[EMS] Bishop and HP Recovery Skills +30%

I wrote this in an attempt to make information about this more readily available to those who care, since it doesn't seem to be well documented or public knowledge. While it's not the kind of blogpost I was expecting to write about, 

it's an interesting topic to have researched and covered, nonetheless. Let's see if this'll help anyone out.

Released with Potential in 2010, a stat that many players are familiar with: HP Recovery Items and Skills +30%. 

• Can be found on any item with Potential, except for weapons, secondaries and emblems.
• Can appear multiple times on the same item; no restrictions.
• Only appears on Unique and Legendary Potential.
• Unique gives 30%, Legendary gives 40%, assuming the item is Level 71+.
• Lower healing rates can also be sourced from Additional Potential, but that's a waste of money.

I'll just shorten it to "HPR+" from now on.

Despite what its name implies, the way HPR+ works is not exactly what it should do. This Potential line will only work on a handful type of skills, but covering that much is not the goal of this blogpost. But basically, if you regenerate health periodically, or if you heal by draining, this HPR+ boost is not applied. It must be as simple as "press skill to recover health", for skills such as Heal and HP Recovery. The Skill Link Invincible Belief currently works with it, but I believe it is a bug: its skill description states that it is unaffected by effects which "modify recovery skill potency".

Bishop has a bunch of healing skills, but only three skills will work with this Potential line. Since Heal already fully restores everyone's health, the only skill that matters in context of this blogpost is Angel Ray. For clarification:

• Holy Fountain does not work with HPR+ (as stated in its skill description).
• Pray and Angels of Libra do not work either, since both skills "regenerate health".
• Peacemaker does work, and it's pretty much the same story as Heal.
• Let's not forget Heal and Peacemaker have a cooldown, while Angel Ray does not.
  
  

Angel Ray heals the user, and then also heals any party members standing inside the projectile's trajectory.

• Angel Ray will always heal the user each time the skill is used, unless the situation prohibits healing.
• Angel Ray will only heal party members if they stand inside the projectile's trajectory.
• AR's trajectory is narrow in height, so it's difficult to heal party members with it that are jumping around, were launched by boss attacks, or are using flight skills such as Blink.
• Angel Ray's healing rates are susceptible to changes in healing proficiency.
• AR's healing rates can be further boosted with HPR+.
• AR's healing rates can be deteriorated in bosses, such as Magnus and Damien.

The base healing rate of Angel Ray is 20% HP. For each 30% HPR+ line that you have equipped, a bonus 30% of the base 20% healing is added, and this bonus calculation is applied for each HPR+ line that is currently equipped.

• My Bishop has 23171 HP, and has eight lines of 30% HPR+ equipped. Angel Ray would heal 4634 (20% of 23171) per attack. My equips would add 1390 HP (30% of 4634) eight times (number of HPR+ owned) on top of the base 4634, making it a total of 15746 HP. That's about 68% HP restored with each attack.
• To fully restore with each Angel Ray, you would only need 14 lines of 30% HPR+.

So, if you were to have a single 30% HPR+ on most of your equip slots, you would see your health bar go back to full each time you use Angel Ray. Contextually, this is a very powerful advantage as you would mitigate chip damage, which is often more lethal than instant-death attacks. Items such as potions and healing familiars are restricted in how often you can rely on them. Ideally, the "most optimal" build would be to run four Legendary items with 40/30/30 to achieve a 99% restoration rate, but that's easier said than done - let alone expensive. Food for thought, though.

The effects of HPR+ are only applied to the character and that character's skills. So if you have HPR+ on a Bishop, you would only receive the boosted healing from your AR - but if you party with another Bishop, you wouldn't receive boosted healing from their AR, even if you had HPR+ equipped. So that's where the other healing skills, such as Heal, Holy Fountain, Angels of Libra and Peacemaker come in handy. That said, for whatever reason did Nexon decide to nerf Bishop's healing with the upcoming Destiny revamp, as it's going to halve Angel Ray's healing rate without compensation. So much for demanding improvements. Like I said: be careful what you wish for.

With the post-Destiny healing rate of only 10%, players would now need double the amount of HPR+ lines: twenty-eight. The difference between needing 14 and 28 is as night and day, due to the limited amount of equipment slots. Fourteen lines of HPR+ can be easily achieved by simply having it appear once on each equip; 28 would require you to have it twice on most items. And given how Potential works, aiming for two lines of 30% with only Unique drastically increases the amount of Master Cubes required. At that point, it's no longer the "budget build" that it currently is, since you would then need to resort to Legendary Potential to make life easier - which is prohibitively more expensive.

But let's be real: it's not necessary to have full health restores on a fast skill such as Angel Ray. Having a modest amount of HPR+ will do the job. And thankfully, if you're aiming for just that: you're in luck. Master Cubes and Cubic Blades are common to find everywhere, and they are dirt cheap to buy in bulk. Additionally, Phantom Forest provides Unique equipment, which also has no cubing fees once you have over Level 90 Insight. And if you really want to source HPR+ from Legendary, there's the abundance of staple Event Rings, such as the Glory Guard and Tenebris Expedition rings, which each comes with free Legendary Potential scrolls and hundreds of event cubes a year. 

Since most players will end up owning duplicates, they can decide to re-purpose those into HPR+ fodder.

So if you have some items with HPR+ lying around and have no clue where to use it, or if you are like me and have plenty of spare resources collecting dust - have fun messing around on a Bishop with the ridiculous amount of healing. It makes Bishop one of the easiest classes to play as (even easier than Paladin) when you need to do "boss muling", which is only becoming more prevalent with the requirement to do weekly bosses for events and the upcoming boss crystal changes. Since events demand you to do the same bosses in different difficulty tiers, it's more common than ever to create a mule to join boss runs - and Bishop is probably the best class for that. At that point, you might as well grab a few lines of HPR+, since in most cases you aren't going to contribute for much damage anyway - and it's not even an expensive investment to begin with. It's dirt cheap, and with only a couple of lines, you would continuously recover stupendous amounts of health with only minimal effort. It almost can't get any more lazy than that. Nice.

That's it for today - I'll see you guys again next post!