You have some options as to which dissonance abilities you have ready to use, you can use a big ward instead of the heal, and you can use a big single-target nuke or a big area nuke, etc. You generally want as little dissonance as possible, because it decays faster when there's less of it, and if something goes wrong you'll need to be able to use those abilities. Dissonance naturally decays over time, or there's a couple abilities you can use to drop it down. Your Dissonance bar is an inverted power bar basically, it starts empty, and fills up as you use it. Those pet heals, and the emergency group heal I mentioned, cost Dissonance instead of Power. You can also use the pet's health to cast a nice damage buff for your next couple attacks. The pet has a HUGE amount of HP, and the heals are really efficient. Then you can heal the pet with your pet-specific heals. What it does do is allow you to put an Intercept buff on the tank (or on the entire group) which sends a certain amount of damage to the pet instead of the target. It can't take aggro, generally doesn't die, and does hardly any damage. Your pet is not like a conjuror or mystic pet, it's just a resource bar (or two) to manage. So even though you're at range, you still want to be fairly close to your tank and the group. And in an emergency, you've got a huge near-instant group heal. You also get a temporary stationary area healing pet thing. When you need to actively heal, you've got a couple group heals (one centered on you, one in a frontal cone) which get the job done. Most of the time, you just shoot stuff, and heals happen in the background. The Channeler is a mobile ranged healer, with multiple resources to manage, that does good damage, especially against multiple enemies. Note: None of this refers to true end-game content, raiding, level 100 Kunark heroic dungeons, etc.