In Age of Conan, all healers are expected to do dps as well as heal. If you ignore doing dps, you will be sitting around wasting your time for most of the fight.
Heals come in three basic types. Your 
heal, 
heal, and Big heal.
and heals provide rings of colored particles around the feet of everyone hit, so you can easily see who was hit with your heals. These are Heal over Time abilities and as they timer ticks down, the circles get smaller until they disappear. Your primary job is to keep both of these abilities running on your group at all times as this is where most of your healing comes from. However, you don’t want to just spam the and heals over and over as this just refreshes the timer and results in wasted mana and time.
The heal hits everyone in your group within a large, but specific range. As long as you stay near your group, your heals will always hit them. As the heal is about to expire, you recast it.
- Each Player can receive the benefits of 2 heals at once.
The heal is a Conal heal and hits those people in front of you. For this reason you want to always position yourself with the rest of your group in front of you.
- This is the most important heal you have.
- Each Player can only have one heal on them at a time. Another Healer’s heal will override yours.
-
heals are a Heal over Time. It is applied in ‘ticks’. One tick per second.
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heals double on the first tick, and then every 15s afterwards as long as you keep using the heal.
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heals have secondary effects. Bear Shamans get increased melee damage and pom/tos can use a feat that makes their heals damage enemies.
- For this reason, heals are spamable, but remember they never heal more by spamming. Use it too much and you just waste mana.
- For this reason,
The Big heal is a single one-time heal that provides a somewhat large lump of health all at once to all nearby players.
- It has a close to a 30 second cooldown, depending on class.
- It applies a debuff on each player hit that lasts for 55 seconds.
- This debuff means that player can’t be affected by that kind of Big heal again until the debuff goes away.
- The debuff has a specific icon per class, you need to learn these icons so you won’t be wasting your Big heals.
- Tos debuff is green, Pom debuff is bright yellow, and Bear debuff is darker yellow.
- Each healer class has their own kind of Big heal, so at most, 3 different Big heals can be applied within 55 seconds.
While the Big heal may be called ‘Big’, it isn’t extremely strong on a tank. Tanks can receive more damage in one hit than can be healed by the Big heal. As such, this ability should be used well before the tank is about to die. When you have more than one healer, it is often best to rotate your use of these Big heals so everyone can get 2-3 Big heals every minute.
Other key bits of information:
Your heals are half as strong on yourself. Your group will get double what you get.
It only takes a second or two to apply all of your heals. You will then have 15-20 seconds before you need to start thinking about re-applying them. In this spare time, you do DPS!
In AoC, healing is a preventative measure. You want to keep everyone’s health as high as possible at all times. You can’t quickly heal anyone back to full health. Most of your healing comes from the Heal over Time (/) spells, so these really need to always be running.
In some fights, there are mechanics which hit the whole group at once for a large amount of damage. DPS who are not near or at full health can die to these abilities (like if they have agro). Big heals are vital for times like these where you need to keep the whole group alive.
TLDR:
- Keep your / Heal over time abilities in use at all times without spamming.
- Use Big heals correctly.
- DPS in all remaining spare time.
Bonus content!
After you hit level 80, you get new heals from the AA (Alternate Advancement) system.
All AA heals are based on your Heal Rating stat. Heal Rating comes from Khitai Gear or newer raid gear. Low Heal Rating means very weak AA heals.
In the middle of your AA tree, you will see a spell called Celestial Gaze. This is the same for all classes. Based on the description you will see, it hits sort of like a reverse cone in front of you.
Each Healer class has their own Special heals at the bottom of the AA tree.
For Bear Shamans, you have:
- Sleuth of Bears - A Heal over time ability
- Spirit of Yggdrasil - A Protective Barrier (Prevents incoming damage)
Other useful info: http://forums-archive.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?193250-Bear-Shaman-AA-class-perks
For a Tempest of Set, you have:
- Idol of Dark Rejuvenation - A burst heal
- Eyes of Set - A Protective Barrier
Other useful info: http://forums-archive.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?181482-ToS-Faq
For Priest of Mitra, you have:
- Shimmering Invocation - An circular aoe heal stronger near the center
- Emissary of Elysium - A Protective Barrier
Other useful info: http://forums-archive.ageofconan.com/showthread.php?194073-Which-perk-do-you-use
Cool External Resources:
I was recently made aware of this handy tool for AA Heals made by Johara. It goes into great detail about exactly how the AA heals works and includes a heal rating calculator for each ability. Here is a link:
http://joharaoc.eu/aaheal
If anyone has any corrections or additions they would like made to this post, please let me know.
