Healing Aware Leveling Builds

[Dataminded]

Hi,

 

Is a sage's innate healing ability sufficient to heal flash points while leveling? If not, can someone point me towards a build that gives me enough healing to be viable in flashpoints hopefully without losing too much in terms of my ability to quickly and efficiently kill things while leveling.

 

Thanks!

[UnregisteredUser]

Depending on the difficulty of the FP and gear levels of the group, the core heal abilities for a sage (Force Armor, Benevolence, and Deliverance) could possibly be enough. However, you will certainly run into force issues during sustained encounters, and all high-end FP content (any HM 55) will be a strain on your healing ability since you are limited to a single-start one-at-a-time style of healing. If you are serious about healing, it is highly recommended that you go with the full healing tree build for sages. It helps with resource management as well as overall power levels for healing. The top of the Seer tree (Salvation) is required for anything more than casual SM FPs. The recommended spec is generally this.

 

For leveling FPs, they are generally tuned for that level and what is available at that point (for example, taunts and interrupts are not required for lower FPs, but they are very beneficial for mid-level or higher.) So if you are queuing for the healer role, it is expected for you to have roughly what is available for that level of healing, so if you aren't that spec, please do not queue for that role. It will only make the experience bad for the whole group.

 

As far as killing things quickly, you should not be relying too heavily on that ability as a healer. Your basic dots and occasional telekinetic throw will be more than enough to help the dps in your group out. For solo content, I can see a concern. Your basic attacks will be more than sufficient to burst small groups down for things like dailies and whatnot, but your sustained damage output is hindered by a very rough force management situation for a Seer sage trying to dps. But what did you expect? You cannot have the greatest (or even near average) damage output in healing spec. Your weak/standard target burst is just fine with dots, project, and telekinetic throw.

 

I highly recommend buying the field respec on your toon and switching to Telekinetics or the hybrid (my preferred build) for daily grinding. You don't have to switch gear or anything because accuracy isn't important for this purpose. You are only switching for the force management to kill things faster.

[MeatbagTitan]

^sound advice above. While I leveled my character heal spec all the way and never even tried the DPS trees until 55, TBH since you're going for willpower/power anyhow, you can level pretty effectively and have decent damage production with the core abilities. Getting telekinetic wave (particularly once you're high enough up the tele tree to get buffed damage and free/insta proccing) is fun and makes things go fast, but if you want to get into flashopints quickly as a healer and do it with regularity, either look into field respec or stay heals. if you are more structured with your time and set aside time you won't be queued for, you can always use the free respec in combat training to jump back and forth.

 

I will say, being healer I feel had edges to some of the tougher fights during the story. Being able to dot the boss, let your companion do some work, and offer some pain yourself helps more than either kill everything before your tank comp dies or hope you can crush/interrupt the boss enough for tharan to keep up (I find myself disappointed by companion healers in lots of cases)

 

TL;DR, don't be afraid to level heals, while you won't pop faces as easily as you would in a pure DPS build with burst, the survivability will help when soloing content and you'll be sure to have the tools to be effective as a healer in FP's

[Woebearer]

Coming from Commando/Merc - Heal the "low" regeneration rate is a real PITA for me

(Sage beeing mid 20´s now).

Or it´s just chaotic groups, guess you wont be able to outweight 2 terribads with any healer that is available, I´m trying to cc more as Sage though.