Guild Wars 2

I really hope the 5-man limit on area heals is a temporary measure because it sucks.

Why? The randomness.

When you use a group heal spell, you have no idea which one of the 5+ people beside you really will get it. Will it be that guy about to die? Probably not.

The whole point about playing support, why it is so satisfying, is that you save that guy who is about to die.

Now, you can go on about “no trinity” blah blah blah blah. But the truth of the matter is, DPS can pick who they can target. But. Support. Can. Not.

“No Trinity” blah blah blah blah. Support was designed as a legitimate role in GW2, along with DPS and tanking (read: area control). Again, which one of these has no idea who their skills will target? Oh yeah, Support.

Do you see where this going? Unless something is done to reintroduce the blanket area heals, the only solution to the randomness of support is Targeted Heals.

Yeah, I know, this undermines the entire design of ArenaNet’s combat system. But their original design lead to the introduction of tactics they did not like, namely, turtling and clumping. To get rid of these tactics they broke Support i.e. they choose to degrade the experience of a subset of WvW players instead of everyone affected by turtling.

Do I have faith in ArenaNet’s ability to fix support in WvW without introducing Targeted Heals? I’m not so sure. I can’t see any way to do it without reintroducing turtling. On the other hand, they are Professional Game Designers.

For the moment though, GW2 does offer the best WvW/RvR out there. However, if another game came along that did Support better (with or without the Trinity blah blah blah blah), I think it’d be tempting for those disappointed with Support in this game.

They don’t want you to play support.
They don’t want you to play defensively either.

They’ve said multiple times that they want offense to be > Defense.

Basically if you look at the direction of how they’re pushing the mechanics/patches they want zergballs all rolling glass cannon burst specs spooging all over each other.

Braxxus.2904:

They don’t want you to play support.
They don’t want you to play defensively either.

They’ve said multiple times that they want offense to be > Defense.

Basically if you look at the direction of how they’re pushing the mechanics/patches they want zergballs all rolling glass cannon burst specs spooging all over each other.

No one is asking for Defense to be made better than Offense.

All the OP asks is: remove the randomness from Defense, specifically the part of Defense that affects others.

Randomness has no place in a competitive game.

This is the reason why it can be difficult to play an Engineer. Several of our abilities and skills are random.

Thrumdi.9216:

Braxxus.2904:

They don’t want you to play support.
They don’t want you to play defensively either.

They’ve said multiple times that they want offense to be > Defense.

Basically if you look at the direction of how they’re pushing the mechanics/patches they want zergballs all rolling glass cannon burst specs spooging all over each other.

No one is asking for Defense to be made better than Offense.

All the OP asks is: remove the randomness from Defense, specifically the part of Defense that affects others.

Randomness has no place in a competitive game.

I absolutely agree. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it because all signs point to BURSTLOLZERGORGTFO

Braxxus.2904:

Thrumdi.9216:

Braxxus.2904:

They don’t want you to play support.
They don’t want you to play defensively either.

They’ve said multiple times that they want offense to be > Defense.

Basically if you look at the direction of how they’re pushing the mechanics/patches they want zergballs all rolling glass cannon burst specs spooging all over each other.

No one is asking for Defense to be made better than Offense.

All the OP asks is: remove the randomness from Defense, specifically the part of Defense that affects others.

Randomness has no place in a competitive game.

I absolutely agree. All I’m saying is that I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it because all signs point to BURSTLOLZERGORGTFO

Gotcha, we’re on the same page. I expected the reactions to this post would be “No Trinity” blah blah blah blah. When I posted about this about a month or two ago, it was.

I wonder if the drop-off in WvW participation in the last month or two has come (in part) from the 5-man heal limit and its randomness.

It could be that an entire segment of support-oriented players just don’t come out to WvW anymore, where they can’t play at their fullest. They can still do that in a 5-man dungeon run.

I know I almost stopped playing my Guardian at the end of last year. I couldn’t put my finger on it at the time, but in retrospect it probably was the 5-man limit. It really was like they cut off your arm, you keep going through the motions, and wondering why it isn’t working, then you suddenly realize its gone.

It’s the same deal with aoe damage- if they allow more targets, then they need to reduce the damage/healing to account for possibly affecting 50 players at once. But if you do that, then the healing/damage is going to be so insignificant, there’s no reason to even use the skills.

I think what anet really wants to avoid, though, is a stack that can simply outheal all incoming damage (aoe or otherwise) just by spamming group heals. If you have 20+ guardians and eles (and maybe mantra mesmers?) pumping out heals every second, the stack will just never die.

Personally, I think support healing (as in, every point of hp you heal on an ally, not yourself) should be counted for participation in events in WvW, not just damage you output. That alone should make it worthwhile to play a healing/support role.

Braxxus.2904:

They don’t want you to play support.
They don’t want you to play defensively either.

They’ve said multiple times that they want offense to be > Defense.

Basically if you look at the direction of how they’re pushing the mechanics/patches they want zergballs all rolling glass cannon burst specs spooging all over each other.

This exactly is what I think too. Aoe limit is 5, heal is limited to 5, is like they are encouraging the Zerg mentality. You can be an amazing 5 man synergy team, but if a 40 man zerg pops onto you…

Map population and coverage, thats what wins lately it seems. Skill is just how long the other team can hold out IMO.

I think aoe damage limit should stay at 5. But aoe support healing should be at 10.

CHIPS.6018:

I think aoe damage limit should stay at 5. But aoe support healing should be at 10.

I think the aoe damage should go up as well.

AOE limited to 5 promotes zergballs. It doesn’t enable smaller groups using terrain, better skill and coordination to stall/take out larger forces very well. Did you see 300? Or read the story of the greek forces holding off the persian hordes when you were in school? That’s the stuff legend is made of. Zergballs rolling over people is blah. But giving the ability for that coordinated group of 5-10 guys the tools needed to outplay the zergballers and punish them for bad plays, that’s just skill-promoting game design.

Of course this does mean that AoE damage needs to be in check so it’s never a better option vs a single target spell in terms of pure damage output (obviously there are times where it’ll be situationally better coughstealthbullkittencough)

Your heals used to be unlimited
But then some people abused it by stacking 20 healers on the same spot so that they never die

Therefore it’s now nerfed

lcc.9374:

Your heals used to be unlimited
But then some people abused it by stacking 20 healers on the same spot so that they never die

Therefore it’s now nerfed

Which wouldn’t have been an issue if AoE’s weren’t limited to 5. Then it would’ve cancelled each other out, with the edge going to the aoe’s because damage>heals in GW2’s basic design philosophy.

Wait are you sure that’s the philosophy?
They must have messed it up quite a bit

From what I heard in spvp

….. I heard it was very defensy place

Water fields are still a strong source of healing.

A blast finisher will Prioritize as follows
The group of the person using the blast finisher > Who’s closest to the center of the field > Who’s most dead.

The Benefit for this, is a properly coordinated Zerg can spit out large amounts of healing if they follow disciplined field placements.

Aoe Effects, like Regen, and the Guardian book spell also follow this, but are less beneficial. You Wan’t Tacticool Play, go stand beside them when you hit that button.

I think they could change the healing to ‘spread heals’ like daoc had, that might help.

Or they could add to all group heal abilities that it hits the person you have targeted, plus 5 random. This keeps the limits, and adds a bit more depth to healing in that you would have to start targeting friendlies.

it’s not only the heals that fall on random 5. AOE like epidemic do the same, which is stupid. The bad thing, taking into account lags on servers is that invisibility does not care about the number of people to affect.
Arena should be consistent here, and either make AOE skills depend only on radius (both heals and damage), or nerf invisibility as well.

Are you absolutely certain that that is how the system prioritises boon application John?

MarzAttakz.9608:

Are you absolutely certain that that is how the system prioritises boon application John?

I could be wrong about the most dead part. but the rest is correct.

Healing has a predictable pattern to it, just need to learn it. It isnt pure ‘random’.

If you are zergballingit it might SEEM random, but it isnt. They also added another check to the heal as it wont heal minions/summons over players anymore.