You could be the absolute best damage build in existence. You could kill thousands of opponents. Your bombs could generate enough ultimate from Combat Frenzy that you could chain them back to back and keep killing forever. The only problem is, you have a finite amount of health, and you won’t be able to do any of this if you’re dead. Too many bombers and damage dealing players seem to think that they are the be-all and end-all of PvP. Many don’t realize that they wouldn’t be able to accomplish very much without the healers and support roles that keep them alive, keep them moving, and keep them buffed with a myriad of benefits.
Healing may seem simple, and I’ve heard many people say things like “just spam Radiating Regen and Echoing Vigor”. In reality, healing (especially in groups) takes more awareness, predictive assessment, reaction times, exceptional positioning, and a higher degree of coordination than most damage roles. A group leader will call for ultimates or some damage skills, but rarely will they make healing related calls other than “big heals” or some variant thereof. Group healers will need to coordinate their gear, positioning, movement, skills, timing, ultimates, and may not be able to take advantage of voice communications to do so (the purview of the group leader making calls).
The standard for healing builds is:
If you don’t have the arena weapons (maelstrom and master’s) and mythics, then you can run two buff sets and a monster set. You may feel that your magicka sustain is low, so a viable option is Wretched Vitality on your back bar (where you keep your buffs). This would allow you to run a front bar buff set, back bar Wretched Vitality, a monster set, one Trainee and one Druid. The details of this type of build is in the Zerg sheet.
Healing can be easily categorized into a few simple concepts. While executing on these concepts takes skill, knowledge, and experience, it should be very viable for a healer with a few hours of play time to reach 80% output and up-times compared to one with hundreds of min/max raids in their history.
No matter the situation, keeping your buffs, procs and positive effects active will be consistent among all of them.
If you maintain the above with near-perfect uptime, you’re already 60% of the way towards excellence. Reading the flow of damage, positioning, and timing your burst heals will make up most the rest.
While moving towards a fight, getting out of a fight and repositioning for a new push, or any time you’re generally waiting for the next fight, the priorities from commonalities change only to ensure that you’re paying attention to your back line or anyone who gets pulled (chains, leach, teleport circle). In this case, we’re adding burst healing right below keeping your own Major Evasion active. Being as you can easily renew Major Evasion way before it would expire, there shouldn’t be many scenarios where this is an issue.
While defending or countering big damage, healing or mitigation ultimates and large area heals have higher priority.
While pushing towards opponents with the intent to kill, you will likely need to dynamically swap between “Moving” and “Defending” styles with some synergies thrown in at a relatively high priority. If you’re running an offensive proc set (such as SPC or Rallying Cry) then keeping those procs up for the damage dealer’s kill window (3-4 seconds) will be higher priority, as will throwing damage synergies.
Healing isn’t only the role of healers. Damage dealers should also be maintaining good Echoing Vigor uptimes, and some classes such as wardens should also slot their area heals (on their back bar) to help when big burst is needed.
Healing can be a lot of fun, and can be very stressful at times. If you’re playing solo and zerg surfing, you may want to add a crowd control skill to disrupt opponents and better protect yourself, and some limited damage (or even a damage ultimate) to tag more opposing players and get in on that sweet AP.