Guild Wars 2

Engineer doesn’t have enough viable choices for their healing skill imo. I like the A.E.D., both thematically and functionally but I feel like it’s problably one of the most problematically designed healing skills in the game right now. Here’s my idea on how to fix this little gadget, for pvp at least.

A.E.D.
20s cooldown
A.E.D. (5s): Heals when the timer expires. If lethal damage is taken, the damage is negated and you are healed for a large amount.
Healing: 2,896
Healing when lethal damage taken: 5,792

Toolbelt: Static Shield (reference to Faraday Shield)
30s cooldown
Cure two conditions.
Shocking Aura (2s): Stun nearby attacking foes with an electric shock (only once per 2 seconds for each attacker).
Stun (1s).

Numbers subject to balancing of course.

Reasoning:
If the idea is to save the A.E.D. for near to death moments it’s cooldown cannot be 40 seconds. That’s 40 seconds you’re left with no heal having recently been close to death, especially if the effect doesn’t trigger. Requiring to drop to 0 health to condi purge is not practical. It works ok to prolong your life a little but it needs more use than that.
Static shock is just not practical on a profession that generally wants to keep some distance from their enemy, and frankly isn’t that good regardless. It’s ok with the wrench toolkit I guess, but a defensive toolbelt skill is much more needed.

Also, what does A.E.D stand for? Automatic Emergency Defibrilator or something?

The toolbelt is a nice idea. If you suggested it also being a stun breaker, it would be even nicer.

I like the toolbelt skill and it would be much nicer if it was a stunbreaker too. As for your suggested changes, I think it was balanced to give off a really big heal, so it’ll stay at 40 seconds. However, I think that if no lethal damage was taken, the cooldown should be reduced in half.

Wondrouswall.7169:

The toolbelt is a nice idea. If you suggested it also being a stun breaker, it would be even nicer.

Hmm stun breaker I think would be a little powerful for a toolbelt skill that already purges condis and can inflict stun. It would be reasonable to have it useable while stunned though.

DanteZero.9736:

As for your suggested changes, I think it was balanced to give off a really big heal, so it’ll stay at 40 seconds. However, I think that if no lethal damage was taken, the cooldown should be reduced in half.

Not a bad idea, I guess that could work. The numbers would need tweaking as a 4344 heal on 20 seconds comes pretty close to a 12280 heal on 40 seconds.
I’d say meet in the middle with 30 second cooldown and the halving effect would be pretty ideal.

I’m using a build for ranked (although my mmr is low… due to some tie trying out memser) that uses AED. It is a variant of my shotgun ninja build. Regardless, the heal is nice. The change I would implement after a lot of thought, is to make it remove conditions when it heals, regardless of if you died. Losing healing turret, is losing some of the only condition removal engineers have… I think if it removed condtions after 5 seconds, you’d see it get used more. The cast time seems likee a good drawback for opponents, although I’d be happy with an instant cast. But slowly dying to conditions (hello incendiary powder) is frustrating enough to not use this heal. Although the fun part of this heal is spending much of the match fighting at 20% hp. XD Just waiting for the right moment to pop it.

Wheras the propsed changes are nice, I don´t think that aed needs that much change. For its toolkit skill it would be more than enough to increase its range to 600.
For aed itself I wouldn´t even screw with the healing numbers too much.
I say make it heal for its full potential at all times after the 5 seconds, regardless of the player reaching 0 hp and clean 5 conditions.
Just make it so that if the player hits 0 hp the cooldown is reduced to 20-25 seconds. If not, it has its usual 40 sec cooldown.

Jelle.2807:

Wondrouswall.7169:

The toolbelt is a nice idea. If you suggested it also being a stun breaker, it would be even nicer.

Hmm stun breaker I think would be a little powerful for a toolbelt skill that already purges condis and can inflict stun. It would be reasonable to have it useable while stunned though.

DanteZero.9736:

As for your suggested changes, I think it was balanced to give off a really big heal, so it’ll stay at 40 seconds. However, I think that if no lethal damage was taken, the cooldown should be reduced in half.

Not a bad idea, I guess that could work. The numbers would need tweaking as a 4344 heal on 20 seconds comes pretty close to a 12280 heal on 40 seconds.
I’d say meet in the middle with 30 second cooldown and the halving effect would be pretty ideal.

I suggested 20 seconds if no lethal damage was taken because I was running some numbers in my head and compared it to Elixer H which heals for about 25% more HP and has a 25% longer base cooldown (Elixer H has 25 seconds as opposed to my suggested 20 seconds on AED’s non-lethal heal cooldown).

Given that the base AED’s non lethal healing is about 20% less than Elixer H, I figured lowering the cooldown to be 20 seconds would make it balanced since 20% less healing compared to Elixer H should mean a 20% faster cooldown. Coincidentally, half of 40 is 20, which happens to be 20% lower than 25. To me, that seems like a really elegant approach to making AED more desirable by simply halving the cooldown.

Also, the lethal healing is more than double the non-lethal healing, but the cooldown is only double the non-lethal cooldown suggested, so that’s a higher health gain per second if I’m not mistaken.