Guild Wars 2

I present to you … the magnificent heal mesmer, aka, the
Heal-O-Mancer!

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vhAQRAse8dncfCloh9fCmfCUrhllj68ACgIr+Qj0JFdyOhLD-TByGABA8EAwTJoiq/M0+DLp8oWlYtpfg8TCgoA8L-e

Why now? Why not pre hot? What happened???

Well the answer is quite simple:

• First raids may force parties to have one or two decent healers. But healing power focused healers obviously won’t deal that much damage anymore. So the best professions for healing are those, who deal a high amount of passive damage, trough vulnerability, alacrity and quickness, since those factors won’t be affected.
• Second, the mesmer recieved a pure passive damage phantasm, the iAvenger, aswell a whole bunch of those none-personal-damage-focused skills: wells. Alacrity and quickness are the primary reasons, why a chronomancer is in your party, aka the passive damage. The personal mesmer damage (including phantasms) may have become quite good with the QoL buff for phantasms, but this is quite negligible.

Pfff… but how can a mesmer even heal his allies? … Mesmer can’t heal … right?

WRONG! >cough< I mean: That’s not true my dear friend. While focusing on healing power, a Mesmer can be quite powerful with some traits and skills:

• Restorative Mantras is the main source of healing with the mesmer. Mantra of Pain heals others for over 4’000 each time.
• Healing Prism is just a small heal every 10 seconds. Yet 1’200 divided by 10 is 120 too, so it’s quite ok. Even tough, this little minor trait grants you 100 healing power per illusion, resulting into 300 free healing power.
• Illusionary Inspiration is just … wow. You could also call it “Illusionary Warrior Sigil Grant Skill … Thing”. Yea, it grants permaregen to EVERYONE, wich results with high healing power to 400 heal per sec. Really impressive, and all you have to do is to have at least one phantasm.
• Well of Eternity is the big mommy of heal. Big fat 8’000 HP for all your allies, and over 10’000 for yourself, while cleansing 5 conditions and with full alacrity it only has 18 sec CD. Oh yea – and it grants alacrity.

Ohhhhkeyyyyy, so … this is quite amazing! Any important tips and notes about the build?

I’ve chosen Inspiration and Illusions over the others because of serval reasons:

• Illusions grant you 15% cdr to all your shatter skills, including F5. Awesome.
• Illusions grant you faster attacking iAvengers and less CD on them.
• Inspiration give you the ability to reflect with focus.
• Having mantras NOT traited, lets you spam mantra of pain even faster. The damage is like 0 anyway with this build.

Some more tips:

• Alacrity can be kept up 100% for the whole party with 3 iAvengers. This means ofc you included wich combined with quickness lets you charge AND cast a mantra of pain about 3 sec.
• The sword is for vulnerability (passive damage) and not using a scepter since yea … you know the whole clones destroys phantasm stuff. Yet you won’t be using it’s aa very often anyway, but blurred frenzy and a fast spawned clone on illusionary leap is quite good for an opener.
• iAvenger literally DESTROYS breakbars.
• It doesn’t really matter if you chose Cleric or Magi stats. One is healing power > power = toughness, the other is healing power > precision = vitality. Power deals 7% more personal dmg, the precision focused one 17% more with reflected stuff. I prefer as much precision as possible, yet some trinkets are not avaible with those stats so… Yea you can see the results in the build editor.

I have a HUGE amount of fun with this build right now. It’s something special, different from anything before and I enjoy it. If Raids require to have one or two decent healers, or simply sustained heal, the mesmer is 100% totally viable in that position, because of the mentioned reasons.

What are your opinions? Do you agree, do you not? I wish you all a good day and hf with this post and the Heal-O-Mancer!

greez
- Xyonon!

http://www.reactiongifs.com/r/shia.gif

My main problem with mesmer heal is not that our healing output is low, but that we cannot “burst heal” someone when needed. The mantra takes 2.75s before it heals, the well 3s etc… But as a sustained healer, mesmer definitely has nice options.

Silverkey.2078:

My main problem with mesmer heal is not that our healing output is low, but that we cannot “burst heal” someone when needed. The mantra takes 2.75s before it heals, the well 3s etc… But as a sustained healer, mesmer definitely has nice options.

With that in mind, are there any classes that have good “burst heal”, but not sustained heal?
This whole exercise is obviously moot when druids enter the picture, because they can do both, but…if your party can do without the druid, it seems like that could have meta value at some point, right?

So if the chrono can cover the sustained heal, and the…guardian? ele? Engi? Could cover the emergency burst healing without sacrificing the kind of dps a druid does, that could be good!

Xyonon.3987:

• Illusions grant you faster attacking iAvengers…

Did ANet fix PH not affecting the Avenger?

Xyonon.3987:

• Alacrity can be kept up 100% for the whole party with 3 iAvengers. This means ofc you included wich combined with quickness lets you charge AND cast a mantra of pain about 3 sec.

You have Improved Alacrity traited. Did you assume alacrity duration for allies coming from avengers at base duration or the +50% duration? It may be self explanatory but not long ago I made a mistake assuming allies got the 50% bonus too, which they don’t since trait affects alacrity applied only to you…

That’s the thing about GW2, the gameplay mechanics are designed around proactive play rather than reactive. If someone is taking so much damage they need to be burst healed, they are not dodging correctly.

Also, I’m assuming that the new Minstrel stat combo would work really well. But that could just be me wanting to play a bard and having an excuse to use Minstrels and The Minstrel legendary.

Good job putting this together.

@frifox:

I did not test PH on avenger yet, will do soon.

Alacrity uptime with 3 iAvengers is meant without any other skills like wells and ofc I tested it on an ally, not myself But good thinking, made the same mistake once too :P

@Plum Butter:

Ever done high lv fotm where the enemy constantly gain retaliation? That’s the pain in the * xD Same goes for some Chak. I also expect this kind of damage in raids, somewhere. That said, if you take a hit and you still are alive, you’ll most likely have some time to regenerate. That’s where you can cast a mantra.

About Minstrel stats – I tried to use them but they are just not better at all. The problem are the following points:

• less healing power
• less damage (but who cares in that build right? :P)
• the boon duration increase is decent, yet our boons are so short, the boon duration increase results in about 1-2 sec quickness and does not have any effect on the 1.25 sec per tic from TW (monk runes give already boon duration)
• regeneration is anyway permanent

The Heal-O-Mancer not being able to burst heal is less of a negative point than first tought. Sure 2.75s cast time is quite long, yet I assume a decent quickness uptime wich reduces this already ba almost a whole second. Still not that fast but totally ok. I mean the heal after that is huge.

and thanks for all the support and compliments!

I was under the impression that clones did not overwrite phantasms. Or at least, that was what MrPrometheus claimed in his YouTube guide to Mesmers.

Valiant.8016:

I was under the impression that clones did not overwrite phantasms. Or at least, that was what MrPrometheus claimed in his YouTube guide to Mesmers.

If you have 3 phantasms, a clone will overwrite the oldest one. Otherwise, clones will overwrite an existing clone.

Xyonon.3987:

Alacrity uptime with 3 iAvengers is meant without any other skills like wells and ofc I tested it on an ally, not myself But good thinking, made the same mistake once too :P

Unless you tested it in a full party, your test is flawed. 3 iAvengers will provide alacrity to themselves and to that ally, making their cooldowns decrease by 40%. In a real situation, no iAvenger will ever actually receive alacrity, as you and your 4 party members will soak all the 5-target aoes that provide it.

how is the avenger “passive damage”? and how does it destroy break bars? if a boss is already slowed, the avenger is doing nothing to it

also isn’t there a stickied post-your-build thread?

@Fay
True, did kinda forget about that! Good you mention it. But I guess the alacrity from wells will come up with that. Yet afaik the iavenger does not grant alacrity to himself, could be wrong tough…

@Lumpy
Passive damage means the damage the whole party deals more because of something that doesn’t deal damage itself. For example if the mesmer applies quickness, everyone deals much more damage during that time. This dps increase is called the passive damage of the mesmer. This means you can’t just take 5 times the profession with the highest dps for max dps, you want to take the 5 professions with the highest personal AND passive damage for max dps. Warrior for instance has probably the highest passive damage due might generation, banner and empower allies (+150 power for everyone).

About the breakbar crushers: Slow is a very rare condition that drains break bars very fast. You won’t have a 100% slow uptime, so they can reapply it very quick to break the breakbar. Also there is focus 4# and shield 5# aswell F3 if you really need to (wich in this build even is aoe).

greez!

I too have been messing with healing builds that maximize bringing passive damage for raids.

Specific advice to your build: Scepter and Malicious Sorcery (If it still affects everything) might be better for spamming MoP. Since, you’ll be spamming MoP, you’ll only have time to channel #3 every once in awhile so clone generation won’t matter.

Gear Choice: I‘ve been telling all my guildies to have NO TOUGHNESS since it controls aggro unless they are the tank. This means clerics and apothecary are no goes. Shaman’s and magi’s are the cheap choices but not ideal stats. Zealots is the obvious DPS and heal armor but it’s expensive and I would feel bad for telling my allies to bring it. If you are willing to spend 80-100g on that sigil though, then I would definitely recommend going for zealots. Trinkets are another story since there is only exotic zealots trinkets and I hate not having account bound healing gear so I went magi there.

Comparison to other healing/passive builds: Keep in mind that with 10 ppl over several minute long fights, I highly doubt that blasting fire/water fields for might/fury or healing will work in raids. These are the two main raid healing builds I’ve been thinking about which makes me skeptical of a mesmer healing in magi. PSEA warrior is also not going to be great vs a boss that is constantly being moved around.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vlUQNAsemn3gmNSuQzJRboNlsP0oS4I6UJ4ENskFglh9iNKZNgDSw+2eDG-TxRGABA8EAmUfQlq/U0+DmfKAsU5nUKBJFgfTtA-e
Can still provide perma fury, tons of might, and protection for the group. About 30-40% less DPS than the full zerker. Rev build that has 87 to 132% outgoing healing bonus means regen between 500-600 despite having less HP than your build. The ventari tablet passive pushes out ~1k health every 3 second which is better than the MoP spam in your build. The active heal movement is another 2.3-3k heal when it slides through people. Then the burst heal from the tablet heals 4-5k. That seems like a much better mix of passive damage, passive damage mitigation, active heals and active damage.

http://gw2skills.net/editor/?vNUQJAWWn0rCNrgtqA2sCEtiFDBDurGWLrOrumVPgJAsuaAnskwJB-TxhXABOpLwunAAUq/Aw+DheJAiS5XDKBJFgfTtA-e
The tiger alone provides perma fury. Frost/fire spirits. Spotter. Glyph = 10% bonus during burn phases. 15% power/condi dmg ally buff from astral form. Pets don’t care about the loss of stats for DPS and don’t die so easily now. And of course, much better healing than the mesmer in both sustain and burst healing because druid and because of the extra +% outgoing healing to allies. Spirits are much harder to kill now and when traited have 1500 range. Banners have 600. So I think ranger spirits will actually be the new banners for raids since they are much more practical for mobile fights.

So while I’ve been trying to make mesmer healing work, I’m just not convinced that they are the best for this role. Herald and Druid do a much better job and bring a lot of passive DPS too. A lot of this is poor scaling on MoP and more importantly, lack of % outgoing healing modifiers. Furthermore, in mobile fights, mesmers have much better reflect uptime and are going to need that precision/ferocity ideally. That’s not to say your build can’t work but I’m very skeptical. If anything, embrace the toughness of clerics and the aggro it brings. Embrace channeling mantras with 600 bonus toughness. Embrace the 50% dmg reduction we can bring with p.Defender and be the tank with some clutch healing. Otherwise I think the perma alacrity, quickness, reflect mesmer is still better off using zerker/assassins with an occasional clutch heal from MoP.

@Fay
PH does still not affect iAvenger as far as I could test it. Sad news :/

Btw I noticed something else, apparently phantasms scale with vita. With the vita in my build, phantasms have 16% more HP.

Another interesting thing I noticed is that the iAvenger has 14k HP, like the iDefender. All others have only about 6k HP.