Asuryan's Flames

Last night I was asked by a guildie who plays a Rune Priest what direction he should be taking at end game to be the most effective at healing. I politely told him that I felt that AOE healing in its current form is the most efficient, especially in pve where a majority of fights are spent dealing with or mitigating AOE damage.

Now this is a statement that I can say is true 90% of the time, even in RVR where you are trying to keep your group alive, and still perform effectively, but what happens when you are healing a group without a healer, or with an inept healer. This is where the rune priest and I started to get into a theory crafting session in regards to keeping people up. I told him that my current strategy was to throw hots up on the target then funnel essence, and then go into big single target heals. In his case I stated, you need to throw hots, then single target heals, but you also need to be preemptive since you have all of your healing split in 3 trees your hots/single target will not be near as effective.

This raised another issue though why is the zealot/rune priest lines of healing forced to specialize where as my archmage is easily a pure healing class. Each has to forgo damage to be able to heal amazingly, but each serves a different purpose. Where as the zealot/rune priest are more bridge/swing healers an archmage is more of a pure healing class. Archmage get less survivability at the cost of being able to put out decent dps or amazing healing. Where as a rune priest does less dps unless purely focusing on it, and really good on the move healing.

All of this plays into the strat and how you play your class. I don’t think that any one build is better than others it is all in the player behind the character and how they play the class, but I do think that there is an efficiency issue with anything outside of the healing line and more over the reliance on AOE damage almost pushes you to those lines.