First off here is the text of the feat from AoN :
Contingent Channeling
Source Ultimate Combat pg. 1 (Amazon)
You can imbue others with your healing energy so that they can use it at the moment of greatest need.
Prerequisites: True healer class feature, Selective Channeling.
Benefit: You can use a standard action to touch an ally and expend one of your daily uses of channel energy to create a repository of positive energy within that ally. This repository contains the same number and type of dice as normal for your channel energy feature, and it lasts for 1 minute. An ally who has such a repository can use an immediate action to roll the repository’s dice and regain a number of hit points equal to the result. If an ally who has such a repository is reduced to negative hit points, the repository triggers, allowing the ally to heal without using an action.
The question I have pertains to the Prerequisites: "True healer class feature"
As a Merciful Healer (archetype) Cleric you gain this class feature which I will paste the text here, also from AoN:
True Healer (Su): At 8th level, when a merciful healer channels holy energy, she can choose to apply the benefits of merciful healing or to reroll any 1s when determining how much damage she heals with the holy energy. She must choose which benefit to take before she rolls to see how much damage she heals.
Obviously you have to take selective channeling at some point before taking Contingent Channeling.
Here is my question: As a Merciful Healer cleric you have several class features, and as you can not change your cleric archetype as you gain levels (ignore retraining for this purpose) "True Healer" is a class feature for any Merciful Healer--Do you have to wait until 8th level to take this feat because that is when "True Healer" has an affect? Or, because it is a class feature, can you take it whenever assuming you already have Selective Channeling?
