Guild Wars 2

Well, the title says it all.

In a PVE point of view, dungeon, fractal, grouping etc… Anyone doing this?

Healing signet, healing shout indeed. Doesn’t it lacks a little bit of vitality?

Currently fully geared bunker (tough/pow/vita) and I’m fine with 3500 armor and 28k HP, but loosing all those vita makes me back to 20ish, which is kinda low.

Does it works well?

In my humble opinion you don’t get enough out of Cleric as a Warrior to make it a desirable alternative to, let’s say, Knight.

I should have added I’m not in a DPS way of thinking indeed.

Purely tanking, supporting, healing. What’s laking in your humble opinion?

If you wanted to “Tank” Full Cleric would let you live longer than full Soldiers.

http://intothemists.com/calc/?build=-sBCCx;0NKkN0_4cKVQ0;9;49-TT-2;316A47Ax

Something like that would work, im personally a bigger fan of using a banner for Regen for the whole group than running healing shouts.

For Banner builds? Its okay. For shouts? No because you somewhat lose out on stats.

Hm. I don’t like using banners.

Well I tried a full Cleric build with banners and/or shouts. And it worked quite well. Haven’t tried it in High-level fractals though.

ChaK.3254:

Hm. I don’t like using banners.

You don;t HAVE to use banners but IMHO 1 banner providing perma regen for yourself and the group allows you to live longer but healing shouts is another viable option.

Problem with banner is the restrictive zone you need to be in. You can pick it up but i’m not confortable with that.

Then go shouts. but then you have to save them to heal up instead of using them to boost party dps because you risk of having them down when you need to heal.

Banner covers a pretty good area with the trait and its not hard to pick them up.

Also, fights are usually gonna last a little bit depending, and Banners will stack up to 33 seconds of Regeneration fairly quickly. Combine that much Regeneration with Healing Signet and Adrenal Health and you got epic tanking abilities from my experience

Puandro.3245:

Then go shouts. but then you have to save them to heal up instead of using them to boost party dps because you risk of having them down when you need to heal.

On the other hand, banners will never help you when you need to heal.

Shouts do more healing over time than banners. The advantage of banners is that it only takes one slot instead of relying on 3 for full effectiveness.

Plus the whole “fire and forget” concept of Banners.

In PvE you don’t really move around too much when you’re in the middle of an encounter. Putting it in the middle of the room will most often do it for the entire fight.

Thanks guys for your opinion.

made me completly rethink my warrior, now thinking about full cleric/sapphire with mace and warhonr.

Also considering banners. Though Yaki I don’t understand what you mean about banner only taking 1 slot. If I want a perma-regen you need 2, or even 3 banners.

Traited banners (-20% reload time) are 96s ans 192s for the elite. They do last 45s, so you need 3 to complete the 100% regen time, and with 2 and perfect timing you have a 6 second of nothing in the middle.

Was thinking about those utilities :

Endure pain
Defensive banner
Tactical Banner
Elite banner

Too much in your opinion?

Actually, a single Banner with the Trait only gives you a couple of seconds where it is unavailable.

Hm

I’m going to test it in the mist then.

I only notice a few seconds of downtime as well when traited, but I’m always holding my banner (those dolyaks won’t run themselves!).

yeah 3/4 sec max, just tested. Great I can have for justice and endure pain then

Do each banner have regen of its own? And how much do shouts heal for?

1 Banner is enough for Perma regen, a banner build should never have more than 1 banner IMHO.

Shouts do more HPS than banners yes but like i said it requires for you to save them to heal and therefore not benefiting the group.

Tested the build in fractal 10 and I absolutly love it, very fun to play, people love regen and bonus we give.

Sure it’s no DPS monster, but it’s a VERY SOLID support build.

And about shout vs banner, shout scales terribly bad (as said before) with healing power.

With one banner and 1240 healing power it’s about 280 hp /sec.

If you consider one minute of healing :

With 3 shouts (let’s round cooldown to 20s for each), that’s approximatively 2180, so 6540 every 20 sec so 19500 for a minute, considering the fact it takes 3 utility slots and you time them perfectly

One banner with the same amount of healing give 280/s, which give 16800/s.

It’s less, BUT it’s fire and forget, people don’t have the need to be in your shout range, you can keep DPS while healing and you have 2 utilities slot open (looking at you endure pain).

So yeah, globally I very enjoyed that banner session, was kind of reticent at first but it’s very powerfull.

Plus you pick it up, give a small regen or boost or swiftness.

ChaK.3254:

Was thinking about those utilities :

Endure pain
Defensive banner
Tactical Banner
Elite banner

Too much in your opinion?

Most of your other questions/concerns were already answered, so I’d like to add my 2 cents about utilities.
I use the Elite banner, one other banner (depends on usage-more on that later) and utility skills #1 and #2 depending on the build/situation.
Mostly it’s 1 physical skill (launch, knockdown, kick) and 1 skill for dps/survival (endure pain, balanced stance, shake it off) … works like a charm.
Use the banner you have + elite if needed or off-cooldown.

There is also one more thing that people forget about banners and use them as shouts-place and forget.
The banners are basically environmental weapons. They have own skills that really aren’t bad.
What I do in solo play/groups, is to hold my banner and buff me/others and make extensive use of skills #4 and #2.
How?
Powerful banner – good against one powerful enemy. Run up to him with #4, slap with #2 to inflict vulnerability and then switch to your normal weapon and continue killing him. Sigils like sigil of Hydromancy work even while putting down the banner.
Defensive banner – good against more smaller enemies or for cc. Run up with #4 and then make space/interrupt with #2. Swap to weapons and proceed facemelting.
Tactical and Elite banner – use #2 to get the buff and then charge with #4. Swap weapons and go to town.
Healing banner – now that’s a bit tricky…I use this mostly in big encounters, where healing is needed and I’m ranged and buffing people with FGJ.

…learn how to use your banners. You will never be sorry about having them…

Sounds like you are running the compassion banner from your last statement, “pick it up give a small regen or boost [of] swiftness.” I’m obviously ignorant of your group composition, but you may get more out of the power/cond dmg or prec/crit dmg banners because you are adding to everyone’s dps while maintaining regen vs slightly increasing heals and boon duration.

True I had the tactical banner.

Might switch for something more important, but I thought boon duration increased was great combined with dwayna runes.

Well it certainly helps. I only made that suggestion because unless you have a static group where boons are a keystone of your gameplan, it is better to buff everyone’s damage than to add .3 seconds to your 3 second regeneration pulses. In fact, you probably are hardly benefiting from that banner at all. 10% boon duration looks good on paper, but when you do the math, unless you are modifying an already substantially long boon or applying tons of boons, it tends to be a wasted stat.

The GW2 wiki has a lot of handy resources for discussions like this. So let’s take a little bit and do some rough number crunching on the actual comparison between Knight’s gear and Cleric’s gear.

Knight gains from precision:

It so happen the wiki lists the average damage increase for crit builds in handy table form. (Here if you’re curious: http://wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Critical). It also offers the following formula for crit chance based on precision (From the Precision page, unsurprisingly):

Critical Chance = Round((precision – 831.36) / 21.16)

A base L80 with no stat bonuses has 916 precision. If you were to use every single gear piece as Knight, the armor alone only contributes about 224 Precision. This comes to a crit rate of about 15%. Or 4% without any stats from gear.

Looking at the table, with minimal (i.e. 0) critical damage addition, 15% crit gets you a 7.5% increase in overall damage. It’d be a bit less than 2% without any other stats, so your net gain is somewhere around 5-6%. Tangible but hardly overwhelming.

But if you’re going to go that road, why would you stop with just armor? Knight’s weapons, accessories, rings, runes and the like should be able to bring your total precision gain to somewhere around 900. So a total of about 1800. That’s a 47% crit chance. On the table then, that amounts to somewhere around a 23% increase in damage, or about a 21% net gain over having no precision gear at all. Definitely noticeable there.

Knight gains from Toughness:

Then there’s the fact that Knight’s has Toughness as its primary attribute. From rough numbers, having Knight’s armor gets you a net gain of 100 toughness over other types like Cleric, or ~300 if you’re going full-bore into getting Toughness as a primary stat on all your gear and weapons as opposed to a secondary stat. The difference between, say, 3500 armor and 3200 is a bit more than 9% in direct damage mitigation. The damage formula is this:
/
Damage done = (weapon damage) * Power * (skill-specific coefficient) / (target’s Armor)

Since its divided directly, having 9% more armor is 9% less direct damage.

Cleric gains from Healing Power:

Cleric and Knight gear offer the same Power, so there’s no net difference in that department. So the Precision and having the primary stat as Toughness on Knight gear is offset by Cleric’s having Healing Power as its primary stat.

If you’re going to town on Cleric’s gear similar to the example above, you should be able to land about 1200 healing power. So what does that do for you? The reality is it depends entirely on the build you’re running. If you’re running with just your heal skill with no banners or the like granting any other benefits:

The Healing Signet has the following formula: 200 + (Healing Power * 0.033). The same numbers would give you 40 additional HP/s, for 20% gain.

I was unable to find the one for Healing Surge, but I can tell you the gain is about 1100 HP per use at that level. So vs 8440 with no healing power and ~9540 with 1200 healing power, it’s about 11.5%.

But if you use banners for regeneration or healing shout builds:

The formula for regeneration is 5 + (1.5625 * Level) + (0.125 * Healing Power). Or 130 + Healing Power/8 at L80. In this example, 1200 healing power would land you an extra 150 HP per second. More than double.

If you happen to be a Shout build with Vigorous Shouts, the formula for the healing gain is this: 40+((Level^2) x 0.18) + (Healing x 0.8). So 1192 with no healing power at level 80. With 1200 healing power it becomes 2152. Almost double again.

Pow/Vit/Toughness Gear

For PvE content Vitality isn’t actually that great. Tough fights generally last too long for you to survive without needing to heal yourself at all, so having an extra 6k-9K HP is essentially equal to using your heal skill one less time over the course of a fight. it does not influence how much HP you recover through heals. In PvP this has a lot of uses in mitigating burst damage, but in PvE sustaining less damage or recovering more HP over time is considered better.

Conclusions (or TL:DR)

The viability of cleric’s gear depends entirely on what kind of a fight or group you’re in. If we’re talking about dungeons and fractals and what makes you the least dead:

Short Fight: Pow/Vit/Toughness. It will buy you about 20-30 seconds longer before needing to use a heal skill.

Conventional: Knight’s gear is probably the best way to go, because the gains on your healing skill alone won’t outweigh the increased damage and toughness.

Healing Shout/Banner: Cleric’s. Knight’s gear only offers 9% mitigation against direct damage, while Cleric’s gear offers a rather whopping increase on the amount of damage you can sustain through heals, and your allies can also gain tangible benefits.

Anyone tried the holidays “Giver”? When you use it on armors, it gives +++toughness, +healing, +boon duration. It’s more tanky than Cleric’s because the main stat is toughness instead of healing power, but it buffs boon duration which is kind of nice for support.

It’s really lacking any kind of offensive stat, but Giver only gives those stats on armor so you can use Cleric on weapons and accessories and get some power there.

Yaki.9563:

On the other hand, banners will never help you when you need to heal.

Shouts do more healing over time than banners. The advantage of banners is that it only takes one slot instead of relying on 3 for full effectiveness.

In ideal situations for shouts I’d agree. if your whole party is clustered in melee range and need healing on each shout CD shouts have a higher HPS. In a more likely senario some CD’s some or all of the players either wont need healing causeing you to delay buffs or waste the heal (or just be out of range) lowering its HPS dramaticly.

On the other hand banners have a significantly large sphere of influence and the regen will persist for a time even if players must move out of it providing somewhat low but constant healing. 1 banner near the boss’s feet will provide almost constant regen to the whole party and always provide healing when its needed. That and only requireing 1 slot to provide it alows for 2 other utilitys. That may be shouts anyway but you can mix those slots up instead of being pigeon holed into 3 of 4 skills only.

The only time shouts will save you when banner healing will not are from spike damage. If you or your party are eating those big spikes of damage someone needs to take dodge roll 101.

Torrad.1075:

Since its divided directly, having 9% more armor is 9% less direct damage.

Eh, not quite. For low percentage deltas the rough math works. To calculate the damage reduction from an increase in toughness/armor:

1 – (1 / (New Armor Value / Old Armor Value))

A little algebra simplifies this to:

1 – (Old Armor Value / New Armor Value)

So, a 9% armor increase would yield ~8.26% reduction in damage. A 50% increase in armor (e.g., going from 2000 Armor to 3000 Armor) would see a 33% reduction in damage.

I was knights then went full clerics, not worth it IMO. Going through the painstaking process of converting back to knights

I have a full healing set, as I kept running dungeons I swapped this gear out. I did find it was good for fixing stupid in pugs.

Okay so I tested some more my half-cleric set, though fractal mid-10 and citadel run.

I am NOT going to go full cleric, as the first answer said : you just loose too much (thx olaf).

BUT, I felt in love with warhorn and healing banners, it’s a blast to play, and I changed my char a little to adapt more to the situation.

First off I dropped the mace, I can’t stand that much in front of the mob anymore, so yay to axe and welcome to damage.

Warhorn correctly traited removes a condition every sec and convert it to a boon. A must have. Plus if gives swiftness and gives weakness.

I made my gear so instead of max heal I’m going up to 1016.
I also put a sigil of life (10 heal every kill, so up to 1323)

After doing the math here are the results :
Healing signets : 233-242 /s
Banner : 252-283 /s
Adrenal health : 360 /3s

Runes of the water, healing a little bit more (1200-1320) everyone when i’m healing myself.

Around 25k health and 2800 armor.

I do believe it’s more balanced that way. Going down to 20k life was would have been to low to my taste, and sacrifing even more stats for +heal would be a waste.

So I auto-answer my own question : Not that much viable. 3/5th of the stuff as cleric is good enough, we need the other stats too. I did put some PVT there.

Sorry to have to slightly bruise your bubble, but Adrenal Health is not affected by Healing Power.. unfortunately.

Would’ve gotten the same healing out of it with no Healing Power.

yeah. You might also notice 360 every 3 sec is the base regen

I was just writting it down here to have all healing capabilities aligned.

But it’s okay

from playing my warrior and messing around with it the only time i run full cleric gear/ solider runes is with healing shouts. when i run banner regen i focus more on my offensive skills and just let the banner regen without much to +healing and just do more dps in turn droping stuff faster. both are very well rounded just really depends on who your runing with cause 2 banner regen warriors is pointless since it dosnt stack regens.