Guild Wars 2

So this idea hit me while I was reading yet another “Berserker players are all bkittens and why would ArenaNet put a stat in the game (Healing Power) which does nothing useful?!” thread. The sad part is that both sets of players are right – the average ZerkAss (Berserker/Assassin, a.k.a. ‘Meta’) player is a complete tosser and generally harmful to the health of the game’s community…but Healing Power as a stat is almost universally bad and it really does exist mostly as a trap for new, unsuspecting players who think, erroneously, that stacking this stat up in their gear/trait choices will make them a better support player.

That sucks. But what can we do about it?

First off, Healing Power sucks because it affects almost nothing in this game. You use it to scale your #6 skill, any Regen boons you generate, and occasionally for some other traits/skills with a specific red-bars-go-up effect. Many classes and most builds don’t have reliable access to secondary healing effects, meaning that Healing Power pretty much only scales your #6 skill, and does so poorly at that.

Power, on the other hand? Power scales up every single piece of damage you do, from any source. Malice scales up every tic of condamage you do. Toughness scales with every single hit you take, as does Vitality (and even then, neither are considered very useful in general PvE). Precision scales with every attack you make; while not all of them are crits, every swing of your sword is another chance for your Precision to trip a crit, and the more Precision you have the better that chance gets. Ferocity is a sticking point – I actually dislike the notion of Ferocity as a gearable stat, but that’s a different thread – but even though Ferocity is essentially useless without corresponding stats/abilities (you need a truckton of Power and some means of generating crits, either via Precision or via some sort of trait that modifies crits), when it does work it works like gangbusters. And it too can be made to affect every single one of your attacks, though doing so takes some sweat.

Healing Power, though? Healing Power scales with practically nothing. Unlike almost every other stat in the game, Healing Power is not universal. It has strictly limited function, only mattering whatsoever on a certain narrow range of effects, all of which universally considered weaker than typical active defenses even before we talk about Healing Power. There will be fights in which a Healing Power character does not get one, single use out of their Healing Power, whereas it is pretty much impossible to have a fight where you get no use out of Power, Malice, or other damage stats, and somewhat tricky to get a fight where your Toughness or Vitality aren’t used.

Ergo, Healing Power is almost universally a poorer choice for your limited gear stats than anything else you might care to run. Why should this continue to be so?

Let’s examine what players who’re running Healing Power want to do. Nominally, that’s easy – they want to heal people. Except that’s a cheap cop-out and ArenaNet’s already answered the question properly. People who run Healing Power want to support their allies. They want to play nice in groups, sharing their strength with their friends, and making everyone else better through the virtue of their presence. Yeah, some of them are Trinity booshnozzles who get off on the glory of being ‘The Guy The Raid Can’t Do without’, but we can’t really knock the desires of legitimate support players because of a handful of booshnozzles.

Currently, ‘Support’ in GW2 is a very nebulous, ill-defined thing with no real go-to. You support allies based more on certain trait selections or timely use of certain utilities, rather than through raw healing or through the active and overt Protection of Guild Wars games past. ‘Support’, in this game, generally equates to blasting the appropriate field whenever it’s up while also ZerkAssing your butt off, and/or laying down a reflect at the meta-specified point in a dungeon wherein the Official Speedrun Guide says a reflect is needed.

What if we changed that?

Change Healing Power into Concentration, that stat we lost when the specializations update hit. Concentration scales healing as it currently does, but it would also scale boon duration. The rough version in my head states that hitting 1000 Concentration would net you that 30% overall boon duration we lost access to when Specs went live. Managing to grind yourself all the hell way up to 1500 Concentration gets you 45% boon duration, while a modest 500-point investment gets you 15% boon duration. Standard linear rising scale.

Suddenly Concentration, Healing-Power-that-was, is a thing that certain builds would very much want to hit. Boons are almost universal – not every class has access to multiple redundant sources of red-bar-goes-up healing, but just about everything in the game has access to boons of some sort. Double-dipping Regen – increased duration for the increased healing Concentration would give Regen – allows for Regen-based builds to become strong support options, while more offensive options such as Phalanx Strength Warriors can hit gear sets like Zealot’s, sacrificing some damage from lost Ferocity but gaining much strengthened Might through the extra duration the set provides. Builds with a lot of Protection, like Hammerguards, would be able to keep up a truly ludicrous amount of the thing, and builds which rely on Ferocity uptime or which try to keep Retal going would have an easier time as well.

Concentration would not be a stat every build wants to gear up – but then, the same is true of every other stat. Not everybody wants Power, maybe they’re going for Malice instead. Not everybody wants Precision, and not everybody has enough crits going on for Ferocity. But this way, Concentration would be a thing. It gains the universality of most other gear stats, being something that would be applicable in just about every fight. It contributes to offense through increased durations of offensive boons such as Might and Fury, assuaging the Speed Racers looking to clear Citadel of Flame in fifteen-point-three-four-seven seconds instead of fifteen-point-three-four-eight. It contributes to defense through increased durations on Protection, Regen, and other nice defensive boons. It brings back a few niche builds that relied on long-duration boons, but also forces them to sacrifice potential in some other area to get that duration back. You don’t get to ZerkAss and also get 30+% boon duration, you have to give something up for that very potent benefit, and so players are given greater options and agency.

And finally, Concentration stops being a trap stat which is dead weight in any encounter worth encountering. Players who gear for Concentration get to know that they’re helping out their friends with those extra-long boons. They get the playstyle they’re looking for, playing nice in groups, and can start to emerge as a legitimate thing.

Well, as legitimate as anything that isn’t ZerkAssing ever is to the ZerkAss crowd, but that’s also a different thread.

Anyways. I know this is almost certainly not a new idea, but I’m curious what people might think of it in the post-Specializations game. Would this be an acceptable way to get our absent boon duration stat back? Would it influence your opinion of sets which include Concentration, like Zealot’s or Cleric’s? Does anyone else find the term ‘ZerkAss’ as hilarious as I do, assuming it’s still there and has not been fuzzy-filtered or moderated out of existence?

Lemme know what you think.

(Also, someone seriously needs to get ArenaNet to LIGHTEN UP on their post wordcount limits. Like no srsly X_X)

Here is what I think:
WoW
EQ
TSW
WS
TERA
FF
that´s all I know with trinity healers for sure from the top of my head, probably a hundred more out there. Have fun.

An interesting idea I had was to rename Healing Power into Utility Power and then use it as the only stat that increases the effectiveness of Utility slot skills (including the healing skill).

Power, Precision, Ferocity, Condition Damage, etc. will no longer impact any aspect of the Utility slots, only the weapon slots.

Is there any way you could reformat this idea into concise bullet points? 3 walls of text is way too much for the average forum goer, and Anet themselves have asked that suggestions be made into compact lists. It makes it easier for the community managers to take your information to the designers if it’s easy to parse.

Healing Power for Utility Spells doenst help. The problem is cooldown. Healing Power itself is strong and has better scaling than power in most cases but the Cooldown for the Skills breaking it.

I can hit every second with a sword with 06.-0.7 Powermodification or i can heal one time in twenty seconds with a 1 modifier. In twenty second, one cycle i can deal 12-14k damage or can heal for plus 1k.

Healing Power lacks the spammable skills.
Boon Duration sounds good and useful because Might can be convertet in Damage. Another idea can be Cooldown Reduction for you second skillbar in general.

Xenon.4537:

Is there any way you could reformat this idea into concise bullet points?

If I had to summarize the OP:

• Healing Power kinda sucks by itself.
• So combine it with Boon Duration. 500 points of “Concentration” (new Healing Power) stat = +15% boon duration. (So you could get about +45% if you maxed out – similar to old boon-duration builds.)
• Now your Healing Power character has more real “support” than just restoring some hp. Also you can be tankier with the improved Prot and Regen.

Admittedly tl;dr, but not the first time we’ve seen the idea, either.

Personally, I’d love to see boon duration increased by healing power. It would shoot the utility into something useful.

Other idea I’ve seen (and thought) is to have healing power affect both incoming and outgoing heals, which could also affect scaling of personal heals by identifying them as outgoing and incoming.

ASP.8093:

Xenon.4537:

Is there any way you could reformat this idea into concise bullet points?

If I had to summarize the OP:

• Healing Power kinda sucks by itself.
• So combine it with Boon Duration. 500 points of “Concentration” (new Healing Power) stat = +15% boon duration. (So you could get about +45% if you maxed out – similar to old boon-duration builds.)
• Now your Healing Power character has more real “support” than just restoring some hp. Also you can be tankier with the improved Prot and Regen.

Ah okay. I’ve seen this idea before and I’ve even suggested something like that myself. The problem is that there’s other sources of boon duration which might cause problems if stacked with such gear. Also, it doesn’t really address the core issue of combat in pve (being dominated by zerker). The game needs combat encounters that can be most efficiently cleared by something besides zerker. That could mean any number of things, but changing gear stats isn’t the answer.

Algreg.3629:

Here is what I think:
WoW
EQ
TSW
WS
TERA
FF
that´s all I know with trinity healers for sure from the top of my head, probably a hundred more out there. Have fun.

Thanks for missing 100% of the point. Much appreciated. I’m not asking for Trinity, I hate that crap as much as everyone else. I’m asking for Healing Power to not be objectively awful.

Anyways.

Sorry; I hate bullet-point lists. When I lay out an idea I want to get the reasoning and logic behind it out there as well – any idjit can post a random suggestion, but in my mind it’s the idjits who can actually back it up and provide a good reason why it’s both beneficial and necessary is in a better place.

That said, yes. Not a new idea, but potentially a stronger idea in a post-Specializations world. We lost a lot of boon duration when the trait stats went away, with no way of getting it back. This would restore that imbalance in the Force while also giving Concentration/Healing Power an actual purpose beyond “Make my #6 skill work better!”

DevilLordLaser.8619:

Sorry; I hate bullet-point lists. When I lay out an idea I want to get the reasoning and logic behind it out there as well – any idjit can post a random suggestion, but in my mind it’s the idjits who can actually back it up and provide a good reason why it’s both beneficial and necessary is in a better place.

And any “idjit” can mash his keyboard into walls of text too… The point is that you need to format your post into something visually strong. We aren’t having a verbal conversation here, so you can’t just ramble. We use our eyes to parse the information on a forum, not our ears. An unbroken stream of information is not ideal here.

Good writing technique involves breaking things up into paragraphs roughly 5 sentences long. You must also avoid “run on” sentences. The average human has a short term memory span of roughly 7 seconds OR roughly 7 items. If you want someone to remember something they read more than 7 sentences ago, it needs to have been concise and easy to parse, otherwise they have to go back and re-read it.

Any good idea worth it’s time can be condensed into bullet points. It helps readers to understand your idea if you give them the bullets, then explain them in further detail in paragraphs. After all, we aren’t writing Shakespeare here. This is a “hang out” for people to trade ideas. Communication must be made clear and quick, because there are hundreds of other threads and only so much time in the day to read them.

I’ll paraphrase one of my favorite quotes:

I’m sorry my letter was so long — I did not have time to make it shorter.

Take the time to edit your thoughts, so that others of us can follow along. I’m sorry you hate bullet-point lists, so don’t do that even if they are a convenient tool. That doesn’t exclude you using other techniques (some mentioned by Xenon). There’s a reason why so many writing teachers recommend learning the 5-paragraph essay: it is incredibly effective, despite it being trite and over-used.

Plus, try not to blame your readers for missing the point. Maybe the idea wasn’t clear in the original three posts. The fact that so many of us are commenting on the length (instead of the content) might suggest there’s merit in restating your case.

Sigh

All right. Do pardon; I’m a writer by inclination, it takes time and goes severely against the grain to edit out all of my thinking on the subject at hand. I always prefer to read someone’s logic and thought processes, to better comprehend and discuss the idea at hand. I certainly could’ve written

“Healing Power should also boost boon duration.”

instead of everything up there, and that would have technically been a correct summary of my thoughts…but it also conveys absolutely nothing. It would have been a worthless thread and rightly ignored or locked. But, since everybody wants a list of three-word bullets…:

1.) Healing Power sucks. It’s a trap of a stat that offers effectively zero improvement in your character’s abilities, because almost nothing in the game scales with Healing Power, while a gripton of things and/or basic functions of the game scale with Power/Malice/Precision/everything else. New players gear for HP, ZerkAss players yell at them for it, everyone walks away frustrated.

2.) Rename ‘Healing Power’ Concentration, and have it affect boon duration as well as strength of healing skills. Few classes/builds have access to healing effects beyond their 6 skill – everything has access to boons. This gives Concentration a definitive purpose – it replaces the Boon duration we lost with the Specializations update, and we no longer get trap gearsets with effectively sabotage the builds of any players who don’t know better. Except Nomad gear, but whatever.

There. Better? Not that it helps, clearly it’s already too late to do anything but razz the hell out of DLL for not being able to condense his thinking into the space of a Twitter post.

Silly me, right?

Honestly the combining of boon and healing power is the single greatest idea anet needs to follow. It wont do enough to counter Meta kittens. I think the base healing power for every class should be lowered, and maybe endurance regen reduced. that aught even it up. incoming meta kittens

because of the availability of dodge mechanic, and down state….

Clearly, people just don’t really get it.

You know what my ideal fix would be? If I was the One for a day and could command computers to do whatever I wanted with my brain?

‘Healing Power’ would disappear completely. There would no longer be any way to scale the strength of heals up or down at all. All skills/traits/whatevers that healed red bars would be reset to a fair point, accounting for the lack of healing strength, and the Healing Power stat would be replaced with a version of ‘Concentration’ that increased the duration of both boons and conditions.

Bam. No more fiddling around with healing, which the game treats as something to do on the sideline without any real fiddling in every single instance except the existence of the Healing Power stat. Condibuilds have to try and stat for Concentration now, as well as Malice and probably Precision, giving them the triple-stat stack that the foaming-mouthed ZerkAssers have been complaining condibuilds don’t have to fight against. ‘Support’ builds get to increase duration of friendly boons they give to allies and conditions they slap on enemies with the same stat.

The system is much cleaner, nobody yells at Clerics or Zealots or anyone else who wants to run something other than ZerkAss, and everybody wins. Theoretically. In the realm of pure fantasy. Unfortunately there’s not a single chance in Gehenna ArenaNet would just eliminate scaling heals altogether, so I tried to come up with something that at least partially decoupled a core gear stat – Healing Power – from a useless relic of a game function – improving healing ability.

Pardon me for trying.

Rauderi.8706:

Admittedly tl;dr, but not the first time we’ve seen the idea, either.

Personally, I’d love to see boon duration increased by healing power. It would shoot the utility into something useful.

Other idea I’ve seen (and thought) is to have healing power affect both incoming and outgoing heals, which could also affect scaling of personal heals by identifying them as outgoing and incoming.

This! But also we reevaluate Boon potency as a concept, not just boon duration. As we’ve seen theres been a significant increase in the power of Conditions that went from duration stack to potency stack. Regeneration is prime candidate for rolling up a similar change, as these are generally short lived, and most skills that apply them are already logically divided into “Upkeep” and “Burst” staggering. Upkeep skills would be Guard mace 2, Healing Turret, Ele Staff 5, which all tick the boon at the same rate they expire.

The big risk is source stacking…. which may warrant them capping it 5 or 8 like they did with Chill and Swiftness. However, with the ability to stack regen, we do gain the ability retweak just the boon to weaken it per stack, but allow more stacks, and builds with higher healing power to boost a stack’s potency.

DevilLordLaser.8619:

(…)(…)
The system is much cleaner, nobody yells at Clerics or Zealots or anyone else who wants to run something other than Zerker, and everybody wins. Theoretically. In the realm of pure fantasy. Unfortunately there’s not a single chance in Gehenna ArenaNet would just eliminate scaling heals altogether, so I tried to come up with something that at least partially decoupled a core gear stat – Healing Power – from a useless relic of a game function – improving healing ability.

Pardon me for trying.

By zerker lets call it builds optimized for better output damage, and that is what is gw2 about, it is a placebo that fast action mmo’s have, because players can kill and feel rewarded, as example on gw1 u need more teamwork than gw2 since in gw2 a players can single burst as a gw1 team could.

With the actual game those stats aren’t needed, and if those stats gave anything good people would start screaming because it was op and they could not kill target as fast as before, they would feel that was needed more effort and that would lessen the self reward expectation.

if anet deleted 60-70% of gear sets and mostly like 90% of the runes game would not miss them.

I’d suggest:

• halving the base healing on regens, heals, weapon skills traits and utilities
• improving the scaling of said skills with healing, multiplying healing scaling with a factor 2.5-4 (maybe 5 in some -rare- cases) at least (3?)
• coupling boon duration to healing
• healing efectiveness should be affected by (receivers) vitality… no I’m not joking…
  maybe base 1000 vitality shoud equal 100% of the conventional heal and each added 100 vitality should add a couple 2% (maybe 3?), with 1831 added (max) vitality (Without Runes/Food) possible for added 18.310 HP maybe this could be supported by 36.6% (2%) added healing effectiveness , 36.6% would be an added 3300 points on a 9000 pt base heal , or 55% (3) FOR an added 4950 points on a 9000 point base heal?

Understand I’m not saying gw should move towards to the trinity, but as healing is useless in most builds… Some improvement is really wanted…

I doubt this game is limited to zerk and sin tbh, as sinister also has decent options…
At least when speaking PvE only.. outside PvE things really change….

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

I’d suggest:

• halving the base healing on regens, heals, weapon skills traits and utilities
• improving the scaling of said skills with healing, multiplying healing scaling with a factor 2.5-4 (maybe 5 in some -rare- cases) at least (3?)
• coupling boon duration to healing
• healing effectiveness should be affected by (receivers) vitality… no I’m not joking…
  maybe base 1000 vitality should equal 100% of the conventional heal and each added 100 vitality should add a couple 2% (maybe 3?), with 1831 added (max) vitality (Without Runes/Food) possible for added 18.310 HP maybe this could be supported by 36.6% (2%) added healing effectiveness , 36.6% would be an added 3300 points on a 9000 pt base heal , or 55% (3) FOR an added 4950 points on a 9000 point base heal?

Understand I’m not saying gw should move towards to the trinity, but as healing is useless in most builds… Some improvement is really wanted…

I doubt this game is limited to zerk and sin tbh, as sinister also has decent options…
At least when speaking PvE only.. outside PvE things really change….

+1 and a hat-tip, good person.

Healing Power is currently the dumpster stat. Adjacent to that is Vitality. At a measly 10HP per point that doesn’t scale, Vitality needs something else besides “alleged condition counterplay.”

And I think what a lot of proponents are saying is that we don’t want Trinity. We’re all sick of it in other MMOs. But, as a gameplay and design element, support focus and healing border on useless. Not to say that support doesn’t work; even base Guardians bring a ton of it, but the stats don’t affect it.

And to starlinvf’s idea, changing healing power to support power (at the risk of piggybacking too much on Wildstar), some incoming boons could scale with it:

• Might increases per stack based on healpow. Multiply that by 25, and that might help heal-heavy characters with damage.
• Fury increases based on healpow. It changes the mathematical balance and might lead to a mix of Heal/Prec/Ferocity/Power gear, since good party comps keep Fury up.
• Why make Retal based on Power? If it’s based on Support Power instead, it transfers value from power to support. Besides, Retal is for non-zerk meta anyway. :P
• Increase durations for non-numeric buffs (Swiftness, Aegis, etc) based on healpow to emphasize support roles. Possibly affect it based on incoming and outgoing.
• And, of course, fix the scaling on healing skills. But, if the rest of the above happen, Healing Power would have a much greater impact that the healing component might not need to be tweaked as much.

Or switch game. Theres plenty of support in this game, its just not limited to filling green bars. Plus, healing is important, gotta keep the bars up to 90% to activate scholar runes 10% buff

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

I’d suggest:

• halving the base healing on regens, heals, weapon skills traits and utilities
• improving the scaling of said skills with healing, multiplying healing scaling with a factor 2.5-4 (maybe 5 in some -rare- cases) at least (3?)
• coupling boon duration to healing
• healing efectiveness should be affected by (receivers) vitality… no I’m not joking…
  maybe base 1000 vitality shoud equal 100% of the conventional heal and each added 100 vitality should add a couple 2% (maybe 3?), with 1831 added (max) vitality (Without Runes/Food) possible for added 18.310 HP maybe this could be supported by 36.6% (2%) added healing effectiveness , 36.6% would be an added 3300 points on a 9000 pt base heal , or 55% (3) FOR an added 4950 points on a 9000 point base heal?

Understand I’m not saying gw should move towards to the trinity, but as healing is useless in most builds… Some improvement is really wanted…

I doubt this game is limited to zerk and sin tbh, as sinister also has decent options…
At least when speaking PvE only.. outside PvE things really change….

Or 5th option: remove Healing Power from the available stats

maddoctor.2738:

Or 5th option: remove Healing Power from the available stats

>.>

That would fix a lot of balance problems issues for the dev team. Or merge Vit with healpow and have one useful stat instead of two garbage ones.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

I’d suggest:

• halving the base healing on regens, heals, weapon skills traits and utilities
• improving the scaling of said skills with healing, multiplying healing scaling with a factor 2.5-4 (maybe 5 in some -rare- cases) at least (3?)
• coupling boon duration to healing
• healing efectiveness should be affected by (receivers) vitality… no I’m not joking…
  maybe base 1000 vitality shoud equal 100% of the conventional heal and each added 100 vitality should add a couple 2% (maybe 3?), with 1831 added (max) vitality (Without Runes/Food) possible for added 18.310 HP maybe this could be supported by 36.6% (2%) added healing effectiveness , 36.6% would be an added 3300 points on a 9000 pt base heal , or 55% (3) FOR an added 4950 points on a 9000 point base heal?

Understand I’m not saying gw should move towards to the trinity…

Yeah, you are. At least, that’s what the first two suggestions would do.

That said, the idea about base heal scaling based on Vit beyond 1K might have some merit, though perhaps the actual increase would need scrutiny. Also, while I can see a need — or at least a desire — for more boon duration in the wake of the stat/trait divorce, I might prefer it as an independent stat.

In general, I question the position that a stat must have relevance in player-derived metas in every game mode or it is overall of no value to anyone.

I don’t think a little more boon duration would fix the fact that you are trading three fourths of your potential damage for a stat that gives a poorly scaling bonus purely to reactive healing, but at least there are other people talking about this issue.

The way that this game currently simply assumes that everyone who wants to play support or tank is either a noob or some kind of primadonna who’s angry that people can do stuff without them and should just find another game is the biggest thing that turns me off from this game at this time. This is a superbly crafted game in pretty much every aspect other than the total lack of role diversity you encounter when you care at all about having a subjective measure of how well you’re doing.

The big thing that I want them to do is to implement systems that let supporters and tankers actually help the party do more damage. I completely support the idea that these characters should not be necessary to survive, but if that’s not their role then they need to be able to boost the party in other ways.

Give people some defensive abilities that scale on toughness, where if an enemy strikes them they can counterattack for big damage and stack some vulnerabilities. Suddenly there is a point to trying to be the guy who gets the enemies attention without having a game where if the enemy hits anyone else they die. It just takes a little rethinking on why the tank is taking the hits. He’s not taking them because he has to, he’s taking them because it fuels retaliatory abilities that can do damage and boost the potential of damage dealers in the party.

Same goes for healing. They just need to rethink why you need HP in the game. It’s a good thing they moved away from “You can’t avoid taking damage, if nobody puts the HP back you simply die” to a system where that isn’t necessary, but they simply didn’t create a new reason to put health back. What if they changed the paradigm to “Any health you aren’t losing by getting hit you can throw back at the enemy for more damage, and healing gives you health to spare!” Boom, healers are useful, DPS is useful, still no rigid dependency on each other.

Removing Healing Power is one solution, but maybe it’s too late and it’s included on many items.

The other option I think may make it useful, on par with the rest of stats, is by making it similar to Precision: add a chance on every hit – received – to heal x amount. For example; 25% chance to gain 100 health on every hit received. It’s up to Anet balance team to decide if the 0% to 100% chance on being hit or the amount of healing received on being hit – or both, to be affected by healing power. This has to be balanced in favor of attacker, because “being hit” is a passive play, but still has to be significant enough to be considered useful.

Or the previous ideea, but healing received, based on your outgoing damage, a percent of damage or just fixed amount on every hit. In each case not tied to healing skills and regeneration or anything, so those can be balanced separately and Healing Power still kept useful, but not overpowered or alowed to encourage passive play. Healing could be even shared on hit, adding more support, without making a healer class.

The thing to keep in mind that getting hit in GW2 is not inevitable, it’s a failure to evade. This is the fundamental change in GW2 that busts the trinity.

Because of that however, anything in the game that exclusively deals with what happens after you get hit diminishes in usefulness the more skillful the player becomes.

As a result any solution to making stats like Toughness or Healing Power useful has to move their impact before the point of failure. Let them do some good before the player messed up, instead of only afterward.

I personally like healing power. Do I think it could be tweaked to provide more for team play? Absolutely! But as it is, it’s still has it’s uses.

It seems to be most useful in WvW though.

Anecdotal evidence:
Be in WvW with my cleric shout heal guardian (mace/shield) traited to do as much healing as I could.
Party with Necro (power build).
We encounter a 5 man group and get attacked. Wipe them all. Minutes later a 7 man group appears. Take all but 2 out before dying ourselves.
I was tossing around healing and boons like they were going out of style. The healing, as well as being either extremely lucky and or facing a really bad group of players, or both, was a major contributing factor to those fights. They kept us in the fight much longer then we should have been, and thus were able to smash our enemies.

One idea to make healing power more useful, in PvE at least, would be to calculate outgoing healing the same as outgoing damage. Any AoE healing, or group healing, skills would be factored the same as any outgoing or AoE damage. This might make it a bit more useful, but as far as the details of it working, I’m not sure.

When players are the thing trying to do damage to you you can’t rely on the idea that you’ll never get hit, so stats that help you after you’ve been hit suddenly become useful again.

None of the healing and survival stats in GW2 are actually bad, the problem is purely with the fact that in PvE getting hit in the first place means you failed to evade the damage. If they made it impossible to avoid the hits survival stats would instantly be useful, but you’d also force the trinity back.

pdavis.8031:

I personally like healing power. Do I think it could be tweaked to provide more for team play? Absolutely! But as it is, it’s still has it’s uses.

It seems to be most useful in WvW though.

Anecdotal evidence:
Be in WvW with my cleric shout heal guardian (mace/shield) traited to do as much healing as I could.
Party with Necro (power build).
We encounter a 5 man group and get attacked. Wipe them all. Minutes later a 7 man group appears. Take all but 2 out before dying ourselves.
I was tossing around healing and boons like they were going out of style. The healing, as well as being either extremely lucky and or facing a really bad group of players, or both, was a major contributing factor to those fights. They kept us in the fight much longer then we should have been, and thus were able to smash our enemies.

It is also useful in PvE when you actually playing with people who need the help.

One idea to make healing power more useful, in PvE at least, would be to calculate outgoing healing the same as outgoing damage. Any AoE healing, or group healing, skills would be factored the same as any outgoing or AoE damage. This might make it a bit more useful, but as far as the details of it working, I’m not sure.

No idea what you mean by this. You want healing to be scaled by weapon strength?

And that’s the biggest problem of GW2: tries to be everything for everyone, though PvE (dealing with “AI”) and PvP (against humans) are very different. No need to go off-topic here, just as exceptions were made up to now (confusion for example does higher in PVE), those should continue and both PvE and PvP has to be improved. Healing would be, and it is, most useful in WvW. Still, people love to heal and revive even in PvE, just because it’s fun and is great – except rewarding that in a system not designed to do that for anything but damage dealt. That’s why mixing it with outgoing damage and balancing to make it fair seems the best outcome. Or just ignore healing power completely (I do), and move on.

The issue is simply that the GW2 devs have retained the function of things like armor and healing 1 to 1 from games where damage is inevitable and haven’t given enough thought to how they can be useful in a game where damage is avoidable.

It’s the soft stat/hard stat duality. You get two kinds of stats in any game, soft stats and hard stats. Soft stats are stats the modify an aspect of the game the player has control over, while hard stats are stats that modify an aspect of the game the player doesn’t have control over.

In a normal MMO the player has neither control over how much damage they inflict, nor how much damage they take. The system calculates how hard you hit, and it calculates how hard you got hit.

In Guild Wars 2 however you can avoid getting hit in many situations, which means how much damage you take is no longer pure math, it’s up to you.

That means any stat that handles what happens when you receive damage just went from a hard stat to a soft stat. The game still handles it like a hard stat though, and that’s where the problem is.

The only way to ever fix this issue is to find ways to make Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power into hard stats again by giving them a function that comes into play independently of what the player does.

Khisanth.2948:

pdavis.8031:

One idea to make healing power more useful, in PvE at least, would be to calculate outgoing healing the same as outgoing damage. Any AoE healing, or group healing, skills would be factored the same as any outgoing or AoE damage. This might make it a bit more useful, but as far as the details of it working, I’m not sure.

No idea what you mean by this. You want healing to be scaled by weapon strength?

I’m not sure exactly what I mean by this either. I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that if damage is: Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Then maybe Healing Power could be something like: Healing done = (Healing skill) * Healing Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (targets vitality)

Healing skill would be rated in terms similar to weapon strength (i.e HS: healing: 3,275)
so the base would be 3275 * Healing Power * 0.5 (skill coefficient) / targets vitality.

Again, not sure exactly how that would work, but it’s an idea.

pdavis.8031:

Khisanth.2948:

pdavis.8031:

One idea to make healing power more useful, in PvE at least, would be to calculate outgoing healing the same as outgoing damage. Any AoE healing, or group healing, skills would be factored the same as any outgoing or AoE damage. This might make it a bit more useful, but as far as the details of it working, I’m not sure.

No idea what you mean by this. You want healing to be scaled by weapon strength?

I’m not sure exactly what I mean by this either. I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that if damage is: Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Then maybe Healing Power could be something like: Healing done = (Healing skill) * Healing Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (targets vitality)

Healing skill would be rated in terms similar to weapon strength (i.e HS: healing: 3,275)
so the base would be 3275 * Healing Power * 0.5 (skill coefficient) / targets vitality.

Again, not sure exactly how that would work, but it’s an idea.

That formula means targets receive less healing with higher vitality which doesn’t really make sense.

Khisanth.2948:

pdavis.8031:

Khisanth.2948:

pdavis.8031:

One idea to make healing power more useful, in PvE at least, would be to calculate outgoing healing the same as outgoing damage. Any AoE healing, or group healing, skills would be factored the same as any outgoing or AoE damage. This might make it a bit more useful, but as far as the details of it working, I’m not sure.

No idea what you mean by this. You want healing to be scaled by weapon strength?

I’m not sure exactly what I mean by this either. I suppose what I’m trying to say, is that if damage is: Damage done = (Weapon strength) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)
Then maybe Healing Power could be something like: Healing done = (Healing skill) * Healing Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (targets vitality)

Healing skill would be rated in terms similar to weapon strength (i.e HS: healing: 3,275)
so the base would be 3275 * Healing Power * 0.5 (skill coefficient) / targets vitality.

Again, not sure exactly how that would work, but it’s an idea.

That formula means targets receive less healing with higher vitality which doesn’t really make sense.

Oh yeah, good catch.

Maybe something like: Healing done = (Healing skill) * Healing Power * (skill-specific coefficient) + (targets vitality/2).

Or something.

Either way, something like this (but with a formula that actually works :P)
Basically make it so Healing Power heals about the same as damage dealt.
Healing Power then becomes useful, but it comes at the cost of being able to deal damage.
This doesn’t mean make a trinity system, but it rewards using healing/support builds.

I don’t think the problem is really that you can’t heal for enough points, the problem is entirely with how much healing people actually need, which simply isn’t a whole lot unless they play carelessly.

Since many of the most damaging things in PvE also knock you down or stun you or otherwise make you weaker you can’t even make a good argument that by taking the damage you’re giving yourself more opportunity to dish it out.

There is simply no infinite demand for green numbers, which is why how much healing you can actually do really isn’t as important as whether or not you can deliver it in the exact moment where it’s needed, and how useful you are when it isn’t needed.

A character with high mitigation from protection already gains a greater benefit from healing, since any point you put on that person is that much harder to take away again because of the toughness. But what’s the point of generating huge healing in a game where you’re better off just dodging and then smacking the enemy with a 10k crit.

Aetrion.8295:

When players are the thing trying to do damage to you you can’t rely on the idea that you’ll never get hit, so stats that help you after you’ve been hit suddenly become useful again.

None of the healing and survival stats in GW2 are actually bad, the problem is purely with the fact that in PvE getting hit in the first place means you failed to evade the damage. If they made it impossible to avoid the hits survival stats would instantly be useful, but you’d also force the trinity back.

The thing to note here is that if mobs attacked faster (as fast as players) they shouldn’t be doing the same damage they do now. Lower mob damage, at least for champion/legendary mobs, and increase attack speed by a LOT is the way to update mobs and make them more challenging. That way it wouldn’t force the trinity back AND make defensive stats more useful.

Sure because you can avoid damage completely the value of defensive stats is lower, however another reason for defensive stats being less powerful is that you are 1-shot killed in either Berserker or Soldier gear. What’s the point of adding vitality/toughness if you’ll be killed in 2-3 shots instead of 1-2? Better focus on more evades/blocks/blinds etc to avoid the damage completely.

Making mobs attack way faster (But deal lower damage) will make the game more like PVP and is like the number one suggestion since release to improve the PVE experience in the game.

Aetrion.8295:

The issue is simply that the GW2 devs have retained the function of things like armor and healing 1 to 1 from games where damage is inevitable and haven’t given enough thought to how they can be useful in a game where damage is avoidable.

It’s the soft stat/hard stat duality. You get two kinds of stats in any game, soft stats and hard stats. Soft stats are stats the modify an aspect of the game the player has control over, while hard stats are stats that modify an aspect of the game the player doesn’t have control over.

In a normal MMO the player has neither control over how much damage they inflict, nor how much damage they take. The system calculates how hard you hit, and it calculates how hard you got hit.

In Guild Wars 2 however you can avoid getting hit in many situations, which means how much damage you take is no longer pure math, it’s up to you.

That means any stat that handles what happens when you receive damage just went from a hard stat to a soft stat. The game still handles it like a hard stat though, and that’s where the problem is.

The only way to ever fix this issue is to find ways to make Toughness, Vitality and Healing Power into hard stats again by giving them a function that comes into play independently of what the player does.

Just on the theoretical side, what if pressure attacks, like AOE, had a stronger impact? As far as PvE goes, AOE only hits players half as hard as normal attacks…. so it kills in you in 2-3 ticks instead of 1. Unless its dungeon boss AOE, in which case it still kills in one.

I run a hybrid defense build on my guardian, and I had to boost the armor to almost 2800 to feel like it makes a difference, and it STILL drops hard to all but the weakest attacks in dungeons.

maddoctor.2738:

Making mobs attack way faster (But deal lower damage) will make the game more like PVP and is like the number one suggestion since release to improve the PVE experience in the game.

You’re not wrong, but the whole point of the discussion is that support and defensive stats need to be useful without being required for survival, because when you make them required for survival you bring the trinity back.

The idea of trinity busting in GW2 basically comes down to the idea that survival is never dependent on your armor and healing. Since that makes the only objective measure of how well your build does in PvE how quickly you can defeat an enemy the devs should have built support and tanking roles around maintaining the groups damage, not a weird secondary way of surviving fights that costs you all your damage output.

I mean, ultimately what this comes down to is, when you strip away the aspect of being absolutely needed for content, what makes support and tanking fun?

The appeal of a support character is that you act indirectly, and rather that measuring your success by your own performance you’re measuring your success by how much happier other people are with their performance when you’re around.

The appeal of a tank character is that you defiantly stand in the way of anything enemies are throwing at you. You don’t dodge, you don’t run, you take the hits, laugh and say: “please sir, may I have another?” and then counterattack.

Both of those play styles are perfectly possible in the context of a game where they aren’t tied purely to survival, if ArenaNet only bothered to put their head to work a bit to make it happen.

please no. healing power is nice. where is the sudden hate for healing power coming from the past couple weeks?

my guardian runs zealots / clerics. my healing power is awesome. my dps is not suffering that much. when zerk metas go down, Im still up fighting. and that’s if they go down. with me around, 99% of the time they don’t.

This isn’t hate for healing power, it’s people who like healing power saying that it needs help to be viable in high end play.

Aetrion.8295:

maddoctor.2738:

Making mobs attack way faster (But deal lower damage) will make the game more like PVP and is like the number one suggestion since release to improve the PVE experience in the game.

You’re not wrong, but the whole point of the discussion is that support and defensive stats need to be useful without being required for survival, because when you make them required for survival you bring the trinity back.

It just means a smaller margin of error when there is absolutely no support. Faster attacks with lower damage also means that the self heal is more likely to be able to compensate for the damage of a failed avoidance.

The idea of trinity busting in GW2 basically comes down to the idea that survival is never dependent on your armor and healing. Since that makes the only objective measure of how well your build does in PvE how quickly you can defeat an enemy the devs should have built support and tanking roles around maintaining the groups damage, not a weird secondary way of surviving fights that costs you all your damage output.

Support is already maintaining group damage when they are not tunnel visioning towards healing. Stacking might, fury, vulnerability, Deep Freeze, stability/block(so attacks aren’t interrupted), etc. Healing is sometimes in there too along with condition removal.

I mean, ultimately what this comes down to is, when you strip away the aspect of being absolutely needed for content, what makes support and tanking fun?

The appeal of a support character is that you act indirectly, and rather that measuring your success by your own performance you’re measuring your success by how much happier other people are with their performance when you’re around.

Looking for love in all the wrong places? Not sure.

The appeal of a tank character is that you defiantly stand in the way of anything enemies are throwing at you. You don’t dodge, you don’t run, you take the hits, laugh and say: “please sir, may I have another?” and then counterattack.

That sounds more like a reckless person I would not want as an ally. More a liability than an asset. If there are 2+ people meleeing a mob there is no reason for all of them to be standing in the mob’s cleave zone. Taking a hit that could have been avoided by just standing there rather than taking action to negate the damage is just playing poorly. This also goes with the healing stuff too. If you don’t have suicidal “allies” taking unnecessary damage then there is less need for massive heals as well.

I have tanky characters but that doesn’t mean I am not going to try to avoid damage. It does mean that if I failed the avoidance(original motivation was a character that I can play even when my connection is being terrible) the consequence isn’t as severe.

if you were to graph the attribute levels on equipped player gear at any given time, you’d see healing power at the bottom. guaranteed. not only that but it would be way down the bottom, probably at a third or less the levels of the next least itemized attribute. I would not be the least surprised to find it at less than 10% of the next lowest stat.

This isn’t an attribute like agony resistance, which has a clear and requisite purpose in the narrow field it is applicable to. healing power, in theory at least, applies to every combat engagement in the game. That it is so infrequently taken is indicative of one or more of a few things:

-It isn’t needed
-People dislike its function
-It fails to perform its function

a case can be made for #1 – it’s frequently mentioned in the various threads criticizing the current meta. #2 is likewise easily argued – a strong healing role is notably absent from this game compared to other MMOs, and a lot of people mention this as a positive attractant to this game. #3 is my personal opinion. If we take it literally, then the stat should empower healing, but even at high levels the attribute doesn’t give even a significant percentage increase over the base. That, to me, says the attribute isn’t doing what it is supposed to, and more than that, isn’t doing enough to make it usable, much less useful.

I like the idea of adding boon duration to Healing Power. It’s a simple enough change that encourages support without sliding into trinity territory.