Guild Wars 2

I was really looking forward to no more dedicated roles. No tank, no DPS, no healer. Just five skilled players doing their best, playing their best, and getting through tough fights.

But I recently started a guardian, and after maxing out my staff skill, I feel a lot like a dedicated healer.

Virtue of Resolve: Heal yourself and nearby allies.
Orb of Light: Detonate the orb to heal nearby allies.
Empower: Heals nearby allies when it ends.
Healing Breeze: Heal yourself and allies in a cone in front of you.

And those are just the direct heals! That doesn’t even take into account the various buffs I can put on the party (swiftness and might come to mind).

So am I seeing things wrong? Because it really looks like my job in a dungeon is going to be to stand back and press heals. The staff sure as hell isn’t a ‘questing’ weapon. It has nothing to kill monsters except auto attack.

It’s not about healing, but more about using all your abilities to keep your group alive.

You can’t sit back and heal because of the short range and long cooldowns of your abilities.

Really it’s like a class that can tank, dps, and heal all in one, but it’s a jack of all, master of none. I think this class fits me well because I like to do all of those things.

The staff is basically there as a healing weapon. I only switch to it when my mace stuff is on cooldown and use the aoe heal or when I want to give everyone around me a speed boost.

shaidyn.4016:

The staff sure as hell isn’t a ‘questing’ weapon. It has nothing to kill monsters except auto attack.

Auto attack of staff is decent for DEs, since you can tag everything, thus get more drops and instant gold medal.

Its called support…

Every weapon use it for the different things and they have different abilities .
Its good to you knowing well all the weapons and use them in the right place and time.(WvW, sPvP, PvE, Dungeons,Events,Boss fights events).
Staff for me its good for world events. Range mass attacks,strong might boost,and heals its very usuful out there.

Different weapons have different playstyles. The staff for guardians is definitely more of a support style weapon, but that doesn’t mean that you HAVE to use that every time you play with others in dungeons. Think of it as something that you can help to do for your team, but you’re not shackled to it’s role.

For example, say you’re getting rocked in a dungeon and your team is taking too much damage, quickly switch to a staff, help other members heal up (along with heals from other players/roles), and then switch back to another weapon to fill in another role.

Hope that helps!

There’s no such thing as a dedicated healer in this game, and that was proven to me personally when I went on my first run in Ascalon. Despite the absurd difficulty, we did well without a healer. It was more a matter of adjusting and swapping out skills to meet each situation. (As a thief I find myself switching into my Tripwire and Smoke Screen utility skills often)

The first champ we encountered we found quite difficult (I blame the one individual who had the WoW mindset when we entered and tried to tank the champ) and he found himself dying instantly to that guy, even being a warrior and all.

So guess what I did? I pulled the champion mob to the top of the stairs, jumped down when he got close. (Mobs don’t jump down the stairs as they used fixed waypoints to get to you) And by the time he hit the bottom of the stairs, I tripwired him and ran up again.

TL; DR; it’s about strategy. My younger sister and a friend both play guardians and they both really enjoy them. If you’re using a guardian to ‘try’ and be a dedicated healer, you’re doing it wrong.

Necros have aoe heals, and dark combo fields. Elementalists have aoe heals and water combo fields. Ranger has aoe heal and water combo field. Thief has aoe heal utilities and dark combo field. (That’s just what I’ve played around with personally…)

I’m pretty sure the Engineer heals aoe style with his turret… and it really wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if every class didn’t have options to heal other if they choose it.

This is not a guardian thing… and that’s why there are no healers. Not because no one can do it, but because everyone can… but not well enough to just heal only.