Guild Wars 2

The skills requires you to get in combat in order to heal, but you’re probably avoiding combat when you need healing the most?

Or… precasting… then jump into combat but then who would wait til hp is low then use the damage skills later instead of when opening the fight?

Can someone tell me how/when exactly to use this skill? lol

(I’m new to GD btw)

Litany works on some Pve content. For example if you use binding blades with Litany in a pack of trash mobs your health fills instantly from under 1k to full, but it’s not even a niche skill. Guardians would love to use this skill, I know personally I would, the concept is nice and it pushes out the offensive guardian but I wouldn’t recommend it over Shelter, Signet or Healing Breeze in Pvp or WvW.

It’s like you said you need to precast it at the right time, then have a burst combo ready just to get the most out of your heal. Why go for such trouble when you can use shelter and also mitigate 100k dmg for 2s?

LoW needs to be either instant or either have a secondary effect like a AoE chill or Fire Nova or something to be useful, even then as a squishy guardian you can’t beat Shelter.
Basically Litany needs to be overpowered to make you consider it over Shelter.

DavyMcB.1603:

Can someone tell me how/when exactly to use this skill? lol

Unfortunately you will find that people don’t use it – mainly because Shelter is one of the best heals in the game and you’d need a very good reason to take it over anything else.

Damage mitigation generally trumps healing in GW2.

I personally don’t think Litany is too bad – If you run an all-out damage meditation build.

Pros:
- Short recharge ( Just 17 seconds between states where it is not active – when traited with Meditation Mastery
- It’s a meditation, so you can get benefits from Fury and Healing with Focused Mind and Monk’s Focus respectively.
- It allows you to continue apply dps pressure whilst taking damage.

Cons:
- Active state is short, and can easily be wasted entirely if you are CC’d and you miss your targets.
- It gives little benefit if you are trying to escape
- You need very good dps for it to be effective.
- You need multiple targets and cleave for best effect.
- It’s not instant cast which means you can’t chain it into your damage rotations like other medi’s
- Not worth taking on non-medi builds

To use this effectively, think of it as another trickle source of healing to bolster a medi guardian’s already formidable sources of healing.

You can pre-cast to land your initial burst and be able to stay on-target(s) for longer. Then use your other medi’s to keep your health topped up before it comes off CD again.

Despite the fact it is very punishing to fail to inflict your damage, at least with Monk’s focus you’ll always get the benefit of a small 2k heal. If you do land your burst then you’ll have the benefit of Fury, and you have 6 seconds where you can effectively facetank a small group of opponents whilst doing massive damage.

It works best with cleaving weapons like the GS and to a lesser degree the hammer ( which can be a little slow to take full advantage ).

I think it’s a nice approach for a healing skill, but on a class that can’t take advantage of it.

Guardians just don’t have that much burst dps, and while our regular dps isn’t bad it’s not exactly enough to warrant a 20% heal from damage dealt.
Nor do guardians have enough crowd control skills to properly ensure our enemies can’t just kite us when it’s in use.
And since we’re a low health class the other options are a lot more tempting, as they provide plenty of healing and have a extra effect.

Meh, Tarsius said it better. read that instead.

I do use it in wvw zerging and roaming, on meditation with lower cd and extra heal trait.
Not doing number crushing vs shelter, but it fits my playstyle, that is rather offensive overall. It kinda make sens with heals on other meditations.
I find that i usually get ok to both escape or get the dmg heal with teleports and leaps to not miss the little extra heal and mitigation from shelter.
As you get to use it more than others, i sometime like to trait with retaliation on heal, adapt the food with proc on heal too etc…)
The good thing imho is that most people dont expect it, and you get to harass your enemy rather then let him heal himself, or land his burst.

Ofc when i get surprised by a zerg i wish i had shelter on, to troll a bit, but afterall we ain’t thieves to troll zergs…

I do see a relevant use for it but you still have to be a fan.

Meditation build + Rune of the defender + Pure of heart (optional)

Litany of Wrath is one of those skills I think is really, really cool conceptually, and I really want it to be good and use it, but it’s just not quite “there enough” to justify it under most circumstances…

I get what they were going for— sort of an offensive alternative to Shelter— but it lacks the utility to really be competitive: as others above have mentioned you either have to

1. hold your bust back in reserve in case you need the healing later which is totally at cross purposes with a DPS build,
2. pop it early in the fight to keep your health high and hope you either kill your opponent in your initial burst, or that you don’t need any “burst” healing later in the fight, and finally
3. as a class we lack the ability to consistently stick to our opponents, which means we have to hope that they decide to go “all in” against as at the same time we decide to pop Litany (and hope that they don’t use any blocks, blinds, or hard CC of any kind).

I also feel like it’s classification as a Meditation is both a blessing and a curse. It’s really cool to have it be affected by that whole line of traits, but that means that Anet also has to balance the skill assuming you have those traits.

The base healing on Litany of Wrath is abysmal, and it scales terribly with Healing Power, so you virtually have to run it with Monk’s Focus, otherwise you effectively have no healing skill

• Assuming 0 Healing Power, if you take Litany of Wrath and Monk’s Focus together, you’ll heal a total of 3.6k health on activation, which still doesn’t compare to Shelter, which sits at 4.5k. This means that in order to “break even” you’d need to deal at least 3.6 damage over it’s 6 second duration just to break even: and that’s if you completely ignore the utility of Shelter’s block (and while the block is not impervious, it’s significantly reliable).

Without those traits the numbers look even worse, it shares the same base cool down as Shelter, but with a base 1.6k healing and a mere 25% scaling with Healing Power. There’s not really any combination of Healing Power or damage done during the buff’s duration that can allow it to “compete” with any of our alternative heals (untraited that is).

This makes Litany of Wrath an extremely niche skill (which imo is a total bummer), and while it’s good in it’s niche, it’s not the best either.

As an exremely personal, largely irrelevant aside, I almost feel like they pitched this skill to the wrong crowd:

For an “all in” dps build like a Meditation build, the blocks from Shelter are extraordinarily valuable (although in truth they’re fantastic for everyone).

If the numbers were shifted around a little though (a different % damage dealt vs buff duration ratio), it could theoretically find a home on Bulky Guardian builds as an additional source of of healing over time. Stacked with the many other regenerative effects we have, a Bulky guardian might not even miss shelter.

But that’s a 100% completely different conversation.

Thanks for the input everyone. Gotta stick to shelter, it seems.

DavyMcB.1603:

Thanks for the input everyone. Gotta stick to shelter, it seems.

Haha! Sorry, it wasn’t my intention to deter anyone from anything, I was more just analyzing the skill with what information I had at my disposal xD

If you want to run Litany of Wrath, you totally can; as a poster above me stated, you’ll have some successes and you’ll have some failures, but that’s true of anything that you run. Just be aware that the trade you’ve made is a significant and reliable defense for a somewhat less reliable means of maintaining a more aggressive offense.

Also, anyone who notices that you’re using it will have a significant advantage over you: while Medi guard comes with stun breaks and condi clear, there’s still a limit to how much CC, soft or hard, that we can mitigate in a given time period. If you fight the same players over and over again you will get kited around.

I think the only stipulation that I would maintain is that if you want to run Litany, you absolutely have to spec Meditations. It is very much the combination of the Cool Down Reduction, and the additional healing from Monk’s Focus (the fury is also super neat and will help make that big burst bigger when it really counts, but isn’t as necessary as the former two traits) that make Litany of Wrath useable.

Something to mention, is Litany heals based off of any damage you do (but not for white mobs like rabbits or something). That includes Condition damage and retal. I really think Litany was not only intended for Medi builds, but Hybrid Medis (or Condi with Radiant Retal) specifically.

Hybrid Medis have the benefit of being able to still tick damage while you can’t be on target (generally about 1.2k dps from conditions). Litany of Wrath, like Medis in general, suffer from being easily kited. So Hybrid Medis with Litany should allow you to still heal a smidgen while you’re being kited. It really all depends on how it works out for you individually. Like with a lot of things, there’s some potential with everything, its all a matter of how that potential is used.

I still think LoW could afford a 1/4s cast time reduction, and a base 25s or even 20s base recharge though. Perhaps its the heal scaling too, but I feel its just barely not good enough to really contend.