Guild Wars 2

TL;DR:
The Elementalist can achieve a Heal Per Second of around 620 by going 30 points into arcane, 15 points into water, spending 20% of his time channeling, swapping to water and blowing a dodge roll every 10 seconds, and blowing all condition removals on-cooldown

The Warrior can achieve a Heal Per Second of around 400 by doing nothing.

Nerf Healing Signet already, turn our free sustain into sustain that requires investment like everybody else’s, and give us more power in places where it will promote fun, interesting gameplay.

Full Text
I play both a Warrior and an Elementalist.

It is my personal opinion as a Warrior player that Healing Signet is wildly overpowered. This is not what I’m going to argue today. That’s a design choice for devs to make.

What I’m going to do is try to inform everybody here about how another class (namely the ele) stacks up in terms of healing, so we can all make more reasonable, better informed comparisons.

The justification I see alot of the time for Healing Signet is “but we have weak sustain, just look at ele omfghealsforfreefordays”

NO. Healing is NOT built into ANY profession (save maybe guardian resolve). The point is that everybody else has to give stuff up for sustain. Healing signet negates that gameplay decision in the vast majority of cases. (Unless you anticipate running into somebody with such high burst that they can go through half of 20k+ hp behind the biggest armor in the game, and keep the pressure high enough that you need a health refill asap, HS has no significant downsides.)

Healing signet heals 400 health per second at the cost of NO INVESTMENT.

Elementalists are widely considered strong healers right? Lets see what they can do with the same amount of investment. We’ll use D/D, because thats the only set that can approach warrior damage in a real competitive environment.

Cleansing wave is built in. 1300 heals every 40 seconds. Less than 40 health per second, less than 10% of HS.

Cone of Cold? 740 heals every 10 seconds. 74 health per second.

Ether Renewal, Assuming a FULL cast worth 5k health every 20 seconds, is 250 health per second.

So, in total, for the same investment, the Elementalist approaches 360 some hps, and healing signet grants 390 some.

The elementalist is also spending 20% of his time CHANELLING a heal. The warrior is spending none.

If we add Healing Ripple for 15 Trait points, which gives near 100 hps given no investment in Arcane for cdr, then the elementalist passes the warrior by only 70 hps, at the cost of 15 trait points, 20 percent of his time being spent channelling, and all of his rotations interrupted to swap to water on cooldown.

If we add 30 points in Arcane for Evasive Arcana, we can bump the hps from Ripple up to 130, and add another 130 hps from the dodgeroll wave.

The Elementalist can achieve a Heal Per Second of around 620 by going 30 points into arcane, 15 points into water, spending 20% of his time channeling, swapping to water and blowing a dodge roll every 10 seconds, and blowing all condition removals on-cooldown

The Warrior can achieve a Heal Per Second of around 400 by doing nothing

Now imagine if we all spent 45 trait points worth of defensive traits and spammed defensive cooldowns. How much sustain would we have without HS then?

“But only bunkers do that and we don’t want to bunker” Then too bad, we don’t deserve sustain.

Now come on. Lets get a nerf on this skill so Anet can buff us properly in a direction that actually has interesting gameplay potential.

Eles also have various blinds, perma vigor, and nearly perma protection. Warrior has one blind on a 20 sec CD. Sustain isnt all about healing. Without HS warrior has literally nothing AT ALL for sustain unless you stack healing power with vigorous shouts, which lets face it is terribad

It’s being nerfed in the balance patch. We’ve known this for like 2 months now.

You must be raging like crazy to overlook the nerf that has been announced by
Anet and known to most people for months now…

Enough nerf has been announced and there are other factors to include.

Such a black and white comparison again. There are so many other forms of defense you have to take in. Like said before, also you are a ranged class.

Healing signet will get nerfed by 8%, which I think is a fair number. Nerf it more and healing surge becomes a lot better. If people come complain about healing signet after the nerf, I am just going to call them straight bad.

If healing signet is wildly overpowered like you say then that would mean warriors are wildly overpowered when using it, which is not the case. I run rings round warriors with my mesmer they barley pose a threat.

dan.3618:

If healing signet is wildly overpowered like you say then that would mean warriors are wildly overpowered when using it, which is not the case. I run rings round warriors with my mesmer they barley pose a threat.

Healing Sig is. The rest of warrior kit is underpowered, and HS is a kittenty attempt to make up for it.

The less quantifiable aspects of sustain require just as much investment
Elementalists have one utility slot blind on a 30 second cooldown, discounting Glyph of Storms which is functionally useless as a small fixed aoe.

Unless you take scepter focus, the equivalent of running with mace/shield/hammer, elementalists has: 0 blocks, 0 lockdown cc with a duration longer than 2 seconds or cooldown less than 40, and 1 evade on a 40 second spell that is also your best engage.

Compare to sword/shield/mace/hammer/gs all with long duration disables, functional evades, or good blocks and interrupts.

The protection uptime from one elementalist cannot exceed 50% without a full boon duration build. This brings them up to warrior base armor.

The vigor is pretty kitten strong, but if you want all of the above you’ve just locked into 3 major traits. Warriors can achieve effectively similar results with stamina on burst and signet of stamina, and if you’re willing to, oh I don’t know, invest the same amount, you could also grab stance vigor and be dodging even more.

Let’s be clear here, I’m well aware that HS is getting nerfed. This is a case study to demonstrate that most us need to change the way we think about building. Nobody else can expect to be a competitively functioning power build without actually spending stuff on survivability, and the fact that HS did just that for us warriors has led to an attitude which is pretty much crippling decent build development.

WHy would you cry to warriors about our hands down favorite ability?

I just want to correct Linnael on the numbers for Healing Signet. The base heal for 0 investment into healing power is 392. NOT 400. thought i might want to clarify that for you.

Carpboy.7145:

Eles also have various blinds, perma vigor, and nearly perma protection. Warrior has one blind on a 20 sec CD. Sustain isnt all about healing. Without HS warrior has literally nothing AT ALL for sustain unless you stack healing power with vigorous shouts, which lets face it is terribad

1. Ele has no blind on d/d. War has low cooldown blind on longbow that is a projectile finisher to boot.
2. Ele needs to waste dodge rolls on EA to get heal, negating vigor
3. Ele has TRAITED protection, which can be corrupted, stolen or stripped easily. War has nearly twice as much base hp and 304 more base armor which can’t be corrupted, stolen or stripped. With no traits.
4. War has Adrenal health which is another 100 hps passive (it’s insanely easy to build adrenaline)
5. War can use lyssa runes to get full condi clear, protection, regen, and aegis every 60s.
6. War can get regen often from dogged march, fully passive.
7. War has 3s block with shield.
8. War has 4s no damage with endure pain.
9. War has 8s no conditions with adren build with berserker stance
10. War has increased armor from doly signet.

Tell me again about war having literally nothing for sustain besides HS? Playing ele is an exercise in frustration since almost all healing is active and it clogs your mind so you can’t focus well on actually observing your opponent for openings. Not to mention makes you incredibly predictable and inflexible since you have to switch in and out of water every 10s or your healing is crap. With war, an entire half of the battle is done completely passively, so you can use 100% of your efforts on examining opponents and picking them apart with well timed immobilizes, stuns, and powerful burst attacks (like eviscerate).

Ele is my main and war is my secondary. But I think from my last few weeks of playing war exclusively it is my new main. There is almost literally nothing ele can do that war can’t do better, and I dare even say skill cap for war is higher since you aren’t locked into mindless predictable rotations.

dan.3618:

If healing signet is wildly overpowered like you say then that would mean warriors are wildly overpowered when using it, which is not the case. I run rings round warriors with my mesmer they barley pose a threat.

I do the same with my war and ele. It’s because most people are bad. However, when on my war it is even easier to kill these bad wars than on ele. Mesmers are one of the classes I fear least on war since those invisibilities can only last long against my constant damage output, and phantasms are all destroyed by longbow burst which also clears conditions any destroyed clones may give me.

MiLkZz.4789:

Such a black and white comparison again. There are so many other forms of defense you have to take in. Like said before, also you are a ranged class.

Ele is not a ranged class. Ranged classes don’t even exist. Ele has ranged weapons. So does war, and it also happens to be one of their strongest weapons (longbow). The difference is ele cannot take both ranged and melee weapons like war. D/D ele has nothing that hits 900 range or above besides magnetic grasp.