Best thing to do is choose the one You'll have the most fun playing but to give you a lowdown
-Thermal, just for the villains, is probably closest you're gonna get to empathy and the healer role, has both PBAoE heal and target heal, plus a load of castable buffs, but none that will help recharge and recovery which the other two do but does have a rez
-Kinetics, very tricky for a new player, mainly because the heal depends on the team being close to the target and the attack actually hitting them, but it does come will the widely loved speed boost and fulcrum shift, no rez though
-Radiation, PBAoE heal, Accelerate Metabolism and Mutation (the rez) probably the best for a newbie and comes with quite a few de-buffs for the bad guys as well(er, the other bad guys)
hope this helps 
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Healing doesn't play such a major role in Co(H/V) as it does in most games. Buffs/Debuffs can be equally, and sometimes more effective than healing. For really defensive and support secondary, I'd take either dark, rad, thermal or cold.
OK, here's my view on things. Thermal is a fantastic healing set, it's the closest thing we will get to Empathy. Although It doesn't technically heal as high as my Kinetics, Thermal will always be the better healing. This is simply because of the fact that it is amazingly more easy to use. Thermal is also an amazing set for PvP, Street, or Arena. There are some pretty decent debuffs, including a great endurance drain.
However, I would still never change my choice of making a fire/kin than a fire/thermal. I said before that Thermal was the closest thing to Empathy. In a way, it is. I noticed very early on in playing CoV, that there was nothing in the 'Villain Empathy' set (as I called it in the first week of playing) That could help teammates endurance.
Kinetics has a far wider variety, is great fun to play, and is very satisfying both in PvE and in PvP. I admit, my levelling slowed down at around 26, but when I hit 32, from then on it just kept on getting more and more fun.
Although Thermal is prbably Asthetically more like Empathy, Kinetics is probably most technically like it. In the same way that a Stalker is asthetically like a Scrapper, but imo a Blaster really.
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And... Rad as a healing set?
Well, I agree Kinetics can do an amazing job of healing, but it does require some skill. When you're all cracked up on 2 siphon speeds, and your entire team zips around the fight cause you speedboosted them, it can be difficult to target the right enemy for your heal. If you can manage this tho, you have just about the most powerfull heal available.
I'd definitly take /kin. Given the choice between thermal/rad/kin I';d take the kin 
. It does get very hard to heal people at times but I've never really had any problems.
Pretty much everyhtign in Kin affects you so it's really great for those solo times. I can't really comment on rad thoguh
Best would probably be thermal "support" would probably be thermal, res/heals/buffs/damage resistance etc. Not nesicerily the most fun to play .
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And... Rad as a healing set?
[/ QUOTE ]Defensive set, not healing 
yeah rad definatly has more debuffs, and of the 3 really is the best for that purpose, i think the thermal healing moves are more powerfull than the others however imo the downsides in each set (purley about the healing) are
in thermal the aimation for the heals require you to stand still.
in kinetics the heal is only around the one mob you select.
radiation does not require u to stay still so u can heal as u run past people (less chance of attracting unwanted attention) however this heal i believe is the weaker of the 3 sets.
the most powerful AE heal is the 1st move you get in dark miasma but this will only heal ally's near you and there is no single target heal in this set.
i would go through the good points but i've not got far in /kin and i would be bias towards /DM
Using my Kin I have been targeting the person I want to heal rather than a mob near them, usually the brute needs the heal and will have the current target it is working on trageted which will be where the power hits.
I have noticed another issue with kin though, if the mob you hit with it dies just before you hit it the power is fired (so has to recharge) and the green aura appears but no one gets any heal. Conversley using dark on my mastrmind hitting a foe as it was going down still got the heal working, its a shame that both of these heal powers that need to hit to have an effect don't heal in equal situations 
If it's any consolation, the problem of mob-centred heals/buffs firing off with no effect when the mob dies is a known issue - I seem to recall that Castle said it was an issue on his (very long and rapidly growing) list. Poor Castle. 
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Thanks for the replies everybody, some very good information!
I have decided to go with thermal and we'll see how it works out, but it sounds like the thing I am looking for.
And as a side note, I think its an interesting twist that the healer and primary ranged damage dealar is bundled togeter, makes things a bit more versatile - from previous games I'm used to if you make a healer, heal is really all you are going to do. So I'm pretty excited about this.
See you all in-game sometime!
Hehe I figured the dying mob not healing thing was intended. Cant drain much from a dead guy (didnt really add up tho, cause siphon power or speed will work fine)
I also target the guy I want to heal and not a mob very often, but with non-melee classes such as dominators for example, this often doesnt work. They dont always have their closest enemy targeted. My dominator buddy could be whacking the nearest boss on the other side of the room, ignoring the minion 2 feet away from him. So I do check my targets. (and yes, in my experience, this can be a life or death difference :P)
By the way Silent, it indeed is an interesting mix. One day you're healing and hardly get around to blasting, and the other day you're hardly healing and just shooting things up. And then there are those days where you have to do both. At the same time. Those are the fun days
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And as a side note, I think its an interesting twist that the healer and primary ranged damage dealar is bundled togeter, makes things a bit more versatile - from previous games I'm used to if you make a healer, heal is really all you are going to do. So I'm pretty excited about this.
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Yeah this is what I really love about the corruptors and cov in gereral.
I also do the target what ever someones targetting to heal with a kin. If it's a ranged AT I find the best way is to click them, hit follow and deselect them. When you get to them hit your heal button twice (one to target the closest enemy, one to cast the power). That way if there is an enemy close enough you heal them, if not, well you couldn't heal them anyway :P. With sithen speed on it usually doesn't take very long to get to someone with follow problem is slingshotting past them :P
As a Kineticist I often team with two Brutes. I can tell you that once the've built up some fury, you've speed boosted them, and then drop a fulcrum shift on them enemies last a single hit. Targetting the Brutes and trying to heal is almost guarenteed to fail.
I would suggest binding a key to target_enemy_near and another tow target_enemy_next (or just use tab). Get close to the Brute, target the nearest enemy, and then tab quickly through to the 3rd or 4th nearest.. this is your heal target. Anything closer will probably be dead by the time the heal lands.
In larger groups you are looking for the toughest mobs as the target for your heals - because it the least likely to die suddenly and unexpectedy. When in teams of 5 or more I generally heal off the purples (one good reason for having 2 accuracies and running tactics - I can reliably hit low purple).
And by the way..nothing can come close to a Kineticists healing potential.. with hasten, five slotted siphon speed (2 acc, 3 rechage) and six slotted Transfusion (2 acc, 3 heal, 1 recharge) you'll be able to heal at an incredible rate, and the AoE of Transfusion is pretty big but unless the group is primarily melee (or Ninja/Undead pets) you will never come close to your potential since people wont be in melee range.
I personally think that dark miasma is the best, awesome heal for a starter, howling twilight can rez multiple team mates, tar patch and darkest night are kick [censored] deuffs, shadow fall is good defence/stealth, black hole I hear is awesome and on top of that you get the dark servant, you gotta love a power pool like that.
am I the only one who doesn't like howlight twilight? I keep hearing how good it is but imo it's not as nice as transferance and the heal takes so long to actually hit I die alot because of it (slow animation time). Nice that it debuffs acc thoguh. I really do like the rest of the set so far thgouh .
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am I the only one who doesn't like howlight twilight? I keep hearing how good it is but imo it's not as nice as transferance and the heal takes so long to actually hit I die alot because of it (slow animation time). Nice that it debuffs acc thoguh. I really do like the rest of the set so far thgouh .
[/ QUOTE ]Howling twilight is the AoE rez, which people like very much. Twilight grasp is the heal, some like it, some don't. IMO It's great for solo, but for team healing it's not too good unless the team is locked in melee.
eek, yes I ment twilight grasp . It's doing a pretty good job of keeping me and my agro alive but I often get it doign the silly animation but me dying first (somehting I don't get with transfusion) which is pretty annoying.
One constant problem with the Kinetics set, is that ranged players get left behind, buff-wise. You have to force them into melee range, and sometimes to go against their instincts (after they nuke, the safest place to stand really is in the middle of the mob).
Thats not true. Siphon power is a personbased aoe buff, and fulcrum is based around your target as well as the person if I am correct? The ranged types miss out on heals and transference tho.
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Thats not true. Siphon power is a personbased aoe buff, and fulcrum is based around your target as well as the person if I am correct? The ranged types miss out on heals and transference tho.
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and fulcrum shift, yes it;s a pbaoe buff too but why on earth would you be standing back with the ranged lot and missing out on all the lovely buffs from the spawn too =).
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and fulcrum is based around your target as well as the person if I am correct?
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True, but only half the story. Fulcrum shift produces the vast majority of its affect around the target.
Fulcrum Shift is an AoE and produces one buff for each mob hit centered around the mob that was targetted and one additional buff centred on the caster.
That means if you manage to hit 7 targets the melee fighters near the mob get 7 buffs (and more than double their damage), and people around you get a single buff (which is actually inferior to Siphon Powers buffs).
Now if you run forward to stand reasonably near the melee guys and fire it off at the nearest mob, all of you will get 8 buffs (7 centred on the target and one centred on you - they stack).
I tend to ignore the extra buff and assume that its centre on my target because the effect around the caster is negligible by comparison, and the better you are at picking big bunches of mobs the truer this gets.
The pbaoe buff is actually 37.5% 2.5x what sithon power gives. The buff aroudn the target is 18.75% per mob.
The more you hit ofc the player buff becomes tiny but it's definatly not negligible.
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Thats not true. Siphon power is a personbased aoe buff
[/ QUOTE ]Which is true, but I tend to be in melee range anyway (that's where the heals are, after all), so the ranged guys and gals miss out anyway.
Apologies, I looked up the fulcrum shift thing and realised my mistake fairly quickly
Hello everybody.
I'm pretty new to the game and was wondering what the best secondary for supportive play would be?
At first I thought termal was the obvious choice, but reading some posts here have made me unsure of that.
The three I am looking at now is /termal /kinetics and /rad.. the later two seems nice, but the how well do they play the role of healer?
Some wisdom from you more experienced players would be greatly appriciated