Healing

Instructors include but are not limited to:
Ulknor

“It was the healers fault!”

We hear this far to often and mostly from those DPS running around like Gaur with their heads cut off or the annoucer in DSA before we kick the champions butt! Here, we will go over the basics of Healing Dungeon and trial groups. The skills healers use and the sets they wear all depend on the content and mostly the skill of the DPS and Tanks.

Starting Out

Use the following moves while leveling to 15 so you can kill stuff and level. Once you unlock your second weapon bar at 15 you can add in a restoration staff.

Puncturing Sweeps – spammable move that does conal aoe damage in front of you.
Destructions Staff – Wall of Elements does aoe damage in front of you. Lasts 6 seconds, so you can do other damage abilities after throwing it down.
Ritual of Retribution – huge ground healing aoe. It doesn’t heal for much, but every little bit helps, and it removes harmful effects including slowing effects. Great to throw down if you are running away and slowed by enemies.
Rune Focus – eventually we will morph it into channeled focus. Great for giving you extra resistance and eventually magicka over time.
Spear Shards – you’ll want to morph into luminous shards. Does AOE damage and gives a good amount of resources back to anyone who synergies with it.

Once you have unlocked the restoration staff you can start off with these skills:

Grand Healing – a great spammable heal that you have to place near your dps/tank/sometimes yourself. If you decide to run Olorimes, this is how you will strategically place your damage buff.
Combat Prayer – decent instant heal for 6 party members in front of you. Also gives those 6 extra resistances and a minor damage buff.
Regeneration – a great HOT for dungeons. If you morph to mutagen it also removes a harmful effect if a group member’s health drops, which could also be what is killing them. Rapid Regeneration is also great because it ticks quicker than mutagen does, but it does not remove a harmful effect. Rapid Regen is still very good, you should be keeping your ritual down anyways to remove the harmful effects.

Vet Heals Crash Course

As a general start, healing is a lot about instinct and knowing your role. Which is true of any class and the game in general, but as a healer main not at all biased to the role, I’d argue especially so in our case. We’ll start with a general overview though, where you should aim for your stats.

> Max Magicka 30 – 40K (aim for around ~35K magicka)
> Spell Damage – 1500
> Spell Critical – 50%
> Stam 10k
> Health 18-20k
> Physical Resistance – 15k
> Spell Resistance – 10k
> Magicka Recovery Minimum ~>2k.

We mainly get our max magicka from glyphs, with the head, chest, and shoulder being the the exception (Tri-stat Enchant with Infused Traits), and attributes which you’ll ideally run at 64 mag. Magicka recovery ideally rests around 2000+, if you are weaving heavy attacks in regularly + Tenacity from your CP, you will run fine. Heavy attacks are especially important in our rotation, not only for resources, but also heavy attacks with our resto staff gives us major mending increasing our heals by 25% for 3 seconds.

As a general overview, stats important to us are spell damage, spell critical and healing done.

- Spell damage will increase your base healing, but it’s not our most important stat. Don’t ignore it but don’t be too worried about it either, it isn’t necessarily a priority, but around 1,500 is where you want to sit.

- Spell critical will increase the amount of healing you do on a crit. Because you can crit a heal, that said, it’s more important to be able to consistently heal, which we ensure through max mag and healing done etc, but again, don’t ignore it. – Why Combat physician is not popular, procs off crit. With that said you want to be around 50% spell crit.

Healing done also influences the amount of raw healing we can give. We get this through passive abilities and set bonuses.

Frothgar is the main food you’ll want to use for this build, giving you 5k heath and 500 mag recovery.

For mundus we will want to go with Thief to get the extra crit bonus. The more often we are criting while healing, the more heals we are doing overall. We get a majority of our magicka recovery from our jewelry enchants, food buffs as well as CP allocation. If you are a Templar you will want to keep your Channeled Focus down as well to give you the extra magicka back and keep elemental drain on the mobs so if you heavy attack you are getting quite a bit of magicka back. This is another reason we can get away with having magicka in the low 30k range, because our magicka recovery is sitting around 2,500+, giving us resources back pretty quick.

Skills

Major skills for healing are Breathe of life, luminous shard, healing springs, combat prayer and extended ritual. You’ll want to run a few of these in combination but I wouldn’t say all of them at once.

- Breathe of Life self-explanatory burst. Some peanuts will try to tell you that you’re not a real healer if you use breath of life, but don’t listen to them. The only trouble is it’s costly so you’ll to rely more on HOTs.

- Luminous Shards is also pretty self-explanatory. When you heal your tank calling for shards, they’re not asking you to glass them, they just want some resources back. So this skill is very important for team support.

- Healing Springs is a very cheap proximity heal that you can comfortably spam. You restore magicka for those healed and it’s especially useful in trials when we’re stacking.

- Combat Prayer is one I personally prefer due to the extra bonuses it gives your team (minor berserk) and the healing is instant, also you don’t need to aim it. It is a little more costly though, so you couldn’t run it just on its own, you will combine it with another HOT. When your %healing done stat is high, this skill can actually be extremely effective as a burst.

Extended Ritual is our happy circle. Gives a little healing to contribute to our hots and also cleanses our friends plus an additional heal. It’s also an effective way of bossing your dps around. Get in the happy circle or enjoy the sad screen of death.

Other important skills include : rapid regeneration, elemental drain, cleanse, energy orb, annulment (harness/dampen magicka) over sun shield.

This is a good point and my initial response is that it depends on your playstyle and what you prefer. Force siphon is definitely a viable option in a flex spot. A few things to consider..

- Elemental drain only reduces spell resistance, not a major breach like pierce.

- Force siphon gives additional resources back, healing as well as magicka when morphed.

- Elemental drain can be cast on multiple targets and is instant.

Force siphon has a longer cast time and counts as a damage ability, therefore it will aggro if the fight hasn’t been started yet.

There are a few different ultimates you can make use of, and none of them I would recommend double slotting. Aggressive war horn, nova, rite of passage, barrier and maybe panacea are our focus. A set up I recommend is having a mitigation ultimate on your front bar, and a group buff ultimate on your back bar. I also prefer Barrier opposed to Rite of Passage, because it gives a pretty large damage shield and heals over time for the next 30 seconds and it is instant compared to Rite of Passage which is a channelled ability.

Main thing about healing is that you’ll never really have a set bar, you’ll have a combination of a few things you consistently use, but in general you’ll need to be switching things in and out depending on what content you’re doing and who your teammates are.

Gear

Just like all things in ESO there are way too many sets out there and not all of them are great. So for general recommendations, for trials and vet dungeons you’ll want to look at getting, and things to keep in mind to get them to work.

- Worm’s Raiment, Worm Cult Vaults of Madness, dungeon
  Group buff set, gives your group 4% magicka cost reduction

- Mending Mage Aetherian Archive, trial
  Reduces damage done by mobs caught in your ground healing effects by 8%

- Sanctuary Banished Cells I/II, dungeon
  Group buff set, increases healing received of your group within a 12 meter radius

- Jorvuld’s Guidance Scalecaller Peak, dungeon
  Increases the ‘effectiveness’ of all buffs cast by 40% NOTE : only those cast by you

- Spellpower Cure White Gold Tower, dungeon
  Group buff set, the current BiS and important for vet content, increases your group’s weapon and spell damage for a time

- Troll King / Earthgore Blessed Crucible / Bloodroot
  Monster sets if you choose to slot one, which give %healing done bonus

Infallible Aether
Depends on the team/healer for this one, but can be great for increasing overall damage without dps giving up one of their preferred sets. Increases damage done to mobs that are hit with a heavy attack by the wearer by 8%.

Since Summerset expansion we are able to run 5/5/2 as far as sets go. Giving us access to monster sets and 2 full sets. A few good monster sets are Bogan’s Nightflame, Chokethorn, Troll King, and Earthgore. You still can use Maelstrom and Asylum weapons, but this will make one of your sets have 4/5 pieces on 1 bar, but still doable.

In the end it’s up to you and what style you prefer, and what combination will work to get the job done.

I encourage experimenting, since I have done a bit of it myself and I’ll tell you what I’ve found.

- Combat Physician is a good set on paper, but in practise it is more effective to heal consistently through focusing on max magicka, %healing done and magicka regen then to build your healer around crit healing.

- Another set good on paper is Draugr’s Rest, which I’ve been testing on a Nightblade healer. The heal circle is excellent, healing for up to 11K very quickly, but it is tiny, and general gameplay (especially vet content) requires you to be in movement too intensively for it to be effective.

Twilight Remedy is not a bad set, actually it’s a very good set, but as a Templar it is hard to justify using it over a second group bonus set because the only synergies we are likely to be consistently running are extended ritual, luminous shards and cleansing ritual, and energy orb. However, the set is likely to really shine on a Warden, who’s class abilities trigger a lot of synergies (thank you to Bootstrap for pointing this out).

“Staying alive to keep your team alive.”

It goes without saying that a dead healer isn’t a good healer, and healers function best when in the thick of things as opposed to lingering on the edges of a mob ball. To perform our role best we need to invest in being survivable. There are a few ways we can achieve this..

- Always run damage shields. As a Templar we have access to sun shield, but this shield is only really useful for tanks as it scales off max health. Annulment (morphed to either dampen magicka or harness magicka) from the light armour skill line is a very powerful damage shield and even more so when we invest more points into Bastion (CP).
  Another possible option is bone shield from the Undaunted skill line, not necessarily recommended, but it has its benefits. Bone shield gives your allies a massive damage shield when the synergy is activated + additional healing received. For us, the beauty of this ability is that it’s stamina – if you’re running low on mag and about to take a massive hit, this ability may just save your life.

Don’t overlook channelled focus, the morph of rune focus. This buffs your resistances by 5K and gives you additional magicka recovery. The only con is that it’s stationary and generally our best survival tactic is to keep moving. It is invaluable in certain situations, though. They recently made it where if you are standing in it the 5k in resistances we obtain is increased by another 50%, so if you are forced to get a pickup, make sure this and your shield are down/on before you start pickup.

Buffed right, sometimes you can even survive ‘one shots’ in Veteran content. Such as Velidreth’s spike. Obviously I don’t recommend tempting fate, but surviving that blow can mean the difference between your team succeeding and wiping.

Skill bars should be close to this with few variations:
Restoration Staff Bar: Healing Springs, Combat Prayer, Inner Light, Extended Ritual, Channelled Focus – Barrier
Destruction Staff Bar: Breath of Life, Luminous Shards, Energy Orbs, Harness/Dampen Magicka, – Aggressive Warhorn

PvP

Let me start off by saying that PvP is ever changing and you can play several different ways and get the same results. This is just how I setup my healer and how I do it. Also, PvP isn’t really my strong suite, and when I do PvP I typically like to go do Battlegrounds.

Sets: I use selfish sets when I PvP. I use Seducer (a crafted set) in Heavy Impen, for the crit resistances, and extra armor, the 5 piece bonus gives us an 8% cost reduction on spells we cast. I have this set as my armor pieces. Weapons and jewelry I use Lich, which gives us insane magicka recovery (close to 1k extra) when our magicka drops below 33%, this just makes sure we don’t run out of magicka, because we will be spamming our heals quite a bit. When it comes to weapons I use a resto staff on front bar, and a sword and board on the back bar (for extra armor).

Monster Set: I use Bone Pirate, which will turn you into a skeleton giving you a 50% reduction on damage received and healing received.

Vestment of Olorime –

Does Procs	Does Not Proc
Spear Shards Cleansing Ritual Rune Focus Grand Healing Wall of Elements Circle of Protection Blood Alter Caltrops Trap Beast Nova (Ulti) Elemental Storm (Ulti)	Combat Prayer