Hello Travelers, and welcome to day three of the pre-patch blog posts!
Healing Hands is a skill which has existed in the Paladin tree for quite some time, without being able to be specialized. There’s various reasons we waited to create a tree for this skill, one of the bigger reasons being that we wanted this type of skill to be able to support nodes which help cooperation with other players.
With our release of Last Epoch on February 21st, Healing Hands will finally be getting its long awaited skill tree. While Healing Hands at its core offers a large amount of support, focusing on healing, one should remember that the Paladin is not a back-line player. Healing to a Paladin means more than mending wounds, but also healing the world of its evils. As such, Healing Hands offers a great deal of customization for offensive ability as well, including multiple ways to make it a directly damaging ability.
Healing Hands
As a baseline, Healing hands is an ability which casts a medium sized area of effect which heals all allies, including yourself for an immediate burst, and applies a heal over time for three seconds.
Both heals from the ability scale with Increased Healing Effectiveness, as well as the nodes on the skill tree. This grants Healing Hands not only strong immediate recovery, but also provide a fairly strong heal over time to help keep yourself and allies nice and healthy. As a Paladin, Healing Hands can offer very strong competition to even Life Leech as a source of health sustain, in addition to its specialization options.
Cleric’s Hammer
Cleric’s Hammer grants Healing Hands a chance to trigger on any melee attack, up to a 100% chance with the full four points assigned. This imbues all melee attacks to provide healing to all allies and yourself in the area. When combined with other options on the tree, this can also effectively convert any melee attack into an offensive spell melee attack, synergizing well with many of the Paladin’s hybrid melee and spell abilities.
Hand of Aurelus
More favorable towards ranged damage? Hand of Aurelus allows Healing Hands to instead synergize with direct Smite casts, adding its own healing area to smites. Combined with Searing Light, adding Damage to Healing Hands’ area of effect, Healing Hands can further augment Smite builds with the additional hit damage.
Divine Bolt
Healing Hands also adds support for Divine Bolts. By picking up the Divine Catalyst node, you will cast a number of Divine Bolts with every direct use of Healing Hands. Further, with just one point in this node, all sources of Divine Bolt will scale with the nodes in the Healing Hands tree.
Rahyeh’s Chariot
Healing Hands can also be converted to a Traversal ability, charging to a target location casting Healing Hands upon arrival. This adds a 6 second cooldown to Healing Hands, however, unlike Lunge, Rahyeh’s Chariot does not require a target to move to.
Seraph Blade
Prefer to channel your healing powers through your blade? Taking this node will convert Healing Hands into a Melee Attack. converting Spell Damage from the tree into Melee Damage. A heavy hitting melee attack which also provides strong healing, Seraph Blade embodies the strongest aspects of the Paladin Mastery.
Unbroken Prayer + Skyfall
Who doesn’t like a good Sky Beam? By assigning Unbroken Prayer, converting Healing Hands into a channeled ability, you can further specialize it into Skyfall. By paying an additional mana cost each second, you will deal additional fire damage over time while channeling Healing Hands, scorching clear a path of righteousness.
Closing
Thank you for again joining us today in this coverage of the Paladin’s Healing Hands skill tree. Offering potential as both a support ability, a damaging ability, triggers, or direct casting, Healing Hands offers the Paladin a number of new ways to build. Healing Hands still remains available at 5 points invested into the Paladin Tree, meaning you can also pick up Healing Hands as either a Forge Guard or Void Knight should you theory-craft such a use.
Tomorrow we’ll be recapping the coverage of Item Factions, Falconer, and Warlock for all the Travelers just recently joining us, or who may have missed the previous information releases. Then on Sunday we’ll be covering some of the new Item bases, Item Affixes, and Unique Items coming with the release of Last Epoch on February 21st!