Guild Wars 2

Hi, i only started gw2 2 weeks ago and my main is a guardian at level 34. I’ve had to delete, recreate then delete characters to find the class and race that fits me. I thought the guardian was an awesome choice since i like to heal/tank in alotta mmorpgs, but i was discouraged to find that (according to another player i met by chance) a healer isn’t a viable role in GW2. Can anybody clarify this? Am i ruining my character by investing on healing power and vitality/defence alone?

This game doesn’t have specific roles like that. Everyone does damage, everyone heals, and everyone can use crowd control abilities.

You can play how you want to, but it is true that making tanks/healers is wasteful. It’s a different kind of combat system.

Purple Miku.7032:

This game doesn’t have specific roles like that. Everyone does damage, everyone heals, and everyone can use crowd control abilities.

You can play how you want to, but it is true that making tanks/healers is wasteful. It’s a different kind of combat system.

Thanks! well i guess i should find out what exactly this “different kind of combat system” is.

Dedicated healer (or traditional tanking) was never supposed to be a role in the game.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/guild-wars-2-has-no-healers-or-tanks

In “hardcore” PvE (there is no hardcore PvE in fact) there is only DPS role. You won’t have much fun here if You enjoy playing healer, sadly.
If You want to play as a healer/tank in classic meaning of this word – go play WoW, Rift, or SWTOR. And this is just advice, this game offers nothing besides DPS role. In the best scenario You can play tanky/support build in PvP, but in grind wars You are meant to heal Yourself with Your own skills. There is no place for such builds atm.

Pretty much.

I enjoy playing healers and have built them using every profession in this game. BUT. most content simply isn’t dangerous enough to merit a full-time healer. They can create some hilarious blowouts in the deathmatch mode, and they can be amazing in WvW mass battles, but in any other solo and 5-man play they simply aren’t needed.

Tanks (generally called bunkers here) have a place in both PvP modes, but again they’re really unnecessary in the solo/5-man player vs. environments. Also the threat mechanics of this game mostly come down to ‘have you done a lot of damage?’ and ‘are you close enough the critter can get a swipe off quickly?’ Answer yes to both and bubba is gonna swing on you.

Now, I still build and thrive with characters that can heal (I find Battle Presence to be immensely satisfying for toughening up pugs in fractals) but understand you will ALWAYS be expected by both the scenario designers and your fellow players to bring a decent amount of damage potential. If you heal, you have to heal and do damage. Which can be challenging and satisfying in its own way. ANd if you are running a guard you have loads of support potential of the kind the game really rewards – Aegis and blinds are both immensely powerful tools for preventing damage in the first place (pre-healing ) and Guardians can splash those effects around like crazy.

Heal power scales pretty badly but it still has an effect. The Zealot’s/Keeper stat combo can be very nice for dual role builds. Celestial is a passable filler also, though you have to have a very good understanding of your profession to really maximize it’s value.

Hope this helps.

GW2 uses a different “soft” trinity consisting of control/damage/support (instead of the traditional tank/damage/healer), and by soft it means that you are never and should never lock yourself into one role, and in any given situation one should at the very least provide some damage, and best to provide at least 1 of the 2 others roles (and is possible to provide all 3 roles too).

Control is well crowd control and stuff, like the line of warding(and guardian skill that prevents enemies from moving over it, and if they try they get knocked down), stuns, dazes, cripples and that sort of stuff.

Damage is well… damage, pretty self explanatory there :P

Support is NOT only healing, though healing is part of it, but it also boons (might, fury, quickness, regeneration, vigor etc, or other effects like thief that share venoms with allies(a special thief skill type that give extra effects to the next 3-4 attack usually (vary per venom used)), reflection i guess is under here as well (though can be argued to be a sort of control effect too.

and guardian is definitely a good character if you want to be able to supply some good support

Now, all that being said, I run a boon/heal/support build on my Guardian that does a fair bit of damage while helping less experienced players or super squishy ones standing a bit longer during big fights. If there are enough people around he is also near impossible to kill.

I tank/heal on my guardian in dungeons and in a pve setting. It is a viable role but not in the sense of other mmorpgs. There is not a dedicated healer, it is more of a buffer (not buffs but buffering HP). My healing helps to stabilize ontop of individual healing. Each player has their own skills to keep themselves alive. My skills merely benefit them as a support. I can’t insta heal people to full unless I use the tome.

Every player is their own “healer”. It was intentionally made NOT a “role” for a very good reason….to avoid “Looking for Healer” requests being a requirement to play content.

The desire to be “needed” by other players to complete content is NOT a reason to alter one of the core concepts of the game….

Contrary to popular belief that healer is completely useless and should be dismissed, while that might be true when you are trying to complete a dungeon effectively, it is actually shown by a few people trying to 3man or maybe 2 to have one of the players a tanky support guardian. You scarifice damage, but it makes your allies totally facerollable to do damage and avoid a large amount of damage when you hold aggro. However, a lot of attacks are AoE, and ‘tanking’ is probably not too possible in the current state of the game, therefore it is highly unoptimized.
Maybe you might think that everyone is only doing dps and its boring. That isn’t true either. Even in the best speed runs, party members sacrifice a small fraction of their potential damage for the slightest bit of control and /or support to keep themselves alive while maximizing damage. So instead of having a dedicated tank/dps/support, in GW2 the role of support is split among everyone.

Worth mentioning, as a Guardian you can run full damage orientated gear and traits while only needing to pick Healing Breeze as your heal skill to support your allies with an individual heal of 6525 and landing all pulses (which is rather easy since in current instanced 5-man content you will be standing very close to each other) on four allies sums up in a total of 26100 health restored every 40th second

If you want to go full heal or make a tank, you can always play with me. I’m not much for one caring what you use or bring to a party I’m not even into this whole “DPS only or we don’t want you.” crap.

Yumiko Ishida.3769:

If you want to go full heal or make a tank, you can always play with me. I’m not much for one caring what you use or bring to a party I’m not even into this whole “DPS only or we don’t want you.” crap.

Haha thanks that’s very kind of you. Will find you ingame when i get the chance ^^

Brother Grimm.5176:

Every player is their own “healer”. It was intentionally made NOT a “role” for a very good reason….to avoid “Looking for Healer” requests being a requirement to play content.

The desire to be “needed” by other players to complete content is NOT a reason to alter one of the core concepts of the game….

Haha of course i’m not demanding any changes to the game. I just like to heal tis all. It’s very satisfying keeping your allies alive.

rainpool.7189:

Contrary to popular belief that healer is completely useless and should be dismissed, while that might be true when you are trying to complete a dungeon effectively, it is actually shown by a few people trying to 3man or maybe 2 to have one of the players a tanky support guardian. You scarifice damage, but it makes your allies totally facerollable to do damage and avoid a large amount of damage when you hold aggro. However, a lot of attacks are AoE, and ‘tanking’ is probably not too possible in the current state of the game, therefore it is highly unoptimized.
Maybe you might think that everyone is only doing dps and its boring. That isn’t true either. Even in the best speed runs, party members sacrifice a small fraction of their potential damage for the slightest bit of control and /or support to keep themselves alive while maximizing damage. So instead of having a dedicated tank/dps/support, in GW2 the role of support is split among everyone.

Thank you for your response!

Vikkela.7261:

Worth mentioning, as a Guardian you can run full damage orientated gear and traits while only needing to pick Healing Breeze as your heal skill to support your allies with an individual heal of 6525 and landing all pulses (which is rather easy since in current instanced 5-man content you will be standing very close to each other) on four allies sums up in a total of 26100 health restored every 40th second

I’ll keep that in mind

Kanashi.5104:

I tank/heal on my guardian in dungeons and in a pve setting. It is a viable role but not in the sense of other mmorpgs. There is not a dedicated healer, it is more of a buffer (not buffs but buffering HP). My healing helps to stabilize ontop of individual healing. Each player has their own skills to keep themselves alive. My skills merely benefit them as a support. I can’t insta heal people to full unless I use the tome.

I see i can kind of understand now! ty!

You can always heal/support on a PvP environment, i’ve seen a couple of guardians doing amazing job on keeping their allies alive on group fights

Healer/support is viable, just not optimal. And you can heal your team reasonably well while still being geared towards damage. Tanking can also be fine with minimal changes.

I mean, there even times where I get a bad pug in fractals while playing my ranger. I pull out healing spring(regen allies+a water field to blast for area heal) and my fern hound (aoe heal+regen) and suddenly we can pull through.

Tanking? Done it on my ranger too, just pull out greatsword and push that evade every third swing and the block to its limit(and a healthy dose of invulnerability from signet of stone). I have to do this on mai trin boss fractal for some pugs that can’t hold her in the lightning.

Guardian doors both these things better, but the point is that there is certainly a place for healer and tank in pve. Just stay away from “berserk only exp speed run” lfg groups and you should never have a problem.

That said, especially with guardian, you can fairly easily do both DPS and Support/healing, but nothing wrong with running around in soldier hear while you learn.