Guild Wars 2

While Guild Wars 2 is my favorite MMORPG, there are many things I wish would change about the game. Ive been playing since launch, and Ive played every profession, besides Warrior ( Hate heavy armor). Even though the Trinity, is not present within this game, It really doesnt bother me, but I must say I do miss it. Why? I love being a healer, a support type Magic based class. I love supporting those I play with in order to get tasks done. I played a Mesmer for 2 years, and I loved the DPS aspect of that class and some of its support spells. But I still wanted to help players more while getting that self gratification that I was contributing on a larger scale.

Thats when I decided to role a Guardian, it was the first time ever in my life, out of all the MMOs Ive played that I was a Heavy armor based class. However, I dont view Guardian as a big tanky meat shield, with the IQ of a Warrior lol. I view Guardians as Spellswords of sorts, or even Clerics from DnD and I love classes like that. The lore behind Guardians is what drew me to play one, and their idea of supporting through their magic. Guardians are the only class in GW2 that focus on supporting their allies more than doing damage. As I play the class ( Level 51 now ) I find myself enjoying the support aspect of it. It may not be a pure healer type class, but it definitely makes one feel as if they are contributing close to the level of a main healer profession.

So I will always miss being a pure “healer robe wearing priest”, (Trying to find armor that will make me look more mage like as a Guardian ) . I sometimes wish ANET would put in a pure healer class but thats not going to happen. So…. Guardian will have to do, despite my lack of interest in the heavy armor look, and thats not a bad thing, because Iam having a lot of fun helping everyone in PvE.

As far as armor goes, check out the Honor of the Waves armor. Lots of cloth.

Ironically, when traited and kitted out just right, a warrior is a great group healer/supporter.

You should look into Elementalist in ascended Nomad gear. Most ridiculous healing I’ve ever seen.

What are you talking about, this is absurd. Next you are going to suggest making healing power worth something. What’s next, fixing WvW?

We will have to agree to disagree. The thing I hate most about traditional trinity type games is having to rely on a “healer” to do things. Heal your dang self is my motto. :P

Guardian is mostly my main and her philosophy is kill it with fire. I’ll provide boons and such to folks, but I will never spec her out to be pure support…feels like such a waste of a guardian to me. I know I don’t do as much damage as a warrior but I love the guardian utilities and abilities. Perhaps you should play an elementalist.

Disclaimer: I love the hack and slash classes. I want to do as much damage as I possibly can and faceroll stuff and take care of myself. Floofy support stuff is not in any way my playstyle.

RoseofGilead.8907:

As far as armor goes, check out the Honor of the Waves armor. Lots of cloth.

Gasp!!!! I jus looked it up! It looks perfect! Totally going to get it! Thanks for letting me know!

I also miss the role but I’m also so happy that GW2 negates it.There are a plethora of MMO’s that cater to the trinity.

I don’t miss “LFMonk then we go” spam in map chat.

As fun as healing professions are they often dictate team builds and overall gameplay, and at worst create more restriction and necessitation than anything else.

LFMonk is probably the main reason they got rid of the idea for GW2

khani.4786:

We will have to agree to disagree. The thing I hate most about traditional trinity type games is having to rely on a “healer” to do things. Heal your dang self is my motto. :P

Guardian is mostly my main and her philosophy is kill it with fire. I’ll provide boons and such to folks, but I will never spec her out to be pure support…feels like such a waste of a guardian to me. I know I don’t do as much damage as a warrior but I love the guardian utilities and abilities. Perhaps you should play an elementalist.

Disclaimer: I love the hack and slash classes. I want to do as much damage as I possibly can and faceroll stuff and take care of myself. Floofy support stuff is not in any way my playstyle.

I understand where you are coming from. I value your opinion! However thats where I must say, I love knowing that my team mates are alive because Im helping them stay alive. In a way its like real life, everyone contributes to something differently than others. some are good at supporting, while others are good at tackling a problem head on. Which is why I love supporting my team mates and keeping them alive. it makes me feel good. Just like it makes you feel good to smack things around, pressing through mobs with your own strength.

P.S: Nothing wrong with FLUFFY stuffs XD

Purecura.1795:

RoseofGilead.8907:

As far as armor goes, check out the Honor of the Waves armor. Lots of cloth.

Gasp!!!! I jus looked it up! It looks perfect! Totally going to get it! Thanks for letting me know!

No problem! It’s one of my favorite heavy sets.

I love when I do large zerg-y type events on my low health zerk elementalist or gaurd, and am kept alive almost solely by the zerg’s AoE healing.

Whether it be traits or runes/sigil causing heal effects, or just certain skills during open world PVE, or more organized WvW zerg healing/buffing periods, group healing is very much an important part of this game.

I wish I could run full cleric in high level fractals and not slow down my team mates.

Purecura.1795:

I understand where you are coming from. I value your opinion! However thats where I must say, I love knowing that my team mates are alive because Im helping them stay alive. In a way its like real life, everyone contributes to something differently than others. some are good at supporting, while others are good at tackling a problem head on. Which is why I love supporting my team mates and keeping them alive. it makes me feel good. Just like it makes you feel good to smack things around, pressing through mobs with your own strength.

P.S: Nothing wrong with FLUFFY stuffs XD

Oh yeah absolutely….I prefer to be independent and do everything on my own, both in-game and IRL.

Fluffy things can indeed be fun but I’m really a hit ’em hard kinda girl. Glad you found a way to enjoy the game as it is

As for Heavy “clothy” armor also check out Braham’s armor from the gemstore. Worn with different shoulders, and a different helm it could totally work for you!

You can try outfits for the light armor look.
Even tried Witch’s Outfit? Unfortunately it has a lot of bones which kind of ruin the “Healer/Cleric” look,looks more like a Necromancer,but still…

Just use an elementalist, camp water on staff. It has an extremely high HPS after the most recent updates to runes, sigils and traits. When properly built, they can restore around 3x the health of personal heals in the same amount of time in addition to the heals already being used by other players and blast finishers on water fields.

You don’t need max healing power (just ~1k of it will be enough), but you do need:
- Aquatic Benevolence (trait)
- Superior Sigil of Benevolence
- Superior Sigil of Water
- 6x Superior Rune of the Monk (Ascalon Catacombs)

The total healing output to allies is increased by 147.5% with a full stack. Using this combination I’ve been able to 2man dungeons with a berserker warrior with said warrior losing almost no health from anything just facetanking.

The HPS is higher than 25 stacks of bleed from Dredge boss in SE p3.

By my calculations proper use of water auto-attack, the sigil of water, Soothing Mist and Geyser will heal about 47K of health every 30 seconds, not counting the health output of the actual Regeneration boon from Healing Rain.

Keep in mind that this playstyle is not often welcome in PvE. It is however extremely welcome in the various PvP game modes (WvW and sPvP).

Maybe GW2 isn’t the game for you….. dodges bullets

I’m totally kidding. I don’t mind playing the healer role in other games. It makes me feel like their life is in my hands and if they kitten me off, they don’t get healed XD

That being said, Eles and Guards can play a really cool healer support role if speced for it. My guild plays tPvP alot and we always skype while doing it. Whenever a certain Ele friend of mine and I finally get out of a fight for a node, he’ll always use Cone of Cold on me—usually healing me to full HP—while yelling on skype “TAKE MY HEALING” lol. I know its not the same as your standard healing role, but at least we have something :P

I kinda like healing the way it is now. Every class has some form of healing and we don’t have to depend on another class to make sure we don’t die.

the phalanx armor is not too awful heavy looking. mix and match somewhat. I like the vigil heavy armor myself, its more in between.

My support for the party is to draw the aggro then chop everything down

Noah.9654:

Maybe GW2 isn’t the game for you….. dodges bullets

I’m totally kidding. I don’t mind playing the healer role in other games. It makes me feel like their life is in my hands and if they kitten me off, they don’t get healed XD

That being said, Eles and Guards can play a really cool healer support role if speced for it. My guild plays tPvP alot and we always skype while doing it. Whenever a certain Ele friend of mine and I finally get out of a fight for a node, he’ll always use Cone of Cold on me—usually healing me to full HP—while yelling on skype “TAKE MY HEALING” lol. I know its not the same as your standard healing role, but at least we have something :P

I kinda like healing the way it is now. Every class has some form of healing and we don’t have to depend on another class to make sure we don’t die.

Haha don’t worry, I don’t use bullets, I shoot out bolts of healing! Yayyy lol. Any who I don’t look at the elementalist as a healing support type of class, like the way guardian is. Because Eles to me remind me of other mage classes from other games. And those classes were mainly DPS. Not saying the Ele is, but I find the lore with guardian more appealing in terms of playing a support class.

My support is usually my Elementalist.

Aquatic Benevolence, Evasive Arcana, Arcane Wave on water-fields for heals.
Attunement change with Elemental Attunement trait, for useful boons like Protection, Swiftness and Regen.
Conjures with Conjurer trait, as offensive choices and additional DPS support.

But for Open world Group content, everything die too fast before they even do anything, so this build is good for Hard content, which is not what I want to do for most of the day.

khani.4786:

We will have to agree to disagree. The thing I hate most about traditional trinity type games is having to rely on a “healer” to do things. Heal your dang self is my motto. :P

Guardian is mostly my main and her philosophy is kill it with fire. I’ll provide boons and such to folks, but I will never spec her out to be pure support…feels like such a waste of a guardian to me. I know I don’t do as much damage as a warrior but I love the guardian utilities and abilities. Perhaps you should play an elementalist.

Disclaimer: I love the hack and slash classes. I want to do as much damage as I possibly can and faceroll stuff and take care of myself. Floofy support stuff is not in any way my playstyle.

Except you don’t even have to do that (heal yourself). You just have to dodge. This was a mistake imho, adding the dodge mechanic as a 100% damage avoidance. It dumbed the game down so that healing is moot (even self healing).

juno.1840:

khani.4786:

We will have to agree to disagree. The thing I hate most about traditional trinity type games is having to rely on a “healer” to do things. Heal your dang self is my motto. :P

Guardian is mostly my main and her philosophy is kill it with fire. I’ll provide boons and such to folks, but I will never spec her out to be pure support…feels like such a waste of a guardian to me. I know I don’t do as much damage as a warrior but I love the guardian utilities and abilities. Perhaps you should play an elementalist.

Disclaimer: I love the hack and slash classes. I want to do as much damage as I possibly can and faceroll stuff and take care of myself. Floofy support stuff is not in any way my playstyle.

Except you don’t even have to do that (heal yourself). You just have to dodge. This was a mistake imho, adding the dodge mechanic as a 100% damage avoidance. It dumbed the game down so that healing is moot (even self healing).

Healing is not moot. I suggest dodging and not using a healing skill at all from now on and we’ll see where that gets you.

Edit: Misread something and removed quote I´ll leave my thoughts on why I think heal-centric builds aren´t the way to go in this game up here though.

Generally speaking, standing around face-tanking everything, while a healer sits behind you and makes sure you don´t die, is purely passive gameplay (from the “dps´/tank´s” perspective mostly).
GW2´s dodge mechanic however encourages you to be proactive and incentivizes high-risk/high-reward gameplay – the better you are at dodging, the less passive defense you need, i.e. the more damage you´ll be able to dish out.

The dodge mechanic itself is not the reason why heal-centric specs are mostly “useless” (when it comes to PvE). I think it has to do with the way many encounters are designed in this game – a lot of predictable, slow and easy-to-dodge hard hitting attacks and not enough scary fast hitting, unavoidable and frequent low damage attacks that self heals can´t handle sufficiently.
This favors defenses such as blinds, weakness, protection, blocks, invulnerability and evades over passive defense, in form of Vitality/Toughness, and healing.

A bit off topic:
A trinity is not required in any way or form to have interesting encounters, anyone who has ever played (even once) a proper RPG that has nothing to do with MMORPGs (REAL RPG) knows that “tank/heal/dps” is only a MMORPG thing and doesn’t exist in ANY REAL RPG. And guess what? REAL RPGs have far better encounters than MMORPGs.

Clerics in DND use Heavy armor and are much like Guardians, and that’s because
a) unlike the crappy MMO healers that stand in the back and button mash their heals, DND Clerics have to go close in order to use most of their Support spells (so they need Heavy Armor to survive)
b) a buffed Cleric can become a force to be reckoned with, more powerful than most other Mundane classes both in terms of utility and even damage.
If you play a Cleric and only HEAL you are a total waste of party space.

Now on topic:
Guardians are great at Supporting their allies, they fit the Cleric type, heavy armored buffers, both lorewise and skillwise. If you ask any good WvW guild, Guardians (and Elementalists, Warrior and others) are often used to buff up their team mates GvG fights. In PVP on the other hand, Guardians have excellent Bunker builds, buffing/healing their allies while holding points.

Skills, traits, weapons and stats support a Support (!!!) playstyle, and is often used in PVP settings, when/if they change PVE to be more PVP-like maybe Support builds will start shinning in PVE too

Once you get your footing with your class you might want to consider sPvP, where healing/support builds can actually be good and useful to the party – I’m thinking for example the AH bunker build (http://metabattle.com/wiki/Build:Guardian_-_Altruistic_Healing_Bunker) might be relevant to your interests.

I miss the role sometimes, but I don’t miss it becoming an obligatory chore-role that someone has to fill, even when you’ve killed the same piece of content a thousand times over and absurdly outgear it.