Guild Wars 2

I am planning to roll with my healing elementalist. But, do we actually get wexp and bags in a zerg fight? I barely do any damage.

Easy with staff. Sorta harder with other weapons. I imagine it’d be hard with full minstel/ nomads, but adding some cleric/celestial gear would be much easier. And a sharpening stone.

Fortunately, either water/lightning skills on dagger or staff tends to hit quite a bit. Another unintuitive way is to get fire/earth aura on yourself. It doesn’t matter if you do crap damage if you just reflect shots back at them eh? So Feel the Burn/Aftershock are good things to go on the bar (don’t need to fit all of them)

You don’t really need that much damage to get credit. If you heal people, part of their damage contribution goes to you, but you still have to hit the enemies involved.

Healers are not that welcomed in wvw, if you do not belong in a wvw guild. Pug healing is not something comms desire, but still if you are good at what you do, especially support melee ele, you will be accepted.

But lootbags are something else entirely. If you do not deal damage/tag, you cannot win a lootbag. There are squad options though, that is why I suggested joining a wvw guild and utilizing your potential to the limit.

I am fairly sure if you are running with the zerg or group, I assume you will since your damage will be basically laughable, that you get credit for the peoples you heal kills. So like if I am running along and you heal me then I kill a few people I think you get WxP for the kills as well. Also any capping you do will obviously net you WxP as well.

Iirc a few months back there was something in the patches about healing giving participation now. I can’t quite remember but I’ll try to dig it out.

Well, there is this post recently anyway:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Guildwars2/comments/6g9dhq/wvw_participation_through_healing/?st=j45h4ykl&sh=3e772212

Supporting your allies will now contribute toward earning rewards for killing enemies and damaging event bosses. The actions listed below now cause a percentage of the target ally’s damage dealt for the next several seconds to also count toward your participation. In addition to that, damaging an enemy’s defiance bar will also grant you some participation toward receiving rewards from that enemy. In order to discourage AFKing with boon-applying auras, you must still be actively attacking targets to receive rewards from them.

Applying boons to an ally (small percentage).
Removing conditions from an ally (small percentage).
Reviving an ally (large percentage).
Healing an ally (percentage scales based on how much healing is given).

I get as many bags etc when running clerics on my ele as I do when running zerk.

Barely do any damage? You can either run a full condi dmg build or just power. Both is enough to support the zerg. Staff fire does massive base damage in comparison to the damage many other classes would get by only using power.

Ryudnard.2587:

I am planning to roll with my healing elementalist. But, do we actually get wexp and bags in a zerg fight? I barely do any damage.

Depends. If you plan to roll as a “text pug” just following a dorito its a bad idea in general other then for self sustain purposes. As a text pug your primary focus should be on simply not dying.

Tagging targets for lootbags will happen by itself and you do not need a DPS spec to tag, you can do so on bunker or healer type or whatever else. Just make sure you’re running a ton of condi cleanse, stun breaks and stab, all of which are very easily available on an ele. And you have enough HP and armor to not immediately get one shot (or one comboed) and just fall over (no, marauders won’t do, its in fact just a waste of effort in this situation) . Make sure you run at bare minimum 2900ish armor and 20k+ hp before any buffs / foods etc. This is easily achievable even on an ele.

So focus first and foremost on not being rally bait. Being bunker type is better then healing, because many times you’ll be CCed and thus preventing any heals in the 1st place, while being tanky allows you to break out of the CC and get away, again, especially as an ele, plenty of skills and traits for that. Go for the lowest CD stun breaks, stab and cleanses, those work the best.

If you plan to use voice comms and be a part of the squad, then ask them what they need. you will live a lot longer and have better group support from other players as an active team member allowing you to live longer, thus collect multitudes more bags, gain WXP etc.

As far as staff goes, have it with you, but you have better options nowadays, don’t spec into it but switch when necessary and just use it “as is”. be flexible, don’t pigeon hole yourself into a single role, single build.

Ryudnard.2587:

I am planning to roll with my healing elementalist. But, do we actually get wexp and bags in a zerg fight? I barely do any damage.

u need only 500 dmg to foe be tagged.

i run full nomad guard sometimes, my damage hit is 200, 500.

yes you will get bags and wexp, just use the shouts or something and autoattack as you’re going through the zerg, no need to switch to a staff just for loot purposes

alain.1659:

Healers are not that welcomed in wvw, if you do not belong in a wvw guild. Pug healing is not something comms desire, but still if you are good at what you do, especially support melee ele, you will be accepted.

But lootbags are something else entirely. If you do not deal damage/tag, you cannot win a lootbag. There are squad options though, that is why I suggested joining a wvw guild and utilizing your potential to the limit.

To address the loot bags point. As long as you heal people that deal damage to enemies, you will also gain a loot bag.

healer get 1/3 the loot of DPS you have to deal atlest 1k Physical dmg to everything to even get a loot table.

ArchonWing.9480:

Easy with staff. Sorta harder with other weapons.

its not hard with other weapons at all! you can use dagger /focus or dagger / wh
you’ll hit a lot of enemies, with smaller ticks of damage, but concider the fact that you heal a huge ammount on your allies. i leave wvw daily with 1 hour fights and end up with 60-100 lootbags. ez game, staff is kitten for actual healing ele, go in the melee with dagger /x and do your thing ^^

Famine.7915:

alain.1659:

Healers are not that welcomed in wvw, if you do not belong in a wvw guild. Pug healing is not something comms desire, but still if you are good at what you do, especially support melee ele, you will be accepted.

But lootbags are something else entirely. If you do not deal damage/tag, you cannot win a lootbag. There are squad options though, that is why I suggested joining a wvw guild and utilizing your potential to the limit.

To address the loot bags point. As long as you heal people that deal damage to enemies, you will also gain a loot bag.

Yes as it seems so. Last night I zerged as a healer rev and the lootbags were not that bad. Not good either but that depends on the situation I guess. Druid or ele would be way better in a moving scenerio maybe. And some (not most but some) commanders really welcome a proper healer in their zergs as I experienced.

But as a fellow player I would advice you to not to play ventari rev in wvw more than 3 hours. It burned my already miniscule brain

A single hit from a staff guard spam 1 skill will tag enemies which you can mindlessly spam and hit most of the enemy zerg- the loot bags just overflow your bags really quickly.

Compared to ele, where you will struggle comparatively to attain 1/3 of the loot. Lots of ele skills won’t earn you a tag on multiple enemies.

Even my necro can’t tag as many as a spam 1 guard.

Conclusion: don’t play staff ele if you want max loot bags.

^ main reason people do not like tablet rev over ele is rev is a lot harder to be effective healer at.

But that being said overall number ele and rev have no different healing total or DPS i say there a slight edge to con removal on ele but it very small.

Baldrick.8967:

A single hit from a staff guard spam 1 skill will tag enemies which you can mindlessly spam and hit most of the enemy zerg- the loot bags just overflow your bags really quickly.

Compared to ele, where you will struggle comparatively to attain 1/3 of the loot. Lots of ele skills won’t earn you a tag on multiple enemies.

Even my necro can’t tag as many as a spam 1 guard.

Conclusion: don’t play staff ele if you want max loot bags.

Loot stick is supreme yes, but 1/3 or even half is sheer hyperbole.

Staff ele can tag enemies further away, before guards get in range, or even before you push.

Unless you camp earth, you have multihit attacks.

It’s honestly not very hard. If you really can’t do it, then simply camp water 90% of the time, alternate between 1 and 2 and only go into air for static field/OL air. Throw in a sigil of fire and take maintenance oil.

I certainly think that anet should do something here again, if they agree healers are also an important role. I would also assume so due to the introduction of druid and ventari.

I know that healing allies would now grant some contribution. But the thing is, the allies would need to get hurt first. Consider that the enemies are not doing any damage, then a healer could never heal nor do enough damage to tag the enemies. Healers are punished in this case, while damage dealers are not.

Forcing the healers getting some power in order to tag the enemies is stupid. All the workaround doing some damages would also hurt the efficiency of healing. Anet could really do better here, unless they care less about healing roles, which is probably true.

It’s somehow ironic here. They hate holy trinity, but there’s still holy trinity and they’re introducing some healing roles, yet they’re still somehow 2nd class citizen.

To think about it, I might suggest just give the bag if players are around 600 range within the dead body, regardless contribution. Whoever could follow that close, might already deserve some prize, if counting real contribution is impossible to implement.

If allies never get hurt then there’s no need for healers. But that’s an unrealistic scenario, even when fighting a keep lord and no enemies, you have randoms going down.

godfat.2604:

Forcing the healers getting some power in order to tag the enemies is stupid. All the workaround doing some damages would also hurt the efficiency of healing. Anet could really do better here, unless they care less about healing roles, which is probably true.

Why is it stupid? That’s the whole point of stat selection. You give up stats for something else. You don’t see people complaining that they have to take defensive stats which lowers their damage because then they’ll die and they also can’t tag many enemies.

Also healing power is a single stat. All the stats with healing as primary (cleric, magi, and apothecary) also have an offensive stat. So damage, and healing are not exclusive; not that you need it anyways to get tag credit.

If it’s just a single lord with a lot of friendly players around, lord could barely do any damage and little contribution could be given to players purely doing healing. The same applies to out numbering the enemies. I know then healers are not needed in this case, but we can’t switch stats in a second, and still damage dealers and healers are not getting the same reward. This might be minor indeed, but it’s still something.

I agree that healing power is just a single stat, and it doesn’t mean we can’t get some damage. But the same also applies to like CC, veil, portal and other utilities. Yes they’re still not exclusive to each other, but my point is that there’s a difference, and I believe this was also a very old topic, and having damage and huge AoE and fast reaction time, leaping, etc, would still be the best way to get reward.

ArchonWing.9480:

Why is it stupid? That’s the whole point of stat selection. You give up stats for something else. You don’t see people complaining that they have to take defensive stats which lowers their damage because then they’ll die and they also can’t tag many enemies.

Sorry, I meant to say that forcing people to tag the enemies is stupid, not stat-selection is stupid.

Edited:
Having some defensive stats could still do enough damage to get the credit. Well, yes then healers could get more power to get to a point that it could go over the threshold, indeed. But if that’s not because I want to do more damage, but because I want to get more reward, then I would think this is not a very good design.

Well, Mesmers that take portal and veil suffer a pretty huge hit to their survival. Utility slots are pretty precious and you can’t really replace it anywhere. Granted, they get even less credit for stuff.

I’d also argue that that extra bit of damage may not seem like much, but 5-10 people making a similar choice, would. I mean a lot of trains does basically wear people down by hitting with a ton of wet noodles focused in an area.

On a fundamental level though, the whole tag and bag thing is a bit lame in gw2 and results in 11111’ism. That I could agree with. A while back I suggested instead of individuals and NPCs dropping loot, that it’d be delivered as some kind of package, ie. player killed near you would be its own reward track, or added to a current pip rewards system. But then I guess a lot of people like the feel of getting bags from fights.

It might also be worth it to simply just to reduce the requirement to merely hitting at all. I honestly don’t think that hurts anyone, even though I feel it’s already like that.

Yes, I agree that the threshold for doing enough damage to get reward isn’t that high, especially if your friendly allies were also not doing a lot of damage. That’s certainly the case with only frontlines. However I won’t be sure if we’re still in pirateship meta (I think we’re out of it now?), and in that case everything just melt in a second. Well, less in a second. It’s very hard to tag in this case. My point is that even if that’s not an issue right now, doesn’t mean the system is not flawed. There are just too many factors, and that’s also why we cannot have a perfect contribution system, and that’s why I think we shouldn’t give reward based on this tagging thing.

Also good point about that 11111’ism. That’s clearly showing that fast reaction is a great way to get reward given current system.

And I have to admit that I am one of those who loves seeing bags piling up in my inventory. I know there are a lot of people who would check how many bags they got after calling it a day. It’s not really about reward, they aren’t worth that much anyway, and it’s more about feeling, since the bags are very easily countable because it’s just Heavy Loot Bag which could pile up from killing. Random green/blue/junk can’t be piling up that many (they’re going to blow up the inventory, so we’re going to salvage or sell them, losing tracks for a day), and we also don’t have such pointer from reward track or the new pip reward (not to mention they just track the time we’ve played)

To give some numbers. I got around 2/3 of bags comparing to my power hammer herald to a minstrel hammer ventari. Gees, you know why I took hammer for healing? Because I want to tag the enemies. Otherwise I would take mace and shield. (of course, staff is a must) And even so I am not getting reward often because, minstrel of course. (well, I already have some cleric mixed in between, which has a few power). It’s also not about the gold, it’s about why can’t I have the same reward as everyone else? Whenever I might actually contribute more to the fight?

In summary, I think:

• We still want to get some reward from taking down the enemies, tracking the records we’ve made in a day or so. We already have PPK and K/D ratio right?
• Contribution can’t be perfect, now it’s leaning toward to dealing damage
• CC, veil, portal, eyes, waypoint tagger, etc, are completely ignored
• It would be nice that the reward could be an item which could pile up in the inventory

Some possible solutions:

• Remove the damage threshold, just check if it’kitten or not as you proposed
• A step further, just check nearby allies as I originally proposed
• Push this even further, what about we just give reward for the whole squad? This would encourage people forming squads as well, which I believe it’s a good thing (See the new LFG for WvW?)

Of course, there must have abusers. All systems have abusers. The point is that we shouldn’t discourage any play styles we think it’s healthy to the game. Don’t punish good people whenever we just want to punish some abusers.

overloading will get you lots of tags. if playing dagger / x then try to be as accurate as possible when hitting the other group.

I use staff on my ele and swap often between air, water and fire. In ZvZ it’s easy to get tags in, and enough healing to get bags. No, I don’t get quite as many as my necro, but I am also not as skilled nor confident with increasing my dmg stats.

If I am running with a coordinated guild group, and in their TS, I Zerk up more and get more bags.

Eles are the unsung heroes of any group. In my guild we send bag donations to our healbots.

Taobella.6597:

^ main reason people do not like tablet rev over ele is rev is a lot harder to be effective healer at.

But that being said overall number ele and rev have no different healing total or DPS i say there a slight edge to con removal on ele but it very small.

Healer Rev has better cleanse and resistance application than Ele. It basically covers the base role of Revenant in WvW group – applying resistance – while outhealing Ele if played correctly.

Rym.1469:

Taobella.6597:

^ main reason people do not like tablet rev over ele is rev is a lot harder to be effective healer at.

But that being said overall number ele and rev have no different healing total or DPS i say there a slight edge to con removal on ele but it very small.

Healer Rev has better cleanse and resistance application than Ele. It basically covers the base role of Revenant in WvW group – applying resistance – while outhealing Ele if played correctly.

Whats the theoretical max healing a rev can achieve, really? Just wondering, last time I saw someone talk about his impressive rev healing, it was at half the number of what an ele put out in the same time. Been lots of patches since though and I dont play rev so I’ve never tested it.

When running in a guild group, arc dps meter shows an average of 5,5-8k+ when group needs healing, occassionaly lower if there are many elementalists sniping (reducing max potential) of your healing or not much healing is needed – but that’s not fault of the build. It can briefly spike up to 10k+ in situations when you happen to get full potential out of your healing or in random groups where healers are not present. Raw throughput-wise, ventari revenant outclasses everything, but is harder to use properly and can’t heal people well if they all run in different directions.

I wouldn’t go overboard and replace all elementalists with revenants, as tempests have their unique things, but having one or two ventari revs who know how to play shouldn’t be underestimated.

The biggest enemy of healer ventari is not viability, but community perception after years of being a meme.

Dawdler.8521:

Whats the theoretical max healing a rev can achieve, really?

rev 827500 per minute
ele 595000 per minute
I can post the entire calculation if you want. I did all of it when there was a discussion about heal rev in a guild I used to be in.

ArchonWing.9480:

Also healing power is a single stat. All the stats with healing as primary (cleric, magi, and apothecary) also have an offensive stat. So damage, and healing are not exclusive; not that you need it anyways to get tag credit.

Many use Minstrel’s…all heal/defense there…

Rym.1469:

Healer Rev has better cleanse and resistance application than Ele. It basically covers the base role of Revenant in WvW group – applying resistance – while outhealing Ele if played correctly.

Not to mention that now Ventari could grant alacrity! I seriously think that this is overpowered, because it’s even better than Chronomancer, which you need to pick All’s Well That Ends Well and pick well skills to share the alacrity in WvW (iAvenger is not going to work at all), and we all know that Chronomancer utility skill slots are quite precious.

For Revenant, you just pick Salvation and you’re done, trading nothing. You could even pick the next elite specialization when the next expansion is out! While if Mesmer is not picking Chronomancer, no alacrity!

Alacrity is seriously useful on your sieges. Don’t need to trait anything special, you get 100% (or nearly, I am a bit unsure) alacrity uptime on sieges.

Stand The Wall.6987:

Dawdler.8521:

Whats the theoretical max healing a rev can achieve, really?

rev 827500 per minute
ele 595000 per minute
I can post the entire calculation if you want. I did all of it when there was a discussion about heal rev in a guild I used to be in.

No need, as I said I never play rev myself so all I had was a pretty mediocre reference. Suppose I could slap together a cleric one and go try it out sometimes.

here a clip of what tablet rev look like i havent done anything new i kinda stop playing tablet rev more or less.

But interm of avr healing number if your ele is above 2.4k a minute there a good healer.
rev is about 2.6k.

ele with standerd minstral set up cap up to 7k a minute. <- theory number only see in arrow cart number.

rev with stranded gear i run around 1400 healing power cap out around 6k pre minute.

Taobella.6597:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEJeXGEgkPs

here a clip of what tablet rev look like i havent done anything new i kinda stop playing tablet rev more or less.

But interm of avr healing number if your ele is above 2.4k a minute there a good healer.
rev is about 2.6k.

ele with standerd minstral set up cap up to 7k a minute. <- theory number only see in arrow cart number.

rev with stranded gear i run around 1400 healing power cap out around 6k pre minute.

Not quite sure what those numbers are? Even only single target that’s obviously nowhere near the healing of either class. An ele doing absolutely nothing will heal himself for 5 times that number in a minute. Did you mean a second?

Sorry i phrase that horribly i meant 2.4k healing pre second over course of a minute. is avr rate of healing.

Taobella.6597:

Sorry i phrase that horribly i meant 2.4k healing pre second over course of a minute. is avr rate of healing.

I dont know how you define the average or the scenario but assuming 5 targets just the passive AoE heal from an ele healbot will exceed the number you stated from a “good healer” and tbh, I dont consider anyone doing the eqvivalent of watching paint dry in the middle of combat to be a good healer.

Healers are at a weird spot in WvW

Guardians and eles can pump out heals like no other, while at the same time pumping out decent DPS. Other classes are absolute garbo at it (yes, druids are currently garbage at healing in WvW).

If you run with an organised group, it’ll be extremely useful in winning fights. If you’re not, I would recommend running glass cannon instead.

Reverence.6915:

If you run with an organised group, it’ll be extremely useful in winning fights. If you’re not, I would recommend running glass cannon instead.

And dying during very first push. No one should run glass cannon in wvw unless he is already experienced and know what to do.

Rednik.3809:

Reverence.6915:

If you run with an organised group, it’ll be extremely useful in winning fights. If you’re not, I would recommend running glass cannon instead.

And dying during very first push. No one should run glass cannon in wvw unless he is already experienced and know what to do.

There’s different schools of thought on that. I started WvW as a glass cannon ele. It taught me how to position very early on, as opposed to creating bad habits by building tankier and putting myself in bad positions just cause (before any power creep had started/couple months before S1 started). Obviously WvW is very different now, especially with how stupid broken both healing and condi is, but unless you’re missing a brain, you’ll quickly learn how to position yourself in a zerg when you’re running with pugs.

That being said, vast majority of GW2 players are playing without their brains switched on, so yeah…

Can always roll something like a celestial / ptv hybrid. Will give you enough umph to kill people and still being able to heal and cc while in a group. I like to run soldier armor and celestial trinkets, give a nice all-round stats.

Dawdler.8521:

Taobella.6597:

Sorry i phrase that horribly i meant 2.4k healing pre second over course of a minute. is avr rate of healing.

I dont know how you define the average or the scenario but assuming 5 targets just the passive AoE heal from an ele healbot will exceed the number you stated from a “good healer” and tbh, I dont consider anyone doing the eqvivalent of watching paint dry in the middle of combat to be a good healer.

Let me explain more in depth When i say 2400 healing a second i mean that effective amount that your group of 30 vs 30 will take damage pre minute on average. Not total amount you can heal but amount your group should take damage at.

becuase at end of the day it not how much “i could heal someone” it how much do i need to heal someone before i can cut gear.