Indecisive about which Healer power to pick.

Hey, so I've been playing this game on and off for a few years, and over time I found quite a lot of powers I like for specific roles, and yet, after all this time, I can't figure out a Healer role power I like.
So I'd like a breakdown of the Healer powers, as I have all of them except for Water.

If it helps with possibly finding one I like, my favorite powers of each role are;
Tank: Ice, Atomic. (Ice is a W.I.P shield build with Lasso, Atomic is battletank.)
DPS: Rage. (Specifically melee Rage)
Controller: Quantum.

I'm not sure what I'm even looking for in a healer, I just know I don't want to rip a hole into my power or rely on pets.

Nature has mostly healing over time mechanics. Sorcery has one AoE, totems and a pet that is mostly useless. Electric is mostly bursty heals. I still to this day have no idea what Celestial does. Water is mostly rotating shields and an AoE that you can stack twice.

Can you explain Nature more in-depth for me?

If you're familiar with combos, and like them (rage melee), celestial might be your ticket.

I'll briefly put my 2 cents in:
Nature: cast your HoT's, refresh. Shield, 2 SC's if you're EoG. Weapon combos in between.

Sorcery: drop your pancake and spam group heal. There's a few other good choices for healing in the powers, but it's a bit simple, like nature.

Electric: mostly burst heal, but there's a couple different ways to heal. This requires you to be much more attentive, and reactive. Probably one of the more difficult healing powers, because of the needed reaction to damage in groups.

Celestial: due to combos, and you can build a few different loadouts with this power, it's likely considered the hardest healing power to master. Once that's done, it's a cake walk, and very powerful.

Water: in my opinion, the most versatile healing power. There are many ways to setup a loadout with this. There's a couple combos, there's the water pool, there's reaction healing, there's mostly shields running: it's truly very versatile. The bonus to that is, if you ever get tired of running a healing loadout, it's easy to change to something that still works great.

On mobile so I can't type out a paragraph ATM but essentially you stack three HoTs at the beginning of the fight and all you need to do for the rest of the time is refresh those HoTs with Flourish ability, shield and priority heal for emergencies.

I'll try Nature out. It sounds like something I'd probably enjoy. Thanks guys.

On second thought;

I'd like elaboration on Celestial.
Main reason why Electricity wasn't on my radar is because, well, the ranging with it. For some abilities, you need to get right up to your allies, and I'm very much a "smash buttons in order without paying much attention to anything else" kinda person, and Electricity requires me to focus.
I also don't really like using Supercharge, unlike it's like Rage's "basically double your DPS" supercharge.

I'd've made my Nature Toon, but I have no idea what to do for them as a character so I'm kinda at a wall in that regard, but in the meantime, I want to know if Celestial is like what I described or if Nature might still be that one healer power I'd like, possibly.

I’ll speak for electricity:

It is burst-centric. Not many powers to choose from to provide heals so it is limited. There is a hot but it is only useful to heal non-players (pets). And has a safety net power which helps provide a heal when players take a heavy hit.

I like electric as it is reactive (like every healing power is) and proactive (can provide a double safety net with pod artifact). You need to stand with your group members if you use galvanize as it is a pbaoe wave heal effect. Nature has a similar power (cross pollination). Basically speaking, health bars may go up and down a lot, but if done right, you can keep people alive with all the burst heals you provide.

Nature was a great healing power, but revamp killed it for me.

Electricity dps has circuit breaker, which gives bonus damage, 15 seconds cool down, very strong.

Celestial has combos will almost every power at it's disposal. It is not required to do combos, but you will struggle without them, doing the combos benefit the team greatly.

Admonish is your group heal, works fine, but doing the combo will also place a short heal over time on your group members (all of them). It also does damage on both the initial hit, and combo (if in mid range).

There are so many options to use with celestial healing, Death Mark combo into shield will damage, place a dot, and shield you. When the enemy is knocked out, it does explosive damage to nearby enemies. When that shield breaks, it does explosive damage to nearby enemies.

Every healing power, has interactions that will either heal, or damage, on top of what the initial power does (the one that starts the combo).

Consume soul for example, does 3 ticks of nice damage, and heals all nearby allies (npc included). Combo that into wrath of the presence to get a bigger damage hit on enemies.

Celestial is one of the only powers that you can be a might based battle healer with, and be effective (water being the 2nd option for night based). To elaborate further, you basically would want to see for yourself, read the powers, what they combo into, and see the multitude of extra effects you get with them. In my opinion, in the "right" hands, celestial is the most powerful healer.

Wall of text incoming.

Will give short description about the healing powers and then will talk about the meta of healing and artifacts.

Nature
With nature you are stacking pheromones which will be activated from using healing powers (read power description). So you will always have stuff running in the background while bursting up on the top.
Nature does NOT have full gorupshield for 8 people.

Water
With water you have some options and 8 playstyles going for you.
1. You can just use burst heals + 8 shields and either the flood of power SC to get rid off all cooldowns and filling up your powerbar. works great in combination with tempest guard as shield. You can also run no SC and use riptide to get rid off the cooldown of your last power. works with shields
2. You can use SoS as huge AoE-HoT and double it up with riptide. Not a fan personally but it works.

Sorcery
You have some options here.
1. You can run a classic healing built with prio, group, shield, AoE-HoT (or channeled heal), Soulbolt to spam heals and the shield SC or arbiter of destiny which is insanely powerfull.
2. You can run watcher. The pet AI is stupid... its doable to use watcher but not the best option

Celestial
You need your Admonish Combo as only combo to run. Other than that its just letting you HoTs (Admonish combo and Consume Soul) running and just heal. For the SC you can use Sacrifice. This is a shield for the entire group but NOT for you. The description says it will draw aggro, but with a tank in presence it won't override (so its safe to use).
Consecrated Ground used to be the best SC in the game, sadly its nerfed to hell.

Electricity
You DON'T have problems with range. Arc LIghtning needs kind of a clumped group but it's not really used by healers these days. Galvanize needs a close group to be extremly powerfull, but you don't need to use it much and with a more ranged approach its still good. All other healing skills you need (prio, group, shield, biocap, groupshield) are "normal" range. Elec having no range is simply wrong and was just before the big stat revamp years ago. People are stupid and seem not to know that

___________
About the meta.

There are 2 healing builds.
1. The classic healer with Transmutation Card, Purple Healing Ray, Page of Destiny.
You want to spec super powered and run either power efficency or reserve tank as chest mod. You don't need weapon attacks to fill your powerbar, its a passive based on your max. powerpool. I prefer that. Cyborg passive as allie is OP for healers.

2. EoG Healer

--This Healer is mostly wanted by groups--

Your artifacts are Scrap of Soulcloak, Eye of Gemini and Purple Healing Ray (or Page of Destiny).
Your loadout is:
Prio Heal
Group Heal
2500 SC (from iconics and movement tree)
2500 SC (from iconics and movement tree)
2500 SC / Shield / 3rd healing power

The last spot always comes down to preferences.
This EoG-Meta makes all healing powers the same, basically, which is sad, imo.

Out of curiosity, which are the movement trees that're ideal for such a build?

As a heal you want the 2500 SC. So the 25% SC from movement and iconic. Thats what I meant.

No, I meant like... Which movements have 2500 SC powers actually worth using for that type of setup? Unless 2500 SC itself is the bar of entry.

AH ok.

The healing one from iconics (pheromone bloom) is good and then its depends on movement, but it doesn't matter since its only there to use EoG to fill the SC of the ppl around you. It has nothing to do with healing

I see. No movement mode has a special 2500 SC skill that's helpful for that role? So I can wing it with my usual of Superspeed, probably.
Nice to know this stuff while I plan this Toon in advance.

Super Speed is fine. It's kind of meta because of precision dps. for those I use these SCs:

Pheromone Bloom
Speed Drain
Metabolic Boost

there are no like super nice effects that will help.
In some instances Dash Attack can be a nice SC but not really often

Alright, good to know.
I need to mull over everything I learnt here and hopefully make a decision that I'm comfortable with.

Celestial is really nice to heal with and the dps side is strong. Sorcery is fun with the watcher (at least to me) and the healing rotation is very simple and effective.

Elec healer, with super speed and hand blasters to go all electric.

Toon name: Nurse Pikachu.

You are welcome.

Each Healer has its strenghts and weaknesses that also affect their best Artifacts (but I'll spare you this rabbit hole)

• Celestial, Nature and Electric are the "Burst and AoE" healers. You will be stuffing your teammates with heal after heal but also requires you to be quick on your toes, never taking a break, abysmal to use with Clarion. Electric in particular is a bit short-ranged, so keep your team together. Celestial is the other way-round, it heals from all the way across a map, have quick cooldowns and stacks the HoTs. I never tested Nature to see it's range, but it seems fairly good.
• Water and Sorcery are the "Stationary" healers because of their summons. Water and Sorcery both summon a massive zone that constantly heals your allies and even NPCs while having a duration matching the cooldown for unlimited uptime. Biggest difference to have in mind is that Sorcery's circle targets your enemies while Water's circle (Called Solace of the Sea) Targets the caster, so depending on the map, one might be better than the other.