Guild Wars 2

Each profession should do a small amount (maybe 1/10 or 1/15 total) of self healing on a killing blow while battling out in the world.

It seems like their are strategic reasons to NOT kill a weak enemy and allow yourself to go down instead, giving you have an easy foe to pick off for the rally. This is opposed to finishing the weak foe off, and going down against a higher health opponent and failing to get the rally.

This seems like a strategy that’s not intended by the designers. And I think it’s less real world (objectively my characters should never prefer going down), and it muddles the game up by obscuring combat objectives.

Adding a self heal to killing blows would correct the issue. Because I’d then always prefer to finish off a weak foe and retreat rather than trying to use the down mechanic “offensively.” I don’t think there is any reason the self-heal shouldn’t work in PvP as well. And to avoid abuse it could be added as an effect to only direct damage abilities, i.e. no self-heal for killing blows the result from ground target spells or condition damage. And there could also be an effect recharge time, i.e. no more than 1 of these kind of heals in any 30 second period.

You can counter the strategy by mercilessly killing the NPC that your opponent is counting on for a rally. If someone takes this approach with you, either try to use more AOE so that their rally reserve is eliminated, or less AoE so that you don’t help them whittle the rally NPC down to a sliver of health.

That’s all true, and great advice. But it’s not really responsive to my suggestion. It’s great to know how to exploit your rallies and how to counter opposing teams’ rallies, it’s another to have situations where losing a fight is preferable to winning a fight. If they added the small heal to a killing blow, you’d always want to win the fight (i.e. better game), but all of that fun down-mechanic and the meta-game strategy of exploiting downs (going down near weak players/NPCs and going down on the point) would still be there for people to have fun with.

Good point, well made.

this is actually a point that needs to be addressed in both pvp and pve. i dont know if a small heal is the right way of doing it but i dont have a better suggestion. but seriously anet think about this one.

It’s a big deal in PvE. I found myself doing that in Orr a lot; once my health got to a certain point, better to get an enemy to a sliver of health and then get downed, so I can finish it off for the rally heal. Not only is the rally heal often better than the healing from most abilities that aren’t your #6, it buys time for your #6 to come off CD.

Exactly. For me that makes the pace of PvE really stuttery.