Fifty Ways to Gimp Your Healer

ArcheAge recently launched in the West, and I have to confess that I hadn’t been paying much attention to it until hearing there were colossal queues to get into the servers on launch day. Queues, you say? A feature guaranteed to appeal to a British audience! I downloaded the client forthwith and was soon enjoying some exceptional queueing, hundreds of people with estimated wait times in tens of hours. The addition of new servers a few days ago slightly spoiled things to the point that I found myself actually in the game. Still, there’s plenty of interesting stuff in prospect apart from the queues like the deep crafting and housing driven economy, a player-run judicial system, and a class system with 120 skill choice permutations with intriguing names like “Ebonhawk”, “Reaper”, “Blade Dancer” and “Senior Systems, Applications and Telephony Engineer” (one of those may be made up).

It’s always interesting to see whether flexible class systems promote a variety of interesting and viable hybrids, or if everyone falls back into traditional specialised roles; whether you can take a number of different approaches to your build, or if there’s but one Proper Way To Do It and (with apologies to Paul Simon), fifty ways to gimp your healer…

The problem is all inside your build she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I’d like to help you to heal the whole of your party
There must be fifty ways to gimp your healer

She said it’s really not my habit to intrude
But guides from old patches, they can be misconstrued
Because they changed the healing stats in one point two
There must be fifty ways to gimp your healer

Pick up Healing Hymn, Kim
Check your mana regen, Jen
You don’t need that Int, Clint
Just heal your party
Try out Auramancy, Nancy
It don’t have to be fancy
A good club is key, Lee
To heal that party

She said it grieves me so to see you in such pain
When your healing efforts are met with much disdain
I said I appreciate that and would you please explain
About the fifty ways

She said why don’t we respec your character tonight
And I believe with the right gear you will begin to see the light
And then she buffed me and I realised she probably was right
There must be fifty ways to gimp your healer

Pick up Healing Hymn, Kim
Check your mana regen, Jen
You don’t need that Int, Clint
Just heal your party
Try out Auramancy, Nancy
It don’t have to be fancy
A good club is key, Lee
To heal that party

6 thoughts on “Fifty Ways to Gimp Your Healer

  1. Pai

    Apparently only a quarter of those skillet combinations are ‘viable’, is what I’m hearing. But that’s still a pretty good variety.

    Also, I’m not sure by what definition people make that statement; whether they mean PvP vs PvE vs Soloing ability or whatever. So perhaps that’s just if you want to min/max the largest number of skill combos.

  2. Tremayne

    As I’m actually a senior systems, application and telephony engineer in real life I think I’ll pass on ArcheAge. I’m guessing “Blade Dancer” is the one you made up :)

  3. Zoso Post author

    @Pai Yes, it’s quite hard to gauge when “viable” means different things to different people, from “capable of soloing all content ever” or “defeating any other player” to “does well enough not to get automatically kicked out of a group”.

    @Tremayne Rumbled! I mean “Blade Dancer”, what sort of fool would dance on a blade?

  4. Crumskull

    I wasn’t paying much attention to ArcheAge either, but there was enough chatter that I figured I’d give it a shot during the last Open Beta before release. The experience in sum was: “That’s nice, but I’ve played this game before.” It was WoW-Rift-SWTOR-FFXIV, plus presumably a few others in which I never even dabbled (full disclosure: I played Rift for about an hour), with added character collision. It seems to be trading primarily on novelty, which I suppose they all do at this point. I understand that although new to the West it is not a new game; I am suggesting it wasn’t new when it was new.

    Of note, in skimming related commentary I was alerted to the fact that there appears to be a class combination titled “Blighter.” At first I found this odd, but then discovered the game also features the classes Git, Wight, Bloke, Fellow, and Chap — so something for everyone.

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