Best off-hand for Support healer?

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Just curious what other healers use as a supporting weapon for pve and pvp.

Im currently using the ice gauntlet with ice storm, ice wall and entomb. I’ve been thinking about using ice gauntlet for pvp support and hatchet for pve with rending throw and other throwing skills for boss and mob debuffs in dungeons and all around pve stuff. I used the hatchet for maybe 15 minutes in the beta so I was wondering what other people thought about it as a purely debuff stand point. Feel free to let me know what you think, even if it’s coming from the tank or dps perspective.

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I’m not a pro and still lvl 25, but I find the Hatchet the best for PvE, since you do a lot of damage even with all points into FOCUS.

A lot of players enjoy the Ice Gaunlet for PvE too, and play with full AOE damage.

For PvP, I would go with Hammer, since the CCs are awesome with heals, and with Heavy Armor you are really tanky.

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Problem with ice gauntlet is you’d be consuming the mana you need to heal with…and the crowd control duration of ice gauntlet are depressingly short and nearly useless (slow has no functional effect on mobs that already move at 40% faster than players can).

The only reason to take ice gauntlet as a healer is for Entomb… your ‘ohcrap I got aggro’ defense and hope your zerging team comes to help you.

Best secondary I’ve found is Musket. Simply because the trapper tree and powder burn lets you put in good damage AND deliver effective team-assisting crowd control.

Traps (2 of them) can hold a boss for a few seconds…enough for the tank to have breathing space. Bombs do excellent AOE damage which is great for boss-adds and for dungeon mob hordes piling on your tank…the knockback is hilarious too.

Powder burn puts in long duration high damage (13s) so you can just pop that thing once and focus on healing afterwards.

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Yea mana has been a problem for with it for sure. I’ll definitely look into the musket for some reason that never even crossed my mind.

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The beauty of it is that since as healer you’re focus build, you need to gem your musket for focus… and since you not using musket to do sustained damage (dps) you rely instead on DOTS and things that keep functioning after you switch back to the healing staff.

You can also get bow and use the bow skills that poison, bleed and penetrating shot… and you can use all three weapons during a dungeon clear.

Since your heals have timers of 10s+ you will end up basically tossing heals, switching to musket for powder burn+throw grenade+drop traps (all done in 5s) then to bow via inventory swap, put poison and bleed on AOE then switch back to heal staff.

You can use musket or bow depending on the mob being faced. If your team got a second healer or multiple tanks but lacks dps the bow does better dps via aoe dots. If your team needs a bit more crowd control help then musket is the better choice.

All gem slotted for focus and you get their high dot damage while still healing.

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