Guild Wars 2

If there’s crit chance and crit damage i think there should be a crit heal and crit chance for heals. People using support and survival are not as effective as a Berserker damage build would be when dealing damage. I’m not saying we should be able to heal as much as the best damage build would deal damage, that’s wrong, but the current heals should be able to critically hit and also have crit heal.

Let’s say a normal heal does 5k. With crit it does 8k.

A hit from a Berserker warrior does 8k. With crit he does 14k.

I think that would be reasonable.
But to get that 8k you really need to put a lot of healing power,crit chance heal and crit heal into your build, just as Berserker need a lot of power, crit chance and crit damage to get that 14k damage.

So.. you have to sacrifice a lot of damage to do good support heals. Some people want to play more like that and i think it should be more like that.

Crit heals don’t really make sense,, for damage it’s like you hitted him on a weak spot, like the back of his head. Crit heals would be like.. having an orgasm? I don’t know But if heals are too weak vs. crit,, they should just buff the base amount of healing (in my opinion).

What they should do is to give every skill its own specific critical hit(based on precision) chance and its own specific critical effect(based on ferocity). So that damaging skills will have just increased damage based on ferocity, condition-based skills will have increased condition damage based on ferocity, and healing skills will have increased healing based on ferocity. This will solve the problem of multiplicative scaling of physical damage of Power-Precision-Ferocity, also introducing multiplicative scaling of conditions and healing.
TLDR: agree

^agree with CoRtex

I’m at the moment thinking about the stats in this game, cause they really don’t make sense. There’s so many random factors in this combat system that it is impossible to balance.

Conditions:

• Some do damage
• Some don’t do damage
• Do damage per second (which is fine)
• Barely need condition duration because nearly every build has 2+ condition removals, which immediately kill your conditions.

Boons:

• Some override conditions
• Some override control (stability)

Damage:

• Uses 3 stats. Crit chance (aka precision), crit damage and power.
• It would make a lot more sense if there wasn’t crit damage.
• Criticals would just mean a constant multiplier; for example your criticals do 2x the damage normal hits do.

Toughness/vitality/healing:

• Scale another way per class, e.g. a guardian can virtually max his vitality and still stay below the normal health a warrior has.
• Armour rate is higher for heavy armour > med armour > light armour, while that is completely out of balance: warrior as a heavy armour class still has the highest dps in the game, where a class like mesmer has maybe half his damage and light armour.
• Casters in this game mean nothing: all the gap closers make casters barely playable. if you want a stable build, you need a weapon with close-range or med-range.

Is there a way to clean this mess? I have no idea.

I think this would be a little, but good approach to ballance a bit the Damage/Support/Control Trinity to improve slightly the Support Role more onto the right path and make it more equal to Damage.

Crit Heals should also exist, no question. But I think its easier to implement them, than the OP thinks.
All ANet has to do is to change the formula of Healings, which gets calculated currently only by Healing Power having its effect on the final outcome of the heal that you receive at the end.

ANet has just to add Critical Damage for example or the Critical Hit Chance as another Stat into that calculation formula, that it partwise increases the Heals you give out, if you heal critically.

But i think, to balance this out, Critical Heals shpould ONLY HAPPEN, if the target that you want to heal is under a certain threshold of HP, say for example, if your Target is under 75 or under 50% Health, and in regard of how low the health of your target is, so stronger should scale up the Critical Heals if they trigger.

Example:

Critical Heals can trigger only, if your Targets Health is under 75% Health.
If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 75% Health, the normal Heals will be 15% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 50% Health, the normal Heals will be 33% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 33% Health, the normal Heals will be 50% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 20% Health, the normal Heals will be 75% stronger

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has only 10% or lower Health left or is downed, the normal Heals will be 100% stronger.

Thats the way how I think how Critical Heals should work best.

Goorman.7916:

What they should do is to five every skill its own specific critical hit(based on precision) chance and its own specific critical effect(based on ferocity). So that damaging skills will have just increased damage based on ferocity, condition-based skills will have increased condition damage based on ferocity, and healing skills will have increased healing based on ferocity. This will solve the problem of multiplicative scaling of physical damage of Power-Precision-Ferocity, also introducing multiplicative scaling of conditions and healing.
TLDR: agree

That sounds pretty good actually.
As it is now i see Condition Damage as a secondary stat, at least in PvE. No one really uses Condition Damage as a primary stat in PvE. You see it more in PvP though. It’s the same with Healing Power, it’s not used as a primary stat, just as Condition Damage, it’s used as a secondary stat.

If ArenaNet want to see more Condition Damage builds and Healing support builds they have to do something like this to make those stats more effective.

Power is the most effective stat in the game.

Orpheal.8263:

I think this would be a little, but good approach to ballance a bit the Damage/Support/Control Trinity to improve slightly the Support Role more onto the right path and make it more equal to Damage.

Crit Heals should also exist, no question. But I think its easier to implement them, than the OP thinks.
All ANet has to do is to change the formula of Healings, which gets calculated currently only by Healing Power having its effect on the final outcome of the heal that you receive at the end.

ANet has just to add Critical Damage for example or the Critical Hit Chance as another Stat into that calculation formula, that it partwise increases the Heals you give out, if you heal critically.

But i think, to balance this out, Critical Heals shpould ONLY HAPPEN, if the target that you want to heal is under a certain threshold of HP, say for example, if your Target is under 75 or under 50% Health, and in regard of how low the health of your target is, so stronger should scale up the Critical Heals if they trigger.

Example:

Critical Heals can trigger only, if your Targets Health is under 75% Health.
If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 75% Health, the normal Heals will be 15% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 50% Health, the normal Heals will be 33% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 33% Health, the normal Heals will be 50% stronger.

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has under 20% Health, the normal Heals will be 75% stronger

If a Critical Heal triggers at a Target, that has only 10% or lower Health left or is downed, the normal Heals will be 100% stronger.

Thats the way how I think how Critical Heals should work best.

I like how you think, i think that could work really well actually. I’m not sure how many percent it could be but i think 2 or 3 stages would be better. The difference of a 15% increase and a 100% increase in healing is a lot, i think all Crit Heals should always be higher than 30% and i’m not sure if heals should crit for 100%. Nice suggestion however!

I would argue that regardless of the validity of the OP, condition damage should be fixed before anything else in the combat system. I can’t believe that they didn’t implement damage, by player, with damage over time from the beginning.

Raine.1394:

I would argue that regardless of the validity of the OP, condition damage should be fixed before anything else in the combat system. I can’t believe that they didn’t implement damage, by player, with damage over time from the beginning.

I agree. Condition Damage is very weak, and so is Healing Power. The most effective stat is Power and all builds use it, even if it’s a lot of Power or less, all builds use it and have use of it. They have to close the gap of Power, Condition Damage and Healing Power. Crit Damage is one step to close the gap between Berserk and other damage builds but a very minor as Power is the most effective stat and not Crit Damage.

I also agree to the suggestion of Goorman, would also be a very good solution to many problems.

Also gave me to think about it, that each Skill could have additional effects maybe, if you crit with them

Example:

Healing Skill X cures normally only some health plus it removes Burning, Bleeding and Poison.
You crit instead with that Healing Skill for example and you’d heal for more Health and when you crit, that Skill could for example Heal then also Torment.
I think that would be also anice way to make Support and Control more equal to Damage. and based on “Ferocity” (still find that stat name stupid and unfitting due to ferocity beign already a personality for this game), that Extra Effect of a Skill if you Crit, could become more effective.

Skills for example could also have increased ranges, or decresed cooldown time,s if you crit with the skill in regard of how high your “ferocity” is).

Example

Fireball normally has only a Range of 1200 and Radius of only 120
If you crit with it, its Range could be for example 1500 with the additional Effect, that the Fireball hits now all targets in a line (so it pierces through enemies until it hits the target) and could have an increased Radius of up to maximum 360 in regard of how high your “ferocity” is

That is amazing Orpheal. Would like to see it.

Honestly I’d just like to see healing power actually apply more healing. Heals are limited in their availability. Every heal has a cooldown, and for every heal there’s several damaging spells. With quantity stacked against healing, at least give healing power some quality.

if critical healing is tied to precision and Ferocity and not a new stat, that would still make Zerkers/Assasins way more awesome than every other class since they have near maxed out precision and ferocity anyways.

Therefore, I would like to suggest that only the healing that is added to heals by healing power is affected by Ferocity.

(for example, Heal as One heals for 6520 at 0 healing power, 8520 at 2000 healing power. Only the 2000 extra healing is affected, so, if you have, 30% Critical damage from Ferocity, you get 2600 healing, for a total of 9120 healing)

(for another example, the bonus heal from Rune of Water heals for 690 healing power at 0, and for 1690 healing power at 2000. If Critical damage from Ferocity was 100% (which would be hard to get that and 2000 healing power with current gear stats….), total healing from healing power would now be 2000, for a total 2690 healing,….which would also make Heal as one heal for 10520 instead of 8520 with 100% crit damage from ferocity and 2000 healing power, whch combined with the water runes, would bring the total heal to 13210)

Well, they probably will be above average at healing and condi damage, but don’t forget, that you have limited skill slots. In perfect situation you have to choose what utilities and weapons you want to use, ones that give good raw damage, or ones that give good condition damage. So even if on the first sight berserker is better at everything, in the end they would have to choose, what to be better at.

This will require to rethink the role of critical strikes in the game. If right now criticals provide ways to boost your raw damage output, after the suggested change it will have the role of “jack-of-all-trades” stat, that will moderately/randomly boost your performance in all part of the games.

What I see aswell is that out of 10 skills we have, 5 are always dedicated to damage, except on a two classes:

• Elementalist water attunement on staff (1 heal, 1 regeneration) and daggers (2 heals)
• Guardian mace (1 heal), shield (1 heal), staff (2 heals)

Give us more swappable stats on each weapon, for each class, with healing and scale healing power as it should, equal to power. If a warrior can hit 3k with auto-attack, give us 3k heals on max healing power.

Goorman.7916:

Well, they probably will be above average at healing and condi damage, but don’t forget, that you have limited skill slots. In perfect situation you have to choose what utilities and weapons you want to use, ones that give good raw damage, or ones that give good condition damage. So even if on the first sight berserker is better at everything, in the end they would have to choose, what to be better at.

Except that, with 100% critical damage and nearly maxed out power and precision, you can use, shortbow for example as a ranger, and not only will you be dealing 1500 damage with the shortbow autoattack, but you’ll also be 100 damage per second with all bleeds you apply. Thats the equivelant of having over 1000 Condition Damage.

Also on the heal side, I would be able to drop a 13040 Heal as One, which is far higher than you would ever be able to get with 2000 healing power (which, with an impossibly high 100% critical damage, which is impossible in the current meta, would heal for 17040, which doesn’t make the investment in healing power worth it at all, if I can heal 90% of my hp just by having 100% crit then let regens or group heals take care of the rest)

The point of the suggestion is to make critical strike do specific things based on the skill. So shortbow autoattack’s critical strike will just apply more bleeding damage, but will not deal more raw damage, because of that Shortbow will lack power-precision-ferocity scaling, it will have condition damage-precision-ferocity scaling.

Goorman.7916:

The point of the suggestion is to make critical strike do specific things based on the skill. So shortbow autoattack’s critical strike will just apply more bleeding damage, but will not deal more raw damage, because of that Shortbow will lack power-precision-ferocity scaling, it will have condition damage-precision-ferocity scaling.

Okay, but what about, say, Rampager stats that uses both Power and Condition Damage (and I can still hit close to 50% Critical damage in that build with traits food and runes). Why should Anet then make the Shortbow limit my ability to deal physical damage and deal condition damage instead? Or, how about the Longbow? I can use Rampager gear, and with the proper traits, runes, and sigil, I can still deal thousands upon thousands of physical damage, and still deal 300-600 condition damage per tick, and thats just with a Barrage.

The problem with your suggestion is that a special case has to be made for every weapon as well as every single utility skill, heal skill, and elite skill, and it makes each and every skill’s critical effect affected by either condition, power, or healing. That severly limits build diversity.

Sorry to pick your idea apart like that, but, it needed to be pointed out.

Well, one thing that this suggestion does is it allows developers to create a lot of different skills for different playstyles. So what you call “limiting build diversity” i call “opportunity to create more interesting and useful skills”. I don’t see anything wrong with couple of weapons being dedicated to condition or support oriented builds, and being absolutely useless on other builds.

TLDR: that is not a drawback, but an opportunity for the developers to implement their vision.

Goorman.7916:

Well, one thing that this suggestion does is it allows developers to create a lot of different skills for different playstyles. So what you call “limiting build diversity” i call “opportunity to create more interesting and useful skills”. I don’t see anything wrong with couple of weapons being dedicated to condition or support oriented builds, and being absolutely useless on other builds.

TLDR: that is not a drawback, but an opportunity for the developers to implement their vision.

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Chrispy.5641:

Goorman.7916:

Well, one thing that this suggestion does is it allows developers to create a lot of different skills for different playstyles. So what you call “limiting build diversity” i call “opportunity to create more interesting and useful skills”. I don’t see anything wrong with couple of weapons being dedicated to condition or support oriented builds, and being absolutely useless on other builds.

TLDR: that is not a drawback, but an opportunity for the developers to implement their vision.

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

What he’s saying is. Make the attribute of the skill more effective when it crits. As autoattack on shortbow for Thief is bleeding, it would make most sense to add extra bleeding on crits. If a skill is for doing raw damage it would add that extra damage on crit. If it is a heal it would add extra healing.

Chrispy.5641:

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Forcing people to choose on of the archtypes is the essence of build diversity. If you are not forced to choose and you play how you want, there are no builds at all.

There ought to be a statistic present in all other games, i.e. “life steal”. With any dmg you deal, you gain life points.

Goorman.7916:

Chrispy.5641:

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Forcing people to choose one of the archtypes is the essence of build diversity. If you are not forced to choose and you play how you want, there are no builds at all.

That is the most banal piece of double-speak drivel I’ve seen in months.

“Forcing you to choose from a tiny pool of pre-defined options is the only way you can have choices.”

Yeah. Pass on that. Thanks.

A few questions that I’ve asked earlier considering this idea on another thread:

• Should precision determine the critical chance for non-damage related crits? Or should it be the related spec? (Like healing power) Would anyone run a precision/ferocity set without either power or condition damage as a third stat? Would critical healers be a solid addition or a boring slowdown?

• Should everything crit? Isn’t it ok for some things to just be steady, not related to chance? Like condition damage?

• Is healing not strong enough in PvP? (I’ve heard complaints about bunkers being lame.) Should this be split for PvP/PvE?

I think there is room for healing power to grow and become more important, but I don’t think that crits are the way to do it. I like for things to work as they say they will, not better or worse (fortunately we are able to reach near 100% critical chance, so it’s not all that much chance based). Critical damage is ok as an option, but I wouldn’t want the other stats to go in that same direction.

(I hate elixir X but I love rampage… oh the agony.)

Just remove the critical hit chance and change it to a flat 25% chance (with a 5-10sec CD) to cause a critical with whatever you are using, be it a dmg ability or a healing one where the critical has added effects. Like the new healing skill: E.D.I Shield on the engineer, where is has a chance to heal for a high amount.
A critical should be something that occurs occationally and gives a nice extra effect.

And yes, enemy HP should be lowered as well, since that is the main reason ppl zerk everything, long and boring fights where dodge is key feature. Heck, why not have endurance tied in as well, where you can only swing your weapon so many times before your arm get’s tired.

Agree with the OP. Critical heals are a must.

Nike.2631:

Goorman.7916:

Chrispy.5641:

How does forcing you to play in one of three archtypes instead of play how you want increase build diversity?

Forcing people to choose one of the archtypes is the essence of build diversity. If you are not forced to choose and you play how you want, there are no builds at all.

That is the most banal piece of double-speak drivel I’ve seen in months.

“Forcing you to choose from a tiny pool of pre-defined options is the only way you can have choices.”

You forgot that right now we only have 1 role to choose from.. DPS. How is that freedom of choice? What a disgrace.

Angel.4581:

Just remove the critical hit chance and change it to a flat 25% chance (with a 5-10sec CD) to cause a critical with whatever you are using, be it a dmg ability or a healing one where the critical has added effects. Like the new healing skill: E.D.I Shield on the engineer, where is has a chance to heal for a high amount.
A critical should be something that occurs occationally and gives a nice extra effect.

And yes, enemy HP should be lowered as well, since that is the main reason ppl zerk everything, long and boring fights where dodge is key feature. Heck, why not have endurance tied in as well, where you can only swing your weapon so many times before your arm get’s tired.

I agree. Critical chance and critical damage should be fixed and should not ever have been bound to stats.

Goorman.7916:

What they should do is to give every skill its own specific critical hit(based on precision) chance and its own specific critical effect(based on ferocity). So that damaging skills will have just increased damage based on ferocity, condition-based skills will have increased condition damage based on ferocity, and healing skills will have increased healing based on ferocity. This will solve the problem of multiplicative scaling of physical damage of Power-Precision-Ferocity, also introducing multiplicative scaling of conditions and healing.
TLDR: agree

I also like this.. If power can have a multiplier why can’t other stats? As others have said, the most effective stat, because of these multipliers is power… this change would help put them all on equal footing.

I like this idea every time it pops up. It’d open up more options for hybrid builds and stat mixes for support that aren’t entirely kitten on DPS.

Even in the current meta, it’d be effective. Since DPS classes tend to have a good crit chance, and the finishers determine the effectiveness of a healing combo, this idea would make healing combos more useful, since DPS’ers aren’t likely to be stacking healing power.

This idea would make healing more viable. Unfortunately, ANet has made it very clear that they don’t want effective healing builds.

I think crit heals would push one armor type only you would see magi becoming the end all be all healing gear set. Magi atm is a bit underused but i do not want it to be better then say condition dmg healing set and the power healing set. I must say i would not see a rampage like healing set healing power main off precision and power.

Vick.6805:

I like this idea every time it pops up. It’d open up more options for hybrid builds and stat mixes for support that aren’t entirely kitten on DPS.

Even in the current meta, it’d be effective. Since DPS classes tend to have a good crit chance, and the finishers determine the effectiveness of a healing combo, this idea would make healing combos more useful, since DPS’ers aren’t likely to be stacking healing power.

This idea would make healing more viable. Unfortunately, ANet has made it very clear that they don’t want effective healing builds.

If its required for a better overall Game Balance and results in far better and more equal comparisons between Damage, Supprot and Control Gameplay, I think ANet should and will rethink of this issue and might maybe also reiterate onto what they have said earlier.

Sometimes you simply have to make mistakes in your life to see in, that something you thought would be the “right path” is in the end not so really the perfect right path and needs simply more tweaking.

If these tweaks then mean, that we have to go on more into a kind of compromise between the current gameplay and that of more classical gameplay roles to find the point, where all roles are better balanced in general and this would lead also in more build versatility and better more complex class roles that are all viable for an overall group success in the game, then I think, that is absolutely ok to do these tweaks, if they are so much required to bring the game back onto the right path, that isn’t Full Damage > everything else.

Please no. I can’t see how adding more randomness to this game in the form of crit heals makes any sense at all. There is already too much detraction from skill and cause/effect.