Guild Wars 2

Has anyone tried or tested a fully dedicated staff healing build? Water Blast actually heals for a significant amount now.

I have and its not that great. The majority of healing done comes from the fact that your heals are water fields. The blasts are unaffected by your healing power. You will be a better utility to the team if you lower your cooldowns on those skills though.

You’re better off running with celestial if you can get it, as FrownyClown said, most of the heals in organized group play comes from the blasting of the water fields you drop instead of the spells themselves. When I run staff I run celestial for the crit damage and the all around stat buffs(Valkyrie is a good substitute if you cant get yourself celestial). It ups your damage a solid amount compared to if you ran full clerics, making you more of a utility than just a water field bot. All you really need to do is make sure you have 30 in Water trait line for the reduced CDs and condi clears and all that and at least 20 in Arcane for blasting staff, rest of traits can be tweaked to your liking.

With the Arcana trait changes is no more viable imo.

Before changes :
With dodges + waterfields + blasts ( 3 blasts + 1 whirl ) + attunement swap + auto attack + condi cleans + regens I could keep my party up anytime.

It was OP, I admit it, with 2000+ healing power, one time I tried to stay alive against 6+ players, and it took them way more than 5 mins to kill me ( at the end they where more like 10 than 6 )

But now… I feel like it has been crippled.

I tried it twice after the patch, but wasn’t good anymore.

20 in arcana is usually what staff users go for the increased staff aoe. Personally, I would go 20 in water. 1 for reduced cooldown on skills and the other for reduced cooldown on cantrips. If I was going to make a dps build 20 30 0 0 20.

I found 30/20/0/0/20 better for DPS, seeing as it is all basically fire.

I am still curious how Water Blast will work now in practise. 750+ small AoE heals are not exactly bad for sustained fights, though the tiny AoE might still drag it down to non-viability.

I don’t get why anyone would play a healing build with the current status of the game.

I do it a lot spamming water fields and water autoattack on gates keeping our army alive, and what’s the reward for it? I don’t get credit for destroying the gate, i don’t get credit for killing people behind it ‘cause i deal no damage, i don’t get credit for nothing.

Support in wvw has a huge flaw, it isn’t recognized by any reward system..

Sssshhhhh stop giving away that supports get zero loot. Lots of them don’t know about tagging. It is even bad to have a healer in your party, get some dps instead. But their heals are welcome though!

When I see a staff elementalist in WvW, I tank the gods for my free loot and I killed the stuffing out of it. So thank you staff ElE.

So here’s some realities.

A lot of people like to talk about blast finishers and how they’re the primary source of healing. An organized force (such as a guild) you’ll certainly have a number of Guardians doing this. However, I find it’s still pretty rare to see more than 1-2 doing it when you have a force rolling around and sometimes none if the force has no real organization.

That said it was pretty viable to play a support/healer prior to the Evasive Arcana nerf. We had many sources of healing (more than a Guardian even) and most of which in WvW got full benefit from +Healing making it pretty worth while. After the nerf you basically gotta aim dodge roll right on top of someone to hit with it (since they will be moving around too most likely so the small 180 radius is easy to miss with). It can make it far more challenging to say the least.

The new Water Blast actually helps out in the scenario of taking on doors to counter act Arrow Carts. Auto attack the door and splash heal the people near it. In other scenarios targets are unreliable to hit/heal your target as desired so it’s not really as useful.

The people who think you get zero tags have no real concept on how you play this. It’s not like you’d sit in Water 100% of the time and do nothing. Usually it was more along the lines of drop Static Field, drop Meteor Swarm, then switch to Water and use the skills there while you wait. It’s still pretty easy to hit around 2000 Power, 1400 Healing and have plenty of Tough/Vitality.