ToD healing

[Darkrok]

I gladly throw the occasional heal with my warchanter, but when I am asked to step out of combat and be a primary healer I take some offense. Yes, I have UMD as a class skill, but so does every rogue and rogue splash build in the party, which is frequently multiple members. If you are looking for a back-up healer, let me know at the onset of the raid and I'll switch to my spellsinger.

I've seen this mentioned a few times in the thread here that a bard may have the same wand/scroll ability as a rogue or rogue splash build that has UMD. I'm hard-pressed to think of a build where this should ever be the case. A single level of bard and a single enhancement point spent gives you a 30% bonus to all wands and scrolls. That's a significant increase in healing and may mean the difference when running ToD between being able to scroll heal or not being able to scroll heal - especially if your target is a healing amp based build where instead of increasing your heal scroll from 110 to 143 you're increasing it (in the case of my current toon at level 17+) from 449 to 583. And that's at the first tier of Wand & Scroll Mastery. The top tier would actually be overkill for my build but a more reasonable 300% healing amp you'd be looking at going from a 330 heal (probably not going to work for solo scrolling the tank) to 577 heal (would almost certainly work with spot-healing thrown in).

So while I can understand not being able to spring for the 9ap's to get a 34.6% increase (1.3x to 1.75x) in wand and scroll effectiveness I have a hard time understanding any bard build not spending 1ap to get a 30% increase. It's extremely cheap and that 1ap is almost as much of an increase as the next 9 provide. Being better than the rogue/rogue-splashes in a pinch should be as common in bard builds as Toughness should be in all builds. How much better is certainly up to build choices but I can't imagine completely eschewing the Wand & Scroll line.

[Darkrok]

Making a shroud cha skills item even prior to 20 shroud completions for instance is a very good idea.

100% agree here. I was even willing to do a +6 cha skills item that I knew I'd have to eventually replace over a +5 cha item with con-opp that I would be able to keep long-term. It was a sacrifice I was willing to make to get to 39 asap.

[maddmatt70]

I've seen this mentioned a few times in the thread here that a bard may have the same wand/scroll ability as a rogue or rogue splash build that has UMD. I'm hard-pressed to think of a build where this should ever be the case. A single level of bard and a single enhancement point spent gives you a 30% bonus to all wands and scrolls. That's a significant increase in healing and may mean the difference when running ToD between being able to scroll heal or not being able to scroll heal - especially if your target is a healing amp based build where instead of increasing your heal scroll from 110 to 143 you're increasing it (in the case of my current toon at level 17+) from 449 to 583. And that's at the first tier of Wand & Scroll Mastery. The top tier would actually be overkill for my build but a more reasonable 300% healing amp you'd be looking at going from a 330 heal (probably not going to work for solo scrolling the tank) to 577 heal (would almost certainly work with spot-healing thrown in).

So while I can understand not being able to spring for the 9ap's to get a 34.6% increase (1.3x to 1.75x) in wand and scroll effectiveness I have a hard time understanding any bard build not spending 1ap to get a 30% increase. It's extremely cheap and that 1ap is almost as much of an increase as the next 9 provide. Being better than the rogue/rogue-splashes in a pinch should be as common in bard builds as Toughness should be in all builds. How much better is certainly up to build choices but I can't imagine completely eschewing the Wand & Scroll line.

Your first assumption is that the increase for scroll mastery 1 will make a big difference necessarily for the limited purposes of this bard having to use scrolls in a limited manner and I am not sure that this is true. 300% healing amp is still pretty rare and even so 330 to 577 heal does not mean very much really in a practical manner. People always overestimate healing stress. Your argument is the same argument people always use when they tell bards they can not heal like a cleric/fvs with mass heal when the reality is mass heal is over heal.

Second it is 1 ap. Yes it is a nice bang for your buck AP, but a bard can always upgrade something else. If they want to melee 98% of the time then?

[bashemgud]

Thank you for the feedback everyone.

I agree completely with what's being said, and also agree that any kind of bard should be able to heal scroll if asked. In light of all this though, I will be making my con opp boots asap instead of my pos-pos hammers I wanted to craft. Getting close to no-fail on heal scrolls seems like an obvious advantage for this build.

I certainly did not want to sound rude or noobish by asking these questions, my main is 2xTr wiz and I never actually did raid as a bard before ^^

At least I know what to expect when running ToD as a warchanter.

And yes I know Light II is not optimal for Horro, but that was a normal run. I've always been told that light II does the job just fine on normal.

Thanks !

[Darkrok]

Your first assumption is that the increase for scroll mastery 1 will make a big difference necessarily for the limited purposes of this bard having to use scrolls in a limited manner and I am not sure that this is true. 300% healing amp is still pretty rare and even so 330 to 577 heal does not mean very much really in a practical manner. People always overestimate healing stress. Your argument is the same argument people always use when they tell bards they can not heal like a cleric/fvs with mass heal when the reality is mass heal is over heal.

Second it is 1 ap. Yes it is a nice bang for your buck AP, but a bard can always upgrade something else. If they want to melee 98% of the time then?

330 vs 577 means quite a bit on Horoth on a tank with solid hp's. It means a topped up tank on a failed disintegrate save instead on one sitting at about 65% health. Though I agree with you on the amp still being rare...I'm starting to see more of them though now that I've been leveling one myself and know what to look for build-wise to recognize them. I do agree with you about mass heal being needed though.

Toward the end of my healing-amp build's previous life as a FvS I started melee'ing quite a bit more (even though I was an evoker build) since I made the longswords for this life. Mass Heal really put a crimp in that melee'ing so I started throwing (massively inefficient) quickened/maximized/empowered/empower healing mass cure lights and moderates. I had enough sp's to easily afford it in Shroud runs and it greatly increased my melee up-time. The thing is though, when you're talking about mass cures on a bard your cooldowns aren't terrible. You can't spam them but you can get darned close (and you really can spam them if you add in a mass cure moderate scroll to the mix). Heal scrolls on the other hand have a fairly long cooldown and for some builds may be the only viable option they have to heal. Getting the most bang for your buck you can afford out of that can be critical in some content (like Horoth).

On your final point, I'd personally spend the 1ap even if I viewed it as emergency-only. Even if it's just for self-use it's worth lowering scroll usage by about 23%. I don't know the specifics of each person's build obviously and there's going to be times you might consider lots of strange things (such as an aa bard build I'm working on right now that completely skips all PrE's even though it's a level 16 bard) but 1ap for 30% more effect out of wands and scrolls seems like a must-have for almost all builds - even if it only gets used 2% of the time.

[Alternative]

I'm not complaining, I will do what ever the leader of the raid asks me to do really, but this seemed less than optimal.

Thoughts ?

If you, as a bard, was asked to heal I'm assuming there was a healer (includng arcanes with recon) shortage. I would sonner ask a bard to heal than a fighter, barb, ranger, rogue, paladin... you get the point. You were asked to heal because you (potentially, even if dps specced) can.