Guild Wars 2

I seam to recall the Dev’s stating that healing power was under powered in the game so much so that no one really even considers it when building a character.
And they said that was bad for the game ! ( I am guessing because they want all stats to be important and worth taking )

But I have yet to see a positive change in healing power at all. did they simply forget about it sense no one uses it anyway ????

Or maybe I am wrong.

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Land of Cheese.2584:

I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Other than Raids? Nowhere.

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Except this isn’t true anymore, and Healing Power is in fact weaker than it should be. It really always has been.

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This is much too extreme of a simplification and it implies much more stark goals than were originally intended.

GW2 is the way it is as a natural consequence of a very particular design choice: to break from the rigidity of the trinity system used by most other MMOs. ANet specifically wanted to prevent players from running into the frustrating situation where your group has to wait around for 10 minutes until a healer wanders in. While there will always be a mathematically “ideal” way of playing any game, ANet made the decision to decouple that mathematical, white-room ideal from the tank-DPS-healer meta such that you could throw basically any five players together using basically whatever builds they wanted and they would be able to see good success if they played well. Not every teamcomp is going to be perfect, of course, but you’ll at least get to play. That was their intention.

Of course by making it possible to play without a healer, ANet inadvertently made it so that playing with a healer was largely pointless if the players all had a certain level of skill. This was not actually their intent; however, the typical skill level of players when the game first came out was extremely low compared to the skill level today and back then, healing builds could actually help smooth out the rough patches in tougher content. They were never necessary per se, but there was a case to be made for them right at the beginning of the game. As skill rose and players became better at avoiding damage entirely, dedicated healing rapidly became less and less useful. Once we reached the point where virtually every group was able to complete virtually all content regardless of teamcomp with minimal wipes, the metric for success shifted from reliability of completion to completion speed, which largely meant increasing the DPS, which meant dropping healers entirely.

Land of Cheese.2584:

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

The Druid is ANet throwing up their hands and admitting defeat. They weren’t able to create content that made space for healers without requiring healers, so they’ve started producing a very specific portion of content designed to require healers.

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

This was NEVER the goal of GW2. You just have to watch what they were saying about the model for the game before launch. All those dev talks and hype we were buying into because GW1 actually delivered what it claimed.

It became the state of things that players locked onto due to flaws in the design that the devs were unwilling or unable to put resources into fixing. Flaws that frankly, should not be too complicated to fix.

What’re you’re seeing now with HoT is their first after 3 years attempt to address this… by trying to return to the model of Guild Wars 1: the duality of DPS + healer.

Whether or not they can deliver… I kind of lack confidence in at this point. I strongly suspect the people who gave us the design of GW1 no longer work there, or have moved on in their game design theory and no longer possess the creative spark they once did.

But the meta we have had for the last 3 years… is not there intentionally.

And this is why so many of us “don’t get it” and “miss” the goal… but we know it was never the goal to begin with – which is an aside from whether or not it is actually a valid meta… I do concede its valid, just not that its the only valid meta.

Healing power is not weak. In fact it boost your healing by a fair bit. Its the sacrifice that has to be done to achieve that healing power that is totally off. IE its actually damage that is too strong. Especially on classes that have no secondary damage mechanic because they hit like wet noodles in healer gear/builds. But druids for example become insanely strong with healing power, because they can still do some damage with their pet.

Einlanzer.1627:

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Except this isn’t true anymore, and Healing Power is in fact weaker than it should be. It really always has been.

Considering that raid healers are more than capable to heal current raid content in full celestial, I’m having difficulty following your train of thought.

If such low amount of healing power is sufficient to get the job done, how is it weak?

If they increased healing power efficiency, they’d just reduce the coefficient of different skills. This game has spvp and wvw too you know, not only pve.

Defensive stats are useful if you can avoid burst. They are in no way a replacement for mistakes.

Substance E.4852:

Land of Cheese.2584:

I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Other than Raids? Nowhere.

Seems to me the Elite specs are simply Anet’s way to add the ‘trinity’ into the game for raiding .. so much content and mechanics aimed as such a small minority, it’s sad.

Absolutely agreed with the main point of this post. Spent precious resources changing my ascended to Magi for my Guardian only to find out that the heals hardly improved with the big increase in healing power.

So far, only Druid healing scales properly with healing power.

Previously, the developers said they didn’t want people who didn’t invest in Condition Damage attribute to reap the rewards of bonus damage from conditions and revamped the Condition feature.

Isn’t it high-time to update the healing skills and traits of all other professions to scale properly with Healing Power investment for the sake of build diversity?

Cyninja.2954:

Einlanzer.1627:

Land of Cheese.2584:

This is a point I think lots of players of Guild Wars 2 miss (as evidenced by a lot of the PHIW crowd). The goal of other MMOs is to mitigate damage via armour, then heal through that damage with — healing. That’s not the goal in Guild Wars 2. The goal here is to negate (avoid) damage entirely through active defenses (blinds, blocks, interrupts, reflections, dodging).

This design goal (avoid damage entirely) is why gear sets other than DPS are terrible (in PvE) and why all of the healing in the game is relatively anemic. This druid thing Anet has come up with is … interesting. I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Except this isn’t true anymore, and Healing Power is in fact weaker than it should be. It really always has been.

Considering that raid healers are more than capable to heal current raid content in full celestial, I’m having difficulty following your train of thought.

If such low amount of healing power is sufficient to get the job done, how is it weak?

If they increased healing power efficiency, they’d just reduce the coefficient of different skills. This game has spvp and wvw too you know, not only pve.

Healing skills scale differently with Healing power, but the vast majority are strong at the base and then aren’t modified that much by healing power. I used to run Celestial and then ditched it because my healing only increased by about 3% with it so it essentially made it a wasted stat.

For some reason, they made Druid Heal skills a bit weaker and then made them scale better with Healing Power. That’s exactly what they need to do with other classes.

Healing Power and weak?
I found already in WvW a player agaisns that i battled with my thief, that was simply able with all of its heals to outheal constantly all of my damage including bursts on a perfectly timed matter, wer were basicalyl on same skill level…

it was so totally absurd, thsat we we would jhave stopped for sure after some time, if i wouldn#t have been disturbed by a silly ally from my enemy whough saw that and thought he needs to put his weight into the battle to cause their side to win, othewise im pretty sure, this would have turned out into a true endless battle that would have been ended first once one side lets down their concentration first and does make either a fatal mistake or one side gets big lag so that the other side could overcome the enemy by dealign the damage in that time, where the other side can’t react.

healing power is surely not underpowered. in the hands of a skilled player with the right build, it makes them pretty much invincible when you are pretty much able to outheal just everything, even if you give all your best to try to burst your enemy down and interrupt their heals even!!!

It was really absurd what i saw that day in WvW and if my memory isn’t broken, I think that player didn’t have had even any great buffs on (no food ect., just basic healing power from the build that this player used)

Orpheal.8263:

Healing Power and weak?
I found already in WvW a player agaisns that i battled with my thief, that was simply able with all of its heals to outheal constantly all of my damage including bursts on a perfectly timed matter, wer were basicalyl on same skill level…

it was so totally absurd, thsat we we would jhave stopped for sure after some time, if i wouldn#t have been disturbed by a silly ally from my enemy whough saw that and thought he needs to put his weight into the battle to cause their side to win, othewise im pretty sure, this would have turned out into a true endless battle that would have been ended first once one side lets down their concentration first and does make either a fatal mistake or one side gets big lag so that the other side could overcome the enemy by dealign the damage in that time, where the other side can’t react.

healing power is surely not underpowered. in the hands of a skilled player with the right build, it makes them pretty much invincible when you are pretty much able to outheal just everything, even if you give all your best to try to burst your enemy down and interrupt their heals even!!!

It was really absurd what i saw that day in WvW and if my memory isn’t broken, I think that player didn’t have had even any great buffs on (no food ect., just basic healing power from the build that this player used)

Uh, no, not really.

Einlanzer.1627:

Orpheal.8263:

Healing Power and weak?
I found already in WvW a player agaisns that i battled with my thief, that was simply able with all of its heals to outheal constantly all of my damage including bursts on a perfectly timed matter, wer were basicalyl on same skill level…

it was so totally absurd, thsat we we would jhave stopped for sure after some time, if i wouldn#t have been disturbed by a silly ally from my enemy whough saw that and thought he needs to put his weight into the battle to cause their side to win, othewise im pretty sure, this would have turned out into a true endless battle that would have been ended first once one side lets down their concentration first and does make either a fatal mistake or one side gets big lag so that the other side could overcome the enemy by dealign the damage in that time, where the other side can’t react.

healing power is surely not underpowered. in the hands of a skilled player with the right build, it makes them pretty much invincible when you are pretty much able to outheal just everything, even if you give all your best to try to burst your enemy down and interrupt their heals even!!!

It was really absurd what i saw that day in WvW and if my memory isn’t broken, I think that player didn’t have had even any great buffs on (no food ect., just basic healing power from the build that this player used)

Uh, no, not really.

Uh, yes, actually yes.

What Orpheal means is, if healing power gets to useful, it will have an effect on spvp and wvw. Bunker builds currently work through damage mitigation via skills and boons, if you add more effective healing power on top, you break those game modes. Not to mention other builds that with current talents and setup would become unkillable.

What most do not understand, healing power not getting improved has almost nothing to do with pve. If it was only pve content to balance around, arenanet would have long ago been able to change coefficients. Spvp and wvw game modes would have to be completely rebalanced from scratch.

Solution: a food whose effect is 50% improvement to healing power stat; not usable in PvP/WvW.

Improving the scaling of healing will allow Anet to increase the variation of enemies in-turn bringing more build variation into the game.

Cyninja.2954:

Einlanzer.1627:

Orpheal.8263:

Healing Power and weak?
I found already in WvW a player agaisns that i battled with my thief, that was simply able with all of its heals to outheal constantly all of my damage including bursts on a perfectly timed matter, wer were basicalyl on same skill level…

it was so totally absurd, thsat we we would jhave stopped for sure after some time, if i wouldn#t have been disturbed by a silly ally from my enemy whough saw that and thought he needs to put his weight into the battle to cause their side to win, othewise im pretty sure, this would have turned out into a true endless battle that would have been ended first once one side lets down their concentration first and does make either a fatal mistake or one side gets big lag so that the other side could overcome the enemy by dealign the damage in that time, where the other side can’t react.

healing power is surely not underpowered. in the hands of a skilled player with the right build, it makes them pretty much invincible when you are pretty much able to outheal just everything, even if you give all your best to try to burst your enemy down and interrupt their heals even!!!

It was really absurd what i saw that day in WvW and if my memory isn’t broken, I think that player didn’t have had even any great buffs on (no food ect., just basic healing power from the build that this player used)

Uh, no, not really.

Uh, yes, actually yes.

What Orpheal means is, if healing power gets to useful, it will have an effect on spvp and wvw. Bunker builds currently work through damage mitigation via skills and boons, if you add more effective healing power on top, you break those game modes. Not to mention other builds that with current talents and setup would become unkillable.

What most do not understand, healing power not getting improved has almost nothing to do with pve. If it was only pve content to balance around, arenanet would have long ago been able to change coefficients. Spvp and wvw game modes would have to be completely rebalanced from scratch.

Which is why the solution is to decrease the base effectiveness of healing and increase the potency of healing power, just like was done with conditions. Only a handful of bunker builds are all that effective, and it has more to do with skill and trait synergy than it does with the effectiveness of Healing Power.

IndigoSundown.5419:

Solution: a food whose effect is 50% improvement to healing power stat; not usable in PvP/WvW.

Result: the food goes unused, because healing power is still irrelevant.

Merrex.5384:

I seam to recall the Dev’s stating that healing power was under powered in the game so much so that no one really even considers it when building a character.
And they said that was bad for the game ! ( I am guessing because they want all stats to be important and worth taking )

But I have yet to see a positive change in healing power at all. did they simply forget about it sense no one uses it anyway ????

Or maybe I am wrong.

They said healing gear stats didn’t scale well, that was the issue.

They also said the zerker meta was unhealthy for the game.

Substance E.4852:

Land of Cheese.2584:

I’m curious to see where they go with it.

Other than Raids? Nowhere.

Correct. It’s worthless in EVERY other situation.

Swagger.1459:

Merrex.5384:

I seam to recall the Dev’s stating that healing power was under powered in the game so much so that no one really even considers it when building a character.
And they said that was bad for the game ! ( I am guessing because they want all stats to be important and worth taking )

But I have yet to see a positive change in healing power at all. did they simply forget about it sense no one uses it anyway ????

Or maybe I am wrong.

They said healing gear stats didn’t scale well, that was the issue.

They also said the zerker meta was unhealthy for the game.

And guess what the new raids call for the Zerker Meta once again 8 out of the 10 players in the raid end up being DPS All because there is a timer which means you have to take the boss down as fast as you can.
So really nothing has changed.
So Ranger got Druid specialization which helps ranger how ? Raids ? A Very small part of the game. They should have made the Guardian or Ele the useless healer. I would have been more happy to turn my ranger into something cool that does more Dps kind of like the Necro or some real world useful skills like the Chronomancer.

Or If they wanted to make the ranger a healer make it flow into the class maybe the arrows now heal people they past through or explode into a slpash of water that heals people near the point of impact.
But giving the ranger a healing form that does no damage was just bad Form.

Healing got a huge boon when they added percentage scaling items. Its possible to reach more than 150% on many builds now, so healing can behave alot like DPS gear. Healing Power itself is still not very good and I rarely stat it, however.

But I imagine that a maximum healing power Elementalist with the maximum percentage bonuses can probably tick 400/sec+ from Soothing Mist which beats out pretty much every other regeneration in the game (plus they can add in Regeneration boon on top of that, maybe staff water auto-attack, etc.). The bigger problem is that right now there is no content that requires that: Boons, CC and other support are better in HoT maps than pure healing, and everything else in the game is pretty much just a boss one-hitting you and not leaving any room for healing.

I have two dedicated healers, one is an Tempest running Scepter/Warhorn with a boon-distributing aura build in Celestial gear, and the other is a Herald running Ventari and Glint with maximum boon duration. Both of them have only around 1k of healing power when stacked and I don’t see a point in any more.

Lessons that I have learned.
- If you’re running a healer, use mixed gear, not “full support” gear, so that you aren’t a complete deadweight to the team (except maybe in raids?).
- Focus on percentage increases like Sigil of Transferance rather than Healing Power.
- Focus more on boons than direct heals whenever possible.
- If you really want to play full support and max healing power, max your percentage healing as well and play a class with a regeneration aura. Effects like the Guardian’s Virtue of Resolve and Elementalist’s Soothing Mist become borderline broken when you push them to their limits in a group setting.

Sadly, Druid is mostly useless. Zero damage even on mixed gear. I suggested to add some burning ticks to the staff auto but was quickly dismissed.