Guild Wars 2

I’ve been reading a lot lately about people’s opinions on low health pools and one thing in particular has been bugging me. It is something about how a smaller health pool is better because heals then heal a better percentage than with a large health pool. Now, I’ll admit that I might be missing something. I realize that their are some runes and some traits that proc on health percent but none of those seem that beneficial to warrant less health. So I’d like to explain something.

Lower health is never better than more health. If you use a heal skill and you only have 12k health you will raise in a higher percent than a person using the same heal skill with 20k health, but the actual number (assuming same build and HP stats) will be the exact same. The actual percentage of your health is actually very unimportant in your survivability. Also, with a lower health pool and a healing guardian build, you have a higher chance of eventually getting to full health and then wasting heals. If you had more health then you would have more to heal and you would spend less time overhealing more time creating a softer cushion in your health pool.

A larger health pool is also better for receiving powerful strikes as it leaves you with more health afterwards and more breathing room. And, no, you may never get your health back to full during a fight but full health isn’t as important and how much health you do get back entirely depends on your healing.

All in all, I don’t know if this needed to be said. It seems pretty obvious to me but then again, as I said, I might be missing some aspect of the game. As it is right now, I can’t find any reason to realistically cut health down just for any “on health percent” trait or rune. Also, this discussion is not about the balance between health and toughness or any other stat, just a discussion on larger health pools and their superiority over smaller health pools. AND this is not a debate over Warriors vs. Guardians.

Ok sorry for all of that (especially if somebody proves me wrong) but I wanted to get it out there either to help others or to learn something new myself.

DaedalusDragon.3754:

I’ve been reading a lot lately about people’s opinions on low health pools and one thing in particular has been bugging me. It is something about how a smaller health pool is better because heals then heal a better percentage than with a large health pool. Now, I’ll admit that I might be missing something. I realize that their are some runes and some traits that proc on health percent but none of those seem that beneficial to warrant less health. So I’d like to explain something.

Lower health is never better than more health. If you use a heal skill and you only have 12k health you will raise in a higher percent than a person using the same heal skill with 20k health, but the actual number (assuming same build and HP stats) will be the exact same. The actual percentage of your health is actually very unimportant in your survivability. Also, with a lower health pool and a healing guardian build, you have a higher chance of eventually getting to full health and then wasting heals. If you had more health then you would have more to heal and you would spend less time overhealing more time creating a softer cushion in your health pool.

A larger health pool is also better for receiving powerful strikes as it leaves you with more health afterwards and more breathing room. And, no, you may never get your health back to full during a fight but full health isn’t as important and how much health you do get back entirely depends on your healing.

All in all, I don’t know if this needed to be said. It seems pretty obvious to me but then again, as I said, I might be missing some aspect of the game. As it is right now, I can’t find any reason to realistically cut health down just for any “on health percent” trait or rune. Also, this discussion is not about the balance between health and toughness or any other stat, just a discussion on larger health pools and their superiority over smaller health pools. AND this is not a debate over Warriors vs. Guardians.

Ok sorry for all of that (especially if somebody proves me wrong) but I wanted to get it out there either to help others or to learn something new myself.

Im not exactly sure where you are getting this debate about smaller vs larger health pools from. The debates on the forums have been about the effectiveness of healing power with toughness vs vitality. No one is going to argue that with te same toughness having a smaller health pool is better, because it simply isnt. The issue has been is it better to take a smaller health pool with while taking less damage, or a bigger health pool and taking more damage.

Hey Daedalus, was thinking about posting the same thread myself.

I fail to see the logic of lower HP pools being better. If a player reads his pool well (not in terms of percentage but of actual HP left), he knows when it is time to heal himself depending on skills available and his comfort zone.

And to be honest, give an additional 5 K of base HP to a guardian and he’ll take it anytime.

Unless I am missing a key element too

i havent seen anyone claim a smaller healthpool is better than a bigger one; unless it was in conjunction with the vitality/toughness debate (i prefer toughness… but with a bit of vitality on my lower base health classes)… in most cases the ‘percentage healed’ thing comes from each health point being ‘effectively’ worth more with toughness than vitality; meaning (in theory) you heal more if you stack toughness over vitality

As Bash points out this is about the optimal distribution of stats rather than just an argument about health pool size.

Low HP means you’ve invested heavily into healing power and toughness or crit/crit damage.

IMHO Anet have done a pretty good job at balancing the relative pool size in relation to healing, armour or damage output ( although I definitely wouldn’t say no to a higher base line ).

• You can invest in healing power and toughness support heavy stats and throws out some big heals and soak up alot of melee damage, and keep agro in pve. Your effective healing against direct damage is high.
• You can have a large HP pool to help mitigate conditions and bursts and couple with some nice DPS. Your effective healing for direct damage is low, but you have a larger buffer against indirect damage.
• You can sacrifice HP for damage, and keep your healing trickling in by critting like an SOB. Your effective healing is low for both direct and indirect damage, but you have high HP recovery without much overheal wastage.
• You can mix a little of all of the above for a balanced build

Really it just comes down to how you should best invest your points to maximise your weapons, utilities and traits and compliment your playing style.

Anyone who argues vehemently that one is better than the other is missing the point

It’s about the ability to ignore vitality as a stat for the most part, and have those points elsewhere (healing power /toughness/etc)

Ok, I knew of those debates but I saw a lot of debate over vitality without regards to other stats often enough to warrant this. There was a lot of debate over a lower vitality being more effective due to higher percent heals…. I swear I saw that all over the place and it kind of bugged me.

DaedalusDragon.3754:

Ok, I knew of those debates but I saw a lot of debate over vitality without regards to other stats often enough to warrant this. There was a lot of debate over a lower vitality being more effective due to higher percent heals…. I swear I saw that all over the place and it kind of bugged me.

Our heals arent based on percentages. So that doesn’t make any sense.

If you have 20k life, or 16k life. your 9k heal is still going to heal for 9k.

The assumption by people who say Vit isn’t good is that the points are distributed to Toughness instead.

Kahrgan.7401:

DaedalusDragon.3754:

Ok, I knew of those debates but I saw a lot of debate over vitality without regards to other stats often enough to warrant this. There was a lot of debate over a lower vitality being more effective due to higher percent heals…. I swear I saw that all over the place and it kind of bugged me.

Our heals arent based on percentages. So that doesn’t make any sense.

If you have 20k life, or 16k life. your 9k heal is still going to heal for 9k.

That was actually my point. I’m not saying that this is my idea that somehow less health for the sake of it is better. That is not what I’m trying to say at all.

So long as everybody understands my point (whether they got it before or after reading my post) then this topic is moot. I only made it because it seemed like people were specifically trying to explain that less health was far superior to a greater health pool because percentages were higher per heal with less health. No one has to explain why that isn’t true to me, I’m a mathematics major in college, I know my percents.

“Less health is better” is not the complete argument. It’s “Less health with stats elsewhere, such as toughness, is better than high health and the lack of those other stats”.

Yes, a high HP pool is better at absorbing large damage spikes and is less likely to overheal. Conversely, toughness and healing power are good at reducing the total damage taken over time. Over a long period of time, toughness will prove more useful than vitality. I’m not sure on healing power. You have you look at effective HP – basically convert all damage reduction and scaled healing to raw HP.

If you look at some common PvE guardian builds, many of them have a lot of small heals over time and are built to survive taking hits for an extended period of time. Toughness plays into that naturally, giving them far more effective HP from all those small heals over 1 or 2 minute fights.

In addition, it’s difficult to obtain precision, vitality, and toughness in large amounts because of the currently available item affixes. There is an affix for Toughness/Power/Precision, but the affixes with both Vitality and Precision have a less desirable third attribute.

Well, Guardians are active mitigation tankers. Meaning, they have lots of active abilities which allows them to negate the incoming damage. Protection, Blocks, Blinds, Dodge with near-perma Vigor. This all leads to the fact that a (properly played) Guardian will receive less incoming damage, than say, a Warrior. Take away all these tanking abilities and Guardian will indeed become extremely squishy.

Guardian’s lower health pool is in fact there to balance the active tanking ability. There is this notion of ‘buffer tanking’ – where you have a large HP pool to soak in the incoming damage, but don’t have much means to regenerate the buffer quickly. In GW2, Necros are an interesting class for buffer tanking due to DS. Guardians do not have buffers – if they had, they would basically never die. They would use the buffer to soak up one burst and their active abilities to soak up another burst, giving then additional time until the cooldowns regenerate.

Simple terms… High Vitality is good when it does not negate your toughness. Healing power could be considered “soft health” if you are managing your utilities and VoR properly. Toughness > vitality >= healing power (depending on build)

All a low health pool means for Guardians is that we have to stack Toughness and work healing into our builds for survival, regardless of playstyle. Imagine the frustration for most of the community if AH/MF didn’t exist. That’s where the real “tankiness” comes from. (Not to take away from Protection/Blind/Block, but if you just take those and not a Toughness/healing saturated build, you’ll still be squishy).

Ok, I think this thread needs a lock.

I also want to double check one thing. Everybody here knows that I realize this right? I KNOW about the balancing of stats, I ONLY said this because it looked like others were ignoring the balancing part AND STRICTLY saying that less vitality was better than more vitality. I only wanted to make sure that if somebody did think that then they might get something out of this.

Alarox.4590:

All a low health pool means for Guardians is that we have to stack Toughness and work healing into our builds for survival, regardless of playstyle.

I disagree. Every playstyle needs a different approach, not just stacking toughness and healing.

There are situations that you will need to stack up for vitality, such as when facing condition damage builds. Remember that toughness will not save you from condition damage.

There are also situations wherein you do not need toughness and vitality and you need to stack for damage and crit, such as fighting bosses that have 1-hit skills.

In other words, you will need to adapt depending on a given situation.

I’m not a fan of low health from a pvp point of view, reason is incoming burst damage.

I have done a countless number of test in spvp with every build/rune combo you can think of and I came to favor a maxxed out honor and valor traits build with Dolyak runes, I sit a little over 20k health 2k+ toughness and about 1900+ power, I look at it this way, If I wanted to play a glass bomb build I would of made a thief or 100b warrior.

IMO a guardian is built to out last, with a nice health pool I have found I live though chain burst and CC like no other class, you can eat any class 1v1 even mesmers & bunker Ele with out a problem, hell I even killed a few rangers without moving, all I did was let my retaliation own them, all while I just soaked up there damage with meditation healing holding a mace/shield, and that could not have been done if my health was 13k. no matter what my + healing is.

Warjin can u share your build pls

There is no need for large healthpools when facing conditionbuilds, then you havent traited properly to begin with. Guardians are probably the best profession in the game when it comes to facing condition opponents.

With that said, stating that you need large healthpools to counter conditions is in fact a l2p issue and not a a necessity for survival. In wvw you can passively (runes and food) make conditions totally worthless and you dont need to have anything else then the 2 10 seconds passive removals in your build.

Burst can be countered by toughness, healthpool and abilities/skills. Its just a matter of taste.

Which leave us with healing, the smaller the healthpool the more effective healing becomes. The same goes for AH and as long as you play an AH build the combination of crit and toughness is the mathematically “correct” path to go. And then you balance your build with healing power and critdamage to get “enough” dps.

I played extensively with all gear types and the one i was most thrilled to get was pre/vit/heal and when i got it i just got so disappointed. The combination lacks both survivability and dps, sure it crits but with the proper combination of runes and accessories clerics are just better. AH gets infinite weak due to the large healthpool and all it gives is a sense of false survivability. A retal build (which relies on the relation between mitigated damage and power is also weak due to the lack of power and toughness) is also very weak since you just can sustain the incoming damage over time. On top of that its extremly sensitive to burst.

When i play my 1h sword/warhorn warrior i just find a pre/vit/heal guardian to be hysterical weak. One flurry and i have made 7k direct damage and on top of that i have 16 stacks of bleeds and three other conditions running, swap to rifle and knock him back, criple, weakness, volley and now they panic and start dodging.
Start a kill shot and if he dodges i abort by swapping and get in there for a new flurry.

With toughness as main attribute/power/crit and some healing power this would have been much more dangerous due to the fact that it has better capability to use retal.

Pre/vit/heal is just a we noodle with bad defense. Two or three accessories is all you need from this set and have 17k health, over 40% crit and 40% critdamage on a cleric build, ofc with more power and toughness and still dodge heal for 1.2k.

Pre/vit/heal is a compliment but using the entire set isnt effective.

Warjin.8942:

I sit a little over 20k health 2k+ toughness and about 1900+ power,

and that could not have been done if my health was 13k. no matter what my + healing is.

I highlighted the important part, its your toughness that makes it possible to use retal to its full effect.

What you describe is the norm in Tpvp, with 16k, builds as long as you have enough toughness. Hell, it can be done with 2k healthpool since a ranger is of no concern what so ever to a retal guardian in Tpvp.

Mr Fancypants.1270:

Warjin can u share your build pls

I use the standard bunker build but focus more on counter attacks from my retaliation, you can swap vengful instead of retaliatory subconscious in the virtues tree most people seem to like the +25% on retaliation but I have learn to love the passive retaliation after a CC, nothing like watching a 100b warrior almost kill himself after the stun/100b combo lol, priceless.

With the use of greatsword’s symbol of wrath and all your other retaliation traits you pretty much become a thorn ball to all direct damage attacks, Dot/condition damage can be a problem if you are not paying attention but it isnt to bad with one passive dot/condition wipe and one triggered.

When I’m pressed hard I just swap mace/shield and try to avoid/reduce damage and use my mace’s symbol of faith on cooldown , with your med heals, you should have no problem regaining health in any 1v1 and in most cases 2v1 depends the classes though.

This build lets me feel safe and at the same time help out my team, no worries of being blown up in seconds , give you time to think/breathing room and enjoy pvp.