Guild Wars 2

So I tried out a support healing build and have to say it was quite fun to play even though it felt not needed. One of the reasons why I tried it was to figure out how healing seems to work with the game and have found its not to keep players at full health but to keep you in the fight longer by mitigating the damage the same way active dodge and other skills work.

The thing that I found to be the most fun was I was healing and fighting at the same time so I was doing the trinity with out trying to. Yes I was in full cleric gear and was not only supportive with heals but also with active defense skills along with some control effects like I would of been normally just my heals helped a lot more. So it was play as normal but with a greater healing aspect.

See healing I think was not meant to be like other games this is more like a defensive heal you take X damage I heal for Y negating the damage you took and it works out very well and if I hit some one with protection they could be healed from my regens only to almost full health and keep them there while my other heals where on cool down cause not even a 5 man group could keep all damage off just enough to keep you fighting. But this way they stayed at full health longer or closer to it.

In the video I explain some of it and how it worked in Silver Wastes and how effective it was with it. I understand the need to kill everything at mega speed but if you have some support it goes that much smoother and easier is all. So check out the video below and I explain it there.

https://youtu.be/pFQqQu05f7A

When it comes to GW2, I like two aspects of the game as related to healing:

1. No trinity healers.
I like being the support guy, but trinity healing is boring. It’s an inverse whack-a-mole with a stroke limit. And most of the time, it’s the GW2 equivalent of 1111111. Being self sufficient is great, and I strive for that in almost every game.

2. Making it work.
Because of dodges, blinds, and other mitigation tactics, damage means something when it happens. (Usually. :P) And healing is somewhat scarce. So knowing I can potentially bring an ally from near-dead to near-full just like a trinity healer, it feels fantastic when I can actually be a healer in GW2.

The main reason healing is undervalued, is because PvE mobs aren’t designed, scaled, nor group comped for attrition warfare. Its one of many reasons Condi damage (which is a pressure mechanic) was so weak for so long, and that defense/armor as a stat is worthless when all the underlying mathematics still result in 1 or 2 hit kills on players. Even on high defensive builds, rapid attacks from Karka and Mordrem are simply devastating with their high base damage and very high frequency.

Player skills and traits are also internally geared toward bursting. Condie cleanses have long cool downs, autoattacks have terrible DPS (base line AND traited) and often no utility, our most effective healing skills are never the passive regeneration ones, most of our healing and defense traits tend to proc together, and above all else, healing power scales terribly across all skills and traits.

You can blame almost all of this on the Mob scaling methodology they use. Essentially all mobs are inherently designed to combat tanks. But most classes have to trade large amounts of offensive power for relatively small amounts of defensive abilities, that our active defenses outclass by light years. Mobs of all classes are designed to win a long duration fight, while players have almost all of their best abilities front loaded.

All the arguments about the PvE game being a DPS race is about as true as it gets. Our defenses diminish rapidly, as does our offensive output, while mobs are generally designed to outlast or overwhelm us as we exhaust ourselves. So its no surprise that the best way to win a fight is to make it as short at possible.

To fix the problem, mobs need to start following some player class design philosophies. Spread the strengths and weaknesses out, have a lot of play and counter play, and capitalize weaknesses in the defense rotation. This can still be accomplished with Potato AI if players simply had more frequent active defenses to call on, but keep their net effectiveness about on par with what it is now. It would also call for very thoughtful evaluation of how skills apply stacked conditions vs long conditions (10x 1sec stacks, vs 1x 10 second stack).

starlinvf.1358:

The main reason healing is undervalued, is because PvE mobs aren’t designed, scaled, nor group comped for attrition warfare. Its one of many reasons Condi damage (which is a pressure mechanic) was so weak for so long, and that defense/armor as a stat is worthless when all the underlying mathematics still result in 1 or 2 hit kills on players. Even on high defensive builds, rapid attacks from Karka and Mordrem are simply devastating with their high base damage and very high frequency.

Player skills and traits are also internally geared toward bursting. Condie cleanses have long cool downs, autoattacks have terrible DPS (base line AND traited) and often no utility, our most effective healing skills are never the passive regeneration ones, most of our healing and defense traits tend to proc together, and above all else, healing power scales terribly across all skills and traits.

You can blame almost all of this on the Mob scaling methodology they use. Essentially all mobs are inherently designed to combat tanks. But most classes have to trade large amounts of offensive power for relatively small amounts of defensive abilities, that our active defenses outclass by light years. Mobs of all classes are designed to win a long duration fight, while players have almost all of their best abilities front loaded.

All the arguments about the PvE game being a DPS race is about as true as it gets. Our defenses diminish rapidly, as does our offensive output, while mobs are generally designed to outlast or overwhelm us as we exhaust ourselves. So its no surprise that the best way to win a fight is to make it as short at possible.

To fix the problem, mobs need to start following some player class design philosophies. Spread the strengths and weaknesses out, have a lot of play and counter play, and capitalize weaknesses in the defense rotation. This can still be accomplished with Potato AI if players simply had more frequent active defenses to call on, but keep their net effectiveness about on par with what it is now. It would also call for very thoughtful evaluation of how skills apply stacked conditions vs long conditions (10x 1sec stacks, vs 1x 10 second stack).

Oh I agree with what you say and I do hope that they can try to fix the way mobs work with the new AI coming in HoT but I do not know as of yet. What I do know is that with HoT we will see a lot of complaints with it after launch about the difficulty for a bit and then people will say its all to easy cause like everything we as players overcome the difficulty just as we did at launch with dungeons and the entire game. This is just how we work and it will never change.

This study I did on healing shows its an effective damage midigater like defensive skills and active dodge and can be as effective for that. But sense many rely on this high damage output they do not need the healing with it over the skills and dodge mechanics in place and the fact mobs seem to be on a set skill rotation right now that you can time everything by it. I think its a fun play style but its just something that many will overlook for the lack of damage to high damage and speed to a less damage and high survival rate.

And thanks for the well thought out explanation its much accepted.

I’m hoping the HOT mobs are better as well. But I’ll be very disappointed if their solution was to simply require specific counters to fight certain mobs. Since certain high value abilities aren’t available on classes, I can’t see that being an effective way to encourage group play without forcing the hard role comps they’ve said they’ve been trying to avoid. The new gear situation complicates this even further, as storage and cost of additional armor sets have been a long standing problem.

starlinvf.1358:

The main reason healing is undervalued, is because PvE mobs aren’t designed, scaled, nor group comped for attrition warfare. Its one of many reasons Condi damage (which is a pressure mechanic) was so weak for so long, and that defense/armor as a stat is worthless when all the underlying mathematics still result in 1 or 2 hit kills on players. Even on high defensive builds, rapid attacks from Karka and Mordrem are simply devastating with their high base damage and very high frequency.

Player skills and traits are also internally geared toward bursting. Condie cleanses have long cool downs, autoattacks have terrible DPS (base line AND traited) and often no utility, our most effective healing skills are never the passive regeneration ones, most of our healing and defense traits tend to proc together, and above all else, healing power scales terribly across all skills and traits.

You can blame almost all of this on the Mob scaling methodology they use. Essentially all mobs are inherently designed to combat tanks. But most classes have to trade large amounts of offensive power for relatively small amounts of defensive abilities, that our active defenses outclass by light years. Mobs of all classes are designed to win a long duration fight, while players have almost all of their best abilities front loaded.

All the arguments about the PvE game being a DPS race is about as true as it gets. Our defenses diminish rapidly, as does our offensive output, while mobs are generally designed to outlast or overwhelm us as we exhaust ourselves. So its no surprise that the best way to win a fight is to make it as short at possible.

To fix the problem, mobs need to start following some player class design philosophies. Spread the strengths and weaknesses out, have a lot of play and counter play, and capitalize weaknesses in the defense rotation. This can still be accomplished with Potato AI if players simply had more frequent active defenses to call on, but keep their net effectiveness about on par with what it is now. It would also call for very thoughtful evaluation of how skills apply stacked conditions vs long conditions (10x 1sec stacks, vs 1x 10 second stack).

Very well said, and I’ve made every single one of these arguments in different threads. Have never seen them so eloquently tied together in one post.