The Reaper: The complete guide to rifle leech healing (more power edition)

The Reaper: The complete guide to rifle leech healing (more power edition)

Benefits and drawbacks of leech healing

Leech healing is now becoming popular in The Secret World, and for good reason. Leech healing brings many benefits to healing. The most obvious is you bring added DPS. A good leech healer can do between 1,000 and 2,000 sustained DPS while still healing a group through the toughest content in the game (endgame nightmare dungeons and the raid, which leech healers can solo heal).

This makes dungeon runs faster, and lets you skip some boss mechanics due to the higher DPS. Here for example,are some recent DPS counts with me on top...

http://i.imgur.com/8Fvwp65.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/DkfS4jG.jpg

As a healer, leech healing also brings incredible spike healing. This is due to its ability to draw on DPS buffs like penetrations. A leech builder shot can sometimes heal for more than a fist healing consumer, and the leech consumers can go upwards of 15,000 healing in a single shot (occasionally).

However... the drawback to leech healing is that it is very complex. Leech healing was dismissed for months in The Secret World simply because most didn’t understand it. It’s far easier to just load crit rating and let Empowerment spam do your healing for you.

So this guide, built on my previous ‘Reaper’ guide, takes a fairly technical approach to explaining leech healing. You’ll learn not only what I recommend after months of playing a leech healer, but also why it’s recommended based on the underlying game mechanics.

The title Reaper comes from the elite skill Reap and Sew, as it’s the signature elite. Plus it easily differentiates my approach from the offshoot of ‘DPS-healing’.

Speaking of these offshoots, many players have contributed to this knowledge. These players include: Nipsnaps, rrauwl, Soahl, jonnymonroe, digirati, Talrindar, Ithule, Shatiya, leiserl, Eth-, Handfish, Mixia, bloodline, bloodlite, RunningoutofHP, bluemoon, and Pixxiedust.

If parts of this guide or my previous guides are used in any other guides, I would appreciate being credited. Otherwise... this hurts me.



Contents:

1. Cutting into the cosmos – the math of anima and anti-anima
2. Overhealing vs flexibility – finding the correct balance of attack rating and heal rating
3. The two rules for Reaper glyphing
4. How to gear up
5. Choosing rifle skills
6. Choosing secondary weapons
7. Choosing the auxiliary weapon
8. Choosing passives
9. Mods you need
10. Overcoming damage reduction and reflection shields
11. Solo builds
12. Raid healing

This is an end-game guide for nightmare and raid healing. While it can be tried before this, results aren't guaranteed due to the differences in content balance.

Cutting into the cosmos – the math of anima and anti-anima

Anima is complex. Accounting for anti-anima even more so. There’s an opinion that leech healing is ‘hard’. In reality, this comes more from the difficulty of understanding the equations behind anima and hence using a sub-optimal build, making mistakes, and unleashing filth when you’re meant to be healing. Oh God.

So the only place to start is with an extensive math lesson. Before we do, however, I'll list the main points to remember:

1. Leech healing is maxed by a careful mix of additive and multiplicative boosts.

2. The order of multiplicative boosts is unimportant, so multiplicative buffs like exposed, penetrations etc are worth exactly the same in terms of leech healing done for any kind of attack rating/heal rating split.

3. Execution signets are much better than Hunger signets (though Hunger are much cheaper and will provide a few extra benefits like extra healing from Reap and Sew and Anima Vessel).

4. The hard-coded weighting of attack rating and heal rating in the individual skills is the most important determinant of the optimal attack rating/heal rating split. Most leech skills lean towards a 50/50 split.

5. Anyone who claims that a particular set of passives or gear makes a different attack rating/heal rating split do more healing than what the hard-coded skill weightings dictate is violating the laws of multiplication and the cosmos.

6. Anti-anima modifiers like glances and blocks are important to avoid, because they’ll probably hurt you at a higher rate than your own positive modifiers can compensate for.

7. Healing is spiky and so minimum healing spikes and incoming damage spikes need to be accounted for, rather than just sustained DPS or healing per second.


These seven points can be explained by six rules.



Rule 1: Some boosts are additive, and some are multiplicative

The basic building blocks of leech healing are additive and multiplicative percentage boosts. Some are additive with the base damage, and others are multiplicative of the additives.

This is explained by the following nine equations used to determine how much healing you do when leeching:

1. Base damage = (attack rating coefficient x weapon power coefficient = combat power) x base skill damage

2. Modified base damage = (base damage x damage additive 1) + (base damage x damage additive 2) + (base damage x base damage additive 3).

3. Final damage = Modified base damage x damage multipliers x target defense modifier (reduced damage depending on whether your hit was mitigated, glanced, evaded, or blocked).

4. Base leech rate = (heal rating coefficient x weapon power coefficient = healing power) x base skill leech rate

5. Modified base leech rate = (base leech rate x heal additive 1) + (base leech rate x heal additive 2) + (base leech rate x heal additive 3).

6. Final leech rate = modified base leech rate x heal multipliers.

7. Base direct healing (for the green heal of Anima Shot) = (heal rating coefficient x weapon power coefficient) x (base skill direct heal) + (base direct healing x heal additive 1)

8. Final direct healing = base direct heal x heal multiplier 1 x heal multiplier 2 x heal multiplier 3.

9. Final total healing = (Final damage x final leech rate) + final direct healing.

...which is leech healing in a nutshell. More than three additives and multipliers can be applied at the same time, I just limited them to three in the example equations to save space.

Now the trick is to understand where boosts fall into those equations. Here is a probably-mostly correct list:


Damage additives:

• Experience (20%)
• Twist the Knife (9%)
• Eagle Eye (10%)
• Anima Boost (7.5%)
• Lethality (10%)
• Ferocity (9%)
• Highly Strung (10%)
• Fury (7%)
• Knuckle Down (10%)
• Do or Die (25%)
• Energise (40%)
• Reckless (20%)
• Armor Fati (10%)
• Subway Tokens (1% - 10%)
• Signet of Execution (3%)


Damage multipliers:

• Exposed (30%)
• Improved bursts (7.5%)
• Closer (7.5%)
• Accuracy (5%)
• Critical hit damage (determined by crit damage multiplier)
• Penetrating hit damage (determined by target mitigation and Signet of Breaching)
• Short Fuse (15% or 25% with passive)


Target defense negative damage multipliers:

• Normal mitigation applied to every non-penetrating hit (around -10% base, going higher depending on boss)
• Glance damage reduction (-60%)
• Blocked hit reduction (-33% normally, but going as high as -80%-90% for some bosses)
• Evaded hits (-100%)


Healing additives:

• Experience (20%)
• Eagle Eye (10%)
• Twist the Knife (9%)
• Anima Boost (7.5%)
• Improved bursts (7.5%)
• Knuckle Down (10%)
• Closer (7.5%)
• Do or Die (25%)
• Energise (40%)
• Reckless (20%)
• Armor Fati (10%)
• Signet of Hunger (3%, but only to leeches)


Healing multipliers:

• Backup Drone (30% on target)
• The Greater Good (15%)
• Critical heal ‘damage’ (same as crit damage, but only applied to direct heal components of skills, not leeches. Hence Anima Shot gets a critical hit damage check on its damage portion used for leeching, and a separate critical heal damage check on its much smaller ‘green’ direct heal portion. These two crits can occur independently of each other.)

Rule 2: Multiplicative buffs get better with more boosts

The more boosts you have in a build, additive or multiplicative, the better each multiplicative boost becomes. This can be shown by a series of examples.

1. If Anima Shot hits for 100, and scores a critical hit of 50% bonus damage, then the crit is worth 50 damage, for a total of 150 damage.

2. If Anima Shot is buffed by Experience to cause 120 damage, and the same 50% critical is scored, then that critical is worth 60 points, for a total of 180 damage.

3. If we push all that damage to be multiplicative, and so Anima Shot is not buffed by Experience, but scores a critical hit for +70% crit damage, then the critical is worth 70 points, but the final shot only does 170 damage. It hits for less damage than buffing the base damage first, even though it added 25% more crit damage.

Now let’s add more passives.

4. If Anima Shot is buffed by Experience, Twist the Knife, and Lethality, then the same hit lands for 139 damage. The 50% critical would then land for 69.5 damage, for a total of 208.5 damage.

5. However, if the critical was somehow converted into additive damage, then the result would be:
100 + 20 + 9 + 10 + 50 = 189 damage. This is smaller than the split approach of high base damage x multiplication damage.

6. However, if we were to convert everything to multiplicative damage, we’d score the highest: 100 x 1.2 x 1.09 x 1.1 x 1.5 = 215.82. As multiplicative boosts get rolling and stacked, they outperform additive boosts. But... you can’t just get all multiplicative damage.

As such, this rule, qualified by practicalities, dictates that you need both additive base damage and multiplicative damage in a build to hit the highest DPS and healing. Additive boosts are easy to acquire and provide the quickest early gains, while more multiplicative buffs provide the biggest gains when they’re added on top.



Rule 3: The order of multiplicative boosts is not important

The order in which multipliers are applied does not matter. This has significant gearing implications when you consider that the leech rate itself is a multiplier.

For example, consider this comparison of Execution signets (rifle damage multiplier) and Hunger signets (leech rate multiplier).


Attack rating lean:

(70 damage x 1.09_execution signet) x .30 leech = 22.89 healing
70 damage x (.30 leech x 1.09_hunger signet) = 22.89 healing

Now let’s reverse the numbers to give a different heal rating/attack rating split to lean towards heal rating:

(30 damage x 1.09_execution) x .70 leech = 22.89 healing
30 damage x ( .70 leech x 1.09_hunger) = 22.89 healing

As you can see, it doesn’t matter whether you use Execution or Hunger signets for healing, regardless of your attack rating or heal rating. The only difference is that Execution signets give you 9% more DPS and are therefore dramatically better.

This doesn’t change even if you include extra DPS passives like Lethality. The healing numbers stay exactly the same for both signet types regardless of the passive loadout.

(That said, Hunger Signets do buff both Reap and Sew and Anima Vessel more than Executions, both of which are very powerful skills.)

This also holds true for other multiplicative buffs such as penetrations. While penetrations will give more DPS, the value of these penetrations won’t change in terms of total healing done, because leech rate and penetrations are both multipliers.

To show this, we can plug penetrating hits of 50% into the above equations:

(70 damage x 1.09_execution signet x 1.5_penetrating hit) x .30 leech = 34.335 healing
(30 damage x 1.5_penetrating hit) x (.70 leech x 1.09_hunger signet) = 34.355 healing

We can keep adding in various additive and multiplicative buffs all day. As long as the balance weighting of the skill stays fixed (in that taking attack to 70 will result in sending leech down to 30 and vice versa), all boosts are worth the same to either build.

Rule 4: Skill weighting determines healing

Building on from Rule 3, Rule 4 states that the hard-coded weighting of the worth of attack rating and heal rating values in the individual skill will determine potential healing done. I.e: You can't game the skills with buffs or passives to get more healing out of an attack rating/heal rating split that does not follow the hard-coded weights.

This graph by Handfish shows Transfuse Anima follows a 50/50 split: http://i.imgur.com/Q1i9Z.gif

This means that it is buffed half by attack rating, and half by heal rating. Applying more attack rating at the expense of heal rating means that half of the skill is getting ignored, and hence why the healing curve goes downwards.

The converse is true as well. Going too far towards heal rating ignores the attack rating component of the skill, and so with 100% heal rating, the skill is only being scaled 50% by your stats.

Conversely, Anima Shot favours slightly more heal rating due to its direct heal component: http://i.imgur.com/JgHdg.gif

Although very small, it is the direct heal component of Anima Shot, the heal over time of the Quantum, and any pure heals of secondary weapons like Blood that can throw the favoured heal rating/attack rating split towards heal rating.

This difference will get less pronounced if passives and multiplicative buffs are used which only affect the leach components are used, such as Energise, Do or Die, Lethality, and penetrations. These boosts, which only boost the attack-leech portion of Anima Shot, will move the skill’s preferred heal rating closer back to 50/50. However, because the leech weighting is locked at 50/50, this split cannot be changed, ever.

Also, if you use skills which have a 100% attack rating lean like the elementalism manifestations, then you’ll get more out of attack rating.

Rule 4 also suggests that contrary to my previous guide, diminishing returns don’t really matter. By the time you push a stat to encounter heavy diminishing returns, you’re already far off the ‘optimal’ inherent skill weighting. Hence, it’s more accurate to simply look at the hard weighting.



Rule 5: Damage and healing have negative multipliers

Leech healing also has to contend with the various negative multipliers that reduce damage (i.e. anti-anima). These include:

• Debilitated (on yourself)
• Corrupted (on your heal target)
• Damage reduction shields (like in Hell Fallen and Hell Eternal... usually equal to having every single hit blocked)
• Glance hits (final damage x 0.4, plus cannot crit, plus will hurt your Lethality base damage)
• Evaded hits (no final damage)
• Blocked hits (about final damage x 0.2-0.7, plus cannot penetrate)
• High physical mitigation (variable depending on target, but can be beaten by penetrations)

These will kill your healing. As such, every leech healer needs tactics to avoid these negative multipliers. Often, removing these negatives will produce greater gains than going for positive multipliers. So pushing glances and blocks down to 0% will often have more effect than pushing crits up by the same rate.



Rule 6: Healing is spiky

While leeching is determined by damage, sustained DPS and healing are two very different things. A tank will take spike damage, from penetrations and attacks such as Charged Hack. Building on Rule 5, a missed or blocked leech hit may also result in a downward healing spike, which is just as serious as an incoming damage spike. If both occur at once - high damage + low healing, then the tank may die.

Therefore, this rule states that smoothing out spikes is important, in addition to average damage or healing per second numbers. This is done by taking high hit and penetration, taking passives that buff different parts of healing (such as a builder passive to increase sustained healing on the builder), and using tricks like Elemental Force on builder shots to have two healing spikes per rotation (Elemental Force builder shot and Transfuse Anima consumer shot).

Overhealing vs flexibility – the correct balances of attack and heal rating

As we just discussed, the hard-coded weighting of attack rating and heal rating in the leech skills determines the maximum healing per second. Tests indicate that these weights are 50% attack rating and 50% heal rating.

However, the correct balance between attack rating and heal rating is a controversial subject with opinions ranging from 60% heal rating right down to 33% heal rating, with the rest being put into attack rating.

Some people also favour going far towards attack rating (as much as 66% or even 75% of your stats in attack rating) due to the desire to avoid overhealing and contribute more DPS. The argument here is that more healing is useless if the tank is still standing, and thus DPS is the only way to increase your group contribution, even if it’s not the optimal theoretical highest healing.


So, what should you do?

Well, which AR/HR split is chosen is really a personal preference, as long as people understand a few points in favour of heal leeching, even in the face of overhealing concerns:

• First, the hard-coded weighting in the leech skills mean you absolutely will get the highest healing per second at 50% or even 55% heal rating (more heal rating if you’re accounting for pure heals like secondary Blood magic). This is the ‘safe’ route which is still capable of doing 1,000 to 1,500 DPS on a fight, while having the healing strength to quickly respond to tank mistakes.

• DPS healing (66% or more attack rating) is highly dependent on having strong multipliers in play at all times to overcome the loss of base healing. This means the exposed debuff coupled with high penetration rates. Penetrations count for a lot when multiplying DPS, so I would not lean to DPS healing unless your penetration is very high with Iron Maiden, and quite possibly the Elder Ashes raid drop... and a Signet of Breaching.

• While DPS healing will add substantial DPS to your personal build, the addition of another 600-800 DPS to the group may only shave a few seconds or so off a boss fight. 500,000 boss hitpoints divided by 800 DPS is about 6 seconds. A ‘heal focused’ leech healer is still quite capable of pulling newbie groups through Polaris with no blue phase on Ur Draug, for example, because the biggest DPS gains were from that 1,400 initial DPS and Deadly Aim group buff that any class of leech healer can give, Reaper or DPS-healer.

• Both options bring their benefits. While DPS healing brings additional DPS and avoids overhealing, heal-leeching brings additional flexibility in terms of higher heal weighted spells like Exquisite Corpse and the Quantum Brace. This flexibility can allow the reaper approach to handle more situations without gear swapping.

• It is glyph stats, not attack rating, that determines DPS, by and large. All the attack rating in the world won’t help you if you have bad stats. A Reaper can out-DPS a DPS leecher if the DPS leecher has bad stats. This usually comes down to the common mistakes of low hit and crit power. Even my early DPS healing attempts with 500 hit and 0 crit power could only hit 1,600 DPS. And not to boast, but now I have the Coney Island Band (+25% crit power), I generally destroy stuff, even with “low” attack rating.

• You can have flexibility. At the moment, I use a lean of about 66% attack rating, 33% heal rating for pretty much everything. However, I can also take more heal rating by drinking heal anima to put me close to 50/50, or an attack anima to put me at 75%/25%.

If you’re rich enough, you can achieve the same effect by creating one extra major talisman to swap in that will adjust attack rating up by 700 or so and heal rating down by the same amount.

In other words, you don’t have to choose between the two approaches. You can easily change your stats by using animas and gear, unless you’re the type of person who hates compromise.

How to glyph

You have about 2040 glyph stats at 10.4, plus 100 or so from an anima. The stats to aim for when going up to 10.4 level are: (in order)

1. 700 hit
2. 800 penetration
3. 360-400 crit power
4. 250-300 crit rating

This 10.4 setup is the best way to achieve these stats, using crit anima: http://i.imgur.com/TV32mWx.jpg

Because this setup uses crit anima, you can also experiment with lowering crit and raising other stats with other animas.

10.5 gear gives about 230 more glyph points, for a stat budget of about 2389 with crit anima. The important thing is to not overdo any one stat, but add slightly to the minimums. If we take values of 700 hit, 850 penetration, 400 crit power, and 400 crit, we get a total of 2350.



Hit

The most important stat, hit is used to avoid glances and evades. Not only does this make healing and DPS more stable, but also gives DPS improvements by letting you run Lethality and the Subway Tokens (if you have them).

The bare minimum hit to avoid glances is 650. However, this will also lead to DPS losses from evades, and will also not be enough hit in the higher instances like Slaughterhouse or Hell Eternal, even with Sharpshooter (you need 850 hit here).

This is why some additional hit up to 700 is useful, but too much hit will take away from other stats.


Penetration

Penetration makes healing more stable by removing blocks, as well as acting as a damage multiplier in itself. A penetrating critical will do over twice the damage of a normal critical, which makes penetration a good compliment to high crit power.

Penetration competes directly with the target’s block rating – the higher the block, the higher penetration you need. Dungeons with notably high block are Polaris, Hell Eternal, and Slaughterhouse. The raid has moderately high block. For all these instances, 800 penetration + Iron Maiden is enough to remove most blocks and have a good penetration rate.

Iron Maiden in itself will not make up for low penetration, as you first need to beat enough of the target’s block rating with straight penetration rating. For example, if you only have 500 penetration, Iron Maiden will not help you in Hell Eternal at all. However, 800 penetration with Iron Maiden will give good penetration rates.


Crit power

Crit power is a significant damage multiplier. Elemental Force lets you always critical hit a five-resource consumer, which is where your main damage comes from. Therefore, crit power is often just a straight multiplier of consumer damage.

At least 400 crit power is worthwhile in 10.4 gear. Anything less and your crits will hit for not much at all. In 10.5 gear, around 500 is preferable.


Crit rating

Crit rating is a luxury stat. After 700 hit, 800 penetration, and 350 power, you simply do not have many points left. If you need crit, the best place to get a lot of it is a crit rating anima, since these give 119 glyph points, and can be bought in the store for 10 cents each.

However, crit rating is valuable to activate signet effects, which means that 300 crit is still good, and if you have the high-end gear to support it, up to 450 is useful.

The three signets which activate on critical hits or heals worth using are a Signet of Laceration, Signet of Thirst, and Coney Island Band.

The Signet of Laceration procs off critical hits, but does not apply to the hit which triggers it. Therefore, the highest DPS gain from this signet is to proc it using a builder shot before Elemental Force, especially if your group fires Breaching Shot before your elemental force hit.

The Signet of Thirst gives your defensive target a 30% leech effect for 5 seconds every critical heal on a 15 second cooldown. A decent tank can do 1,000 DPS, so every 15 seconds you can add 300 healing per second without doing anything but crit on anima shot. This signet only activates off the green heal from anima shot, so cannot be triggered by Elemental Force.

The Coney Island Band gives you 25% more crit damage off a critical heal every 15 seconds, which locks it into the same cooldown as the Signet of Thirst. This is a huge DPS increase if you can manage to get this active in the first rotation of a fight. Therefore, once you have the Coney Island Band, your biggest DPS and healing gain comes from taking crit to 300.

If you have both the Coney Island Band and a Signet of Thirst, then every 15 seconds you can supercharge your healing with crit heals.

Signets

Once you have glyph stats sorted, the real increase in power comes from signets. Here we’ll go through what signets are the best for each slot, so you don’t waste pax.


Head Signets


Kingdom Signet

Available from the Ca’d’oro vendor in Egypt, and gives you a couple hundred extra hit rating. This is very useful for those in 10.0 gear without large glyph budgets, as it lets you put only 500 points in hit and the rest in penetration (very useful to end up at values of 700 hit and 800 penetration in blue gear). After 10.2 gear though, this signet isn’t worthwhile.


Thinis Signet

Also available from the Ca’d’oro vendor, this signet gives the unique effect of a 20% chance to build a secondary resource when using Anima Shot. This is a great endgame signet, as it provides very useful effects.

With blood magic, this is more damage by letting you fire more Bloodshots and doubling the value of Cannibalise (if you use Canniablise after building one resource you end up with 4 resources, which fuels two Bloodshots). With Blood Magic Exquisite Corpse, or Fists Creature Comfort, this also lets you use secondary heal consumers to smooth out healing.

This signet is so good that I have it in a 10.5.5 head. You can put this signet in the attack head from the Egypt vendor, not just the heal head.


Breaching Signet

If purple quality, gives everyone in the group +30% more damage a third of the time when you penetrate. This signet is powerful because every group needs one to do the best damage. If no one else is bringing one, a Breaching Signet on your head will be the best DPS and healing buff you can have.

However, this benefit is reduced by that if someone else has one, yours will probably not activate as much. Though, given the random chance to activate it, this can still be beneficial to smooth over gaps in activation times.

It’s also further reduced in value that the Breaching Signet is one of the best for an offhand blood magic focus, and so you might want to consider placing it there instead.

You do not want to use a Breaching Signet unless you have a purple quality one, since it’s possible a green or blue breaching will interfere with another purple breaching in the group, leading to less group DPS.


Abuse/Aggression Signets

These two signets give a random +damage multiplier, there isn’t much difference between them. At the purple quality level, they amount to roughly a 5% damage increase. This is useful, but the Thinis signet provides an equal benefit with more potential utility for far cheaper. Therefore, I would only use these signets if you are creating a cross-role piece that can be used for both leeching and DPS roles.


Ashes of Elder Things

This is a raid drop that gives you +25% more penetration rating. So if you have 800 penetration normally, you have 1,000 with this talisman. The benefits from this appear to come from when you don’t have many Astral Fuses, so have a lower stat budget.

Due to the way penetration competes with block, even going as little as 100 over the penetration rating needed to eliminate blocks can produce good results (the raid needs 900 penetration to remove blocks). However, when you start to get more glyph stats, you’re probably better off with one of the more unique effects that aren’t subject to diminishing returns.




Weapon Signets


Laceration signet

The laceration signet gives +18% to crit damage at the purple level. So if you have 400 crit power giving you +25% or so crit damage to have 50% crit damage, when the Laceration signet buff triggers you have 68% crit damage. Taking into account diminishing returns on crit power rating past 400, this makes a purple laceration signet equal to about 400 crit power in itself.

This signet is best placed on your rifle, since the trigger crit that activates the buff will not benefit from the buff, meaning you want to ideally trigger it with Anima Shot before Elemental Force. You also want to ensure you keep the signet even when you switch secondary weapons.


Breaching Signet

If you use a blood magic focus, a breaching signet is one of the best signets to use here. While it won’t have fantastic uptime, it is the only weapon signet without an absurdly long cooldown. For example, if you put an Aggression signet on the blood focus, then the cooldown of 10 seconds is longer than a normal rotation. Therefore, you’ll only have a chance every two rotations to activate Aggression.

This changes a bit with a true Rifle-Blood DPS build, as they fire enough bloodshots every rotation to give chances even every one in two rotations. But leech builds do not fire many bloodshots, which reduces the proc rates of Aggression dramatically.

Conversely, Breaching has a 33% chance of activating off any penetrating bloodshot, with no cooldown. This is especially useful when you spam bloodshot during breaching shot, since the more breaching signets that are thrown at something, the faster they will proc. Magis bombardis.

Since a Breaching Signet applies to the triggering penetration, it is a good way to get extra damage off Bloodshot, if nothing else.



Major Signets


Coney Island Band

The Coney Island Band is a raid drop (finger heal talisman) that gives you +25% crit damage on a critical heal. This works like the Laceration signet in all respects, so if you have 50% base crit damage, you now have 75%. Such a large amount of crit power makes this signet very powerful, and it is the best talisman you can have for leeching.

The critical heal trigger means a green critical heal. In a normal leech build, this only includes the green heal portion of Anima Shot, and sometimes the heals off Anima Vessel (if using that). It cannot be forced with Elemental Force, nor does it trigger off damage-to-health leeching effects like Transfuse Anima, Reap and Sew, or Leeching Frenzy.

This means that to use the Coney Island Band, you need some crit rating. The ideal crit rating to crit power ration with the Band is 3:4. So if you have a budget of 700, 300 in crit rating and 400 in crit power.


Egon Pendant

The Egon Pendant is a raid drop (neck attack talisman) that gives you 25% more crit rating. This is kindof useful if you have both the Coney Island Band and close to 400 crit rating, though can be interchangeable with a purple violence/amelioration signet.


Amelioration/Violence

These two signets add a small amount of heal rating or attack rating.

Which of these signets you take comes down to personal preference and gearing. I use a setup of two major heal talismans, so prefer to put Amelioration on the other heal talisman beside the Coney Island Band. Ameliorations are also a lot cheaper than Violence.

On the other hand, Violence will add to DPS more. However, I still prefer to not go below 1,500 heal rating, and anything over 3,000 attack rating is close to meaningless due to severe diminishing returns on high attack rating.



Minor Signets


Subway Tokens

These are a raid attack drop in the luck slot, and give a stacking 1%-10% damage increase every 6 seconds, which resets on glance. This effects all outgoing damage, and winds up to be a fairly significant DPS increase, increasing total DPS by up to 10% in practice.


Execution Signet

This is a +3% boost to rifle attacks. Due to the way leech healing is a multiplication of both attack and heal ratings, this also is +3% to healing done. The downside to this signet is it is the mot expensive minor signet, and only applies to rifle attacks. So in an endgame leech build with a third of the damage coming from Bloodshot, this will only add 2% total damage.


Hunger Signet

This is a 3% boost to leech effects. This will provide the same healing increase as an Execution Signet, but at a fraction of the cost. It also will buff group leech effects, like Reap and Sew and Anima Vessel. You will lose the +2% to damage from the Execution Signet, but that’s not much if you’d prefer to spend the exorbitant amount of pax Execution Signets cost on other more powerful signets, like Laceration.


Thirst Signet

At the purple level, this gives your defensive target a 30% leech effect for 5 seconds on a critical heal (not the 30% in the tooltip). This is very powerful, for if a tank is doing 1,000 DPS, they’ll receive a boost of 300 healing per second when this signet activates. If the tank is further buffed in the raid to do 2,000 DPS, they’ll receive 600 heal per second, which is enough to keep them up without you doing anything.

Because this is a very unique effect that isn’t really replaceable by simple +damage increases, I like to use a Signet of Thirst alongside a Signet of Execution.


Tomes Signet

This gives +3% to blood damage. In an endgame build, where 33% of your damage comes from Bloodshot, this is a small 1% damage increase. This isn’t much, except that Tomes are very cheap to buy, and if you’re already healing enough to not need Hunger Signets, they can serve as a replacement for Execution Signets until you can afford those.

Choosing active rifle skills


1. Pick a builder

The first step to making a leech build is to pick a builder – Anima Shot or Anima Burst. Anima Burst is generally the better builder at low gear levels. The burst effect tends to increase your critical penetration rates, which is good when you have low penetration chances.

In addition, passives like Healing Sparks and Donor work very well with Anima Burst at low gear levels, especially if you’re using a heal rating lean, which you generally should before you get purple gear.

However, for various reasons, Anima Shot tends to pull ahead in both DPS and healing once you start to get end-game gear.

These reasons tend to be a complex mix of the Exposed debuff, high hit and penetration ratings making more of your attacks hit (Anima Shot is very sensitive to miss rates), the multiplicative effects of passives, and the increased frequency of shots that let you get more shots out in buff phases (Anima Burst has up to a 1.3 second cast time, while Anima Shot is 1 second exactly).

It’s too complicated to explain briefly, but all testing I’ve done – whether this be dungeon runs, dummy test firing (both short and long tests), and even simple tooltip math put Anima Shot ahead of Anima Burst slightly for healing, and by as much as 200 DPS for damage.


Anima Shot also has some more practical advantages.

The first is its direct heal is more frequent due to the 1 second cast. Once you get a Coney Island Band drop from the raid, you’ll see a large boost in healing and DPS.

However, the Band effect only procs off pure heals, not leeching. Therefore, the faster you can squeeze off direct heals, the higher your uptime with this buff. The same mechanics apply to Veteran, in any situation you might use that. Anima Shot builds Veteran counters faster.

For what it’s worth, the Coney Island Band is one of the main reasons I advocate against using an attack builder rotation from an alternative builder like Hip Fire. If you’re not healing, you’re not getting a massive crit power multiplication.

The second reason in favour of Anima Shot is its heal comes instant, rather than at the end of a 1.3 second cast. This makes switching around group members in need of health much easier with Anima Shot. In heavy group damage fights like Machine Tyrant, Anima Shot is much easier to use as you can simply cycle through group members healing them, rather than relying on group heals.

The third is that Anima Shot gives you some of the highest mobility of any character in the game, with its full running speed and 20 meter range (and 40 meter healing range). This lets you drop the rocket launcher’s Death from Above for something more useful, like the Quantum to trigger the Coney Island Band.



2. Pick a consumer(s)

Rifle has up to five viable consumers to use. In general, you always want to take at least two.

Transfuse Anima is the tank healing consumer. This dramatically outscales any other healing consumer in the game, and a high-end leech healer can get 15,000-strong heals off this if the numbers all align (Breaching Shot giving a penetration on an Elemental Force crit with stacked crit power and self-buffed with Energise while doing a handstand).

The main weakness of Transfuse Anima is that it can also bounce in a glance or block if you have low hit or penetration ratings, or even if you hit but don’t get a penetration or crit (in which case it might heal for a piddly 2,000 even in top gear). However this can be worked around with the right combination of gear, passives, and utility skills.

Three Round Burst is useful to increase DPS and manage Elemental Force. Three Round Burst still does more damage than Transfuse Anima even when using the Experience passive. This makes it good for increasing DPS when you don't need the healing of Transfuse Anima. Three Round Burst also makes managing an Elemental Force rotation easier, as you'll always have a consumer off cooldown to use when Elemental Force lands.

Anima Vessel is good for group healing, as well as sustained tank healing if you don't quite need the heals of Transfuse Anima right now, but might need more healing over time. For everyone attacking the target for eight seconds after you hit with Anima Vessel receives a leech heal effect at your heal rate, passive bonuses, and extra bonus if the target is afflicted.

This means that a top leech healer with hunger signets can give everyone in a group an almost constant 20% leech return rate. This is extremely powerful, and can completely heal through many group healing situations, even the reflect shields in Hell Eternal. Also useful for the raid because it will heal two tanks at once, and even DPS outside your group.

Shot of Anima does not scale too well with the low heal rating of leech builds, but is very useful with the passive Increased Dosage for healing when damage reduction shields are in play. Hell Eternal 4 can be healed just with Shot of Anima, mostly, meaning you won't have to change to a fist spec to get through this fight.

Anima Outbreak with the Outbreak Alert passive is amazing for Hell Raised. By giving the whole team a dependable major hit chance buff, you can increase group DPS substantially by even letting them run Lethality.



3. Pick rifle utility skills


Lock and Load works well as a general utility because it has a low cooldown, meaning it can be fired off whenever just to increase sustained DPS by 50-100 points. It can also be used to increase burst healing inside group buffs, and time Transfuse Anima shots to Elemental Force.

Lock and Load also doesn’t take any global cooldown, which means you can hit it without wasting a second to buff up. The ubiquity of its uses means it’s usually worth putting on your bar, just ‘cause you can rely on using it whenever.

Energise is a massive buff available once every minute. For ten seconds, you get both +40% damage and leeching, giving you a base healing buff of +80%. If you then combine this with multiplicative buffs such as Deadly Aim and Breaching Shot, and use a crit power kickback gadget, you’ll possibly out-do even DPS players during a group buffing phase.

You should always take Energise. It's too powerful to ignore.

Where it Hurts hinders an afflicted target, and you can afflict with Anticoagulant. Interestingly, Where it Hurts interrupts some bosses as an impair, most notably Dr Klein. This means, for example, you can safely impair Klein on Ankh 6 from across the room, so the tank doesn't have to risk teleporting past the Wave of Mutation. And because of the short cooldown, you can impair Klein on both sides.

Platoon is a small group heal, used best with around 50% heal rating. It gives you an easy way to quickly heal all DPS at once, which can be useful in some fights in Hell Risen, for example. Platoon's healing on other people (not yourself) regardless of whether they're at full health or not, can also trigger the Coney Island Band buff, which gives it a high chance of proccing this as you have a separate chance to crit on four people.

Tactical Retreat is a backwards dash, which can make it a decent replacement for rocket jump where you might need it (such as the raid), but want to the Quantum for out of combat healing (again, the raid).

Suppressing Fire is the basic rifle AoE skill and it can be useful in situations where you need to help gun down adds. If you want to ensure the tank stays healed, throw in Anima Vessel occasionally. Suppressing Fire will (for some reason) spread the leech effect to every add hit, so the tank will be leeching off every add they hit. This makes Suppressing Fire + Anima Vessel better than Reap and Sew for most add-heavy healing due to its 10 second cooldown (instead of a minute).

4. Pick the elite

There are eleven elite skills worth using—Reap and Sew, Do or Die, Re-Animator, Cold Blooded, Clean Up, Fired Up, Pistol Love, Born Leader, Red Mist, and Shellshocker/Slow the Advance.


Reap and Sew

Reap and Sew gives everyone in the group a unique transfer leech effect, meaning that any damage you do is converted into healing put onto your defensive target. Regardless of who cast the Reap and Sew, this transfer rate is always determined at the individual group member’s heal rating and passives.

So if a DPS or a rifle healer (it doesn’t matter) casts Reap and Sew, then your heal rating plus buffs like Experience and Eagle Eye can give you a 150%-200% transfer leech rate, which then gets added on top of your existing leech rate. So the 15,000 Transfuse Anima would heal for another 25,000 or so again.

Or you can do tricks like hit Reap and Sew and then do large AoE damage with skills like Suppressing Fire or the Chainsaw Hurly Burly, and dramatically drive up your healing.

On that note, the easiest way for a rifle healer to handle add rush fights like in Darkness War 2 is to just get the tank to pull the whole lot, hit Reap and Sew, and then gun everything down. As long as the DPS keep themselves all targeted they’ll be able to heal tank any adds that break through the tank’s threat.

Which brings us too... many people believe DPS have to be targeting the tank to make Reap and Sew effective. While this does increase the healing done under Reap and Sew, it is ultimately not needed.

A rifle healer doing 1,000 DPS at a 200% leech rate will do an extra 3,000 healing per second under Reap and Sew. A DPS with no heal rating doing 3,000 DPS at a 35% leech rate will be doing 1,000 or so healing under Reap and Sew (and that’s a top-end DPS). A single, average rifle healer will do more than enough healing under Reap and Sew by themselves to handle any tank damage, and it is often better for DPS to keep themselves targeted for group heals.



Do or Die

Do or Die is a baby Energise. It gives an extra 25% to both damage and leech rates, for an increase of 50% extra healing, for ten seconds out of every minute. Do or Die and Reap and Sew have the same 60 second cooldown, so Do or Die is really limited to just giving a bit of extra DPS. Reap and Sew provides dramatically better healing and so should be taken in most circumstances. Do or Die's only real advantage is that it does not use a global cooldown, so it can be used at the same time as skills kile Deadly Aim and Energise.



Re-Animator

Generally poor for most situations, Re-Animator’s a curious skill that doesn’t really scale well with heal rating and is out-performed by other healing elites with similar cooldowns such as Cold Blooded.

However, Re-Animator is useful for a grand total of one fight in the game – which is the fourth boss of Hell Eternal. This boss gets a 90% damage reduction shield, making most leech skills useless a lot of the time. Re-Animator can provide a decent healing boost when the shield is up. This makes it worth having for Hell Eternal master planner runs, but otherwise don’t bother with it.



Cold Blooded

Cold Blooded is a very powerful group and tank heal (even better than Re-Animator for tank healing) that both heals and barriers at the same time. It’s very useful for fights where you need to quickly shield the entire group from damage, or for when the tank is out of combat, out of line of sight, and you need to heal them quickly (like Machine Tyrant, or in the raid).



Clean Up

Clean Up is a shotgun cleanse and purge all in one. It's well worth taking for situations where you need to cleanse nasty afflictions (every boss in Hell Risen), or clean crowd control from the group (Polaris 5, Hell Eternal 1). The good news is that unlike a fist healer, you have a non-elite group heal in Platoon, so don't lose much by slotting this.



Fired Up

The fist secondary weapon version of Cold Blooded. Has a shorter cooldown, but heals for far less. Not really worth it as a general elite due to not having Empowerment in a leeching build, but you can get some use out of it in Hell Risen where frequent group heals are useful, and where you might be using fist as a secondary weapon due to other skills like Pack Leader and Reckless.



Pistol Love

Pistol Love removes afflictions from your defensive target once every 30 seconds. This can be useful if you need to remove afflictions, obviously, in fights where these are the main incoming damage on the tank. Also deploys a heal over time for 15 seconds due to the weird way in which the pistol weapon skill Ingenuity works.



Born Leader

Born Leader is a pistol skill on a short cooldown of 20 seconds, and for 5 seconds heals everyone in the area, damages targets, and applies five stacks of the corrupted debuff. While this skill is often overlooked or derided, it's actually rather useful for countering damage reflect shields.

If you spam it when available against Eblis in Hell Eternal, he'll stay at 8-10 corrupted stacks the entire fight, which reduces his reflect shield damage on the DPS in half. In addition, if he gets a shield during his 'cast out' phase when DPS are all standing together, the area heal will offset any reflect damage put back on them.

Born Leader can also be useful as a low cooldown AoE heal for fights like Polaris 3 or Hell Risen 1 where DPS will be stacked on you and you need to heal them at regular intervals.

Also useful to heal yourself while helping to fight off little adds in Polaris 5 and is the only decent out of combat heal pistol gets. Plus it has a good looking skill icon and makes your hotbar prettier.



Shellshocker/Slow the Advance

The skills are hinders. In some fights, hindering adds is more important to avoiding a wipe than healing the tank, notably Ankh 5. I personally prefer Shellshocker over Slow the Advance because its hinder is easier to target and potentially lasts longer if it gets refreshed by subsequent hits in the channel effect.


Red Mist

When you use Veteran at Machine Tyrant, you simply don't need an active elite heal. Red Mist lets you do a lot more damage in this fight, while Veteran will keep everyone healed just fine.

Time Red Mist to Elemental Force for some really big hits. You'll need about 800 hit (700 on gear + a hit anima) to give some reliability to Elemental Force, as it won't advance counters if you glance.

Choosing a secondary weapon

There are five decent secondary weapons to choose from for leech healing—blood (best), pistol (good), fist (okayish), shotgun (good), and elementalism (okay).


Blood

Blood brings both strong extra healing and strong added DPS, making it one of the better secondary weapons (and my preferred one). All blood consumers can be cast with your own health once every 6 seconds. This means that you can, for example, cast Bloodshot after every 5 x Anima Shot, 1 x Transfuse Anima rotation, with no downtime, to increase sustained DPS.

This tends to be more group DPS than simply carrying around a group buff from pistol or shotgun, because a group buff cannot outdo the ability to reliably use a second consumer (DPS using Pistol Shotgun for two group buffs and refusing to cast their shotgun consumer would really suck, for example - you need the hitting power to exploit buffs).

If doing this, you can also fit a Signet of Aggression to your blood book to give your rifle skills a random damage boost.

Blood also gives offhealing from Exquisite Corpse, The Scarlet Arts, and Cold Blooded.

Exquisite Corpse will stop up to 50% of the total amount an incoming attack, making it great for fending off huge individual hits. Even the raid boss's instant kill attack for ten million can be reduced to five million. This is very useful as a low-resource cost barrier when applied directly after transfuse anima to fend off the next big hit while you build up resources again.

The Scarlet Arts can provide a long-lasting barrier, which is good for situations such as in the raid when the tank is running back from phase 1 with damage stacks still on.

Cold blooded, as mentioned earlier, can serve as an excellent heal for when you are not in range for leech healing. It appears to have a range longer than 20 meters, and ignores line of sight.

The ability to sacrifice health also allows you to chain cast many Blood spells in a row if using ambrosia (which gives 5 blood resources every two minutes). So you can first build 5 blood resources, then cast one Scarlet Arts. Then cast another Scarlet Arts with your health, and drink ambrosia to cast another Scarlet Arts again. In a few seconds you’ll then be able to cast yet another The Scarlet Arts from health. That’s four chained strength 5 heal consumers from just building 5 resources at first.

Alternatively, you can do this during a burn phase. Hit Bloodshot just as someone activates Short Fuse to give you blood offering, then use Ambrosia to give 5 resources. Cast two Bloodshots, then use Cannibalise for another two.

Blood also benefits immensely from the Signet of Thinis from the 1.6 quest chain, and combining this with Cannibalise. When you get one blood resource, use Cannibalise to take it to four, which is two extra Bloodshots or Exquisite Corpses. This large flexibility with resources is blood's main strength.

The only downside to all this is you’ll need to switch back to healing yourself every so often.


Pistol

Pistol is a good secondary healing weapons due to its Deadly Aim buff, which works well with a lean to crit power. Once you get to 100% crit damage, Deadly Aim makes burst healing a breeze, especially if at least one DPS is bringing one too.

Supported by a crit power kickback to bring even more power, twenty seconds of Deadly Aim at 120% crit damage makes even high sustained heal checks like Ankh 3 into point and shoot somewhere-in-the-general-direction-of-the-fight affairs. However, even at 'only' 80% crit power modifier (laceration signet, brawler, and 400 crit power), this is still highly effective.

Alternatively, you can also support this with a crit stimulant and crit kickback to act as a ghetto Deadly Aim used after the initial two Deadly Aims. This is 40 sustained seconds of more power (very handy for Ankh 3, for example).

Pistol also brings effective heal buffing skills such as Backup Drone and The Greater Good. These are leech rate multiplies that simply multiply the final leech rate, which makes them very strong. Another benefit to keeping Backup Drone around is it deploys another heal over time to trigger the Coney Island Band.

The third major benefit to pistol is that none of its major skills you’ll use rely on the pistol’s weapon power, so you could feasibly run around with the QL0 pistols from the training dummy area while solo healing the raid, just to be cool like that. Otherwise, it saves bullions if you only have to upgrade one custom weapon.

Marked is also a good source of spot-corrupted stacking for bosses with reflect shields, like Eblis.

And finally, as mentioned earlier, pistol gets two useful elites of Pistol Love and Born Leader.

Pistol’s main weakness is the lack of an out of combat heal other than Born Leader, but that has been somewhat mitigated by the Quantum Brace. Overall, when you take the Quantum, pistol is a strong sidearm.


Shotgun

Shotgun provides the combination of Breaching Shot, Flak Jacket, and Cleanup.

For pure damage and healing per second, pistol is often better due to Deadly Aim building on large amounts of critical power. Once you get up to 80% crit damage, a single one of your crits is better than a crit-pen of someone with no crit power.

Shotgun is very good, however, in Hell Risen. If you just have 2910 health from a health anima, a penetrating macroshock will kill you. However, if you hit Flak Jacket whenever the succubus looks at you, you'll be safe. Plus, there's Cleanup, which is always good to have through the whole dungeon.

Flak Jacket's uniqueness as a damage prevention ability also makes shotgun well worth considering for a number of fights, including all 18s.

Shotgun attack builder combinations like Striker + Defensive Turret are not recommended due to the number of active skill slots this takes up.


Fists

Fists bring some of the strongest out of combat healing around, as well as Reckless. Reckless is a fist buff on a 40 second cooldown that will add +20% to both damage and leech rates, for a total of +40% healing, for 10 seconds. Combined with Do or Die which is also for 10 seconds every 40 seconds, this can lead to having a good sustained damage buff for half the total fight time.

Fists also bring the warmth skill, which is any time you use a fist healing skill, your defensive target will receive extra leech healing for the next few seconds. Thus it can be worth using a fist builder a few times to help ‘power up’ a Transfuse Anima if you want to save Transfuse Anima in anticipation of a large hit.

The third benefit to fists is the easy group healing from Shelter. The Quantum does reduce this benefit somewhat, but it’s still there.

Fists also give Pack Leader, which is a glance-reduction group buff. This is useful in Hell Risen if timed with other group buffs, to ensure the group does not miss penetrating and critical hits. In most other situations, however, Pack Leader is not very helpful.

Finally, fists give very decent out of combat healing from Cauterize and Surgical Steel, if needed. Again, the Quantum has reduced the value of this, but in some fights with damage reduction or reflection shields, a few fist heals are very good to have.


Elementalism

Elementalism is an... interesting choice, as it provides almost no massive healing increase alone. Its strength is its manifestations, which can give you the Fury buff (+7% additive damage) if you tab target back to yourself occasionally while they’re up.

As such, Elementalism is perhaps the only secondary weapon that can really benefit from using an attack builder occasionally to power secondary consumers. The main downside to this approach is you use up many spots, even prohibiting the use of Lock and Load, and in a direct departure from many DPS-healers (this is the Reaper thread, dammit) I do question whether it’s even worth it.

Lock and Load will add 50-100 sustained DPS by itself in a Reaper build. You then need to be healing constantly to add the huge 25% crit damage buff from the Coney Island Band, which is even more DPS, so have little time for banging away with attack builders. And if you're not so mega-geared, you will need to be healing constantly to keep the tank alive anyway. It’s very gear dependent of course, but I just can’t get an Elementalism DPS-heal build to give me any real advantages.

The only real benefit I can see from Elementalism is that it has very good purges, and that can be important in Darkness War if you're not fully geared. You could, however, just ask a DPS to purge.