Guild Wars 2

I decided to create a full cleric gear set, because I wanted to run a staff support build when grouping. Since this was intended to be a staff build, those are the healing skills I tested with. I wanted to post the results and see what others think.

Total +Healing – 200
Water stance 5pt minor (passive per tick) – 90
Geyser (per tick, ticks 3 times) – 858
Signet of Healing (passive per spell cast) – 222
Signet of Healing (activated) – 3375
Regen (per tick, any source) – 155
Water Bolt – 396

Total +Healing – 1166
Water stance 5pt minor (passive per tick) – 138
Geyser (per tick, ticks 3 times) – 1100
Signet of Healing (passive per spell cast) – 319
Signet of Healing (activated) – 3853
Regen (per tick, any source) – 276
Water Bolt – 487

+Healing ratio to actual amount of health returned
Water stance 5pt minor (passive per tick) – 20:1
Geyser (per tick, ticks 3 times) – 4:1
Signet of Healing (passive per spell cast) – 10:1
Signet of Healing (activated) – 2:1
Regen (per tick, any source) – 8:1
Water Bolt – 10:1

I rounded off the fractions, but these are very close. So essentially, I see two spells where there seems to be a meaningful return. The activated water signet (though this is self only, so not much use for group utility) and Geyser. Geyser seems to almost be worth it, though keep in mind you need a full gear investment to reach the +healing I had, and in return you see an extra 242 health per tick, noting that you’re going to have a hard time in the GW2 “always be moving” combat to get anyone with multiple ticks.

My initial reaction is that this doesn’t seem very worth the investment in a full +healing set of gear. I’m open to questions or ideas on how this can be improved; though unless I’ve overlooked it I couldn’t find any traits that really impacted our healing capabilities.

In Arcane there’s an attunement trait that bolsters your healing ability when attuned to water .. check it out and see if it makes any difference.

I made a thread in GD about the scaling of +Healing and uh… honestly, it’s not looking good.

I ran the same kind of tests in beta and came to the same conclusion. Some +healing is OKish for personal use, especially if you have high vit; however as a support stat it’s pretty worthless for an ele. Honestly, it’s pretty worthless overall imo.

Guardians fare slightly better when stacking heal for support, but largely because of Tome of Courage.

Jayne.9251:

In Arcane there’s an attunement trait that bolsters your healing ability when attuned to water .. check it out and see if it makes any difference.

Which trait is that? I just looked through all of my major traits for Arcane and Water, and I see nothing like what you describe.

There is no trait like that, unless Jayne is talking about Elemental Attunement, which does grant regen on attune.

Rainshine.5493:

There is no trait like that, unless Jayne is talking about Elemental Attunement, which does grant regen on attune.

Yes, I’m already using that. I’m also using evasive arcana and using it to blast finish my water fields. That’s about the best support setup I’ve found right now.

I do wish there were some traits that helped our healing directly; I know guardian has one that increases their passive healing at the very least.

Healing is useless, and this is what I’ve been complaining about, and this is really one of three things I want changed.

1) Better stat scaling for Damage, Armour, and Healing stats
2) Better synergy between traits
3) Useful elites please.

Do we have the numbers for a blast finisher in a healing field?

Wildpath.9078:

Do we have the numbers for a blast finisher in a healing field?

No, sadly I didn’t think to test that at the time. I’ll probably go back and run that test too (though I may have to test with 1066 healing power, as my talents now include 10 fewer points in water).

My healing in +healing armor around 1100 healing at level 80 seems to be quite higher then that.

I’ll get numbers up in a few.

Ditch the cleric for the shamans amulet. No point in heals if you don’t have the toughness. Besides, you’ll find the condition damage goes a lot further than the power.

I went back and was trying to test the blast finisher in my water field thing, and it’s actually quite difficult to get good numbers. There are 3 or 4 things happening (passive heals, signet of regen passive, proc heal, etc) and the little heart right in the way to tell me I did a combo. Since none of the healing numbers show up in the combat log, it makes this hard to get a real number.

Complicating this further, it appears that the blast finisher heal is a spread heal, so it looks like the numbers you see will be different based on the number of people who get hit with it. When I tested it with myself only, it was darn near a full heal. When I was testing in my dungeon run, I was seeing numbers between 1,000 and 2,000, again seeming to vary largely on the number of people hit by it (but tough to tell exactly how many I hit in each case, again due to the ‘not in the combat log’ part).

Does +healing affect the amount you heal other players, or just the amount you heal yourself?

Yvraine.2715:

Does +healing affect the amount you heal other players, or just the amount you heal yourself?

Both. It impacts the spells that produce healing, but to varying degrees based on the spell.

This post makes me sad I wanted to run a staff/water support build with +healing.

1 Vitality equals 10 hitpoints. 1 Healing Power heals for a total of 10 hp if you hit a full group with 8s of regeneration and one Healing Ripple. (assuming everyone has taken damage)

8s of regeneration and one Healing Ripple is coincidently what a heavy support elementalist with decent boon duration will generate every time he switches into water attunement.