Post by Raydra on Jul 8, 2014 6:45:50 GMT
IMPORTANT: As of July 25 2014 I have switched mains to Spellslinger and will no longer be maintaining this guide.
Hey TMV! I thought I'd share my knowledge about medic support after a month of reading, tweaking, and trying. If it's even half-viable for a support medic I've tried using it, so 99.9% of what's written here is based on first-hand experience. This thread is meant to help guide fresh 50s towards choosing efficient builds and reinforce their knowledge or speculations about how to play the support medic effectively.
I realize that, after a month, there are quite a few guides out there, but I've read them and while some contain good information I feel most have missed the mark on a quite a few things. I figured I'd try my hand at it and give our Magisterium medics a home-grown place to read up on this amazing class. That, and I'm bored. Be warned that it's a hell of a read, but afterwards I guarantee that you will be as informed about medic healing as the best of us. So without further adieu:
Naz's Builds:
If you don't like to experiment, trust in my taste and/or knowledge, or you just want something to copy & paste these are the builds I personally use:
Naz's CW Build
Naz's SS Build
Choosing which of these two builds to use will depend upon the skill of your group. The Shield Surge build is more well-rounded but relies on your group to evade and position excellently for things to be smooth. The Crisis Wave build sacrifices the stability tank shielding brings but is simpler to execute, makes healing DPS quick and easy, and will free up an extra LAS slot as I don't take Flash.
For either build Swap out Paralytic Surge and/or Field Probes if you need other utility or support skills.
Overall Support Strategy:
Believe it or not healing is rather simple if your group is intelligent about positioning and movement. Medics are short-range support and will require your group to be aware of their distance to you more so than other classes. The tradeoff is that everything in our arsenal is multi-target (save Triage) and mobile and we bring a truckload of utility. It's important to remember that with all of our heals being freeform it is as much the group's responsibility to get healed as it is yours. DPS should make efforts to position themselves where it will be easy for you to heal them. If the survivability isn't attractive enough the prospect of additional damage through Empowering Aura and Empowering Probes should convince them to stay close.
Shield Surge LAS:
Keep all of your probes running on as many people as possible as much as possible. Stabilize your tank with Emission while you wait for their shield to hit 0, then slap them with a Shield Surge. For light group damage spot heal with Emission while letting your Mending Probes do their work. If you find that a DPS is taking consistent damage or you believe that they'll be taking damage again shortly top up their shields as well. For heavy group damage or shoring up large health deficits use the probes/Flash combo. Flash is a short cooldown and should be back up by the time you have to detonate again, so definitely don't hold out on it.
Crisis Wave LAS:
Again, keep all of your probes running on as many people as possible as much as possible and keep your tank stabilized with Emission. When you begin losing the tug-of-war with your HoTs or your tank takes spike damage hit Crisis Wave until their health is back near the top. Healing group damage is largely the same as the Shield Surge LAS only use Crisis Wave in the place of the probes/Flash combo until your target(s) are back to full or near full.
Now for those who want to read...
The AMPs:
The beautiful thing about WildStar, or at least I've found, is that there is no one "correct" choice. There are things that are considered near mandatory, but there is a lot of room for tweaking and personalization. With that said I recommend using this build as a core which leaves you with (amongst other things) 5 AMP points to play with at base. If you choose to experiment for yourself the critical AMPs I recommend for every build are:
Empowering Aura (via Strikethrough III)
Higher healing and damage for group members within 10m. The only scenario where I can comprehend not taking this AMP is if you run every single dungeon and raid with a DPS medic or another healer medic who already has it. Strikethrough III is the best option to unlock this AMP as assault power does nothing for us and armor pierce will give our Shield Surges notably less damage done over the course of a fight than increased strikethrough. Although still trivial, more damage is more damage.
Critical Hit III
Significantly more healing throughput for only 3 AMP points. What's not to love?
Support Power III
Speaks for itself, really.
Reboot:
This AMP is just too incredible. If you hold out on Shield Surge until your tank's shield hits 0 it will add an extra 225% of your support power essentially doubling the amount shielded. The only problem is that a lot of tanks have what's been dubbed "trickle shields", tiny but consistent self-shielding which can make this AMP's value nose dive if not controlled effectively. Things like Bolstering Strike are fine because they apply shields instantly and are used at the tank's discretion. If your tank is educated they will not use these abilities while at or near zero shields because they will know you are casting or about to cast Shield Surge.
Things like the Repair Bot (due to its shield-on-attack) and Empowered Attack Mastery AMP for stalker can hurt our throughput, and consequently the tank's survivability, because the tank can't reliably control the shielding granted and thus cannot play around Reboot. If you know your tank and notice small shields constantly trickling in from zero address it and make sure they understand how this counteracts medic healing. If your tank is a PUG it may not be fair to ask them to change their AMPs if they don't have a medic-friendly build available already (which most experienced tanks will), so just try your best to hit the reboots and don't stress out too much if they miss.
As a side note a lot of medics are petitioning to have this changed to allow a low percentage of shields to be active on your target, so stay tuned to those patch notes!
Armor Coating:
An extra 8.9% armor on your tank is just too good to pass up. You'll be getting critical heals off too often for this to have much less than 100% uptime.
Cooldowns III:
More healing throughput, higher uptime on probes, and more utility availability. This is as good as it gets.
Solid State:
Interrupt armor can trivialize some boss mechanics which makes this exponentially more useful than any other T2 utility AMP. Why do we want more utility? We want it to unlock...
Protection Probes:
These little guys are absolutely glorious. They have a theoretical 50% (approximately 59% with Cooldowns III) uptime on a base 17% damage mitigation to your group. Less damage taken, less healing needed, more focus saved. It's a win/win/win. This only gets better as you tier this ability. In addition it provides 1 interrupt armor for its duration with Solid State which, as we've covered, can break some encounters. On top of everything else Protection Probes is off of the global cooldown allowing you to weave it into your healing without compromise. Just be wary of the T8 bonus. Remember: trickle shields are bad!
Why I Recommend...:
Hypercharge:
This turns your innate's active into a group-wide focus-free shield for 220% of your support power. Use Energize on cooldown for higher throughput or save it to help deal with spike damage, either way it's fantastic value.
Dash Regen III:
A large portion of WildStar's combat design is based around movement. Dashing provides you with a small burst of speed, and this lets you do it more often. By itself this is not terribly ideal, but it is much more valuable than any T2 utility except Solid State which we've already taken. Why do I say that? Every heal and shield we cast affects us as well, severely diminishing the value of Regenerator and Shield Reboot. Quick Dodge or Concentrated Effort are extremely situational and inconsistent as you will not be doing CC breaks or be interrupted much, if at all, in a PvE environment.
Other Choices:
So you still have 5 points left to play with, or maybe you're going against the proverbial grain and cutting points from recommended AMPs, so what do you do with them? There is no one correct answer and it can, and will, revolve around gear and play. Here are a few choices that warrant experimentation:
Null Zone:
Less damage done to the group means less damage you need to heal and less focus you need to spend. The big drawback to Null Zone is that it requires you to be 8m from the enemy which often means compromising mobility or positioning to get value from it. I can't honestly recommend Null Zone for that reason but it remains a viable option.
Surgical:
If you choose to run Field Probes on your LAS Surgical can provide a worthwhile boost to your throughput.
Critical Severity:
Although an unexciting choice these AMPs can be taken advantage of with every LAS and are non-situational. For that reason I'm quicker to recommend this over the other options unless you have focus issues.
Focus Cost:
Once you're raid-ready any focus issues will be alleviated entirely by gear, specials, and rune sets. Until then these AMPs can provide a cheap way to boost your longevity if you're having trouble sustaining heals in drag-out fights.
Focus Recovery:
Like Focus Cost but with less value unless you find yourself in fights with frequent lulls in healing.
Rejuvenator:
The concept of DPS being able to have more control over getting healed is an attractive one. When you cast Rejuvenator a small activator will hover in the air at a ground-targeted location for 30 seconds. When an ally walks into it a 15m x 15m HoT field will deploy from this actuator lasting 10 seconds healing 9 allies within the field. Rejuvenator has a whopping 30m cast range, and with the cooldown lining up with the activator's duration it gives us a great way to lay down some serious proactive healing. The downside is that, although it provides the most healing per cast of any medic ability, it requires the intended recipients to stand in an unmoving field for 10 seconds to get the full value which isn't ideal.
The LAS:
I'm going to go over each support and utility ability and briefly discuss why it's good, bad, or just mediocre, and share which ones I've found are the best to tier up. This way you can understand why I recommend the abilities I recommend and decide for yourself which take in your free slot, when to take it, and for what purpose.
Emission:
Don't be fooled, Emission is ridiculously powerful thanks to its incredible scaling. With the T8 bonus you get good chunks of healing for extremely little focus or 0 focus when you're under 250 total making it much easier to sustain healing in long fights. T8 is basically mandatory across all medic healing builds, it's that good. Just make sure stay on target and trigger that bonus.
Crisis Wave:
Crisis Wave allows for quick, on-demand healing within a massive telegraph. In terms of throughput it pulls ahead of Shield Surge with Reboot at T8 thanks to every 3rd cast being instant, actuator-free and off of the global cooldown. Using Crisis Wave over Shield Surge will result in your healing being more forgiving towards group damage and positioning at the cost of tank stability. Whether that's worth it or not is up to you. If you're going to take Crisis Wave take it all the way up to T8, and I would recommend at the cost of Mending Probes.
Dual Shock:
This is for solo builds or for when you outgear instances and can afford to sacrifice healing to help out a bit more with damage. With no synergy, a 10 second cooldown, and rather average numbers Dual Shock is not an optimal ability on a pure healing LAS.
Mending Probes:
In addition to providing the HoT which can stabilize your group Mending Probes becomes an absolutely insane group heal at T8 when you detonate them simultaneously with Flash for silly huge numbers. If you run Shield Surge over Crisis Wave I cannot stress enough how much you should tier this up to 8. Let me run some numbers by you:
At 1000 support power T8 Mending Probes will heal for 4168 over 12 seconds. This means that when they detonate each probe triggers a heal for 2084. Now with T8 that heal hits three allies within 6m. Assuming your group is well-positioned (and there is no reason they should not be) this would equate to an average of 8336 per person. Toss in the healing from Flash (base for 1924 @ 1000 support power) and you've landed, again on average, a staggering 10260 per person. That's assuming zero critical hits. At only 1000 support power. Every 15 seconds at most. Convinced yet?
When you get to raiding you will be able to pull your points out of this unless you're expected to pull double duty. Espers and/or Spellslingers casting Reverie and Sustain on your raid will take care of group healing, so just use it at base or low tiers to help stabilize the tanks.
Triage:
I like to look at the positive side of abilities, but there's no getting around it: Triage is just not worth it in its current state. It's an extremely focus-efficient single-target half-heal-half-shield with a low cooldown and a cast range that's unparalleled for our direct heals. The bad? It's a "smart heal" and automatically chooses between you or one target in the telegraph based on current HP, not a percentage. This forces you to process extra information before casting it and makes it highly unreliable. If you run tiered Mending Probes Triage, like Flash, detonates them so weaving it in to your regular healing would be detrimental, too. All of this on top of it simply not healing for much and I have to recommend against taking Triage.
Flash:
Flash really shines (see what I did there?) when coupled with T8 Mending Probes as previously discussed, making this an extremely good choice when paired with its counterpart. If you run a Shield Surge LAS I recommend taking this up to T4 in 5-man content to give yourself more burst healing.
Barrier:
Barrier is a great emergency button as it works with the Reboot AMP, though it's a little heavy on focus cost and comes with a substantial cooldown. If you find yourself in need of more emergency healing, or you just have nothing else useful to take, consider Barrier.
Rejuvenator:
Covered in the AMPs section.
Shield Surge:
Holy !&#$ this ability, oh my god. This is the reason to choose a medic healer and the reason why every good raid needs one. Let's talk about shields for a second:
As you may or may not already know medics are the only healer that gets to restore shields. Shields mitigate half of any incoming damage at base. This means that, until depleted, shields add their value as effective health. At current content tanks pushing towards raids tend to hover around 30-35k HP and 10-15k shields. Since tanks are, of course, taking constant damage their natural shield reboot never comes into the equation during a fight. For every other healer that 10-15k effective health is just plain lost. On average that's 38% effective health! And we get to sustain it on-demand! How %#!*ing crazy is that?! And that's just at entry level. I've seen raiding tanks rock shields as high as 25k making Shield Surge all the more valuable.
Now that I'm done gushing about our class let's actually talk about the ability. Shield Surge provides massive shielding with the Reboot AMP and synergizes perfectly with our innate's passive. Taking this up to T4 and pushing shield mitigation to 100% allows you to rely on shields to keep low-health targets alive but is more focus intensive and makes Emission largely overhealing. If you want to run a Shield Surge LAS I recommend leaving this at base and using those precious ability points elsewhere.
As well as being an amazing support ability Shield Surge also piles on a bit of extra damage. Spam it towards trash (or even bosses if you're not worried about focus) to help your group clear that much faster!
Extricate:
You can use Extricate to yank CCed DPS out of telegraphs or pull them into range for emergency heals, but there are other ways around that problem such as CC breakers, Urgency, or plain old situational awareness. Experiment with it if you like but I recommend saving that LAS slot for something that's generally more useful.
Utility:
Paralytic Surge:
As a lot of you may have already figured out, interrupts are ultra, ultra important. Not only to prevent damage, but also to grant moments of opportunity to your group. Healers sometimes get a pass but in fights that require heavy amounts of interrupts this is not only the best choice for your LAS but can be the best place to spend those points and hit the T4 bonus.
Urgency:
This is one I overlooked for the longest time. I plead you: don't make the same mistake! The mobility is just too good to pass up. Kiting adds? Urgency! Tank just took a huge spike and you were busy healing wandering DPS? Urgency! Trapped yourself in a corner and are about to eat a giant telegraph? Urgency! Girlfriend just caught you looking at another woman? Urgency!
Restrictor:
If a fight requires you to take a root or snare Magnetic Lockdown is, or at least in my experience has been, a better choice.
Antidote:
Antidote doesn't often have a place on a PvE support medic's LAS. Most enemies do not debuff, and the ones that do are usually tied into mechanics that are either avoidable or that you cannot dispel. If you find your group getting hit with avoidable debuffs (such as DoTs) on a regular basis put this in your spare LAS slot as it will save you both attention and focus in the long run, otherwise skip this unless the fight very specifically calls for it.
Recharge:
A very good choice if you encounter focus issues. Use Recharge on cooldown and you should never run out of focus during a fight. It's also a good option when you don't need to take anything else, both for the safety net of the extra focus and the empower.
Protection Probes:
Covered in the AMPs section. Never leave home without it. Mmm, dat medic utility.
Empowering Probes:
Unless your group has an Annihilation DPS medic, as they already run them, you're going to want these. +10% damage for the entire group with the same uptime potential as Protection Probes is just too good. Also like Protection Probes this is off of the global cooldown.
As a personal note this is where I choose to spend my extra ability points unless I'm having trouble keeping my tank or my group alive. The extra damage and critical percentage helps push your veteran medal timers that much better.
Magnetic Lockdown:
If the fight calls for snares/roots this is the one to take. Otherwise there's practically no reason.
Calm:
Quite simply and predictably an excellent choice for fights where you are or can be regularly CCed.
Field Probes:
A solid choice when the fight doesn't call for anything else. With no focus cost an extra 20% healing taken for everyone in the field is nothing to scoff at, and this ability has good synergy as it affects tank self-heals/shields as well. The only bad part about it is, like Rejuvenator, it's a ground-targeted AoE in a movement heavy game so again mileage may vary.
Stat Weights:
Using the table below you can assess how valuable a new piece of gear would be. To make things easier you can download the WeightMate addon, enter these values, and it will do most of the math for you. Just remember to take runes in to consideration afterwards!
Focus recovery rating's value will change for you as specials, runes, AMPs, and Recharge will all affect how much you need it. If you're already running focus AMPs, run with Recharge, and still encounter focus issues prioritize recovery after insight. Otherwise don't sacrifice anything for it. Building for focus recovery (past rune bonuses of course) should be an absolute last resort as once you have "enough" any further amounts are dead stats.
Runes:
Keep in mind you can only have one of a rune with the same element and same stat increase in one piece of gear. The game will let you equip more but the extra runes will not grant you their stats. If you are able to reach a rune set bonus, do so. Life Giver is top tier, but Focus Regen is what you want until you're decked out in über gear. Knowing that, rune out your gear according to the stat priority above.
Keep an eye out for gear with life & water slots as they are the most valuable. This is followed by fire if you can reach a Life Giver bonus, air if you can reach a Focus Regen bonus, or fusion if neither. Try to minimize the amount of earth slots on your gear as the best thing they give us is crit severity.
Recommended Addons:
*Naz's personal preference
Nameplates:
There's no getting around it, the default nameplates suck for support medics. I've tried every nameplate addon out there and in my opinion nPrimeNameplates*and MinimalistPlates are currently the best, but anything with a separate shield bar is a massive improvement.
Group Frames:
If you're running the stock UI I recommend picking up BetterPartyFrames as I find them cleaner and easier to read. Fixed shield bars go a long way!
FocusUp:
FocusUp is a great little addon that will track focus recovery from sources other than rating. It will then display equivalencies in both rating form and per second. Use it to weigh the value of focus recovery specials, rune sets and abilities.
Combat Metres:
This is a great way to compare yourself to, well, yourself. Get instant feedback on what works and what works better! Either GalaxyMeter or NexusMeter* will do the job.
Cooldown Trackers:
I hate taking my eyes off the centre of my screen, so for me cooldown trackers are a must. AuraMastery is the most popular allowing you to track all manners of cooldowns, triggers, and conditions. It's incredibly customizable if a little user unfriendly.
QtCooldown requires next-to-no setup and will track all ability cooldowns out of the box in a neat little timeline. You can customize it and add on more bars to track buffs/debuffs and can set up whitelists and blacklists to make sure you're seeing only what you want to see.
Doom Cooldown Pulse* is about as simple as it gets. Whenever something comes off of cooldown it pulses the ability icon at a movable anchor.
Useful Links
These are the pages and places I monitor for information or insight. Not just for medic, but for play in general. If you ever want to go digging for yourself check these out:
Medicating Nexus
Official WildStar Medic Forum
Taugrim's MMO Blog
7/16/14: Removed stat priority, added stat weights.
7/20/14: Added "Naz's Builds" and "Useful Links" sections.
Hey TMV! I thought I'd share my knowledge about medic support after a month of reading, tweaking, and trying. If it's even half-viable for a support medic I've tried using it, so 99.9% of what's written here is based on first-hand experience. This thread is meant to help guide fresh 50s towards choosing efficient builds and reinforce their knowledge or speculations about how to play the support medic effectively.
I realize that, after a month, there are quite a few guides out there, but I've read them and while some contain good information I feel most have missed the mark on a quite a few things. I figured I'd try my hand at it and give our Magisterium medics a home-grown place to read up on this amazing class. That, and I'm bored. Be warned that it's a hell of a read, but afterwards I guarantee that you will be as informed about medic healing as the best of us. So without further adieu:
Naz's Builds:
If you don't like to experiment, trust in my taste and/or knowledge, or you just want something to copy & paste these are the builds I personally use:
Naz's CW Build
Naz's SS Build
Choosing which of these two builds to use will depend upon the skill of your group. The Shield Surge build is more well-rounded but relies on your group to evade and position excellently for things to be smooth. The Crisis Wave build sacrifices the stability tank shielding brings but is simpler to execute, makes healing DPS quick and easy, and will free up an extra LAS slot as I don't take Flash.
For either build Swap out Paralytic Surge and/or Field Probes if you need other utility or support skills.
Overall Support Strategy:
Believe it or not healing is rather simple if your group is intelligent about positioning and movement. Medics are short-range support and will require your group to be aware of their distance to you more so than other classes. The tradeoff is that everything in our arsenal is multi-target (save Triage) and mobile and we bring a truckload of utility. It's important to remember that with all of our heals being freeform it is as much the group's responsibility to get healed as it is yours. DPS should make efforts to position themselves where it will be easy for you to heal them. If the survivability isn't attractive enough the prospect of additional damage through Empowering Aura and Empowering Probes should convince them to stay close.
Shield Surge LAS:
Keep all of your probes running on as many people as possible as much as possible. Stabilize your tank with Emission while you wait for their shield to hit 0, then slap them with a Shield Surge. For light group damage spot heal with Emission while letting your Mending Probes do their work. If you find that a DPS is taking consistent damage or you believe that they'll be taking damage again shortly top up their shields as well. For heavy group damage or shoring up large health deficits use the probes/Flash combo. Flash is a short cooldown and should be back up by the time you have to detonate again, so definitely don't hold out on it.
Crisis Wave LAS:
Again, keep all of your probes running on as many people as possible as much as possible and keep your tank stabilized with Emission. When you begin losing the tug-of-war with your HoTs or your tank takes spike damage hit Crisis Wave until their health is back near the top. Healing group damage is largely the same as the Shield Surge LAS only use Crisis Wave in the place of the probes/Flash combo until your target(s) are back to full or near full.
Now for those who want to read...
The AMPs:
The beautiful thing about WildStar, or at least I've found, is that there is no one "correct" choice. There are things that are considered near mandatory, but there is a lot of room for tweaking and personalization. With that said I recommend using this build as a core which leaves you with (amongst other things) 5 AMP points to play with at base. If you choose to experiment for yourself the critical AMPs I recommend for every build are:
Empowering Aura (via Strikethrough III)
Higher healing and damage for group members within 10m. The only scenario where I can comprehend not taking this AMP is if you run every single dungeon and raid with a DPS medic or another healer medic who already has it. Strikethrough III is the best option to unlock this AMP as assault power does nothing for us and armor pierce will give our Shield Surges notably less damage done over the course of a fight than increased strikethrough. Although still trivial, more damage is more damage.
Critical Hit III
Significantly more healing throughput for only 3 AMP points. What's not to love?
Support Power III
Speaks for itself, really.
Reboot:
This AMP is just too incredible. If you hold out on Shield Surge until your tank's shield hits 0 it will add an extra 225% of your support power essentially doubling the amount shielded. The only problem is that a lot of tanks have what's been dubbed "trickle shields", tiny but consistent self-shielding which can make this AMP's value nose dive if not controlled effectively. Things like Bolstering Strike are fine because they apply shields instantly and are used at the tank's discretion. If your tank is educated they will not use these abilities while at or near zero shields because they will know you are casting or about to cast Shield Surge.
Things like the Repair Bot (due to its shield-on-attack) and Empowered Attack Mastery AMP for stalker can hurt our throughput, and consequently the tank's survivability, because the tank can't reliably control the shielding granted and thus cannot play around Reboot. If you know your tank and notice small shields constantly trickling in from zero address it and make sure they understand how this counteracts medic healing. If your tank is a PUG it may not be fair to ask them to change their AMPs if they don't have a medic-friendly build available already (which most experienced tanks will), so just try your best to hit the reboots and don't stress out too much if they miss.
As a side note a lot of medics are petitioning to have this changed to allow a low percentage of shields to be active on your target, so stay tuned to those patch notes!
Armor Coating:
An extra 8.9% armor on your tank is just too good to pass up. You'll be getting critical heals off too often for this to have much less than 100% uptime.
Cooldowns III:
More healing throughput, higher uptime on probes, and more utility availability. This is as good as it gets.
Solid State:
Interrupt armor can trivialize some boss mechanics which makes this exponentially more useful than any other T2 utility AMP. Why do we want more utility? We want it to unlock...
Protection Probes:
These little guys are absolutely glorious. They have a theoretical 50% (approximately 59% with Cooldowns III) uptime on a base 17% damage mitigation to your group. Less damage taken, less healing needed, more focus saved. It's a win/win/win. This only gets better as you tier this ability. In addition it provides 1 interrupt armor for its duration with Solid State which, as we've covered, can break some encounters. On top of everything else Protection Probes is off of the global cooldown allowing you to weave it into your healing without compromise. Just be wary of the T8 bonus. Remember: trickle shields are bad!
Why I Recommend...:
Hypercharge:
This turns your innate's active into a group-wide focus-free shield for 220% of your support power. Use Energize on cooldown for higher throughput or save it to help deal with spike damage, either way it's fantastic value.
Dash Regen III:
A large portion of WildStar's combat design is based around movement. Dashing provides you with a small burst of speed, and this lets you do it more often. By itself this is not terribly ideal, but it is much more valuable than any T2 utility except Solid State which we've already taken. Why do I say that? Every heal and shield we cast affects us as well, severely diminishing the value of Regenerator and Shield Reboot. Quick Dodge or Concentrated Effort are extremely situational and inconsistent as you will not be doing CC breaks or be interrupted much, if at all, in a PvE environment.
Other Choices:
So you still have 5 points left to play with, or maybe you're going against the proverbial grain and cutting points from recommended AMPs, so what do you do with them? There is no one correct answer and it can, and will, revolve around gear and play. Here are a few choices that warrant experimentation:
Null Zone:
Less damage done to the group means less damage you need to heal and less focus you need to spend. The big drawback to Null Zone is that it requires you to be 8m from the enemy which often means compromising mobility or positioning to get value from it. I can't honestly recommend Null Zone for that reason but it remains a viable option.
Surgical:
If you choose to run Field Probes on your LAS Surgical can provide a worthwhile boost to your throughput.
Critical Severity:
Although an unexciting choice these AMPs can be taken advantage of with every LAS and are non-situational. For that reason I'm quicker to recommend this over the other options unless you have focus issues.
Focus Cost:
Once you're raid-ready any focus issues will be alleviated entirely by gear, specials, and rune sets. Until then these AMPs can provide a cheap way to boost your longevity if you're having trouble sustaining heals in drag-out fights.
Focus Recovery:
Like Focus Cost but with less value unless you find yourself in fights with frequent lulls in healing.
Rejuvenator:
The concept of DPS being able to have more control over getting healed is an attractive one. When you cast Rejuvenator a small activator will hover in the air at a ground-targeted location for 30 seconds. When an ally walks into it a 15m x 15m HoT field will deploy from this actuator lasting 10 seconds healing 9 allies within the field. Rejuvenator has a whopping 30m cast range, and with the cooldown lining up with the activator's duration it gives us a great way to lay down some serious proactive healing. The downside is that, although it provides the most healing per cast of any medic ability, it requires the intended recipients to stand in an unmoving field for 10 seconds to get the full value which isn't ideal.
The LAS:
I'm going to go over each support and utility ability and briefly discuss why it's good, bad, or just mediocre, and share which ones I've found are the best to tier up. This way you can understand why I recommend the abilities I recommend and decide for yourself which take in your free slot, when to take it, and for what purpose.
Emission:
Don't be fooled, Emission is ridiculously powerful thanks to its incredible scaling. With the T8 bonus you get good chunks of healing for extremely little focus or 0 focus when you're under 250 total making it much easier to sustain healing in long fights. T8 is basically mandatory across all medic healing builds, it's that good. Just make sure stay on target and trigger that bonus.
Crisis Wave:
Crisis Wave allows for quick, on-demand healing within a massive telegraph. In terms of throughput it pulls ahead of Shield Surge with Reboot at T8 thanks to every 3rd cast being instant, actuator-free and off of the global cooldown. Using Crisis Wave over Shield Surge will result in your healing being more forgiving towards group damage and positioning at the cost of tank stability. Whether that's worth it or not is up to you. If you're going to take Crisis Wave take it all the way up to T8, and I would recommend at the cost of Mending Probes.
Dual Shock:
This is for solo builds or for when you outgear instances and can afford to sacrifice healing to help out a bit more with damage. With no synergy, a 10 second cooldown, and rather average numbers Dual Shock is not an optimal ability on a pure healing LAS.
Mending Probes:
In addition to providing the HoT which can stabilize your group Mending Probes becomes an absolutely insane group heal at T8 when you detonate them simultaneously with Flash for silly huge numbers. If you run Shield Surge over Crisis Wave I cannot stress enough how much you should tier this up to 8. Let me run some numbers by you:
At 1000 support power T8 Mending Probes will heal for 4168 over 12 seconds. This means that when they detonate each probe triggers a heal for 2084. Now with T8 that heal hits three allies within 6m. Assuming your group is well-positioned (and there is no reason they should not be) this would equate to an average of 8336 per person. Toss in the healing from Flash (base for 1924 @ 1000 support power) and you've landed, again on average, a staggering 10260 per person. That's assuming zero critical hits. At only 1000 support power. Every 15 seconds at most. Convinced yet?
When you get to raiding you will be able to pull your points out of this unless you're expected to pull double duty. Espers and/or Spellslingers casting Reverie and Sustain on your raid will take care of group healing, so just use it at base or low tiers to help stabilize the tanks.
Triage:
I like to look at the positive side of abilities, but there's no getting around it: Triage is just not worth it in its current state. It's an extremely focus-efficient single-target half-heal-half-shield with a low cooldown and a cast range that's unparalleled for our direct heals. The bad? It's a "smart heal" and automatically chooses between you or one target in the telegraph based on current HP, not a percentage. This forces you to process extra information before casting it and makes it highly unreliable. If you run tiered Mending Probes Triage, like Flash, detonates them so weaving it in to your regular healing would be detrimental, too. All of this on top of it simply not healing for much and I have to recommend against taking Triage.
Flash:
Flash really shines (see what I did there?) when coupled with T8 Mending Probes as previously discussed, making this an extremely good choice when paired with its counterpart. If you run a Shield Surge LAS I recommend taking this up to T4 in 5-man content to give yourself more burst healing.
Barrier:
Barrier is a great emergency button as it works with the Reboot AMP, though it's a little heavy on focus cost and comes with a substantial cooldown. If you find yourself in need of more emergency healing, or you just have nothing else useful to take, consider Barrier.
Rejuvenator:
Covered in the AMPs section.
Shield Surge:
Holy !&#$ this ability, oh my god. This is the reason to choose a medic healer and the reason why every good raid needs one. Let's talk about shields for a second:
As you may or may not already know medics are the only healer that gets to restore shields. Shields mitigate half of any incoming damage at base. This means that, until depleted, shields add their value as effective health. At current content tanks pushing towards raids tend to hover around 30-35k HP and 10-15k shields. Since tanks are, of course, taking constant damage their natural shield reboot never comes into the equation during a fight. For every other healer that 10-15k effective health is just plain lost. On average that's 38% effective health! And we get to sustain it on-demand! How %#!*ing crazy is that?! And that's just at entry level. I've seen raiding tanks rock shields as high as 25k making Shield Surge all the more valuable.
Now that I'm done gushing about our class let's actually talk about the ability. Shield Surge provides massive shielding with the Reboot AMP and synergizes perfectly with our innate's passive. Taking this up to T4 and pushing shield mitigation to 100% allows you to rely on shields to keep low-health targets alive but is more focus intensive and makes Emission largely overhealing. If you want to run a Shield Surge LAS I recommend leaving this at base and using those precious ability points elsewhere.
As well as being an amazing support ability Shield Surge also piles on a bit of extra damage. Spam it towards trash (or even bosses if you're not worried about focus) to help your group clear that much faster!
Extricate:
You can use Extricate to yank CCed DPS out of telegraphs or pull them into range for emergency heals, but there are other ways around that problem such as CC breakers, Urgency, or plain old situational awareness. Experiment with it if you like but I recommend saving that LAS slot for something that's generally more useful.
Utility:
Paralytic Surge:
As a lot of you may have already figured out, interrupts are ultra, ultra important. Not only to prevent damage, but also to grant moments of opportunity to your group. Healers sometimes get a pass but in fights that require heavy amounts of interrupts this is not only the best choice for your LAS but can be the best place to spend those points and hit the T4 bonus.
Urgency:
This is one I overlooked for the longest time. I plead you: don't make the same mistake! The mobility is just too good to pass up. Kiting adds? Urgency! Tank just took a huge spike and you were busy healing wandering DPS? Urgency! Trapped yourself in a corner and are about to eat a giant telegraph? Urgency! Girlfriend just caught you looking at another woman? Urgency!
Restrictor:
If a fight requires you to take a root or snare Magnetic Lockdown is, or at least in my experience has been, a better choice.
Antidote:
Antidote doesn't often have a place on a PvE support medic's LAS. Most enemies do not debuff, and the ones that do are usually tied into mechanics that are either avoidable or that you cannot dispel. If you find your group getting hit with avoidable debuffs (such as DoTs) on a regular basis put this in your spare LAS slot as it will save you both attention and focus in the long run, otherwise skip this unless the fight very specifically calls for it.
Recharge:
A very good choice if you encounter focus issues. Use Recharge on cooldown and you should never run out of focus during a fight. It's also a good option when you don't need to take anything else, both for the safety net of the extra focus and the empower.
Protection Probes:
Covered in the AMPs section. Never leave home without it. Mmm, dat medic utility.
Empowering Probes:
Unless your group has an Annihilation DPS medic, as they already run them, you're going to want these. +10% damage for the entire group with the same uptime potential as Protection Probes is just too good. Also like Protection Probes this is off of the global cooldown.
As a personal note this is where I choose to spend my extra ability points unless I'm having trouble keeping my tank or my group alive. The extra damage and critical percentage helps push your veteran medal timers that much better.
Magnetic Lockdown:
If the fight calls for snares/roots this is the one to take. Otherwise there's practically no reason.
Calm:
Quite simply and predictably an excellent choice for fights where you are or can be regularly CCed.
Field Probes:
A solid choice when the fight doesn't call for anything else. With no focus cost an extra 20% healing taken for everyone in the field is nothing to scoff at, and this ability has good synergy as it affects tank self-heals/shields as well. The only bad part about it is, like Rejuvenator, it's a ground-targeted AoE in a movement heavy game so again mileage may vary.
Stat Weights:
Using the table below you can assess how valuable a new piece of gear would be. To make things easier you can download the WeightMate addon, enter these values, and it will do most of the math for you. Just remember to take runes in to consideration afterwards!
| Stat | Weight |
| Support Power | 2.0 |
| Insight | 1.0 |
| Critical Hit Rating | 0.76 |
| Moxie | 0.51 |
| Crit Severity Rating | 0.27 |
| Brutality | 0.13 |
Focus recovery rating's value will change for you as specials, runes, AMPs, and Recharge will all affect how much you need it. If you're already running focus AMPs, run with Recharge, and still encounter focus issues prioritize recovery after insight. Otherwise don't sacrifice anything for it. Building for focus recovery (past rune bonuses of course) should be an absolute last resort as once you have "enough" any further amounts are dead stats.
Runes:
Keep in mind you can only have one of a rune with the same element and same stat increase in one piece of gear. The game will let you equip more but the extra runes will not grant you their stats. If you are able to reach a rune set bonus, do so. Life Giver is top tier, but Focus Regen is what you want until you're decked out in über gear. Knowing that, rune out your gear according to the stat priority above.
Keep an eye out for gear with life & water slots as they are the most valuable. This is followed by fire if you can reach a Life Giver bonus, air if you can reach a Focus Regen bonus, or fusion if neither. Try to minimize the amount of earth slots on your gear as the best thing they give us is crit severity.
Recommended Addons:
*Naz's personal preference
Nameplates:
There's no getting around it, the default nameplates suck for support medics. I've tried every nameplate addon out there and in my opinion nPrimeNameplates*and MinimalistPlates are currently the best, but anything with a separate shield bar is a massive improvement.
Group Frames:
If you're running the stock UI I recommend picking up BetterPartyFrames as I find them cleaner and easier to read. Fixed shield bars go a long way!
FocusUp:
FocusUp is a great little addon that will track focus recovery from sources other than rating. It will then display equivalencies in both rating form and per second. Use it to weigh the value of focus recovery specials, rune sets and abilities.
Combat Metres:
This is a great way to compare yourself to, well, yourself. Get instant feedback on what works and what works better! Either GalaxyMeter or NexusMeter* will do the job.
Cooldown Trackers:
I hate taking my eyes off the centre of my screen, so for me cooldown trackers are a must. AuraMastery is the most popular allowing you to track all manners of cooldowns, triggers, and conditions. It's incredibly customizable if a little user unfriendly.
QtCooldown requires next-to-no setup and will track all ability cooldowns out of the box in a neat little timeline. You can customize it and add on more bars to track buffs/debuffs and can set up whitelists and blacklists to make sure you're seeing only what you want to see.
Doom Cooldown Pulse* is about as simple as it gets. Whenever something comes off of cooldown it pulses the ability icon at a movable anchor.
Useful Links
These are the pages and places I monitor for information or insight. Not just for medic, but for play in general. If you ever want to go digging for yourself check these out:
Medicating Nexus
Official WildStar Medic Forum
Taugrim's MMO Blog
7/16/14: Removed stat priority, added stat weights.
7/20/14: Added "Naz's Builds" and "Useful Links" sections.
