seeing them get no healing to let you know of that, and the 2nd one is that you don’t affect the tank (or your defensive target) with any of the buffs that BiS healing talismans provide, and there’s not much point of using a healing gadget like Anima Jet on yourself most of the time. With a good tank you should get away with it fine, but this way of targeting does have an effect of halving your basic healing output in some circumstances.

2. Target the tank most of the time. I’m saying “most” because sometimes on some bosses tank will have to go out of range and you’d switch target on yourself or someone else. This is directly superior to the previous one is that you still have ~25 meter range that you can target the tank at, so you can be safely away from any danger and you effectively double your basic healing output.And you would have to target the tank to use burst healing like Anima Jet, Serenity ability or a Power Ability Heal.

3. Target whoever needs healing the most right now. This is only relevant on bosses that have dps damage events like mummies hitting them, or boss applying some kind of DoT effect. Given how painful switching targets and the damage scaling in e17 dungeons you are likely better off just using group heal to heal a dps in your group rather than trying to target them manually. Still possible to do if it’s just 1 dps that is taking continous damage.

What is the Healing Ability Rotation?

There isn’t really an ability rotation per se, the closest you can get to that is doubling your baseline healing output with fist by applying Feral Regrowth every 6/8 seconds so that it ticks on everyone 100% of the time.

Otherwise you are just using basic whenever you can (really, if you’re not doing anything else you should be using basic) and doing stronger heals (ncluding group heals) as necessary.

When Do I Heal?

Like I said above you should be using stronger heals as necessary, but how can you tell when it’s necessary? Well, dps will drop in heals rather rapidly when that happens so you’ll see that easily, but when it comes to the tank, it’s less clear cut.

Here’s the guideline I use when deciding on what to heal with.
Tank is at 100-90% hp - Just basic is enough.
Tank is at 75-90% hp - I should probably use a heal gadget if I have one (Jet has a very low cooldown so it can be spammed and it heals for more on a single target than some healing elites), or place Shelter gadget on the tank, use one or two group heals
Tank is at 60-75% hp - Spam group healing (normal, or, in case of Fist Revivify from your Invgorating Wrath), use non-elite burst heal like Anima Jet, or Serenity Fist ability.
Tank is at <50% hp - use Elite or any burst heal you can have, or damage prevention like Expunge Blight on the tank.

Now, barring some specific bosses that have very hard hitting abilities and are meant to be a cooldown rotation / heal check bosses (like Polaris #6, or first phase of Darkness War #6) a good tank shouldn’t drop through several of these tiers at once, and once they go low, they would use a cooldown that should stall the damage and give you enough time to heal them back, but given the damage scaling on some bosses you should probably do it with something other than basic.

How Do I Heal Specific Content?
I wrote a healing guide for the raid here, so this section will cover general overview of what you should do in five Elite dungeons. Lairs and regionals do not really require any special healing.

Polaris
In this dungeon players will be randomly affected by a DoT effect called “Maddening Melody” that will spread to others if they stand too close to each other. That DoT has to be countered by group healing. Stupid DPS will also get exploded by Deep Blast AoE that deals ~90% of HP bar (scaling % will be the same on dps or tank) so you will have to heal them through that too.

In the second phase of boss #3 everyone will be taking massive damage from electrified crates they’re standing on so Compact Catastrophe Shelter gadget is recommended to heal through that easier. Boss #5 will spawn a lot of adds in the break phase that will want to eat your face so you might want to set some survivability AA on that fight or go to the tank real fast. You will have to hide behind the rock on Boss #6 and someone will get spotted so you should use Shelter on them so they don’t die to Cosmic Sundering (Unless it’s a tank, don’t use it on a tank they should have their own cooldown). Also Boss #6 hits the tank for 35k damage on a normal hit, so if the tank isn’t using correct rotation or if, due to low dps, the phase goes on long enough that they run out of cooldowns they will start taking a lot more damage, be advised of that.

Hell Raised

Here, players will be affected by Lifeburn and Soulburn debuffs. Lifeburn deals damage over time for 10 seconds per stack and Soulburn prevents cleansing for 5 seconds, forcing you to heal through at least 5 seconds of Lifeburn on everyone.

Bosses #1 and #5 will have a chain attack that hits everyone and you will have to use group heal to heal through that (on #1 it hits much harder but the original target can hide from the boss to cancel the attack). Boss #3 will have periods when players are forced to move from platform over fire taking continuos damage, so it’s advisable to keep some group healing in reserve for that.

Boss #6 will cast Soulburn + Lifeburn often enough that if you want to cleanse all of that alone you would need a specific rotation here. You need to cleanse 2 instances of Lifeburn and in order to do that you use Clean Up to cleanse one and your Elite + Purification Drone to cleanse the other. Keep in mind that you have to use Elite and Drone after Soulburn effect expires, whereas you can pre-cast Clean Up because it lasts longer than Soulburn and will, therefore, cleanse Lifeburn as soon as Soulburn runs out. You should use group healing to keep the dps alive during 5 seconds they take 3.5k/s damage from lifeburn, and it’s much easier to do with Fist since you have additional group heal in Invigorating Wrath. With Blood you will have to ration your energy more carefully and use expunge on some of Lifeburns to be able to heal through them without using as many group heals to conserve energy. Expunge can also double as extra cleanse if required.

Darkness War

Similarly to Polaris, everyone here will be taking damage from Devotion Through Death - aoe attacks Mayan adds will cast as they die. Based on how well geared you are for the level you might want to have dps not kill too many adds at once, and using wings on more than 6 adds will instantly kill dps. Using Shelter gadget helps reduce damage dps take, provided they actually stand inside of it. There are fights that have adds present at the start, so if you start healing early and gain healing aggro on them, do make sure to stand further back, otherwise they will run to you and want to hug you. Adds can also be turned into bombs and if you walk in a proximity of the bomb you will instantly die to massive damage hit (you could probably survive it if you have ~5-10 survivability AA, but just barely)

Boss #6 will hit the tank for 30k dmg on a normal hit so you should probably place shelter on them just to help out some. In phase 3 of the fight it’s worthwile to keep the cleanse running as frequently as you can because the boss can pull and stun everyone at random point and instacleansing the stun is valuable. With fist you use CU whenever it comes off cooldown, with blood you can supplement CU with Expunge. It’s possible to kite the adds after pulling them with heal aggro so that dps dont have to spend time killing them, but you probably want at least some kind of speedbuff to do that like Signet of Quickness or Alacrity to make it comfortable.

The Ankh

Some bosses in this dungeon will spawn unkillable adds that will laser players with damage that you have to heal through. Catching a Mote of Aten will silence the player and deal massive damage over time to them, that you will have to heal. It’s foolish to expect players to just not stand in the motes’ way so prepare to heal.

Boss #1 will also place a random target AoE that will deal ~60% of the dps’s hp in unavoidable damage. Boss #2 has a heal check mechanic called Dreaming Shroud - a cast targeting whoever he has the aggro on (it’s usually the tank, anyone else would just instantly die to that) dealing 10k of unavoidable, unglanceable damage per second. Now, Ideally a tank would use two cooldowns stacking them to overlap and prevent as much of that damage as possible, but those cooldowns will likely run out before the shroud itself does, so prepare for a spike in incoming damage on the tank towards the end of the cast. If you are a blood healer, you can place expunge on the tank to prevent even more damage (ideally do that in the second half of the cast). Alternatively you can use Shelter gadget for a similar effect. If your tank is bad and doesn’t use any cooldowns, you can place expunge at the start and maybe sometime heal them through without any cooldowns on their end, but you have to spank tanks that do that. On boss #6 you might want to use shelter to give yourself and dps some protection from laser mummies as they deal a lot of damage per second.

Hell Eternal

In this dungeon players will take reflect damage while hitting “Occluding Lens” shield on the bosses that you have to heal through (it’s intended that they don’t shoot it, but who ever seen that?) and some bosses will cast Rot Iron - an attack that will apply a hefty slow debuff on the target, deal a lot of damage on application, deal damage over time before killing them when it expires ~5 seconds later. It has to be cleansed, unless the person that has it said something mean to you.

On Boss #2, every time it casts Fallback it will stun everyone it can see and apply Rot Iron debuff to the target that has the higest aggro that it can see. While it’s possible that everyone would hide and nobody will gain Rot Iron, you shouldn’t expect that and should cleanse every Fallback cast. You need 2 cleanses for that. Do not use channeled ability to cleanse while he does fallback because that will result in you being stuck to the ground with phantom stun. Boss #3 will gain damage increasing stacks after it casts Draw Heat and tank will start taking a lot more damage at around 3rd dunking pool, so be prepared for that. On Bosses #5 and #6 it can be hard to see the chains, so it helps to target the boss that does the cast (The Iscariot and Ebliss respectively) to see it being cast and cleanse.

The Penthouse

There will be some Damage over Time effects placed on the players by Boss #2 that you will have to heal, as well as Filth stacks DoT on Boss #3 and generally people being dumb and standing in stuff on all bosses. Use group heals when necessary.

Blood Uta will apply “Exposed Vein” debuff on the tank that will grow in potency, cleanse that before it starts hitting the tank for 10k per second. Filth stacks on Boss #3 are not cleansable. Shelter gadget is useful to reduce incoming damage to dps.