The Followers of Tarmalen

The Tarmalen guild has the strongest healers in the game, so a member is an indespensable resource in the vast majority of parties. Sadly, there is spectacularly little room for healers to diversify. This is a powerful guild, but the coders seem have made little effort at all to make it interesting to play. Healers on the whole feel about as unique as a peanut butter sandwich. Many find party leadership to be their only hope at establishing some kind of personal identity. As one of the most overpopulated guilds in the game, it can be often very difficult for a lower level healer to get into a party. There are three primary reasons this guild is so prevalent:

First, it is one of the only caster guilds that allows someone with relatively low experience to participate usefully in parties, especially experience parties. Unlike conjurer-mages for instance, a tarmalen can be of use without needing a spectacular amount of experience and equipment.
Second, a good healer is important for nearly all types of parties and all levels of play. Unlike some guilds it does not reach a point of diminishing usefulness. As such, it is probably the easiest guild to attempt "no reincarnation" with.
Third, there is no major guild in any other background which is so universally taken by the people who have access to it. 95% or so of good_religious characters take this guild, since it is equally useful to backrow casters and hybrid tanks.

Tarmalen Reputation

The Tarmalen guild doesn't have much to work towards, besides better healing skills and spells. However, this is not to say there is absolutely no reward for being a devoted healer over a long period of time. As they advance past the ranking of 'just baptized', the maximum amount that a Tarmalen can heal with their standard spells goes up a little bit. I'm not sure how much it helps party heals, but target heals gain in a set pattern, which is +2 hit points for each rank up through faithful, and +3 points each for anointed, devout, and pious. This bonus seems to be a constant rather than varying. You gain these bonuses gradually over time, so if are anointed and you notice cure light wounds capping at 102 hit points (assuming 100% mastery), you know that you are pretty close to gaining the devout rank. Anointed and higher tarmalens can study the enhanced vitality spell. This whole process takes a long, long time, so you're only likely to see it if you genuinely like being a healer.

Rank                 Bonus Associated with Rank
=================================================================
just baptized        +0-1 to heals
newly initiated      +2-3 to heals
initiated            +4-5 to heals
humble               +6-7 to heals
faithful             +8-9 to heals
anointed             +10-12 to heals, can study enhanced vitality
devout               +13-15 to heals, can study enhanced vitality
pious                +16-?? to heals, can study enhanced vitality

Tarmalen Leadership

A level thirty healer can visit the statue of Tarmalen at a guildhall and check how well it ranks up as a potential guild leader. The leadership system is currently a joke, it's not something you can work toward over time, but resets to zero every season or so. Hundreds of healers are on every week, so chances are you have too much of a life to compete with the cream of the crop, and aside from that the system by which leadership is assigned is itself broken. If you manage to get it through luck or being in lots of eq parties, leadership comes with a nice healing special.

Compared to the favorites you are wet behind the ears.
Compared to the favorites you are totally inferior.
Compared to the favorites your abilities pale.
Compared to the favorites you have much to learn.
Compared to the favorites you still so much you have to learn.
Compared to the favorites your abilities are poorer.
Compared to the favorites you are inferior.
Compared to the favorites you are much too young to lead.
Compared to the favorites your healing abilities are almost as strong but you lack the wisdom.
Compared to the favorites you are not as experienced and recognized.
Compared to the favorites you not far behind what comes to power.
Compared to the favorites you are nearly as powerful healer.
Compared to the favorites you are almost as able to lead the guild.
You are a powerful healer and one of the favorites to next Leader.

Reincing into Tarmalen

Reincarnating into tarmalen is a relatively straightforward process, except that the guild locations can be somewhat remote, and there's a wandering trainer you need to visit which isn't made mention of anywhere in the entire guild help system. I think she may or may not be noted in the message boards, can't remember offhand.

Important Skills

Quick Chant

Quick chant is important for a Tarmalen that wants to cast anything besides unstun and cure serious wounds. It is absolutely vital for those who want to help with any sized equipment monster. When your whole party is wounded and a meteor swarm is pending, you need that major party heal cast NOW. This skill scales in a linear fashion, so don't break the bank trying to get it to 100 if you're experience poor.

Mastery of Medicine

Mastery of medicine improves the power of all healing spells. 100% mastery raises the amount healed by about 50%. It is probably the most important skill for a tarmalen to train, but don't neglect the spells it boosts when doing so.

Mastery of Assistance

Mastery of assistance is primarily of importance in making unstun and unpain more effective. This skill is most vital when dealing with large monsters, and much less important when killing small-fry for experience. Don't neglect it, but neither is it a high priority compared to other stuff.

Mana Control

Mana control helps dampen the cost of failing spells. Formerly known as "skill that saves sp". It is helpful, especially to the less experienced, but tends to lose usefulness once competence with all important spells is reached. Still, it's cheap to get to 100, so one should not skip it.

Ceremony

Ceremony gives a large boost to your effective percentage in the next spell to be cast, but it takes time to use. As with mana control, this can be a very helpful skill, but it can't replace reliable casting ability.

Tempt

Tempt can help you bring someone to the exact same alignment level as you. If you aren't significantly smarter than your target, you will tend to fail, or even fumble and have them attack you. Tempt is an occasional source of cash and little else.

Bless

Bless allows you to place a random blessing on someone else of your alignment who has not already recieved a blessing during the boot. It is not very powerful, but every little bit helps, and is quite inexpensive.

Baptize

Baptize changes someone willing to your current general alignment, in this case good. This works quickly and effectively, however they will not be very strongly aligned. To get them to maximum goodness, you'll need to use tempt.

Burial ceremony

Burial ceremony is a two round skill that causes corpses to bury themselves and gives you some spell points for each one. This skill conflicts with barbarians and due to it's extremely small payoff is considered to be useless.

Consider

Due to its extremely low cost, some skill in consider is always nice, since it can help find out the experience worth of a monster. However, straight tarmalens have such low combat ability that they can't use it to get a very accurate picture of how strong a monster really is.

Important Spells

Unstun

Unstun grants protection against all sorts of stun effects, or removes stun from someone who is dazed. This protection lasts till removed or used, and if cast by a decent tarmalen can negate more than one full stun. Annoyingly it won't stop skill or spell disruption, even if it fully stops the stun which caused it.

Unpain

Unpain temporarily boosts the hit point maximum of the recipient. The strength if this spell is partially based on the background of whoever recieves it. As the recipeient takes damage, the spell slowly wears off. Unpain is one of the cornerstone methods of keeping spellcasters alive during combat with blasting monsters.

Remove Poison

Remove poison, as one might guess, cures poisoning. Poison is a long lasting danger that has been the death of many a solo player, so being able to cure poisoning is a very useful ability that few other guilds have.

Cure light wounds

One of the most efficient healing spells in the game, certainly the most efficient targetable healing spell. Cure light wounds is a slow but very cheap way to restore someone's health, effective out of combat or when your tank is so heavily protected that you don't need to use anything bigger.

Cure serious wounds

The best cure spell with a casting time of only one round. This is the cornerstone of most newbie tarmalens, who don't have enough quick chant to use bigger stuff.

Cure critical wounds

The best healing spell that good_religious characters get a natural bonus in. With its two round cast time, a high quick chant will often pull it down to a single round. A very popular healing spell of midbie tarmalens.

Minor, major, and True heal

The strongest targeted heals avalible to players. These spells all have three round cast times and cost a fair deal of mana. Since they get no background bonus and have a high experience cost to begin with, getting enough ability to cast these reliably takes a great deal of experience. For situations requiring this form of healing, major heal is by far the most popular spell to specialize in.

Minor party heal

Even without a background bonus this is a relatively cheap spell and very effective at healing small amounts of damage to lots of people at once. Party heals tend to be preferred during combat, since healers then don't have to concern themselves with who will be the next to get attacked.

Major party heal

A big step up from minor party heal, pretty similar in effect to hitting everyone in your party with a cure critical wounds spell. This is the best party heal which quick chant can bring down to a one round cast time.

True party heal

Heals everyone in your party quite a lot, but is expensive in spell points and has a four round cast time. Almost never used outside of equipment parties, and not cast all that much except against extremely tough monsters.

Life link

Reccomended for tarmalens with high hitpoints, as well as hybrid healers. Life link is a complex and risky spell that more or less causes damage to be shared between the tarmalen and the recipient. The bigger the difference in hit points between the two, the more risky this spell can prove. The biggest uses of this spell are improving the odds of survival against targeted blasts, critical hits, and improving the efficiency of party heals.

Lessen poison

Given it's ultrahigh experience cost compared to remove poison, you'd assume that it offered some spectacular protection against all sorts of poison damage. The truth is this is I've heard this is just for those times when party members are getting poisoned faster than you can remove it efficiently, and does nothing against killing cloud etc.