Chanter Healer Build

[Jaxom]

Hey guys,

Looking to build a support chanter. Debuff Heals etc. - How should I go about maxing my healing output on a chanter?

thanks!

[ColorsFade]

Ancient Memory & Beloved Spirts talents. You're going to regen a small amount of health to those in range (4 meters). So you want to use a ranged weapon and huddle behind your front-liners (like a Priest using Consecrated Ground). You're going to need to be close to them for this to work.

You want max INT and MIG. Your chants aren't affected by DEX (so they cannnot be sped up with higher DEX). INT will affect the LINGER portion of the chants, so the duration will last longer. Max INT for sure.

Might will affect the amount of healing you do, so you want to max that as well.

The game recommends CON and RES, but I'd leave those at 10. Neither is going to impact you very much. Instead, I'd put the rest of my points into PER since you're going to be shooting from range and you want to hit things.


For Chant Phrases, I'd focus on the ones that help you be a healer. There are four pretty good ones you can twist to help you as a healer.


The Silver Knights' Shields Broke Both Arrow and Blade - Increases Deflection of allies; it's better to not get hit in the first place than need to heal.

Her Courage Thick as Steel [WM1] - Damage Shield

Old Siec Would Not Rest 'til His Hunger Was Sated [WM1] - Damage your allies do regens as Endurance

Mercy and Kindness Followed Where'er She Walked [WM2] - Allies receive bonus from healing effects (I believe this works with your own Ancient Memory)


For Invocations, it's up to you. But in my experience the best ones with a ranged Chanter were always the Summons. It takes a Chanter a certain number of phrases before you can do an Invocation. So it's all time-limited. As such, I thougth the best bang for your buck was Summons.

That said, "Rejoice, My Comrades! Two Fingers of Daylight!" [WM2] is a pretty good one and if you're focusing on healing I'd take it (it restores Endurance).

The Chanter is the best summoning class in Pillars and for me that's where it shines. If you are setup to simply shoot a ranged weapon, stick close to the front line fighters and regen Endurance, and summon when you have an Invocation ready, I think you'll do well.

Note - A priest is still a better healer by a long way, because of defensive/offensive buffs. If you are going to have a priest in your party, I would not worry about making a healing Chanter, and instead go with all the offensive choices to really allow your party to do more damage and cut stuff down quickly.

The way Pillars is setup, most battles don't last very long such that healing is not necessary. If you're getting hit hard enough to really need healing, you're probably going to die before the healing can help much. I find the best thing to do is focus on Deflection instead, so folks don't get hit hard in the first place (and spells that change Crits to Hits and Hits to Grazes).

On Hard difficulty, I find that a priest's Consecrated Ground and Strange Mercy on an offensive 2HS Paladin are basically all the healing I need in 95% of the battles (save for the boss mobs and dragons).

But you want a healing Chanter, so this is my recommendation. Good luck!

[D'amarr from Darshiva]

There is not a single shoe size that fits all.

A few things to consider:

* Chanter can do much more than give support. Unless you want to restrict yourself deliberately, don't ignore the options to do tons of damage with phrases.

* Base area of your chants is large already. There are items to increase it. It is not strictly necessary to raise INT a lot to increase the area. On the other hand, INT also affects the "linger" duration of chants, the duration of invocations and the duration of status effects you cause.

* Reconsider whether you really want to "maximize" something, since min/maxing attributes bears risks when you want to play the game at higher difficulty modes. There is no need to min/max attributes. Even the story companion Chanter Kana is fine and versatile enough to fill multiple roles. His attributes are 16,12,9,14,17,10 for reference.

* If you want to focus on chanting phrases and take the penalty of slow action speed, you may decrease DEX a lot. Notice that you can pretty much forget about using your weapon efficiently while chanting, because you will be slow like a snail. And the action speed will also slow down invocations and casting from scrolls.

* If you want to survive as a frontliner and include more enemies in the area of your chants, you may want to increase RES to 15 or higher, because base Chanter is -5 compared with Fighter/Monk.