Oof. Going to make AvA painful. Assist trains have a knack for finding healers with staves trying to hide.

I read many threads in beta saying the Resto Staff healing was perfectly fine by itself (along with possible class utility added). It is far more magicka efficient. Templar players using they class heals complained they were very expensive to use. I have no idea if they actually set up for magicka use or not though. I think we will see a ton of heavy armor users with weapons trying to heal complaining "I'm OOM!".

My first build will be a NB caster using Resto Staff so will easily be able to train into a full healer. NB offers many hots to layer with Resto Staff. I am 100% confident it will be every bit an equal healer as a Templar.

We've seen gameplay video of a sorcerer equipped with a restoration staff heal for a dungeon and they had no problems. There wasn't actually a whole lot of healing going on.

At least on paper Templars seem to have an advantage in terms of speed. Thanks to passives they can pump out more healing in a short time than another profession using a resto staff.

They also have a significant advantage when it comes to resurrection. Templars have passives which can double the amount of health a target is ressed with, reduce resurrection cast time by 40% and refund a soul gem (presumably empty). There's another passive available to anyone which reduces resurrection cast time by 50%. Combine with the Templar one and it means Templars will do it at least 5 times faster than anyone else.

There is no need to have more than one skill bar for support. You can easily have another weapon to "trick" others or simply have an offensive bar and blow them up anyway. My primary build will likely use just Resto Staff(s) with 2 bars of magicka based abilities. The offensive bar skills will be morphed to add healing anyway but is more than capable of killing things. It will be extremely hard to know who is healing or who is using a Staff offensively. You can still use a Resto Staff offensively. The main concern is how much you use the heavy attack which is very easy to notice.

I am certain too. I just want to mix both healing lines for RP purposes on a specific character. And see how well I work it.

Re: the rp angle, templar might be better, since you can heal while equipping a bow like Rosa.

There's no guarantee that the guy with a Resto staff is actually a healer, and assuming so can be a painful mistake.

Nothing stops a healer from having a melee weapon with skilled-up abilities on his weapon swap, either...

Yep, anyone can pick up a healing staff and become quite effective at healing. I played a Nightblade healer during the beta, and it was my favorite class so far. The experience was sort of like a blood mage, as most night blade abilities use magicka, and siphoning skill morphs can heal your allies.

Right. Exactly what I was thinking. But I wanted resto staff first, then bow as my swap.
Anyone have any recommendation on race?

Very true and I'm not even going to try to argue your point, but for me it just wasn't enough to really justify having a resto staff.

Force Siphon, for example does the following (I'm assuming you mean its morph version since you're talking about the magicka you get back): Siphon Spirit: Nearby allies gain health and 1% magicka, player gains 100% additional health when attacking target for 20 seconds.

Whereas with what you can get with something like Restoring Spirit passive: get 2% magicka for just activating any ability (I believe, this any ability part may be wrong).

Even the Rush ceremony morph, Honor the Dead has some ways to save magicka: Restore magicka when healing low health allies. So there are certainly ways you can save magicka without having a resto staff

As far as damage migitation there's things like Rune focus (which, by the way can also give you magicka if you take the Channeled focus morph), Light Weaver, and of course the ultimate in the Restoring Light Tree, Rite of Passage.

So yeah Resto staff may offer some passive that could work with resto staff but they don't seem to be something that is needed since the Templar Tree alone can do pretty much the same thing without the staff, if not a bit better depending on the situation. I just think that ultimately those points you put in resto staff would serve better somewhere else. But yeah, to each his own, it didn't work out for me to have resto staff as a Templar, but doesn't mean it could not work well for someone else.

Argonian has some racial skills related to resto staff

Preferably human or mer. Argonian doesnt really fit into the backstory im creating.

Oh yeah, for RP purposes. Hm, probably Breton is your best bet then.

That's what I had originally planned, two-handed or sword and shield primary with resto staff secondary with my heal skills on there. That was when I was trusting the skill calculator so I thought I had a reasonable mix of stamina and magicka abilities. Now that it appears I'll be magicka starved half the time , it's going to be necessary to rethink. A DK with staff secondary is starting to sound more viable as a healer just because of crowd control and survivability skills.

Or Altmer maybe? Will probably go with Breton though. It'll be DC either way.

To see what it was like, I went full Templar Healer with Resto Staff and all my skill points into Magicka in the last Beta. I got to level 18 and did a couple of dungeons with guild members.

Firstly, having all 5 skills plus the Ultimate as healing skills is a complete overkill. I know, I tried it to see what it would be like.

I found myself using pretty much two skills Restoring aura morphed into Repentance from the Restoring Light Templar path (Magicka cost) and Regeneration morphed into Rapid regeneration from the Resto Staff line. With these two 'hots', I managed to heal Spindleclutch pretty effectively and although we had a few deaths at the beginning, that was more to do with everyone being there for the first time and getting to grips with how grouping works in TESO.

My gear had +Magicka regen and +max Magicka on it but I overcharged both of those (far too easily, in my opinion but that's a story for another thread), so I swapped out some armour for some other gear to bring myself under the soft caps. The issue we had at the beginning is that some of the spells have immense healing ability but svck Magicka away like it's thin air. Of course this means that I gimped myself somewhat by not having much in the way of DPS abilities, although by half way through the dungeon, I had worked out my 'go to' healing spells and my emergency healing abilities and had swapped out the others for damaging abilities instead.

Beig over level 15, I had a Frost Staff as my weapon switch and had a different set of DPS abilities on that bar.

All in all it worked pretty well and i'm planning a build based round that for when the game goes live.

Like all the racial weapon passives it only boosts weapon xp, i.e. the rate at which you level the skill line. Once maxed it will have no effect. I'd say the Argonian boost to healing received has more benefit, assuming you make judicious use of Equilibrium.

Otherwise I think many would say High Elf or Breton for their increased magicka and magicka regen.

Woah there, that can't be true. What resto staff abilities were you using? All of the resto staff abilities definitely used magicka and not stamina when I was in the last beta.

Yeah, I agree. I forgot it was just xp related. The OP wanted something more RP related anyways.

As other said Altmer or Breton if planning on being a heavy magicka user. My only concern with Altmer is their one racial being about elemental effects which mostly apply with the use of a Desto Staff. If planning on using that staff too then go for it.

Yeah I didn't play with the staff much but I did check that it used magicka and it did.

I'd prefer it to use stamina but that'd be less realistic and kind of in pipe dream territory.

I stand corrected. I could have sworn they used Stamina instead of Magicka, although that might explain why my Magicka pool drained as fast it it did. ><

Going with resto staff first as a solo player it took me 10 hours to get out of the starter zones. I think I could have done them with a bow in 3 hours.

What powers did you use? I used a Resto Staff along with my Nightblade powers with light armor and killed normal mobs in 2-3 hits. Dps certainly wasn't an issue. The lack of aoe early on was but 2-3 at a time was still a joke. I had crazy fights with 4-5 even level mobs that got hairy but circle strafing goes a long way in this game and NB has a great early cc.

Starter zone speed though varies wildly. If someone is a completionist they will always take a long time no matter the build.

I'll add that the early levels were indeed slower due to the fact that class magicka based abilities are costly. I highly suggest throwing skill points into light armor passives asap. When pushing level 10 I really started to see the mage style NB build starting to mature. I absolutely love how the game allows you to spend skill points often and early even though you do not have much early access or even skill slots for powers. Other games are very boring until you finally start getting more powers far later on and even talent trees are often locked out until level 10. TESO is like having talent trees available at level 1.

I kept thinking TESO is sort of like a themepark game with heavy leanings toward sandbox. I am now almost thinking it may just be a near perfect themepark or shall I say, what a themepark should have been.

It didn't matter what I was holding. Veiled strike sneak attack followed up with any attack was enough to near instantly drop any of the starter zone enemies.