Guild Wars 2

With recent changes, Altruistic Healing has fallen out of the limelight for some people. Regardless of the semantics with if AH is/was broken and if those changes hurt the build, I wanted to talk about fundamentals of creating a build.

In GW2 we are supposed to learn out to help ourselves and maintain our own survival. Indeed in every profession there are ways to prolong your own life and sometimes the life of others around you to a much lesser degree.

So a core function of any build should take into consideration on how to maintain your own life to continue fighting. Well how do Guardian’s accomplish this? Let’s list out the sources of our own survivability.

• Altruistic Healing
  • Heals yourself for each boon applied to allies and self for 69 + 1% of your healing power. This is most effective in group situations where it becomes our best heal over time with reliable boons being applied.
• Monk’s Focus
  • Heals yourself every time you use a meditation skill for 1960 + 10% of your healing power. This is our best burst healing, and best used in solo fighting situations over AH.
• Regeneration
  • This boon is available to other professions, but we have the capability of having a fairly good up time with the boon and the only profession that can have it available on a utility slot. Necromancer’s and Guardians provide regeneration consistently. It heals for 130 + 12.5% of your healing power at level 80.
• Virtue of Resolve
  • Built into our profession mechanics, this virtue seems weak when activated and for the majority of the time best if maintained as a passive (unless traited in the virtue trait line). This heals for 84 + 6% of our healing power.
• Selfless Daring
  • Every time you roll you heal yourself and allies for 129 + 100% of your healing power (50% in pvp).
• Zealous Blade
  • While using the Great Sword, attacks heal for 25 per enemy hit at level 80. This does not scale with healing power, but provides decent burst healing in large clusters of mobs. Also leaves the AH or MF self healing traits available to select to stack on top of ZB.
• Writ of the Merciful
  • Symbols will now heal yourself and allies for 107 + 7.5% of your healing power. On quickly activating symbol weapons (the hammer) this can provide a lot of healing up time while fighting.
• Pure of Heart
  • Whenever an aegis you applied is removed, you are healed for 645 + 10% of your healing power. The question remains is, will this heal allies that gain your aegis? Will this heal yourself if allies that gained an aegis from you is hit? At first glance this seems less effective since our aegis are on long cool downs, but some creative players might find a use for it. Works well with Valorous Defense, which gives you an aegis when your life drops under 50%.

An interesting side note, we have the longest cool downs on our Healing skills (shelter, healing breeze, and signet of resolve) out of all the other profession. This may be due to our various ways to heal ourselves in the traits and skills listed above.

The best way to keep yourself up at the moment is the combination of Altruistic Healing/Monk’s Focus with Sigil of Blood and Omnomberry Ghost. That Sigil/Food combo has no shared internal cool down and can proc at the same time (Sigil has 2 seconds internal cool down to itself, and the food has about 1 second internal cool down).

Check this video out of me being down and how the sigil/food combo keeps me up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mkjmq7cUHDY&feature=youtu.be
In less than a minute (around 40 seconds), I got a total healing of about 11331 on a single target from the food and sigil.

True that sigil of blood and omnomberry ghost provide good life steal, but was trying to keep this specific to how to build your Guardian’s and new or old ideas combined.

The things that any profession can tack on top of their build such as gear and food is icing on top of a good foundation.

but food is not a class related mechanic, thief and warrior can use that combo better then us.
And that food is pretty OP, i think it will be tweaked soon.

Ok, since no one else is chatting it up and discussing how to use the above abilities I’ll throw my spin on it.

There are two general break downs in healing. Good with Healing Power and Bad with Healing Power.

Good with Healing Power (Defensive)
*Regeneration
*Virtue of Resolve
*Writ of the Merciful
*Selfless Daring

Bad with Healing Power (Offensive)
*Zealous Blade
*Monk’s Focus
*Altruistic Healing
*Pure of Heart

With the two lists we can split the style of game play up to be more offensive or defensive. Without having to stack healing power to be viable you can utilize the list that has bad scaling with healing power to maintain self survivability and now stack other damage dealing stats like precision, power, crit damage, or even condition damage/duration if you want.

The other list that scales well with healing power will inherently benefit if you go down the Honor trait line and wear gear such as Cleric’s armor and weapons. While stacking healing you are now limiting your offensive stats and have positioned yourself to be playing defensively.

The question is now, do you stack more defensive abilities on top of your gear and traits, or do you try to balance them with offensive abilities like the Healaway build that has been posted on this forum.

Remember, the whole point is to stay alive while you are killing things, and the longer the fight goes, the harder it is to stay alive typically.

So how would you combine the above abilities to gain an effective build?