City of Heroes/Powers/Empathy

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[edit] 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Healing Aura

Power Stats

Use: Click
Targeting: None/Self
Range: Area (radius 25')
Affected: Self, nearby friendly
Activation time: 2 seconds
Endurance cost: 13
Recharge time: 8 seconds
Effect: Each is healed 13% (Defender) or 10.4% (Controller) of the user's base maximum HP.

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 targeted, it can be used as a knee-jerk power when a tea-mmate 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.

[edit] Heal Other

Power Stats

Use: Click
Targeting: Single friendly
Range: 80'
Affected: Target
Activation time: 2.3 seconds
Endurance cost: 13
Recharge time: 4 seconds
Effect: Target is healed 26% (Defender) or 20.8% (Controller) of the user's base maximum HP.

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.