Guild Wars 2

i’ve played wow for couple of months and then switched to gw2 since past spring. one thing i notice, is how volatile gw2 meta is. devs say they move by increments, but still, meta changes completely. yesterday it was 8 necros, today its all hunters, and so it goes.

do you think absence of dedicated healers contributes to difficulty for balanced game? with damage alone, even tiny disparity in damage accumulates over the course of combat towards one guy going down.

In proper mmorpg combat, each class contributes to a team effort to win fights. When a particular class is nerfed a bit, it usually retains its role in the team, and relies more on teammates to compensate for whatever was nerfed.

Here, it is a dps race and the razor’s edge between viable and not is too thin.

Conclusion: yes.

That’s the main reason I wish they made hybrids and bunkers and aoe support healers viable. Honestly, I get pretty bored of building DPS race builds and killing people in <3 seconds. But I think its a little too late for that. It’d require big stat weight changes, heal changes (making personal healing smaller to compensate for loss of damage), increase the time to kill (TTK), buff support, but only when supporting others, not themselves; just too much for the devs to handle I think. :S Its best to just roll with the punches I guess.

That’s because Anet…
With power/crit/critdmg scaling so well together, you tend to end up netting much more dmg than the survivability you lose through a more balanced build (with the hard CC in this game, it’s not hard at all to get a working burst combo down).

THE PROBLEM
Physical dmg being burst or bunk creates an EXTREMELY high baseline to balance dmg around, condi dmg (with one stat) has to deal competitive dmg compared to top tier burst, bunkers need to have REALLY high survivability to keep up with the top tier burst and of course also the inflated dmg from condi classes.

That leaves it as a ‘burst or condi or bunk’ deal… just extremes, little room for middle ground.
It really is rather depressing that they couldn’t get around to fixing that issue, I’m not even sure they think they are issues…

EASY SOLUTION
If Anet just made crit dmg not scale much with power, the game would be in a good spot (make it mainly based off of base ability dmg). Burst dps wouldn’t scale as high and so, relatively, power alone or crit chance alone will deal viable, not near the same as burst, but viable dmg so middle of the line specs can exist without being utterly subpar. That’d let condi dmg be largely nerfed (yet kill very, very few builds) since if a build wants to be more condi based yet deal good dmg, it can go with rabid/carrion/rampager (instead of tossing its stats into pure bunking).

As someone that played PvP in WoW since vanilla to Cata, I would like to think that the absence of healer is great for PvP!

In example, what was the most fun 2v2s? If you say 1 Dps and 1 Healer, I’ll start to wonder what’s wrong with you…
The most enjoyable fights was in general 2 vs 2 Damage-dealers.

WoW had an issue where healers we too good at keeping themselves alive and doing nothing else. GW2 would likely have combat healers (heal aoe while still fighting, not targeting allies) in which case, if they were better at supporting others more than themselves things would even out a bit, and it wouldn’t be “attack the healer for a day”. GW2 has better grounds for combat healers than WoW has/had, but it’d still be an incredible amount of work/tweaking.

Combat is volatile because there is a lot of essentially guaranteed damage.

Healers also allowed for fights to stagnate or never end. The grass isn’t exactly greener in that regard. This way everyone gets action instead of watching a lot of health bars.

Phadde.7362:

As someone that played PvP in WoW since vanilla to Cata, I would like to think that the absence of healer is great for PvP!

In example, what was the most fun 2v2s? If you say 1 Dps and 1 Healer, I’ll start to wonder what’s wrong with you…
The most enjoyable fights was in general 2 vs 2 Damage-dealers.

I’ll somewhat disagree. In a 2v2 situation it’s fun to have 2 dps players on both sides, but when you got to 3v3 and 5v5 arenas, I had the most fun as a healer. In BG’s, I also had the most fun as a healer when you get that one crit heal on a warrior and he ends up taking down 2 or more players and we continue to wreck others cause we coordinated better. There was a sense of fulfillment when you know you’ve played a sizable role in supporting your team, especially in 5v5 arenas.

^I can agree with that, but consider that you still can get those moments of being the savior quite easily with some builds.

Phadde.7362:

^I can agree with that, but consider that you still can get those moments of being the savior quite easily with some builds.

Very true. I guess I just miss being a healer (especially my disc priest and holy pally) and I felt that Anet completely disregarded a population of players who actually like to heal and provide full on support.

ensoriki.5789:

Combat is volatile because there is a lot of essentially guaranteed damage.

Too many passive damage, easy and guaranteed damage and the TTK ratio too high. You don’t need a healer to fix those things, you need better balance, in a way, guild wars 2 lack of healer is great, but poor design but fixable choices are making the healer nice by comparison.

personally, I despise healers, in aion they used to intentionally let me die because I used to spend a lot my time on vent insulting them. So not relying on those glory hugs and self-important jerks was good, initially.

SuperHaze.4210:

Very true. I guess I just miss being a healer (especially my disc priest and holy pally) and I felt that Anet completely disregarded a population of players who actually like to heal and provide full on support.

Disregarded? That wouldn’t be the right word for it, disregard means to ignore or not pay attention to. For several weeks/months before and after GW2 release we saw tons of discussions along the lines of “No healers omg!” and multiple Youtube videos also popping up about it.
It was a conscious and extremely calculated decision by ArenaNet to break-away from the standard MMO formula (Holy Trinity), and for the most part I would say they have pulled it off extremely well at least as far as PvE goes. Even in PvP it ultimately works well, class balance issues aside.

If you want to play a healer-esque role in GW2 you can somewhat do it with a bunch of builds/profs. When multiple defensive boons (protection, aegis, etc) + AoE healing fields come together, it can result in a LOT of overall healing + damage reduction for all nearby allies. However it requires coordination and not just 1 dedicated healer facerolling his keyboard with all healing abilities lol, like how WoW healers used to play whack-a-mole with raid frames.

Neither format is perfect, both have their strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to the player (you) to decide what you want out of your MMO.

For me the disadvantages of having dedicated healers are too many. If all my years of WoW taught me anything (raided Tier 6 – Tier 13) it’s that balancing around dedicated healers means they become an absolute necessity for every group, otherwise everyone dies to all the unavoidable damage flying around. However if you tone-down all that incoming damage to lessen the need for a healer, then the presence of a healer would make all content a laughing joke to beat. It’s either one extreme or the other.
Then there’s the issue of PvP balance (2v2/3v3 from S3 – S10, 100K+ lifetime kills). GW2 is very AoE-based which helps things a lot, but you will still end up with a dire situation in your typical 5v5 match where the team with 1-2 healers is going to have an huge advantage over the team which has no healers.
Since this is conquest gameplay, healers will become incredibly powerful for holding points. For the majority of WoW’s lifetime Warriors were known to be terrible without pocket-healers, but WITH a pocket healer they become absurdly powerful (borderline unstoppable). Again, it was either one extreme or the other.
There are many more I could list, like healers needing the ability to sustain themselves + other people or suffer having no role.

I much rather prefer GW2’s system of having a large variety of roles and builds available to every class, resulting in them being either bunkers (tank + self-healing), team support (AoE boons + heals), control (cc/lock-down), direct damage (glass cannons) or condition damage (moar DoTs), or some combination of those. Dedicated healers simply have no place here :P

If people think power-creep-damage is scary now, power-creep-healing is even more difficult to balance.

@Wintel

While I understand where Anet tried to go by eliminating dedicated healers, it still deprives a certain group of players who want to exclusively heal. Sure Anet can push those players towards support builds, but it’s not the same (or fun to some of those players) as being a dedicated healer. The problems I see now with support builds are boon juggling. Add boon, steal boon, boon stripping, applying conditions to negate boons, etc., has caused it own set of problems, especially to classes that don’t have much access to either boons or condition removal.

I can see dedicated healers being extremely OP in the conquest game type because of the extra bunkering power provided by dedicated healers, but it’s no different now where instead of a healer being a requirement, a bunker or two are required for a team. Hopefully in the near future, we will have other game types that won’t depend on bunkers so much.

SuperHaze.4210:

@Wintel

While I understand where Anet tried to go by eliminating dedicated healers, it still deprives a certain group of players who want to exclusively heal. Sure Anet can push those players towards support builds, but it’s not the same (or fun to some of those players) as being a dedicated healer. The problems I see now with support builds are boon juggling. Add boon, steal boon, boon stripping, applying conditions to negate boons, etc., has caused it own set of problems, especially to classes that don’t have much access to either boons or condition removal.

I can see dedicated healers being extremely OP in the conquest game type because of the extra bunkering power provided by dedicated healers, but it’s no different now where instead of a healer being a requirement, a bunker or two are required for a team. Hopefully in the near future, we will have other game types that won’t depend on bunkers so much.

Healers and tanks are a minority: a rarity even. The vast majority of players prefer DPS roles. WoW LFG taught you this. Wanted to run a dungeon? Pop the LFG tool. Wanted to wait 15-20 minutes? Queued as DPS. Wanted to wait 10-20 seconds? Queued as a healer or a tank.

I just wish:
- All skills were more telegraphed like warriors.
- Less 2-4 second kill builds, but buff all squishy builds a bit.
- Tanks did more damage but weren’t able to sustain forever.
- Support builds existed (even as combat healers) but in such a way that they weren’t bunkers, but actually benefited others more than themselves.

ronpierce.2760:

That’s the main reason I wish they made hybrids and bunkers and aoe support healers viable. Honestly, I get pretty bored of building DPS race builds and killing people in <3 seconds. But I think its a little too late for that. It’d require big stat weight changes, heal changes (making personal healing smaller to compensate for loss of damage), increase the time to kill (TTK), buff support, but only when supporting others, not themselves; just too much for the devs to handle I think. :S Its best to just roll with the punches I guess.

Like I’ve said many times. The builds are viable, it’s just everyone likes damage. You can talk about improving healing all you want but if the mentality of the players keep focusing on damage then it’s damage they’ll take.

With regards to the source of the problem though, I’m beginning to think it’s due to the game mode that the “damage” over all things persists. Conquest forces you to split up and try to be in more places at once and in order to win most fights, you need a good amount of damage output.
Well, let’s condense it down and draw the whole fight to just one point and forget the sides nodes, it becomes a whole different story. It becomes about rezzes, it becomes about positioning and drawing your enemies into a corner, it becomes about support and team builds because you can guarantee that you’ll all be in the same place so you can more often than not, rely on each other.

gesho.9468:

…
do you think absence of dedicated healers contributes to difficulty for balanced game?

Yes. It is more difficult to balance a combat system where the dedicated healer is absent.

Does that mean that they should put in healers? I don’t think so. The absence of a legitimate healer is only a contributor that makes the balance issues that exist more glaring. Keeping in mind that perfect balance is an unobtainable ideal, much like playing at skill cap, the best solution is to fix the real problems, not overturn the entire concept of how the game was designed and deal with the ridiculous instability that would result.

The most glaring issues in balance are (mostly a matter of opinion):

1) Damage is too high across the board. Conditions, direct damage, doesn’t matter what you are looking at, all of them are just too high for a healer-less combat system.

2) Boons are too accessible with not enough removal on some classes.

3) Conditions are too accessible with not enough removal on some classes.

4) Having only conquest available makes balance issues more glaring rather than minimizing them.

5) Amulet and trait system is too limited in statistic allocation to allow for build diversity. This is exasperated by #1 which forces everyone into a DPS race for the most part rather than encouraging versatility in builds.

6) The entire combat system has far too much RNG, Passive Effect and AI spawn. Particularly with a misbehaving targeting system this is a major drawback.

Thedenofsin.7340:

SuperHaze.4210:

@Wintel

While I understand where Anet tried to go by eliminating dedicated healers, it still deprives a certain group of players who want to exclusively heal. Sure Anet can push those players towards support builds, but it’s not the same (or fun to some of those players) as being a dedicated healer. The problems I see now with support builds are boon juggling. Add boon, steal boon, boon stripping, applying conditions to negate boons, etc., has caused it own set of problems, especially to classes that don’t have much access to either boons or condition removal.

I can see dedicated healers being extremely OP in the conquest game type because of the extra bunkering power provided by dedicated healers, but it’s no different now where instead of a healer being a requirement, a bunker or two are required for a team. Hopefully in the near future, we will have other game types that won’t depend on bunkers so much.

Healers and tanks are a minority: a rarity even. The vast majority of players prefer DPS roles. WoW LFG taught you this. Wanted to run a dungeon? Pop the LFG tool. Wanted to wait 15-20 minutes? Queued as DPS. Wanted to wait 10-20 seconds? Queued as a healer or a tank.

I never stated that healers and tanks were a majority because they didn’t need to be in WoW. It’s true in WoW that a tank can find a group effortlessly, more so as a healer, but we’re discussing tpvp roles here. From a PvE standpoint, GW2 dungeons were designed not to rely on tanks and healers, just support and dps mainly. I never ran a dungeon in GW2 ever since release so I have no input as to how a dedicated healer would affect the PvE side of the game so I’ll refrain from making any assumptions in that regard.

i HATED wow trinity system… the joke on wow was that w/e patch buffed the hell out of the class, that class was ruling the season untill the next patch; wow pvp was even more “volatile” than gw2 pvp (cough season 12 warriors for example)

wow pvp is REALLY REALLY REALLY bad at this point, devs don’t give a flying cow about pvp; gw2 despite issues here and there is STILL MILES AWAY better than wow pvp

healers? no ty, i like how classes are rather more independed in this game

i don’t want to sit for weeks and look for half decent healer that doesn’t heal just by drooling on his keyboard

from someone who been playing wow arena for years at high rating, archiving balance through small tweaks here and there YES, love it; adding semi trinity to game – HELL NO

gonna use this post also to say many thanks to Anet and their devs actually working on pvp and trying to keep things balanced, some changes might be stupid and uncalled for, but nothing in this game is as absurdly broken as in wow… so to all Anet devs, thanks a lot, great job and keep it up, pvp in this game is reason why i quit wow and joined gw2

SuperHaze.4210:

Phadde.7362:

^I can agree with that, but consider that you still can get those moments of being the savior quite easily with some builds.

Very true. I guess I just miss being a healer (especially my disc priest and holy pally) and I felt that Anet completely disregarded a population of players who actually like to heal and provide full on support.

Bet you’re kinda hyped for Wildstar? You, as an old healer, seems like part of their targeted audience!

Cynz.9437:

i HATED wow trinity system… the joke on wow was that w/e patch buffed the hell out of the class, that class was ruling the season untill the next patch; wow pvp was even more “volatile” than gw2 pvp (cough season 12 warriors for example)

wow pvp is REALLY REALLY REALLY bad at this point, devs don’t give a flying cow about pvp; gw2 despite issues here and there is STILL MILES AWAY better than wow pvp

healers? no ty, i like how classes are rather more independed in this game
…. to all Anet devs, thanks a lot, great job and keep it up, pvp in this game is reason why i quit wow and joined gw2

Agreed! There was a speculation that they made the insane (absurd, bonkers, mind-boggling, etc.) balancing in WoW because they wanted people to spend time leveling the class that was good at that given time to finally steamroll people over. I mean, generally you got angry at the balancing they made, but you still stayed and pay’d up. Maybe your class was the thing next time?

Anyways, that kinda gives anyone an idea of how “volatile” the balancing was/is in WoW, because this theory seems perfectly reasonable considering their actions with class balance. Tried the PvP out again this august, got miserable, realized that I finally had a better game to play.

Roe.3679:

Healers also allowed for fights to stagnate or never end. The grass isn’t exactly greener in that regard. This way everyone gets action instead of watching a lot of health bars.

I have played many mmos and the only way that u can have a never ending fight is either that they have lots of healers or that the agressive team dont coordinate their alpha.

For example Tera 3vs3 u got healer/tanky/dps, u dont attack the healer u either cc him and u burst the dps, or u just whack the dps and scream omg healers op they dont let me kill this guy. (3vs3 last i think 5 minutes? i dont remember and having draws is quite rare), i can name a bunch more.

In gw2 bunkering battles in mid can last 3-2mins? and ppl keep ressing each other and stuff and its not a dps race like some1 said … its more like press F race.