City of Heroes/Powers/Empathy

City of Heroes / Powers

General
The primary function of most defenders is buff/debuff. Empathy differs in that its powers specifically follow the suit of most "priest" classes in other MMOGs. It is a common misconception that Defenders are healers; in truth, although most have some form of healing, only Empathy defenders are devoted to repairing damage; other sets hope to prevent the damage in the first place. Because of its reactive nature, Empathy is very powerful on its own. However, more than one Empathy defender in a group is rather ineffectual; if a single Empathy defender can't keep the team alive, a second one will barely help at all. Empathy works very well with other buff/debuff sets, but is unique in that its benefit quickly tapers off the more Empathy heroes the team has. Empathy is a Defender primary set and a Controller secondary set. Like all secondary sets, it is 80% as powerful as a Controller secondary than it is as a Defender primary.

Empathy Powers
Below is the list of Empathy powers. Note that many of the numbers have been rounded off of their exact values for readability.

Healing Aura
This is a great all-purpose power which will serve a team well, especially in the early levels. This makes a good first choice for Defenders, as it allows you to heal yourself for the first few levels, when finding a team can be hard. Because it does not need to be specifically targetted, it can be used as a knee-jerk power when a teammate suddenly takes a lot of damage. For healing one person though (i.e. the team Tanker), it's not very efficient, and most Defenders will find that they need one of the single-target heals.

Heal Other
Although it can only heal one non-self target, Heal Other has a longer range than Healing Aura, as well as double the effectiveness and half the recharge time. This is the only single-target power in the game which focuses all its energy on healing (with no other beneficial side effects), and as such, it's quite powerful. Note that healing a large team after an AoE attack is a slow and endurance-expensive process, so this doesn't replace Healing Aura by any means; however, it's perfect at what it does. Indispensable when a single Tanker is absorbing all of the damage for the team.

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