worst misinformation?

It's out of date information. Darkest Night, along with an extra 5th power for the other Patron Pools and the Epic Pools, was added later, but the plaques were never updated.

Nope...not missing anything.

People who say healing is not neccessary are missing the point. Mitigation will get you only so far. Healing is a benefit, and makes any team 10 times stronger. Empathy, regardless is a healing set. A rez is still a healing power, regardless of how you view it. And a few sets have that.

Force fielders are great. I love mine. But I am certainly not contradicting myself. My argument was that Empathy is not viewed as a healing set, when it is a healing set.

My point about not needing a healer is that sure, you might be able to get away with not having one, but at the end of the day, if you have a Therm, and Empath, a Rad, or a Pain...even Dark Miasma and Kin as well, then you will go much further, much faster than other option available.

Healing is a boon, and fill in the holes of a team that might not be the sturdiest team out there.

I do appologize if you don't agree, but I am not going to get hostile over this, when I see it absolutely all the time in my gaming here.

Yes you are.. See Below..
The point is, "sturdy teams" are actually quite common. "Healing is not necessary" (for them). People who wait around specifically for a "healer" to show up are the ones missing out.

As i said in a previous post... you can't make a generalizations based on specific situations. There are a million ways to be useful in this game. Having powers that heal just happens to be one of many.

Hence, the impact that mis-information has on the community.

I'm sorry if you are taking it personally. Nobody is getting hostile. Everybody is entitled to a difference in opinion. This thread is more about incorrect facts though, and the fact is.. "healing is not necessary". It may help you and your teams sleep better at night, and that's fine.. but telling everybody else that they need one is just plain wrong.

(Edited for sounding like a snob)

I said empathy was a healing set. There are other healing sets as well. You are jumping on the fact that I said that Healing is a boon to every team, and if you don't believe that, then I think it's your statement, but one I cannot agree with at all.

Healing "IS" a boon to any team. A team that has it is better off than one that does not. It's appreciated when done well, and it benefits the entire party 100%. You can go further, fight longer, move faster through missions, and generally allows squishier AT types to do what they are supposed to without risking as much.

Im not saying a good healer has an auto heal macro, or ignores their attack potential, but if you are on a team with an empath Defender (Or other sets with with healing options) if you state that you will not be more effective as a whole, then I wont try and convince you otherwise.

As for what you reffer to as my misinformation. In all the time I have been playing, I have seen this common argument. That a healer is not needed. But in all of the time I have been playing, when you have one, the team shines brighter.

Peace ((You changed your post. Im not taking it personally. Dont worry. We all have our experiences in the game))

The same is true of any other form of mitigation, whether defense, resistance or control powers. Healing is the most generic form of mitigation which is useful but it pays for this by being pretty much the weakest form of mitigation (it's questionable whether it's better or worse than -recharge). It can only be used after taking damage which gives it a limited window of usage and in terms of cast time it's less effective than most other types of mitigation.

This isn't to say that healing is bad but in every set with healing the healing is the least important element of the set. If I had to choose between an Empath who didn't use healing powers but was good with the buffs or one who was an excellent healer but awful at buffing I'd take the buffer every time. I can easily use inspirations to heal myself if I take damage but with Fortitude on me I won't be taking much damage anyway. Conversely using inspirations to buff my defense to fortitude levels results in me burning through inspirations pretty quickly.

I saw what you said, and I don't take it personally. The problem with what you said was "I feel we share a difference of opinion".

I guess that may be true, but the only thing I'm trying to convey here is FACT, not opinion.

"Healing is useful" is NOT the opposite of "Healing is not necessesary".

Both are true.

It depends on what you mean. I know that often, when people say "Empathy is a healing set" what they mean is "Empathy's sole important contribution to a team is its heals" which is not true. But it is the set with the highest source of healing: if you want healing, Empathy is the best place to get it. If you need a healer, like "we need a healer for the Hami taunt team" then its no insult to say Empathy is the healer for you. In that sense, it is a healing set.

The number of powers shouldn't matter, for or against. Invuln is often called a "resistance set" because it has five resistance powers (not counting unstoppable) and only two defense powers. But one of those defense powers is called "Invincibility" and its almost singularly as strong (when saturated) as all the resistaqnce powers combined. Similarly, the set has only one +health power, dull pain, but its slotted strength is equivalent to 37% resistance to all (including psi). You could argue that Dull Pain by itself is also almost as strong as all the resistance powers combined. So even though Invuln has five res powers, two defense powers, and one +health power (and unstoppable) its actually a balanced set: it has resistance, defense, and +health/heal in sizable quantity.

Honestly, when I think of Empathy, the first thing that comes to mind is healing, followed immediately by Fort. And then Clear Mind and recovery. And not in terms of what it can do for me, but actually in terms of what I'm likely to be doing with the set when I'm playing it.

Of course, I'm using my secondary as well, it would be stupid not to. But this is just a personal opinion of mine: when I'm playing a defender, or any character for that matter while on a team, I'm always about what I can do to best benefit the team. If a team member has low health, there is a much larger return on cast time if I heal him than if I fire neutrino bolt at someone. I considered it a point of pride, actually, that back in the day I could teleport to a spot with my Ill/Rad and hit a group of scattered players with my AoE heal because I knew its precise radius visually.

It is equally my opinion, however, that this is player choice. You do what you think is right, and the team will decide if they want to keep you around.


The reason why healing is often valued higher than things like, say, bubbles, often comes down to play psychology. You do not "see" force fields save your life. You see force fields prevent your life from being jeopardized in the first place. Its heals that always "save" your life in the sense of bringing you back from the brink. Furthermore, teams often automatically put themselves into a position to need heals. If you're just steamrolling everything and no one is remotely in danger, the tendancy often is to up the difficulty.

It takes significant experience to know that a situation that should be vaporizing the team is being held in check by force fields and sonic bubbles and controller mez and a good tank, and all those things should be getting credit for making heals superfluous.

If you keep increasing difficulty to the point where preventative defenses eventually get overwhelmed, then by definition you will eventually need heals. If you're the kind of person who gauges the correct level of difficulty as "the point where I start to take significant damage" then healing is essential. In a sense, if you think you need heals, you probably do. If you think you don't you probably don't.

I think it's all relative to how you view healing. I think my view of healing is perhaps different, but I believe that healing is mitigation.

My Force Fielder mitigates damage by preventing it

My Therm mitigates damage by resisting it, and offering support heals, and debuffs

My Poison MM, Mitigates damage by reducing what the enemies damage potential is.

My Defender, Heals and buffs. My main buff Fortitude protects from damage, and offer to hit buffs. I use it a lot. But all I see is Hit Points. Hit Points that are saved by either Mitigation by a force field, which is not always 100% protection from losing HP, while Emapthy mitigates the loss of HP 100% of the time. It does not prevent damage from occuring, but it does prevent the loss of HP.

Im saying that my view of mitigation may differ, but I do not believe I am wrong, because I have never seen in game anything that would convince me otherwise.

I see what you are saying. Cheers

There seem to be two solid camps when it comes to healing powers and "healing" sets like Empathy.

One is, LF HEALER, WE NEED HEALS. People who came from another MMO, or are just stuck in this line of reasoning. They want to fill up their team with "healers," as in people who just spam heals constantly.

The other is, THERE ARE NO HEALERS, BUFFS MAKE HEALS USELESS. People who push the line way back to the other side and dictate that this is a buff-based game and heals aren't needed or are even useless.

To me, heals are a last-line of defense type of ability. If you're using your heals to keep people alive constantly, you're doing it wrong. There are much better ways to reduce and mitigate damage. Our game isn't designed around standing there spamming one heal power on one person over and over. That's a waste of just about everything (time, endurance, other powerset, fancy visuals, my eardrums).

But there ARE times when I want or would like a heal to go off. For instance, my team rules so we have tons of DEF and maybe even some RES. For the most part our team does fine. Except we get to the AV and his Foot Stomp hits me, doing most of my HP in damage. You know what'd be great at that point, would be if someone healed me.

Heals, for me, are for an emergency. Build your team as if heals don't exist, but take someone who can heal for when something goes wrong.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

Having just ported over from WoW, my brain still says you need a 5man and all the set-in-stone rules that come with it.

This game is also designed with the intent that random, pick up teams should work reasonably well in most content. So if all you've got is a healer, and no bubbler or defensive buffer, its perfectly acceptable if the character with the heals goes nuts with his or her heals. There's nothing wrong with that per se.

Even on my Ill/Rad there were days when I was leveling up that I was spamming the heal to keep the team in the fight. And looking back with six years more experience, my tactical evaluation is that I was doing it right.

Not saying it's not possible, but I wouldn't recommend it. I even recall being teamed with a Thermal who kept neglecting shields. When they were up we did fine. When they were down they healed like mad and we still died. Having nothing but heals to rely on is frantic and sometimes painful. Unless it's a small team and/or on +0.

But really, relying on ANY one thing doesn't work for me. JUST DEF has its flaws, JUST RES has its flaws, etc. That's why our defense sets aren't built that way.

Originally Posted by PRAF68_EU Dispari has more than enough credability, and certainly doesn't need to borrow any from you.

If you're just counting number of powers that are "heals" it would be Corruptor Pain Domination. 1 AoE heal, 2 single-target heals, and 1 AoE heal toggle is four actual heal powers to Empathy's three. Count the rezzes and +regen powers and it's even at six each, though, and ... ... this. Besides, Empathy's second single-target heal has a higher scale.

When playing my Empath, I think of CM, Fortitude, AB, and then healing - but she's a PvP character. For PvE, it's usually blasting and keeping Fortitude up, with occasional top-off heals. I actually tend to be more of a buffbot and healer while playing Kins in PvE... I consider not having stacked Fulcrum Shifts to be a moral affront.

Of course, this sums everything in the "healer" debate up nicely.

Originally Posted by PleaseRecycle it has gone from unconscionable to downright appalling that we have no way of measuring our characters' wetness.

Originally Posted by Brillig It's hard to beat the entertainment value of Whackjob Wednesdays.

Speaking of in-game misinformation, I levelled up to (I think) 12 in Praetoria, and actually paused read the info on the trainer screen rather than just clicking the link to level. I discovered that Praetor Duncan was helpfully telling me all about how I could invite characters at least three levels lower than me to be a sidekick.

I never said to neglect anything. I was replying to this: