Healing as a Defender

I've had some emp defenders in the past, but I've always wondered if empathy was really the best choice in regards to healing capacity in this game. I really want to play a true-blue support class that can really keep the team going in unlikely situations, but I was hoping to get some advice on slotting, or even if there is a powerset or AT that can do this better.

tl;dr, are empathy defenders really the best healers? If not, then what AT or powerset is better for the kind of group support I'm looking for?

If you want pure green numbers then an empathy defender has the most of those. Dark miasma and kinetics also have great heals, and though they take more skill to use, with these sets there is less actual need to heal.

Healing doesn't do as much for a team as force fields do. Then again, Cold Domination gives almost that much defense, but also reduces AVs to underlings.

Preventing damage is always better than recovering from it.

The answer to your question is that that's not the right question to be asking. In this game, healing is probably the *weakest* form of team support, simply because buffs, debuffs, and mez are so good. A partial list of random support style things I think are more useful than healing (in no particular order):

Defense buffs and tohit debuffs so that you don't get hit in the first place
Resistance buffs and damage debuffs so you get hit less hard
Knockdown, slows, and other soft controls so you get hit less often
Holds, confuses, and other mezzes so you don't even get attacked
Damage buffs and resistance debuffs so that the foes die before they get very many attacks off
Recovery and recharge buffs so that the team can gogogogoneverstopattacking and kill stuff faster and see above

That's not to say that healing things or giving them regeneration buffs (which are actually often more useful than heals) aren't *useful*, because they are. Tthey make a great complement to all of the above support effects, and I'd never turn down a teammate just because they had a heal as opposed to another type of support (especially since, while other types of support may be *better*, often healing is still *good enough*). However, what it *does* mean is that if someone were to roll an emp/* defender, take all of the heals and the rez, one unslotted attack, the entire medicine pool, none of the buffs, and a bunch of travel powers, they'd be seriously missing the point. The real strength of the empathy set is actually in the powerful buffs, especially fortitude.

If you want to experience the firepower of this fully armed and operational battl... wait, wrong line. Sorry. Anyway, if you want to really experience the true power of buffs, debuffs, or mez, try dark miasma or radiation emission. Both of those sets have a decent heal, but both of them also have mondo powerful other abilities. That line above might be from star wars, not CoH, but trust me, you'll be cackling like the emperor the first time you leave an entire spawn permanently trembling in fear with dark's fearsome stare.

Anyway. To try to answer the initial question, if you're looking for all-out support I'd go with a controller. Controllers don't get dark miasma, unfortunately, but they do get plenty of other nice buff/debuff sets. Defenders get somewhat better numbers on the sets that they share with controllers, but in my opinion the safety provided by a controller's primary set outweighs that in terms of team support. Defender blast sets may tack on some additional minor debuffs, but that doesn't compare to the lockdown ability of a control set. Defenders seem to have been intended as somewhat of a hybrid ranged auxiliary damage / support archetype, while controllers are lockdown/support (that's not to say that you can't do damage as a controller, but on average they don't do as much).

If you haven't tried a controller before, I'd suggest earth control (multiplicity of good control options), plant control (seeds of confusion = best single mez power in the game), or illusion control (two long-lasting fire and forget options in phantom army and spectral terror leaves you with plenty of time to use your secondary). Pair those with the support secondary of your choice and go forth to neuter your foes. Just one tip: repeat after me, 'immobilize is not a control'. It doesn't stop your foes from attacking, and sometimes immobilizing things is actually counterproductive if they're currently spread out, or teammates are relying on knockdowns. Use your AoE immob if there's both an advantage to mobs remaining where they currently are *and* reason to believe they won't stay there without it, but otherwise be sparing in its use.

Empathy isn't all heals, you know, so if you're just looking at it from that angle, it sounds like you aren't looking at defenders the right way.

Is empathy a better healer green numbers wise? No. Dark Miasma and Kinetics have the strongest heals in the game because of their drawbacks.

Sheer number of heals? They have the most.

If you want to be a traditional "healer" and only heal with no attacking and little buffs/debuffs, then all I can say is NO.

I've known a few "all support" empaths over the years, and they often feel trapped while playing the toon.

The corolloary to the idea that healing is the weakest form of mitigation is that there are times you'll end up on teams that can layer on so many other forms of mitigation that you will rarely need to heal. At that point, your role will be reduced mostly to running leaedership toggles, huggling up for the non-healing auras and throwing out (possibly redundant) ST buffs.

Most of the empaths I've come across are happiest with builds that can mix it up with a decent attack chain for the times that they don't have to OMG ALERT! to keep teams going.

Anyway, yes. Empaths can throw out the best green numbers. But a more prudent path would be a balanced build that can slot itself into different roles on the fly.

If you are really stuck on the idea of being a support-y kind of toon, something like an Illusion / Empathy 'troller might be more up your alley.

As a player primarily of Controllers I disagree that heals are the "weakest" form of support. I feel they are just a form of support. When talking about armor sets with heals (e.g. Fire or Dark Armor) you don't really find statements about the healing being the "weakest" part. I feel that the healing abilities of the buff classes more or less mirror the mechanics of these armors, but on multiple people. Exactly like an armored character, you wouldn't leap into the fight without your armor/buffs on, but you also wouldn't forget your heal either. Some armors don't have built in healing powers, but people wouldn't skip them if they did. Just because you don't "need" it doesn't mean it's not a great thing to have.

For many people the word "healing" conveys the sense that a person is "only healing and doing nothing else." I have encountered one or two people in the game who take this approach, but unlike many other posters, its been rare for me. That said, my experience has also been that because of the negative backlash against these "only healers," at least some Defender players have not developed a sense of when they should stop blasting and concentrate on their support. To me this is no different than a Dominator knowing when to halt DPS in order to control.

Anyway, Empathy and Pain Domination pretty much rule the roost in pure terms of restoring green bars. Thermal lacks heal-over-time. Kinetics and Dark both have excellent AoE heals but their tendency to miss at critical moments and limitations on their range (Kinetics especially) mean they can fail at critical moments and in some encounters just not work at all.

Did someone say healer?

Healing is an important part of an Empath's arsenal for sure, but the further you go up in levels and build investment, the more important your buffs become.

Fortitude is a good example, as empaths with very high recharge can keep Fortitude on 6 teammates at once, which grants them FF bubble levels of defense, great +ToHit, and solid +DMG. And then you have AB, which can give enough recovery to overcome nuke downtime among other awesome stuff(+100% rech(!), tons of regen, slow resistance). With some recharge bonuses you can make AB perma.

I've always felt the quality of an empath can be measured by the number of Fort/AB/RegAura icons on the team (on average while in mission). -50 style points for Healing Aura on auto (outside of a Hami raid), the true flag of a misguided (or just lazy) empath.

How many points for blasting instead of waiting for health bars to drop/buffs to recharge?

I just chose an Empath as my new defender. I really don't want to think of him as a pure healer.

I'd like to think I can help the team out of tight situations. I'd like to think I can still do moderate damage, while giving my team an edge in hitting, and causing damage. I think that's what an Empath can do and to label any single AT in a pigeon hole is just wrong.

A tank CAN and does absorb damage right? But they can damage back, they can also show signs of soft control.

This is an example of why these kinds of threads turn people off of an AT..... you GOTTA play what you LOVE. Then if you MUST, classify the bejesus out of it. But at the end of the day... who gives a rats hairy **** what you're classified as? Have fun. Kill stuff. Heal stuff. Get XP... repeat.