Guild Wars 2

GW2 great in terms of giving all characters healing options, and also auto-healing between encounters. But I’ve noticed the conspicuous absence of in-combat healing. In most games you can just go to a merchant and buy a bunch of healing potions to use while fighting.. in GW2 you can’t. I assume that’s by design and part of the difficulty, and I have no problem with it. Well, except that I seem to die fairly often.

Are there any good options here that I’m unaware of? I started using those candy corn custards that drop in the Hallowe’en event as they provide 45 minutes of regen, but they’re really rather slow (I get I think 8 health a tick at level 20).

I’m playing a mesmer. Thanks!

Every class has healing spells. Your healing spell is always bound to the key 6. Depending on the class and race you can have 3 or 4 healing spells for different situations.

Specific classes and combo fields can also provide you with healing and are very useful but a bit underrated. Guardian and Eles are the best classes to give your teammates a bit of healing when their healing spells are on cooldown.

Thanks. I know I have a healing spell, I just often find myself mashing the “6” key because of the long cooldown, where in another game I’d use an item. That’s what I’m trying to figure out here.

Well no except the healing skills, combo fields and skill combinations of waterfields there are no other ingame healing options except some foods that give you passive regen and sigils with healing aspects. That’s why you have to be careful with using your skill 6.

The key to staying alive in this game is NOT getting damaged (or minimizing the damage) in the first place (proper timing of dodges, blocks, boons and intelligent movement). If you are relying on your healing skill alone to keep you alive, you WILL die a lot….

The requirement of an active gameplay style for survival is one of the key differences between GW2 and most other MMOs.

Mesmer’s in particular don’t have a lot of healing. As Brother Grimm says , you should aim to avoid damage rather than heal it up.

As a rule of thumb on my mesmer, I use dodging and range to avoid damage. I start looking to get out of LoS (Line of Sight) of my opponent at about 75% health and when it get’s to 50%, matters are getting serious enough for me to use my valuable #6 and/or break out of combat.

At 30% I hit the emergency exit.

Try to spawn as many clones as possible before you heal if you’re using Ether Feast, it makes a large difference if you have all 3 clones out.

Thanks for the replies.

One issue I find with my clones, at least at this level, is that they seem to do zero damage. I guess they are just decoys. Yet they are often ignored. Maybe I’m using them wrong but much of the time the monsters just run right past them and towards me, which makes them of little use other than one-time shatters.

Mesmer is one of the harder classes to master, especially in solo pve. You are probably just seeing clones, and not phantasms spawn. Clones are high hp, low damage illusions, while phantasms are high damage, low hp illusions. The trick is to use your damage dealing ones and your tanky ones, and use the shatters appropriately

Mesmer is a hard class at low level, but it’ll get much better as you level up. Some extra options there can be to take your first 10 trait points (which you should have at level 20) in the chaos line. It’ll give you extra toughness (toughness makes you take less damage when you’re hit), 5 points into it gives you the metaphysical rejuvination minor trait, that will give you regeneration when your health drops below 75%, and you can take the illusionary defense trait that reduces the damage you take by 3% for each clone you have active.

And yes, clones do almost no damage, but sometimes can have different effects. The phase retreat clone, for example (staff 2), casts winds of chaos that applies conditions to targets, and if you have sharper images (15 points in the dueling trait line) clones also apply bleeding when critting, but in general once you get to 80 most people get a shattering build (create lots of clones and shatter often) or a phantasm build (create phantasms and let them do damage).