Guild Wars 2

I know that this game has broken away from the traditional Healer/Tank/DPS make up, but I would like to build the best group healer I can for my style of gameplay. Can anyone tell me what class/race would be best?

There really truly isn’t sustained group heals. I understand that Water Elementalist does pretty well at it. I myself use a support Guardian in dungeons with the heal Elite. It’s only every 3 minutes, and it takes 5 seconds of uninterrupted channeling to cast, but when it goes off and every health bar goes to full I feel pretty darn good.

Less good when someone gets downed 1/2 second before it goes off, of course, and I can’t rez while the elite is active (channeling or not) so I look like a jerk if someone’s lying at my feet.

She’s not just for heals. She’s for boons, stability, aegis, condition removal, all the protections, and some minimal dps. If you focus on heals as your main thing you’ll be dragging your team down.

Race should be immaterial unless you want the minimal heal edge a sylvari healing turret gives (I think — I’ve seldom bothered with any racial skills as they are designed to be weaker than class skills).

Firstly, I’d reconsider focusing on just healing and branch out to the different support aspects of gameplay as well.

That out of the way, you don’t need to worry about race, since you’ll be using profession skills and race doesn’t provide any statistical bonus.

Support can generally be broken down into:

• Offensive Support – Might, Fury, Vulnerability, Quickness, Boon Stripping / Boon Corruption, Stealth (ambushing) ect
• Defensive Support – Aegis, Protection, Weakness, Reflect and Blocking, Stealth (chance to recover), Frost Armour ect.
• Healing Support – Healing, Regen, Condition Removal / Condition Converting ect.

Each profession has ways of providing support.

For example, Warriors can use Shouts, Banners, Warhorn Skills as well as a number of Traits to help boost damage, remove conditions, burst healing / constant regen ect. You could Trait Phalanx Strength, giving everyone a stack of Might when you gain a stack of Might (Warriors have a shout “For Great Justice!” which, with this trait, grants 6 stacks of Might).

What I’d suggest is taking a look at a build calculator and fiddling around a bit. You won’t be fully fleshing out your build until level 80 at any rate.

Ele and guardians are the best for support, IMO, especially when it comes to heals and defensive boons, but…you’ll be making a huge mistake if you spec as a full healer for PvE.

In WvW, heal-specced eles and guardians are useful, and eles are especially needed. But in PvE, you’re just bringing your group down by only statting for healing and no damage. At least in the case of eles, you can still heal while having decent damage. Not sure about guardians, as I don’t play mine in PvE.

You don’t have to go full DPS if you prefer the support playstyle, but going full healer and no damage is a really bad idea. Most damage in the game can be avoided through dodges, evades, blocks, aegis etc, and every class has heals to some extent, so dedicated healers are not necessary. If someone’s facetanking damage and not trying to avoid it, they’re going to die anyway, and no amount of heal power is going to save them.

This is coming from someone who’s only ever played a full healer in games before GW2, too. It was an adjustment for me as well, but I stick to playing support ele in WvW and DPS builds in PvE.

Since gw2 released nomad, i was curious about it, so i crafted (very expensive) full set of nomad for my alt engineer for WvW and is really amazing that gear, im a healer tank, run in the middle of zerg targeting my commander and healing all around (with bomb,sigil,runes,weapon, etc) also i have some cc abilities to help (shield 4, crater, big bomb, etc)

I seriously doubt you can generate sustained healing for any length of time (before a significant CD period). Yes, you can generate some serious healing surges when you are geared with Healing Power, but between those surges of healing (that frankly your allies should not really need), you are going to be less than helpful actually KILLING the foes that cause damage to you and your allies.

Unfortunately, this game is pretty focused on the fact that dead foes can’t hurt you….

I have a fire/water Elementalist that does good damage and decent healing. My staff #3 can usually refill someone’s lifebar from near death to a little over half to 70% full or completely full when they use their own heal as well. For armor I have 3 for Zerker (Chest, hands, helm) and the other 3 are either Magi or Cleric. Damage is pretty good.

heals over all don’t help much but for sake of argument; this is what I would and have done:
Shout-hammer-gaurdian with runes of the grove. The hammer auto attack puts down a symbol that can be buffed to last 2 seconds longer this way you can provide 100% uptime of the protection boon which reduces all incoming damage by 33% for those affected.
The nice thing about it is that you can still spec for damage while being a good support for your team.

I used to run a cleric elementalist but I achieved the same result with hammer guardian but the hammer guardian is also able to do decent damage in the proces of keeping people alive.