I Wanna be a good healer

It's not that healing sucks. It's that healing is, very often, a sign that you missed an earlier opportunity to prevent damage more cheaply.

At $dayjob, a lot of work goes into catching bugs early. You can catch a bug during initial development, code review, later internal use, testing, or after shipping. The cost of the bug goes up by roughly a factor of ten each time.

There's a similar issue with healing/damage. The closer you are to "character has already taken all that damage, now we heal it", the worse off you are. Damage that never makes it in can't defeat you. Damage that makes it in might defeat you if you were already low on health. The earlier you prevent the damage, the better:

* Enemy dead
* Enemy unable to attack
* Enemy can't hit
* Enemy does trivial damage
* Enemy does full damage

Healing only comes into play once you're at the 4th or 5th slot in this, and that's late -- if you can stop things earlier, it's better.

That said, having heals available is awesome. Furthermore, healing is much more significant at lower levels, where it's unlikely for anyone to be def capped.

Nothing wrong with a healer build, but you wont be able to solo. Thats fine and all if you plan on teaming all the time. My advice is not to do this character on a dead server otherwise you wont get many levels that way. Personally I prefer pure healer build on a defender simply because your less likely to have someone to miss a heal and die due to the defender blasting. On a controller you have the extra safety net of added control which is greater mitigation than heals will ever be. I wouldnt do a pure healer build on a controller because it really gimps you because your controls are greater than heals.

Im very lazy!

So Ill go into two things.

Heals, regardless of what anyone says are appreciated, especially in the other forums, however one can't deny the fact that sets like force fields or Thermal or Sonic prevent the damage from occuring which then negates the overall need to heal.

However, heals are still appreciated and can save a teams butt.

Now on to my thoughts. My illusion/FF needs rarely any form of heal, and in fact she can't heal at all, but my force fields really do dedflect a lot, which is valuable to my team in mitigation.

Now, I have tried a ton of things with Masterminds, and well, POISON!!!

Poison does have a heal which while not the greatest is ok, and dodes give toxic resistance which most sets don't, but the heal is so secondary because of things like Antidote, which frees people from mez'z and status effects and stacks resistance. The set also severely impairs enemies to hit and defense which eats through bosses like mad and mitigates much of the deamaged you recieve, if you recieve any at all.

I would suggest if you want to play a pure healer (Which again people look for and appreciate) then Earth and Ice might be the best for the control aspect, and Empathy or Therm would be excellent heal sets.

But if you go the MM Pain, Therm, and Poison are all solid...although I hate Therm with an MM. Im lazy, far to much going on controlling pets and warming people up.

Healer is kind of an out of place concept in CoH, but if you're like me and you wanted to make your first character focus on keeping people alive, I suggest going Controller instead of Defender..

I find "Defender" to be a bit of a misnomer. When you have several buffing characters on a team, I think you'll find that the small % lead Defender buffs have is hardly noticeable, and pretty much all endurance restoration powers are overkill anyway. It's the offensive debuffs that really distinguish the Defender powersets on Defenders.

Defenders' blast secondaries generally don't help a team stay alive (well, ignoring that dead enemies do very little damage), whereas the Controller primaries are very much focused on keeping teams alive. Also Controllers do pretty respectable damage, especially compared to Defenders.

Heck, you could even go with Plant primary and get Spirit Tree and then stack it with a +regen power from your secondary for stationary boss fights, if you wanted.


Anyway, I tried a few Defenders early on, and I always end up with a serious case of Controller envy. If blasting enemies isn't your #1 priority, and you want to keep teams alive, definitely consider a Controller.