The Keep:Webmuskie's Guide to Being an Effective Quest Healer

There are two entirely different approaches to being a healer.

The first is to have become a healer in order to use the healer's skills on yourself. The healer's skills will certainly keep you from dying if you ordinarily miss dailies. It's not a bad class for new users who haven't yet built up their staying-organized muscles. It is, as the wiki says, an easy class, if this is how you use the class. Every skill a healer has will in some way protect from, or heal, damage in the healer.

But there is another kind of healer, the healer whose goal is to keep their party alive during boss quests. Arguably, this second kind of healer has the hardest role in all of Habitica.

First, Do No Harm
If you want to be a boss quest healer, forget everything you may have read about healers and their the ability to miss or skip dailies. Every missed daily during a boss quest will hurt your party, sometimes severely. A boss quest healer must strive, at least during quests, for perfect days. Like they say in the medical world: first, do no harm.

If you can't skip dailies, even with all your powers, then what's in it for you? For a boss quest healer, the answer is nothing, at least as far as spellcasting goes. Unlike any other class, if you dedicate yourself to completing your dailies, you will cast every one of your spells for the benefit of others (this may need rebalancing). If you can't forego the amount of gold, drops, experience, and glory everyone else seems to be getting, being a boss quest healer is not for you. A boss quest healer is all about the health of their party.

A quest healer's role is so unrewarding that I spend much of my time outside of quests as a mage. It costs me quite a few gems to change class as often as I do, but that's all to the benefit of HabitRPG anyway.

Preparation
Even though the primary attribute for healers is constitution, a healer can't do their job without mana. When distributing attribute points as a healer, I give a little over a third of my points to INT,  a little under a third to CON, with the remainder divided between STR and PER.

If you want to help your party to succeed, you need to suit up with the best gear for CON and INT that you have. This is usually the best healer's gear you have, although Jean Chalard's Noble Tunic and Mustaine's Milestone Mashing Morningstar are better for CON, even adjusting for the lack of class bonuses, than the best healer's gear, and the Nameless Helm is better for INT. It is always worth checking your equipment before a quest: more than once I've found my avatar wearing party hats and other decorative gear that provide no bonuses during a quest.

Dilligence
During a quest, your own health bar will let you know when someone has missed a daily. If at all possible, a healer should keep a web browser open to the HabitRPG tasks page during a quest, and refresh it frequently. If your own HP bar goes down you should immediately cast as many blessings as you need to bring your own HP back to 50. Then check to see that the blessings brought everyone else in the party back to 50 HP, too, by checking the profile of each party member. If anyone has not been fully healed, cast another blessing.

Unless you are very low on mana it is important to heal even a few points of damage as quickly as you see it. I have seen a few damage points being followed, almost immediately, by 38 damage points, killing an entire party before anyone had the time to react.

If you have a large party with more than one healer, it helps to coordinate with each other, or at least to keep each other informed, of what times you will be able to monitor party health.

If, during a quest, you cannot actively monitor a party's health, but there are other healers who can (or you know party members are able to react quickly on their own to buy health potion), then you can best help your party by casting multiple protective aura spells. I prefer not to cast protective aura when I am able to monitor the party, because I need to keep mana on hand in case it is needed.

After a  number of quests, you may begin to notice a rhythm to damage. Certain party members are more likely to miss dailies than others. With my party, I know to check health as soon as I possibly can in the morning and to check it again around my dinner time, because those are times we take the most damage. Knowing the pattern that damage takes in our party makes my job much easier,

Outside of quests, it is a helpful thing to look in on the health of party members. In a large party it can be tedious to click on every member's profile. But if you've been paying attention, you will come to  recognize which party members are more likely to have taken damage. I also keep an eye on lower level players, and players who don't have the gold to buy health potions. If you find a party member whose HP is low, cast enough blessings to bring their HP up to something reasonable. Because, outside of quests, party members won't be taking unpredictable damage, a few points under 50 is of less concern than is keeping your mana up.

Keep Your Mana Up
You can't do your job without mana. More than any other class, you need to protect your mana. In my opinion, party rules about casting a certain number of group spells in a day should not apply to boss quest healers. It's better that a party's healers cast each spell when, and only when, they are needed, and not merely to fill a quota.

Unless your mages have given you a silly amount of mana to work with, you need to think before you cast a spell. Don't cast blessings unless you know that one or more party members need healing, and do not cast so many protective aura spells that you'll be unable to respond to an emergency. If you alone need healing, consider buying a health potion instead of casting healing light, and avoid casting searing brightness. You may need every bit of your mana to cast a series of blessings at any time.

If pinched for mana, you can get a little more mana by adding some routine tasks to your to-do list, and then checking them off. It is a bit of a kludge to be adding to-dos that you wouldn't normally have bothered to list, but I've used this in a pinch to help my party survive.

Dealing with Vectors
To quote Wikipedia, "In epidemiology a vector is any agent (person, animal or microorganism) that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism." Questing parties sometimes have vectors, too: players, who, time and again, cost their parties 20, 30, even 40 HP at cron. You begin to wonder if they're so sodden with Vice they can't manage a dailies list whose only entry is "Get out of bed in the morning". Or if their planning skills are so bad they've listed "write and publish a trilogy in the fantasy genre" as a daily. Or you'll wonder if they know they should rest at the inn before setting out on a round-the-world cruise.

Cracking down on nonperforming party members is the job of the party leader. If you happen to be also the party leader, then do what you must. But if you wear only 18:24, March 19, 2015 (UTC)Webmuskie (talk)the diadem of the boss quest healer, it's your job to keep your party alive, vectors and productive members alike. Resist the urge to let a nonperforming player die, just to prove a point -- remember, a vector will almost certainly take a lot of productive players with them. If you feel you must intervene, you can private message a player who repeatedly fails to perform and offer your help. You'd be surprised how often players don't know simple things about the game, like that they can check out at the inn when ill, or that incomplete dailies caused by listing a long term goal as a daily will do damage to the party.

Good Advice
Helpful advice may not be one of the healer's official skills in Habitica, but it goes a long way towards keeping your party alive. It can also help make your party more effective. When you are looking at profiles, checking on HP levels, you may notice party members who are wearing ineffective equipment into battle. A good boss quest healer will message poorly equipped party members. Sometimes higher level players deliberately wear less effective gear in order to create a greater challenge for themselves. But oftentimes, it's an oversight or an accident, or the player doesn't know that equipment choice affects quest play.

Do you Have What It Takes?
If you don't want to quest, the healer is certainly the easiest class in Habitica. If you want to quest, but don't want a difficult class, you may be better off as a warrior, because a boss quest healer's job is the toughest and least rewarded of all the classes in Habitica.

Webmuskie (talk) 18:24, March 19, 2015 (UTC)