Emp Q: Absorb pain vs. Heal Other

Is it better to just dump AP for HO slotted for recharge?

Full disclosure: I personally haven't leveled an empath to 50, so take my advice with a grain of salt.

I have, however, helped a friend level his empath / archery to 50, and helped him with SO slotting back when he was playing, so I do know a little about the class and how to play it.

Absorb Pain is a painful power to use. If you're not careful you can kill yourself with the power... not just by literally removing your own hp points, but by ruining your ability to heal yourself and getting attacked.

However, it's very useful. Unslotted on a defender you'll be healing around 670 hp. Slot it up with just SO's and you'll be topping 1300. Pick up some Healing IO's like Miracle, Doctored Wounds, or Numina, and with the healing boosts, I've seen some empath defenders clock 1500+ heals. To put this in perspective, my Spines / Fire scrapper, at 50, has an HP of 1383. Just on SO's alone a single Absorb Pain can pretty much take me from zip to full.

Heal Other, at 50 on an Empath, has a base of just 262. Even if you cap that, you'll be doing maybe 524. If you max your recharge, you'll be doing one heal other about once every 2 seconds.

The activation time is 2.27 seconds. So you actually are hard-capped there on just how fast Heal Other can recharge.

So, lets do the math.

If you maximize the recharge into ED on Absorb Pain you can be pushing a recharge time of 7.5 seconds. Every 7.5 seconds you can heal for 1400+ hp.

7.5 / 2.27 = 3.3

For simplicity, we'll just say you can do 3 heal others for every one absorb pain.

524 * 3 is 1572.

So, staying in the realm of ED and SO's with an emphasis on recharge boosts to get our maximum numbers, Heal Other and Aborb Pain actually offer about the same level of healing.

***

However, how they deliver that healing is dramatically different.

If you're laying on Heal Other... you really don't have much time to do anything else. You won't have time to deliver Clear Mind. You won't have time to deliver Fort or AB. You'll be hamstrung on just one power if that's what you depend on for ally heals.

So, from what I found playing as a tank and a blaster to my friends empath defender, I much preferred him having BOTH powers.

Having actually used both of them, it's hard to outright recommend one over the other. Heal Other has a number of things going for it: it doesn't have a 0.5s delay before the healing kicks in, which could make the difference between life and death, and of course it doesn't stop you from healing yourself. But if you are used to turning red health bars full with a press of a button, it will feel very weak. Sometimes you need a massive burst of health to buy time for a teammate on the verge of death to get to safety, and Heal Other doesn't always buy enough time.

Take both, but if you could only take one on a Defender I would probably say Heal Other. It puts you in less danger (and dead Empaths don't heal anything) which leaves you freer to blast and use other mitigation from your primary [edit: secondary].

Take both, use both.

Honestly, calculating heal-per-second doesn't make sense when talking about Empathy. It's a reactive set, you only heal when damage comes in. The healing powers in Empathy serve two purposes: one, to reduce downtime between fights by toppinng up everyone's hp; and two, to patch up any sudden holes in your team's defense. After the first few levels, when people get defense powers, strong debuffs and reliable controls, you should only need to heal when other teammates make mistakes or the enemy gets a lucky hit, resulting in dangerous chunks of hp that are gone. Your role is to bring those chunks back as soon as possible, not to be outhealing all incoming attacks. The Resurrect power follows this logic, too. If a mistake so big happens that a teammate's down, it only takes you a few seconds to undo it.

Empathy's single-target heals are not for supporting, Empathy's heals are for saving people. (Which is something the other defender sets can't do. They all bring strong defense strategies, but if they fail, they're screwed, whereas a heal will always pospone a death.)

Your various heals are there to give you space to react. Sometimes, multiple mistakes will happen at the same time, and that's when you need to have both HO and AP, so you can spread yourself around and save whoever needs saving. In this sense, HO is more useful because it's up more often and can react to more mistakes than AP can, whereas AP can react to one very bad mistake very very well.

That said, yes, AP is indeed nasty because it lets you open to damage. Playing my Pain MM, I found out that the trick to getting around this is to boost your regen as much as possible. This is easy for Pain MMs because they can take both Health and Supress Pain. Empathy gives you Regen Aura, which isn't as reliable. My advice is to learn to use RegA as a self-support power instead of a team buff. Don't cast it together with RA, but keep it instead for when you sense that things might go wrong and you're going to need AP.

If your build is tight, AP is droppable.

It's useful, don't get me wrong. I've pulled some behinds out of some very nasty fires with it. But I really don't use it often at all. and go missions at a time without ever touching it. If you've got fort and AB slotted up for recharge, and know how to place them for mitigation, and are using your RAs when they're up, you should very rarely find yourself in a spot where HO isn't cutting it.

Life without absorb pain is accomplishable with one simple rule: Avoid people who expect Empaths to be good healers. Alot of these people have no idea.

Heals should be supplementary. People need heals because they compromise their position most of the time. If they didn't compromise their position then they wouldn't be in trouble. Those that can't help but be compromised may need buffs and I say may, because it depends on their build.

Players that don't safeguard themselves with people who are supposed to safeguard others within reasonable limits yet don't, are a recipe for disaster.

I've seen people get hit by PBAoEs that they had no logical business of being in range of, I've seen people split up, breaking LoS and wondering why an empath can't get to everyone with a heal other in a single instance.

There are some really silly, almost swore then, but players who think theyre better than they are and it's always someone else fault when stuff goes wrong.

If it weren't for the lag today I would be doing an MoSTF today without a single buffer, healer, debuffer in the team. Survivability is very much about not being stupid.

I got my old Emp/Dark up 40+ without even looking at Absorb Pain. Once you get Regeneration Aura, your time spent “healing” should greatly diminish. Take a few minutes to write “Gather” macros suitable to your play-style so that you buff everyone. On most missions, you won’t need to heal anyone except the occasional victim of the Alpha Strike until the buff wears off. If someone misses the buff…

…well, the way I see it, death can be a great teacher.

If you need Absorb Pain, it will be for healing Tankers on very tough missions. They have so many hit points that it takes a lot to heal them back up. If you like the more challenging missions, you should consider it. Even then, you should compare it to other power choices. After all, it may not be worth giving up Vengeance.

Just a quick note: recharge time starts after activation finishes, so the total cycle time is activation+recharge. That changes je saist's figures slightly.
i also agree with MonkeySpirit's point that cycle time is generally irrelevant.

AP is completely skippable, even on MoSTF runs I've not needed it, AB the tank and just have HO ready, between AB and Regen Aura you can keep the tank mostly capped off pretty easily.

I find Absorb Pain completely dispensable. I've never needed it while supporting a tank against Recluse in the STF--or for anything else, really. In my experience, it's very rare to have someone die on me as a result of just not having enough healing; they die because they've wandered off, because I've been mezzed and am out of Break Frees (rare--I'm obsessive about keeping them in stock), because they've split up and two or more teammates need heals simultaneously, or because they took enough simultaneous hits to kill them before I could fire any power.

None of those scenarios can be fixed with Absorb Pain. They can, however, be ameliorated by sensible use of buffs, inspirations, aggro management, and team coordination. That's not to say AP is useless; if you have a power slot free, and nothing else you really want to put in it, go for it. You might even occasionally save someone with it. (Of course, you might also occasionally manage to kill yourself with it.) On the whole, though, I'd rather fill that slot with something a little more proactive (like a mez or--heaven forfend--a blast) and rely on Heal Other for my ranged healing.

Do you NEED AP? Nah. Should you take AP? I'd recommend it.

It's a good heal to have when that tank of yours for some reason just went red. It'll pull him back into the green in one shot, instead of 2 from HO. And it'll happen to the tank from time to time, even if you keep him fully buffed, crap happens and it's nice to have the right tool for the right job. Not to mention it's another place in my build to stick the doctored wounds IO set. With AP, that give you 5 full sets. And i like that. More recharge, better healing bonus. It's all good.

But again, it's not NEEDED. You'll do fine without it, if your build is that tight. (mine was not, and yes, belive it or not i still have an attack chain. ) But i recommend it if you can fit it.