Guild Wars 2

Will this ever be buffed so it scales better?

Well we’ve seen Anet tweak individual skills to scale more with HP – so they might eventually do others ( Zealous Blade anyone? ).

I don’t think we’ll see blanket buffs because it would make certain builds much too strong.

In my opinion, the scaling is fine for most of our abilities. If you’re running enough healing power, the combined effect of all of our different heals (be they passive or active) sort of eclipses the low scaling of each individual heal.

Tarsius.3170:

I don’t think we’ll see blanket buffs because it would make certain builds much too strong

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

…

We already have one for one scaling on an ability and a trait, some of our other abilities scale at 80%. It’s already pretty darn high.

Oh, and now you can even score a free 250 healing power off of maces.

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Tarsius.3170:

I don’t think we’ll see blanket buffs because it would make certain builds much too strong

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

…

and I had even resisted the temptation to add “I’m looking at you Christos” – now I wish I had ;-)

@OP I think the max HP a guardian can achieve is just over 2300, that’s 2.5k of healing for allies just for rolling in the dirt every second or two in a zerg.

I also think healing power is scaling well enough as is. Although, I do think some of our class based abilities need to have a higher base heal for the given intention of the lower hp design.

Namely Virtue of Resolve. As it is now I think it only heals for somewhere around 84 hp a second. If you spend 20 points into Virtues you get a 1.25 better improved VoR that brings it up to 105.

I want to be really cautious about doing a class comparison with warriors, but hear me out. They have higher stats because they are supposed to be heftier and we have lower stats because our class mechanics are supposed to make up for the lack of health.

Yet the warrior Healing Signet heals for 392 health a second without any healing power or traits. I think this is backwards since warriors have a high health pool as it is. Was it buffed to make up for the lack of pvp survivability in a recent patch?

VoR should heal for as much if not more than Healing Signet as a class mechanic that relies on boons/virtues to accommodate for the lower HP pool.

I do know that early in beta VoR healed for more, but was nerfed because people found it difficult to kill Guardians, but I blame that on lack of experience and level of skill of beta testers versus 1yr+ release players.

VoR should be re-evaluated and given a higher base heal

CMF.5461:

VoR should be re-evaluated and given a higher base heal

Tarsius.3170:

Christos de Soufre.3802:

Tarsius.3170:

I don’t think we’ll see blanket buffs because it would make certain builds much too strong

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

…

and I had even resisted the temptation to add “I’m looking at you Christos” – now I wish I had ;-)

@OP I think the max HP a guardian can achieve is just over 2300, that’s 2.5k of healing for allies just for rolling in the dirt every second or two in a zerg.

Yeah but what do their other stats look like?

They really must. With 1500 of healing power almost every skill scale up 23% of its base heal. The only exception is regeneration wich scales 144% with 1500 healing power. ALSO SEVERAL SKILLS (NOT ONLY GUARDIAN’S) DOESN’T SCALE WITH HEALING POWER AT ALL. To have 1500 of healing power is a huge investment with too low return. Other classes suffer a lot more than guardian.

They really must buff healing power. This is the most useless stat to have, compared with the other stats, healing power scales too awful.

I do understand the balance between ANet not wanting to make us “healers” and the players wanted to be able to use healing power to simply survive better.

Regeneration is actually really strong, but it has counter play in the terms of short duration, poison conditions, and boon removals. Each class has different ways to resolve those issues.

Other traits, skills, and utilities that heal separately than the regeneration boon do tend to heal to a lesser degree and scale less well.

There are two approaches, either increase the healing power coefficient on those abilities or increase the base heal.

By increasing the healing power coefficient you make those skills worth it, “IF” you invest into healing power.

By increasing the base heal, you make it accessible to more players and builds “WIHOUT” investing into healing power.

Increasing healing power across the board, I think, would be bad.

Selective changes to certain abilities would be favorable, as I indicated with my opinion about VoR needs to heal for more to accommodate the classes lower HP pool.

This change would make more builds viable without the investment of healing power, on the contrary, I think if someone wants to gain from regeneration, they would have to invest into that as it is a situational and class specific.

Things like the elementalist heal on skill use has been adjusted down I believe, but there is always room for re-evaluation of if it is too low or too high.

Healing power for the intent of healing others should be a heavy investment and sacrifice of offensive stats. On the other hand self healing abilities may need to be looked at without adversely buffing group healing abilities.

Sure they say they didn’t want dedicated healers in gw2. But guardian seems VERY close. So I don’t feel that anet are sticking to their values much.

TBH, I’d rather have more self sufficient traits and skills than more that support allies.

One problem I have with healing power is that it goes with absolutely nothing, its a support stat in a offensive game that is suppose to rid its self of healer archetypes.

I hear you Aza, but as you said, guardians are very reliant on healing power and yet the game doesn’t want us to be, and the meta doesn’t use healers/support for the most part in pve, pvp on the other hand we still perform well in a defensive role.

Still it is frustrating as it is so contradictory, not to say we can’t be offensive. We see tons of people showing off what guards can do on the offensive side, but we pay a bigger price the others I feel.

CMF.5461:

I hear you Aza, but as you said, guardians are very reliant on healing power and yet the game doesn’t want us to be, and the meta doesn’t use healers/support for the most part in pve, pvp on the other hand we still perform well in a defensive role.

Still it is frustrating as it is so contradictory, not to say we can’t be offensive. We see tons of people showing off what guards can do on the offensive side, but we pay a bigger price the others I feel.

I personally play the game to experiment, to see if I can discover something new. Guardian can trait to be dps, but I feel its niche. It takes guardian to proc multiple sources of damage to reach the damage potential of another class.

For example, shield of wrath+ smite condition, whirling wrath is a powerful combo. But it takes aligning them perfectly to achieve the damage another class can do just by spamming one skill over and over.

In regards to healing power, I feel it should be removed. Maybe replaced with something that converts are standard stats into healing power.

Healing power is implemented extremely poorly in this game. Some issues:

1) The scaling is inconsistent between abilities. Ex. regen and virtue of resolve both heal per second with low initial values, but they both get different contribution from healing power.

2) Relative scaling is completely out of whack. Big heals get marginally larger even with tons of heal power. AH gets a negligible increase from heal power. Yet dodge heal gets ridiculous contribution, increasing by over 1500% when you max out heal power.

3) Different classes have different amounts of heals. Tons of tiny increases is better than a few tiny increases. It doesn’t help that many classes best heal is shared by every other class (regen) and doesn’t stack intensity (why not!?).

However, the fundamental problem is that you really don’t need defensive support in this game. Even if healing power were buffed you still wouldn’t take “healers” in good groups in this game because they simply aren’t needed.

CMF.5461:

I hear you Aza, but as you said, guardians are very reliant on healing power and yet the game doesn’t want us to be, and the meta doesn’t use healers/support for the most part in pve, pvp on the other hand we still perform well in a defensive role.

Guardians aren’t reliant on healing power. All of your heal skills scale poorly with heal power and AH scales poorly with heal power. You get defensive boons such as protection and aegis which have nothing to do with heal power at all. The only reason you can sort of make healing power work is because you have more tiny heals than other classes so you get more overall contribution from heal power, but by no means are you “reliant” on it.

Yaki.9563:

Guardians aren’t reliant on healing power. All of your heal skills scale poorly with heal power and AH scales poorly with heal power. You get defensive boons such as protection and aegis which have nothing to do with heal power at all. The only reason you can sort of make healing power work is because you have more tiny heals than other classes so you get more overall contribution from heal power, but by no means are you “reliant” on it.

Let me clarify, our provided game mechanic that was intended to make up for our lack of HP is reliant on healing power. Virtue of Resolve.

That one virtue is supposed to make up for our low HP, and then additional things such as regeneration, altruistic healing, monk’s focus, writ of the merciful, and I’ll even go as far as to say zealot’s blade are supposed to enhance that innate class based regeneration.

herein lies the problem though, in specing to improve our lack of HP you have the option of vitality, healing power, and toughness to some degrees. By doing so you are hindering your offensive stats which are typically tied to trios on gear sets.

So in order for us to make up for our low HP we lose out on damage. If we ignore our low HP then we are very flimsy and as some put it gimicky.

This is why so many people love AH, with no effort you gain a lot of healing, not so much in terms of recovering from damage, but prolonging the health pool.

Since AH heals for so little, increase and decreases in healing power only affect it by single digits, which in turn allows you to run AH with no healing power, as long as you have a steady flow of multi target boons, what it lacks in raw healing, it makes up for in quantity.

Now think about all the incoming healing and incoming damage. You already have VoR ticking for somewhere around 80-200 depending on your healing power, but we will say 80 since we are ignoring that stat.

Altruistic healing is also doing something around 70ish healing each boon.

If you have regeneration ticking, you are also getting somewhere around 130 healing a second.

Now add in writ of the merciful just for the hell of it and you are getting about 100 healing per second from that.

VoR+AH+Regen+Writ
80 +70 +130 +100 = 380 healing per second

or if you want to include up to 5 allies lets change the 70 to 350

80+350+130+100 = 660 healing per a second

Healing Signet
392 healing per second

We have to do a lot to make up for our lower HP which will in turn hinder your offensive traits/gear. Virtue of Resolve is should be able to keep up with the passive regen that healing signet does without any traits or gear.

Or you could ignore that and just go B to the W and not care.

Protection helps soften the incoming damage, but it will only do so much. Also, unless we only stick to hammer, we will not have 100% uptime of protection. Besides, boons should be situational and skill based, not passive and always on.

Aegis is not bountiful enough to provide long term fight sustinability. It is a boon which you should use to preempt big heavy damage while you let the passive regen handle the remaining attacks.

By making effective health pools our “thing” you put guardians in a odd situation where low damage can be completely ignored, but high damage will decimate us because the health pool can not handle it, or our regen will not keep up with it. That is where blocks, blinds, aegis, come into play.

Protection+passive regeneration is supposed to help us sustain via effective health instead of a large health pool.

The guardian is played in a tug of war with effective health and wanting to do more than sit there and heal yourself, and it gets frustrating to see the mechanics hold you back.

Coming back full circle to my original statement, we need VoR to have a much higher base heal in order to bring about more build diversity for the guardian profession.

As it is now, you either multi stack lots of different small healing sources and/or stack healing power. But we rely on heals, I feel, more so than most of the other classes in the game.

(link to another discussion about large health pools versus replenishing health pools)
https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/guardian/Play-to-Our-Strengths/page/3#post2601948

Has anyone ever played Wanderlust: Rebirth? I’ve not played it very much but I did notice something in that game that I totally loved. The Cleric class in Wanderlust is a little like the Guardian, a support melee fighter, however, they have a unique ability that turns any over-healing they do to an ally into aoe damage around that ally, probably affected by some ratio.
Wouldn’t that be freaking amazing on Guardians?!

CMF.5461:

Yaki.9563:

Guardians aren’t reliant on healing power. All of your heal skills scale poorly with heal power and AH scales poorly with heal power. You get defensive boons such as protection and aegis which have nothing to do with heal power at all. The only reason you can sort of make healing power work is because you have more tiny heals than other classes so you get more overall contribution from heal power, but by no means are you “reliant” on it.

Let me clarify, our provided game mechanic that was intended to make up for our lack of HP is reliant on healing power. Virtue of Resolve.

That one virtue is supposed to make up for our low HP, and then additional things such as regeneration, altruistic healing, monk’s focus, writ of the merciful, and I’ll even go as far as to say zealot’s blade are supposed to enhance that innate class based regeneration.

VoR alone is not supposed to make up for the low HP. It’s the entire toolkit. VoR, easy access to protection, VoC for aegis, along with all the heals. The baseline value of those heals is more than adequate to make up for the low hp. Else how would bunker guardian work so well without any healing power at all?

Yaki.9563:

CMF.5461:

Yaki.9563:

Guardians aren’t reliant on healing power. All of your heal skills scale poorly with heal power and AH scales poorly with heal power. You get defensive boons such as protection and aegis which have nothing to do with heal power at all. The only reason you can sort of make healing power work is because you have more tiny heals than other classes so you get more overall contribution from heal power, but by no means are you “reliant” on it.

Let me clarify, our provided game mechanic that was intended to make up for our lack of HP is reliant on healing power. Virtue of Resolve.

That one virtue is supposed to make up for our low HP, and then additional things such as regeneration, altruistic healing, monk’s focus, writ of the merciful, and I’ll even go as far as to say zealot’s blade are supposed to enhance that innate class based regeneration.

VoR alone is not supposed to make up for the low HP. It’s the entire toolkit. VoR, easy access to protection, VoC for aegis, along with all the heals. The baseline value of those heals is more than adequate to make up for the low hp. Else how would bunker guardian work so well without any healing power at all?

He is speaking more so about non bunker guardians. Bunker’s are surviving off mitigation and vigorous precision. So this almost makes valor and honor mandatory.

If you go zeal and radiance, you won’t have enough to survive at all. Its a serious issue, but I would blame healing power entirely.

If you look at the other two classes with the same base hp as guardian then something can be observed.

Elementalist: High mobility and escape ability
Thief: High mobility, escape ability and stealth
Guardian: Just sits there and takes damage

Ele and Thief can buffer their low hp pool by having the ability to escape at will and of course thief has that and stealth.

Guardian on the other hand is forced to stay in and take the damage. But here lies the problem, there is no possible way to buffer that low hp pool other than using the valor or honor tree or perhaps both. Get it?