While Sharpened appears to be the one and only must-have trait for all DPS characters, tanks and healers do have a variety of options that all have different uses. What trait you use may depend on your role and the content you’re completing. Here are some general notes on each trait.

Maxed Stat: 7%, or 3.5% for one-handed weapons.

This trait is better than Precise when it comes to providing stronger healing. The only reason you might want to run precise is if you were doing a mixture of damage and healing which, in most PvE situations, is not a great strategy.

Powered for Tanks: Because Vigor’s strength comes from the weapon on the bar in which it was cast from, a backbar sword with the Powered trait is sometimes used by high-level off-tanks who want to increase the potency of their Echoing Vigor heals. In order for this to be most effective, they would need to be running a medium armor tank build. This almost always involves the set Powerful Assault.

Powered for Healers: Powered trumps Precise. There are reasons why you might want to run a Precise weapon on a healer, but the options are few and will be covered in the Precise section below. The way I compare Powered with Precise is through considering the extra probability of casting a critical heal versus the extra potency Powered provides to all heals. Let’s pretend for the argument’s sake that we were going to cast 100 heals with a spell critical chance of 35%.

With a Precise two-handed weapon, your spell critical is going to rise to 42%. This means, on average, 42 of your 100 heals are going to heal for an extra 75% (a regular critical heals for an extra 50%, but then we are assuming the healer has 100 in Elfborn, which in the current Homestead patch grants a 25% bonus to spell criticals, including heals). However, the other 58 heals are going to not receive any bonus.

On the other hand, with a Powered two-handed weapon, your spell critical will stay at 35% but all of your heals, regardless of criticals, will be 7% stronger.

No trait = 1 * ((35 * 1.75) + 65 = 126.25%
Precise = 1 * ((42 * 1.75) + 58) = 131.5%
Powered = 1.07 * ((35 * 1.75) + 65) = 135.09%

As you can see, a Powered weapon will provide almost twice as much of a benefit compared to a Precise weapon. Even with the Shadow mundus, Powered is still stronger. But is it the best?

Maxed Stat: 220%, or 110% for one-handed weapons.

Charged is a very mysterious trait. Suffice to say, there are better traits out there for tanks considering that a Charged Axe for instance, coupled with a Shield, will not proc any status effect. The status effects we care about are the elemental ones, which are accessible to healers.

Charged for Tanks: I can think of no status effect that a tank can apply in their trade. Possibly a Dragonknight tank using Burning Embers may proc the Burning status effect, but not even I am sure of this, and even if it was true, the Burning would do nothing that isn’t already accessed by magicka DPS characters. There is a possibility that an off-tank can use a Frost staff with frost abilities like Elemental Blockade to help proc immobilisations and maims, and Charged would help with that.

Charged for Healers: In the current meta, healers are the chosen few to proc Off-Balance from Concussion with a Lightning Blockade. Fortunately, you don’t need an increased chance to proc Concussion unless your raid is short on lightning damage. Considering you probably already have a lot of lightning damage coming from magsorcs in your group, you won’t need a Charged staff as the Charged would only be to proc Concussion, and Wall of Elements has a 100% chance of proccing Off-Balance on Concussed enemies.

Maxed Stat: 7%, or 3.5% for one-handed weapons.

Precise is one of the weaker traits for tanks and healers. I’ve already covered in the Powered section why this is, however I want to present a few reasons where this might be useful.

Precise for Tanks: Sorry, I can’t think of why you would run this. The only consolation for running it would be that your Alkosh might critical 3.5% more often, as well as your heals, however Alkosh may or may not be subject to the game’s policy on 0% criticals from proc sets. The two bonuses together, if they exist, might make this more useful than Powered for a tank, but still far from the best trait you could have.

Precise for Healers: Despite being weaker than Powered, there are some reasons you might wish to run a Precise weapon. Firstly, you may be of the belief that the potency of heals on near-death characters is all that matters and having a higher chance to critically heal is more important than having stronger heals across the field. Secondly, some sets require critical heals in order to function, including Combat Physician and the Maelstrom Restoration Staff.

Maxed Stat: 20% stronger enchantment with 40% reduced cooldown.

Infused is one of the best enchantments for a tank, and one of the weakest enchantments for a healer without a Master staff. Infused doesn’t seem to affect damage enchantments, but it does have a drastically strong effect with buffs and debuffs, namely the Crusher enchantment.

Infused for Tanks: The difference between a regular Crusher and an Infused Crusher is absolutely huge. For starters, unless you’re carefully managing with another source of Crusher, your uptime is going to be 50%, as the debuff lasts 5 seconds and the cooldown is 10 seconds. This is unreliable and I’m sure that if your group was good enough to do this strategy, then you would already have considered using Infused anyway. An Infused Crusher’s cooldown is 6 seconds, meaning that the true cooldown for this enchantment is 1 second.

Complimenting this uptime improvement, the Infused Crusher provides 1946 penetration whilst the regular Crusher provides 1622 penetration.

Avg. Crusher penetration/second
1622 * (5 / 10) = 811
Avg. Infused Crusher penetration/second
1946 * (5 / 6) = 1622

Therefore, the Infused version is roughly TWICE as good as the regular version, and because the enchantment is so useful for boosting DPS, it is in fact ~Best In Slot~. Just remember to hit the target with a pierce armor, heroic slash or light attack once every 6 seconds for the best uptime.

NOTE: If there are any other players in your raid using a Crusher enchantment, make sure that it is Infused, otherwise your Infused enchantment is going to get overridden. Your damage dealers should not be using Crusher at all in trials.

Infused for Healers: There aren’t many worthy enchantments for a healer to make use of, and even I am guilty of going longer than 8 seconds without hitting a target to generate ultimate, so on most restoration staves, this will be pretty useless… However! Infused will increase the potency of the enchantments on your Master and Maelstrom Restoration Staves, which can actually prove to be quite useful.

Maxed Stat: 5160, or 2580 for one-handed weapons.

Defending, despite being strong, is highly overrated on a tank, but highly underrated on a healer. On a healer, it is far stronger than it is on a tank. In fact, you should barely notice it on a typical trials tank that has block up nearly 100% of the time, and that is because of how armor resistances and block mitigation works.

Defending for Tanks: Let me just start off by saying that your Defending sword is only going to increase your resistances by 2580, and also that at very high resistance builds, you should already have maxed spell resistances thanks to some handy passives. My tank hits around 32.5k Physical Resistance when I’m standing in my Lord Warden orb, using a Defending sword. With max resistances capping at around 33k, that’s a pretty good effort if you ask me, but is it really worth it to push the cap? The damage you take goes through at least three reduction processes. The first is armor resistances. Every ~3300 armor, you’ll receive 5% reduced damage, so at ~33000, you’ll hit a maximum of 50% reduced damage. The remaining 50% damage is then reduced by about 65% thanks to blocking (50% for DPS and healers, typically). Seeing as Champion Point reductions change from trial to trial, and build to build, we will skip over them for the time being.

Dmg Mit. Blocking @ 33k (max)
0.5 + ((1 - 0.5) * 0.65) = 82.5%

Now let’s just say we took away our Defending sword, and our resistances dropped to about 30.4k. Our heavy armor now blocks 46.1% of damage passively. So dropping the Defending sword actually does take a bite out of your resistances, so long as you’re not blocking. But what if you are blocking?

Dmg Mit. Blocking @ 30.4k
0.461 + ((1 - 0.461) * 0.65) = 81.14%

So while you are blocking, you’ve gone from receiving 17.5% of the original damage to receiving 18.86%.

You may want to use a Defending sword on your backbar, the bar where you do not have Absorb Magicka that increases the amount of damage you block, or you may wish to put it on for certain fights like vHRC Hard Mode, vDSA final boss or vAA final boss, where your Infused sword’s crushing effect is not going to do anything.

Defending for Healers: Contrary to tanks, healers spend most of their time out of block and obviously do not have the same resistances a tank does. Furthermore, they also use staves typically, which will give the full 5160 benefit. The thing about tanks and healers is that when they die, many others die. When a DPS character dies, usually another DPS just resurrects them and life goes on. If the tank goes down, the organisation of the boss and ads immediately ceases, and if a healer goes down, the safety of everyone is jeopardised. Healers can boast they have the strongest heals as much as they want, but a dead healer can’t heal at all, and the healers that I typically run with tend to forget that they are priority target for healing (maybe they’re just lovely, selfless people who like eating dirt).

A guaranteed 5160 spell and physical resistance is A LOT. Having a Defending staff is going to mean you take roughly 7.8% less damage from all sources. Couple that with increased spell resistance from light armor and Major Ward/Resolve from Rune Focus, you are going to have a very safe healer. I consider this trait ~Best In Slot~.

Maxed Stat: 9%, or 4.5% for one-handed weapons.

This trait has no place in a trials environment, and depending on how you’re grinding experience, Sharpened may actually be a better trait for your weapon(s) anyway.

Maxed Stat: 5160, or 2580 for one-handed weapons.

This trait is barely useful for a tank, and considering all the other traits available, there is no need to find a scenario to justify it. It is even more irrelevant for a healer in a trials environment. In a dungeon, where you might want your healer pumping out some damage, it may be useful.

Maxed Stat: 34% chance, or 17% chance on one-handed weapons.

This trait is often overlooked but with what you’ve already got on offer, it may be for good reason.

Decisive for Tanks: You’re only looking at a 17% chance to gain 1 ultimate, which is about 1 ultimate every 6 seconds which is pretty pitiful. The tooltip says it is whenever you gain ultimate, so I imagine that this means it can proc from using an Earthen Heart ability but it’s still hardly reliable. Tanks already generate ultimate faster than healers do, and it could be overkill with the way war horn rotations work in well organised raids.

Decisive for Healers: This is an interesting pick. As I mentioned briefly at the end of the tank section, this can affect the war horn rotation. For healers, it would be a positive to have another way to generate ultimate. Tanks generate ultimate faster than healers, thanks to Minor Heroism. You or your healers should try to run either Purifying Light or Power of the Light to increase the speed at which you generate ultimate. Having a 34% chance to gain ultimate every time you gain ultimate (including when casting your Dawn’s Wrath ability) will help keep you up to speed with your tank’s war horns, keeping the uptime of war horn pumping.

The only drawback of this is you would have to forego the resistances of Defending and double bar your Decisive traits for the best uptime of war horn. Perhaps in fights that aren’t as risky, this could be considered the best strategy for a healer.

Maxed Stat: 11%.

This trait is mostly useless, although I have not tried it (mainly because it would cost me more than I want to spend to test it). Increasing the damage of the weapon is going to increase the potency of your heals and damage, however, there are many factors that go into calculating the strength of heals (we’re not really concerned with damage). One of those factors is your Max Stamina or Magicka. 11% bonus damage is likely to have a much smaller effect than one might think.

Recommendations

Here are my top 3 recommendations for your weapon sets.

Tanks

Infused, Powered – This setup will give you the best utility for the group. It will increase raid-wide penetration by a ton, with excellent uptime, whilst also boosting your healing potential, even if just by a little bit. You’ll see the best effects on medium armor off-tanks.
Infused, Defending – This setup will still provide you with that same great penetration bonus for your DPS, but also make sure that you aren’t eating too much extra damage on the backbar where your Absorb Magicka isn’t barred.
Defending, Defending – This setup is for those times where you aren’t tanking your group’s main focus, for instance, when tanking the axes in vAA. Applying crusher is not going to benefit anyone, and allows you to survive the best.

Healers

Defending, Defending – This setup will keep you alive the best, and in turn, keep your group alive the best. You are a key component to the team, as most of the DPS forego self-sustainability to optimise damage output. You go down, they go down.
Decisive, Decisive – This setup will maximise your Aggressive Horn or Nova uptime and allow you to better keep up with the tanks in regards to ultimate generation. Arguably, this is the best setup for less risky fights.
Infused, Defending – With the upcoming Morrowind nuke of resource management, this setup may become best, but only when used with a Master Restoration Staff. It will keep the tank’s stamina up, and will make sure that everyone has a high enough stamina so that the orbs/shards don’t restore the incorrect resource.