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