Dantia/Logs/20200514 Log

Another form of triage is what I call front line or battle line triage. This means that the Empaths join with the fighting party and move room to room with them, healing as needed. Obviously this puts you in a fair amount of danger, and your enemies will have no qualms about advancing on you or lobbing arrows and bolts your way. So only those who have trained their offensive skills decently should consider this type of work.

It's also incredibly important to remember that the smarter your enemy, the more likely they are to pick you out of the group as the Empath and want to target you. So battle line triage is certainly not for the faint of heart.

There may be some of you now thinking you could join the front line and also fight! Could you? Possibly. Should you? No. Your job as a front line triage Empath is to keep yourself alive first and foremost, and those around you second. Time spent fighting is time spent neglecting your main duty, healing.

Battle line triage will be very hectic and noisy, and most of the time you probably won't have a great pulse on what is happening on the battlefield. You will need to learn to trust your fighting party leader for that. Some great people I have worked with lately are Mazrian, Tankata, and Chuno, but I'm sure there are other great leaders out there.

One of the best tactics I've seen a fighting party leader employ has been to give a warning before they move rooms. This should be heeded at all times so that you are not caught preparing a spell when the party moves, leaving you behind. If your leader is not doing so, ask them for a five second heads up before moving. Others in your party will appreciate that, too.

If you are in a group with a Paladin, ask if they can Shield Block you. The more experienced the Paladin, the more they can use themselves to prevent attacks on you from getting through. It's an incredibly powerful symbiosis, a Paladin and the Empath, so don't be shy to ask.

Just like in regular triage, you should have priorities for who you heal. Yourself, the fighting party leader, your Shield Block Paladin, and then the rest of your fighters. Obviously you may want to prioritize those who are aiding in a certain battle more than others, which can only be determined on the fly as you fight.

If one of your fighting party should fall, you should use your judgement call on if you could drag them to triage quickly enough to get back to the fight. It's important to keep your fighting party strong, but if it takes you away from the fight for too long everyone will suffer. Better to gweth for a drag.

For city invasions, it's very likely that you will come across dead bodies of general citizens. Although you may be tempted to stop to heal them, or even drag them to triage, remember that the time spent away from your fighting party is time spent not doing your job. Gweth for a drag.

As I mentioned before, things will be very noisy and there may be very little chance for you to see who takes wounds. Ask your fighting party to call out for heals when they are hurt, and tell them not to wait until they are at deaths door before asking. The more you can stay on top of the injuries, keeping people to scratches or less, the easier it will be for you to heal up.

On the front line, I regularly use Regenerate and Heal. Obviously you can heal yourself as you see fit, but those two spells are usually enough to allow me to heal a group of a dozen or so fighters, depending on the strength of the enemy. But do remember that is -my- skill level, and you may need to adjust accordingly.

Sometimes it's worthwhile to have Innocence up, even just to keep the weaker enemies off you, but do balance the use of your mana for this purpose. If you get caught with no mana and a lot of wounds to heal up, that Innocence spell may cost you your life.

I also employ Persistent Link to keep an eye on my most important fighters, and Unity Link as much as I physically can to speed up the process.

Another very useful skill to use is Redirect. If you have not yet practiced using this skill, I would encourage you to try it in a controlled situation before trying to use it in the chaos of battle. Redirect allows us to transfer incoming wounds to a specific body part. For example, during these Gorbesh invasions where we have seen a high number of chest wounds, I alternate redirecting those wounds to my right and left hands so that I don't risk overhealing in my chest area and killing myself. I can live without a hand, I can't live without a chest. Redirect can be activated and deactivated at will, but you have to get used to turning it on and off, so do practice.

It is also helpful for you to tend arrow and bolt wounds of our fighters, as you have the capacity to do so. The responsibility for that is not solely on your shoulders, but the more you can free the fighter up to fight, the better off the entire group will be.

You can also help tremendously by keeping an eye on the gweth and reporting information to your fighting party as it becomes available. Things will be just as noisy for them, so they may not see important information that you can then share.

The last point I'd like to make is that you should never expect a tip for front line triage. Those fighters are helping to keep -you- alive just as much you are them, so there should be no expectation of them paying you back. I will say, however, that some still will, and you should be appropriately thankful for that.