Celtic Heroes

At lvl 96 ive reached the point where id like to go pure healer. Id welcome advice and opinions on what to reset my skills to. 25 natures touch but what else? I am in a high level clan and frequenly lvl with 130s and 140s on dragons etc. I spend a lot of my time boss hunting as well.

Maybe 20 or 25 in giants ward and fire?

Should i keep embrace maxed or near maxed?

How much to put in group heal?

Also we are planning on taking Argh soon.

Thanks

Dinien, this is a difficult question to answer.

Taking your question literally, I can answer that in order to be the best "pure healer" you should max focus at the expense of all other stats, max the three healing spells, then save any unallocated points for when you get a skills bump at level 120 and are able to allocate 30 points in each. Then rinse and repeat for when you reach level 150. But that's pretty poor advice.

To answer your question more seriously, Teaweasel's signature says it better than I can: "Best Build is a 30/30 in Thinking for yerself". You'll have to figure out how you want to play, and then work from there. There is no longer an ideal/best build for any of the three main styles of play (dps, support, hybrid). What works well for you and your server and clan will be completely different for someone else.

If you want to to broaden your build outside of pure healing, and create a support druid, you need to figure out where in the damage triangle of "avoidance, reduction, mitigation" you want to sit.

Avoidance:
Howling Wind at a high enough skill level will significantly reduce the number of hits that land on your tank
Calm, even with the basic single point in it, can cause a mob to retarget: off of yourself, or from a high dps player back to the tank
Abundance at a high enough level can create a resist against health debuffs

Reduction: Bark and Wards

Mitigation: Heals, and I'm going to put Abundance and Abundant Aura in here as well since usually these are creating a "hp credit" that gets taken down by damage.

The best questions to ask yourself are "What will I be fighting? Who will I be fighting with?" Best look at the most common kinds of damage that are being dealt, what's the most effective means of dealing with them given the people who are being dealt the damage, and then what the other skills of your team are.

Wards are great. If you level on lava, boost ward of fire. If you fight a lot of grimwall/magmadon golems, boost wards of giants and fire. Wyverns? Wards of fire and soldiers (someone else please confirm that wyverns do slash damage, not pierce). Doing dragons (Aggragoth or summer dragons) requires abundance at minimum skill level of 7 to resist the health debuff. Wards of fire and giants will also help on Rockbelly and Ironspike. Giants and magic on deadroot and Falgren. Ward of fire and a good group heal has saved more than a few rangers on anything that casts any type of fire cloak. Some clans split wards between the druids, where each will specialize in one or two, but taken as a whole they have a complete set. Or most of one. I've yet to see anyone advocate for a maxed ward of frost though this could be useful in pvp vs ice mages. Maybe your level partners fight a lot of golems so you want ward of giants, and another clan druid does a lot of wyverns so has strong wards of fire and soldiers. Between the two of you, your tank will be a lot stronger vs the Lavalord. Talk to your clanmates, and figure out what's going to build the strongest team.

My support druid is level 91. Nothing is maxed. He has a 620-ish natures touch, 88 embrace, 320-ish group heal, and about 20/25 in each of ward of giants and fire. Maybe slightly more in fire. He has the above-noted 7 abundance. He also has royal rings of embrace, breath and giants, and a grand warding ring of fire, so he has an extra 19 skill points compared to someone without rings. He's optimized for golem busting, but is useful on wyverns and Ythair. We will see how he does on Aggragoth when we do our first run at him this weekend.

My main is a dps-weighted hybrid build. He has a mid-range bark, which I use when solo/duo levelling. But in a boss fight I leave the bark to a friend who has twice my skill level when he wears his rings. And other druids cover embrace since theirs are 120+ compared to the paltry 88 my support druid can offer. My main's group support is decent but that's because he's level 131 and has good gear rather than having been built for support. On Aggragoth I plan to reskill him as full support.

If I wasto go back to levelling on wraiths, but dual box with my support druid rather than soloing, I'd give my support druid a similar layout in the heals, but switch up the wards to be mob appropriate (soldiers and magic instead of giants and fire). In fact, I usually re-evaluate both toons every 10 or so levels, and redo skills if I change zones or the main mobs I'm going to be fighting. Better to spend 10 plat on a book of alt, and a bit of time analyzing your friends and enemies, than to be constantly going through resto pots and idols.

I'll close with another question, which could be another long post entirely: how are you going to handle energy regen? Lux items? Sigils? Meditate? You might not be able to afford lux. Sigils don't work when you're affected by DoT. Meditate doesn't work on lava. Whichever you choose, realize that a support druid without energy is dead weight in your group.

@aleph Wyvs and Dragons do Slash. Confirmed.


You need to talk to the other healers in yer clan.

Why? Because if another Druid in your clan who plays with you a ton in boss fights is rocking Giants/Fire Wards..then You could totally rock a more traditional Bark/Abundance build in your healing. There is no point to rock same spells on Druids because then the myriad of class strong skills can't be used correctly together. With 3 Druids all with different max's group boss fights go so much easier. I wouldn't touch any other ward than Giants/Fire, but i would put them all on your second or third hot bar, because even the base ward is helpful in boss fights when it's just you healing.

At mid-90's I personally chose to keep my group heal at like 13/25, I didn't find much of a use for it, if ever...you don't find AoE bosses till like Rockalanche, and on Red Boss Fire Cloaks... I max'd my touch, and then I chose some stuff I wanted, on all of it I didn't really go far past 16-18/25 because energy is a serious drain in both leveling and healing. If you want to heal and solo embrace is really useful...so useful that you need to max it? I say No, but you need to decide fer yerself.

After you get some grand rings you can decide how to slide things further.

max embrace, touch, breath, and maybe meditate

i suggest not to do breath until you can afford to do so when you hit the 90s or something

Aleph, I appreciate the time you put into your reply, good advice.
Tea as always good as well.

I did max natures touch, kept 20 in embrace, 22 in giants ward 20 in fire, 10 in breath

Now i have to get use to get use to having no offense at all and frankly Im having a hard time being totally dependant on others. Will take some getting used to. Breath seems like a waste of points so far. Would definitely like those points elsewhere. Howard you were right about breath.

It is kinda funny to beable to stand up to the ironrock golems 25 lvls higher than me for several minutes letting my embrace heal their giant ward mitigated damage. However, pretty much all i can do is tickle them. Not much fun tickling golems.

I did find that the giant wards allow me to travel easier.

In your 90's the crush ward really isn't for the golems, it's for the trees and the kelpies in the swamp area, just skip the eyes and start with the ash saplings and easy kelpies, with a dps partner you also can kill fast and really maximize both your wards and your heals.