Age of Conan: How Healing Works
DateTime:9/27/2009 11:20:23 AM

Well, in AOC, Healing is far more 'hands off' and isn’t nearly as micro-managed as it in other games. In fact, if you’re failing to contribute significant damage to an encounter you’re not playing as effectively as you should be. How’s that for a change of pace from the usual life of an MMO healer? None of the healing spells in AoC require a specific player to be targeted. You won’t get the burst heal if the HOT is still in effect. In other words, spamming this spell only refreshes the HOT timer. If you want the burst heal, make sure the HOT has expired on your target be it yourself or a group mate. Put simply, if you want the burst heal, make sure your target doesn’t have a blue ring around its feet, otherwise you’re just refreshing the HOT.

Lastly, the ‘emergency’ heal, is a 360 degree AOE heal that will heal all players within its radius of effect. You, or any priest in your group, can only use this to heal the same player once per minute. Said another way, a player can only be healed by this spell once per minute, regardless of how many priests are in the group.They’re called this because a player affected by the cone heal has a blue ring appear around their feet and gradually fade, grow smaller, and disappear as the spell runs it’s course. Likewise for the group HOT, which produces a green ring around the affected player.This makes maintaining your HOT’s very easy. If you’re the only healer in your group and your group mates don’t have a green and/or blue ring around their feet in combat – recast your heals.Make sure you have nearby player health bars enabled in your GUI options. Between this and the blue and green rings mentioned above you’ll only have to glance at your party interface screen (traditional health bars) once in a while to check for certain icons which I’ll get into later.