I want to heal on my minstrel. How should I trait?

[Merowin]

Two common ways to trait as a minstrel are 4 blue / 3 yellow and 3 blue / 4 yellow. The difference lies in your anthem cooldown. Traited 4 yellow you can reduce your anthem cooldown to 5 seconds. Traited 3 yellow you are limited to 10 seconds.

Why is that important?

With a 5 second anthem cooldown and a 30 second duration you can keep roughly four anthems up, providing nice buffs to your entire fellowship.

Unfortunately, minstrels use a lot of power, and if you don’t have a captain or loremaster feeding you power, you will soon find yourself out of power.
Fortunately, you can regenerate power.
Unfortunately, it involves using your coda which removes all anthem buffs.

When you use Anthem of Composure your next coda will give you a 20 second power-over-time effect. If you repeat this every 20 seconds, it will be almost impossible for you to run out of power no matter how heavy you are healing. Unfortunately, keeping yourself with power that way means you cannot keep four anthems going.

This is where traiting 4 blue comes in. Traited four blue gives you a 10-16 % bonus to healing, but limits you to a 10 second anthem cooldown. However, this still allows you to use both Anthem of the Third Age, Anthem of Composure and your coda every roughly 20 seconds, giving you the extra healing from Anthem of the Third Age and the power regeneration of Anthem of Composure and your coda. Traiting 4 blue will therefore allow you to boost your healing, without reducing your power regeneration.

Traiting 5 blue, however, would increase your anthem cooldown to 15 seconds, and that would force you to choose between not using Anthem of the Third age (reducing your healing) or using your power regeneration less often, and neither choice is really appealing.

The choice between traiting 4 yellow or 4 blue therefore comes down to a choice between maximum buffing (4 yellow) or maximum healing without loosing power (4 blue). However, keep in mind that even traited 4 yellow you can still use the same power restoring healing routine you would use traited 4 blue. You just don’t have the extra blue trait or the extra 10-16 % healing from being 4 blue.

[Merowin]

These are the traits I would recommend for a healing minstrel:

The Watcher of Resolve (Blue)
Silver Tounge
Life-singer

The Protector of Song (Yellow)
Smooth Voice

Legendary Traits
Rally!
Fellowship's Heart

[Merowin]

These are the legacies I would recommend:

Max out Tactical Healing Rating

Songbook (Major)
Healing and Motivation Skills Healing
Bolster Courage Healing
Inspire Fellows Healing
Healing Skills Power Cost

Songbook (Minor)
Chord of Salvation Cooldown

Your weapon has a few useful legacies, but nothing I would consider crucial for healing. If you want some versatility, you could dress up your weapon for DPS and your songbook for healing. If you are going down the 4 yellow path you could also consider a songbook optimized for your anthems.

EDIT: With update 10 it has become much easier to avoid running out of power on a minstrel, Healing Skills Power Cost is therefore not as important as it was (but I still use it).

[Merowin]

When looking at gear I would recommend Will, Critical Rating and Tactical Mastery for healing. And Morale, Physical and Tactical Mitigation, and Vitality for survivability. The worst healer is a dead healer.

For virtues I would recommend Morale and Tactical Mitigation.

EDIT: With update 10, Will contributes to Tactical Mitigation, which has therefore become very easy to cap on a minstrel. Because of that you may want to look at Physical Mitigation virtues instead of Tactical Mitigation. Straight Morale is also better than Vitality now, since you're most likely capped on Tactical Mitigation, which is the second contribution from Vitality.