Guild Wars 2

Hey guys,
This is a poll to get your first impression of your new heal skill. This is not talking about any of the other balance changes, but just what you think of the heal skill in terms of how viable it is. In other words how “good” it is.
The vote will be on a scale from 1 to 5. 1 being the skill is horrific and bad, 5 being the skill is amazing.
Thank you so much for you time and please remember that this is only first impressions. It may take awhile for a build to be formed with it that really shines.

Litany of Wrath: http://strawpoll.me/845879

Was just using it with a staff on trash mobs and it healed enough, but haven’t tried it enough in other situations

Needs work. Fine for pve, but no one traits meditations in pve. I haven’t been in zerg play with it in wvw, but can’t see it coming out ahead of shelter there. In 1vs1 it is very weak. In spvp it is too slow and unreliable to use in emergencies.

In order for it to be competitive with our other heals it needs at least one of the following- instant cast/longer duration/ larger base heal/ stronger effect (50% vs 20%)

The current version is just way too conservative.

I’d fix it adding a passive factor to it:

Pasive: Each #1 hit heals you for 5% (probably to high, but just to put some numbers) of the damage dealt

Active: the same as it is now

the main problem to me is that having such a long cast tied to an extremely low base heal makes it ineffective, removing the cast is one thing that should be done asap

The biggest problem for this skill is there’s just so many things that can go wrong. A cast time makes it interruptable, and you need to be on top of an enemy for the next five seconds to get use out of the drain.

Any CC, or even a mere cripple, at any point during the drain window turns this ability into Shelter without the block.

Even running with meditation traits, I think Shelter is still a more potent choice.

I don’t understand why a lot of people are so whiny about the cast time. The cast time is 1 second, similar to Signet of Resolve. I know a lot of people expected it to be instant, so did I. But I don’t think 1 second is so loooooong that people have to make a deal out of it. At 0 healing point and Med traited, the Litany of Wrath gives you 3600 HP per 24 seconds. On the other hand, Shelter gives you kitten per 30 seconds. If you divide them into hp per second, you get 150 hp per second for Litany of Wrath and 151.83 hp per second for Shelter. From there you just need to pick which one is better for your build: block or damage+heal. I mean seriously, it’s not hard to cast Signet of Resolve, why would it be hard to cast Litany of Wrath? You know what’s dumber? Getting interrupted while blocking using Shelter. No heal and it goes on full cooldown. That’s the main reason I prefer Signet of Resolve than Shelter.

The negative side of Litany of Wrath is probably it relies heavily on the med traits.

fully traited with 3 other meditations and high burst damage, littany is good. it needs to be precast though when your burst chain is available and reliable. if used reactively, it will fail you. so dont pop it when you’re dying…it’s too late. do it early in the fight because the cd is so short. it’s not a typical heal, and it only supplements heals from the other meditations imo.

littany does not work with tanky builds at all. you really need to be able to burst and crit hard.

littany and other meditations scale amaaaazingly with healing power, so hard hitting celestial builds will be scary in skirmishes.

mistsim.2748:

fully traited with 3 other meditations and high burst damage, littany is good. it needs to be precast though when your burst chain is available and reliable. if used reactively, it will fail you. so dont pop it when you’re dying…it’s too late. do it early in the fight because the cd is so short. it’s not a typical heal, and it only supplements heals from the other meditations imo.

littany does not work with tanky builds at all. you really need to be able to burst and crit hard.

littany and other meditations scale amaaaazingly with healing power, so hard hitting celestial builds will be scary in skirmishes.

sounds interesting (haven’t tried it on my guardian since i don’t play meds 10/30/30 much).

I put my vote smack in the middle for the sake of potential. The skill has a good idea behind it and emphasizes its use in an offensive situation, it is good when combined with the Valor line for the meditation traits.

Its biggest downfall is the cast time, not for it taking you out of combat during that time, but because in pvp and wvw your opponent (in smaller scale battle) can see it and instantly adapt to it making your heal absolutely worthless. However if it was instant, it would quite possibly be overpowered.

Honestly if they increased the cooldown of the skill to 40 seconds (32 when traited) and instant with the same 6 second duration (18.75% upkeep) the skill would be absolutely amazing, as it is now I cant justify using it in wvw unless I have another ally to supplement CC so I can actually deal damage to heal, and even then I’d probably take shelter for the dangerous situations.

I was using it for a bit but I’ve gone back to Shelter in PvP.

Litany of Wrath and Shelter have very similar hp/s in terms of base healing vs recast timer.
The difference really comes about with use.

Can you block more damage in 2s with Shelter, or gain more healing from 20% of your damage in 6s.

I find more often than not that Shelter is much more useful.

Trying to follow up Litany of Wrath with lots of damage often doesn’t work just because of how PvP combat works, people don’t stand around like training dummies.

If you can attack many people then many people can also attack you.
Whirling Wrath with 2+ people around usually results in suicide by Retaliation.

In a 1v1 it’s also very easy for an opponent to just evade you afterwards, either on purpose or just because of how lots of fights work in GW2 with a lot of evasion tied into skills / dodging or trying to maintain range to kite a Guardian.

So Shelter is more useful, it can block damage when we get Immobilized, Crippled or Chilled. It can avoid burst. It has good synergy with block traits.

Litany is too slow to cast, it interrupts the flow of combat with how you would intend to use it, to get into a fight heal at 75% and then keep playing aggressively – it’s a nice idea but right now it doesn’t quite work.

I tried my Guardian again after this patch to see about the changes, mostly all useless. I do mostly play a meditation DPS guard and now days I mostly play PvP so while I have not yet tried the new heal in PvE/WvW I can say in regards to PvP it is mostly useless.

The biggest problem I noticed and a problem already inherently lacking in Guards is Meditations builds mostly lack one HUGE factor for PvP; stability. For this heal to be efficient, or even useable you need to be up, and dishing out mass damage. In 5 v 5 the chances your WW is going to hit all 5 of the enemy at once is slim to none, yer lucky if you can get 3 in the area at once, and even then you’re lucky if the entire WW even hits.

Then on top of that, with all the CC spam out there, immob’s, Knockbacks and downs, Fears any player worth their grain knows if a Guardian is in the fray at mid he is probably DPS so you are going to get CC’d out of any attack.

My suggestions, to make the heal worthwhile, would be 5 seconds of stability while it has been casted (We have no other way of getting stability now as a med spec DPS so why not?). I’d personally like to see the trait that gives Fury on Med use also apply 3 seconds of stability or something to that affect, or maybe just the heal itself gives stability during the 5 second window. If this is not an option then increase the time from 5 seconds to about 8. Otherwise, in its current state, I will never use it, and most of my guildies and friends that tried it agree, for what that’s worth.