Guild Wars 2

What classes are viable healers at the moment for raiding, other than Druids?

Unfortunately the main problem in being a viable healer is not who can heal in raids, but who can do so without doing close to 0 dps. It’s a fact, that you don’t need much healing most of the time, so the important thing is to contribute something else while your heals aren’t needed.

And the at moment, the sad answer is:
- Druids can heal while still providing a meaningful contribution to dps through their offensive buffs (spotter, spirits, glyph of empowerment, grace of the land)
- Minstrel Chronomancers can provide additional healing without losing much damage (because their personal dps is already low, they are brought for their offensive group buffs (quickness, alacrity)), while also doubling as a tank

Every other healer is limited to the rare occasion when your group constantly struggles to stay alive… and that’s mostly only an issue in inexperienced groups, before they learn to manage the boss mechanics and to avoid avoidable damage.

Ele
- Situational Revenant

Guardian might become viable when PoF hits with the Firebrand spec aswell.

I’m guessing so far it’s a water-based Elementalist. How does a Revenant heal?

ventari tablet, and, to a lesser extent, regen application from glint

There is also minstrel chrono, which is not technically a healer, however if your playing with a non-regen druid, the more powerful regen ticks of the minstrel chrono are significant.

So, if your playing with a staff/staff magi druid or a condi druid, minstrel chrono can make a significant impact. Condi druid are typically only seen in experienced groups, but some new players seem to like staff/staff magi druid. It is the widely held opinion of my static that there is no reason to play staff/staff rather than staff/warhorn+x.

So to summarise:

Minstrel Chronomancer
Ranger Druid
Water Elementalist
Guardian Firebrand
and situationally Revenant

druid when you don’t need much healing but like doing more damage
ventari rev when you want to be healed A LOT AND QUICKLY (super burst heals)
magi auramancer for HIGH SUSTAIN HEALING (think things like ignore-mechanics-o-clock vg runs)
minstrel chrono is more of an off healer. they’re still insanely good, of course. but I’m not sure having a minstrel chrono would mean you could swap a healer for another dps… you ccould try. it could be interesting.

all healers can sustain and burst heal, but those are the strengths from what I’ve seen.

Murdock.6547:

druid when you don’t need much healing but like doing more damage
ventari rev when you want to be healed A LOT AND QUICKLY (super burst heals)
magi auramancer for HIGH SUSTAIN HEALING (think things like ignore-mechanics-o-clock vg runs)
minstrel chrono is more of an off healer. they’re still insanely good, of course. but I’m not sure having a minstrel chrono would mean you could swap a healer for another dps… you ccould try. it could be interesting.

all healers can sustain and burst heal, but those are the strengths from what I’ve seen.

In a sense, you can swap minstrel chrono for healer. If a minstrel chrono allows you to swap magi druid for condi druid. It would effectively be similar.

Most famous example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/56mmnk/trio_vale_guardian_by_sc/

i’ve mained druid for raiding since Jan this year.

My initial note is that full magi is pointless in all apart from training runs (personally even a 5LI group you don’t need full magi). I tend to roll trinkets which dont boost my DPS by much, 2.5k (lazy mode) to about 5k (lazy mode) while still being able to heal everyone nice and good.

Healing in GW2 is easy and classes that CAN do it are – Druid, Tempest/Elementalist(both can), Revenant and Warrior (shout heals LUL) and mistrel chrono(would prefer they focus on Alac+Quickness uptime though ^^)

Druid is by far the strongest of those overall since none of those healing classes can match a Druid’s offensive buffs (spotter, GotL, Spirits and empowerment) and in some cases can’t match its DPS too (condi druid gets 10-15k DPS while still being able to heal – this is squad dependent. mechanic eaters might need magi heals)

Ele has some good heals too and i’ve seen it work quite well for some easier fights like VG.

i’ve seen some revenants play as kiter on things like Cairn and that seems to go.. acceptably. i think Revenant’s strength is shown on the deimos kiting scene where he is pretty kitten strong.

I am not too familiar with the minstrel chrono stuff but from what i can tell their well healing skill has some okay scaling with healing power and if they’re using Signet of Insp on regen then i see potenital. But again i also say this is squad specific as i believe experienced FULL-MAN raids can run 2 Berserker chronos with 1 on Berseker’s Accessories and another on Knight’s Accessories for the extra toughness to get like 1408 (i think).

Shout warrior is a meme.

I personally think Condi Druid is the best healer and i think someone did the maths to prove it but i’m not going to quote anything.

Maybe we’ll see a mixup in PoF with barrier+heals if LWS4 Raid wings (when we get em ^^) are painful and/or work around barrier in some way.

Depends on your definition of the word viable. If you are looking for a build that could replace a druid as the healer while the party remains to be just as effective as before, then no. There is no such choice currently.
As of now, any of the following variations will be more effective than replacing any of those with another healer or by adding any other healer on top of them. Some are already overkill as it is.
Minstrel Druid + Minstrel Chrono
Magi Druid + Berserker Chrono
Minstrel Druid + Berserker Chrono
Viper Druid + Minstrel Chrono
Viper Druid + Berserker Chrono

However, if you are talking about clearing the raids quickly and doing just fine without having to push the best efficiency and min-maxing possible then you have a lot of different options. I’d probably add the old support guardian as a possible option then.

As for healer/support in current form – druid. Gotl spotter spirits too good to miss.
Keep the other players heavy dps xD