Wanting to play a healer

So, I have made a couplehealers and haven't realy stuck with them because I feel like it's a bit repetitive, but it just donged on me, THATS WHAT HEALERS ARE SUPPOSE TO DO IS JUST HEAL! So I am curious if I play another Defender, what is a fun secondary to use?

The secondaries all have the pros and ocns.

The trick to finding a fun defender is to find the primary thta matches your style

FF/Sonic/Cold primarily long duration ally buffs.

Rad/TA - primarily foe targeted debuffs

Storm/dark - foe debuffs and control

Empathy - heals and short duration buffs

Traps - combination of lots of things, a very unique set.

Pick a primary first then worry about the secondary

I'm really shocked this thread hasn't gone down in flames yet.
FYI - defenders don't like being called healors...


That said, I view my Empath as being a 'Healer' meaning, he focuses on healing others pain.
Doesn't mean thats all he's good for though. On a good team I often find my heals to be less useful than my buffs.

Oh man, buffs is were its at!
Yeah healing the team is what will get you complimented but buffing the team is really what you should focus on.
The buffs/debuffs are what make defenders shine. The heals are there for when things start going south.

In the low levels your heal/Heals are gonna get a lot of use.
In the later levels they should be collecting dust.
By level 32 your teammates are going to be more self reliant. You'll notice the health bars aren't dipping as much. This is when you start buffing and debuffing like a machine.
I went with Radiation as a secondary for the added -defense!

Maestro, what TV or movie is your avatar from?

Its the scene from five years past. on Heroes season 1

Its the scene were Peter and Sylar start to face off with Fire and Ice. While Hiro and Hiro are hiding in the closet.

It should've been the fight we'd all waited for. Instead we got yet another
'We don't have the budget for the FX' behind closed door light show...

I thought that looked like Sylar... but I don't remember them having those colored powers.... was that added after the fact by a fan?

I am getting the idea. I may avoid Emp and try something different. I appreciate all the diffrent input and will continue to read this post. Thanks guys.

As stated previously, you should not play a 'healer'. That doesn't mean you shouldn't play an Emp/ defender. They do far more than just heal, and the last five powers are just as, if not more important than the first four. The point is that pure 'healers' are one of the few things that can challenge petless Masterminds to the throne of worthlessness.

Why? Because healing is the worst form of damage mitigation in the game. It has its place, but that place is behind soft control, buffs, debuffs, and hard control. Its purely reactive, and thus absolutely useless against heavy hitting attacks in large groups or against AVs that can two-shot squishes before you can even fire off the heal.

Now, Defenders are worth playing. They're one of the more active and versatile archetypes, and there is no greater joy than turning yourself and your team into unstoppable tankmages while your enemies cower in a corner accepting the sweet embrace of death. I'd recommend looking through the Defender guides on this forum and looking for one that suits your playstyle, but a few general recommendations:

Rad/Elec: Heavy controls and debuffs, but you're going to be stuck teaming with it, since the damage is awful. However, there have been times where I've tanked with mine thanks to Choking Cloud, Tesla Cage, and Short Circuit (which apparently prevents enemies from attacking for a very short period of time). Put hold procs in the attacks and it just gets silly.

Kin/Sonic: Buff you and your teams damage to the damage cap, debuff the enemy's resistance, and go to town. Doesn't need travel powers and can respec out of stamina in the late twenties.

Storm/Ice: CHAOS! AHAHAHAHAHAAA!

Dark/Dark: Probably best for team-play, it focuses on debuffing accuracy to absolutely nothing. You and your entire team will effectively become tanks.

Wow, great feedback and I was totaly in the dark about Emp. Defenders. I was just used to playing clerics/healers in different games and sterotyped Emp defenders the same and I am sorely mistaken.

Westley, that's awesome. I like what you said and hoe you explained it. BTW...I love your quote on LFTeams. Nice...

Like the others said, Healing has it's place, in the back of the mitigation usability matrix.

But, I think i should try to add a little bit of weight against that.

When an enemy gets a lucky roll, a heal can undo the damage that's been done. When the team is in trouble, an Empath doesn't need to position herself, or hit an enemy, to heal their teammates. People are ignorant and FORGET what the bubbles and waves and glows around them are actively doing to keep them alive, but they know when they get HIT... and they know when the green numbers come up that someone is watching their back.

What Healing lacks in in-game effectiveness it more than makes up for phsychologically. Even with force bubbles, sonic shields, ice armors, and flames around their body, many people will still hold back. BUT, add someone who plops green numbers over their heads? The entire team becomes Leeroy Jenkins. This is both good and bad, for various reasons, but it cannot be discounted that, for better or worse, healing makes people feel better about their teaming situation.

Now, if you want to be an Emp, that's fine... that's great! Just make sure to use your other buffs, which, for the most part, will ensure you don't need to heal people in the first place. For best results, I'd say pair up with /Dark, whos attacks will debuff enemy's accuracy so that they can't hit your teammates, and therefore, you don't have to heal as much. Or maybe Rad or Sonic so your team kills the enemies faster and therefore don't need as much healing =)

I play a Mind/Emp controller, not an Emp defender, but I thoroughly agree with the thoughts here. It's worth noting though that Emp's really good buffs have significant recharge times. Fortitude, you'll probably get it onto two to three people at most (four if you have a lot of recharge bonuses and don't mind how busy getting it right on the dot will make you), so you have to be strategic about who you buff. Likewise, AB is largely a single-person buff. Recovery and Regeneration Aura won't be up full-time but are really nice and entire teams can get away with more while they're active. Just mind their radius (I try to use them while the team's clustered in one spot, sometimes this is mid-battle).

In general, I Fort anyone taking noticeable damage first (plus a heal of course). If that's less than three people (the number of Fortitude I usually give out), I put the rest onto damage dealers to buff their damage. Sometimes the ones taking the most damage are the biggest damage dealers, in which case you get the best of both worlds, heh. Or they might be people doing a lot of controlling or debuffing (which can draw enormous aggro), in which case you're keeping alive someone who's doing a lot to keep the team rolling nicely.

Adrenaline Boost I throw onto someone still taking noticeable damage even after the Fortitude, or someone constantly running low on endurance. If no one's particularly in need of faster health or endurance regeneration, I just pick out who I think will benefit from the huge recharge rate buff (for example people with long recharge buffs/debuffs/controls/nukes) and throw it onto them. With the new Supersidekicking system, I've found myself teaming with pre-Stamina toons more often. AB helps them out nicely on endurance management.

The nice thing is that with Empathy's multifaceted buffs, you'll often find yourself meeting many of those needs on a single person. Forting someone who's both dealing a lot of damage and taking a lot of damage, or ABing someone who's dipping low in both health and endurance not to mention that nearly everyone can benefit from more recharge speed.

Of course, going in at first you won't know who'll be taking the most damage. Just do your best to guess and generally put them at first onto squishy toons with a lot of damage or debuffs or controls. Or both. You might find yourself adjusting your buff targets as you learn how the team works, and as circumstances change.

Then you use your heals to cover the gaps where damage still get through. Sometimes you won't need to do any healing. Sometimes you'll need to do a LOT of healing. If everyone you can reasonably buff is buffed and there's no healing to be done, that's where your blast set comes in handy. Help kill stuff.

Your blast set's there to be used, and it can be handy. Dark Blast as noted before debuffs your enemies' accuracy (which can stack nicely with Fortitude's defense buff). Sonic Blast increases the entire team's damage by debuffing your enemies' resistance. Ice Blast slows. And so on. Also, some blast sets have controls (commonly a single target hold or stun). Just pick a blast set with effects that you like. That effect can even be just damage if that's what you like. Defenders might not do as much damage, but their damage still helps.

I'll make a few notable caveats about blast secondary effects. Electricity Blast benefits from being paired with additional endurance drains (like the ones in Kinetics and Cold Domination) because endurance drain does nothing unless your enemy is at zero endurance. Energy Blast's knockback can be a benefit or liability and will require learning strategies on not to annoy your teammates. Radiation Blast's defense debuffs are generally more useful in the early game than the late game by which point people tend to have sufficient accuracy slotted (though there're some exceptionally high-defense enemies in the late game--damn you, Rikti drones).

And, of course, you could just pick another Defender primary. There're a lot of excellent ones. The other posters're already doing a good job of covering their strengths.

I like Empathy partly because it's pretty much a fun game to me of trying to figure out who needs what (as opposed to the 'just buff everyone' approach of many other Defender sets). But I also love the Dark Miasma and Traps sets. Kinetics can be interesting for a hectic pace of play (though Speed Boosting large teams annoys me).

I've found that I get more compliments rezzing people than healing them...

Take what you will from that.

Whats really funny is that I remember when the "pure healer" concept was popular and Lady was the rogue for standing out and saying she had only three heals as an empath and none where six slotted... years ago.

Now one person posts something with "Healer" in the title and we get the most polite flaming the forums have ever seen. That of course would be the reason I come to the Def threads though, you guys are hella polite. Even the tankers are being less than helpfull these days. More a stoicly quiet bunch I guess.

P.S. Forgive the misspellings... drunk and tired.