Guild Wars 2

So far, healing power doesn’t seem to be a well-understood or highly desired stat. The handful of tests I’ve seen on it indicates that the scaling probably makes it hard to justify on gear in place of most other stats. Many of the hardcore support players seem to prefer vitality, so they live longer, or potentially toughness.

Maybe healing power is just fine and we haven’t let it even out at level 80 yet. Maybe lots more people than I know are using healing gear. However, if my general impressions are correct and this stat is getting ignored by the vast majority of players of all types, then I have a suggestion.

Just scrap healing as a stat. You can retain some stat for healing abilities to scale with but nix the unused gear stat.

At current, I suggest you simply make healing depend on toughness. Vitality might be a better choice thematically, but vitality seems popular enough not to need a “buff.” You could consider making regeneration based off the condition stat, since it applied over time. Or, you could simply make healing power some appropriate percentage of the “power” stat – though I think this would be a mistake since everyone will want to take power anyway, and it might just make everyone much more powerful defensively.

To clarify, I don’t think that healing in general needs to be more powerful. I have no idea how it’s doing relative to the design goals. I do think that there’s a throwaway stat right now in the form of healing power, and that should probably be rectified without making everyone substantially stronger. You could also just junk the stat and not add a replacement, so that people aren’t even remotely tempted to try to put together a “healing” character. Then you just have to make sure you’re happy with the base scaling of all the healing spells, and rethink some traits.

You don’t have to be level 80. You can head to the Mists, stack it using free PvP gear, then fight one of the duelling bots and see how much it adds to your self heal.

Healing actually scales really well on my necro when stacked enough. Take well of blood for instance (my personal choice of heal fro necro). Without +heal it has about a 6.2k base heal and 200 per tick every second. With the healing factored in, it has a base heal of almost 9k, with every tick healing 700. Math factored in no heal stat = about 8k, with heal stat = about 15k almost double and all from like 1233 to heal stat. Healing has a place, it is just underused because very few classes have multiple skills to utilize it. On my necro it scales with regen from the staff 2, the MH dagger 2 life drain, as well as the regen from 4 on the offhand focus.

Many Wiki entries on skills have data on the healing power coefficient already filled in.

For example, http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Healing_Signet

“increases by around Healing Power * 0.0325 per second”

That’s 3 HP per tick for every 100 healing power, when level 80 characters have 5 digit hit points, and are hit for 4 digit numbers. Not even an exotic in every slot is going to turn you into Wolverine, it seems.