All-Round One-Bar PVP Healer For Beginners (With Subclassing!) - Templer Baue - ESO

Just a disclaimer in advance: I have a fully up-to-date two-bar set-up that is much higher in potential than this build. Go check that instead if you have no issues playing with 2 bars.

This build is intended for people who, for any reason, choose to play with one bar. So this build is for you if…

• you are a complete beginner at PVP and you want something that quickly allows you to be effective as a healer in Battlegrounds or Cyrodiil.
• you want to learn the principles of high-end PVP healing in an accessible way.
• you wish to play with one bar either out of gameplay preference, a condition or anything that renders you unable or unwilling to play with a two-bar set-up.
• you're just looking for a relatively comfortable way to get your daily Battleground out of the way, or to join some friends in Cyrodiil casually.
• you want a build with gear that is relatively easy to obtain, and without scribing skills or monster sets.

This build is NOT for you if…

• you want to reach your maximum potential as a healer.
• you have the ambition to (eventually) join smallscales, ballgroups or other organized PVP environments.

I have to get this out of the way because many content creators are dishonest about their one-bar builds and will call them ‘OP’ or whatever. One-bar set-ups cannot compete with two-bar set-ups at the end of the day. Realize that barswapping is a learned skill; I went from barswapping literally once a week to doing it every 4 seconds on average.

Still, I wanted to make this one-bar build for two reasons: First, a one-bar build is a viable option for people who want to play more casually or are unable to manage 10 skills. Second, many of the one-bar builds out there don't just cut out barswapping; they fail to teach you really anything about high-end healing since they only revolve around a single gimmick (such as spamming Negates or Practiced Incantation, or being max health tanks).

So this build will, beyond the one-bar feature, offer you a fairly balanced healing experience that will teach you how to manage your resources and your mobility in a low stakes manner. The idea behind this is that, if you do at one point want to switch to a more high-end build, the step will be much smaller than when you've spent months getting used to a one-dimensional gimmick build.

Skill trees & skills

So first, let's start with the subclassing.

Our first skill line is Siphoning (Nightblade). It gives us access to some useful passives that help generate ultimate, and we will be using two skills from this line. The first is Siphoning Attacks. I've added this skill because it is a relatively easy way to get back resources. This makes it so that you can more liberally spam your skills without worrying too much about running out of juice mid-fight. The second skill we'll be using from this tree is Soul Siphon. It's a powerful ultimate that does a big burst of healing when it's cast, and then continues to heal for 4 more seconds while also increasing the targets' healing taken. It has a large radius and it is more effective at preventing group deaths than Practiced Incantation.

Our second skill line is Restoring Light (Templar). This skill allows us to run the Ritual of Rebirth healing spammable, which is cast in a radius around you. This makes it significantly easier to use for beginning players than something like Blessing of Restoration, which is cast in a cone in front of the player and thus has to be aimed. If you are playing 4v4 Battlegrounds, you can also opt for the Breath of Life or Honor the Dead skills instead.

Our third skill line is Green Balance (Warden). This gives us Leeching Vines, giving us some extra protection through passive healing, as well as proccing the Minor Toughness buff. Minor Toughness means our health gets increased, making us even more survivable.

You can also slot in other skill trees, such as Storm Calling or Living Death, but I deem those less essential to run on this build.

Remember that your base class does not matter as long as it is one of the classes whose skill lines we use.

We also use a few non-class skills. The first one being actually very important to this build, namely Race Against Time (from the Psijic Skill line). This skill does not only make us more speedy and thus mobile; it also procs one of our sets, Wretched Vitality, which I'll get to in a bit. It also removes snares, which is very important since it allows you to keep your mobility. If you get snared (soft CC'd), instead of dodge-rolling and spending precious stamina, just cast this skill to break out of it.

We are also using Echoing Vigor (from the Assault skill line). It's the most solid heal-over-time available to us, so you can use this to make your allies a little tougher and learn how to keep good uptimes in case you ever want to switch to a more buff/HoT-based build.

So that's pretty much it: use Race Against time to proc Wretched Vitality while in combat and make sure to refresh it every 15 seconds; use Echoing Vigor every 15 seconds to give your team a heal-over-time; use Leeching Vines to proc Minor Toughness; use Ritual of Rebirth as your main burst heal; use Soul Siphon as your healing ultimate for big moments, and finally use Siphoning Attacks to add some juice to your resource pools while you're on a potion cooldown.

Sets

We'll be using a few things for this build.

Oakensoul Ring is pretty much inevitable since this is a one-bar build. One major advantage it does give you is that you already have a bunch of buffs that you don't need to track or slot skills to access, making this build quite low maintenance and simple to play.

Wretched Vitality is a versatile set that will give you a ton of sustain. It can easily be procced while in combat by using the Race Against Time skill. It's a craftable set, so you can make it in any weight you want. More on that later.

Robes of Transmutation is a set that gives allies (and yourself) crit resistance when you heal them. So look at it as a defensive buff set. You can also run something like Gossamer here for Major Evasion, which is actually a buff that is not granted by Oakensoul and not available to us in any other way with our current set-up.

A heavy Trainee chest is fit onto the remaining spot, meaning a little more health for us.

Traits, weights, food, Mundus, etc.

As said, Wretched Vitality is a craftable set, so we actually have a large degree of freedom in deciding the balance of the armor weights. My sweetspot for Battlegrounds is 3 heavy, 3 medium, 1 light. Feel free to change this based according to your preference. Basically: heavy = more tanky; medium = more healing; light = more magicka sustain.

Armor traits are mostly Impenetrable. The Trainee chest should be Reinforced, and you can also make one of the other heavy pieces Reinforced instead of Impenetrable. The results are pretty similar in the end so don't stress too much over it. Enchantments are tri-stat (prismatic) glyphs.

For your jewelry, we're going for one piece of Infused, and two pieces Swift. The Infused jewelry should have a magicka cost reduction glyph, and the Swift ones should have increase magical harm enchantments. If you struggle with sustain, add more cost reduction or magicka recovery glyphs.

Your only weapon is a Restoration staff, which should be Powered and carry a weapon/spell damage enchantment.

Use tri-stat potions, with either Orzorga's Smoked Bear Haunch (expensive) or Jewels of Misrule (cheap) as your buff food.

Our Mundus blessing is The Ritual. Use The Atronach if you need more sustain.

This build can be played with any race. Breton is the most convenient since it has innate sustain and is the evergreen choice for healing builds. Argonians, Dark Elves, High Elves, Imperials and Nords are also fine. The remaining races can work fine but don't add much to the build through their passives. You can compensate by changing attributes, jewelry enchantments or your Mundus. So if you want to be a Redguard healer, just go for it! 

Don't use vampirism.

In case you play in Cyrodiil, I have included the relevant Champion Points in that section. For Battlegrounds, these are irrelevant.

FAQ

Here are some questions you might have as these topics often come up in healing communities.

Q: Why don't you use a tank set?
A: We can add enough base survivability through other means: weights, enchantments, attributes and relevant buffs. The thing that, in my experience, kills healers more than a lack of tankiness is a lack of sustain. So with Wretched Vitality, we can add a ton of sustain without forgetting about tankiness. Yes, it is possible to make this build more tanky, but it would also be less useful in helping anyone who isn't you. I also avoid tank sets out of principle because I have noticed that these often do little but teach their users bad habits because they crutch on their initial survivability and don't learn the importance of remaining mobile.

Q: Why don't you go all-in on ulti generation builds? Those get crazy numbers!
A: As with tanky builds, ultimate generation builds are one-dimensional and don't truly teach you anything about healing effectively, as your performance essentially hinges on pressing a single button. What I often see is that healers who rely on an ultimate (it's always Practiced Incantation) may get high healing numbers, but they're still less effective at actually keeping people alive since between those ultimates they lack the tools (and sometimes skill) to heal effectively. Even if you'd have 0 downtime on your ultimate, there is always a risk that your cast will be Negated and that you're toothless until the next ultimate hits. These builds can be fun as an easy way to farm Battleground medal score if you're into that, but again they do not teach you anything worthwhile and they lose their effectiveness outside of Battlegrounds and some zergy battles (where they'd get outperformed by a proper healing build anyway). If you want to become decent at healing, you need to learn how to become mobile, learn how to prioritize skills, and learn to time your ultimates rather than using them on cooldown. My build will teach you all of those things in an accessible way.

Q: Where can I use this build?
A: Any casual PVP environment. So non-sweaty Battlegrounds, and unorganized PVP in Cyrodiil.

Q: Why don't you use Scribing skills? Can I add those?
A: You can certainly add scribing skills to this build. The reason I didn't add them is because I wanted to make this build as simple as possible without requiring newer players weeks to set up. Doing a few Psijic quests and grinding out Oakensoul are unfortunately required to make this build work, but the other items and skills are fairly easy to obtain, so you should be able to put it together from scratch relatively quick. Sadly, we do have to use subclassing, which may mean a bit of grindiness to newer players, but this is the meta we live in and not benefiting from subclassing is just a major self-nerf that I couldn't in good consciousness recommend to newer players.

For any other questions, find me on discord (name's the same as here) or over at Healers Haven.