Guild Wars 2

Hey all,

Sorry if something similar has been talked about before (I am sure it has), but after doing a couple searches via the forum search bar, I was unable to find anything.

Simply, my question is for all the people that have always played support / healer classes in past MMOs. What class did you find that best filled that role for you in GW2?

I have played Healing classes since DAoC, up through WoW, WAR, Etc. That has been pretty much all I have ever played and enjoyed the most. In GW2, as we all know, there is no dedicated healing class and because of that I can’t seem to find a class that I just really enjoy.

So far I have leveled an 80 Ranger to go with a Spirit pet build, then leveled an 80 Mesmer, last was an 80 healing shout warrior, and now I am in the process of leveling a Necro..

I love this game, but the lack of healers really makes it hard for me personally to find a class I really enjoy and want to stick with. For any people in the same boat as me, what class did you role that seemed to fill that gap?

EDIT:
Just to clarify in case anybody was curious. I primarily play WvW, with a bit of PvE dungeon runs for gear / skins.

Thanks,
Taint

Necromancer

Well of Blood, the one that causes Blindness, the ones that convert an enemy’s boons and convert an ally’s conditions (the latter two only for PvP/WvW).

If you’re in a dungeon definitely Plague form, the AOE blind is awesome for reducing damage your party takes.

Staff staff staff. Regen on 2, chill / combo field on 3, 4 dumps all conditions, 5 is a fear. The entire weapon is built for support.

Hey Ostracize,

Thanks for the response. Necro is what I am currently leveling and have been looking forward to some WvW once he gets his traits and unities setup the correct way.

If you play WvWvW primarily and want to feel like you are healing then go with ele using staff on water attunement.

Professions focus their support style differently. Guardian are great at damage mitigation, healing, and spreading offensive & defensive boons. Necros are great at condition manipulation and healing. Rangers are great at offensive boons and combo fields. Eles are super at combo field creation.

Taintertots.2798:

Hey Ostracize,

Thanks for the response. Necro is what I am currently leveling and have been looking forward to some WvW once he gets his traits and unities setup the correct way.

Keep in mind that you can go into sPvP with full traits and all skills unlocked and test around in there first, before you try and get into WvW (which is hard to be competitive until at least level 30, when you get your elite skill).

The same build I use for support is also a pretty decent sPvP bunker build, which can be fun if you’re defending keep or graveyard.

Go Ele, play with Staff. Yes Water has good healing as does our Water trait line. But just know that as an Ele you will be playing with all 4 attunements. You can’t simply sit in water all day, but we can produce a heck of a lot of healing when played right. Besides three group healing skills in Water attune for Staff, we can produce AoE burst heals on top of that by using a Blast finisher in one of the two Water combo fields we have, we also have a perma group regen buff when we’re in water with a few points in Water trait line. We have lots of both personal and group condition removal when specced into Water trait line.

Staff Ele can also provide a lot of CC. It can also provide Water, Ice, Fire, and Lightning combo fields (and we can provide both Blast and Projectile finishers as well). Those combos can produce a number of great effects buffing the group, debuffing enemies, and adding extra damage, on top of whatever effect the skill already provides. We can also trait into providing a number of boons.

So a very capable all around support. Just a bit more complicated than most classes, but also more fun and versatile, so head on over to the Ele forums and we’ll help you out.

Seth.1079:

If you play WvWvW primarily and want to feel like you are healing then go with ele using staff on water attunement.

Thanks for the suggestion. I tried something similar to this in the beta weekends and the healing output seemed very week. However, I was only got up to my mid 20s and probably didn’t have the traits needed to make it more powerful.

Might have to look into the ele if the necro doesn’t pan out.

Leiloni.7951:

Go Ele, play with Staff. Yes Water has good healing as does our Water trait line. But just know that as an Ele you will be playing with all 4 attunements. You can’t simply sit in water all day, but we can produce a heck of a lot of healing when played right. Besides three group healing skills in Water attune for Staff, we can produce AoE burst heals on top of that by using a Blast finisher in one of the two Water combo fields we have, we also have a perma group regen buff when we’re in water with a few points in Water trait line. We have lots of both personal and group condition removal when specced into Water trait line.

Staff Ele can also provide a lot of CC. It can also provide Water, Ice, Fire, and Lightning combo fields (and we can provide both Blast and Projectile finishers as well). Those combos can produce a number of great effects buffing the group, debuffing enemies, and adding extra damage, on top of whatever effect the skill already provides. We can also trait into providing a number of boons.

So a very capable all around support. Just a bit more complicated than most classes, but also more fun and versatile, so head on over to the Ele forums and we’ll help you out.

Thanks for the suggestions, I will def. have to take another look at the ele.

pistol/shield-bomb/elixir gun engineer.

-Healing turret (also removes conditions)
-Healing mist
-Regenerating mist (also can be comboed with shield 4 for a huge aoe heal)
-Elixir gun AoE healing field (also removes conditions)
-Your main attack(bombs) is a small AoE heal every second.

Not only you have a crapload of heals/regens, but you are also one of the best mitigating damage in the game. A lot of dazes/blinds. Smoke bomb is the best damage mitigation in the game IMO, 5 seconds blind and the AoE is HUGE.
The damage isn’t bad either since with your trait lines you can pick toughness to power and healing power to power.

If you like something more straightforward, a Mesmer with restorative mantras (trait) using mantra of pain, has a huge aoe heal with 4 seconds cast time and no cooldown.
Basically let you spam heals forever. I don’t like that build though and its usefulness is questionable.

It really depends on your play style. If you like to manage stuff, Engineer. If you like to be in your face melee, Guardian. If you like to stand back, Water Elementalist.

From personal experience and guildies:
Engineer feels like the best overall support class, very versatile. (I hate playing it though.)
Guardian can offer a full heal to people with elite skill. This alone can turn a battle. A well played Guardian is a forced to be reckoned with. (One of my favorite professions)
Elementalist – Feels too squishy. Water attunement heals are helpful, but not sure they are as powerful as a Guardian.

Guardian

with our armor and damage mitigation skills, as well as some of the heals we have (combination of virtues of courage and resolve, shouts), i am closer to a dedicated support char more so than a damage dealer, and i feel pretty good about it (i played wow as a paladin, lineage as a knight, aion as both templar and cleric), so i pretty much like this combination, and with the traits i have for rezzing bonuses (shield of absorption and the on revive gives regen, protection and aegis) allows me to revive people with a bonus for us both, as well as allows me to ignore a few hits if timing right some shouts (retreat + virtue of courage).

all in all, loving it all, granted i do miss being able to tank like hell like aion’s templar, or being a dedicated healer like the cleric, but i always forget about it all whenever i begin a gw2 play session

If you want to support me, I don’t really need your heals. Interrupts and blinds on the bad guys, boons on me, conditions on the mobs, conditions removed, and teamwork for managing the field.

If you think support means aoe heals, you’re missing most of it.

Warrior.

If you have 30 in tactics you only need to change 2 traits and equipment to switch between a healing shout build which buff and heals for maybe the best AoE heal of the game and is really fast… And not to mention the short but effective buff, debuff and CC that Shouts give

But the other choise is my favorite Banner support, which gives a REALLY BIG stat buff that is really helpfull in battles and with tactics banner you increase the healing even more… And it gives regen which is nice, not something to be fascinated but is a plus. And banners give you the freedom to move and focus on the battle contrary to the belief that banners in fact, slow things down, which is fake, all the oposite, shouts condemn you to be looking at CD and worring more on the buff/debuff timing than moving in the battlefield… With banners you just spread them well to have most your mates on their ranges and you are free to move till their long CD goes off, but is not that long, so you can focus on the battle and then you will just rebuff after some action. Works wonders in WvW sieges and Dungeons, not so good at random zerg vs zerg. Really not good for PvP xD

My main is a Staff Ele boon lover build. I like the ability to AoE heal and cure conditions and spam changing auras with each (max arcane – have trait for boons from auras as well). It’s not the best of support, but its close. And I freaking love crowd control, and Ele offers a nice variety of it at least.

I also have a Mesmer, Guardian and Necro. All within support areas. Necro mostly staff well build, and that seems to offer quite a bit of help to others so far (not very high level with this). Guardian is a no brainer on support. And Mesmer is pretty good support in Inspiration/Chaos traits. With Null field and Mantras they are pretty good.

A lot of classes offer good support abilities really.

I think almost any class has the ability to support, albeit in a different way. I can only speak for eng coz that’s my main, but I’d reckon a support engineer would put traits into a bit of healing (healing turret, elixer gun skill 5), condition removal (traited for the toss elixer remove condition one), and CC (grenade/bomb’s slow/immobile, blind, shield knockback, interrupt, rifle knockback, etc). oh and putting up combo fields. While it isn’t always appreciated, I always try to put up area might by dropping fire bomb and using shield skill 4 to trigger a blast combo finisher.

Imo, healing is only a part (and can even be argued as a small part) of support. Imo, support can be classified into two: offensive and defensive. Offensive ones deal with putting up conditions or CC on mobs (thief’s blind for example), and defensive ones are putting boons on allies (guardian shout for example) or purging conditions, and ofc, healing.

This is my personal input about the matter. For me, I really REALLY love people with utilities that remove conditions. Condition removal is a must and you really can’t exaggerate the help removing conditions on allies do. Which is why I love warrior’s “shake it off” shout.

I picked elementalist, but mainly becuase I also wanted to be a scholar profession and wear light armor.

Probably guardians because they have the most team healing / team health regen spells in the game with also multiple spells that grants ‘aegis’ and can easily saves lives in teamfights.

The other more subtle healers type of support classes are either elementalists (water) or engineers (healing turrets). You can also try mesmer clones that grants illusions heal regen… but still by far the guardian is your best choice of a “supporty healer” type of class.

EDIT: I would say that ele comes pretty close second (but they don’t have aegis) and then other classes follows behind it.

People need to stop talking about “Water” Ele’s as there’s no such thing. Ele’s play with all 4 attunements, especially a Support Ele. Water trait line is certainly reccomended for support, but Ele’s offer far more support than just healing so please stop misleading the OP and others with similar questions.

Like a few of us have said already, Staff Ele’s offer lots of heals (possibly more than any class in the game when specced into Water trait line and also with proper usage of combo fields). They also offer lots of group cleansing, 6 CC’s with Staff weapon skills and 2 more with Lightning and Ice combo fields, Might, Protection, Swiftness, and Regeneration boons and the ability to stack them, Burning, Bleeding, Vulnerability, and Weakness conditions, 4 types of combo fields.

Ele’s are most definitely not subtle healers, nor are we subtle in other types of support. In fact support is one of the few things the Ele actually excels at if actually played right (which I suspect some people aren’t or aren’t even playing the class and don’t know anything) and arguably has more varied support than most other classes. Feel free to play something else, but just trying to set the record straight.

@Leiloni: First of all, nobody’s misleading anyone. Elementalist can switch elements in fights, and the element that gives heal is the water element on the staff is it not?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Staff#Elementalist

Secondly, you took my comment way too personally. I called it “subtle” because in my experience I haven’t met an ele that really carrythe team with supporting, while I’ve seen a full heal-spec guardian at work, and it’s ridiculous how much difference they make in dungeon runs. If you want to show me how it’s done, you’re welcome to do an AC EXP with my lvl 41 asura guardian, and I’ll be happy to show you how easy it is to run AC with a lvl 41 guardian using full heal-spec support build

@ OP- Elementalist has lots heal spells, but the heals won’t last if you can’t also block for the players [healing is one way to support]. Like how going pure vitality on a player won’t make him/her much more tankier without the ability to reduce/cancel incoming damages. A guardian (with aegis) is definitely the best support healer, cuz it can both heal the hero and sustain that regen by giving his allies immunity to damages. Nevertheless, I will rephrase my statement by saying that elementalist “is a viable healing class”, because they can heal quite a bit. But I stand by the fact that guardians are better in terms of both supporting and healing, and that any class other than ele and engineer with healing turrets are not very good at being a “healing support”.

But it’s definitely false to say that any class can be a support healer (refer to Leiloni’s earlier comment). You gonna tell him to “feel free and play a thief” and expect him to be able to take a role on the team as a support healer?

A venom-share thief can give extremely good support.

Big thanks to everybody in this thread. Seems like most people are mentioning a Ele, so I will give it a go.

Till then I will continue to gear out my shout warrior and might give the banner build a try. Main issue I have on the shout build the range on the shouts. They don’t seem to have much of a range on them.

Here’s a rare one for you:

Ranger!

Longbow/Shortbow combos are great for controlling an enemy’s movements when with a team. You might not do the most damage, but you can definitely make sure that guy isn’t getting away. The best thing is that you can turn immediately to another play and focus them into submission from 1200 range when you notice the first one’s going down. Combine that with an easily constant poison from close range shortbow skill and those enemies won’t be healing anywhere near as much.

This isn’t a bad combination for 1v1s or even tanking 1v2s either. You can make very strong builds for rangers (despite masses of people saying they suck) utilizing control builds and invulnerability skills – see “protect me” and signets with spec’d traits. You won’t take people down as quickly, but man you will love playing them with groups.

FluffyDoe.7539:

@Leiloni: First of all, nobody’s misleading anyone. Elementalist can switch elements in fights, and the element that gives heal is the water element on the staff is it not?

http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Staff#Elementalist

Secondly, you took my comment way too personally. I called it “subtle” because in my experience I haven’t met an ele that really carrythe team with supporting, while I’ve seen a full heal-spec guardian at work, and it’s ridiculous how much difference they make in dungeon runs. If you want to show me how it’s done, you’re welcome to do an AC EXP with my lvl 41 asura guardian, and I’ll be happy to show you how easy it is to run AC with a lvl 41 guardian using full heal-spec support build

@ OP- Elementalist has lots heal spells, but the heals won’t last if you can’t also block for the players [healing is one way to support]. Like how going pure vitality on a player won’t make him/her much more tankier without the ability to reduce/cancel incoming damages. A guardian (with aegis) is definitely the best support healer, cuz it can both heal the hero and sustain that regen by giving his allies immunity to damages. Nevertheless, I will rephrase my statement by saying that elementalist “is a viable healing class”, because they can heal quite a bit. But I stand by the fact that guardians are better in terms of both supporting and healing, and that any class other than ele and engineer with healing turrets are not very good at being a “healing support”.

But it’s definitely false to say that any class can be a support healer (refer to Leiloni’s earlier comment). You gonna tell him to “feel free and play a thief” and expect him to be able to take a role on the team as a support healer?

You didn’t even read my post. I’m trying to make the point that while Ele’s can do a ton of healing, they also support in many other ways and have a more varied toolset than many other classes. So all around support they do quite well. Guardian is good at preventing damage and its a niche that only they really can offer so if that’s what people want they’re great for it. But healing, cleansing, cc, buffing, debuffing,, etc. is what the Ele does better. They are different classes that support in entirely different ways. Although this game isn’t really built around the idea that one class ‘carries’ the rest – if one person does carry the rest, then the rest are not pulling their weight and need to do something differently.

As for the rest of the post, yes obviously water is where the heals are but no Ele sits in Water attunement all day unless they’re bad (and all the other types of support I mentioned above come from using all 4 attunements and utilities/traits properly). That’s my point – a good support Ele is not a “Water” Ele. I also never said any class can be a support healer, so like I said already in this post, read what I actually wrote. I said feel free to play any class you want, as in you don’t have to play Ele just because I was talking about it. Also I think you’re misunderstanding his request – he didn’t say “support healer” he said “support/healer” and only used the word “support” in the title. As in support in various ways, not just standing around healing people.

Edit: If your Guardian is only level 41, hit 80 and find a competent Ele properly specced for support and then you’ll see what they can do. An important part of any support Ele’s build (or, sadly, most Ele builds since we’re so limited in what is effective) contain 20-30 points in both Water and Arcane trait lines. You can’t do that at 41. And honestly most Ele’s aren’t as skilled at 41 as they are at 80 because it takes a bit to really figure out the class.

Yah ok fair enough.

Either ele or guardian would be a good class to fill the role of “support/healer”. I guess it’s just preferance which you pick & in what situations are you trying to make their case for (cuz they both have really good defensive buffs/debuffs), not sure about in WvWvW (ref. OP) cuz I’ve never rolled supports in WvWvW before.

I don’t have a lot of experience with builds like this so I can’t really judge these arguments on their merits.

But simply the fact that at least one poster has put forth seven out of eight professions as potential “best healer” is a testament to GW2’s success in creating classes that can play a number of roles.

And – the Mesmer is the only class that hasn’t yet been suggested. Are they really the worst healers?

dybryd.1358:

I don’t have a lot of experience with builds like this so I can’t really judge these arguments on their merits.

But simply the fact that at least one poster has put forth seven out of eight professions as potential “best healer” is a testament to GW2’s success in creating classes that can play a number of roles.

And – the Mesmer is the only class that hasn’t yet been suggested. Are they really the worst healers?

I have actually seen some support builds and they can offer some healing but most of their support comes from other skills. And it is actually quite effective support. Just different. But Mesmer is a very different class in general so it fits.

I’ve only just started playing a guardian and so far I like it, and I can definitely see the potential for this char to become a big supporter role.

In pugs in PvE my thief always has shadow refuge on hand, and I’ve found that a lot of the shortbow attacks make pretty good combos. Basically I use as many stealth/blind skills as possible in order to buy time to rez people, and I combine those with poisons/traps that slow crowds down. Some of the tricks in here are pretty useful. Good thread!

edited to add: Shadow Refuge does life steal in combo with ranged weapons, which is also pretty cool. I only just figured this out recently. Go go team slow learner!

Alexander Dragonfang.1759:

Warrior.

If you have 30 in tactics you only need to change 2 traits and equipment to switch between a healing shout build which buff and heals for maybe the best AoE heal of the game and is really fast… And not to mention the short but effective buff, debuff and CC that Shouts give

But the other choise is my favorite Banner support, which gives a REALLY BIG stat buff that is really helpfull in battles and with tactics banner you increase the healing even more… And it gives regen which is nice, not something to be fascinated but is a plus. And banners give you the freedom to move and focus on the battle contrary to the belief that banners in fact, slow things down, which is fake, all the oposite, shouts condemn you to be looking at CD and worring more on the buff/debuff timing than moving in the battlefield… With banners you just spread them well to have most your mates on their ranges and you are free to move till their long CD goes off, but is not that long, so you can focus on the battle and then you will just rebuff after some action. Works wonders in WvW sieges and Dungeons, not so good at random zerg vs zerg. Really not good for PvP xD

Any particular build for this?

Warrior.
Banner of tactics. Banner regen trait. Spam 2.
Everyone happy.

All of them.

/15 char

RamataKahn.4283:

Alexander Dragonfang.1759:

Warrior.

If you have 30 in tactics you only need to change 2 traits and equipment to switch between a healing shout build which buff and heals for maybe the best AoE heal of the game and is really fast… And not to mention the short but effective buff, debuff and CC that Shouts give

But the other choise is my favorite Banner support, which gives a REALLY BIG stat buff that is really helpfull in battles and with tactics banner you increase the healing even more… And it gives regen which is nice, not something to be fascinated but is a plus. And banners give you the freedom to move and focus on the battle contrary to the belief that banners in fact, slow things down, which is fake, all the oposite, shouts condemn you to be looking at CD and worring more on the buff/debuff timing than moving in the battlefield… With banners you just spread them well to have most your mates on their ranges and you are free to move till their long CD goes off, but is not that long, so you can focus on the battle and then you will just rebuff after some action. Works wonders in WvW sieges and Dungeons, not so good at random zerg vs zerg. Really not good for PvP xD

Any particular build for this?

If you are asking about the shout build, this is kinda of what I am currently running. If you are talking about a banner build, I am not 100% sure.

http://en.gw2skills.net/editor/?fIAQRBJdxG2JpDJPGFkzD4QGAQPs6qtMF+J9IM0SD;TYAqsMZJyymlLLZWA