Guild Wars 2

Hey,

Originally I created an Elementalist with the thought of only doing dungeons with her at full support mode/healing.

I have read some of the forums (after the fact of leveling her a bit) that suggest against going support or heal build and just doing more DPS with minor heal abilities.

I wanted to know if it truly is a silly thing to go full support or recommendations?

I usually play healers in games so it was kind of a bummer that I couldn’t in this one (I do like the trinity, just doesn’t cover the one character I always lean toward :P ) I have a thief as my main character for all else.

P.S Also, someone noted that healing was a very boring way to go versus DPS?

If you enjoy it, go with it.
Use cleric and magi gear or/and soldier to get some power.

I just don’t think there are enough healing/support skills to justify a full support/heal Ele.

If you plan on sitting in water attunement and waiting for your 1-2 heal skills to come off CD then you will be severely gimping your team and will be contributing very little. Your group heals will most likely not be stronger than the individual #6 heals. It is fine to spec into support but it isn’t viable to try and make a “healer” with the elementalist.

even as a support, you should be able to dish out some damage to help clearing packs faster. that’s true for any gw2 class.

ele support tend to use staff as it allows you to stay out of the melee pretty easily given the skills have high range.
staff also brings a lot of combo fields, which your group may use as they wish with their finishers.

that said, a good ele support imo should switch attunements pretty often, which can only be done by speccing very deep into the arcane line (ie putting all 30pts usually).
also, speccing into cleansing wave (water trait #5) is probably a must as you’ll help removing conditions everytime you switch to water. since you’ll be probably speccing into water anyways, that should be no problem to take it.

with all that said, i’ll repeat one last thing again : even when playing as “support”, you should help as much as you can in dps, since there is nothing like a dedicated healer in gw2.

/agreed with everything everyone said.

Support means alot of things. You can remove conditions, lay down combo fields for a lot of special blast and projectile finshers for your party, grant boons to your allies such as protection, regeneration, swiftness, might, armor, lay down substantial aoe crowd control, single target crowd control, deflect incoming attacks, grant heals and regeneration, increase party dps, and on and on. By Anet design, the best class able to do all of this is the elementalist.

Still, you can’t outheal incoming damage, lock down a mob for 30 seconds, mute casters for their remaining lifetime, or take 30% off the top of a mobs damage output as healers and crowd control classes are able to do in other games.

Our efforts only complement, not replace, other classes efforts at the same things. So, we have to be able to do our fair share of damage output. Our damage is not inconsequential but we aren’t going to win the dps profession of the year award.

Re your question re full support. Since we can’t give full support, how can we call something a full support build? You could call it a, “I’m doing the best support that I can and I know you are all still dying so you better go back to healing yourself” build, I guess .

There is a balance in there somewhere.

I use a slightly modified (I have my points in earth instead of air and I have summon elemental instead of mist form – plus some other tweaks I can’t really look up now because I’m at work :p) version of this build:

http://www.gw2builds.org/view/911016/elementalist_healing_support

I use the superior runes of Dwayna in my armor.

It relies on the situation which attunement you’ll be using most, but you’ll have to switch attunements a lot and be very flexible to make the most use of this build. However, if you are smart with your combo fields, you’ll be able to keep everyone but the worst players alive in any situation, while doing some moderate DPS and annoying the bosses

I love this build, especially in dungeons.

healing is not strong enough even though it can be quite bit. crowd control + combo fields + boons + aura + healing is pretty good imo.

Dwayna is good rune but also altruism can give offensive support. monk/s. water/m. water to get 40% boon duration is another good option

I’m full support with altruism/water runes and the res trait/aurasharing and it’s a lot of fun.

Just don’t expect your direct heals to keep someone up, sometimes it’s best to use some immob/cripple/knockdown/chill/weaken (we have a lot of control to keep people safe)

I will never understand the point of going full support. The heal is totally not worth it, and you sacrifice so much damage to run it. Not to mention all the combo fields/condition spreading is still used in damage builds. But I guess people miss monk so much that they will try anything…

Evyl Hart.1980:

I will never understand the point of going full support. The heal is totally not worth it, and you sacrifice so much damage to run it. Not to mention all the combo fields/condition spreading is still used in damage builds. But I guess people miss monk so much that they will try anything…

All the players know that there is no healing class and that we are all responsible for our own heals. So, we never hear, “Heal me.” (That is so nice!) No one every hears complaints like, “Why did you let me die.” lol. An elementalist is not a required member of a party. In fact, a fifth is not a required member of any party for almost any make up of professions or quality of players or content.

In other words, the “support” elementalist may very well be completely unaware that his contributions are not making a huge heck of a difference. That’s not to say they are not helpful. I am just saying that spec’d and playing differently, things might be moving alot faster and many elementalists may not be aware of the difference.

The classic bunker build with boon duration runes is quite strong in support. Just make sure you’re near the appropriate people when you switch attunements so they get the boons/heals.

If you’re a tanky D/D and can get in there and brawl, you’ll keep the other nearby melee up with all the protection, heals, and regen. The simple water attune, roll, switch, repeat 9 seconds later outputs tens of thousands of healing a minute before you even hit any buttons. I hear a lot of people say “you can’t keep people alive with healing in gw2”. I gotta say, unless someone is facetanking in berserker gear, you can come pretty kitten close.

In the 0/10/0/30/30, you can switch the 30 water trait to aura sharing, handing out plenty of fury/swift too, of course they get the actual aura effects also.

That’s before getting into the might stacks you give out from any fire 4 —> earth 4, 5 you get off. In PVE I like to sub out a cantrip and load up arcane wave for another blast finisher too. If no healing is necessary at the moment then you’ve got the earth roll in evasive arcana for yet another blast. It’s really long lasting might too with +70% boon duration (30 arcane, 2 superior monk, 2 superior water, 2 major water). Each blast finish in fire will give 3 stacks of might that last 34 seconds.

It’s good enough that I would argue a guardian + ele is better than 2 guardians for PVE. Some people might dispute that but it’s extremely viable regardless.

If someone’s playing staff and isn’t near people to give the attunement switch bonuses, they cannot match D/D support boonwise OR healwise (In fact, it isn’t even close). So if you run with a staff, be mobile and get near people at appropriate times. Though staff makes up for it in some situations with the multiple CC fields available.

personally, I’ve gone d/d with a mix of knights/valkyrie/berserker gear and went auramancer. I do decent damage and keep quite a few useful boons on all other melee teammembers. the amount of healing is quite good even if you don’t spec into it, but it’s not something you focus on. if I’m in a dungeon and someone goes full ‘support’, we usually take a lot longer because this person does 0 damage and the support is often completely unnecessary – what does a healer do, if everybody’s at full health? he weighs down the team.

Eiken.6821:

Hey,

Originally I created an Elementalist with the thought of only doing dungeons with her at full support mode/healing.

I have read some of the forums (after the fact of leveling her a bit) that suggest against going support or heal build and just doing more DPS with minor heal abilities.

I wanted to know if it truly is a silly thing to go full support or recommendations?

I usually play healers in games so it was kind of a bummer that I couldn’t in this one (I do like the trinity, just doesn’t cover the one character I always lean toward :P ) I have a thief as my main character for all else.

P.S Also, someone noted that healing was a very boring way to go versus DPS?

As someone who also enjoys playing healer I gotta say GW2 is refreshing. Water magic is your first port of call when traiting and where your healing comes from. But Just member Support does not equal Healing. All the fields you put down and boons you give are all under support. So there is much benefit to swapping you elements around according to the situation.

I’m using a D/D build with Powerful Auras I can support my party very well, even better in a party full of melee characters (that can benefit more from the aura sharing)

While a support role is very easily possible as elementalist, it’s important to know what support you actually have, and that there are times when killing things works better.

As for what’s available with staff (what I’m most familiar with):

Fire: Best damage output when other support isn’t necessary + Lava Font fire field (Area might on blast finisher)

Water: Every skill here supports in some way
- 1 : AoE heal around the target
- 2 : 6 stacks of vuln every 3 seconds or so
- 3 : AoE heal ground-targeted, + water field (AoE heal on blast finisher, AoE regen to melee combatants on projectile finisher)
- 4 : Chill slows down mob attack delay/move rate, frost field for more chill + frost armor (which now adds a defensive buff)
- 5 : 4 stacks of regen over 10 seconds, water field

Air
- 2 : Targeted blind with a small AoE around the target, short CD
- 3 : Knockback/Interrupt/Defiant Stack Remover
- 4 : AoE swiftness (kinda meh, but still support)
- 5 : Lightning field + dazes for lots of interrupts/defiant stack removals over a short period

Earth
- 1 : Weakness with nearly 100% uptime if you have condition duration, though that requires sticking in earth…
- 2 : Blast finisher for all those nice fields staff has
- 3 : Group projectile reflection if you trait for powerful auras
- 4 : Cripple, but this is hard to use and doesn’t matter if your group’s got decent melee fighters
- 5 : Immobilize, but see 4

That’s just the weapon skills for staff, and a lot of those aren’t dependent on stacking healing power or traiting for support. As for actual trait support…

Boons on attunement (Water Regen and Earth Protection are the most valuable for support, but you need to be close enough to allies to spread it to them)
You can get a 20% CD reduction for water if you want to focus more on the healing skills
Water AoE heal on attunement
Evasive Arcana is awesome; AoE heal + condition removal in water, or AoE cripple + blast finisher in earth, or AoE blind for 6 seconds on air
You can also trait for an AoE condition removal when attuning to water, and condition removal whenever you grant anybody regen. With both that’s 2 condition removals when attuning to water, but also 4 condition removals over 10 seconds when you use healing rain if you’re using staff (and one self-removal when using Glyph of Elemental Harmony in water)
There’s a bunch of other traits that I’m sure are useful as well, but I’ve only really described the ones I’m familiar with.

This isn’t starting to consider utility skills. What’s important to remember is that support is not just healing, especially when you pay attention to how much more eles can do than simply healing.

I’m sure the other ele weapons have plenty of support available as well, but I’m not used to them, so I won’t talk about that.

Evyl Hart.1980:

I will never understand the point of going full support. The heal is totally not worth it, and you sacrifice so much damage to run it. Not to mention all the combo fields/condition spreading is still used in damage builds. But I guess people miss monk so much that they will try anything…

I absolutely hated healing in other MMOs, and I’ve never played monk in GW1. But I love playing support ele, mainly because depending on the situation, I can switch from damage to healing to CC in a heartbeat. Sure, I can go full DPS on all my characters, but where is the diversity then?

And if you ever really take the time to analyze your dungeon runs, you’ll notice they run much more smoothly when there is at least one character being full support.

just fyi, no one really needs support. need dps and survivability. don’t die, and kill stuff. thx. we don’t need ur 200 pt water aa. If you can maintain 25 vuln solo at least you might be useful unless there’s a warrior or a (god kitten forbid) axe (ROFL) necro in the group.

Xynn.2748:

just fyi, no one really needs support. need dps and survivability. don’t die, and kill stuff. thx. we don’t need ur 200 pt water aa. If you can maintain 25 vuln solo at least you might be useful unless there’s a warrior or a (god kitten forbid) axe (ROFL) necro in the group.

Ah. And what if my support can help the DPSer survive (he can pay less attention to “keeping himself alive”) so he can do more damage, something he is probably much more suited for that I?

You have a really narrowminded view. It’s not about you, it’s about your team. Unless you’re a solo player of course, in that case, go ahead.

I disagree with Xynn as well. People say healing is pointless but that’s because they misunderstand its purpose. It’s not meant to be the only way to heal. It’s used to take the pressure off of teammates so they don’t have to use their healing skills as often. Less healing animations means more dps animations. I’ve seen glass cannons struggle while killing CoF 1 bosses quickly but I’ve also seen them thrive with just one support specced ele that healed when needed, stacked might to increase overall damage and use all kinds to tricks to keep swiftness up when running past mobs.

I’ve also did a test while the Cave Troll event was going on. When I was only using fire, several people were downed. When the troll respawned later and I only used water, no one went down. From then on, I refrain from using water in that event just so I can get my daily heals!

Why not do both?

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Why not do both?

It’s just in that particular event that I don’t use water and that’s only when I want healing dailies. For all others I’m constantly switching between fire and water. I rarely use air outside of applying swiftness because I find little use for blinds and the damage is lackluster. As for earth, if magnetic shield lasted 8 seconds or 5 seconds with more than one way of applying it, I would consider it as a great defensive attunement. I’m still tinkering with it on occasion but, as things are now, water is just better. I get heals, regeneration and a few conditions which I find more useful.

Crossplay.2067:

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Why not do both?

It’s just in that particular event that I don’t use water and that’s only when I want healing dailies. For all others I’m constantly switching between fire and water. I rarely use air outside of applying swiftness because I find little use for blinds and the damage is lackluster. As for earth, if magnetic shield lasted 8 seconds or 5 seconds with more than one way of applying it, I would consider it as a great defensive attunement. I’m still tinkering with it on occasion but, as things are now, water is just better. I get heals, regeneration and a few conditions which I find more useful.

playing with staff, which means combofields, while ignoring earths blast finished (pre-cast ofc).. personally, I’d recommend you to go over your books again before giving people bad advice.
fyi: earth, #2, switch to air, #5, arcane blast finisher gives nearly a minute of speed. just something out of your ignored attunements.

Crossplay.2067:

Swimsasa Stoon.8936:

Why not do both?

It’s just in that particular event that I don’t use water and that’s only when I want healing dailies. For all others I’m constantly switching between fire and water. I rarely use air outside of applying swiftness because I find little use for blinds and the damage is lackluster. As for earth, if magnetic shield lasted 8 seconds or 5 seconds with more than one way of applying it, I would consider it as a great defensive attunement. I’m still tinkering with it on occasion but, as things are now, water is just better. I get heals, regeneration and a few conditions which I find more useful.

I use D/D as a support/healer. Shared auras and waterskill 2 and 5 plus switching to water heals a bunch. Earth 4 and Air 5 are pretty good control skills and fire 3 and 4 give combofields with which you can give your allies some might. Also switching atunements in general with maxed out boon duration will give your allies might, regen, protection etc. You yourself will be pretty hard to kill also.

i did not read the wall of text but this is the build i have atm for full water elementalist healer/support WvW / PvP

i build it solely based on trial and error, and with this current build i can say im happy, there may still be some adjustments minor though to make it more viable, but i can say i am happy with the gameplay of this build.

at the moment my gears are still exotic

SUPPORT DAMAGE DEALER / SUPPORT HEALER

GW2 do not need a full healer, because each class has the ability to heal itself, so water ele builds can only really be support healers, but still have damage dealing capabilities so this should not be ignored.

when engaging enemies i usually start with earth skills , followed by fire skills to start the ticks of my DoTs on the enemies, sometimes im even bold enough to rush to the enemies (which often encourages my allies to rush as well), knowing that i could easily survive and walk out of from the red circles of hell unscathed. I need to time my attunement to water cause it has aoe heal effect and regen, which could help my allies go on and fight.

if there is intensive damage, i attune to water (and then perform a dodge to activate the cleansing wave wave effect) attuning to water would heal you and nearby allies, and grant them regen, and removing a condition. If the heals still was not able to mitigate the damage, i would use healing rain (and geyser) then attune to earth to blast it, to add x3 regen which would also remove conditions (healing could remove 2 conditions by itself)

i also try to stay on water (esp when earth and fire are still on cooldown) because your first water skill heals your allies within the blast range

SURVIVABILTY
as a support damage dealer and support healer, you must survive! as such stay on the fringes of the fights, away from red circles, if pursued by enemies, there are a lot of things you can do, each element has a skill allowing you to “get away” so use them wisely!

SET
Giver’s Set (Toughness, Healing Power, Boon Duration)

RUNE
Rune of Dwayna
this rune increases healing power and and regeneration duration by 30% and also adds +5s regen when you use a heal skill so its a nice combo rune with my build

Weapon
(Toughness, Healing Power, Condition Damage)

SIGILS
sigil of renewal : when you change attunement you and your allies are healed (a nice combo with elemental attunement) and basically allows you to heal allies every 9s whenever you attune to a different element

Sigil of Purity (so so rune, im still thinking of a better rune, but for now this will do. the 60% chance to remove a condition every 10s seemed too weak, but in combination with the other traits and skills, it could be a potential life saver)

Accessories
(Toughness, Healing Power, Boon Duration)

my traits
0/2/6/6

EARTH
III Earth’s Embrace – activates auto when my health goes below 50% granting me 8s of -33% protection from damage, 100% vigor regen, 3k regen heal, and stability (since i have the talent: cleansing water, this activation would also remove a condition

WATER
V Soothing Wave -whenever im crit i gain regen, which would also remove a condition, and because of the rune of dwayna the regen duration is much much longer than usual that most of the time never loses regen the entire battle

IX Soothing Disruption- this gives my cantrips additional abilities: vigor regen, and regen (which would also remove a condition)

XI Cleansing Water – this is the fundamental trait of the build, whenever regen is grated a condition is removed

conditions are very important in PvP, they could easily spell the difference between survival and being downed, so as a support, you need to have a way to deal with this, and cleansing water is the solution, with your skills and traits providing you with the ability to gai and grant regen, comes the ability to suppress the prevalence of conditions, which could really make a big impact in your and your team’s survivability; thus in your gameplay as well.

ARCANA
III final shielding (not really that important but i add it for survivability, sometimes you just need a few more seconds before you could use your healing skills again to survive and cotinue fighting)

VIII elemental attunement (also the one of the core traits of the build. without this you will just rely o your 2 heal skills which isnt really that good because of their o
long cooldowns. elemental attunement + sigil of renewal will provide burst heal on par with your “geyser” and only for 9s

XI Evasive Arcana, this is a nice addition to the build, aside from having the condition cleanser when you attuned to water and perform a dodge, it also improves your bleeds when you are attuned to earth and fire, as part of your rotation

HEAL SKILL:
Signet of Restoration – the heal is weak, but it gives you 300-400 heal per attack, which could help mitigate damage (in combination with mango pies; which resotes 90 health per second and improves vitality)

so the three utility skills i have are all cantrips because i have the IX soothing disruption trait

cleansing flame (removes condition, grants regen;which then removes another condition, gives 100% vigot regen, would help you perform a dodge: cleansing wave when attuned to water, to remove a condition)

armor of earth and lightning flash, both gives regen and vigor regens aside from the usual effects of their abilities.

:D

The Necro is strong in this one. Can you feel it

Holy mother of Necro.
Anet should make this class viable so they stay out of Forums.

The best supports are bunkers that can self sustain while passively buffing allies.

in dungeons, its better to just DPS the NPC’s in a timely fashion, as you can imagine everyone in the group have many things todo and that dungeon is but 1 of many on their quest todo whatever it is they wanna do. So making short work of them is effective because you can head onto the next task. But if you would like to heal your allies abit but keeping damage in mind. You can mix Things like Zerker, Cavalier and zealot(gotta craft). if you arent at the crafting level, you can check out magi pieces which can be obtained via twilight arbor dungeon. then throw in some sentinel or zerker. In time you’ll learn it is best to just DPS the NPC’s. Use things like fiery GS, icbow, Staff and you can just aoe all the npcs, cause your an ele! and its alot of fun to create storms