Guild Wars 2

I’d like to spend a little while setting out my thoughts on the Ventari legend, for what they’re worth. It would be interesting to see if others share my experience, or can tell me what I’m doing wrong. This thread isn’t really about the lack of damage a Revenant can put out – that particular horse is being flogged in other threads.

I tried maxing out healing power as best I could and trundled into the Silverwastes as there are usually plenty of people to heal up in there. I equipped all the out-going healing effectiveness traits and equipped the Monk runes. The additional healing that you receive from that huge investment in gear and traits is very, very little. Let’s take a look. Base heals on skills before healing effectiveness takes effect:

Staff #4, Renewing Wave. No HP: 1332, With HP: 1983

Ventari’s Will. No HP: 827. With HP: 1218

Natural Harmony. No HP: 1657. With HP: 2308

Purifying Essence healing per condition: No HP: 332. With HP: 463

We’ve all known for a long time that Healing Power is a very difficult stat to justify taking. Even with +40-50% from outgoing healing effectiveness (if I’m correct in understanding how it works) those heals are nothing when you compare them to the following:

Personal Heals

My Guardian’s Shelter with a full berserker build heals for four thousand, five hundred and fifty five (if I type that number it translates it into “kitten”). Only me, I accept. For a Revenant to facilitate a heal of that magnitude on themselves using the Ventari legend and staff for Staff #4 and Natural Harmony, they would still only give them a self heal of 4273, and they have to get the tablet (or themselves) into the ideal location, AND they have to sacrifice stats for Healing Power to make that work, when my Guardian does not. My Guardian also gets a two second block on top.

Group Heals

Revenant excels a little more when it comes to group healing, but in my opinion, it’s not enough. The clunky, awkwardness of Ventari has been mentioned on the forums before. Since other professions can utilise so much swiftness and many movement skills, they can have moved too far before a Revenant has reacted to the situation and spent 0.5 seconds commanding their tablet to move, followed by another ~0.5 seconds waiting for the tablet to physically move. Perhaps this would work better in more structured group content where you can reliably know where your team will be.

My engineer, which does not stack healing power, can blast it’s healing turret for a 1320 heal, and place it’s Mortar Kit #5 on top of allies to (over 4 seconds) facilitate a 1480 heal. That water field can be further blasted by anyone. 2800 is already a pretty reasonable group heal when you remember that everyone has their own dedicated healing skill anyway, and for the last 3 years, has done pretty well without the need for large scale group healing.

Final Thoughts

The idea is cool, the implementation is clunky. The Ventari utility skills feel too weak for the stat investment that they feel like they crave. It looks as though the Ventari legend has been created to fulfil the role of the Healer. In the last PoI we see Colin saying that Staff + Ventari is supposed to be “very very supporty” – it was quite clear from listening to Colin that hugely supportive players would have a key role in the new expansion, in particular with the “challenging group content”. My concern is will a fully geared Healing Power Ventari Revenant going to be able to compete (in terms of group healing) with a Sinister stat Engineer, or Berserker Ele with plenty of water fields to blast?

The Healing Fragments on the elite don’t stay around long enough. Five seconds isn’t enough time for other players to notice that they’re there and run over to them. The Engineer bandages stay around for a long time, why can’t the healing fragments? If you’re on TeamSpeak with a group of players then maybe you could give them a heads-up that you’re going to pop your elite and your top DPS-ers should stop what they’re doing and run over to pick them up, but this just ’aint gonna happen in open world.

So, what is it? Am I playing it wrong? Is this Legend made specifically, and only, for the HoT Challenging Group Content? Does it exist because the Challenging Group Content will require a healer and the traditional Trinity?

“We never said we don’t want to have the DPS and the tank and the healer in the game, and I think that’s a common misconception.” #ColinSmile.

Honestly, I think they have it tuned too low right now. This isn’t the finished product and in this beta test, they went very towards balance between the legends. Given that this is to encourage us to play around with the three legends currently available, I can see why.

What we see now will not be what we see later down the line in other beta events and especially not HoT.

This isn’t the finished product, just something ANet is allowing us to play with.

jgcd.6041:

This isn’t the finished product, just something ANet is allowing us to play with.

It should be a product that ArenaNet thinks is in some way viable, otherwise what would be the point of the test? You don’t put out a product that you know is broken for people to test, because if you know it’s broken, you know what criticism you’d get back for it… so what would be the point?

Lots of people, both on the forums and in-game like to parrot “omg it’s not finished yet just wait for Shiro”…but it’s not about waiting for the other legends or weapons, this thread is about Ventari specifically.

ArenaNet must think that they’re in the right place with the legends they’ve put out so far, and I don’t think they are, certainly with Ventari.

Sarie.1630:

jgcd.6041:

This isn’t the finished product, just something ANet is allowing us to play with.

It should be a product that ArenaNet thinks is in some way viable, otherwise what would be the point of the test? You don’t put out a product that you know is broken for people to test, because if you know it’s broken, you know what criticism you’d get back for it… so what would be the point?

Lots of people, both on the forums and in-game like to parrot “omg it’s not finished yet just wait for Shiro”…but it’s not about waiting for the other legends or weapons, this thread is about Ventari specifically.

ArenaNet must think that they’re in the right place with the legends they’ve put out so far, and I don’t think they are, certainly with Ventari.

Any feature or class set is rarely balanced on their initial release. This is everything to do with marketing as it does testing…. if the class is OP during testing, then players will be up in arms about it. But if its under powered, it can be tuned upwards fairly easily until it hits equilibrium.

In the realm of player psychology, which abhors nerfs, no matter how warranted, its actually better to start under powered and work upwards. This does 2 things….. give the illusion of rapid progress, and gives people the happy feeling of buffs. Some Devs have a tendency to under shoot power, which is what I see happening here; but the PR damage of a lack luster class is far less then the damage of an OP class tied behind a paywall.