Healing in any online game is in high demand and only certain (super selfless, courageous and all 'round wonderful) individuals have an inclination towards watching their DPS slip in order to keep the others in the fight. The good news is in Windward this isn't always the case... More on that later.

If you've read to here you are either one of these people, think you want to be, or are just utterly mystified by the Water Barrel Launcher and want to know WTF!? exactly is going on when you plop a barrel of water on your/someone's lazy crew! If any of these are you, you are in the right place my friend, read on, and I shall share what limited insight I have gained through many many hours of dumping freezing cold water on lazy seamen... :cough:

Disclaimer: The information here is mostly conjecture from personal experience as facts are tough to come by with Windward. So if you spot something wrong, or can help me understand anything I haven't got quite right, please let me know!

What you need to heal:
So if you want to heal you need at least a Water Barrel Launcher equipped in your barrel slot in your inventory. This slot is shared with items that give you special effects on your attacks such as Shredder Ammo, Explosive Ammo etc, it can also hold special attacks such as the Mortar.
So picking your barrel of choice is a big thing, you are giving up the crowd control effects of Shredder Ammo or the demolition potential of the Explosive Ammo, however certain high level Water Barrels will grant you some other special effects/attacks.

More info (although not much) can be found on these items at the Wiki, here.[windward.gamepedia.com]

And that's it! Well all you need...

What follows is partly educated guesses, the percentages are confirmed (see the wiki for source), however the rest is from my experience.

So what does the water barrel do exactly?
By default it will restore the health of a target by upto 60%. The magnitude of this heal is dependant on two things:
- The proximity to the centre of the AoE effect. ie Did the barrel hit the target directly? This will cause the biggest heal, targets further from the center will recieve less heaing.
- Your diplomacy score. The higher the better the heal.

So you now know what you're gonna absolutely need to heal, but to be a half decent support you will need some other things:

- Support specialisation: mainly Crowd Control to increase your maximum heal to 90%, without this talent at max your heal is capped at 60% of the target's maximum HP. Then Elite Training, which reduces that all important cool down.
- Diplomacy should be your primary stat, this usually means it's the highest, so keep an eye open for equipment that doesn't often have diplomacy on it. For example: Cannon Balls, who knows how pretty cannon balls help, but they do, so stock up when you get the chance!
- Collect Water Barrel and Support -10-20% cool down reduction equipment. (Yes 20% exists!) One of the worst things as a healer is watching someone die because your cool down hasn't finished, so try to avoid it at all costs, 30% reduction in cool down is a reasonable number, but for a truly dedicated healer, higher is always better. (Bear in mind this will probably be balanced by a 30% (or equivalent) offence increase in cool down on the same equipment.)
- A good Water Barrel! They come in different qualities from +1 to +5 (legendary) the earliest one gives the basic healing barrel, as they go up they include features such as a larger AoE with a HoT (Area of Effect and Heal over Time), then Sticky Tar (makes your Grogalovs directly hit your target, and stick to the enemy ship, no matter where in the AoE your target was), and then the legendary includes all these features and also has the Mortar built in. Any Water Barrel with the larger AoE and HoT is a good Water Barrel.
- Lastly, the right ship. Lastly because it is possible to heal in a mismatched ship, just harder.

Ships, and what you need to know:
Firstly and most importantly, it's the higher support stat you are looking for. However what does this mean?
Well ship stats are slightly different to item stats, they are expressed as a percentage. So that means if your ship support stat is 80, that means the sum of the diplomacy on your items is multiplied by 0.8. If your support stat is 400, your diplomacy is multiplied by 4. This applies to the other categories also, so offence, speed etc are all percentages.

With this in mind you are armed to pick your own support vessel, or just go for the one with the highest support. Support ships, generally, are quick but fragile (however the Turtle Ship is respectably tough, but it doesn't have as high support stat) so plan your other stats accordingly, being able to get to the ally in need is just as important as being able to heal them when you get there, so sinking, or still slowly turning around whilst they get pounded isn't effective healing ;-)

Personally the ZPL-1700 is my favourite support ship, being super agile and the ability to flee over land is very handy, you do die very quickly if you get pinned down, and Fire instances are very dangerous as the DoT caused by towers in them is pretty much a death sentence, and you must focus on healing yourself for far too long. A Turtle Ship is a good alternative here.

The ZPL-1700 is (often, but no solely any more) acquired from a level 36 mission found floating in the sea. Once examined it provides a "Strange Diagram" (or somesuch) there are guides for this so I won't go into detail here, but it costs around 600,000 and a load of trade goods, remember as part of that price (100k ish) is the Galleon which you cannot complete the quest without.

This section has a couple of little tips and snippets that you may not know or just make you a little better once known and used, they aren't secrets just the cherries on the Support cake.

Firstly and most importantly for a healer: The shift key! This key should be your best friend, because what the game doesn't tell you about the better Water Barrel Launchers, those with the large AoE and HoT effect, is that using them increases the cool down of the ability by 20%. This increase can be avoided by holding the shift key when you launch your barrel, this will use the lower level version of the water barrel, with smaller AoE and no HoT.

However, unless I am mistaken (and I could be, please correct me, these advanced bits are often educated guesses) the initial heal of this barrel is no smaller than the advanced version with the larger AoE. It just has no HoT, and the HoT sucks. A tick of a thousand HP (it's percentile, I think so this amount changes) for a few seconds doesn't come close to simply hitting the target with another barrel. So what does this mean? It means the best way to heal a single target is to hit it with a full power barrel and then use smaller ones once the HoT is ticking, it doesn't tick very long, so you may find yourself (like I do) only using the shift-click smaller AoE much more than the larger one. This also gives you more flexibility as you often have multiple targets to heal and you don't want them grouped together! If your allies are tacked together they just all get hit at once by the enemy AoE and it's a damn sight more effective than your heal is.

Why is this? Because even if you have your Water Barrel Launcher ready and off cool down, the flight time of barrel is long enough that they will take a ton of damage and your barrel only heals the full amount on the target you directly hit, so everyone else is screwed, even if they have a tiny HoT on them.

The Grogalov is your friend:

Your high diplomacy and support skills means your AoE attacks are tremendous! In dragon fights (or any boss fight where you are worried about healing or fleeing) your Noxious Fumes (Nox) attack is invaluable as it will last ages. In most other situations your Grogolov Cocktail will be your main damage dealer, it depends where your other stat strengths are, but as offence and diplomacy are its governing stats chances are your Grogolov rocks, it may not always feel like you are doing a lot of damage because it's all in DoT (Damage over Time) form, but throw 'em when you're confident the cool down won't get anyone killed and the damage soon racks up!

The Fog Light is a legendary captain's tool that is also really handy, this is because you can throw out a Fog Cloud (Fog) and hide in it, the lantern lets you see out, so you won't get shot by the pesky pirates. This also allows you to (slowly) demolish Guard Towers, create Fog near tower, fly in, shoot tower, renew fog, repeat. With high enough diplomacy your fog will last long enough to get off a Grogolov in the time it takes for the Fog to disperse, but keep Defiance handy, as the duration of Fog seems to vary somehow.

By now we know how to equip ourselves, what ship to sail, how to use the Water Barrel, and a few little extras to buff our damage on the side.

Follow all this stuff and you should be a pretty good support, I don't pretend to know it all or be the best, this is just a collection of things I found helpful, and I was asked to write it up!

If you have stuff to add, please let me know and I'll see about throwing it in somewhere, if I have something very wrong, again, I am open to changes :-)

Thanks for supporting the game, it's great and I want to see even more of it!