Guild Wars 2

I started a thread on the Warrior page about thinking about running banners and shouts when HoT drops.

One of my fellow players stated that if we go full blast in healing power we gain an extra 62.5 healing on the 1000 the shout provides.

How can Arenanet not look at that number and laugh?

A shout/banner warrior actually gets something from healing power, you can double those heals by getting 1000 healing power.

Though there are other heals that only see a 15 – 20% boost from 1000 healing power.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I started a thread on the Warrior page about thinking about running banners and shouts when HoT drops.

One of my fellow players stated that if we go full blast in healing power we gain an extra 62.5 healing on the 1000 the shout provides.

How can Arenanet not look at that number and laugh?

Vigorous Shouts scales 1:1 with Healing Power, so if you were to run full cleric/monk/riceballs/benevolence, the shouts would be healing for 3300+ and your regen from the banners could reach about 450/s.

Much better, thanks guys.

Macilien.3078:

A shout/banner warrior actually gets something from healing power, you can double those heals by getting 1000 healing power.

Though there are other heals that only see a 15 – 20% boost from 1000 healing power.

And here the druid sits with 2.5-5% healing power scaling on their skills…

Mantra Healing trait on Mesmer goes from 2600 → 2900(ish) from maximising Healing Power, certain things really have terrible coefficients.

Like most of the abilities in the game, there are different coefficients for their “main stat”

Most damage abilities have power as a main stat, with different coefficients per skill. Healing skills have different coefficients per skill as well.

It’s not about healing power as much as it is the poor design of healing skills. Too many of them are overly weighted toward raw values with really insignificant healing power coefficients, and this is one of the many elements that makes non-DPS stats such a bad investment on many builds. Armor versus toughness has a similar problem, vitality in many cases has a similar problem, etc.

Basically, anet wanted to make a game with stats, and then completely forgot that for stats to be fun they have to actually have noticable effects.

PopeUrban.2578:

Like most of the abilities in the game, there are different coefficients for their “main stat”

Most damage abilities have power as a main stat, with different coefficients per skill. Healing skills have different coefficients per skill as well.

The difference is that power scales proportional meaning you get double damage for the the first 1000 power you put on top of your base power.
With conditions you get a damage increase of 125% to up to 300% for the first 1000 points of condition damage.
For healingpower it has the most variation down to the point where it’s simply not worth to use it at all, which is the case for the druid for example.

Anet really opened up a can of worms introducing a pure healer spec like Druid. Now they are going to be forced to address healing power coefficients so that it actually starts to make sense but you can’t address it for Druid alone since its a stat that affects all professions.

Leodon.1564:

Anet really opened up a can of worms introducing a pure healer spec like Druid. Now they are going to be forced to address healing power coefficients so that it actually starts to make sense but you can’t address it for Druid alone since its a stat that affects all professions.

I think it’s a can that needed to be opened though.

Rashagar.8349:

Leodon.1564:

Anet really opened up a can of worms introducing a pure healer spec like Druid. Now they are going to be forced to address healing power coefficients so that it actually starts to make sense but you can’t address it for Druid alone since its a stat that affects all professions.

I think it’s a can that needed to be opened though.

Indeed. Support-minded players need more than a lame 15-20% conversion on a stat like that. Because of Druid, we’re going to see an uptick in threads on healing power.

I’m actually hoping they’ll be some grand merge, a giant globby ball of healing power discussion, so ANet finally addresses it. The players have had some good ideas, but small threads aren’t going to get noticed. :\

1st: Generally spoken in this game healing power is really really underwhelming.
Mostly because there seemingly is a need for people to still have an effective healing solution even if they do NOT run healing power…
But when playing I notice this is mostly not true:
Experienced players do not use heals often or ever, most of the time healings are used to trigger (rune) bonusses while players stay above 90% health. Also making the forementioned point of scaling useless or without meaning, and ONLY applicable to new/green/unexperienced or otherwise not capable players.
Consequently I think it wold be wiuse to rescale healings, and make the base healing enough to support starters until a certain level then make the scaling part take over…
The fixed healing could be a truly fixed number so peole only playing with 1 or 2 stats can stuill survive, but at level 55+ (triple stats) healing scaling should take over from healing base and healing should be a thing you need to trait and/or spec for to retain it’s value. It would also raise combat difficulty, and make combat awareness more important….

e.g. This causes extremes like signet of resolve (one of the most powerfull healing skills available) having 8150 healing base and a modifier of 1.25… (also one of the most powerfull healing modifiers) This means a guardian running signet of resolve speccing fully in healing with sigil of life, signet of mercy and all other things imaginable could have a maximum healing of 2200… making this skill heal for 10800 points at complete cap…. in this eaxmple the base STILL is 3/4th of all healing so a person ignoring healing completely will get 8150 healing… there are other heals healingh for less, but why healing cannot raise heals to 2 or 3 times their value is simple. there were no healers in Gw2… and no tanks.

In effect ANYONE can be tank(y) though aggro mechanics makes doing so useless
In effect NO-ONE can be healer though you can limit your build by being healer.
This also shows why people are not encouraged to take healing.

ANY other stat will give you more to work with in comparation to healing, even vitality….

e.g. When speccing 1800 points in vitality you’ll gain 18k HP…. which is in effect the same as 8 of the forementioned healings, which will replenish as soon as you are out of a fight.
Or you could add 1800 toughness and get 1800 added armor. It will benefit you a lot…
You could go power full stat and take ferocity as minor in exchange doing 40-60% more dmg. each hit….
All instead of having Max healing…

This shows why healing is underwhelming.

I made suggestions about healing and healing scaling before.

• Making all healing skills and all other things doing actual healing (lifesteals/siphons/vamprirics/regenerations) scale whith healing. Only 1 of the vampiric traits ever scaled with healing with a 0.004 modifier (also being the lowest modifier ingame:each 250 points in healing raises healing by 1 point…) Do you really think these numbers warrant speccing in healing??? No vampire would remain alive in the Gw2 universe… I’m sure.
• Make all things causing any heals trigger rune, traits and abilities as if HEALING would be a QoL boost for healers.
• Make boon duration scalable with healing (seems very simple (2% for every 100 healing?))
• Make the Base healing 66-75% of what it is now and multiply ALL healing scaling 2-3 times MINIMUM, some things could use way more love (see vampiric traits/ skills if all vampirics (vampiric aura life siphons and transfusion would be buffed vampire necro’s would become a new build type I’m sure.). Remember vampirics ignore invulnerability and armor.

As it is now:

The introduction of DRUID could mean healing would become a thing. BUT most experiened players have group builds so they -NEVER- drop below 90% health, as this is really bad for DPS. If you never drop below 90% health you do not need healing, only some regen uptime.

5 remarks:

1. Vampiric/lifesiphon/lifesteals/transfusion are all heals. at least at one side. making them scale on the dmage side by using a halved power factor and a halved healing factor and having the heal part scale with healing would really make necro and insteresting (self)healer. Especially with the vampiric aura.
2. Healing also scales up water blasts and regen. those have low modifiers as well.
3. Passive healing could be reworked. soothing mist, virtue of resolves, signet of the wild and other skills/ traits giving regeneration like buffs should be scaling with healing
4. Boon duration could scale with healing about 2% for every 100 healing would be a nice start.
5. Healing alone doesn’t build a trinity. I’ve been talking with many people about this…

IMHO This game has a 4 point setup for builds:
You’ll choose focus points for your build(s)

• being DPS (power(precision/ferocity), Main damage, scales good
• being DOT, (condition dmg/condition duration)Main damage scales good
• being Control (none), (condition duration) based upon daze/stun/blind/weakness/fear/knockdowns/pushes/pulls and so on it has not functioned well most being mitigated to give a makeshift form of balance which seems bad… Now we get a breakbar…. it might be fixed…
• being Heal and Booning (healing, boon duration ), healing scales horrific since launch, booning has not been balanced since june 23, where it was nerfed -badly-.

When looking to the above we notice DPS or DOT is needed to kill, or both, the CC will not work in all cases and healers lose options to do dmg or make builds. Those 4 things can all work as solo or pairs…

This leaves -tanky- which can be added to ALL, easier in solo role builds, more difficult in dual role builds. But as tanky had no influence on others only on yourself…. it isn’t actually a role.

I think this would solve most problems regarding healing in PvE, WvW, Raids, Dungeons.

I do think there is an actual chance you could destroy PvP balance with pure healers, and vampire builds….

Coulter.2315:

Mantra Healing trait on Mesmer goes from 2600 -> 2900(ish) from maximising Healing Power, certain things really have terrible coefficients.

Most of the time, the bigger the initial heal, the smaller the coefficient (doesn’t always work like that tough, CD and radius have to be taken into account). In the case of mantra heal you are right you go from 2600 at 0 healpow to 2900 at 1500… but with a CD of around 5 to 6 seconds when use with mantra of pain…. ok this is an increase of around 10 % but the number are quite huge (520 to 580 hp per second passively for 4 people in your team when you spam it).

Now look at regeneration boon:
Basically you can maintain 100% uptime of regen on 5 people with illusionary inspiration at the cost of keeping your phantasmal warlock up (since it’s a range phantasm it is more resilient). With 0 healpow you heal 5 people for 130 HP per second. With 1500 HP (sans bonus from healing prism or other stuff) you manage to give 318 (=130+1500*0.125) HP per seconds, representing a global sustain increase of 144% for the entire team.
On the other hand, if one person double his DPS, the team’s DPS increases by 20%. That is the exchange between scaling : DPS scales for one fifth of the team’s when healing (since every outgoing heals are group wide) scales for 100% of the team’s sustain.

regeneration doens’t stack… so If people with low or no healin power apply it it tends to make regeneration from other sources less interesting.

And with raids the numbers stay the same even though the party has 10 ppl most buffs only apply only for 5 people, so 2 people need to spec in buffs… where you’d normally expect 1.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

regeneration doens’t stack… so If people with low or no healin power apply it it tends to make regeneration from other sources less interesting.

That is called team organisation/coordination. You want to be the healer of the team, ask the other to avoid regeneration boon. Moreover, regen stacks in duration and I am not sure if the rule is first in first out or if there is a priority on the bigger heal.

PaxTheGreatOne.9472:

And with raids the numbers stay the same even though the party has 10 ppl most buffs only apply only for 5 people, so 2 people need to spec in buffs… where you’d normally expect 1.

That is a totally different problem here, I don’t see any correlation with the healpow intensity and the fact that raids are 10 people. Then you can also argue that personal DPS increase in raids only account for 10 % of team’s DPS increase (so if you increase it by 50% the team gain 5%).
And who said you want only one healer in raid? I mean the vids we have seen have most of the time 1 single druid but they are also bringing heralds with their insane amount of boon (including regeneration).
But whatever you do with scaling you’ll always heal 5 persons. I would add that with chaotic persistence (but any boon duration increase will do the job) I’m quite sure your phantasm turret will apply regen on more than 5 people with time. At least that is what I observe in world boss when I want to have fun as a healer (and yes it saves people when they simply don’t dodge Claw’s attack while using mortar on the ice wall)

Honestly I think the biggest issue with healing power is the way the coefficients work in the first place.

Most skills are heavily balanced around raw numbers with pathetic healing power coefficients.

IMO only peronal heals should be balanced in this manner, and then not even all of them.

Guardian’s recieve the light? That’s a clear group utility skill. That should be a healing power focused skill. It shouldn’t really be a good build pick in any situation where you’re not investing in support gear. The tradeoff needs to be enforced so you can’t have a build that’s bot high support and high damage.

Stuff like thief signet of malice? That’s a clear case of valuable tradeoffs. It’s a heal that only works when you hit stuff, so healing power should be the majority of its weight, thus you have to choose between damage or healing on an ability that heals while you damage. This is another case where the tradeoff nature is very clear. Using the skill means trading safety for sustain, as he loses personal burst healing, but also has to actively engage targets to proc his passive healing, so the user needs to have more control over how much sustain vs. damage he wants since the ability only works while he is actively in combat.

Warrior’s healing signet? There’s a case of where you shouldn’t use heavy healing power scaling. It’s a pure passive hp source. Allowing such sources to scale too high makes them too good in comparison to active defenses and simply create pure face tanks.

Most of the other active heals though, on every class are usually “here is a personal heal and a bit of an extra effect.” And scaling them too high with healing power would just make everyone’s personal healing too good and kill all of the external healing from being at all viable, so most of the personal heals work fine as they are.

The problem is that the support heals all suck, and that’s where you’d expect users with high healing power builds to be playing. In stead anet keeps doing stuff like traits with +% outgoing heals, when all they needed to do was up the coeffs or directly address healing power. Water ele stuff? Make it more dependant on healing power than raw numbers as you kill two birds with one stone. It doesn’t skyrocket a cele user to total overpowered, and it becomes next to useless for a full zerk build, but it becomed very good for someone trying to build support. Roll this logic across the rest of the game’s support heals by balancing support healing against builds equipped with healing gear and you also do a bit more to combat the “zerker meta” problem where pure DPS builds have too much built in support (though that problem is far larger than just support healing and is more a content and skill design issue)

As much as I’d love for them to fix it, it’s risky. They could blow up PvP balance changing how some of the poorly scaling skills work, and I think they’re trying to be gentle with it at the moment. Healing is a troublesome issue in GW2 because I think there is a genuine risk of it becoming far too overpowered.

Ranael.6423:

Coulter.2315:

Mantra Healing trait on Mesmer goes from 2600 -> 2900(ish) from maximising Healing Power, certain things really have terrible coefficients.

Most of the time, the bigger the initial heal, the smaller the coefficient (doesn’t always work like that tough, CD and radius have to be taken into account). In the case of mantra heal you are right you go from 2600 at 0 healpow to 2900 at 1500… but with a CD of around 5 to 6 seconds when use with mantra of pain…. ok this is an increase of around 10 % but the number are quite huge (520 to 580 hp per second passively for 4 people in your team when you spam it).

Now look at regeneration boon:
Basically you can maintain 100% uptime of regen on 5 people with illusionary inspiration at the cost of keeping your phantasmal warlock up (since it’s a range phantasm it is more resilient). With 0 healpow you heal 5 people for 130 HP per second. With 1500 HP (sans bonus from healing prism or other stuff) you manage to give 318 (=130+1500*0.125) HP per seconds, representing a global sustain increase of 144% for the entire team.
On the other hand, if one person double his DPS, the team’s DPS increases by 20%. That is the exchange between scaling : DPS scales for one fifth of the team’s when healing (since every outgoing heals are group wide) scales for 100% of the team’s sustain.

I really disagree with your assessments.

You compared one person doubling their dps (this is increasing stats and still using all their skills correctly to achieve it I assume) to get a 20% increase in team damage with Regen with max healing power giving a 144% increase in team healing (you just completely ignored self heals and other sources of healing from other team members and the fact regen will not stack with other sources of it). This was an awful comparison, shows us nothing. You tested 2 things against each other under different rules and restrictions.

The HPS on Mantra with maximum investment gained 60 HPS (with your numbers), IT IS NOT PASSIVE it requires a constant spam and channel to achieve and locks out a utility, not to mention HPS which can be interupted with forced dodges or plain old interupts, is EXTREMELY poor at reaction and requires proximity (this means you need to walk into where damage is being dealt to heal that damage). The skill is clunky and not just a passive HPS for you and 4 others. It scales horrificly.

I’m just not a fan of how the healing power coefficient is variable per skill and that it isn’t evident what that coefficient is in-game. If we are testing a build or some gear in-game, there’s no clear way to know what effect healing power will have for the skill you’re interested in other than to try it. (Sometimes expensive, time-consuming, or just annoying.) The only way to know the coefficient ahead of time is to look it up in a source outside the game.

I like it when a trait is like vitality. If you invest a point in vitality, you know you are getting 10 health. But if you invest a point in healing power, you get… something undocumented that varies per skill.

TL;DR: Pls make an overall healing power-scaling remake of all skills and traits for all professions. Low base values but good scaling with HP (up to 2-2,5 coefficients)

My opinion to this, quoted from another thread:

Irenio CalmonHuang.2048:

In general the Celestial Avatar form’s base heals feel a bit too high and heal coefficients didn’t feel rewarding enough to go with healpower stats. The heals themselves seemed to be working at decent values, so I’ll be tweaking the base heals down and coefficients up some in order to better reward selecting healing power stat combos as a druid.

Thx, Irenio, I really appreciate this. This should be an Overall makeover of skills and traits that give some healing.

Regeneration is fine, no changes needed there.
As well for Healing-Skills. They should be decent for each profession without Healing Power but should scale with it. Most Healing skills scale with a coefficient of 1, and I think, ist ok for whis (there are exceptions like Troll Unguent or such skills, but it’s finde overall IMO)

But for all other traits and skills that provide some healing, I think it should scale much better, so that you feel rewarded if you take some HP increase in your stats.

I know ist possible, ist already done for Necro in traits like “Life dfrom Death” or “Transfusion” which scale very well with HP. Same should be done for Druid skills.

For example Lunar Impact. Actual it has a base heal of something like 2950 IIRC.
This should be tuned down to 1500 healing and increase the scaling with healing power to 2-2,5. In that case, you feel rewarding, when you go for HP with 1000 and you see “wow, I can heal for 3500 now instead of 1500, cause i have invested 1000 attribute points into HP”
In that case, the 1500 is not bad as a base heal, it’s a nice boost for ppl are not playing with HP and such who do, can heal for more.

Pls discuss this intern with all devs, to bring the healing power attribute in line with other ones (like condition dmg) and make it a reason to skill =)

Orion Templar.4589:

I’m just not a fan of how the healing power coefficient is variable per skill and that it isn’t evident what that coefficient is in-game. If we are testing a build or some gear in-game, there’s no clear way to know what effect healing power will have for the skill you’re interested in other than to try it. (Sometimes expensive, time-consuming, or just annoying.) The only way to know the coefficient ahead of time is to look it up in a source outside the game.

I like it when a trait is like vitality. If you invest a point in vitality, you know you are getting 10 health. But if you invest a point in healing power, you get… something undocumented that varies per skill.

One of the recommendations I’ve been making in various threads is to change healing power into a pure percentage stat. 2% per 100 or something similar, depending how base healing would work out. That way, we’d at least know what we’re getting.

Rauderi.8706:

One of the recommendations I’ve been making in various threads is to change healing power into a pure percentage stat. 2% per 100 or something similar, depending how base healing would work out. That way, we’d at least know what we’re getting.

I like the idea. Whatever percentage or ratio they came up with, at least we’d have something consistent.

Lauriewonnacott.9841:

As much as I’d love for them to fix it, it’s risky. They could blow up PvP balance changing how some of the poorly scaling skills work, and I think they’re trying to be gentle with it at the moment. Healing is a troublesome issue in GW2 because I think there is a genuine risk of it becoming far too overpowered.

I think thats a concern had by both Anet and players.

For the most part, we were both willing to let sleeping lions lie because there was really no need for healing and because the base healing we had was sufficient for 95% of the game.

I’m willing to bet that most heal spell coefficients never saw any type of balancing and are in a complete shambles since no one cared enough about them to make a stink. Now that Druid is out and Anet is hyping healing as an important part of the expansion, I’d like to see how they address healing power, if at all, considering the amount of work that needs to be done.

I would go for self targeted heals scale badly and team targeted heals scale well.

DresdenAllblack.1249:

I started a thread on the Warrior page about thinking about running banners and shouts when HoT drops.

One of my fellow players stated that if we go full blast in healing power we gain an extra 62.5 healing on the 1000 the shout provides.

How can Arenanet not look at that number and laugh?

Shouts used to have decent healing coefficient then ArenaNet saw the cleric roam builds in wvw and hated that so they nerfed it into nothingness.