Greetings, Lets start off with the reduced passive power regen in combat while a pet is summoned. This makes sense for most if not all pets except for the Watcher. A healer needs power and having power issues is not a rare sight for most heals. Next up is the golden aura you get while using a pet in healer role. It once had an effect of granting 5% increased crit heals. That was pre-revamp and the effect got deleted but not the visuals. Would be great for some artifact synergies to have it back like Strategist Card. Now to the interesting parts: Healing with the Watcher is absolutely useless in its current state. The Watcher needs power in order to heal. You can fill 30% of its power bar with the group heal Ritualistic Word. The Watcher uses approximately 20% of its power bar for one group heal. This makes it pretty hard to keep the Watchers power bar filled using only Ritualistic Word. But worry not, since Offering refills the power bar by 100%. This is great and your Watcher can spam as much as possible with infinite power now. But here's the drawback, the Watcher can only heal every 3,5 seconds. It takes about 17,5 seconds for the Watcher to completely empty its power bar. Since Offering has a 6 second cooldown, it just sits there with no use for 11,5 seconds, waiting to be used again. Since group heals are essential for every other heal artifact, its impossible to drop it from your Loadout. We end up with the Watcher and Offering, blocking 2 Loadout slots. So in order to make up for 2 potential extra heal abilites they have to make up for them in efficiency, right? 10500 or 13000 with Offerings resto buff. Thats the amount healed by the Watcher every 3,5 seconds with a CR of 320. In conclusion, if you use both Watcher and Offering you have a constant HoT of 13000 every 3,5 seconds. To bring this into proportion, thats the same amount you can get from the Circle of Protection. Thats one ability that outperforms 2 or is at least just as strong (depends on how often you crit). Since Ritualistic Word has a 3 second cooldown and the Watcher heals every 3,5 seconds, it is possible to keep it up with Ritualistic word only. Since Ritualistic Word does'nt grant the 10% resto buff to the Watcher like Offering, the healing is 10500 every 3,5 seconds wich, again, let the Circle of Protection outperform the Watcher. So, now that we know that there is no proper use for the Watcher over other healing abilities it gets worse, because the Watcher can't crit heal. Immediately making this the least synergizing setup for Strategist/Trans Card artifacts wich gets used by a lot of healers including myself. Now to the changes i would love to see to get the Watcher back up to its ancient greatness: Increase Watchers ability set by making it use different abilities from either Ritualistic Word or Offering (to make both abilities viable) Make the Watcher build outperform other setups slightly, since the inability to crit works against a lot of artifact synergies already Increase the power given by Ritualistic Word to 40% Decrease the Power given by Offering to 60% Using Offering grants Watcher a detaunt and a weak shield (maybe 25% of the Watchers health) Remove the passive power regen decrease Bring back the golden auras crit buff A graphical rework would be awesome too since its still the same since launch and the Guardian/ Fury ended up awesome. Please let me know if you have any additional thoughts or facts i have not adressed.
While I would love to have him better implemented, if you're using trans/strat/eog I would go soul wells or something over watcher. I'm using orb/page/phr so my spam is ritualistic word to stack the page, activate phr, and feed watcher. My dps goes up and he's easy to keep fed. Always hangs around with the tank so the tank gets his heals and the CoP. So watcher is slightly better than a soul well but the bigger part is that I don't have to think about using another power. If I slot him out, I usually put in soul well. Or if I drop orb, put in eog and use pheromone bloom in his slot. But yes to everything you've said
This is amazing advice as I've been using offering with the watcher in order to boost the heals. Circle I notice is amazing, if you are standing in it, but in the raid, moving around, honestly, the tank is the one who benefits the most, so should I remove Offering and put in another or should I leave it? Thank you so much for ur wisdom.
I completely agree with what everyone said here and also if you can devs can you make ritualistic word get the same benefits as offering like we get the buff for our heals making them more powerful and the restro bonus
For a non supercharge loadout, try this: Priority heal Boon of souls 4player shield Watcher Circle of protection Invocation of renewal Ritualistic word/ group heal Watcher can be pulled to either run a soul well or a supercharge. If you're trying to eog spam, pull watcher and put in iconic pheromone bloom. If your group is struggling for power and is generally bad, put in arbiter supercharge and do the same loadout except throw in shard in the extra slot. I never use supers unless the group wants eog spam. And I will tell them if you let me run my usual loadout, what I listed 1st, with orb of arion instead of eog then we will not die at all. Eog, there will be some downs. If I bust out Arbiter, then that's basically me saying you are all terrible and I can't believe I have to do this.
Watcher prioritizes himself and the healer, if his life goes down enough he activates Medicine until he runs out of power. Watcher power bar is ridiculously low, like 500 or something? And a controller artifact (I don't know which one) can restore power to pets, automatically Watcher has infinite power to spam heals.
The problem is that only like 5% of all Trolls use this artifact (BoP Commlink). Not because its not good but because its more useful to use other ones for several different reasons.
I agree that it can use a buff. But to be completely honest. I actually personally use it. I don’t use trans and strat on my healer so it not criting isnt a deal breaker thou it should be able to. I currently use orb, page, and soul cloak to have my arbiter up as much as possible. Since the sc give me a lot of power regen the watchers power drain is again not an issue for me personally. I’m actually able to keep the orb specter up at all time while watcher is up too. Thou it relies completely on being able to keep arbiter up off cooldown. In my main loadout I use: Group heal Watcher Group shield Invocation of renewal Priority heal Arbiter In arbiter I have Group heal Watcher Shard of life Sc generator Priority heal Soul well Don’t get me wrong. I also think sorcery could use some love in general Soil well ticking every 2 seconds is ridiculous IMO. This goes for both dps and healer. It should tick every second. And it would be nice if it gave power to any watchers within its range. Circle of protection should have a similar effect as solace for water. Place the circle at the users location with its area increased. Or it should do what it’s name suggest. Allies with the circle take reduced damage.
Hmm... What if Offering made Watcher cast an Invocation of Renewal? That would equal to 250% of Invocation's standard effectiveness. What if Guardian restored a small amount of health to the group each time it hit an opponent affected by Bad Karma for no power cost? That way it would have synergy with Grimorium Verum, which gets rid of power regen reduction at Rank 200.
