Guild Wars 2

I, personally, always loved playing a support role in MMOs. The Support playstyle generally involves focusing more on allies than enemies, and healing and buffing them against whatever enemies we come across. Its a rewarding playstyle that takes practice (in most cases), patience, and attention to both ally and enemy detail. In most games, support characters are rewarded for their hard work via loot bags, scoreboard notice, and the unending gratitude of their teammates.

In GW2, most support players are rewarded with little loot, a frustrating supporting experience (because everyone thinks you’re DPS if you’re not a Guardian or Engineer), and blame for not running “full Berserker like everyone else.” It’s not to say that there aren’t any rewards. There’s a cool little title “Combat Healer” that nobody really cares to notice, and if you’re putting out lots of heals in sPvP you’ll be greeted with “Chaos Archangel, Combat Medic!” which is honestly really effing cool… but not enough.

There are many people who come to Guild Wars 2 hoping to be able to play a viable support role. The “Holy Trinity” in this game has be turned into Damage / Control / Support with each category being either a primary, secondary, or tertiary aspect of any build. Aggressive playstyles are rewarded with more rewards while defensive playstyles gain … very little if not a tPvP bunker.

Here are some improvements I think would definitely help improve Support play in GW2. (Mind you, this is from a Mesmer perspective. I don’t have much experience with Healing Power’s influence on other classes besides Elementalist)

HEALING POWER
Healing Power is currently very underwhelming; why go Healing Power when you could easily spec Toughness or vitality for defense? To trait for high Healing Power one must sacrifice damage, and since healing power only effects the potency of heals (survivability) and Regeneration boon (Defensive Support) it makes a crappy defensive stat and a much more potent support statistic.

• Quicker Rezzing - When I started speccing for healing power, I assumed that I’d be resurrecting my allies from downed faster. I figured “Surely these green healing numbers of mine that are springing up over this poor fool’s corpse must be greater than the brute Zerker Warrior kneeling right next to me. I specced for healing!”. I was wrong of course, and I can’t help but wonder.. why?
  - I think that your revive speed should increase respective to your healing.
  500 Healing Power = 10%
  1000 Healing Power = 20%
  1500 Healing Power = 30%

• More Gear Choices - Givers Gear -while totally underwhelming and barely worth it- was a step in the right direction. More options, such as a Healing Power / Power / Precision set would open up new opportunities for support specs. Runes like Superior Runes of Altruism (please put in sPvP) /Water (please fix 6th rune bug) / Dwayna are great examples of how new support runes, sigils, and food could be implemented.

REWARDING SUPPORT PLAY
One of the best things about Guild Wars 2 is that you can find a reward for everything you’re interested in. People who like to farm, run dungeons, go full DPS, go full tank, WvW, sPvP, ect, can always find something that’ll reward them for their playstyle… except support. The biggest complaint about running support builds is the lack of reward for all the effort.

• Loot for Support Players - I don’t know the technical side of this, so forgive my ignorance, but there’s got to be some way to reward players who focus more on heals and boons for allies than trying to tag enemies.

- Healing allies for a certain amount of HP through a battle should earn bags/gold.
- Number of boons cast on allies should earn bags/gold.
- Peripheral damage done (Example: Granting someone Retaliation/Might) should earn bags/gold
- Rezzing downed allies should earn greater rewards.

If we could figure out a possible way to implement this into the reward system, there would be many happy healers.

• Should Have a Visual Indicator (Tag of sorts) - You can see a Commander anywhere on your map, which is hella important for WvW. Having an icon or glow or .. something that allows you to see the healers in a skirmish would save a lot of time and headache and help a lot with team coordination.

• Should earn achievements. - I wanted to make a thread about earning rewards in dungeons for different achievements. (Clearing a dungeon within a certain time / Clearing all the mobs / Never wiping / Healing a certain amount / Inflicting X amount of damage to a single boss in 5 seconds ) Achievements would make people WANT to explore a supportive role.

• Boons could scale with Healing Power

supportive class do indeed deserve better reward and consideration. Sometime id love to run elixir enginer in party, sometime id love to run healer ele in a party but what i get is always angry people :/

Minion masters and pet user who focus on controls and control spec in general also get that kind of look.

i rly would like to see an improvement in this

and some skills could need some rework to bring real suppourt

like staff #2 from guardian should have same mechanic as Mesmer gs but for heal
short range low/normal heal -> max range higher heal/big heal

or something like this could be a nice trait for Engineer Grenades.
- lower Damage (50% ?) but give aoe Heal on short distance and on max range highest heals

I think we need more skills and weapon skills that are quite OP in support, but hard to land instead of pressing a button and poof, you got boons, or just targetting an area.

I don’t have any ideas myself that I can throw out, but seeing as support isn’t truly required in dungeons, it needs unique stuff to it. With the boons and combos we have now, we might need a few more to really make support a whole category for itself, maybe even adding some new mechanic as well.

Either way, support needs more love, not just with healing. Even if GW2 is not supposed to have tanks, what I want is a “taunt” ability that forces the mob to chase and attack you for X seconds and then goes back to doing what it did. This ability could save allies and even be quite fun in sPvP as a sort of supportive control role.

Taunt is never gonna happen lol. Its so unrealistic and against the lore of humanity. Almost every single mom out there that’s new or soon to be has gotten rid of it and are trying to instead make NPC’s smarter and not attack the hardest target and such
Other than that though, I completely agree with the op’s post.

Support suffers from the lack of friendly targeted skills.
Without this, any form of support is forcefully AoE and potentially so strong that some kind of additional cost (smaller heals, shorter boon durations, longer CDs, hard to reach trait allocations, …) is usually required.
I can understand devs avoiding spammeable direct heals, which are usually played though the UI, but once they’re given a moderate CD I don’t get how those can be worse than AoE ones. The UI play is ingame anyways for many things like boon corruption or AoE condition removals.

There’s only one reason for all this AoE support to exist: the insane amount of AoE attacks. Bring down both, introduce single target support and I’m fairly sure that the game would be much more interesting and enjoyable.

Cush.4063:

Taunt is never gonna happen lol. Its so unrealistic and against the lore of humanity. Almost every single mom out there that’s new or soon to be has gotten rid of it and are trying to instead make NPC’s smarter and not attack the hardest target and such
Other than that though, I completely agree with the op’s post.

You should try Smite. Action based MOBA, reminds me of GW2’s combat just more action, which makes use of taunt on a hero. The players autoattack that hero for up to about 2½ seconds and mindlessly runs into it. Imo, that isn’t impossible for GW2 to have.

I don’t mean a taunt much like in WoW where once you taunt, you increase your aggro, no, that’s not my idea. This other taunt can even be used on players as a CC, much like reversed Fear.

I couldn’t agree more. The current meta of gw2 is just “damage, damage, damage”.

The most “support” I can slip in on my mesmer without being useless is full zerker gear with some invis and reflects.

I totally agree with the healing power/rezz time idea though! It would give it a lot more usefulness.

As for the rewards for playing support, I couldn’t agree more. Why should I get punished in a zerg and given less rewards for healing/rezzing/providing boons?

You’ve got some great ideas. Keep it up Chaos!

What drew me to this game was the expectation that support would be made up for in another way. Its not.
While the absence of the trinity makes for interesting gameplay, the lack of roles to fill is a monumental detriment to the growth of this game.

good ideas here. One option to make support more important (not viable though ^^) would be to tone down #6 heal-spells of all classes and increase (scaling of) AoE-Heals on weapons/utilities.

Hey Chaos! Happy New Year, hope your holidays were amazing and you rested well! Glad to see you’re still advocating the support archetype in this game (as am I). I actually made a thread on gw2reddit about a month ago with some ideas on how to increase the attractiveness of healing power for support players. In addition to the amazing ideas you included (faster rezzing, gear choices, better loot + tag options…etc), my thread proposed the following:

First, in order to make healing power more of an appealing stat for support players, I propose that Healing Power is renamed to Support Power. We will attempt to increase the effectiveness of this stat by not only allowing it to increase outgoing heals and regeneration but by also baking more utility into boons. As such, we will allow boons to scale in intensity and implement additional effects to said boons to make Support Power a more worthwhile stat.

Boon Scaling: Before listing a few proposed changes to the current boon system, I’d like to state in advance that these suggestions are not definite and should not be criticized based on numbers. Feedback surrounding the core idea would be most suited and appreciated. With each proposal, a brief explanation will be provided to highlight why each change is taking place. The assumed “equilibrium” Support Power used will be 1500 support power. Aside from Aegis, and Stability, the following changes should take place to allow boons to scale with Support Power:

1) Might: For every 100 Support Power, each might stack applies an additional 1 power and 1 condition damage.

Since you are fully specced into Support Power, the might stacks you apply to your party should SOMEWHAT make up for the damage lost in rolling full Cleric’s/Apothecary/Magi’s gear. The only case I can think of where this proposed change may be a bit problematic is with the Guardian’s Staff 4 (Empower) ability as it can give a total of 12 might stacks with a full channel. Nontheless, full support guardians do very little in terms of damage and should make up for it with intensified boons and heals. At 1500 Support Power, each might stack will grant 15 additional power and condition damage for a grand total of 50 power and 50 condition damage per might stack. While it was explained earlier that a support’s offensive boons should assist in increasing their damage, it should not alleviate the problem entirely and that is why a low number was used. Bringing another DPS should still have its benefits.

2) Fury: For every 100 Support Power, fury grants an additional 0.66% critical hit chance and 0.66% critical hit damage.

In addition to making the obvious change of increasing the critical hit chance obtained, fury will now also increase critical hit damage for reasons similar to the ones listed under Might. At 1500 Support Power, Fury will grant an additional 9.9/10% critical hit chance and 9.9/10% critical hit damage for a grand total of +30% critical hit chance and +10% critical hit damage.

3) Protection: For every 100 Support Power, protection grants an additional 0.66% damage reduction.

Protection is already an incredibly powerful boon…the only comment I can make regarding this is that the base damage reduction may need to be reduced down to 30% to accommodate for this change. The idea here is to solidify the role of the support as a protector of his allies…so it’s therefore important that their protection feels stronger than protection given out from non-supportive builds. Note that at 1500 Support Power, protection will gain an additional 9.9% damage reduction for a grand total of 42.9% or 43% damage reduction.

4) Regeneration: For every 100 Support Power, your regeneration heals for an additional 12.5 health per second (original functionality). Furthermore, for every 100 Support Power, your regeneration heals for an additional 0.03% per 1% of health your allies are missing.

In addition to maintaining its original functionality, regeneration should also serve as a “clutch” boon that supports want to time carefully in order to assist their allies in their most critical moments. In an attempt to reward that behavior, regeneration would now also scale based on an ally’s missing health percentages. Let’s take the equilibrium value of Support Power as an example where you have 1500 Support Power. At 1500 Support Power, your regeneration will be healing an additional 187.5 health per second (original functionality). Also, your regeneration will have a scaling of [(0.03/100)*(1500/100))]=0.0045 or 0.45% extra healing per 1% of health your ally is missing. To clarify, suppose I cast regeneration on an ally who’s missing 50% of his health. Regeneration will now heal (130 base + 187.5 normal scaling) + (0.45)(0.5)(130+187.5) = 317.5 + 71.44 = 388.94 for the duration of that regeneration boon. The goal here is to reward smart casting of regeneration as opposed to mindless spamming.

CONTINUED FROM ABOVE

5) Retaliation: For every 100 Support Power, your retaliation also heals allies for 7% of the damage done. There is an internal cooldown of 1 second per ally.

Retaliation already serves as an incredibly powerful disengage tool as its damage procs have no internal cooldown and can trigger multiple times and in quick succession. Increasing the damage on an already powerful boon would have broken it. Allowing it to heal allies however gives rise to new support builds and provides other ways for supports to sustain their party without needing heavy access to regeneration (as well as maintaining Retaliation’s core purpose; mainly as a deterrent to stop enemies from attacking you). Note that at 1500 Support Power, Retaliation will heal for 105% of the amount of damage its dealing every second (granted that the ally is being hit). The one second internal cooldown was added to prevent hyper sustain situations where fast attacks would rapidly heal an ally.

6) Vigor: For every 100 Support Power, your vigor also grants allies [Blur](http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blur) for 0.016 seconds at the end of their dodge.

Vigor is, similar to Protection, one of the most powerful boons in the game which is why it scales slightly worse than the other boons. It is also one of the harder boons to permanently maintain on yourself (or others) and as such, requires proper timing to utilize it to its fullest potential. In an effort to preserve the essence of Vigor (dodging), this change was implemented to allow allies more breathing room with their dodges. At 1500 Support Power, Vigor would grant Blur for 0.24 seconds after an ally dodges.

7) Swiftness: For every 100 Support Power, your swiftness grants an additional 2.2% movement speed for 2 seconds. After 2 seconds, movement speed tapers back to 33% for the remaining duration of Swiftness.

The idea behind that change is to provides those few critical seconds of insane movement speed (to allow your allies to either escape motivated pursuers OR to catch fleeing opponents) while tapering off to normal speeds after the two second duration. This change, consistent with the other changes, allows supports to feel even more rewarded for casting a clutch swiftness to secure a kill or to prevent an ally from sure death. The goal here is to again, reward smart casting of swiftness as opposed to mindless spamming. At 1500 Support Power, Swiftness would grant an additional 33% movement speed for 2 seconds (total of 66% movement speed for the first three seconds of the swiftness boon), before tapering off to 33% for the remainder of the Swiftness boon.

Food Changes: While we’re on the topic of increasing the effectiveness of Healing Power, is it possible that we get food options that also increase our effectiveness? I find it a little silly that we’re forced to use Chocolate Omnomberry Creams (MF Food??) and either Sharpening Stones or Maintenance oils as Support Specs where as other specs have food options catered specifically to their roles. Here are a couple of suggestions:

1) Wrench Nourishment:

i. Blessed Focusing Crystal – +100 Condition Damage, +10% Boon Duration, +10 Experience from Kills

ii. Blessed Maintenance Oil – +100 Precision, +10% Boon Duration, +10 Experience from Kills

iii. Blessed Sharpening Stone – +100 Power, +10% Boon Duration, +10 Experience from Kills

iv. Blessed Alchemic Potion – +100 Support Power, +10% Boon Duration, +10 Experience from Kills

2) Apple Nourishment:

i. Chocolate Lava Cake – +70 Support Power, +20% Boon Duration, +10 Experience from Kills

TLDR: Healing power should be renamed to Support Power to allow boons to scale with higher amounts of Support Power. This is done primarily to emphasize the role of supports in parties and to increase the utility they provide for their allies. Some examples of said scaling include: increased power and condition damage from Might, increased damage reduction from Protection, and granting your dodges [Blur](http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Blur) while under Vigor. These changes are explained in more detail in the Boon Scaling segment.

Chaos, you are welcome to put this (if it allows you and you have enough room) in your main post if you’d like

Very interesting KinkyPotato.
The biggest worry about improving this stat is passive play combos (condis and regen).

Gorni.1764:

good ideas here. One option to make support more important (not viable though ^^) would be to town down #6 heal-spells of all classes and increase (scaling of) AoE-Heals on weapons/utilities.

I agree with this guy. The problem is that heals are already powerful enough that they don’t require extra healing power. If they nerfed every healing in the game, even the self heal, it would suddenly make things a lot harder without a support and those spells would become significantly better if the scaling was increased.

Agree.. old mmo had trinity, the new one have only dps… gw2 have to be more

Might, fury, protection, regeneration, Aegis, Stability, Vigor, Blind, chill, Cripple, Immobilize, Vulnerability and Weakness are all Support. (and some utilities as well)

If you think there is no support you are definitily being unlucky in doing PUG’s, i see all these things when playing in a pug, yes damage is prevalent as killing things fast is more effective however there is loads of support, healing power is the 1 stat they should never have made for this game as it kinda makes people think/want to heal, instead they should have made -condition duration.

Anyway, to make it short, there is loads of support even in berserker builds.

I play a clerics guardian. Please don’t tell me healing power shouldn’t be a stat, trust me its amazing. I like the fact that there’s a clear line between buffer and healer (even though I’m both). Although I cant say whether or not i agree that in the stats was the place to make it (should probably be in the traits and skills) Also I will say that the scaling of healing power tends to only be good with support abilites, most solo abilities don’t take advantage of it that much, probably kuz the devs don’t want every1 to be undying bunkers. Kinda makes it feel like it should be renamed support power because that’s all i ever see it used for (with altruistic healing being the acception…but even that requires support skills). I can say for a fact that trying to get loot as a support sucks because, yes hitting that staff 4 and empowering your allies doesn’t tag any enemies. The fact that Im fulling specced into healing power and I dont res people faster…yes this nags me, greatly

i want healing to remain useless because everything is currently easy and healing just makes things harder and longer, healing isn’t needed so why make encounters longer?

@Azzer: There’s a difference between support (boons) and control (conditions). I’m not arguing that there isn’t any support in this game, and this post ISN’T strictly about dungeons.

Painbow.6059:

i want a useless stat in this game

Yeah.. you lost me there.

—-

@Kinky: Happy New Year! And wow that is an incredibly thoughtful and creative idea. (Dat vigor would be OP though) I’ll happily try to link it in the OP, and while I’d love for a change like that to be implemented it would require the entire game to be reworked. Random mob encounters, bosses, dungeons, ect.

I also like Gorni’s idea, though I have a hard time predicting how that’d affect the game. Reducing the potency of #6 heal skills across the board could be a huge improvement if done properly, especially if healing power is made to scale better with certain skills.

Chaos Archangel.5071:

@Kinky: Happy New Year! And wow that is an incredibly thoughtful and creative idea. (Dat vigor would be OP though) I’ll happily try to link it in the OP, and while I’d love for a change like that to be implemented it would require the entire game to be reworked. ….

Thank you! Yeah, you are absolutely right about vigor…I just checked the wiki and a dodge provides about 0.75 seconds of immunity and the original proposed change suggests Blur for an additional 0.6 seconds? Definitely changing that right now so that it’s a much lower value since that would be ridiculous.

I’m also changing swiftness so that it feels even more clutch than just another passive bonus to movement speed (also because a lot of support specs can permanently upkeep swiftness…running 10% faster than other builds for large periods of time is pretty ridiculous as well). The idea behind that change is that it provides those few critical seconds of insane movement speed (to allow your allies to either escape pursuers OR to catch up to a fleeing opponent) while tapering off to normal speeds after a short duration. That allows supports to feel even more rewarded for casting a clutch swiftness, rather than just casting swiftness on cooldown to maintain the movement speed throughout combat.

I don’t necessarily think the entire game has to be reworked to accommodate for these changes…looking at it from a broad picture, I’m not really suggesting any huge or radical mechanical changes that require the game to undergo such a vast restructuring. Most of these changes just add simple functions or build on original mechanics. While some boons may cause problems in certain instances, I am sure that it can be readily and easily remedied through testing/reporting (just like other things in this game). Thank you for linking it in your post though, much appreciated

KinkyPotato.4219:

Hey Chaos! Happy New Year, hope your holidays were amazing and you rested well! Glad to see you’re still advocating the support archetype in this game (as am I). I actually made a thread on gw2reddit about a month ago with some ideas on how to increase the attractiveness of healing power for support players. In addition to the amazing ideas you included (faster rezzing, gear choices, better loot + tag options…etc), my thread proposed the following:

First, in order to make healing power more of an appealing stat for support players, I propose that Healing Power is renamed to Support Power. We will attempt to increase the effectiveness of this stat by not only allowing it to increase outgoing heals and regeneration but by also baking more utility into boons. As such, we will allow boons to scale in intensity and implement additional effects to said boons to make Support Power a more worthwhile stat.

I was thinking along the same lines a while back actually. In my ideal world, you would decrease baseline effectiveness of boons by 33%, to avoid power creep, and increase maximum effectiveness by 33% so that people are rewarded for investing into a support stat. So a fully specced protection would be 44% reduction, while unspecced it would end up at 22%.

P Fun Daddy.1208:

I was thinking along the same lines a while back actually. In my ideal world, you would decrease baseline effectiveness of boons by 33%, to avoid power creep, and increase maximum effectiveness by 33% so that people are rewarded for investing into a support stat. So a fully specced protection would be 44% reduction, while unspecced it would end up at 22%.

Exactly! If the baseline effects of boons need to be lowered by a certain value to preserve balance, I am all aboard for that…just as long as there is a clear and visible reward for fully spec’d supports (like you mentioned).

The possibility of doing a Healer is there, Elementalist and Guardian can be very effective in sPvP and WvW, but imo there are few problems with the combat system and combo system :

1) The radius of heals are all very short, 240/420 ( traited ) is not enough and it pushes people to stack, try to heal a team mate that jumps and dodges all around the field with your Water trident.

2) The water fields are very powerfull, but it doesnt matter if you have 0 Healing power or 2k, it only matters the Healing power of the ones who blasts it, and to blast it they have to be near you when you cast the water field.

3) As it is right now an elementalist with 2k healing power and 3k toughness is almost immortal, I can easily tank 3/4 ppl while my team mates kill them one by one.

Pros to improving support/ counter support roles :

- More build diversity for every class
- Conditions like poison and vulnerability will be more valuable, giving rangers a meaning to exist outside sPvP/WvW roaming.
- More tactical fights, no more spamming conditions/attacks, coordinated bursts will be more powerfull, the right timed poison/vulnerability will be more effective…

Cons :

- Dunno if there are cons, at least not for WvW/tPvP, the only problem I can think of is in dungeons and fractals, maybe PvErs don’t like to be forced to pick up a specific class, but from what I hear they are already forced to do so ( ex. no LB ranger pls ).

Anet recently stated that they want to make support builds better in all aspects of the game. So, In addition to some of the proposed changes made in this thread, I’d also like to highlight some other interest points:
- Anet should move towards normalizing/or at least granting most boons to most support specs
-Guardians reign supreme as they just have to mash a bunch of buttons to spam their allies with boons
-while Guardians should remain one of the stronger support specs due to its relative low level of difficulty to perform exceptional, other support specs should be able to produce the same results (albit in different ways)
-therefore, guardians still maintain their niche as a strong and effective build due to their relative ease and potency but don’t rule out the possibility for other professions to provide just as much support

-Examples:
1) Elementalist Niche: Attuning to elements/blasting combo fields to achieve similar effects (Could be worked on a little more…granting stability to allies/and protection need to be improved…otherwise, in a relatively great spot)
-2) Mesmer Niche: Channeling Mantras/overloading themselves with boons and then transferring boons with Signet of Inspiration (Could be worked on…inconsistencies with small ranges on traits prevent this spec from giving regeneration and protection to allies…otherwise, in a relatively good spot)

Ok everyone for the last time, you have to consider the combination of an increased healing power with another passive, like condi and retal…
Passives are what many agree to be ruining the game. Enough passives and the trinity becomes necessary to keep the whole thing together.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Ok everyone for the last time, you have to consider the combination of an increased healing power with another passive, like condi and retal…
Passives are what many agree to be ruining the game. Enough passives and the trinity becomes necessary to keep the whole thing together.

Care to elaborate? Passives as in traits? Signets? Skim through the entire thread to see what we came up with. I don’t think we have to FORCE a trinity…the game is fine as is.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Ok everyone for the last time, you have to consider the combination of an increased healing power with another passive, like condi and retal…
Passives are what many agree to be ruining the game. Enough passives and the trinity becomes necessary to keep the whole thing together.

Stats by nature are passive.

You get power to passively raise your attack power.
Critical hits are passive and rng.
Critical damage is passive.

The only difference is that toughness doesn’t have skills affected by it. Other than that offense stats are the opposite of defensive ones.

Aza.2105:

Stand The Wall.6987:

Ok everyone for the last time, you have to consider the combination of an increased healing power with another passive, like condi and retal…
Passives are what many agree to be ruining the game. Enough passives and the trinity becomes necessary to keep the whole thing together.

Stats by nature are passive.

You get power to passively raise your attack power.
Critical hits are passive and rng.
Critical damage is passive.

The only difference is that toughness doesn’t have skills affected by it. Other than that offense stats are the opposite of defensive ones.

Pretty much this. offense in this game is still the typical MMO RNG, but defense pretty much active. This because active defenses (dodge, block, aegis, blind, the list goes on and on) override the passives found in toughness and vitality, by virtue of being damage negators (they negate one or more hits, full stop).

I posted it elsewhere on this forum, and i suspect is is just a wild eyed brainstorm, but i found myself wondering how the game would play if the active defenses boosted the passive stuff rather than override it.

Meaning that if you dodge you are not completely immune to incoming damage, but much like with the protection boon you get a percentage reduction of damage. This would then compliment toughness rather than override it, by acting pretty much as a temporary toughness buff.

One issue i foresee as i think about it more is conditions, as they only need to hit to begin ticking. As such, a change like this would further entrench the condi-bunker PVP meta.

And that is why i consider it a wild eyed brainstorm, as it would likely require a wholesale rebalancing of the game. Tho IMO, that is required for the PVE side anyways as the core issue with PVE right now is mob behavior across all of PVE.

Your suggestions are interesting but what you have to understand is this : most people like the game the way it is and it won’t be radically reworked just because a few players feel they need more roles or the game to be oriented towards healing.

If you feel GW2 isn’t the game you want it to be maybe GW2 isn’t the game for you.

If you increase healing power as a stat you’re only going to promote lazy play where players faceroll without even requiring skill ( to dodge ) to go through content.
See the Arah video where they did the entire dungeon without ONE single dodge. It was posted around the forums for a while.

Is that what you want the game to become? because that is doable now – increase Healing Power and see what you get.

“Guise, we need more healers”.

haviz.1340:

“Guise, we need more healers”.

Even if the system mechanics allowed it, they still wouldn’t be needed. To be honest, I feel Anet doesn’t really know how to solve the problem of support and control archetypes co-existing with the dps archetype.

DPS can bring everything to the table that support and control archetypes can. I don’t see how this can change this without either completely overhauling mobs or the system (which would be a huge mistake).

I feel the only support stats that should of existed is condition duration and boon duration, because those are the only supportive stats that slightly separates dps from those two archetypes. Healing power doesn’t make that much of a difference, toughness outside of pvp doesn’t either. But long boons, cripples, immobilizes and vulnerabilities possibly could.

During the live stream one of the devs said: “People have this idea that support is just killing the mob attacking your friend as fast as possible”. He laughs about it. But what is he going to do about it to stop it from occurring? Probably nothing, killing mobs faster will continue to be the considered as optimal support.

The problem with this, not every class can even be “supportive” You have Ele, Engi, Guardian as the main ones, sure you get a few AoE heals or something. Mesmer is decent with Feedback, Chaos Storm and such but still not enough compared to Engi, Guard and ele. Necromancer has like a Heal and thats about it for example…

You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.

quick questions:
If support is unviable in pve, how comes most parties in lfg wants a guardian or 2?
You can go without but most people simply won’t.

Seems at least a single profession can support…..maybe matching other professions effectiveness, cds and duration?

Would you take a support ele/engi/ranger instead of a guardian to your daily fotm 49 pug?

Guardians are boon dispensers like no other, and very often hand out aegis simply by proximity. And you can still go balls to the wall zerker as a guardian and provide said boons.

ArmageddonAsh.6430:

The problem with this, not every class can even be “supportive” You have Ele, Engi, Guardian as the main ones, sure you get a few AoE heals or something. Mesmer is decent with Feedback, Chaos Storm and such but still not enough compared to Engi, Guard and ele. Necromancer has like a Heal and thats about it for example…

This depends on how wide one define support. For necromancer, support can be seen as condition manipulation (plague signet) and conversion (well of power).

But very little of that is stat related. And it depends on the enemy fought is using conditions in the first place.

haviz.1340:

You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.

From one perspective gear stats just seem to hold back the game. I don’t feel they were ever needed and that Anet should of stuck with gw1 formula. No stats, just light, medium and heavy armor types.

You are right though, if the game was all about your playstyle being determined by what points you have invested in trait trees then the game would of been much better off. And probably less negativity from players.

haviz.1340:

You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.

I really wish that the gear to trait line ratio for stats were reversed. Right now some 2/3 of the stat total come from gear.

SIGNED °³8/4 characters

digiowl.9620:

This depends on how wide one define support. For necromancer, support can be seen as condition manipulation (plague signet) and conversion (well of power).

But very little of that is stat related. And it depends on the enemy fought is using conditions in the first place.

Well everyone can burst conditions near enough. Condition manipulation has been nerfed so much that it really isnt that great anymore. I think removing the trinity actually did more harm that good balance wise.

Harper.4173:

If you feel GW2 isn’t the game you want it to be maybe GW2 isn’t the game for you.

ANet doesn’t seem to think that way. That was a community conclusion, never anything ANet truly intended for their PvE game. Complain to them, and see where that gets you.

Also, any changes won’t ever hurt the Berserker’s builds. I can bet that such a gear set will always be the most powerful. No reason to panic over nothing (or worse, attack other players as “zerker-nerfers” because they don’t play the way you do, and as if it was their fault-it was ANet’s fault all along for letting the PvE game devolve into DPS races, and they know it.)

digiowl.9620:

haviz.1340:

You increase your support via traits (pure of voice, elemental attunement, etc) and that’s a better option than to have it tied to gear. Let’s imagine a new dungeon (yes, I might have taken that too far) where support is very efficient and sought. You want to play with a group of friends but all of you have offensive gear and traits. Is it easier for 1-2 people to retrait for 3.5s each or get a new sets of gear? As long as anet wants people to randomly create successful parties while giving the incentive to play more supportive we need to have a gear that doesn’t influence said support.

I really wish that the gear to trait line ratio for stats were reversed. Right now some 2/3 of the stat total come from gear.

Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.

As much as I would really love seeing this happen, it won’t. Why?

Because ANet is currently trying to balance the game for all the bloodthirsty, sexually frustrated 15 yr olds so that they’re happy bashing buttons and “lul kill” and then they’ll look at the rest of the game mechanics.

As you can see it’s been a year and a half and everything is still right back where we started.

I agree..
Support needs more buffs..Defently dmg will always be first, ive played WoW for a long time and even if some players found healing-tanking interesting most of the players wanted to make dmg…In their Looking for Group tool tanks and healers had smaller q times than dps..I know that WoW had 4 pure dmg classes, but still i believe that most ppl prefer to see numbers…..It gets boring sometimes tho

Vargamonth.2047:

Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.

It would be much better if you could change your stats more flexible. Not saying to tie them to trait lines but more flexible than they are now.

haviz.1340:

Vargamonth.2047:

Not a good idea.
Traits, weapons and utilities (and runes up to some degree) are still the most build defining choices, with more impact on the end result than gear stats will ever have.
Moving gear stats, which can also be mixed, to traitlines would achieve nothing but a far less flexible character building.

It would be much better if you could change your stats more flexible. Not saying to tie them to trait lines but more flexible than they are now.

The more flexibility, the better.
Devs are already aware of most players wanting this … that’s why they’re releasing more legendary gear in the future :P

I’m probably more concerned about Sigil/Rune flexibility. Being able to change gear stats at any times sounds great, but what’s the point if I still have to carry half a dozen berserker greatswords with different sigils.

Star Ace.5207:

Harper.4173:

If you feel GW2 isn’t the game you want it to be maybe GW2 isn’t the game for you.

ANet doesn’t seem to think that way. That was a community conclusion, never anything ANet truly intended for their PvE game. Complain to them, and see where that gets you.

Also, any changes won’t ever hurt the Berserker’s builds. I can bet that such a gear set will always be the most powerful. No reason to panic over nothing (or worse, attack other players as “zerker-nerfers” because they don’t play the way you do, and as if it was their fault-it was ANet’s fault all along for letting the PvE game devolve into DPS races, and they know it.)

I’m not the one spamming the forums with " omg zerkers are clearing content so fast – nerf them into oblivion because i’m jealous I can’t do the same on my full cleric’s guardian".
It’s the zerk-nerfers who do that. My reaction is justified. I’ve seen so many zerk-hating threads it’s not even real.
And people are hating on something they don’t even get. They’re not even playing with the zerkers ( because the zerkers won’t have them) and they claim to not want to play with the zerkers but are just mad that zerkers are doing good.

They say things like " full dps trivializes content " but fail to realize they can form their own 5 man cleric parties and take as long as they want in a dungeon.

Why attack and try to ruin another player’s way of playing?

If zerker is nerfed – then the new optimal gear will be a requirement and for these " suboptimal players " that refuse to gear with the most effective gear the game will stay the same. Elitists ( previous zerkers) will demand the new gear meta and when they fail to provide it they’ll get the boot.

I especially agree about the ‘reward part’ the OP mentioned, it seems as though, if you don’t tag a foe, you weren’t there … even if you actually made the fight a win by keeping everybody in the fight.

Now apparently when you ‘hit’ a foe your name gets added to the loot distribution list. Consequently the ‘table’ registers every ‘hit’ you do to establish your contribution. So what needs to happen is that each player gets a ‘supported by’ list (with say a 30sec cleanse), if a foe is hit by any player, the ‘supported by’ list gets added to the loot distribution list, and this list uses the fight registry to calculate your contribution and distribute loot accordingly.

Then I also agree a lot with the res-speed linked to healing power, part of this speed should be linked to the healing power spec.

I agree with most of these ideas to improve support.
I’ve always gravitated towards support/healing, because I just like helping people, and it’s just not rewarded or valued for the most part.

I esp would like to see Boons scale, as I always found it ridiculous that a full berserker could get just as much out of them as a full support. Makes you wonder what’s the point of going support if that’s the case.

Thou I wonder if you might be better off just having a new stat altogether rather then changing Healing Power, thou it should scale better.
I’d like to have a stat that increased the duration of certain types of abilities.

Such as Wards, Reflection, Spirits maybe.
If I could have Feedback or Null Field last say 15-20 seconds when heavily invested in, that would be worth the investment.

Unfortunately a lot of support skills just have no stat association at all, so you can’t really invest in them to any significant degree, even if you wanted to.

nice to see this thread started………this is the type of tweaking that would actually help balance PvE and promote build variety. hopefully this doesn’t get lost in the sea of “zerker meta/ferocity” threads.

hopefully these kind of stat scaling/functionality changes are being considered. the new nerf to crit damage would make much more sense if it was coupled with buffing support/defense/condi-damage stats.