whats the best archtype for healer

I want to do a healer but not sure which archtype is the best for healing party members.
any suggestions would help please ?

Many folks will tell you that being a healer isn't very useful in CoH. There is some truth in that, but it's not absolutely true. The answer to your question is you want a Thermal or Empathy Defender. A Time Defender is a decent healer as well, but a much better buffer/debuffer than the other two IMO.

Stalker. Use hide and put aid other on auto.

Like Geko says, support in CoX is not just healing, but buffs to make your allies tougher and debuffs to weaken the enemy.

Defenders do support and ranged damage.

Corrupters do the same, but with more emphasis on the damage.

Controllers do crowd control and support, and are the best archetype for offering "pure" support, ie not doing damage directly.

Good healing oriented sets are:
Empathy for Defenders and Controllers.
Pain Domination for Corrupters.
Thermal Radiation for all three.

All these sets do more than heal, so make sure you take other powers like Fortitude in Empathy and the fire shields in Thermal. Also, take and slot your attacks and controls, they're valuable to your team as well as your support powers.

Have a look at the guides in the forums for these archetypes. And if you ask questions in the Defender forum, be wary of using the word "healer" and say "Support" instead. Some people have a knee-jerk reaction against that word, because Defenders do more than heal.

Empathy is really good at healing. But if healing is all you do with the set, you are playing it wrong and you are not helping the team as well as you should.

Would also like to mention that leadership can be a good idea to pick on supportive characters. Maneuvers is only okay defense on its own, but stacks nicely with any defense buffs from you, teammates or that anyone has for their defense set.

For a bit of an extreme example, defender maneuvers slotted up gives about 5% defense. A friend of mine has 40% defense ranged/melee/aoe on his brute. That 5% defense brings him to the defense cap and halves incoming damage against him. Even on someone with no defense at all, I believe 5% defense is an average of 10% damage avoided.

Assault is a decent damage buff, and tactics can make hitting enemies much easier along with granting confuse protection.

Thermal is great for healing with consistent damage mitigation buffs, plus it has some very strong debuffs.

Empathy has the most absolute healing potential, but it's buffs are a bit more limited use due to (excessively) long recharges, though they are very powerful while active.

I would personally avoid Pain Domination, it is mostly just a less useful Empathy, and Empathy isn't considered a great support set anymore.

Other sets that can heal, but provide much more support to their team in other ways are:
Dark Miasma (Great debuffs and control)
Kinetics (Several amazing buffs, decent debuffs)
Radiation (Amazing buff and debuffs, some control)
Time (All around good set, has amazing buffs, debuffs, and control)

Technically speaking, Storm can also heal in an extremely limited fashion, but O2 Boost is highly skippable.

I24 Proc Chance = (Enhanced Recharge + Activation Time) * (Current PPM * 1.25) / 60*(1 + .75*(.15*Radius - 0.011*Radius*(360-Arc)/30))
Single Target Radius = 0. AoE Non-Cone Arc = 360.

I have a level 50 Illusion/Empathy character who makes a great all around teaming character who has good heals and decent buffs. Illusion has some great tools for keeping the party safe and for allowing you to heal others in relative safety.

I suspect that an Illusion/Thermal controller would be even better.

But as others have said, Thermal, Empathy snd Pain are good sets for it.

Lewis

For pure hit point replacement (healing and +regen) an Empath is going to lead anything else. Fortitude and Adrenaline Boost are 2 of the strongest single target buffs in the game. The flip side as alluded to above is Empathy has no inherent debuffs on its own, all the others do. Pain then Thermal follow (in that order) for the next two strongest (again for strongest hp replacement), Pain going ahead primarily as Thermal lacks both an Absorb Pain or an Adrenaline Boost type clone (a huge heal and a huge +regen respectively). Pain's AB clone exchanges the +100% recharge buff of AB for a +50% damage buff while the Fortitude clone in Thermal lacks the +defense but has higher +damage and +to hit buff values. The 3 (Empathy, Pain and Thermal) are at the top of the heap as all 3 have both a pbaoe heal and ally targeted heal that do not require a foe to be used.

If you are looking towards the endgame and choose an Empathy defender I'd lean strongly towards either /Sonic for single target -resist nastiness or /Ice for AoE ability that doesn't use defender AT damage mods (i.e. Blizzard on a defender hits as hard as it does on a Blaster).

My DS/Pain is a pretty strong healer. She has a VR Spiritual and +25% healing bonuses from sets. Her Share Pain is 909 HP.

Of course I prefer her +RES buffs and damage buffs over the heals, but she can heal when it needs to be done. She can support tanks on Recluse, which is kind of cool. Since her pets can attack towers while she does that.

Quote:

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

I also recomend MMs for being the best healers. Granted, they have the worst healing values in the game, but they can deal 90% of their maximum damage while animating heals 100% of the time. On top of this, they are significantly tougher than any other support AT in the game-- as a dead healer is a useless healer/rezzer.

I too have a DS/Pain, and in many situations it is the best dedicated healer there is. Share Pain can be used with reckless abandon while standing in melee range and spamming your AoE heal. You won't be doing this on a Defender or Corruptor.

I actually prefer my /Pain corr to my /Emp troller, especially for end-game content. Empathy has better buffs but they require so much more attention, and when everybody is nearly self-sufficient due to IOs and/or Incarnate powers I feel like it's a lot of stress for nothing. I really like Fortitude, AB and both auras on mid-level teams though, because I can see that they bring something to the team (and if the team also lacks somebody to neuter the aggro, controls are very welcome).

Pain is lazier, bring +RES buffs that are somewhat rare (and +DMG and +ToHit in a single PBAoE: it's not only lazy but it also buffs you \o/) and self buffs itself with Absorb Pain and the rez. And if /Pain is your secondary, it means that your primary does damage that you can also amplify with Anguishing Cry. When everybody is buffed to the extreme, I prefer to contribute with res/def debuffs and damage that will speed up fights than with buffs that will feel like drops in the ocean and unnecessary controls (even if some defender secondaries can debuff res for instance).

Since Pain recently was a villain-only powerset, it's also not as well-known as Empathy. On forums everybody seems to know support is more than just "healing" but IG I hear a lot of teams saying "we need a heal!" ("for our scrapper/blaster only team" oh god...). In this case I like to play my corr with a secondary that do... things, rather than an Emp which will maybe make feel the team a little too self-confident just by being an Emp (because they have a healer ).

Pure healing, I'd say the best AT is a Def. Then a MM, assuming the MM pays attention to the rest of the team, and not just the pets. Then Trollers, then Corrs.

My responses are, however, a blended response factoring the raw numbers and the psychology behind the ATs as well. If you went just numbers and ability, I'd say Def, Corrs, Trollers, MMs. Either way, if you want to make healing your main focus, Def is probably the way to go. And Emp the set you want.

All that being said, you really should also consider and factor in other things, like buffs/debuffs and offensive potential, as CoX really isn't a 'heals' driven game. I'd take a blended heals/Buffs/debuffs/offense teammate over a 'pure heals' teammate any day. And I'd be far from alone in that in this game.

Kinetics. Transfusion is a disgustingly good heal.

The absolute best for TF/Incarnate Trial/Trial or other is Empathy/Radiation defender.

I have three build for this, all +5 IO Boosted, Incarnate maxed out with all trees and am one of the best healer in game. You can using IO's to maxing hardcap heal at 470+, with bonus power up to 540 AOE but boosting from 470 only lasting little while. You can also get perma to almost perma +health and +stamina as buff to all peoples, also can help softcap or even hardcap person defense with buff, there is good rez, and also able to using heal other.


One build I having with emp/rad is meant for perma +health +stamina, and max AOE heal with rad powers maxed for debuffing enemy.

Second is pure healer with all healing powers selected and very little to no attacks/debuffing. This used for PVP event if asked for this, or if team wanting nothing but healer for certain task or +4/x8/Boss/AV setting on timed TF and wanting get this done quickly as possible.

Third is what I calling HealTank! Or sort of like this. It is good for Solo/AV. Takes very long time to defeat enemy with defender but it has lot of debuff while mostly self-healing power to keep own health at maximum and mostly all perma stamina.

It all depending on what you doing with IO and how you select powers, and who you teaming with and how they build themself.

Hope this helps.

Good luck and happy gaming! <3

Addendum to the above: said character is also a massive investment of RL $ for not much return in terms of +5ing all those IOs, and probably improves a team's performance by at most the same as a purely SO'd rad/, dark/, kin/, cold/, or (probably) time/ defender who can actually supply both offensive and defensive buffs and debuffs. Especially if you take a nice secondary like /sonic or /ice (for example) and actually use it as intended instead of ignoring it or slotting it for mostly irrelevant debuffs like -defense.

Healing in this game is probably the single *least* important form of mitigation available. It can be useful, but empathy's (for example) best powers are the buffs. If I was doing a +4/x8 TF, a 'pure healer' empath would be about the *last* character I would want along. No amount of healing is going to save a squishy who just pissed off a +4 rikti chief soldier, I want buffs and debuffs in that situation.