I second Razenth and Shamarah in this.

Potential offensive benefits aside, how effective would a Healing Researcher be at healing and curing allies during group combat? What kind of synergy does Healing have with Harmonics and Aeonics?

Truth be told, I have no idea how viable Healing is in any guild; this is the first time it's piqued my interest (because I'm curious about Researchers). Can you adopt a feasible "white mage" sort of playing style with it, for instance?

You could throw out auras, and gems are still targetted to all allies, so they're be a lot of passive curing. Active curing is harder, because you have to assume they have a system and work with that. If they're outrifting and herb to eat as you're curing the same thing, it's a waste of your time. So you either snipe lower priority afflictions and save them some time, or you break locks on people, or you get rid of something like paralysis or aeon that would otherwise be delayed.

If it were me, I'd make a system that just scans Succor over and over and has a priority list you can tweak to various scenarios.

I have fought against a researcher with healing; I find it annoying and difficult to do so effectively. Bedevil plus rubies plus the passive afflicting makes for a painful situation. Your only real option is to run away and eat the timewarp from the rubies while munching horehound and hoping that it decides to cure bedevil and not the timewarp that you undoubtably now have.

That's pretty much what I figured re: active curing. I suppose if someone were really savvy, they could cure allies out of affliction locks that a single combatant's system couldn't handle (anorexia and aeon, that sort of thing?), but that would require a LOT of savvy, I bet (or perhaps a good system).



Well, the auras in and of themselves seem pretty useful considering that Healing's a tertiary skill, even disregarding active curing. And hey, Healing has a lot of RP value, as much as Music or anything else, really.

Seems viable. Equally as viable as Astrology, depending on the goal? I know any build can be viable in the right hands, but I mean comparatively speaking.



That sounds cool. So it's hard and annoying to kill 1 vs. 1, and offers pretty decent support in group combat (I presume).

Supporting in group combat with succor is pretty useless - most of the things that are lethal in group combat aren't easily cured by healing. However, gems and auras still do offer valuable support, and you can contribute to the group's offense at the same time with balestone, paradox, etc.

I wish we could choose a skillset that allowed us to afflict with specific, targeted afflictions (that were not randomly determined by the position of the stars/etc).

Tarot doesn't really fit, thematically, with Researchers anyway. Maybe I'll hold out hope that we'll get a replacement down the line.

You hope in vain. You're not getting a new Tertiary.

They are. It's called Nuclear Physics.

I still don't know why they didn't give us Hexes instead of Tarot.

... okay, I do know: because that would be overpowered. But still!

We should campaign for Hexes anyway! Tarot just doesn't make sense RPly and synergetically.