Guild Wars 2

…Until you realize that they are made to suck on purpose due to balancing reasons.

And you won’t ever use them, unless the game forces you to do so (aka, to heal this new “toxin”).

Yeah, I’m all up for horizontal progression, Anet, and skill hunting was an excellent, excellent feature of GW1.

But here’s a tip, Anet: the charm behind skill hunting is to get to use your new-found tools and get satisfied by the results, or even to create new builds revolving around your new tools.

If all we’re getting out of horizontal progression is skills meant to suck, then there’s no horizontal progression at all, because nothing changes. It’s just an illusion.

Never thought otherwise with this skill. Might as well have been an environmental item.

Of course it’s a balance thing. When you can’t fix your balance by changing the numbers, you create new tools to deal with the problem areas. Conditions are overused and you can’t nerf them more or risk making them totally useless, so create more tools to deal with them.

They did that in WvW with the stealth detecting items to counter the stealth spam thieves, as well.

It’s a really bad condition removal skill. I’ve been using it and every time I use it I regret replacing my other heal. It feels like it should have a 15 or 20 second cool down considering how weak it is and how limited the range of conditions it removes are.

This was a disappointing skill. I can only see myself using this if there is some upcoming content forcing us to remove toxin.

I don’t even mind if those pve skills are slightly underpowered, as long as they are good at their own well-estabilished niches.

Prayer to Dwayna, for example, is a decent healing skill, and there are times where the flat decent health gain is better or as good as the alternative profession-specific options. That’s nice!

When I read this skill, I immediatly thought, “this sucks for solo playing, but it’ll be decent in dungeons because of the AoE!” And that would be the niche behind this skill. But it turns out it doesn’t heals allies, it only cleanses them, and knowing Anet, I doubt it’s a bug – probably just a description mistake. But I can also understand that: the niche behind this skill is not for massive aoe spikes (it would be OP in wvw, afterall), but for aoe cleansing.

But here’s the problem: it’s not good at cleansing neither. It’s very restricted in pve environments, and the extra healing (which should affect allies, right?) is unnoticeable. How many times are your allies going to poisoned, confused AND tormented, at the same time, in a pve situation, to make it worthy? Even if the update for the next patch adds a situation like that, the entire, remaining pve experience isn’t still like that.

In practice, this skill reads: “sacrifice your own survival. heals other allies for 500 health and cleanses them a single condition only at certain spots of the game”.

I’m much better off at spreading regeneration to my allies than dedicating my precious healing skill to remove poison and heal allies for 500.

TL;DR: This skill isn’t good even at its little, restricted niche.

pswendel.8179:

Never thought otherwise with this skill. Might as well have been an environmental item.

This. Except then Anet wouldn’t be able to brag about the introduction of new skills. Anyway, you can’t expect much after the Canach Lair “new dungeon” debacle.