Guild Wars 2

Coming from other MMOs, I find GW2’s lack of the need for the Tank/Healer/Fodder setup pretty refreshing. I do enjoy healing in other MMO’s, though, and I was wondering how feasible being a dedicated* healer was in GW2’s, in World PvE, Dungeons, and WvW.

Anyone tried this, or seen it?

*As dedicated as a healer can be in this game. Obviously, you’re going to be doing DPS, but your focus would be on keeping your team alive.

Pure dedicated healers are not viable. The trinity in this game is more tank/dps/support. Support can come in throwing down CC conditions or boons to reduce damage and increase crit.

Skills that heal other players in this game aren’t targeted and are usually an AOE of some sort. The amount they heal are usually relatively small to top up their hp bar or allow them to survive an extra hit while they run away and heal themselves. That’s just for nuke heals. Regen boon heals are incredibly small. Even if you had something like 2000 healing power, the regen is 380hp/sec while you will usually be taking damage in the thousands per hit. Since everything is cooldown based you won’t have enough healing skills to keep people alive. Each player has to rely mainly on dodging and their self heal skill to stay alive. Anything you add is just an extra bandaid.

I felt the exact same way, and played a healer in most other games too. Its much more difficult in this game, but not impossible. From what I’ve seen, Warriors, Guardians, Eles, and Mesmer have all boasted that they make decent healers at one point or another.

I can personally vouch for Mesmer and Elementalist, as I quite a bit of time to make a support build. Guardians are well known to be good healers. Remember that your goal isn’t to keep everyone at max, but to keep them sustained and strong in the times that their own personal heal is down.

The trick is finding the VERY TENUOUS balance between being a contributing support character and being a near-useless healbot. Support-builds in this game need to be more than simply heals or simply boons. For example; my Mesmer dishes out relatively strong heals (atleast 1k HP per sec), can supply every boon in the game every minute, and has high reflective abilities (projectiles are one of the most common forms of attack) but sacrifices damage as a result.

I look at it like this: With all the boons, healing, and damage mitigation I’m making my team roughly 1.5x as powerful. So if I’m doing my job properly.. a team of 5 is as strong as a team of 6.5 even if my DPS isn’t up to par.

The other thing to consider is player mentality. Its a lot harder to help a team if they don’t know how you do it. And people like to fall into the jaded mentality of “Support = Bad. This game has no viable support characters” which is simply untrue.
Support characters by nature have to communicate a bit more, because no one can just look at you and say “Oh OK this guy/girl’s a healer.” I always give a if I’m with a random group.

“Hey guys, I’m a support Mes. Try to touch/stand in any purple Mesmer magic you see for buffs, and my Phantasms and I can heal/regenerate when you’re near us.”

After that, you see a lot better team co-ordination. People don’t just work better with me, but keep an eye out for eachother’s combo fields and AoE buffs.

TL:DR – Its difficult, but very possible. I’d recommend Mesmer, Ele, or Guardian if you want to be a viable healer. Remember that your goal isn’t to keep everyone at max, but to keep them sustained and strong in the times that their own personal heal is down. The game needs more Support reps, so have fun and good luck!

What Chaos Archangel said.

You can’t be a dedicated healer to the point where you’re doing nothing but healing and no one else in your team ever needs to look at their health bar or care that they’re standing in lava because you’re keeping them alive.

But if you expand it to include other forms of support, like boons and crowd control skills you can be extremely valuable to your team without focusing on doing damage. As long as they’re also aware of the limitations and that they still need to dodge, use their own heal etc.

Thanks for the advice. Maybe when I make my Mesmer/Guardian, I’ll do support. It’s a pity Engineers weren’t on that list. I suppose I can go ask the Engineering forum how they do.

My Guardian does excellently at healing/support. Horribly at dps. She’s still my go-to for dungeons. I have her built for defense and boon support, and the healing elite is wonderful (every 3 minutes, given a few seconds channel, I can heal my group to full, then toss extra heals at them until the elite fades). Last night we did the CoE submarine path. All went well until the final Alpha fight, when 3 of us went down when he was at 25% health or so. I and another two-manned him down, rezzing each other back and forth, healing up from bare slivers of health, and saved us from a wipe. At the end, panting for breath, I said on Mumble “And -that- is why I bring (this alt) to dungeons!” In F&F Molten Facility I was at times the only one up on the end boss. I stayed alive fine but couldn’t dps him enough … so I had to jump off the platform to suicide so we could reset.

I’ve seen some decent healing Engineers. They have really high cooldowns and don’t bring quite as much raw utility as a Mesmer, Ele, or Guardian, but that’s not to say that they’re useless in comparison. They can dish out stronger heals on a slightly higher cooldown, in addition to having large AoE heals.

Engies, Eles, and Guards are, imo, the best “healing” classes. You already seem to understand there arent dedicated healers, so no reason to clarify that one!

They all do it quite a bit differently from one another though. This isnt entirely accurate, but you can think of them all doing roughly the same job (when built for it, obviously) but the ele does it at long range, engi does it at medium, and guard does it in the middle of the battle.

That said, I find that if you get a guard and a couple of water fields, that they all work together quite well with a hammer. Meaning, if you get a support/healing ele and a support/healing guard, they will be much more effective than one or the other on their own.

Basically, if you build a small party of 5 to be solely support/healing on the inside of the zerg, there is a very, very good chance you will keep those players alive for much longer than they would without you.

My advice would be to just try out the different classes and see which one works best for your playstyle. They all bring something relevant to the table, and are even better when used together as a “Borg Collective Healer.”

As a BCH, you actually get quite close to a dedicated healer in other games. You will still inevitably be doing damage, and reflects, buffs, etc. but its about as close as you can get. I find that having a BCH in a zerg of even 30 can turn them into a real monster (i.e. resistance is futile).

Of course, all will soon be assimilated.

Mesmers are able to be good healers with one simple trait. Restorative Mantras gives ~3k heal with NO HEALING POWER. This means it can be used with ANY build (that uses 20 points in Inspiration).

necros are best healers