Passive Resto Rit

Spamming life/rejuvenation/recuperation will never keep up with a good direct healing build. Especially since your entire party should not be taking steady and evenly spread out damage. I guess it's your only option though if you want an alternative and just want to redbar. Eh? Let's examine the math on that, shall we?

First, I'm going to assume that by "good direct healing build" you do not mean an ER build. I freely admit that ER's Infuse has far, far more heal/sec than anything else in the game. This thread is about a potential complementary build for the second backline position that fills in some places where ER is weak.

So now, let's look at the passive resto build. Not even counting the heal from Spirit Light/MBS, we've got 8 HPS from Recup, plus 12 HPS from REjuv, plus 9*20/21 ~= 8.6 HPS from Life, for a total of 28.6 passive HPS per party member.

Now, let's look at what my best guess for what you mean by "good direct healing build." I'm assuming this build spams WoH and Patient Spirit (and the rest is either standard hybrid stuff (mostly redundant given the assumption of ER as the other backliner), or e-management, or removal, or inferior healing options that might as well be blank skillslots). Let's assume 14 Healing and 9 DF. Let's further assume that somehow you've got impossible levels of energy and can spam both heals on recharge. Let's also assume that you somehow manage to always trigger the bonus on WoH. With all of those extremely favorable assumptions, WoH heals for 94 + 109 + 29 on a 3.75sec recycle, or ~61.9HPS. Patient heals for 114 + 29 on a 4.25 recycle, or ~33.6 HPS. Add those together and you get 95.5 HPS.

Now, compare. Divide it out and you see that the resto build matches the WoH+Patient build for HPS if only 3.3 people are receiving healing. Now, take away all those favorable assumptions I gave you. Assume the resto build does occasional cast Spirit Light/MBS; assume the WoH+Patient build does not have infinite energy to cast on the recharge; assume WoH does not always trigger the bonus heal. The break even point is going to fall below 3, and maybe even closer to 2. How often do you play any serious zone and not have at least 3 people below 100% hp at any given time?

Which brings me to a bit of a point: If you've already got 5-7 health bars that are always full, you can put Alesia in charge of the backline and still succeed. Build choice is only going to matter when you're facing real pressure, which likely means that everyone is going to be taking some damage, and several people taking quite a lot. In those circumstances, passive resto is going to outheal WoH+Patient by 2::1 or even 3::1.

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But I'm sure thoughtful readers already knew that conclusion without me saying a word. After all, the inherent multiplier in the party healing mechanic gives it an unfair advantage.

So maybe a more apt comparison is to those ubiquitous UA party healing monk builds. These tend to look something like UA+Divine Healing+Heaven's Delight+Heal Party+GoLE. Let's assume 14DF and 13 Healing. Let's also assume that 1GoLE gets used to power 2x Heal Party, which is otherwise not used. Divine Healing will heal for 57*1.57 (ignore the DF bonus because it only goes to the caster himself) on a 16sec recycle, for ~5.6 HPS. Double that for Heaven's Delight. 11.2 HPS. Heal PArty heals for 69*1.57 twice in 31sec recycle, for ~7 HPS. That totals 18.2 HPS. That's only about 2/3 as good as the resto build. From there you could add a spot heal like Patient, and, to the extent that it was superior to Spirit Light/MBS, it would narrow the gap, but probably not catch up.

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None of this is to say that this resto build does not have shortcomings, merely that failing to out-redbar direct healing builds is certainly not one of them.