Guild Wars 2

My biggest dissapointment with GW2 is the fact that there is no healing-based class! I know it is thought to be that not having one will somehow benefit gameplay, but, the truth is, it doesn’t. Not. At. All.

Are you telling me that there were all of these magnificent professions in the world of Guild Wars 2, but, yet, not a single adventurer decided to devote them selves to healing and light magic? Come on!

You can say things like “All a healer would do is watch health bars”, but, actually, it takes skill and hard work to help your team to survive. Why would you take away such a successful class is beyond me, but, please, for my sake and the sake of your players, please add a healing-based class!

Thank you.

Supporters:
• robinsiebler.3801

I am squishy and I support this idea!

This message was brought to you by a Kitten with a Keyboard

This game was designed from the very beginning not to have the “trinity” roles — tank, dps, healer. So it’s not likely to change. And good riddance to the trinity model says I.

What is a class

@pdg
Guardians are the obvious tanks, and all classes can be dps. Yes, most professions have some sort of “heal”, but that is nothing near what is needed to compensate for a healer!

@Beaster

A set or category of things having some property or attribute in common and differentiated from others by kind, type, or quality.

In other words, another word for a profession.

I hear ya. I love supporting/healing but as PDG said it’s suppose to be that way…But that just makes me think in dungeons it’s an all out free-for-all. I haven’t reached that part so I’m not sure how dungeons run. Guardian and Ele’s are the closest I see for support. I’m trying Guardian to see how support runs.

Are you sure that you don’t want certified ‘classes’ as tanks and dps too?
They could throw in some raids while they’re at it
maybe raise the level cap and slap on 900k hp
Don’t forget mounts

Beaster.4531:

What is a class

A class is what GW2 calls professions.

@Beaster
Sir, you are being completely biased. How does a healer profession have anything to do with those things you mentioned?

@Rise
As I previously mentioned, none of the professions can compare to a healer. Guardians are for protecting allies before they are damaged, while healers are for healing allies after they are damaged. Does it make any sense to have one profession and not the other?

I don’t miss PUG PvP matches being determined primarily by number of healers or anti-healers (generally mesmers with certain builds), as was often the case in GW1.

Also, such a system is bad for world enemies. It was always clunky in Rift, trying to get every party to have a healer to fight zone bosses (or whatever the term was).

In any case, guardians are all about reducing damage. They are the profession that most closely fulfills that role. How many different ways are there to make healing interesting, really? What always happens is something like: Here’s the heal that heals over time, and here is the heal that uses more mana (which this game doesn’t have) but is faster, and here is the big group heal on a cooldown.

In this game, the idea is to try not to take the biggest hits in the first place.

No Holy Trinity → no Healers.

Simple as that. If you are too squishy you are making something wrong.

nachtnebel.9168:

No Holy Trinity -> no Healers.

Simple as that. If you are too squishy you are making something wrong.

Finally some common sense

I enjoy playing healing classes in other games (and everything else), and I have found an ele traited deep in water with staff equipped is pretty effective in this role. The great thing is, I have the option to go dps as well, for when I am soloing, or for whenever the mood hits me. I would never want them to change the professions or add a strictly “healing” class. I think they did everything right with professions personally. The freedom of a build! Experiment some, this way is much better.

@Signet of Forums
You called Mesmers anti-healers, therefore saying that their main purpose can not be fulfilled due to there not being any healers!

Those of you saying that healers would disrupt order are clearly “hating” on healers with skill! A decent mesmer/necromancer/any other class for that matter could negate the effects of the healer.

Bradley.4075:

@Rise
As I previously mentioned, none of the professions can compare to a healer. Guardians are for protecting allies before they are damaged, while healers are for healing allies after they are damaged. Does it make any sense to have one profession and not the other?

Yes, it can make sense to have one and not the other. Healing is reactive where as protection is proactive. Healing promotes a very passive type of gameplay and is less punishing of bad play, especially if you shove all of that responsibility onto one player.

When everyone has a self heal and there is a no dedicated healing class, then everyone is in charge of their own well being. If you die, then chances are your death was a direct result of your own actions and/or negligence.

By putting an emphasis on protection and damage mitigation instead of heals, you’re encouraging players to play more skillfully. It takes a lot more player skill to use a block with a 3 second window than to use a heal with an infinite window.

Bradley.4075:

@Signet of Forums
You called Mesmers anti-healers, therefore saying that their main purpose can not be fulfilled due to there not being any healers!

Those of you saying that healers would disrupt order are clearly “hating” on healers with skill! A decent mesmer/necromancer/any other class for that matter could negate the effects of the healer.

Actually, what I said is that mesmers with certain builds in the first game fulfilled the role of anti-healing, but you can twist my words however you want, I guess.

I don’t miss that being a necessary role. One of the biggest problems with PvP in the first game was that it could be such a crapshoot whether or not your build would be particularly useful in a given match or not.

Aecelia.9043:

Bradley.4075:

@Rise
As I previously mentioned, none of the professions can compare to a healer. Guardians are for protecting allies before they are damaged, while healers are for healing allies after they are damaged. Does it make any sense to have one profession and not the other?

Yes, it can make sense to have one and not the other. Healing is reactive where as protection is proactive. Healing promotes a very passive type of gameplay and is less punishing of bad play, especially if you shove all of that responsibility onto one player.

When everyone has a self heal and there is a no dedicated healing class, then everyone is in charge of their own well being. If you die, then chances are your death was a direct result of your own actions and/or negligence.

By putting an emphasis on protection and damage mitigation instead of heals, you’re encouraging players to play more skillfully. It takes a lot more player skill to use a block with a 3 second window than to use a heal with an infinite window.

Also, this.

@Aecelia
Once again, completely biased response. First of all, you can’t have proactive without reactive. Secondly, not having a healer profession encourages players to not play skillfully at all! With healers, much more skill will be needed to protect ally healers and to put a stop to enemy healers. Instead of this, you are left running from battle as soon as your health drops 200hp.

@Signet of Forums
So in other words, not having a healer takes away from diversity in professions. Healers means more diversity!

@Zionka
Some people would prefer support through healing than being deep in water barely making a mark in your allies HP. You say freedom, but, yet, your taking away from the players’ freedom by not having healers!

It’s the other way round: As soon as there are healers, players start to pay less attention, cause there is someone else to blame if they die. If there would be tanks too, it would even be worse.

The best about the current system is, that there are no excuses for any profession to die. If you died, it was your fault, nobody else to blame. Either you didn’t pay enough attention to your surroundings, you wasted your dodges on attacks that deal no damage, you had not enough protective skills or you are just too much glass-cannony (what a beautiful word creation).

Don’t get me wrong, I love healer, in most other MMOs I played one, but they just have no place in GW2.

Bradley.4075:

@Aecelia
Once again, completely biased response. First of all, you can’t have proactive without reactive. Secondly, not having a healer profession encourages players to not play skillfully at all! With healers, much more skill will be needed to protect ally healers and to put a stop to enemy healers. Instead of this, you are left running from battle as soon as your health drops 200hp.

@Signet of Forums
So in other words, not having a healer takes away from diversity in professions. Healers means more diversity!

@Zionka
Some people would prefer support through healing than being deep in water barely making a mark in your allies HP. You say freedom, but, yet, your taking away from the players’ freedom by not having healers!

If there was a profession that possessed other players, that would mean more diversity. That doesn’t mean it would make the game better. “More diversity” is not a very strong argument.

Guild Wars 2 is not every other post-WoW fantasy MMO on the market. There are literally hundreds of different games that have what you want. Healers aren’t coming to this game, plain and simple. The game was designed from the ground up to not have them and to not need them. (And make no mistake; as soon as a game has them, they are needed.)

In the end, you can suggest it all day. It’s not going to change anything.

This game is designed and balanced at a fundamental level to not have specialized character roles. What you’re suggesting is a radical revision of the content design, combat system and character balancing.

And for what? To make Guild Wars 2 more like every other MMORPG on the market?

@nachtnebel
The way you are saying it, you apparently care about the oppinions others have about you (due to your figurative lack of skills with the profession), and, because of that, a healer is not the class for you. Also, thieves are the obvious glass cannons along with elementalists. You can pretend that they aren’t there, but you’re only fooling yourself.

@Signet of Forums
You are obviously uneducated in the fact that Guild Wars 1 did, in fact, have a healer profession. And you are now resorting to non-sense to try to pursue yourself into believing these biased ideas.

@Stice
The majority of other MMOs have warriors, guardians, engineers, elementalist, thieves, and every other profession, just not with all the same name. But, some how you believe that not having a Healer but keeping all of the other professions will some how make the game unique? Yes, it will, but not in a good way.

Guardian with healing breeze, Mace & Focus and staff provides a good healing support role.
Elementalist with water attunement (various weapons) provides another alternative with good healing ability.

@Elthurien
Once again, other classes obviously can heal, but none can compare to a healer.

Bradley.4075:

@Signet of Forums
You are obviously uneducated in the fact that Guild Wars 1 did, in fact, have a healer profession. And you are now resorting to non-sense to try to pursue yourself into believing these biased ideas.

It’s funny because you already replied to a post of mine about Guild Wars 1 healers, and the reason I know this was not by memory (though I was pretty sure it was you), but by going back and looking.

Bradley.4075:

@nachtnebel
The way you are saying it, you apparently care about the oppinions others have about you (due to your figurative lack of skills with the profession), and, because of that, a healer is not the class for you. Also, thieves are the obvious glass cannons along with elementalists. You can pretend that they aren’t there, but you’re only fooling yourself.

Yes, there are Thieves and Elementalists in this game, but they don’t need a healer to survive, they can do so on their own. Okay, maybe not all, but that’s cause of the player and not a matter of the profession.

If you need a healer, you just have to learn to play GW2. Sounds harsh, but it’s true.

The game was designed to not rely on the trinity. Every class is capable of fighting by themselves or in a group without getting completely smashed. If you really love healers so much, roll guardian (full support) or elementalist (water attune).

Aiishe.3240:

The game was designed to not rely on the trinity. Every class is capable of fighting by themselves or in a group without getting completely smashed. If you really love healers so much, roll guardian (full support) or elementalist (water attune).

Or play something else. Seriously, the appeal of this game to a large extent is the things that it does differently…

A dedicated healer class would screw up PVP balance. It would turn into which side had more healers, or become standstills as no one would die.

@nachtnebel
Your response implies that healers should be in the game because it does not matter what professions there are, it depends on the players.

@Signet of Forums
I have no clue what fantasy you’re going on about, that’s the first time i have said that to anybody.

@Aiishe & Phy
If you are so ignorant not to read the rest of the thread, then please don’t post.

Bradley.4075:

@Aecelia
Once again, completely biased response. First of all, you can’t have proactive without reactive. Secondly, not having a healer profession encourages players to not play skillfully at all! With healers, much more skill will be needed to protect ally healers and to put a stop to enemy healers. Instead of this, you are left running from battle as soon as your health drops 200hp.

1. You mention a biased response but I gave a really specific example in terms of using a shield vs. using a heal. Can you give me a counter example to this to which that heal requires more skill than using the shield?

2. Can you explain to me what you mean by “can’t have proactive without reactive”? Going from my example of proactive play (protection) vs. reactive play (heal), you can clearly have shields and damage mitigation without any type of heal. Again, revisiting my example: A shield that blocks 300 damage and a heal that heals for 300 damage, if both used correctly, will leave the user at the same state. The difference is the window of opportunity of use and the necessary skill and judgment associated with exploiting that window of opportunity.

3. You mention the skill required to protect and go after enemy healers. The skill you use to protect your own healer can similarly be applied to protecting any single one of your party members really. As for running away at 200 HP: even if you had a healer, would you not disengage to a safe spot so that your healer can heal you? Does it require more skill to prevent ever hitting 200 HP, or does it require more skill to bring an ally up from 200 HP?

Phy.2913:

A dedicated healer class would screw up PVP balance. It would turn into which side had more healers, or become standstills as no one would die.

I remember all of those Fort Aspenwood matches where Kurzicks would just heal the gate NPCs and due to the other team not happening to have enough anti-healing, there wasn’t really **** they could do about it.

I guess OP’s solution is going to be that I just play as an anti-healer every match for the life of the game. No thanks.

I did read the thread. It appears you’re one of those people who can’t handle differing opinions.

@Aecilia
More bias opinions! That’s like me saying a warrior takes more skill to play than a necromancer, or a mesmer takes more skill to play than a guardian. Totally biased. You also added some ignorance in, great – I specifically said that guardians are to protect allies from damage, while healers are to heal players after they are damaged. Your last statement is a mix of ignorance and bias, and I will not bother answering such a question.

@Phy
Someone had already made the same response as you and I had replied to it, saying the same thing once again is redundant.

I think anet took a heavy dose of time to actually look over the Trinity, and determine how they would adress the situation. Gw2 handles combat like a hack-and-slash. Which in many hack-and-slash games you are your own healer. After all, how fun would it be to just watch someone kill all the monsters and all you do is watch health bars in an action game?

Gw2 is more of an ACTION MMORPG rather then straight up stratigical mmo. Which seperates it and puts it on it’s own pedestal. Many other MMO’s do not have the action element. Gw2 is designed to be active, not reactive. You try your best NOT to be hit, rather then to “heal” the damage of being hit….

And Im a Support guardian, All I do is drop health and sheilds. Trust me! But at the same time, even with all that healing, All it does is barely “aid” the team in surviving tiny damages. In masive events my heal will not be so strong as to overcome the 6K that dragon just spewed on little john over there. For a good reason to. When an epic dragon comes to town, it would be so boreing to actually miss the Unique encounter because you were more busy with flinging heals at the idiots who instead of dodgeing away from the fireball..run into it.

In gw2, you are not a healer, because you are not a babysitter. No Hack-and-slash I have ever played let you babysit other classes. And I played a Cleric on realms of norrath(if I remember the name right). THat class had lots of heals..but I still had to do something other then heal. Otherwise I would die! lol, gw2 is more diverse then other mmo’s learn to embrace that.

Why do people keep suggesting we have “features” from WoW/InsertCloneHere ~ that are 100% against the direction of GW2?

First people demand mounts… really? wtf.
Now people want healers? o.O

Seriously, if you like WoW.. that’s AWESOME! ~ but please don’t come here expecting GW2 to cater to that mindset, when in countless interviews/previews/posts ~ the dev team have stated their want to be “more than the typical mmo”.

This means, no healers.. no tanks.. no trinity.

If you’re confused by any of this.. please watch their Manifesto ~ http://youtu.be/b_FskSWHLgE

Bradley.4075:

@nachtnebel
Your response implies that healers should be in the game because it does not matter what professions there are, it depends on the players.

You really should stop trolling, it’s getting tedious.

If you are really not trolling, you should stop trying to read something into statements that just isn’t there. There is absolutely no reason why there should be healers in GW2. Even you didn’t come up with a real one yet.

As much as I love the healing classes in other games, I seriously doubt they would implement a “healing” class. The basis of this game is to do away with the trinity. Adding a healing class would not only mess up pvp but it would also mess up pve. Dungeons would be a complete joke. I play ele, some times I feel like being a support and go deep into water with a staff, even then we do a lot better than other groups I’ve had but if they added a “heal” class it would turn completely turn the game upside down.. why stop there? People would complain to just add a tank class… then were back to the trinity.. and this is exactly what Arena Net was avoiding so I would say dont get your hopes up.

Bradley.4075:

@Aecilia
More bias opinions! That’s like me saying a warrior takes more skill to play than a necromancer, or a mesmer takes more skill to play than a guardian. Totally biased. You also added some ignorance in, great – I specifically said that guardians are to protect allies from damage, while healers are to heal players after they are damaged. Your last statement is a mix of ignorance and bias, and I will not bother answering such a question.

You ignored every one of my questions and points, blanketing it under the misnomers of “ignorance” and “biased opinion”. You clearly are not here to have a discussion on the matter and any attempts to have a discussion will go nowhere.

If you are to make a suggestion, you should take in all criticism into consideration. If it is to go into implementation, it is going to effect every single player in this game’s player base. A change of this magnitude, especially one that goes against the game’s fundamental design, should not be made just because of your whim. Especially if you can not defend your suggestion with concrete examples and counter points to the ones I, and others, have brought up.

As other users have stated, there are plenty of games out there that have healing classes that would cater to your desires.

@Aecilia
If you read what I said, I clearly answered your first 2 questions, and your last was, as I previously stated (WOW I’m having to say those words a lot), it was too ignorant for me to bother answering.

@Everyone else
Trinity is not a good enough reason to not add a healer profession! Seriously, what! That’s like saying because WoW had a warrior profession, there shouldn’t be a warrior in the game. What? Come on guys, open your eyes. I know there’s going to be a lot of smartkitten remarks to this, so, please, keep them coming! I can keep this up all day!

@OP ~ Sorry.. but this thread is a waste of space *(against what ANet have declared to be the direction of GW2).

Thus I would suggest to everyone here ~ please don’t reply or bump this thread anymore.

It’s taking up space and pushing other useful ideas off the front page.

Thank you for your time

Signet of Forums.4397

I don’t miss PUG PvP matches being determined primarily by number of healers or anti-healers (generally mesmers with certain builds), as was often the case in GW1.

Bradley.4075:

@Signet of Forums
You called Mesmers anti-healers, therefore saying that their main purpose can not be fulfilled due to there not being any healers!

Bradley.4075:

@Signet of Forums
You are obviously uneducated in the fact that Guild Wars 1 did, in fact, have a healer profession. And you are now resorting to non-sense to try to pursue yourself into believing these biased ideas.

Signet of Forums.4397

It’s funny because you already replied to a post of mine about Guild Wars 1 healers, and the reason I know this was not by memory (though I was pretty sure it was you), but by going back and looking.

Bradley.4075:

@Signet of Forums
I have no clue what fantasy you’re going on about, that’s the first time i have said that to anybody.

Are you serious or what? It’s not exactly brain surgery, scrolling up the page to see your own posts.

Why do you want to keep “this” up all day? Just give us some proper reasons why this game NEEDS a healer profession?

There is at least one reason why there should be no healers:
Healers are a specific kind of class/profession. There reason of their mere existence is, that other classes/professions need their heals to survive combat. So, if you need healers, the game has to be designed accordingly and if that’s the case, each pve and pvp group needs at least one. And that goes totally against what Arena Net tried to achieve with GW2.
Currently you don’t need any specific profession in order to clear a dungeon or be competitive in pvp. If they would add healers, this would either change or healers would be a useless profession since they are not required. Because, why would you bring a healer if he doesn’t change anything? Just think about it, if you are able to clear a dungeon/win a tournament completely without a healer, why bring one that does nothing else but to lower your overall dps and therefore slows you down?

It’s obvious that I’m not going to get enough support with this idea. Thank you all for your time and consideration, have a good day.

I predict the monk class returning within the next 2 years.

Banewrath.5107:

I predict the monk class returning within the next 2 years.

They’re going to take all of their skills back from guardians. “Give me back my Aegis!”

Both Guardians and Elementalists could heal quite a bit during the BWE’s. So much so people were starting to make builds based around healing. ArenaNet nerfed healing across the board pretty much after that.

How would you even level up as a healer, since you don’t get get DE’s done by healing people, so you’d have to actually help out
Any minimal damage you would then do, you’d complain about and say ‘it needs this and that’
Same with hearts
It just seems like alot of work for anet for something we don’t need and only a few want

I have nothing against healers (or tanks for that matter) but I do not miss them in GW2. It is a welcome change from the trinity. Although there is no holy trinity but there are still roles such as control, support, bunker or damage. These roles take as much skill as would healing or tanking if not more.

In the classic roles you would either be full healing or full tanking and that is all (unless you ran a hybrid spec for pvp/arena – and was a ‘class’ that could do more than one role). In this system you have to do a little bit of it all and that is no easy task.

I understand and respect your passion for the healing profession but I think your opinion may be skewed by that love. This is a good system and has no need for healers but feel free to explore the support side of it. If you look at it from a different perspective you may find that there is a challenge to successfully support your team.

I mainlined monk in GW1 and like to think I was really good at it. (I Heal And Deal was my monk :P )

I must say that I honestly do really miss playing monk. But at the same time, adding a monk to this game would cause a lot of problems I think.

The main problem is that it would turn into a requirement to have a monk in every party for dungeon, spvp, and maybe even wvw. And that is exactly why anet set the game up this way – to avoid required classes in parties.

So as much as I do miss my monk, I would actually vote against adding them to this game. (You have no idea how hard it is to say this but I feel this is the wisest path)