Welcome to my healing guide! This guide will provide builds and tips for becoming a better PvE healer

We will go into some detail about how to heal, as well as how to build your healer to provide the best support to your group

This guide is intended for PvE groups and will have only very limited application to PvP

Table of Contents

• The Healer Role
  • Your Job
  • Not Your Job
• Healing Basics
  • Rely on smart targeting
  • Stand behind the group
  • Use your HoTs
• Setting up Your Healer
  • Attributes
  • Race
  • Mundus Stone
  • Food/Drink
  • Potions
  • Champion Points
• Gear
  • Basics
  • Gear Sets
  • Traits and Enchantments
  • Example Gear Setups
• Skills
  • Basic Skill Types
  • Skill Setups
  • Quick Guide to Skill Casting
  • Rotation
• Sustain Tips

The Healer Role

A good healer in ESO is usually able to do much more than just heal. In your toolkit you’ve also got lots of options for putting out damage buffs to help your team do more damage, and healers are also sometimes called on to perform extra tasks to deal with mechanics as content requires

Your Job

These five items sum up the role of a typical healer

• Heal! Obviously your chief role is to keep everyone alive. When your group is in a tough spot, everything else is secondary
• Buff your group’s defense and sustain. A couple of buffs to give everyone extra resistances and resources can go a long way toward keeping them alive and keeping their resources up to cast their skills
• Buff your group’s damage. The faster your team can kill the enemies, the less long you’ll need to heal them for
• Perform extra content-specific roles. Healers are occasionally asked to perform extra tasks. Healers are particularly often given special roles like kiting roles (such as kiting Oaxiltso’s jumps in Rockgrove trial) and dealing with mechanics that require extra healing. Some encounters have healing checks (where your whole group takes lots of damage very quickly and you must heal them through it) and others have mechanics requiring lots of healing toward one particular ally (such as tombs in the Lokkestiiz fight in Sunspire trial). Further specifics of such mechanics are beyond the scope of this guide, since they vary in each content; just be aware that they may come up!
• Do some damage. Your heals are already healing? Your buffs are already buffing? You might consider putting out some extra damage of your own

In endgame healing, putting out buffs for your group is at least as important as healing them. Good buff management can provide enough extra group damage to make the difference between a slow slog through a fight where mechanics appear over and over, and a quicker, cleaner clear without so much hassle

Not Your Job

Some tasks are distinctly out of your control or otherwise NOT your job

• Healing “Stupid.” You can’t heal everyone out of everything. Is a dps standing in a mechanic meant for a tank? Did a tank forget to block a one-shot kill? Tough luck, nothing you can do about that. In general, it’s your team’s job to deal with mechanics correctly, not yours to heal them out when they mess up. Provide some extra heals if you’re able, but ultimately if other people die from failing mechs, that is not your fault. You cannot heal people through one-shots
• Resurrecting Teammates. Your job is to heal your team. Don’t stop to rez, or you might let other people die too! Rezzing is the job of the dps, whose role is generally not so urgent; only rez in a desperate situation where there aren’t dps alive to handle rezzes themselves

Healing Basics

These three basics will get you a long way toward putting out lots of healing for your group

Rely on smart targeting

Any heals that don’t heal the whole group will normally automatically target people whose health percentage is lowest. When there are multiple teammates in range, you cannot (and generally don’t need to) choose a particular one to heal. Just rely on smart targeting to find the right person

Stand behind the group

With few exceptions, heal skills (like most other skills) are directed in front of you, whether at a particular teammate or an area on the ground. It is very difficult to adequately heal people who are behind you. Therefore healers should aim to stand closely behind the group and face them whenever possible. Position yourself so that the dps are between you and the boss. This way your forward-facing heals will be able to heal everyone. Don’t stand too far from the group though; stay close so that your healing AoEs can heal both the group and yourself

Need to give extra heals to someone in particular (because they’re dying, or because you know they’ll be taking extra damage throughout the fight)? Make sure you’re facing in that person’s general direction, and smart targeting will normally apply your heals to them if they need it

These pictures show a very idealistic positioning of how your group should normally be standing. Most groups are not coordinated enough to have everyone stand quite this neatly together, but this should be your goal

Use your HoTs

A variety of heal-over-time (a.k.a. HoT) skills are available to you. Instead of one big burst of healing, these skills put out smaller amounts of healing that are applied repeatedly for typically 10 to 20 seconds. While each individual tick does only a little healing, a few well placed HoTs will add up to much more healing than you could do with just your burst heals. In fact, the bulk of your healing output should be done by HoTs

Don’t just heal responsively when you see people’s health dropping; by the time you notice, you might not have enough time to heal them before they die. Always make sure you’ve got at least one or two HoTs healing the group all the time, and ideally more; this will make your job a lot easier when someone actually is dying

Additionally, HoTs cost less magicka to cast than burst heals. Always use your HoTs!

Setting up Your Healer

As healers, the stats most important to us are:

• Max Magicka, which not only gives us more resources to cast our skills from, but also increases the healing power of our skills
• Spell/Weapon Damage, which boosts not just our damage but also our healing power, much like Max Magicka does. (Spell and weapon damage are essentially equivalent; nearly all sources of them will affect both)
• Spell/Weapon Critical, which determines how often our heals randomly “crit” to do extra healing. (Spell and weapon crit are essentially equivalent; nearly all sources of them will affect both)
• Magicka Recovery, which passively restores magicka gradually over time

In general, there’s no need to build your healer very tanky. You’ve got lots of ways to recover; you’re a healer after all! Stay behind the group out of the worst of enemy attacks, and keep on pushing out heals to heal both your group and yourself, and you’ll be fine for the most part. Just focus on providing all the buffs and healing you can

Attributes

Healers universally use magicka as their primary resource pool, so drop all 64 of your attribute points into magicka. Your skills do more healing based on your Max Magicka value (or Stamina, whichever is higher), so it is ideal to build this value as high as possible

• It’s possible to make a stamina-based healer, but so many staple healing skills are magicka-based that a magicka build is much more practical

Race

Race matters even less as a healer than it does for other roles, since the stat differences won’t do much more than affect your healing output by a small amount. (Remember, half your role is putting out buffs, and those will be more or less unaffected by your stats)

Seriously, use whatever race you like. But if you want to optimize a little extra, consider one of these options

• High Elves, Dark Elves, and Argonians have the highest magicka pools and stat bonuses that affect healing, so they can put out a little bit stronger heals than the rest
• Bretons have excellent magicka sustain, well suited for casting expensive healing skills without running out of resources

Mundus Stone

• Use the Ritual (+8% healing output) to put out extra healing
• Or use the Atronach (+310 magicka recovery) for extra sustain

Food/Drink

• Witchmother’s Potent Brew is a great and well rounded option, providing a mix of Max Magicka for stronger heals, Max Health for extra survivability, and Magicka Recovery for extra sustain. I recommend this for most healing builds
• Bi-Stat food like Solitude Salmon-Millet Soup is another possibility if you are not in need of magicka sustain. It provides larger amounts of Max Magicka and Max Health
• Ghastly Eye Bowl is a third option for if you can confidently keep yourself alive. Large amounts of Max Magicka and Magicka Recovery, but no Health bonus
• Advanced option: Clockwork Citrus Filet is a very expensive option for very advanced healing. It provides large amounts of Max Magicka, Max Health, Magicka Recovery, and Health Recovery. Due to the high cost/rarity of ingredients, I do not recommend this option unless you’re doing very sweaty endgame content

Potions

• Tri-stat potions (such as the Crown potions occasionally received for free in daily rewards) or Magicka potions are generally sufficient, especially if you have the Inner Light skill slotted providing the Major Prophecy buff
• Spell Power potions are another good option that can act as an alternative source of Major Prophecy, as well as Major Sorcery

Champion Points

A rough progression of what CP nodes to start with after level 50. Fill each node completely before moving on to the next one

Warfare (blue)

Start with Precision, Eldritch Insight, and Blessed (in the Mastered Curation subtree) for some basic stat boosts, and then add the four slottables below. Once you’ve done that, add the non-slottable CP nodes in the Staving Death subtree, followed by the rest of the non-slottables throughout the tree in more or less any order

Slottables

• Soothing Tide (enhances area heals)
• Rejuvenator (enhances all healing)
• Swift Renewal (enhances HoTs)
• Enlivening Overflow (provides resource recovery for allies) or From the Brink (provides damage shields to dying allies)

Focused Mending (enhances single-target heals) can be very situationally useful for times when you need to apply a lot of focused single target healing, e.g. for tomb healing in Sunspire trial. But the above setup will be best for most scenarios

Advanced tip: Due to their respective 12 and 30 second cooldowns per target, both Enlivening Overflow’s and From the Brink’s effects do not stack or provide extra benefit when used by multiple people. Advanced trial groups will often assign just one healer to use each; one slots Enlivening and the other Brink

Fitness (red)

Start with all of the first three slottable nodes listed below, then take Sprinter, Hasty (in the Wind Chaser subtree), and Hero’s Vigor. Then add Tumbling, Defiance, Tireless Guardian, and Fortification, as well as one of the fourth slottables listed below as soon as you can unlock it. Finally, get the rest of the non-slottable CP throughout the tree in more or less any order

Slottables

• Boundless Vitality (extra max health)
• Fortified (resistances)
• Rejuvenation (extra resource recovery)
• any of: Celerity (movement speed), Expert Evasion (free dodge-roll every so often), Slippery (free automatic break-free every so often), Bracing Anchor (increases how much damage Blocking will block, but makes you move slowly)

Craft (green)

Green CP has essentially no effect on combat. Use whatever you find useful

• Many people find the movement speed boosts from Steed’s Blessing (movement speed while out of combat) and Gifted Rider (mount speed) fairly universally handy

Gear

For some full gear setups, skip down to Example Gear Setups below

Basics

• As a magicka based role, you’ll want mostly or all light armor to provide magicka recovery via the Evocation passive. I recommend all 7 pieces as light armor for this purpose
  • A 6/1 build (using one medium piece) or a 5/1/1 (with one medium and one heavy) are also popular, to get some stat variation from medium armor passives and build up the passives in the Undaunted skill line, which give extra bonuses for wearing more armor types. 6/1 or a full 7 light are generally considered optimal, but the differences are minimal; any of these options will do fine. (But remember that fewer armor types means fewer armor skill lines you’ll need to level and spend skill points in!)
• With its strong healing and group buff skills, a restoration staff is the obvious choice for our frontbar weapon
• We’ll use a lightning staff or an ice staff on our backbar
  • A lightning staff will provide the off-balance debuff via the Elemental Blockade skill, while an ice staff’s Blockade will reduce enemy resistances and provide shields to allies. Normally the ice staff will provide stronger benefits, though an optimized tank in your group will typically use an ice staff and have these benefits covered
  • Using a destruction staff also ensures that we can apply our backbar enchantment reliably. The Wall of Elements skill (like all weapon area DoT skills) is able to proc this enchantment as long as it’s doing damage, even while we’re on our frontbar. Restoration staves don’t have such an area DoT to proc the enchantment, so a resto backbar’s enchantment would only ever proc when we light attack on that bar, which would generally be far less consistent
  • Running both bars as restoration staves can work fine for most scenarios, but you will provide more utility to your group by using a destruction staff on your backbar
• Blue or purple quality gear is entirely adequate for the vast majority of content in the game. You can consider gold weapons for a bit of extra healing power, but gold upgrades to armor and jewelry provide only very slight benefit and are largely not worth the cost of the upgrade

Gear Sets

Advanced healing almost always prioritizes gear that provides group buffs rather than putting out extra healing. Most of the best healing sets either boost your group’s dps or give them extra resources (which they can in turn use to deal more dps). Your skill casts will be plenty adequate for providing enough healing

However, you do not need advanced group buff sets to do perfectly adequate healing for much of the content in the game. If you’re just looking to do casual healing and aren’t too worried about optimization, check out the first two tabs below

These tabs below show good healing sets to consider for both new healers and advanced healers. See Example Gear Setups below for a few full setups

Traits and Enchantments

Just healing casually? You’ll be just fine with any traits and enchantments; whatever you have around will do fine. Most of your effectiveness as a healer comes from your sets, skills, and personal familiarity with healing. However, certain traits and enchants are more useful to a healer than others. If you’re looking to optimize your healer, set up as follows

• Armor: Divines trait to boost your mundus effect, and Max Magicka glyphs to enhance your magicka pool
• Jewelry: Infused trait to boost the enchantments, and either Spell Damage glyphs for stronger heals or Magicka Recovery or Reduce Spell Cost glyphs if you need extra sustain
  • Arcane trait is also a good option that’s cheaper to craft and unlock
• Frontbar (restoration staff): Powered trait for extra healing output, and Weapon Damage glyph for stronger heals
  • A decisive trait can also be useful sometimes, to cast ultimates like Aggressive Horn or certain class ultimates more often
• Backbar (destruction staff): Infused trait to boost its enchantment, and Weakening glyph to weaken the enemy’s damage against your group
  • Crusher enchantment is another good option here, to lower the enemy’s resistances. Good tanks will normally have this debuff covered, but it can sometimes be helpful for healers to slot it anyway in case they don’t
  • Or try Absorb Magicka enchantment if you feel you need more magicka

Example Gear Setups

These are some example setups, showing some beginner setups as well as some of the most common endgame trial setups. Consider them as templates for your own builds. Don’t have correctly traited gear pieces? Prefer a different set than one of the listed ones? Just swap in what you’ve got!

These setups use optimized traits and enchantments, but again this sort of heavy optimization isn’t too critical. Using whatever you’ve got around will be perfectly fine for most content

Skills

This section will not attempt to list all possible healing and utility skills, just the best ones. If a skill isn’t listed in this section, that’s most likely because it’s usually unnecessary, or because there’s another skill that will do something similar but better. But if you like those skills anyway, don’t let that stop you from slotting them!

Also remember to put skill points into your passives! A lot of those have great bonuses that will boost your healing power, your magicka regeneration, and other useful stats

For some full skill setups, skip down to Skill Setups below

Basic Skill Types

These types represent the main goals your skills accomplish. Some skills do multiple of these, e.g. some skills provide both buffs and healing, or provide both a burst heal and a HoT. A few examples are listed with each listing; these are just a few good examples and not at all a comprehensive list

• Burst Heals : These skills do a big burst of damage right when you cast them. Useful when you need to quickly heal someone who is dying, or when all your other skill timers are ticking and you just want to put out some extra healing. You usually just want one or two of these on your skill bars; having additional burst heal skills isn’t very useful
  • Examples: Combat Prayer, Healthy Offering, Summon Twilight Matriarch, Enchanted Growth
• Heals over Time (HoTs): These skills do small amounts of healing every second or two for longer periods of time, usually 10 to 20 seconds. Even though they don’t do as much healing per second as burst heals, they add up to huge amounts of healing over the long period they’re running. You should usually slot several HoTs for maximum healing; using three or even four is common
  • Most HoTs are cast on the ground, so they’ll heal everyone standing in the circle or rectangle where you cast them. Anyone not standing in the area will not be healed, so take care that you aim these ground heals correctly onto the group
  • A few HoTs are “sticky” heals which are applied to allies directly, rather than being confined to an area on the ground. As long as people are near you when you cast the skill, the healing will continue ticking on them even if they move away afterward
  • Examples: Illustrious Healing, Echoing Vigor, Cinder Storm, Extended Ritual
• Buff/Debuff Skills: These skills provide buffs to the group or debuff enemies to make your group do more damage or protect them from damage. Alternatively, they may provide just you with a buff to make you do more healing
  • Examples: Aggressive Horn, Zenas’ Empowering Disc, Expansive Frost Cloak, Fetcher Infection, Vibrant Shroud, Inner Light
• Utility Skills: These skills are used to provide some other useful purpose for the group, e.g. cleansing debuffs, providing shields to negate future damage, or providing synergies to give allies extra resources, healing, or buffs
  • Examples: Renewing Animation, Efficient Purge, Energy Orb

Skill Setups

All classes are capable of being strong healers. Some classes provide more group utility than others, and so are more often sought for endgame healing roles, but others will still do an entirely adequate job for anything short of very advanced endgame content

Advanced healers will often swap out skills throughout a dungeon or trial to provide different support for different fights. However, most healers will do just fine keeping more or less the same skills on all the time

Skills marked as FLEX can be swapped out for other skills as desired or needed. I highly recommend keeping all non-flex skills

Generic Setup Template

Most of the setups below roughly follow this template. Flex skills are very replaceable, and can be switched out for more healing skills or any other skills needed for a particular fight. Some classes’ skills may work better on one bar than the other, so this template can be rearranged slightly to make room

For the slot, each class has an area HoT skill that you will normally want there. Class HoTs are usually the strongest HoTs in your toolkit

See below for full setups for each class, and farther below for descriptions of the generic skills in this template

Combat Prayer	Illustrious Healing	Radiating Regeneration	[Class HoT]	Inner Light	Reviving Barrier

Overflowing Altar	Energy Orb	Echoing Vigor	Elemental Blockade	Inner Light	Aggressive Horn

Full Setups

Click on the tabs below to see skill setups for each class

Generic Skills

Staples

• Combat Prayer: Provides excellent Minor Berserk and Minor Resolve buffs for group damage and resistance, as well as an AoE burst heal. Because of these buffs, this skill belongs on essentially all healing setups. Combat Prayer will be our main spammable heal because of its AoE burst
• Illustrious Healing or Healing Springs: Excellent ground HoT. Also a staple healing skill that belongs on almost any healing setup. Use Illustrious for a longer heal or Springs for extra magicka
• Energy Orb: Provides healing as well as a synergy that one person can take to restore resources and health. This useful synergy makes it a staple of most healing builds
• Echoing Vigor: Applies a strong sticky HoT, which will continue healing teammates even if they move away. Costs stamina, so can help keep from overspending magicka
  • Since Vigor is a sticky HoT instead of a ground HoT, re-casting it will heal anyone who isn’t already getting its heal. This means that in a trial, you can heal your whole group (not just the usual six-target limit) by casting Vigor twice
• Elemental Blockade: Provides some damage as well as special effects depending on what staff you have equipped. A lightning staff provides the Off Balance debuff, which many dps setups can exploit for extra damage. An ice staff provides armor debuffs on the enemy as well as shields for your group
• [Ultimate] Reviving Barrier or Replenishing Barrier: Huge shields for your whole group. Very useful in tough spots where people are taking lots of damage. Use Reviving for extra healing, or Replenishing to get extra magicka and ult back
• [Ultimate] Aggressive Horn: Provides powerful buffs in the form of Major Force and stat boosts for your allies. Staple healing ultimate, though some classes have other powerful ultimates that are good alternatives
  • You can also just slot Barrier here again if you’re planning to only ever cast Barrier

Additional flex skills

• Radiating Regeneration: Applies a sticky HoT to three allies. Excellent in dungeons and somewhat good in trials, especially when people are moving around too much to stay in your ground heals
  • This skill’s sticky heal is extra useful because it will continue healing people even if they move away from you. However, it only hits three targets, so in trial content it will do relatively little healing. If your group is moving around a lot, this skill can be good to slot since it will keep on healing them, but otherwise you might consider swapping this skill out for something else
• Inner Light: This is just a passive bar-buffer skill that provides Major Prophecy crit boost and expands your magicka pool. Don’t cast it; it’s just there for passive buffs
• Overflowing Altar: Provides healing via its Lifesteal debuff, as well as a synergy that one person can take for a huge burst heal. Costs health rather than magicka, so can help keep from overspending magicka
  • Advanced tip: Like all named debuffs, Lifesteal cannot be stacked multiple times onto enemies. Advanced groups will typically have one and only one healer slot Altar to avoid redundancy
• Ring of Preservation: Strong ground HoT but has a very small radius. Only use if you’re in a group that can stay stacked together well. Also provides Minor Protection buff to mitigate some damage from your group. Costs stamina, which can help keep your magicka pool up
• Dampen Magic: Big shield for yourself. Usually unnecessary, but can be useful in some kiting roles where you might be taking extra damage
• Elemental Susceptibility: Shoot this at an enemy to reduce its resistances with Major Breach, as well as apply several status effects for a little extra damage. Occasionally useful if your tank is not providing Breach, or if something the tank can’t reach needs Breach
• Crushing Shock: A ranged interrupt. Normally tanks and dps will be handling interrupts, but occasionally it can be useful for a healer to use one

Niche use skills

These skills are typically only used for specific fights at fairly advanced levels. Most healers will probably rarely or never need them, but for the sake of completeness I’m listing them here

• Healing Ward: A big shield and HoT for one ally. Usually unnecessary, but can be very useful when one person in particular needs lots of healing, e.g. for tomb healing in Sunspire trial
• Efficient Purge: Cleanses effects like debuffs and sticky DoTs from group members. Usually unnecessary, as you can heal your group through most effects that this skill would cleanse; however, some advanced content does have effects that require a cleanse
• Mystic Guard: Protects one teammate by transferring some of the damage they’re taking to you. Only rarely necessary, but occasionally useful in very advanced content where someone (usually a tank) is taking very high damage. This skill will cause you to take extra damage, so use with caution. Must be slotted on both bars, or else the guard will fall off when you switch bars

Quick Guide to Skill Casting

• Remember, there is a one second global cooldown (GCD) for casting skills. After you cast a skill, you are unable to cast another skill for one second. Therefore it is ideal to cast skills on a consistent rhythm of one skill per second, the maximum speed allowed by the GCD. Consider using a metronome to get accustomed to this rhythm
  • Naturally, casting this frequently will burn through a lot of resources, but any second where you’re not casting a skill is a second wasted where you could have been! If your group isn’t in need of a healing skill every second, consider slotting a damage skill or two. See Sustain Tips below if you’re running out of resources
• Also remember to weave a light attack between each skill. Along with dealing extra damage, this will cause you to generate ult and also assist in applying your weapon enchantments, which are activated by light attacks and weapon skills. A successful weaver will cast one skill and one light attack in each one-second interval

Rotation

Your goals in your rotation are:

• Keep your HoT and buff timers running at all times
• Cast a useful skill on every one-second GCD

Watch your skill timers! Make sure you can see timers visible for both your frontbar and backbar skills; there are several addons that will make timers clearer and easier to read than the basegame UI offers, so consider checking out such addons

• Whenever one of your HoT or buff timers has run out or is about to, cast that skill again to keep it running!
• Whenever your cooldowns are all still running, hit Combat Prayer for some extra just-in-case burst healing, or just cast a damage skill if you feel you’re putting out enough healing
  • Try to avoid recasting HoTs before their timers expire, unless your group has moved. This will not provide any additional healing

You should spend most of your time on your resto staff frontbar. Just go to your backbar briefly to refresh skill timers

Sustain Tips

Healers tend to use a lot of magicka. Running out? Check on these items, which should be done fairly universally by all healers

• Have you bought all your passives? Your Light Armor and class skill lines have a number of passives that will give you extra magicka
• Are you using all light armor? If not, consider doing so for that big sustain passive
• Do you have CP points in the Rejuvenation passive (red tree)?
• Are you using food with a magicka recovery buff, like Witchmother’s Potent Brew?
• Are you using a potion with a magicka recovery buff? If so, do you have the Medicinal Use passive unlocked from the Alchemy crafting skill line? Without this passive, your potions will run out a while before you’re able to drink another one, but it does unfortunately require leveling Alchemy
• If you’re using Roaring Opportunist, are you heavy attacking occasionally to proc it?
• Do you have Echoing Vigor slotted, and are you double-casting it if you’re in a trial? Vigor costs stamina, so every cast of Vigor is avoiding using magicka
• Are you using your HoTs on cooldown? HoTs cost less magicka than burst heals and will help you save some magicka

If you’re still running out of magicka, you can try these additional options

• Try an additional non-magicka skill, like Overflowing Altar or Ring of Preservation
• Use magicka recovery glyphs on your jewelry
• Some class skills give magicka when you cast them. Consider slotting one; these skills are mentioned above in the class skills section