I planned to focus primarily on healing/support with just enough destructive powers to allow some soloing. But as of now it’s still very possible that we’re going to get wiped, so I decided not to build a perfectly specialized toon, and I may as well try some of the nifty offensive spells.

It seems that a twentysomething level templar can still solo surprisingly well, with some patience and your excellent crowd control skills you can take on any regular mob.
Healing is very cheap, offensive spells on the other hand eat up your mana quickly. For this I tend to focus of MND when it comes to choosing my equipment, leaving the otherwise tempting, damage boosting INT a secondary concern. MND adds to your MP, boosts your healing spells, and its best and often overlooked effect: it adds to the critical chance of your spells. Neat.

Wand or staff: I don’t have a strong preference here, I use whichever has better stats. Wand with a shield adds a blocking chance and more “reinforcement sockets”. Staves offer way better stats for MND than wands+shields and also higher melee damage. You may wonder why melee damage is a concern: when a mob has very little health left, I usually want to beat them to a pulp to conserve mana. Staves make it a lot easier.

Now for the skills

Elec Bolt: Offers medium damage, not comparable to the shaman’s fireball, but it is your bread and butter. You should keep it requiem lantmaxed all the time or until you find another offensive spell that better suits your needs.

Electric Twister: Picked it up after realizing that it is the only offensive skill with a DNA available to boost its damage. Results: aoe effect, which is always a big plus for me, better damage, higher mana cost. However while you’re sitting like a duck surrounded by the mob you take heavy damage – not that it would be a huge problem, as you can easily heal yourself, but it adds additional mana cost which I planned to avoid. After some testing I’ve come to think that sniping/kiting with your Elec Bolt may be more time- and mana efficient. I can see that using Electric Twister along with some other aoe spell (templar/tempest has plenty of those) can turn your toon into a mean aoe machine, but sadly I’ve heard rumours that dots do not stack, they simply overwrite each other. With only one aoe spell available for me at this point, I’m waiting for confirmation on this one.