Guild Wars 2

GW2 is about dynamic combats you have to react to, AoE or other attacks to dodge, and so on.
Yet, now we get a pure healer spec. In my opinion, the spec design is quite terrible right now, but why not. Let’s imagine druids turn into a super awesome well rounded healer AND support class with no clunky mechanic. What does it still lacks ? A proper UI !!!

How does a healer operate ? It needs to find out the damaged allies and heal them. How does (s)he locate damaged allies ??? Well, either (s)he

• 1/ selects each ally successively by mouse or target next ally shortcut to have a look at their healthbar. Terrible and higly inefficient (well actually, I tried the next ally shortcut for the first time today and it does not even work !! But I guess nobody ever used it)
• 2/ look at health bars on squad UI, then locate the tiny nameplate of that ally, lost in the chaos of skill effects, so that (s)he can more or less aim ground targetted heals on that ally
• 3/ look at health bar on squad UI, and target that ally by clicking on its UI square. Will work for targeted heals if UI allows for it, will do little to help for ground targetted heals which, without much surprise, make for 3 on 4 of the strongest druid heals. Problem: welcome in WoW, healing through UI will take you out of the fight and will have you spend hours of raid contemplating your wonderful squad UI. Which anyway is not exactly advised in GW2, you will quickly die from an AoE doing so. Welcome headaches !
• 4/ ask the UI to display all player healthbars above their tags, look in the fray, heal as you go by looking actively into the fight and pointing your mouse (and your ground targeted heal at the same time) at the red and depleted healthbars in front of you. You should not have much issues with AoEs and targetting this way.
• OR 4 bis/ asks all the members of your raid to make a cute tiny 120 unit wide stack which you will mindlessly spam with your ground targeted AoE heals which will then heal all the group members at once without requiring from you to think at who you will heal first. Such a wonderful healing experience !

Conclusion: Please Anet, if you are really going to have druids play as dedicated healers, please give us a UI option to properly display at the same time all allied health bars above their nameplates (without requiring us to mousehover succesively over each nameplate to display the healthbar). Otherwise it will be a UIWar (played way enough of this in WoW) or yet another instance of stackWar.

Best healing experience I had in a game was with Global Agenda (squad based "MMO"FPS), where the healing allowed (well, actually forced) medics to look at the game, at their targets, in order to properly heal instead of sticking to a piece of UI.

EDIT: after some recollection, I remember that during my last days in WoW, I had an addon named “Clique” which allowed to click bind a dozens of spells to mouseover click, and another addon, “Tidy plates” that replaced nameplates with pretty healthbars that included my selection of ongoing buffs and debuffs icons, duration and stack. This allowed for a great healing experience by allowing to heal while hovering over nameplates in the world window instead of the UI. Keeping track of the lifebloom this way was a bit hard, but GW2 has no such issue.

I would like for a similar UI feature in GW2 to allow for healings that does not take the healer out of the combat in favor of the UI.

Yep, I wanted to kill myself when a Low-Health (10%) green name popped in front of me (through like 7 others) and I almost sold my kidney just to track the name and heal the poor guy.

Just so I could realize after he died that I kept healing a bloody pet! (Yes, I’m using a model limiter for flooded areas).
If I could see the Health Bars in larger area, not just one by one, that would give Druid a life-time change. To the better.

Bump

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Yeah, we really need overhead HP bars. It’s hard to tell who needs healing when without them. Half the time in PvP I had to check if the guy in the party losing HP rapidly was at the same point I was at or at a different one, since you’re usually devided into at least two groups. The other half I was just spamming heals on point because I couldn’t really tell what the status of those who were with me was in all the chaos, so I was playing “better safe than sorry.”

Fully agree. Playing the role of a healer with no easy way of finding who needs to be healed is the biggest oversight ever in the history of GW2.

This thread really needs an official response.

Seems simple enough to implement though.. Hopefully they can get something through for us within the next 3-ish weeks.

Yup, definitely an issue – compounded by the fact that most, if not all druid heals are either ground targeted, or severely limited by range.

Since there’s a renewed focus on healing (outside of water blast finishers) as a viable support option, the ui needs to get with the times – otherwise we’re just going to be staring at a bunch of health bars to the left of our screen. If I recall correctly, conceptually, this game was advertised as moving away from that playstyle.

Bump

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