I saw the developer post on the ‘Healing Signet’ thread that basically said they need to focus on improving the active effect of the skill before doing any hard nerfs to the passive heal. I propose that this ( improve the active effect) be done to the Elementalist and Thief signet heals too (Signet of Restoration, Signet of Malice). I find the passives on these to be average at best, and very situational. The actives should be improved so there is more of an incentive to chose them.
Actually, those 2 Heal Signets differ in one way (you might include the new 25 point Mesmer heal, too). Someone needs to actually use an attack skill to get healing from them. So they are a great deal more ‘active’ than Healing Signet, which also regenerates when one stands in a city, autorunning against a wall.
By active I meant literally activating the heal skill. The passives aren’t fully on par with Warrior ( they’re close), but there always comes a time when you need the instant health and 3-4k health just doesn’t deliver relative to the cooldown.
Signet of Restoration does have an inbuilt ‘fix’ but it requires traiting into a pretty useless traitline to get “Signet passives are always active even if the signet is used.” So sure, you can use that active and not be kitten afterwards, but you’ve already lost a lot of your effectiveness due to the trait line.
Signet of Malice is only really good if you can get multiple hits/conditions on multiple mobs, but let’s face it how often does that occur in EVERY area of the game? It’s usually just PVE.
Maybe we can make use of this thread to suggest interesting activation effects?
Because I’m an elementalist, I’ll start with suggestions for Signet of Restoration’s active effect:
Signet of Restoration
Recharges all attunements So you can use it for a stronger burst with air, or an healing burst with water, or get a lot of protection from earth. Would it be too strong?
(Weaker version) The next time you swap out of this attunement, it is not put under a cooldown This one I like, as it forces you to choose the optimal attunement, instead of recharging all of them.
Gain Superspeed for 3 seconds So you can reliably run away from fights. But perhaps its RTL that should be addressed, not this… Still, resetting a fight at the cost of the passive heal might be balanced.
Heals you more if you are under torment, chill, cripple or immobilize. Interest alternative when trying to kite/ escape.
Restores half of your endurance To make this active more valuable in tight situations – also triggers evasive arcana
Gain a random boon for each hit received while casting the signet The “random” effect is probably too mesmery and chaos armory, though…
Gain an aura depending on your current attunement Should be a glyph then, not a signet, so not good.
Recharges all your other signet’s cooldowns Interesting alternative to Written in Stone, but maybe it would make it useless forever. Also, it would be too strong if someday we ever get an elite signet.
Stun Break Break stun at the cost of your passive healing. Interesting, but how effective are stun breaks with casting times?
Heals you more for each boon on you Interesting, but elementalists are too biased towards defensive builds already.
Don’t ignore the fact that Necros now have a healing signet too.
If you pretend it doesn’t exist the balance team will pretend it doesn’t exist, just like the Necromancer players!
Attrition – A pretty name for taking longer than anyone else to kill something.
Don’t ignore the fact that Necros now have a healing signet too.
If you pretend it doesn’t exist the balance team will pretend it doesn’t exist, just like the Necromancer players!
I have yet to a build or time the necro.heal.signet would.be useful.
I’ve been trying SoM in Wv3. It feels week compared to Withdraw, I haven’t run HiS in a while but recall it being decent.
SoM’s passive and active healing could definitely use a boost IMHO. Remove the cooldown and allow the passive to work after activation would be a good first step.
