12:32 pm, November 15, 2014
516
Survivor healing build
They will survive!
Weapons: fist
- Cost: 583 AP (Link to Deck)
Actives
1. Shelter
2. Blast of Light
3. Nurture
4. Creature Comfort
5. Cauterise
6. Surgical Steel
7. Claw
Passives
1. Nurturing Gift
2. Predator
3. Brawler
4. Making Amends
5. Empowerment
6. Shadow Medic
7. Mad Skills
Q: What is this build for?
A: Healing survivors between the waves.
This is a build I put together to help myself get more platinums and more blueberries out of my solo runs. I have used it to very good effect in elite duo and NM solo scenarios, but it seems to work well in the group scenarios I have run too, whether I'm with one more person or a group. If they can handle the waves for a bit, I can go heal survivors for more than just the time between the waves. It should be useful in any scenario, in other words.
Healing a moderately damaged group to full is pretty common from my experience. Heavy damage can at least be very well mitigated and could be the difference between gold or silver and platinum.
Q: What kind of equipment and stats does this build need?
A: There is nothing hard and fast about the build, but in general, gear for this build should be as much heal rating, crit, and crit power as you can muster. You want to trigger empowerment at least once per second, so with ~4 HOTs on a survivor, you want 25%-30% crit chance which is somewhere over 1000 crit rating. Mad skills helps here, of course. The rest I would fill with crit power to make the most of those crits.
If you don't have much crit rating available you can drop Empowerment and use Out of the woods instead, and also switch brawler with something like Closer or Knuckle down.
You won't fight anything while using the build, so you don't need HP, however you may want to keep your HP piece(s) on or build it with a properly glyphed HP piece because when you switch back you will need to eat a taco or heal yourself to get your HP back.
Q: How is this build used?
A: There are three key things to do to make the most of this build.
First, fight the boss near the survivor camp you will want to heal, but not on top of them or in range of AOEs! This camp should be the one with the most damage on it, either one you had trouble defending during the waves, or the last camp you rescued at the start.
Second, you cannot use cooldowns late in the fight, because trying to swap builds with an ability on cooldown will fail. This is really important, and is likely to cause the most trouble for people. This means no impairs late in the fight, no using that defensive/offensive cooldown, etc.
And third, you want to be able to switch to the build quickly to lose as little healing time as possible. There are a few ways to speed things up, with scripts, macros or just running your clicker through the character menu as fast as you can. I personally opened up the macro box and made a chat macro for it. From there I can just click and equip.
As for actually using the build, it is a matter of targeting a survivor and pressing 123456. Yes really. If a lot of survivors are hurt, you may want to do 1234, switch, 1234 instead. This maximizes the AOE and longer HOTs you have. If you want to maximize healing on one, you can do 3456, 3456. Obviously you want to focus on the most damaged survivor and also the one or two that are attacked by waves most. Those are typically the one with the gun and the one closest to the spawn point for the waves.
Q: Why fist? Why not blood or AR?
A: Fist is a melee weapon, melee weapons have this interesting property of building resources when you are out of combat, while blood and AR do not. This means that spamming 123456, all your consumers are going to end up activating with 2-3 resources, despite only hitting one builder between them. Also, AR can't build resources without enemies, and blood sacrifices raw healing for shields which is not what you want here.
Q: What about Vigour for healing a group?
A: That can cause problems because it has a 20s cooldown, which means when the next wave starts, you are stuck in the healing build for a while. With only 20s between killing the boss and the next wave, you still may not be able to start healing survivors until 15s left on that clock.
Q: What is claw for?
A: I found that leaving it blank caused problems for me, as my normal build has full momentum in that spot, so switching builds left full momentum there if the build was left blank, and then accidentally hitting that meant I suddenly had a long cooldown before I could switch back to my normal build. Claw prevents that. You may want to do something similar for your aux weapon, such as putting in pop shot.
Q: When can't this build be used?
A: If you get the traitor event, you're not going to be able to heal any survivors.
Weapons: fist
- Cost: 583 AP (Link to Deck)
Actives
1. Shelter
2. Blast of Light
3. Nurture
4. Creature Comfort
5. Cauterise
6. Surgical Steel
7. Claw
Passives
1. Nurturing Gift
2. Predator
3. Brawler
4. Making Amends
5. Empowerment
6. Shadow Medic
7. Mad Skills
Q: What is this build for?
A: Healing survivors between the waves.
This is a build I put together to help myself get more platinums and more blueberries out of my solo runs. I have used it to very good effect in elite duo and NM solo scenarios, but it seems to work well in the group scenarios I have run too, whether I'm with one more person or a group. If they can handle the waves for a bit, I can go heal survivors for more than just the time between the waves. It should be useful in any scenario, in other words.
Healing a moderately damaged group to full is pretty common from my experience. Heavy damage can at least be very well mitigated and could be the difference between gold or silver and platinum.
Q: What kind of equipment and stats does this build need?
A: There is nothing hard and fast about the build, but in general, gear for this build should be as much heal rating, crit, and crit power as you can muster. You want to trigger empowerment at least once per second, so with ~4 HOTs on a survivor, you want 25%-30% crit chance which is somewhere over 1000 crit rating. Mad skills helps here, of course. The rest I would fill with crit power to make the most of those crits.
If you don't have much crit rating available you can drop Empowerment and use Out of the woods instead, and also switch brawler with something like Closer or Knuckle down.
You won't fight anything while using the build, so you don't need HP, however you may want to keep your HP piece(s) on or build it with a properly glyphed HP piece because when you switch back you will need to eat a taco or heal yourself to get your HP back.
Q: How is this build used?
A: There are three key things to do to make the most of this build.
First, fight the boss near the survivor camp you will want to heal, but not on top of them or in range of AOEs! This camp should be the one with the most damage on it, either one you had trouble defending during the waves, or the last camp you rescued at the start.
Second, you cannot use cooldowns late in the fight, because trying to swap builds with an ability on cooldown will fail. This is really important, and is likely to cause the most trouble for people. This means no impairs late in the fight, no using that defensive/offensive cooldown, etc.
And third, you want to be able to switch to the build quickly to lose as little healing time as possible. There are a few ways to speed things up, with scripts, macros or just running your clicker through the character menu as fast as you can. I personally opened up the macro box and made a chat macro for it. From there I can just click and equip.
As for actually using the build, it is a matter of targeting a survivor and pressing 123456. Yes really. If a lot of survivors are hurt, you may want to do 1234, switch, 1234 instead. This maximizes the AOE and longer HOTs you have. If you want to maximize healing on one, you can do 3456, 3456. Obviously you want to focus on the most damaged survivor and also the one or two that are attacked by waves most. Those are typically the one with the gun and the one closest to the spawn point for the waves.
Q: Why fist? Why not blood or AR?
A: Fist is a melee weapon, melee weapons have this interesting property of building resources when you are out of combat, while blood and AR do not. This means that spamming 123456, all your consumers are going to end up activating with 2-3 resources, despite only hitting one builder between them. Also, AR can't build resources without enemies, and blood sacrifices raw healing for shields which is not what you want here.
Q: What about Vigour for healing a group?
A: That can cause problems because it has a 20s cooldown, which means when the next wave starts, you are stuck in the healing build for a while. With only 20s between killing the boss and the next wave, you still may not be able to start healing survivors until 15s left on that clock.
Q: What is claw for?
A: I found that leaving it blank caused problems for me, as my normal build has full momentum in that spot, so switching builds left full momentum there if the build was left blank, and then accidentally hitting that meant I suddenly had a long cooldown before I could switch back to my normal build. Claw prevents that. You may want to do something similar for your aux weapon, such as putting in pop shot.
Q: When can't this build be used?
A: If you get the traitor event, you're not going to be able to heal any survivors.