Guild Wars 2

Recently it seems Anet have working towards increasing the viability of non DPS roles, support with Ventari and to a lesser extent control with taunt and slow, coupled with resistance for stronger condition tanking.

There are rumors of more challenging content that may require more varied roles, which i am hyped about but my concern is whether or not players running none DPS specs will be credited as much as those running DPS?

After all most credit in this game is based on damage dealt where as it doesn’t matter how much a player healed their allies or how much they controlled a boss, even if those mechanics are absolutely necessary for succeeding only the damage dealt matters reward wise.

I feel for Anet to succeed in diversifying builds, particularly for open world content where you may not have a party to tag bosses for you when you are healing, they need to not only make the content harder but reward more than DPS.

For example grant credit based on the amount of successful heals you output or conditions removed/boons applied for support builds.
(Successful heals being healing an ally that actually needs healing not just spamming heals on an ally at full health).

As for controls the number of CC’s used during a break bar or CC conditions applied that don’t damaged but slow/weaken a boss.

What are people’s thoughts on this?

For point capture/defense events, I don’t think it matters because you simply have to be in the area. For boss fights, they might make it so that it is based on continuous time in combat proximate to the event, contribution to healing, contribution to break bar, etc. It’s kind of hard for me to believe that ANet would be making these structural changes to play and not compensate in the event reward system.

FFXIV ARR does what you are asking OP. Except a lot of it can be cheated by spamming heals etc… it is hard to make a perfect system for recognizing ALL contributions. Instead of DPS maybe they mark # of abilities going off (weather successful or not)

Well, when it comes to loot, credit is pretty much a binary thing. Either you did enough damage to tag the mob for a chance at loot, or you didn’t.

If anything, that gives more of an advantage to classes with AOE and wide cleave attacks regardless of builds. (So Ele and Engie tend to average out more loot from mob swarms than Mesmers or Thieves might)

I assume in the new system depleting the defiance bar will be just as good for tagging as doing damage.

So it would be nice if you also got a mob tag by healing and buffing the actual attackers. But I don’t know if the mob tagging system is quite sophisticated enough under the hood to detect healing in that manner.

This is a change needed for WvW, too. I’m not touching Ventari or his tablet unless they start rewarding credit for healing, something every other MMO has had implemented since launch.