Guild Wars 2

Over in the General Discussion forum, I see periodic claims that the Healing Power stat is very under-powered. These discussions generally seem to be centered around PvE content. It’s always been my impression that HP was quite effective. The survivability of celestial wearers seems to bear this out to some degree. So, am I wrong? Is HP under-powered in WvW. OP? Just right?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Healing power is underpowered in everything. Celestial arent strong because of healing, its because of all the other stats making a balanced build.

Look at it this way – if you max out hp, your self-heal will go from maybe 4000→5000 hp (if even that). That’s 0.5 more seconds you can live against a dps build. Meanwhile, you sacrifice so much damage your ttk on an average target will triple.

Healing Power is very underpowered in WvW because the area healing from blasting a water combo field gives people hp based on their healing power, not the blaster. The blasting is also usually where the majority of healing comes from so having someone with water fields spec for healing power doesn’t make a massive difference.

Heal must be under powered. The attack always must be stronger or there will be immortal builds

Healing power is pretty weak in larger scale combat. However, that said, a cleric/nomad spec player in a small team can do wonders towards keeping that small team alive.

When you choose to spec into healing power, you sacrifice almost all your other utility in order to make yourself a healbot. You had best hope that your team has players who are completely specced into damage in order to make up for the loss of pressure from you. Now that you are essentially only good for CCing enemies, since your damage pressure is nil, your job becomes that of the medic, apply your CC, keep your allies alive.

Here’s a small team with a guardian healbot taking out almost 4x their numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=id99moK7YzA

TLDR; if you’re going to spec into healing power, play your role, and do a good job of it. Make sure your team knows that you are not going to contribute to damage.

During one of the recent weekends when my ping was 400+, I changed my warrs gear from zerker to nomad (armour/weps) and cleric (trinkets). With wvw buffs/food etc, I have 30k HP and 800 HP/s as basic, gets higher with regeneration boon on.

That sort of build mainly focuses on CCing enemy, helping friendly players get back up and believe it or not, tanking. Even when people realise that warrior over there takes billion hits to kill, they can’t resist and still hit. Those that shift focus from me to squishier targets still can’t ignore my CC.

Ofc this build can die but it’s rather rare and usually from huge condi overload. The number of condis/stacks that would usually kill my zerker warr, in nomads you can just ignore it. Often enemies that are not high dps keep hitting me and I regen HP back so fast, my HP bar just doesn’t move.

The dmg is tiny vs other tankier builds or high regen builds but it can still kill squishies, tho it takes longer than with zerker.

It’s quite good in a team of players that can play high dps builds. For a bit squisher but more team support oriented gameplay (aka boon bot), healer ele is great. I also tried full apothecary ranger, 400HP/s regen boon on party + perma swift and good uptime on fury is pretty sweet but imo, it lacks the CC.

The reason healing power isn’t very popular is that people prefer to kill enemies asap, and I doubt anet would buff heal power as it already can be really good when maxed out in certain builds. Think about that many people consider warrior heal signet OP, then realise a full healer build can put regen of 400+ HP/s on a full zerker, and regularly add a burst heal. In a good party that can max the healer build potential, healing power is amazing.

Woodenpotatoes has a nice video about Healingpower:

Thanks again for the comments. Some interesting points have surfaced.

Dawdler.8521:

Look at it this way – if you max out hp, your self-heal will go from maybe 4000->5000 hp (if even that). That’s 0.5 more seconds you can live against a dps build. Meanwhile, you sacrifice so much damage your ttk on an average target will triple.

Thus, the main usefulness of HP comes with sustained healing, not burst. However, not all regenerative abilities benefit from HP.

Radian.2478:

Healing Power is very underpowered in WvW because the area healing from blasting a water combo field gives people hp based on their healing power, not the blaster. The blasting is also usually where the majority of healing comes from so having someone with water fields spec for healing power doesn’t make a massive difference.

I didn’t know that. When I think about backline staff ele dropping a water field in the GWEN meta, the ele was not doing the blasting, it was the W/G’s in the front. Also, the point about water field blasting being the main source of heals is important. The WP video points that out. This suggests that healing via fields is counterproductive because of the way fields work. Over-writing fields is a major issue. A longish CD water field gets overwritten, or it overwrites other fields, notably fire fields, that are in some situations more desirable.

I tend to agree with Hamster and Jayden’s points about the small group utility of an HP wearing character v. less effectiveness in the zerg. When one looks at the raw numbers of the passive healing Jayden reports, it seems to me that HP is quite strong. Ergo, it’s game design issues that get in the way of healing power being desired in more content, and those issues have much more of a negative impact in larger groups.