User:Pious Grallatorian/General Healing

General principle
This is a build designed to help monks create a base build for general healing that covers the basics that other players expect from a healing monk. It seeks to cover emergency and pressure healing, ressurection and the removal of both hexes and conditions.

It is a build designed for someone planning to walk into an unknown situation, possibly with a completely unknown pick-up group.

Basis
These seven skills are essentially a set of robust spells, most of which have a low energy cost to cast and a fast recharge time. You should get a fair bit of use out of an Anchorite's Insignia with this build, as you are constantly casting and planning your next move.

The recommended, unmodified Monk attribute levels are: Healing Prayers 12, Divine Favour 12, Protection Prayers 3. Healing Prayers is the most important attribute to increase.

Healing Breeze is a tactical spell that you cast on someone whom you think is going to take damage at a constant rate. When cast keep half an eye on it to make sure that it has not been dispell or, in some cases, dismissed by the character you cast it on.

Word of Healing is the Elite skill in this build but not it's focus. The large amounts that the spell can heal, especially if the target is heavily wounded, is not enough to keep a party alive by itself.

Orison of Healing is the secondary healing skill that allows you to keep people alive and pace your use of the build's other skills.

Heal Party is the most expensive spell to cast but can be invaluable once your party size gets larger than 6 and once you are nearing 20th level. It is an especially good counter when you have been hit by something like a Giant Stomp, which damages the whole party.

Remove Hex is a basic, reliable spell. Removing hexes, especially your own, is a very effective way to counter the otherwise devastating effect of an enemy Necromancer or Mesmer.

Mend Ailment removes conditions and heals people in the process, making it one of the build's five healing spells. Note that the amount healed is calculated from Protection Prayers.

Restore Life is probably the best way to ressurect another character if they have died close to a dangerous enemy. However this should, in ideal conditions, only be done once the party has disengaged from the fight, look at the skill itself to find out why.

The eigth slot is left intentionally blank in order to have a standard space for strategic or location-selected skills such as Signet of Capture and Lightbringer's Gaze.

Side skills
Subsituting skills in a build is one of essential skills an experienced GuildWars player needs to learn.

Healing Breeze is probably the a spell most ripe for subsitution by another Enchantment healing spell. There are some excellent spells, such as Healing Seed and Healing Ribbon that work best with an experienced party but are almost useless with a pick-up group.

There are so many way to remove Conditions and Hexes that experimentation and adapting your skills on a constant basis is advisable. The two spells used above are bland but reliable.

Battle behavior
This is not a skill set for leading parties into battle but you should still attack a well-chosen with your staff or wand once your party has locked itself into a combat.

However your focus should partially be on the Party window, where you can track the ebb and flow the battle and plan your best intervention via the use of your spells. Even when the pressure is not on for healing and instant remedies you can still use the time to get used to your group and the way each player or NPC interacts with each other.

You should also be keeping track of where people are as casters of healing spells tend to run towards the person whom they are casting the spell on. If someone has wandered off and started to take damage during a fight, trying to heal them can drag you away from the larger party.

Essentially use of this build is about resource management, for not only do you seek to stop death and health degredation but you also have to keep certain characters operational. Blindness on a Warrior can be devestating in terms of his or her damage output, just as Mesmer spells that punish spellcasting with damage can be to a Monk or Elementalist.

Remember that keeping yourself and other healers alive can be pretty key to the survival of the group as a whole. Most of the party generally won't notice a henchman or hero healer dying but you undoubtedly will unless that character truely was redundant.

Disadvantages
One of the main drawbacks of this build is that sometimes you can't remove hexes and conditions as fast as they can be applied. If you are the sole remover of hexes and conditions in a pick-up group then people will soon start to complain.

Relying too heavily on Word of Healing and Heal Party can be a real temptation, something that can really trip you if those skills become interrupted or are given an abnormally long recharge time by oponent's skills.