Guild Wars 2

Which heal should I go with for a dagger dagger build?

Depends on the circumstance.

I’ll just copy and paste what I have in a document for a planned out ele guide that I was working on a while ago. Hopefully it is helpful for you.

Elementalist actually has the highest potential in the game for healing, provided you want to spec for it. If you focus on maximizing DPS the heal you’ll want to use the most is Arcane Brilliance, as it serves as a blast finisher.

However sometimes you may find that using your healing skill just for blasting yourself fury and might isn’t practical due to the encounter being unforgiving. If that’s the case, then you may need to play more conservatively and save the heal for when you actually need to replenish HP. However, we have other options that heal much more and worth considering. Keep in mind, Arcane Brilliance heals 20% more for every target. Also keep in mind that there is currently a bug with Arcane Brilliance where it blasts wherever your target is, but the damage happens around you with a radius of 240 still.

Comparisons between our heals to show how much hp/min you heal with them (assumption of 0 healing power):

Arcane Brilliance:
3,560 every 25 secs
60/25 = 2.4, 3560 * 2.4 = ~8,544 hp/min (with 0 targets)

Glyph of Elemental Harmony:
4,894 every 25 sec
60/25 = 2.4, 4894 * 2.4 = ~11,746 hp/min
in water attunement add 12s regen to each use of heal (1,560)
1,560 * 2.4 = 3,744, 14,682 + 3,744 = ~18,426 hp/min

Ether Renewal:
625 * 8 hp every 15 sec = 5000
Effective CD = 18.5 seconds
5000 * (60/18.5) = ~16,216 hp/min

Signet of Restoration:
with nothing but Lightning Whip autoattack,
60/0.95 = ~63 casts/min, healing per cast = 202
60/0.95*202= 12,758 hp/min

Ether Renewal has the absolute highest healing potential for us over time but mainly for the condition removal aspect. It pulses 8 times and removes a condition every single pulse. This makes it in my opinion, close to brokenly OP. However, it’s channeled over 3.5 seconds meaning you have to stop attacking and avoid getting cced out of the channel to make full use of it. Provided you ever need condition removal, this should be the first option to choose from.

Glyph of Elemental Harmony comes a close second in terms of healing capacity, and provided it’s always casted in water attunement for the regen it actually will surpass the health restored by ether renewal. Despite the fact that it heals so much over time when used in water attunement, it is in my opinion a poor choice most of the time due to its longer cast time than Arcane Brilliance. What I personally use this heal for is when I’m out of combat and want to maintain swiftness, I cast it in air attunement for 12 seconds of swiftness. Alternatively, you can do the same with Arcane Brilliance in a static field but due to Glyph’s shorter cooldown and longer swiftness duration, you can maintain more than with Arcane Brilliance.

Signet of Restoration falls short in terms of efficacy as it heals less over time than some of our other options and requires us to be casting at all times to make full use of it. Because you won’t ever only be autoattacking in air, the number calculated above does not accurately represent how much health it restores over time. It varies a lot and as a result this option is very, very niche at best in PvE. However due to the abundance of crowd control skills in PvP, you will find that Ether Renewal and Glyph of Elemental Harmony are sometimes too unreliable and that signet of restoration is in many cases the best option in PvP D/D builds.

Purple Miku.7032:

Comparisons between our heals to show how much hp/min you heal with them (assumption of 0 healing power):

Arcane Brilliance:
3,560 every 25 sec * 2 = 7,120 in 50 sec
10/25 = 0.4, 0.4 * 3,560 = 1,424
7,120 + 1,424 = roughly 8,544 hp/min (with 1 target)
~6,835 + 8,544 = ~15,379 hp/min (with 5 targets)

Glyph of Elemental Harmony:
4,894 hp every 20 sec * 3 = 14,682 hp/min
in water attunement add 12s regen to each use of heal (1,560)
1,560 * 3 = 4,680, 14,682 + 4,680 = 19,362 hp/min

Ether Renewal:
625 * 8 hp every 15 sec = 5000
5000 * 4 = 20,000 hp/min

Signet of Restoration:
with nothing but Lightning Whip autoattack,
60/0.75 = 80 casts/min, healing per cast = 202
80 * 202 = 16,160 hp/min

There’s a couple things wrong with this data in my humble opinion.

First off, the arcane brilliance number for one target is actually the number for 0 targets. Which makes the healing per minute for target cap 17088/60s, exactly double.

Glyph cooldown is 25 seconds, which means the numbers become: 11746 in any attunement + 3120 worth of regen in water attunement

Lastly, not considering ‘effective cooldown’ (meaning cooldown+ cast time) is generally acceptable, but in the case of ether renewal it heavily skews data. The effective cooldown of ether renewal is ~19s, which makes its HPM ~15789.

If correcting the other heals for the cast time inaccuracy, they’d go down by about 5%.

Gokil is right
Miku made a lot of very valid points though

Also:

Signet of Restoration:
with nothing but Lightning Whip autoattack,
60/0.75 = 80 casts/min, healing per cast = 202
80 * 202 = 16,160 hp/min

The total animation for lightning whip is 0.95 not 0.75
60/0.95*202=12,758 hp/min

Zelyhn Lekovitch.2867:

Gokil is right
Miku made a lot of very valid points though

Also:

Signet of Restoration:
with nothing but Lightning Whip autoattack,
60/0.75 = 80 casts/min, healing per cast = 202
80 * 202 = 16,160 hp/min

The total animation for lightning whip is 0.95 not 0.75
60/0.95*202=12,758 hp/min

Sound about right. Thanks for making it clear.

Yeah he is right. I’ll edit my post to reflect his corrections.

Also lol, I think I had quick glyphs trait at the time when I typed all of that up. That’s my explanation for the wrong glyph cooldown xD

I’ll just chime in and say that saying that signet of restoration heals less than others is bullkitten; here’s why.
First of all, it’s triggered by attunement swap and your utility skills, meaning that you actually get many more than by simply spamming lightning whip on cooldown(due to instant-cast spells).
Also, it has much higher healing power scaling, being 0.1 on every single cast. Compare that to 0.75 every ~20 seconds on Ether, and you’ll see why it is such a popular choice.
Then again Ether might be picked over it due to condition removal.

Correct: the optimal DF rotation does 39 casts (counting no other utility cast than arcane brilliance) in 28.25s, that is about 45% more casts per minute than simply spamming lightning whip.

But then we all knew that DF is superior, there is no debate here

(Edit just to clarify: obviously you wouldn’t be casting arcane brilliance if you were using the signet of restoration, but you would be casting RoE instead, which does not change the numbers much)

Evalia, did you read the last sentence of the last paragraph of my post?

“However due to the abundance of crowd control skills in PvP, you will find that Ether Renewal and Glyph of Elemental Harmony are sometimes too unreliable and that signet of restoration is in many cases the best option in PvP D/D builds.”

The amount it heals varies on what skills you are casting, so for the sake of simplicity I only calculated what it would do if you spammed lightning whip.

This all assumes 0 healing power, which I once again included in my post.

Things obviously change when healing power is considered but the OP did not mention whether or not they would do PvE or PvP, and healing power is not something I would assume for PvE builds.

I think all the heals have a place, and really, it depends on the situation. For max utility, Arcane Brilliance is great because you can use the blast finisher in a Fire Field to get more Might. Also, if you hit lots of targets, it becomes a sizable heal as well!

Ether Renewal is good if you want a low cooldown and large heal. It’s also good if you want more condi removal. The downside is that channeling it keeps you from doing DPS while using it.

The Glyph Heal is a decent burst heal and you can cast it in Air Attunement for Swiftness. To be honest though, the cast time is still kinda long, to the point where I think Arcane Brilliance and Ether Renewal kinda outclass it, but I know some people like it a lot.

The Signet Heal honestly feels underwhelming to me, but I suspect if you’re taking a lot of little damage from Retal or something, it probably provides pretty good overall sustain without necessarily taking away from your DPS. I’m not totally sure on this point, however – I honestly don’t use the Signet Heal in PvE much, and don’t know if it really does give enough healing in the theoretical situations where it should win out. The main thing about the Signet Heal is that if you’re a Cele Ele in PvP, it provides massive sustain without you needing to spend time casting your healing skill, making it really really strong.

Well, cele ele in sPvP has healing power and a large part of its sustain also comes from traits and not just the signet. Take 62600 signet build as an example, I find myself activating the signet heal a lot more frequently than in the case of d/d cele for sustain.