Guild Wars 2

Hi folks! Like myself, you guys were probably pretty disappointed in the Spec. Patch that initially reworked Med Kit. Healing Turret after the most recent fix to the bugged Med Blaster skill still reigns supreme.

I wanted to submit an idea for an alteration to Med Kits functionality. My guess is someone has suggested this verbatim, or something similar already, but here it goes.

I would like to see the kit centered around it’s auto-attack Med Blaster. It’s a neat concept for a bit of direct healing, but it just does little effective healing at the moment. Each of the other skills, the “Throw X”s, does about 505 heaking base with a .25 coefficient, which is not a bad little heal.
The usability of these little packages are abysmal though, as the pick up hut boxes are tiny! In the middle of combat finding a tiny pack or repositioning so your engi can maybe throw it directly at you is highly impractical.

So a thought: have the skills Throw Bandage, Throw Stimulant, Throw Accelerant, and Throw Antidote be changed to Inject Bandage (maybe Restorative instead), Inject Stimulant, Inject Accelerant, and Inject Antidote

The function would be that using say, Inject Antidote, would apply the healing and effects of what was Throw Antidote to the next use of Med Blaster by “charging” it, or injecting the Antidote into the spray of the next Med Blaster. Thus, the healing would be the base Med Blaster, plus the 505 of the “injection” and the condition cure and Resistance application as well.

Even this might not beat out the raw team healing per second of Healing Turret (not able to run the numbers at the moment) , but it would give the Med Kit the much needed usability to at least be experimented with to find places where it works well. As to specifics beyond these, we can discuss them here. Overall though, what do you think of this idea?

I’ve seen this been posted here before, and it have one problem: Your med blast only hits allies, not yourself, so you would not be able to benefit from the skills effect. Ofcourse, they could change it to effect yourself as well, I just like to point it out. Also, if they do, the blasts channel should be shorter.

Other than that, personally I like the idea of Medpacks, it feelt like an unique method of healing/support that have it’s own downsides and upsides. It’s just that the execution is les than optimal. Ground targeting only gets in the way since you run as fast as they move through the air. Different cast times on the medpacks makes them inconsistent and, when combined with ground targeting, have a tendancy to make you run past the medpacks landing spot before they land. There is also the problem with target count, making them very selfish.

The issues you pointed out with the packs were actually why I felt it was far wiser to scrap them entirely. The issue too, if you changed them to be faster-flying projectiles, with a large area of effect, and larger number of affected allies, it would still push the use of Med Blaster to the way side compared to just using the Throws and rotating out of the kit afterward.

Change them into pulsing pylons with AoE area. For example throw bandage becomes Throw bandage pylon. Throw it in an area and first it pulses 50% of the current healing, then 50% of it current regen, and then again. This would give the Med Kit an actual group support role instead of jus one target. If ArenaNet want that active healing that bad (walking over it) they should make the pylons activate by walking over it

Pylons I am actually glad they didn’t stick with, as they suffer an issue the packs suffer from; the higher mobility of combat compared to how stationary the skill is mechanically. If you and your ally are retreating or repositioning, stopping for more than a moment can mean death or just be very counterproductive. When you place the pylon in this scenario, you and your ally might not be able to stay within the radius for that second tick, if the radius of the pulse effect is not large enough. Additionally, this would make them basically turrets in another form with different effects.

The Throw X skills suffer, and in fact run counter to the idea of the kit, by affecting only one ally; we are in agreement here. That’s the idea behind using the Med Blaster as a way to apply their effects to multiple targets while giving Med Blaster a purpose past subpar healing.

Here’s my suggestion, it is pretty simple and feed into their current iteration; All med packs thrown to the ground instead make a circle that allies can run through and receive the effect of the med pack. They can only get the effect once per medpack.

So you can stack all 4 on top of each other, so multiple allies can run through and all receive healing/boons. With a radius that makes it easy to hit allies, and also easy for allies to see on the ground.

I like this idea in the OP.

I think the medkit should keep its packages, just not in a throwable fashion.

I would like the medkit to remain unique among the engineer healing options and to serve as a focused healing option while healing turret should be our area of effect healing/condition cleanse, elixir H should be our selfish heal and AED should be our high risk/high reward heal.

Among the problems that arose with the medkit update was not only the mandatory throw effect (this trait was only taken because it provided a solid 25% boost to medkits, meaning you could get a nice addition with small amounts of healing power) but also their heavily shortened duration to compensate for the added resistance and condiclears. In pvp you could drop a set of medkits out of combat while capturing a node and still have them available if the enemy response arrived. In pve you could do the same before an encounter. Now it essentially forces you to throw the medkits at the player when he/she needs it instead of already having them available. This change was implemented to prevent you from having 10s of condiclears stacked along with a long resistance boost available if you have camped a point for a while.

I would suggest the following:

-Stimulant supplier now doubles the health received from medkit drops on other allies.
-health insurance buffed to 20-25% (keep in mind you are only healing others extra while in medkit, meaning you do no/little damage)
-Medblaster applies “overheal” for 2-3 seconds (not stacking) which increases all healing that ally recieves by x%, meaning timing a medblast on someone who is going to use his/her healing skill increases that healing. This could possibly be an additional function to medical dispersion field.
-Medkits lasts for a longer duration, but once deployed the skills are swapped to a detonate function, this allows for preparatory healing while still preventing massive stacks of medkits on a point. The recharges should still be happening while the medkits are out, meaning they should not work like gyros do now cough, meaning redeployment is easy.
-The resistance duration of the last skill should last a bit longer on other allies, short duration resistance is primarily for covering cleansing during condibursts /CC and medkits will never work as a panic countermeasure.
-Increase the scaling of medkits and healblaster.
-EDIT: I almost forgot, give the kits a thin, tall blue beacon of light (possibly with a hovering ankh) signaling where they are, even in a graphical mess. Heck if i had it my way we should see them on the minimap.

This way we have a quite unique healing option, without the hassle of having to balance it around healing 5 allies at a time.

Imo, we need more control, because control is the key to healing. Relying on wounded people to heal themselves with our mini medkits is just silly and simply does not work.
You can’t rely on them at all, AT ALL.

Anet, that is the reason nobody tries to seriously use the kit, it’s silly, people like to be effective, not silly, so they pick HT for 2 waterfields, crazy emergency AOE heals, ability to use offensive/utility/protection abilities WHILE healing and AOE knockback(and blast finisher so another heal if specced..) from explosives build.

the best thing about medkit atm is 15% outgoing healing while using mortar/egun aoe heals, and even that utility is behind keyboard juggling and often you can accomplish the same and more by slapping down a healing turret.

It simply takes too much time and effort to use the kit when compared to other options, so when a healer is going to work, he’s only gonna take reliable and useful tools with him.

Would you clean your floors with a brush of a vacuum cleaner? Both work, but after using the vacuum for a while, you don’t wanna go back to the brush.

It’s exactly the same for medkit/HT.

Solution 1: Make every medkit skill PBAOE but cut down the buffs slightly.
Solution 2: Let us throw kits straight to our selected friendly target so we have CONTROL.

There’s no point holding on to broken mechanics just because they’re unique, give us instead mechanics that MAKE SENSE AND WORK.

In my opinion it’s perfectly acceptable to rely on people to learn that if they are wounded they can walk through your medkits to quickly recover. This was sort of how the old medkit worked, and compared to the current state it was in a good spot (or at least better).

The problem isn’t that your allies have to adapt their playstyle a bit to reap rewards, the problem is that the rewards as of now are worse than ever and that the low profile of the packs make them hard to spot even for the player aware of them, which i think could partially be solved with my beam of light and hoovering ankh idea giving everyone looking over the battlefield an idea of where they are in case they need them

simply making them pbaoe means it has to more or less compete with healing turret. I would prefer if we had healing skills that excel at different roles, medkit ideally being reliant on coordination and focus but with big rewards for being properly utilized. With the craze of implementing outgoing heal coefficients we can make a medkit that have the potential to burst heal allies who need it with short cooldown without us being unkillable monster bunkers and without the effects having to be balanced about healing everyone.

I think your second idea holds a lot of merit though, and this should not only be implemented to medkit but to skills like elixir F and similar skills as well, any projectile that affects allies should be able to target allies. It would open up a whole new range of skills, not to mention a whole new way of playing. That they like to show off their new movable fields and boast about all that other new tech while still not having implemented proper allied targeting is rather strange, especially given how much they want to “support support” in the expansion so to speak. It would be nice to see you drop the medkits at your feet without a friendly target and throw them at your friend otherwise.

thanks miri I think the original idea is quite funny, and works in clean environments well, but as soon as you add some mobs and spell effects to the mix, the mini heal kits simply vanish in the middle of the chaos
it would require telepathy atm to reach the same amount of effectiveness as HT can pump out :P
Also, camera angles will mess it up at some point even if they add arrows or whatever beacons to the medkits, even a big enough mob will completely hide the markers if it’s close enough to your face.

I’m trying to think from 10 man raid healing perspective atm, and I just don’t see the current targeting mechanics working at all in that setting. PBAoe works, for sure, but then medkit wouldn’t be “special” in any way.. just a really good healing kit :P

We also need hotkeys to target teammates if Solution 2 becomes reality, lets hope it does not just target next/nearest ally key.

The functionality of medpacks worked fine pre spec patch but their effects was lackluster. Now their functionality is unintuitive but their effect is quite good.
OPs suggestion is far from bad, but while it might be effective, it is kinda simple and boring. If I wanted to play simple and boring I would play Warrior. Engineers are about doing their job in a complicated way and takeing advantage of that.

The idea of Medpacks have been done really well in many other games. Making a base or storage of medpacks that allies can go to if they need them is very interesting and sets engineers apart from other classes. It’s currently one big problem for that play style: Medpacks should last longer than 12 sec. There is no reason to create a semi-permanent gameobject in the world if it’s just going to disappear shortly after.

Instead of the 12 sec durration, I’d like to see 5 min like traps and turrets, but a cap of 10 medpacks out at any given time (includes Bunker Down packs or Med Pack Drop). Going over the cap removes the oldest medpack. This way, we tap into the engineer aspect of preparation and creation that is also seen with turrets.