Healers: Weapon of choice?

[Kirth Gersen]

M'ladies, m'lords, and Exiles,

Please listen to my query.

For some time now I have been hunting the Lands, and defended myself during difficult rescues. I currently use a Quarterstaff. I do own a Short sword, too.

Which weapon would you recommend me using? I am a 1st Circle healer with about no combat training at all (some lessons with master Bodrus, and a few more with master Higgrus).

I know, I know... those who have been hunting with me know there is a little fighter soul burning inside me... I am trying to vanquish it, but still... I do like to solo island panthers from time to time. ;-)

Humbly,
/Kirth

[Althus]

I'd use the short sword for serious fighting (small cats, vermine, rats. Things you'd kill to rescue a fallen) and the quarterstaff for tagging. With little/no Bodrus, you have the best possible chance of tagging things at higher levels (I sorely regret the 100 I trained now). A Quarterstaff has a high bonus to balance, which is great for tagging.

[Kirth Gersen]

Thank you Althus for the reply!

How would you think about training with Bracis for a healer? I must confess I do prefer using my hands, rather than using a weapon... But the problem is of course that I will divert my training concentration from more important areas of study.

Ah well!

As long as I can defend myself against rats and vermine I guess I am all right.

/Kirth

[Tas Furrfoot]

Hi Kirth!

I'm not WoD but I tend to lurk here. /action peeks in now and then while eating a snack. WoD and Tan have (I hope!) a good working relationship.. or we are working on having a good working relationship! We tend to cross post somewhat... /ponder there are quite a few WoD posters on our forums! Eek! [;)]

Everyone has their own way. I'll say that. I have yet to pass the test into 3rd circle. /action waves at his 2nd circle support buddy, Konoko. I tended to train everything BUT healing skills for quite sometime and I like to have a good balance in those skills... not too much faustus, etc... I can't stand having to "rc" or recharge! I'm probably mostly an Eva trainer with tweaks to keep my balance the way I like.

I too did train with Bodrus until he wouldn't train me and perhaps that's why i can't hit worth diddly, but - it was about the time that I realized I was getting too big for my pants.. okay, that was earlier... but you know what I mean! I decided to fill up on Bodrus and picked up Bracis so I could use cloth and metal bracers. I have long given up my dagger that someone gave me to someone who could use it and when I do decide to tag (rarely) I use the cloth... which works okay... and when I need to do some damage the metal works decently. I had short sword for a time and the metal bracers replaced that. A friend of mine has a quarterstaff to give me... /ponders where is he with it! so I'm curious to see how that works fr me.

It's not much, but I tend to be the rescue healer - my method of healing is not horus but to maintain constant healerness... i.e. I can go on and on and on with healing unless someone has excessive spirit. I have chains, but I try to not get too enthusiastic about chaining someone to town unless absolutely necessary and the fallen doesn't mind. Chaining can be an expensive habit to keep - I'm on my 8th chain... my average pulls is around 40 per chain... but I've broken some on 1 or 2 pulls and then had one that worked through 90some pulls! I'm good with Loovma, almost better.

I'm toes with Higgy (or the equivalent Hista for those fighters?) so I can absorb some damage now.

My problem lately is that I'm actually a problem in taking care of myself. With that much higgy and little spirit myself - I take some time to heal myself. I like my respia/ring combination while I'm chaining, BTW. I'm best with another healer who does have horus. I'm good when a rodding situation comes up. I can stand for quite some time and with my chains I might be the last one up to do a rescue.

I will conclude in saying that you will certainly lose focus if you go to Bracis that you probably don't need. I tend to be curious and well rounded (hee) in my studies but that is the way I like it for the most part! Good luck!

Regards, Tas

[Althus]

Training with Bracers is PURELY an RP choice. Frankly, except for cloth, I think they're all sucky weapons. If you can't stand using a sword, though, it might be worth the 10 ranks for a pair of cloth ones

What I have come to view as the ideal combination for healers is a fighting weapon and a tagging weapon. With the fighting weapon, you should be able to 1-hit rats with no whiffing except the normal 1/20 luck whiffs. With the tagging weapon (usually a quarterstaff or shiny dagger) you should still get about 10 to 20 swings, enough to get fairly regular luck hits.

The problem with capped, unbalanced trainers like Bodrus and Hardia is that they don't scale well. In the beginning, they seem like a great idea because they'll make you about as strong as your fighter friends, if not even moreso because of your selfhealing capability. 800 ranks down the line (I know it seems a long way off, but it WILL happen) you can't hit anything you still hunt with fighters, and you only get 4-5 swings with your weakest weapon, not enough to do jack diddly for luck hits.

There are four commonly trained healer trainers that I would suggest avoiding at all costs. Awaria, Bodrus, Hardia, and Sespus all have the problem that they don't scale well to bigger tasks as you grow stronger. Awaria for example:

Lark has 550 awaria or thereabouts (she has a ledger). She can just about solo-rod 3 orga warlocks. Tharloch or Hidden, with 1 mid-level healer on their backs, can do about 5. Tharloch has 400 Spirtus, Hidden has 500. Sespus has the problem that he's not particuarly useful for anything, since once you run out of spirit, you're relying on Respia again. Burst-healing is simply not useful enough with any reasonable level of training to make up for the other skills lost.

2

[Konoko]

/action waves back

Hi Tas!

Tas and I are founding members of the 2nd circle support group: "Hello. My name is Konoko and I am still 2nd circle"... :)
Hopefully Tas won't go and pass his test and leave me here all alone... :)


Konoko

[Moon Kitty]

Originally posted by Althus
There are four commonly trained healer trainers that I would suggest avoiding at all costs. Awaria, Bodrus, Hardia, and Sespus all have the problem that they don't scale well to bigger tasks as you grow stronger. Sespus has the problem that he's not particuarly useful for anything, since once you run out of spirit, you're relying on Respia again. Burst-healing is simply not useful enough with any reasonable level of training to make up for the other skills lost.

Right now I'm training in Higgrus because my health drops too quickly when healing and I've been thinking about what to train after that. Since you have so many ideas, I thought I'd ask you about your opinions on Sespus and burst healing. I am one of Sespus's better students (50 trainings exactly) and was considering either keeping him on his toes or doing the same thing with Spiritus (20 trainings now) or training with Respia until teaching me is a challenge (200 trainings that would give me a 2:1 ratio of Respia to Faustus).

You say that burst healing isn't useful enough with reasonable level of training. What do you consider reasonable and do you prefer being able to heal forever with a high Respia (barring health) as opposed to using all of the spirit and then healing them normally? Won't having more spirit enable you to self-heal more or is having more Respia and Spiritus better?

Thank you for reading and for hopefully reading and answering these questions.

[Kiriel]

Personally I think a little bodrus for healers is a good thing, but 50 should be their max. I know that my healer friend had a lot of trouble even killing rats with no bodrus (which is after all a common healer responsibility) but at 50 bodrus, she can hit the small stuff pretty well, which helps in clearing the area near fallens. At higher levels that 50 bodrus probably won't do her much good, but it did a lot of good in the early days and I think it was worth the investment.

Regarding healer weapons, this is a more complicated question than it used to be. It used to be that the best weapon for a healer was a dagger, and daggers were hard to come by since they couldn't be bought. Now that there is a wealth of weapons available there are more choices for healers and fighters, which means more daggers available for healers, and more weapons to choose from too. From what I understand, a dagger is still a pretty good healer tagging weapon because it has an atkus bonus and not much balance use. I hear rapiers and quarterstaffs are also good healer weapons, although I don't think either has an atkus bonus. Cloth bracers are nice for tagging but I don't think they're necessarily much better than a club or a dagger and they don't have an atkus bonus- I find them mostly useful for my fighter when trying not to accidentally kill critters on newbie hunts. I wouldn't worry too much as a healer about doing much damage- really a healer only needs to tag things except when clearing stuff like rats, and even when you're trying to kill something larger you may find it better to maintain balance and take it slower so you can switch to heal and back.

But of course these are just my opinions, your mileage may vary.

[Althus]

Originally posted by Moon Kitty
Right now I'm training in Higgrus because my health drops too quickly when healing and I've been thinking about what to train after that. Since you have so many ideas, I thought I'd ask you about your opinions on Sespus and burst healing. I am one of Sespus's better students (50 trainings exactly) and was considering either keeping him on his toes or doing the same thing with Spiritus (20 trainings now) or training with Respia until teaching me is a challenge (200 trainings that would give me a 2:1 ratio of Respia to Faustus).

I'd reccomend Spirtus over Sespus highly, since he seems to do more for selfheal, I have about 100 myself, and I'd reccomend between 1 and 200 for anyone. Spirtus also contains comparatively high faustus/sespus and low respia/higgrus in relation to Eva, in addition to the Rodnus component, which is good for increasing selfheal. I currently have a 2:1 ratio of Respia/Faustus (teaching is a challenge :: toes) and I'm quite comfortable with it, although a little more Respia is always a good thing. Currently I'm training Eva/Respia until I hit 250 Faustus.

You say that burst healing isn't useful enough with reasonable level of training. What do you consider reasonable and do you prefer being able to heal forever with a high Respia (barring health) as opposed to using all of the spirit and then healing them normally?

I consider 200 Sespus a reasonable level. Assuming 200 is a little less than 2x as effective as 100, I know that with "toes" Sespus 1 burst heal takes a Mystic (Neige in this case) from low red to low yellow. This doesn't seem terribly useful to me.

Regarding healing forever vs. using all spirit and then healing normally, I'd have to say you need to be able to heal forever in either case, since healing with no spirit is absurdly slow. I click for three healers right now, with 3 different respia ratios. Althus has a 2:1 ratio, and barely regenerates spirit while healing a shared fighter. Hidden has a 1.333:1 ratio, and loses Spirit very very slowly when healing a shared fighter, and can usually heal about 100 histia worth of health before running out of juice. ***** has a 4:1 ratio, and his health/spirit bars never dip from 100% when healing a shared exile.

Won't having more spirit enable you to self-heal more or is having more Respia and Spiritus better?

With more Sespus you get a bit more selfheal capacity at the start of a battle/encounter, but once it's used up, it's not going to do you any good without the respia to back it up.

Back to the topic of weapons:

Originally posted by Kiriel
From what I understand, a dagger is still a pretty good healer tagging weapon because it has an atkus bonus and not much balance use. I hear rapiers and quarterstaffs are also good healer weapons, although I don't think either has an atkus bonus.

The whole idea behind quarterstaves and such is that they have no atkus bonus. Infact, from my testing, QS have a small atkus penalty and a darkus penalty roughly similar to a shiny dagger. This makes them an ideal tagging weapon, since Atkus and Darkus are irrelevant to tagging.

really a healer only needs to tag things except when clearing stuff like rats

This is my own personal pet peeve. I don't honestly think it's a healer's place to tag everything that moves, and that it can slow down and endanger hunts.

Awfus' Golden (although the ammount it gets dumped on has turned it sorta puke brown) Rule of Healer Tagging
Never, ever try to tag a monster unless NONE of the fighters in the group are in any danger of falling. Only tag when there's an open space next to the monster, and never whine if you miss something. Your experience will come primarily from the library and shares, so you'd better get used to it. If you vanquish things, it may be more acceptable to tag if you're sharing the brick, but not at the expense of the kill-rate of the party. You're only hurting yourself and your friends.

[Jeanne]

Originally posted by Althus
Training with Bracers is PURELY an RP choice. Frankly, except for cloth, I think they're all sucky weapons. If you can't stand using a sword, though, it might be worth the 10 ranks for a pair of cloth ones

I just passed third-circle with metal bracers and I can say that they aren't sucky, just different. They are the only weapons that add to your defense rating, much as a shield does, and also adds a bonus to balance. Apparently, Delta Tao thinks a bonus to defense is so powerful you need to train with Bracis 50 times to use them.

Also, most people seem to have passed third-circle with 150 trainings in Atkus but I needed 180 to hit the Orga Rage regularly. Some others say that Fen have a deficit in Atkus which makes the fact that Atkus is a Fen slightly ironic. Therefore, I don't know if I needed more Atkus because of of the metal bracers or because of me being a Fen.

Overall, I recommend that if you are looking into a defense-oriented route and are willing to spend the 50 ranks, I can recommend getting metal bracers.

[Althus]

Originally posted by Jeanne
I just passed third-circle

Congratulations!

Also, most people seem to have passed third-circle with 150 trainings in Atkus but I needed 180 to hit the Orga Rage regularly. Some others say that Fen have a deficit in Atkus which makes the fact that Atkus is a Fen slightly ironic. Therefore, I don't know if I needed more Atkus because of of the metal bracers or because of me being a Fen.

Fens have, if anything, a natural atkus *bonus*. My fighter also recently passed 3rd circle, with about 130 Atkus and a Greatsword. He's a sylvan (atkus deficient race). This says something to me about the lacks of bracers as a weapon. 50 atkus less than a GS (about 30 less than an axe) and a (from what I've heard) 10 Detha or so bonus isn't to me worth 50 ranks. YMMV.

Overall, I recommend that if you are looking into a defense-oriented route and are willing to spend the 50 ranks, I can recommend getting metal bracers.

I reccomend, if you're interested in a defense-oriented route, spending the 50 ranks on Detha and using a weapon with minimal balance usage like a Quarterstaff.

[Konoko]

180 Atkus for the rage? Ugh...
I'm still only at 100... :(

I'll be in the 2nd circle support group forever! :)


I was always under the impression that it was 150 Atkus for the rage. But I have heard of the fen deficiency in atkus (it did take me more atkus ranks to kill the ferals for the 2nd circle test from what i was told would work).

Anyone out there with any info on the 150 atkus guideline and hitting the rage and a fen atkus penalty?


Thanks!

Konoko

[Jeanne]

Originally posted by Althus
Fens have, if anything, a natural atkus *bonus*. My fighter also recently passed 3rd circle, with about 130 Atkus and a Greatsword. He's a sylvan (atkus deficient race). This says something to me about the lacks of bracers as a weapon. 50 atkus less than a GS (about 30 less than an axe) and a (from what I've heard) 10 Detha or so bonus isn't to me worth 50 ranks. YMMV.

That's certainly very illuminating. I had hoped that the metal bracers would have added a larger bonus to Detha. At the very least 25 which would make each rank of Bracis equal to 1/2 Detha. If it's truly one rank of Bracis equal to 1/5 Detha, I am truly disappointed in Delta Tao and in Bracis. Do they think that 50 ranks is a small amount that we can gain in a day or two? Argh!

I reccomend, if you're interested in a defense-oriented route, spending the 50 ranks on Detha and using a weapon with minimal balance usage like a Quarterstaff.

I've heard that the Quarterstaff has an Atkus and Darkus penalty so perhaps a Rapier would be a better choice.

[Mehan]

I have a quarterstaff and a dagger. Honestly, I dislike the quarterstaff. I whiff too much.

course I'm a zo with 2 swings. what can I say?

[Delirium]

I like to play with sticks and sharp things: I have a Quarterstaff, candy club, dagger, rapier, and axe. The favorite of this shashbuckling healer is the rapier. I hit slightly more often with the rapier, it seems, and it seems to do more damage than any of the others besides axe. However, since I don't seem to hit as often with the axe, and I don't get as many swings with the axe, I find I usually kill things faster with the rapier. If I am just tagging things, I use my dagger, because I hit about as often with the dagger as with the rapier, but I get one more swing with the dagger. If I'm really wiffing something and just want to get in a tag, I switch to quarterstaff, because I seem to get more swings with that than anything.

[Kirth Gersen]

Ladies, Lords, Exiles,

Thank you very much for all the valuable input to my original question. I will continue using my quarterstaff for the time being, and maybe, sometime, when I have trained with master Horus for 500 lessons, I think I want to try unarmed combat.

So much to learn, so many places to see, so many friends to ask and receive answers from!

Humbly yours,
/Kirth

[Kirth Gersen]

Your House Healer With A Weapons Fetish Posts Again...

Today I had the opportunity to try out an axe at some nasty GVs in SF and a couple of IPs at KB (acronymic disorder...). I didn't fall. I got approx. 3 swings out of it. The price tag is 350c.

Should I buy or should I refrain?

/Kirth
Going to wash my bloodied white shirt now...

[Blaise]

Haven't had a chance to try a rapier yet. I generally use the axe for most purposes these days, and switch to staff when I need more swings and/or want to tag. I'm still trying to decide if the staff improves my defense.

Guess it depends on how much money you are willing to spend.

Blaise

[Delirium]

I have found that for me, a better student of Bodrus, I hardly ever use my axe any more, but I use my rapier all the time. Sometimes I use my dagger, sometimes my quarter staff, and sometimes my candy club. The Axe does a lot of damage, but the rapier does a fair bit too and I seem to hit more often with it, which usually means I do more damage faster with my rapier. If I need to kill something, I reach for my rapier, not my axe.

[Drablak]

Of course I have no business giving my opinion here since I am not a healer and the subject is "Healers: weapons of choice" but that has never stopped me before so... :)

I have tried the staff, the hand axe, the flail, the short sword, the dagger and the rapier.

Of course one thing to consider is that I am a thoom and we are physically weaker than most other races so my experience with these weapons might be different than for a human like Kirth.

Of all of those, the one I prefer is by far the rapier. I used the flail and hand axe for quite some time because of the added darkus[1] (which I need being a thoom). But since I have a rapier I do not use them (gave them away in fact). I find that I hit more often with the rapier and I kill critters more rapidly. I have more swings with it than with heavier weapons and the regia[2] is good. All in all a good investment I think. For me anyway.

I used to use a dagger for tagging because of the high atkus[3]. I find that using the rapier is as effective, so I rarely switch to dagger now (only to save up tags for others when I am in a big group).

Anyway, that's my 2c.
YMMV [4]

Drablak

Explanation of terms for the newby:
[1] darkus in a weapon represents the bonus to damage
[2] regia is the speed at which you regain balance after swinging
[3] atkus is the bonus to accuracy, it's what makes you hit more often
[4] (for the person who always asks me) Your Milleage May Vary :)

[Kirth Gersen]

Weapon fans,

Thank you all for your valuable advice in the matter! Especially Blaise (who told me what I wanted to hear so quickly!).

I actually took some time off my study period, and rushed down to KB and met with Molek who offered the axe for 350 coins. Then I rushed out to East Fields and tried my new edge. Orgas, GVs and other small and large Beasts fell quickly to my sharpness!

As a healer, I almost feel guilty for having so much fun and getting so much pleasure from going solo-hunting. I beg of you: bear with me!

Humbly,

/Kirth
Now with: http://kirth.puddleby.dk/pictures/axe.gif