Rehgar is closer to a jack-of-all type healer, so on one hand, he can feel a bit safer, or more stable, than some other healers, but it’s not hard for players to risk more than it’s worth to try to get bad trades on damage, lose bounce heals and run oom by casting unnecessary spells (such as totems)
One of the ‘best’ parts of rehgar is you don’t need to think of him as having all-in builds. Most of his talents are good upgrades regardless of other talents, so you can pick the utility you want as you need it without commiting to totem build, or lighting shield or trait or whatever.
(for example, wolf form has a 4 sec cooldown, and the lvl 7 talent reduces spell cdr by 2 seconds; for 8 second cdr abilities, it’ll still take 2 bites even with the lvl 1 talent, so don’t take lvl 1 trait for the cdr, take it for the movespeed)
Control rise, you do want to usually play from the back and only take opportunistic bites at enemy heroes, or better yet, keep bites to nearby pve targets or summons. If you’re going for a bite against an enemy you want to
a) time it between attack animations on them (bad timing means you could take more hits than you gave up running up and then back out)
b) are going to stay in the fray to keep attacking
c) try to draw an attack or two from an enemy intentionally since chain heal hits 3 targets; so sometimes taking an attack or two that is going to get healed up by Chain anyway can be okay.
While chain automatically targets the lowest hp targets in range, it does have limited bounce range and can hit pve targets if a valid hero target isn’t in range. So, like stukov, some of your play should be to help bounces actually connect either by being in position between two allies that need it, or by self-casting it first if the second bounce is going to be lost anyway.
Totem doesn’t really seem all that impactful, but it makes a bigger difference than some notice and casting it too much can sink a lot of mana that takes away from Rehgar’s heals or shields (esp bad if it cuts out a heroic)
Healing Totem is a ‘safe’ pick in that it is extra healing that doesn’t cost mana, but it’s effectively a buffer out of combat heal that takes 40 seconds to matter and doesn’t help rehgar if he’s already low on mana. While getting a few ticks on 5 heroes seems amazing, most aren’t going to sit in it for most of the duration anyway, so it tends to not do as much as people would like, even if the numbers look good.
Lighting shield manaback is generally the best take since it doesn’t care what targets are hit and rehgar is probably going to clear some waves or mercs anyway. It does cost mana to cast in the first place, so you generally only want that if you’re going to be taking other talents for Lightning Shield anyway (such as the lvl 1 for increased radius)
The wolf mana back can get like 25 mana back every 3 seconds, so in some skirmishes it can get better throughput than Lightning, but i would only suggest considering that if you’re playing a 2 healer group as bites are usually too risky as is.
Anyway, Healing totem is okay, but again, tends not to actually help keep allies alive in battle, so it is more like padded healing and may prevent people from just hearthing for hp/mana and can essentially undercut a team by thinking they can stay out longer than they should – with rehgar probably the worst victim of that.
For point of comparison: at 13, a Q + trait empowered Reghar can drop 260 x 3 heals about every 3 seconds so having the mana to sustain cdr can yield much more team healing than what the totem would bring.
So all that said to directly answer the questions asked:
- W build is ‘safe’; Shield + cleanse + Ancestral is one of the best single-target assists a healer can have, and mitigating damage can be better than needing to heal it back up, esp since most lightning talents work just as well against any target, while other builds tend to be hero-only.
- Wolf talents can be worth it, but it takes a lot of experience to get value out of them, so they can be riskier than they’re worth. Part of the issue of an all-trait focus is that some talents work against pve targets, and some work against enemy heroes, so it can be just fine to take the cdr talent if there’s nearby not-hero targets to hit. If a zar or azmo is going to be tossing out free targets, then wolf cdr can halve Rehgar’s spell cooldowns and really up his healing throughput.
- WIthout any talents, wolfform doesn’t do much, so it’s fine to shift into it for mobility (avoiding enemy spells) but don’t feel obligated to bite enemy heroes. The surge of bite damage isn’t enough to trade against a lot of other heroes who may shoot rehgar as he approaches, after the bite, and again while trying to back out.
Build-wise:
1,1,3,2,3,2,4 is probably his ‘safest’ build with lightning shield getting mana back, shield at 13, cleanse, ancestral and storm shield.
3,1,2,x,3,1,1,x is a mix of shield and trait abilities that can be used as a pve build (split push, or double lane) Since rehgar is one of the few healers that can heal ally minions, you can use totem + double shields + wolf bites to clear camps and waves really quick. Bites get cdr on pve targets, and shield gets mana back on enemies hit, so it’s fairly stable on spamming the spells.
I personally prefer heal cdr over cleanse; cleanse is handy, but reliant on the other player to actually do something with that time. If you can time it to prevent stun locks, then the ally is more likely to actually do something instead of waiting out the 1 second and expect themselves to be out of it. Increased healing throughput is more likely to keep allies in the game as they’ll notice their health bars more than than will the ‘unstoppable’ font.
So if anything, since his cleanse is 1 second of unstoppable, I think it’s better as an ability enabler for heroes that need a bit of momentum to get their spell combos going; so if I don’t have that, then I may favor cdr or aa slow depending on the enemy team.
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