Guild Wars 2

Seriously, why is it even around? Our healing traits scale so poorly with HP that I wonder why it even exists as a stat, except maybe to benefit other classes. Guardians are supposed to be the Paladin-y, cleric-y class though, right??

I was screwing around on GW2skills.net today and fell upon this build for PvE because I get bored of glass cannon builds after awhile. It’s centered around building stacks of might and using symbols to survive and do damage. It’s not a great build, I admit it, it’s just what I was playing around with when the idea for this post popped into my head. For kicks I looked at it in full Zealot gear. The Zealot build has almost 400% more HP, but increases Altruistic Healing heals only by about 8%, Zealous Blade by about 40%, and Writ of the Merciful by about 38% at the cost of about 40% critical damage. I know, 38% and 40% is nothing to scoff at, but the actual numbers are already so low that it’s still a nominal increase when compared to the truck-load HP margin between the two builds.

So, my question is: why do you think Anet hates healing so much in this game? I get that, in GW2, combat survival has more to do with moving around, blocking, and dodging than straight up healing throughput or damage mitigation (ie, toughness, which is a much better stat to stack than HP). If that’s the case, then why bother with HP at all? There is something wrong when only a few gearing choices and a few trait schemes produce really good performing builds. It gets boring running around in the same zerker build all the time.

Healing power is one of those things that is more difficult to quantify than it might seem. Healing power becomes dramatically more effective as your enemy’s time on target drops. No one applies 100% of their on-paper DPS 100% of the time.

You can kind of think about it like this – Healing power is more effective when people aren’t hitting you, because your actual HP/s recovery increases as incoming damage decreases. Taking 1000 DPS and healing 500 HP/s is a losing battle. If you can reduce your incoming damage taken to 500 DPS though, either through maneuvering or blinds or whatever, then suddenly you’ve actually reached an equilibrium… and you’re effectively invulnerable.

Put another way, say you’re taking 550 DPS and healing 500 HP/s. You’re gonna die eventually. With a modest buff of only 10% healing, you suddenly become invulnerable again.

Of course, your own ability to kill the target becomes a factor in how long you actually have to survive in the first place. Dead enemies deal no DPS. Also, this applies more to PVP than PVE for various reasons. But healing power isn’t useless, and it’s not helpful to characterize it as such. It’s just very difficult to quantify, and it remains one of those stats that is more of a “I feel” than an “I am.”

In an effort to avoid having “healers” they try to not focus on healing or tanking in the game. Yet as you said our class has a lot of healing embedded into it, so it feels like we are against the game mechanics.

Yet, bunker guardians in pvp need that healing power for as much sustain as possible, at the sacrifice of all and any damage. Many guardians feel this is unreasonable, but the rest of the community feels that this is balanced and other classes should follow that structure of all or none with sacrifices.

Additionally any group healing skills often suffer in effect because of that fear of a healing archetype, even though some of those skills you listed have only self sustain capabilities.

There were a lot of posts about healing power coefficients and which skills gain more or less from the stat, and AH/MF/ZB all scale badly and tend to be more offensive sustain type abilities that perform pretty much the same with or without healing power, which helps offensive built specs so they don’t have to sacrifice stats.

Regeneration, Selfless Daring, and Writ of Merciful all scale fairly well with healing power.

For even better effect consider overlapping healing abilities like virtue of resolve, writ of merciful, regeneration, and even mace auto attack. Those abilities combined can get healing per a second into the 1k range for self and group. Which is pretty powerful….AND very useless in PvE, as you will have next to no damage.

WvW and PvP that can be important though, depending on who you run with and how your team is built.

Actually dodge heals scale extremely well with healing power, almost a 1:1 ratio. With that you wanna maximize your dodges to heal up. That means vigor and energy sigils are really important

So you’re saying that HP shines in PvP/WvW and sucks in PvE..

I wouldnt say it “shines” in those areas. But it is a lot better there than in pve

Carpboy.7145:

Actually dodge heals scale extremely well with healing power, almost a 1:1 ratio. With that you wanna maximize your dodges to heal up. That means vigor and energy sigils are really important

Except in PvP where it’s been nerfed by 50%

O_O

Aedrion.6483:

Carpboy.7145:

Actually dodge heals scale extremely well with healing power, almost a 1:1 ratio. With that you wanna maximize your dodges to heal up. That means vigor and energy sigils are really important

Except in PvP where it’s been nerfed by 50%

O_O

still very strong since overall dmg taken is lower in spvp

I’ve been running it in PvE for months. Love it.

it just another way to play the game. u can tank and be a walking water field for your team. I use it in dungeons/fractals and in wvw. keeps dps uptime for your party. heals anyone that “needs” it in a zerg. at gates in wvw let ur ram masters keep going while they get that gate down. zerg fights be the protector and reviver and support everyone while doing it. using clerics gear and superior rune of water then upgrade to monk when u can your aoe healing can be insane. sigils like life or benevolence. whichever one gives u more at ur healing level along with other sigils that proc when hit/swap/get hit etc. a good demontration video would be this

Guild Wars 2 – The Immovable Object [guardian tan…: http://youtu.be/oueBpmhAU-o

Actually, what I’ve found easiest is to just get the magi armor from AC (free monk runes) and clerics everything else. With 30 in honor ( which you’re going to have, I hope) you’ll be sitting at 17k hp without anything else. Sigil of benevolence and monk runes with 2k+ hpow, and battle presence ticks for 300, regen for 400, and anything else is gravy. Also, dem dodge rolls.

Those doge rolls are such fabulous.

I’m trying to decide whether to use Sigil of Renewal on both weapons or Sigil of Life on one and Renewal on the other since the underwater weapon bug got fixed.