Guild Wars 2

Out of all of the defensive stats I feel like toughness is most useful. Therefore I think vitality and healing power could get a significant boost if they were merged into one stat which could retain the name vitality. It could be a straight merge in that if you have 100 vitality you get 100 healing power as well as 1000 health.

Any gear that you currently have that has healing power on it could be converted to a new stat which increases boon duration since recent trait changes has eliminated our boon duration increases from trait stats.

So if you have cestial gear, instead of healing power, you get 2% boon duration. If healing power is a secondary stat on a gear piece you get 4% and if primary you get 5% per piece. And any armor with vitality on it gets the added bonus of healing power added to it, in addition to normal vitality stats.

The problem is not in the defensive stats, but in the offensive ones. Power, Precision and Ferocity have a mutually strengthening synergy.
Power adds directly (and linearly) to average damage per second, by flatly increasing the damage on every direct hit.
Precision adds indirectly to average damage per second, by increasing the chance to score a critical hit (150% damage) on an attack.
Ferocity adds indirectly to average damage per second, by increasing the damage bonus when a critical hit is scored.
- The higher your Power, the bigger the difference made by having more Precision.
- The higher your Precision, the bigger the difference made by having more Ferocity.
- The higher your Power, the bigger the difference made by having more Ferocity.

Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power also have some synergy, but a weaker one.
Vitality directly increases the damage you can absorb by raising your health pool total.
Toughness directly increases the damage you can absorb by reducing incoming damage to your health pool.
Healing Power indirectly increases the damage you can absorb by increasing the effectiveness of healing effects.
- Toughness and Healing Power do not have a multiplicative synergy, but an additive one. Having a high Toughness, does not increase the value of your Vitality score, or vice versa.
- The higher your Toughness, the more effective your Healing Power, because the damage-absorbing function of Toughness makes it so that healing effects bring you closer to your maximum health than otherwise.
- Having a low Vitality score actually increases the effectiveness of Healing Power, since any individual healing effect will heal a larger percentage of your total health pool.

However, Healing Power does nothing if you never use or are given any healing effects during combat. Also, Healing Power has a fairly limited effect on healing skills, which varies by skill.

All in all, defensive stats are more helped by creating more multiplicative synergies between them, than by merging them haphazardly.
For example, a new stat X could be added that gives a chance to score a “critical defense” on any being hit, which causes the incoming damage to be halved when triggered.
If this would be done, Vitality, stat X and Toughness would mirror the dynamics between Power, Precision and Ferocity. Not exactly, but the synergies would be comparable.

Vitality would become the most powerful stat in the game. You cannot combine stats into one, it just won’t work.

You honestly haven’t thought this through at all. You’re basically asking them to create an entirely new system and we’d have to start balancing all over again (like we just did). Round 3 of a brand new game? No thanks.

I support this change. Most people find the healing stat completely worthless and the loss of boon duration sucks. This would make some non-dps builds more viable, while dps builds will still be kings at what they currently do.

OR they could just change modifiers on “healer” traits (Guardian healing symbols is an obvious example) so that they have much stronger heals when maxing out healing power.

Sometimes the simplest change work just as good.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

This would make some non-dps builds more viable, while dps builds will still be kings at what they currently do.

This would make anything vitality based extremely op. Might as well merge power and precision.

Lobo Dela Noche.5127:

I support this change. Most people find the healing stat completely worthless and the loss of boon duration sucks. This would make some non-dps builds more viable, while dps builds will still be kings at what they currently do.

I’ve found the healing power extremely useful in the past. Haven’t really tried with the new trait system, but with the old one, my Ele could dish out some 15k heals within seconds. AoE no less. That felt pretty useful with a coordinated group

Edit, found how to edit!