What's up with Healing Power?
People tend to stay away from healing power because damage mitigation can be handled in other ways. Dodging and other evasive skills, defensive boons, interrupting and blinding enemies and stealth are all good way to negate damage, and those ways don’t require gearing for a specific stat.
The way HP scales is not well understood. 1000 stat points invested in healing power may not cause heals to heal for that much more – and I suspect this is because healing can be very strong in the right circumstances. The way buffs (including passive healing) are spread can also be an issue. Your passive heals, like an elementalist’s dagger 5 in water attunement can affect up to 5 people people. If you’re doing large open world content and you’re in a party, and all stacked together, your heal will affect your whole party. But without grouping and stacking, it’s difficult or impossible to heal the person who needs it most.
Sacrificing damage output in PvE sucks, because you aren’t credited for participation in events for healing. I think this is unfortunate. Someone specced for healing power might actually be a huge help in keeping people vertical, but as a result not do enough damage to the target to receive credit for the event or kill.
Support skills that require sacrificing damage output for utility aren’t used much in PvE, but they often are in PvP and WvW. Healing power isn’t without its place, it just isn’t often in dungeons or open world content.
This video: http://youtu.be/aRnw05Boi8I sums it up pretty well, if you want to further explore the topic.
eta: The stat options for healing power do suck. We’ve gotten a couple more in the past year, so maybe that trend will continue. In PvE, I do use healing power sometimes. On elementalist, I’ve found the “sweet spots” for healing power effectiveness even multiples of 100 (200, 400, 600, 800). More than 800 seems to give me very little benefit. I use a berserker’s/assassin’s hybrid for armor, and celestial trinkets. The celestial trinkets give me just over 200 healing power, which is nice from a utility standpoint. I’m doing world completion on that character and running into low level squishies all the time. I wouldn’t take it into dungeons though, save for maybe higher level fractals.
(edited by Elegy.2159)
Your other thread hasn’t even left the front page yet. Is opening more threads really necessary?
Actually there are quite a few stat options around healing power: Zealots, Givers (armor), Clerics, Apothocarys, Magi’s, Nomads, Settler’s and Shamans.
I wouldn’t say under-tuned either. The problem is that you have to sacrifice damage for healing. Of course, the right build can pump out some serious healing, but you do such horrible damage as it’s not worth it, in many peoples minds.
For PvE, healing is useless as you can dodge your way out of all damage, and if you did take enough healing power to out heal any and all damage done to you, you are utterly useless as you don’t do any damage.
In PvP. Its situational. I found that going cleric warrior, (shout heals/banner regen, and full points into healing) one can stay alive pretty well, but don’t think you are going to kill anyone. Used it in the spirit watch map (the one with the orb) and it was funny watching 2 and sometimes 3 people focusing me while I was carrying the orb and barely taking any damage. Eventually got downed after heavy focus from 4 players.
WvW. Same as PvP. Situational. If you want to play a regen guardian, you could (at least in theory) keep a small group alive for a fairly long time, which would be great for smaller havoc groups in small scale fights.
“You know what the chain of command is?
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
What makes you think healing power is undertuned? Self heals tend to have unimpressive ratios as toughness-stacking tanks healing to full every time their heal is up is not good for the game, but party heals and regeneration scale pretty well with healing power. It keeps boosting healing as time goes on, as well – on a character built for it in a group situation it usually starts pulling its weight on the second round of utilities.
Your other thread hasn’t even left the front page yet. Is opening more threads really necessary?
Is this the thread you are refering to? It’s not the same person if it was. Also this is a thread about healing power NOT zerkers.
“You know what the chain of command is?
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
Your other thread hasn’t even left the front page yet. Is opening more threads really necessary?
Is this the thread you are refering to? It’s not the same person if it was. Also this is a thread about healing power NOT zerkers.
No, it was this one:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Zerker-Discussion/first#post4743448
And then the other one where they were arguing with people, which caused the thread to be closed.
And OP opens this thread with the words ‘zerker discussion’
Your other thread hasn’t even left the front page yet. Is opening more threads really necessary?
Is this the thread you are refering to? It’s not the same person if it was. Also this is a thread about healing power NOT zerkers.
No, it was this one:
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/game/gw2/Zerker-Discussion/first#post4743448
And then the other one where they were arguing with people, which caused the thread to be closed.
Gotcha…
Well to be fair it is a different topic.
“You know what the chain of command is?
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
It’s the chain I beat you with until you
recognize my command!”
I found that going cleric warrior, (shout heals/banner regen, and full points into healing) one can stay alive pretty well, but don’t think you are going to kill anyone.
Yeah. This game is balanced with PvP in mind, and I happen to agree with that strategy. Healing power vs. other players can be very strong. I can 1vX forever on a cleric’s warrior with healing signet and shouts. I won’t go down, but neither will any of my enemies. Builds like that are useful for bunkers (holding points) but I need my team to show up at some point to actually take anyone down. My damage output is so low that they can always outheal it. And that’s balanced. I shouldn’t be able to outheal damage from 3 players and still do enough damage to take them down.
I wouldn’t say under-tuned either. The problem is that you have to sacrifice damage for healing. Of course, the right build can pump out some serious healing, but you do such horrible damage as it’s not worth it, in many peoples minds.
Swapping from full Berserker to nearly full Keeper (there’s no backpiece) costs you < 20% of your damage, and gives you 710 healing power. I don’t know where this idea that swapping out of Berserker gear makes you do horrible damage comes from – the damage difference between full Berserker and full Keeper is less than the damage you get from using food and oil, and I’ve never seen anyone lose their kitten over a party member having the wrong food up in a dungeon pick up group.
Your other thread hasn’t even left the front page yet. Is opening more threads really necessary?
Irrelevant. it’s not the same topic. Why post if you didn’t have something meaningful to contribute?
(edited by Einlanzer.1627)
I wouldn’t say under-tuned either. The problem is that you have to sacrifice damage for healing. Of course, the right build can pump out some serious healing, but you do such horrible damage as it’s not worth it, in many peoples minds.
Swapping from full Berserker to nearly full Keeper (there’s no backpiece) costs you < 20% of your damage, and gives you 710 healing power. I don’t know where this idea that swapping out of Berserker gear makes you do horrible damage comes from – the damage difference between full Berserker and full Keeper is less than the damage you get from using food and oil, and I’ve never seen anyone lose their kitten over a party member having the wrong food up in a dungeon pick up group.
I’d actually be curious to see the math behind this. The bonus damage you get from Ferocity is pretty substantial, and the bonus Healing you get from Healing Power really isn’t.
I don’t see it as under tuned. The game is not developed with dedicated healer in mind, non of the combat mechanic is designed to require healer role. Healing is just one part out of the defense system. There are also CC, reflection, block, dodge etc active defenses in players sleeve. Therefore, healing is only the last resort after the failure of CC, reflection, block and dodges.
When a game is out for 2 years, the contents are more or less remain the same, players are much skillful and able to handle the threat by active defenses, that demoted healing into a back plan for sustain rather than healing.
Asking to increase healing power to a major stat during combat, is breaking the whole combat mechanic into ground and build it up again. 1) it will take a lot of time, 2) it will need a major rebalancing, 3) it will demote the game back towards trinity that MOST players hated to see.
Once i recall before the game launch, GW2 is promoted to increase active defense to a level that minimize the needs of healing, and therefore we don’t have a healer class since day one. Down side of this design decision is why healing power is not a major stat of player choice.
I posted this on the “other” zerker thread:
Healing Power is way too OP, it’s by no means weak
/thread
Exactly, healing power is not under-tuned in any way. It’s the fact that healing is very rarely needed in PvE because there is no dedicated healers in GW2. I’ll repost something I put in the other threads: Not every stat set needs to have a use in every game mode.
(edited by Lazaar.9123)
Heal power can be very strong in certain setups that are based on passive regen, clerics guard, regen ranger etc. Its obviously more useful in a competitive gamemode. Its not designed to dramatically improve the self heal #6 skill, its main use in builds is to improve passive regen.
I say what needs to be said, get used to it.
Honesty is not insulting, stupidity is.
>Class Balance is a Joke<
Honesty is not insulting, stupidity is.
>Class Balance is a Joke<
There’s also the fact that by design Regeneration is the only truly well-scaling non-primary heal. So yeah, healing power does a lot, but not for everything.
The strength of heart to face oneself has been made manifest. The persona Carighan has appeared.
A self healing D/D elementalist is nearly unkillable in PvP. Healing power is quite OP
Expac sucks for WvW players. Asura master race
Beastgate | Faerie Law
Currently residing on SBI
Beastgate | Faerie Law
Currently residing on SBI
Healing power is very strong, it’s just not desirable because it doesn’t increase damage and therefore does nothing for increasing the speed of encounters.
Healing power would be more desirable if fights couldn’t be stacked up and burned down so that the enemies could actually pose a threat to the group.
Mind you, I’ve ran dungeons with a support ranger with high healing power, it is really hard to die with just 1 heavy support healing power player in your group; the regen is out of control.
Healing power multipliers are small, so adding HP has a small % chance relative to base. Power has no ‘base’, so adding anything to direct damage has a more consistent % improvement.
Also, half of the heals in high level play are not direct heals, but triggered as combo finishers on water fields. The classes giving the water fields are normally the ones who want the healing, but the healing is determined by the healing power stat of the person who uses the finisher – so only engineers and staff elementalists really end up benefiting from boosting HP on cb finishers.