Guild Wars 2

Has there ever been a statement why most necromancer skills/passives don’t scale well or at all with healing power? What is the point?

Bad design requires bad balance :<.

Pretty much think the reason is cause of high hp + death shroud = no good healing & bad heal scaling. And before some people jump in and flame im guessing its about the lifesyphon crap?

Pretty much everything in the game scales poorly with healing power, and there’s a pretty good reason for it.

To understand the reason, you need to understand a problem that WoW arena PvP had for many years. Arms warriors could get an ability called Mortal Strike which placed an uncleanseable debuff on a target which decreased healing on that target by 50%. Moreover the cooldown and duration was such that you could keep this debuff up forever. So arms warriors were everywhere in arena PvP, and this created a very delicate balance situation. Getting hit with Mortal Strike then getting focused couldn’t be a guaranteed kill or else it would be the only strategy people used, so heals had to be strong enough to power through Mortal Strike and give the defending team a chance. But that meant that heals were incredibly strong in every other situation, so you basically needed an arms warrior to keep them in check. It created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (is that the correct term?) because these effects were so strong. Rift had a problem with this for a while as well.

The only solution to this issue is to tone down or remove the reduced-healing-debuff while also toning down the amount that heals do so that things can stabilize, which Blizzard and whoever makes Rift eventually did. And so GW2 is designed like this. Poison only reduces healing by 33%, cannot be kept up on a target permanently (except for us necros if you spam scepter 1), and is removable. At the same time most things in the game have healing power ratios less than 1. You can think of it as a pre-emptive design measure to keep things in check.

Well of Blood actually scales the best with healing power of any spell in the game. It’s 4.4x your healing stat IIRC.

@lettucemode.3789
WoBs regeneration is the point that scales nice, the actual starting heal is just like every other, overall the Healing power stat is pretty much useless since scailing of Power (life siphons) and Vitality (general heals) or Boon Duration for ticks (Regeneration already does) would be better without the need of a stat that doesnt actually give you the amount of + healing it says it does.

Andele.1306:

@lettucemode.3789
WoBs regeneration is the point that scales nice, the actual starting heal is just like every other, overall the Healing power stat is pretty much useless since scailing of Power (life siphons) and Vitality (general heals) or Boon Duration for ticks (Regeneration already does) would be better without the need of a stat that doesnt actually give you the amount of + healing it says it does.

You are right, my number of 4.4x includes the ticks and assumes you stand in the well the whole time. Thanks for the clarification.

They haven’t directly stated why they don’t have healing do more, but they have indirectly answered that. It is the same reason that they have lots of boons that are pretty accessible, why everyone has a self heal, and why there is no designated “priest” class: they didn’t want the age-old holy trinity of RPGs (tank, dps, healer).

Now then, as someone said, heals need to be balanced with the rest of the game. If the game is designed in such a way that boons and not being hit are supposed to be your main defensive sources, then if healing was really strong, it would very easily become OP, and we’d end up in a similar situation as to what the WoW situation had.

I can understand the need to curb in the straightforward healing value, but to me it seems like the regen healing is pretty ineffective in most situations. I can’t ever tell any difference whether I have it on or not. I think only maybe the engi’s regens that I can upkeep 90% of the time and certain guardian regens make any notable difference. If they fixed the scaling of regen ticks to be more viable I don’t think people would complain as much about healing power in the game.

If what people stated above is correct about the games design philosophy. Then maybe what Necro’s lack more than heals scaling better/at all with healing power, is easier access to defensive boons.

Our accesss to Stability is almost non-existent (grand master trait 3 seconds). Our abilities that gives us access to Protection are on far to long cooldown or far to short uptime (wells or utility). Our retaliation is very short excluding Axe#3 which is uncommonly used due to poor implimentation.

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Visionary.5681:

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Im pretty sure that the whole point of necros was that we dont rely on boons/dodge that much but facetank, fear and DS around to absorb damage and then regenerate the resource spent, with our on hit heal being 25-27 at level 80 while a thief has the same amount at level 20 makes it kinda pointless, just as most other siphons (since trait ones dont scale of power nor healing and signet of the locus goes from a 4:1 Damage-heal ratio to a 1:4 damage heal ratio making it just a weaker heal if mobs are hugging eachother).

Andele.1306:

Visionary.5681:

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Im pretty sure that the whole point of necros was that we dont rely on boons/dodge that much but facetank, fear and DS around to absorb damage and then regenerate the resource spent, with our on hit heal being 25-27 at level 80 while a thief has the same amount at level 20 makes it kinda pointless, just as most other siphons (since trait ones dont scale of power nor healing and signet of the locus goes from a 4:1 Damage-heal ratio to a 1:4 damage heal ratio making it just a weaker heal if mobs are hugging eachother).

You only get 25-25 on your on hit heal at 80? I have seen 60-70’s for on hit heal and way more than that from my minions.

We have to remember that we have a significantly longer lifetime thanks to DS, multiple ways to do direct heals, and access to Chill, Weakness, Blind, and as you pointed out fear. All of which are designed to reduce the amount of damage we take. I think many times people look and see that we have no aggressive huge heals, but forget that we have a multitude of little heals that just keep coming back. I remember going into DS one time with my minions at half health, and then coming out of DS at 90 percent health :P. Granted that was a hilarious one time event where everything went off from minions siphoning to life transfer heals and siphon heals.

Visionary.5681:

If what people stated above is correct about the games design philosophy. Then maybe what Necro’s lack more than heals scaling better/at all with healing power, is easier access to defensive boons.

Our accesss to Stability is almost non-existent (grand master trait 3 seconds). Our abilities that gives us access to Protection are on far to long cooldown or far to short uptime (wells or utility). Our retaliation is very short excluding Axe#3 which is uncommonly used due to poor implimentation.

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Necros are a bit different. We are more towards the philosophy that a good offense is the best defense. We take reduced damage not by reducing incoming damage with protection, but by reducing their damage output with chills and blinds. We do have decent indirect boon access through traits and condition transformation, but since we already have the highest sustainability in the game, it’d unbalance us to have a bunch of boon access too.

Even though Necro’s are about debuffs, we could use a few more boons. Boon stacking builds seem much more effective than condition builds, and its because conditions are so much easier to remove than boons.

Pendragon.8735:

Even though Necro’s are about debuffs, we could use a few more boons. Boon stacking builds seem much more effective than condition builds, and its because conditions are so much easier to remove than boons.

Until you face a necro, and all your boons are turned into conditions, then a few bleeds added on, then epidemic’d to your entire team, and everyone dies because you put boons on yourself.

But yeah, necros don’t need boons, we are fine as is on that front.

I think they wanted to make sure the healer role (from the trinity) was gone.

However, it was done to the point where it renders a bunch of traits useless. Like that one where you heal when you leave deathshroud… for a whopping almost 300. Yeah, that’s really useful. Heal every 10s for less than 1 auto attack. Actually, I just remembered… that trait doesnt’ even scale with healing power!

Unpredictability.4086:

I think they wanted to make sure the healer role (from the trinity) was gone.

However, it was done to the point where it renders a bunch of traits useless. Like that one where you heal when you leave deathshroud… for a whopping almost 300. Yeah, that’s really useful. Heal every 10s for less than 1 auto attack. Actually, I just remembered… that trait doesnt’ even scale with healing power!

It doesn’t need to scale it’s one of our many tiny heals that add up over time. We have 5 different ways to heal all within a short period of time. I have never sat there and thought dang I wish I had guardian shout heals right now.

Bas.7406:

Andele.1306:

Visionary.5681:

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Im pretty sure that the whole point of necros was that we dont rely on boons/dodge that much but facetank, fear and DS around to absorb damage and then regenerate the resource spent, with our on hit heal being 25-27 at level 80 while a thief has the same amount at level 20 makes it kinda pointless, just as most other siphons (since trait ones dont scale of power nor healing and signet of the locus goes from a 4:1 Damage-heal ratio to a 1:4 damage heal ratio making it just a weaker heal if mobs are hugging eachother).

You only get 25-25 on your on hit heal at 80? I have seen 60-70’s for on hit heal and way more than that from my minions.

We have to remember that we have a significantly longer lifetime thanks to DS, multiple ways to do direct heals, and access to Chill, Weakness, Blind, and as you pointed out fear. All of which are designed to reduce the amount of damage we take. I think many times people look and see that we have no aggressive huge heals, but forget that we have a multitude of little heals that just keep coming back. I remember going into DS one time with my minions at half health, and then coming out of DS at 90 percent health :P. Granted that was a hilarious one time event where everything went off from minions siphoning to life transfer heals and siphon heals.

Vampiric on its own is 25 at level 80 or if you have bloodlust at around 59, minions are up to 125 if i remember right, but by going minions you pretty much cripple yourself in most other aspects making em unviable for pure siphoning (not to mention that healing them isnt important its the self heals that are, necros are the masters ally healing). Signet of the locus is a weaker heal for utility slot upon hitting all targets healing up to 5500, but ususally less because of limited aoe and lock on requirement (thus placing it on 3k heal – half of your real one) with special NPC attacks not ignoring weakness and not being affected with chill in 9/10 ways (auto attacks aint slowed because they dont have a cooldown and monster only skills are timer proced or %hp based making only caster/light armor npcs like risen corruptors actually affected by the dps reducing component).

Overall if we take a Theif healing kit (only requires Shadow Arts 10 points) a Necromancer has to take up 20 points into blood magic and have 100% crit chance to be even close, losing instantly if the thief has any healing power because all of his regenerative abilites scale of it from 1%-5% pre tick and direct heals gaining from 20% to 50% of healing power.

Thus if a necromancer is supposed to be a attrition class, why can a theif outheal him in long term both solo and aoe, with necros having short time period burst aoe heals in favour because of well of blood+transfusion+invigoration combo?

Also heals dont affect the necromancer in DS because it is calculated as your curret hp but cannot be increased by effects that dont gaint life force meaning your story is utter bs.

Bhawb.7408:

Until you face a necro, and all your boons are turned into conditions, then a few bleeds added on, then epidemic’d to your entire team, and everyone dies because you put boons on yourself.
But yeah, necros don’t need boons, we are fine as is on that front.

No necromancer ever can do that, even if you do it in WvWvW on the worm and epidemic 25 bleeds, poison and 25 vun, all 5 enemies will just cleanse em. Also Corrupt boon conditions have under 5 second durations and aint applied in stacks making it impossible to kill someone with it unless you hacked the game and fight a level 1 as a 80.

I wasn’t serious about killing a team. Still, if you cannot out sustain every other class in the game, bar full bunker specced (no damage) guardians, then you have specced a lot into damage. Necros have, bar none, the highest general sustain in the game. We have the strongest condition application and removal, bar none. If you add easy access to a bunch of boons on top of that, I could make a bunker necro that could tank through boss fights (again, not serious, but you get the point, bunker necros are already incredibly strong at sustaining, give us boons and it’ll just be stupid).

Andele.1306:

“Vampiric on its own is 25 at level 80 or if you have bloodlust at around 59, minions are up to 125 if i remember right, but by going minions you pretty much cripple yourself in most other aspects making em unviable for pure siphoning (not to mention that healing them isnt important its the self heals that are, necros are the masters ally healing). Signet of the locus is a weaker heal for utility slot upon hitting all targets healing up to 5500, but ususally less because of limited aoe and lock on requirement (thus placing it on 3k heal – half of your real one) with special NPC attacks not ignoring weakness and not being affected with chill in 9/10 ways (auto attacks aint slowed because they dont have a cooldown and monster only skills are timer proced or %hp based making only caster/light armor npcs like risen corruptors actually affected by the dps reducing component).

Overall if we take a Theif healing kit (only requires Shadow Arts 10 points) a Necromancer has to take up 20 points into blood magic and have 100% crit chance to be even close, losing instantly if the thief has any healing power because all of his regenerative abilites scale of it from 1%-5% pre tick and direct heals gaining from 20% to 50% of healing power.

Thus if a necromancer is supposed to be a attrition class, why can a theif outheal him in long term both solo and aoe, with necros having short time period burst aoe heals in favour because of well of blood+transfusion+invigoration combo?"

Because simply out healing doesn’t mean outlasting and comparing apples and oranges doesn’t help anyone’s case. I think most necros want to see the siphoning skills and traits get some kind of love. I just don’t see how pointing out disparities in classes with totally different play styles is going to get us closer to that love.

Terrordoll.4652:

Because simply out healing doesn’t mean outlasting and comparing apples and oranges doesn’t help anyone’s case. I think most necros want to see the siphoning skills and traits get some kind of love. I just don’t see how pointing out disparities in classes with totally different play styles is going to get us closer to that love.

The only difference between a avoidance DD theif farm tank and necro aoe siphon one in terms of avoiding damage is one is evasion other is DS, both being damage not going to hp… thus no there aint that much difference in siphon gameplay with the 2 (both relying on hybrid damage, siphoning hp, using tricks for condition removal and ulitmates if they pull too much).

Healing needs to scale better with siphoning. Siphoning is useless in pvp

nerva.7940:

Healing needs to scale better with siphoning. Siphoning is useless in pvp

Siphoning needs upgraded a lot, due to lack of mobility.

Visionary.5681:

If what people stated above is correct about the games design philosophy. Then maybe what Necro’s lack more than heals scaling better/at all with healing power, is easier access to defensive boons.

Our accesss to Stability is almost non-existent (grand master trait 3 seconds). Our abilities that gives us access to Protection are on far to long cooldown or far to short uptime (wells or utility). Our retaliation is very short excluding Axe#3 which is uncommonly used due to poor implimentation.

Maybe instead of siphon and proc heals, we should be asking for more boon access?

Actually, I would suggest other professions have longer CD on condition removal, or for Necromancer to have at least one unique condition. However, the lack of stability options is really annoying, even in PvE. Catapults and farmers with shovels just knock me around. I understand the dodging mechanic but if I am too close to a cat the red circle provides no warning and if there is more than one angry, undead farmer, sometimes they will just play tennis with me.

I’d kill for transfusion to heal me while I’m in DS, heck I’d kill for heals in general to heal while we are in DS. I just find it weird that we have a trait that is purely for other players. I mean almost all traits in the game that benefit other players also benefits the user. Oh and transfusion needs to scale with healing power because currently it doesn’t at all. Not that a 2.7k heal isn’t bad, but I’d like to get some use out of the healing power points I get from that trait line instead of feeling like they are completely wasted.

Healing power scales really well for thieves actually

I was thrilled to see some healing/support traits in Blood Magic. So I went with “Heal when you leave DS” and “LT heals nearby allies”. The healing is under 1k and it never helped anyone in any dungeon I was in.

So I turned to self-survival using Well health siphon and Siphoning 50% more effective boost. Good, and I’m very sustainable now, but the dagger siphon is PATHETIC in comparison and I use daggers a lot in PvP. Hardly noticeable health gain. As is regen, like some1 already said I can’t even tell if it’s on or not.

Yep,

I think most necros want to see the siphoning skills and traits get some kind of love.

pretty much sums it up.

lettucemode.3789:

Pretty much everything in the game scales poorly with healing power, and there’s a pretty good reason for it.

To understand the reason, you need to understand a problem that WoW arena PvP had for many years. Arms warriors could get an ability called Mortal Strike which placed an uncleanseable debuff on a target which decreased healing on that target by 50%. Moreover the cooldown and duration was such that you could keep this debuff up forever. So arms warriors were everywhere in arena PvP, and this created a very delicate balance situation. Getting hit with Mortal Strike then getting focused couldn’t be a guaranteed kill or else it would be the only strategy people used, so heals had to be strong enough to power through Mortal Strike and give the defending team a chance. But that meant that heals were incredibly strong in every other situation, so you basically needed an arms warrior to keep them in check. It created a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (is that the correct term?) because these effects were so strong. Rift had a problem with this for a while as well.

The only solution to this issue is to tone down or remove the reduced-healing-debuff while also toning down the amount that heals do so that things can stabilize, which Blizzard and whoever makes Rift eventually did. And so GW2 is designed like this. Poison only reduces healing by 33%, cannot be kept up on a target permanently (except for us necros if you spam scepter 1), and is removable. At the same time most things in the game have healing power ratios less than 1. You can think of it as a pre-emptive design measure to keep things in check.

Well of Blood actually scales the best with healing power of any spell in the game. It’s 4.4x your healing stat IIRC.

I think this is overshooting the reasoning behind it. ArenaNet doesn’t want people playing dedicated healer roles as evidenced by the skill and class systems. They don’t want healing power to be viable over other things. They want the combat to be simple and homogenized. It has nothing to do with stupid skill design decisions made in WoW. Who would ever design a skill that made healing 50% less effective in a trinity game? GW1 had Deep Wound which made healing less effective, but it was in no way unremovable or lasting for an indefinite amount of time. There WAS no healing power stat in GW1.

I think Healing power is left in this game to give players the illusion of choice that they can build a character to be viable in a certain role. I also think it’s a remnant of design, a vestigial structure, if you will from a time during the making of the game where there were perhaps direct healers or monks. I also have the notion that it’s kept in to make way for a healing class when they release an expansion.

Anyways, yeah, i think you’re overshooting it a bit with your reasoning. It’s in to give players an illusion of viable choice in role specialization, which is almost non-existent in this game. It’s nothing more than a number to appease the min/max/ calculator crew and fool people into thinking there’s the option to heal. It definitely is an ambiguous design choice.

My hope is that they add a monk class that can actually make use of it and enhance the group dynamic, the encounter design, etc by association. Add more depth to combat roles.

The game is balanced around SPVP, not WVW, not the various PVE.

And necromancers are a troublesome profession for ANet. I have read claims that a single necro during one of the beta weekends could sit on a SPVP point and via DS and other means basically hold out against the other team in full.

Best i can tell, they call this bunkering. And it is something ANet seem to have a phobia against. Sadly, as the SPVP balance bleeds into PVE it means that anything that reduce a professions ability to bunker in SPVP will reduce their survivability in PVE.

Honestly, from the recent changes in daily achievements we can clearly see how ANet wants everyone to play the game.

Daily dodger requires us to get the evade message when dodging, while the dodge mechanic both makes us invulnerable and move us in a direction fast. Meaning that ANet doubled up on the functionality of the ability, but intended the unvulnerability to take present. But as we can see from the number of question after the achievement introduction, most people had picked up on the movement as the key.

Same with healer. What ANet considers “healing” goes by rez or resurrection in community lingo.

All in all there appears to be a serious disconnect between how ANet intended the game to be played, and how it gets played by the community.

I wonder if someone at the helm got overly hung up on some early design concepts and insisted on ramming it home, come hell or high water…

digiowl.9620:

And necromancers are a troublesome profession for ANet. I have read claims that a single necro during one of the beta weekends could sit on a SPVP point and via DS and other means basically hold out against the other team in full.

Yep, you can look up footage from the beta matches they officially held, 5v5, there was a necro that, as I remember, demolished people.

ANet has said a few times that they are very cautious of buffing necros directly (as opposed to bug fixes which indirectly buff us to what we should be), because we are a very high skill cap class, and they don’t think the majority of the community is close to reaching it. While buffs might make the average necro more competitive, it would also make those at the very top of the skill spectrum even better.

Bhawb.7408:

Yep, you can look up footage from the beta matches they officially held, 5v5, there was a necro that, as I remember, demolished people.

ANet has said a few times that they are very cautious of buffing necros directly (as opposed to bug fixes which indirectly buff us to what we should be), because we are a very high skill cap class, and they don’t think the majority of the community is close to reaching it. While buffs might make the average necro more competitive, it would also make those at the very top of the skill spectrum even better.

I am by no means the best necro out there, but as a minion mancer glass cannon, I ran into two average players, and destroyed them both 4 times in a row, before a third guy came to help them. I held Mine for almost the entire match which was on their side. My team spent the entire fight fighting at keep because I could take and hold the opposing teams close side for half the fight.

Granted, it was a Power Ranger and a Burst warrior so neither really were great players or builds that aren’t pretty easy for us to drop. Nothing like a LB ranger who stands within 1k to prove how easy it is. I also once fought a bunker guardian (MM owns these guys), Thief (pretty bad one though) and s/d ele on a point for a nice long time before they killed me off.

In the same note, I once ran into an engineer who destroyed me in 2.5 seconds, a thief who blew every cooldown and dropped me because I forgot to hit ds when he came out, a mesmer I could not beat for the life of me, and a condition ranger who absolutely fed me lunch and then asked if I would like some dessert.

On a good day against the rigth grouping, a good necro can hold out indefinitely against multiple targets.