Guild Wars 2

Hello all!

I have seen many topics regarding healing power, but none that I feel the need to use life transfer on to rez it. (NERD)

Healing power is underwhelming as a stat, and is, in near all cases, better dumped for any other stat. I realize that healing in GW2 is in a good place and doesn’t generally need nerfs or buffs anywhere, but this all comes from base values. Healing Power adds minimal gain for the investment.

As a main Guardian in PvE I can say that my ability to heal is awesome. I have so many heals and HoTs, its great! I tried running a HP build for a long time, classic SuppTank role. And it sorta worked. I healed a lot, did low damage absorbed dps for days.

What threw me off of this build, however, is that I learned I could dump my over 1500 HP and still be a boss healer, but I dealt damage too.

What I’m getting at is that (and its been discussed to death in other forum topics) HP need not be a stat. Its kind of a trap.

Now, healing values should not be static, and I’d still love to build that cleric Guardian that’s a heal-tank support role extraordinaire, so we’d need a new stat to replace HP that increases your healing numbers right?

I don’t think so. So here’s the crazy idea.

Vitality.

Bonus vitality. I’m not that insane.

Think about it! It makes sense, as the more health you have, the more health you need to heal for to get the same healing effectiveness (in terms of % total health). Also, since healing is strong in base values right now and the proliferation of active defenses, (blocking, dodging, blinding, etc.) defensive stats already take a back seat.

Vita does so especially as effective health doesn’t care much about your TOTAL health, but rather how much you’ll have overall, after all the healing you get.

A person with 15k total hp and 15k worth of heals has more health than a person with 25k health.

If we combined the two stats it would give both the buff they need to be truly considered as a buildable stat.

How this would work would be that HP is no longer a buildable stat, but shows up on the stat panel. The value would be your vita minus base vita.

Think about it!

I’m thinking about it and I think Dire (and maybe Soldier’s) would be completely broken. HP scales the way it does b/c, with everyone having their own self-heals, it would be completely unbalanced otherwise, with all the access to passive and AoE healing in the game. Also, Anet is adamantly opposed to having pure Healers. This is a slippery slope your asking to introduce.

to make it more useful a stat, they need to reduce the base heals, and incr the coeffs

that way its more worthwhile for someone to invest in it.

A sensible thought, and Vitality is another of the “waste” stats on gear in a lot of cases. If you have sufficient toughness and mitigation/sustain (dodge/blind/heals), you don’t need vitality.

Overall, the Toughness/Vitality/Healing Power trifecta is in a weird place in comparison to Power/Precision/Ferocity. PPF is multiplicative in growth, but defense stats sit on more of a Toughness x (Vit + HealPow) combination.

I’ve seen some of the new traits enhance this, adding 1% Healing per 100 Vit or HealPow, but Vit and Healing Power need more synergy.

Or, like Jaxom said, retool the bases and coefficients to improve healing power, maybe normalize them by cooldown times.

Jaxom.7310:

to make it more useful a stat, they need to reduce the base heals, and incr the coeffs

that way its more worthwhile for someone to invest in it.

But then you have the problem of self heals being worthless and requiring investment into HP or depending on a healer. There is PvP/wvw taken into consideration.

Healing Power has never been tuned correctly. They really should do the same thing they’ve done with condition damage and lower the base healing and increase the scaling with Healing Power.

Tman.6349:

Jaxom.7310:

to make it more useful a stat, they need to reduce the base heals, and incr the coeffs

that way its more worthwhile for someone to invest in it.

But then you have the problem of self heals being worthless and requiring investment into HP or depending on a healer. There is PvP/wvw taken into consideration.

i don’t think they should be worthless, but not so useful that the heal pow stat is worthless.

right now, would you say taking toughness as a stat could be useful? depending on how u want to play, u could survive w/ the base toughness, but u will be…tougher if u have added toughness stats. but if u have a significant amnt of stats in heal pow right now, u just wasted those points in most cases because it doesn’t help your base heal enough.

just needs to be adjusted and made more worthwhile to actually use the heal pow stat

Tman.6349:

I’m thinking about it and I think Dire (and maybe Soldier’s) would be completely broken. […] Also, Anet is adamantly opposed to having pure Healers. This is a slippery slope your asking to introduce.

A change like this would necessitate some re-evaluations of certain stat combos for sure, but particularly the two that you mentioned wouldn’t fit the issue you describe of people becoming pure healers.

Dire
+condi damage
-toughness
-vita

Soldier’s
+power
-toughness
-vita

Both of these sets have main stats that are offensive.

I actually think Nomad’s would be at greater risk of becoming 100% support. But then again the HP on that set would change to some other stat, so maybe power or precision? Give it some offensive stat as its new 3rd and boom! not pure defense anymore.

I didn’t say anything remotely close to those stats becoming pure healers. Read your proposition in the OP again and then take another look at the two stat sets I mentioned. I mentioned those stats b/c your proposition would make them completely broken. You’d basically have two sets that have primary damage stats (Dire is already very strong) with the added benefit of having the equivalent of ‘minor Nomad stats’. The ‘pure healer’ comment was just a reminder that A net doesn’t want to get involved in the slippery slope of buffing healing to the point of making Healers a thing. That’s why I mention ppl already having their own self-heals (which would become useless on power/condi glass setups and therefore require an outside healer to keep them alive) as well as there being many forms of passive and AoE heals in the game already. If you want your personal healing to be more efficient, invest in Toughness and Protection to compliment it. Doing away with HP and making Heals scale with Vitality is a very bad idea though.

Also, “Nomad’s becoming 100% support” is not an issue b/c support=/=healing others. Gw2 has plenty of support already and 99% of it has absolutely zero to do with healing. Once again, that’s the reason we all have our own personal heals.