Guild Wars 2

So with Heart of Thorns, ANet is significantly improving the function of CC with the break bar mechanic and the stacks of stability. CC still may not be as meta as DPS in PvE, but at least it will have solid value.

However, I haven’t heard any information on changes to healing power, or support in general. This stat has been near-useless since launch, and it scales so poorly that it’s almost never worth speccing into. Healing support as a whole is generally unimportant in this game, so I just want to ask: Are we going to see it improved somehow, to the point that I can run a heal spec without handicapping my party?

If not, I recommend scrapping it entirely, it doesn’t really fit into the game in its current state.

If you have any suggestions or ideas on how to make it better, post em here.

I hope that healing power is improved. I understand that they want to stay away from the MMO trinity of Tank, Heals, and DPS, but the lackluster healing power only serves to reduce build diversity and to make certain weapon sets inferior.

I personally love to run support builds and to keep the health of my allies high, but the sheer DPS loss compared to the relatively little utility gains make healing power a substandard build option.

You can’t have a discussion about healing power without discussing the prevalence/value of active defense blocks, dodges, reflect, positioning, etc. If you tried to look at all the tools available to you that you use on a regular basis in order to survive, you’d find that healing power is probably one of the least used tools in your belt. Often, you can avoid/reduce more damage than you can out heal through active mitigation instead. If it were the opposite, which it isn’t right now, you’d find less need for active damage mitigation. The value of active mitigation is interesting, at least, for Necros because right now they don’t make great use of healing power or any of the other tools that other classes leverage in place of healing. So, one has to wonder what value Anet places on those tools from a balance perspective.

I don’t think healing power should be scrapped though. It apparently has some use in PVP as you can’t leverage active mitigation through a prolonged fight. Once those cooldowns are blown, healing power can make a big difference. In WVW, healing is also important for attrition fights for much the same reason. It’s use in PVE is where I feel it is downplayed a bit more. But really, what complicates its value is how different skills scale wildly with healing power and some professions/skills benefit a lot more from it than others. So, I think it has a place and a value, but it’s value is muddied by various design choices.

Healing Power is already balanced, but it is balanced around applying healing (Regen in particular) to allies, not just yourself.

• 1000 Vitality = 10,000 extra health for you.
• 1000 Toughness = something like 33% direct damage reduction for you, useless against conditions.
• 1000 Healing Power = 125 more health per second per ally from Regeneration. That’s 625 more health per second. In about 16 seconds, your group can get 10,000 health from that 1000 healing power. In about 32 seconds your group can get 20,000 health and you get whatever small bonus you get from your healing skill scaling and healing trait scaling.

Giving Perma-AoE-Regen is easier on some professions than others:
Banner Warrior
Shout Ranger
Turret Engi
Mark Necro
Mace/Symbol Guardian
Regen on Stealth Thief
Phantasm Mesmer

With max healing power and +outgoing heal stuff, you can grant AoE regen that heals allies for 450 health per second.

Honestly, the Helping-Your-Allies stat can do a lot better than being ‘Toughness #2 barring the attrition-battle edge case’.

Only 1 Hit Point matters – the very last one.

Everything above that is just warning, and there’s only so interesting applying butterfly kisses to somebody’s warning system can get. I can’t tell you how many of the green numbers I’ve seen were for the sake of having green numbers, and not because it actually helped anybody in a meaningful way.

When it comes to healing in a game, play for stakes or not at all.

I also hope we see some changes. Maybe also changes to the enemies. How about dots that you can’t remove and which have to be “healed”?

no

/15characters

Just so long as they specifically buff it in PvE, but not in PvP, just like they nerfed retaliation specifically for PvP but not in PvE.

In PvE, it could use a significant buff. In PvP, it’s perfectly fine as it is.

misterdevious.6482:

With max healing power and +outgoing heal stuff, you can grant AoE regen that heals allies for 450 health per second.

It’s not a specific value, certain regeneration effects are more powerful than others, for example, the guardian mace symbol regen is actually much more powerful than just about any other regeneration effect. My cleric guardian has a regen of around 1500 over 1 second on her mace symbol, pulsing over the symbol’s duration. It would be higher, but I went with a soldier rune over a monk rune in today’s condition heavy metagame.

I keep seeing people say that Healing Power isnt as needed because of the many ways to avoid damage.

well if thats the case why not get rid of that useless trait line and add more damage and active defense lines to replace Healing Power since its so far behind?

So I did some thinking and I’ve come up with a suggestion for what it’s worth. Give a basic healing bar to every profession and put it above the health/stamina bar. This healing bar will build up a little bit every time you heal something. If you do a small heal like Altruistic Healing it will build 1%, and if you do a huge heal like Tome of Courage it will build something like 50% or more. The amount of percentage built up with each heal will be affected by healing power, so if you have 2000 healing power you’ll get 2% from a small heal instead of 1%.

At set intervals (25%, 50%, 75%, 100%) burst healing skills will automatically activate, they will not be able to be stored like Warrior burst skills. This will encourage you to actively manage your healing cooldowns so you can build up to an interval and get a burst of healing when you need it.

I’m focusing on burst heals because much of PvE content, and general content throughout the game is built around heavy damage. Slow regen over time in PvE is not very useful when one attack from an enemy can take you from 100% HP to 30%. With a system that encourages you to heal a huge amount at once rather than over time, it becomes much more useful keeping yourself and teammates alive.

The biggest drawback to this comes from the imbalance of healing abilities between professions. Guardian and Elementalist would be straight up broken and completely superior to a class like Necro with this system. As a result I suggest adding traits to each profession’s support line that will give profession specific effects to the burst abilities.

For example, a Necro trait could be “Reduce the amount of healing needed to charge up your healing meter. When your meter hits 100% you give spectral armor to yourself and allies in addition to your regular heal.”

I don’t think this would require too much of an overhaul. Healing power gear would still be useful to help build burst heals faster and more often, and it would scale much better with one big heal rather than little heals overtime. ANet already plans on adding a “break bar” to make CC useful, so I think this “healing bar” idea would be a good counterpart to make healing more useful.

Before this game launched, ANet’s goal for a holy trinity was Damage, Control, and Support. They’re trying to make control as useful as damage is, but support is still mostly left behind. An expansion is a good time to think over a change.

I found (when trying to play a main attribute heal Guardian) that healing was fully effective. Most boss fights (including some with “1-hit-KOs”) I could completely heal through, having people stand on me and autoattack to their heart’s content.

The problem was that if people were moving around and applying their own damage reduction techniques or CC, having a 5th damage dealer negated more damage then healing over time – as i could only help 2 of my 4 marks at any given moment.

Eponet.4829:

misterdevious.6482:

With max healing power and +outgoing heal stuff, you can grant AoE regen that heals allies for 450 health per second.

It’s not a specific value, certain regeneration effects are more powerful than others, for example, the guardian mace symbol regen is actually much more powerful than just about any other regeneration effect. My cleric guardian has a regen of around 1500 over 1 second on her mace symbol, pulsing over the symbol’s duration. It would be higher, but I went with a soldier rune over a monk rune in today’s condition heavy metagame.

This is something that I’ve heard before and just chalked it up to learning new things about the game (way back over 2 years ago) but looking at it talked about now, I’m curious why this is.

Looking at the wiki, it does show that Symbol of Faith gives the regen boon that heals for the standard amount. It shows 650 heal for 1secx5 applications but the symbol itself says it pulses 4 times and I’d assume an additional time when you first activate it.

I’m curious, but is it true that some regen boons heal for more? Is the wiki wrong? Or is this just hearsay?

I’m all for this (and not just because I play a shout warrior in wvwvw), but it doesn’t have to be a flat buff (but that would be nice too). Here are some ideas:

1. Let heals (including regeneration ticks) crit.
2. Have regeneration tick more often.
3. Flat buff to healing power scaling. (hey, I said it wasn’t necessary, but not that it would be nice).
4. Longer cast times and increased power on outgoing heal abilities.
5. More directional/less “full-circle” AoE heals.
6. Healing is affected by blinds.

Why this would be awesome:

• Allowing heals to crit would add a lot of build diversity without adding new stat combinations. It may even make Magi Gear viable.
• Longer cast times and increased directionality on outgoing heals adds more play and counter-play to creating a heal-support build—they’ll be more easily interrupted, and you have to be aware of where the people you want to heal are. (I’m thinking of skills like Regenerating Mist).
• More ticks on Regeneration will make that boon less useless.
• The Flat buff just makes more healing power builds worth taking.

Those are my thoughts. I love the idea of playing a medic-type character (particularly in WvWvW, but maybe in some future dungeon that requires one do more than wear zerker gear and stack in the corner -.-), but it’s rarely that effective (though Healing shouts on Warriors are awesome for defending people on rams in WvWvW).

That being said, there is a lot more than healing to a support build. My Warrior (which is basically a riff on PvP Meta shoutbow) provides a ton of AoE condition cleansing, which is crucial for taking towers and keeping the people on rams alive (also, removing poison is crucial if you want to efficiently heal), so, unless they buff Healing Power to such an extent as to make it OP, then a pure healz build will always be less attractive to a group than a build with less healing and more condition cleanse and boon sharing.

Furthermore, there is much, much more to support than even that. Keeping vulnerability stacks/blinds/weakness/poison on enemies does minimal damage, but drastically improves your party’s dps, survivabilty, and effectiveness. An explosions engineer who knows how to effectively keep disabling conditions on enemies is probably a better asset to more parties than a mediguard who only focuses on healing power.