Guild Wars 2

With so many people swearing PTV is the way to go, seeing GvGs where almost all the warriors are stacking PTV, and seeing the usefulness myself, I wondered how efficient would Clerics be in the typical Soldier Runes / Shake It Off / FGJ hammer build. Vitality is a linear stat, while toughness and healing power gain more effectiveness for longer fights, so let’s find out where the threshold is that Clerics would give the collective more hp than PTV.

This is the formula for the Vigorous Shouts trait, given by Anet staff.
40+((Level^2) x 0.18) + (Healing x 0.8)

1000 Vitality vs 1000 Healing Power (10k hp from Vitality, +800 health per shout per person affected)

Let’s be generous. Let’s assume that only 4 people benefit from each shout, not 5, and that each took the full heal. We will also assume that:

• FGJ is used every 20 seconds
• Shake It Off is used on an average every 30 seconds
• You don’t pop FGJ before you engage, but right after the fight starts and you benefit from the heal

For a fight that’s a minute and 10 seconds or so, that is about 4 FGJs and 2-3 SIOs popped. Let’s say only 2 SIOs were used:
800 * 4 (people affected per shout) * 6 (shouts used) = 19200 health.

+92% total health for the group of frontliners added than the vitality gives, whether it’s 100 Healpower or 1000.

This is being very generous and more realistic than wasting Shake It Off right when cooldown is up, and saying 5 people were affected (while very often, you do affect the full 5).

This is only a little over a minute in. The amount of health for the collective only further exceeds Vitality the longer the fight goes on.

For yourself only, the difference of health at 1000 Healpower 0 Vit would be -5200 health on Clerics with 6 shouts. However, Clerics added seems to be superior for group compositions, where every Warrior is using a bit of Clerics instead of PTV to the max. With a more reasonable mix of 200 Healpower 800 Vit that would be -1040 health to yourself compared to the original 10k. Obviously the commander needs to build more for himself than the group.

This does not take into account water blasts, main heals, or condition removal at all, which also gains effectiveness if the collective is using Soldiers runes too (it loses effectiveness with Warriors that build for themselves with Melandrus+Poultry and Leek Soup).

You don’t have to stack full clerics and go down to a 23k health pool again. But, with Vitality being linear, what about finding the sweetspot between Clerics and PTV?

Despite all of this, I see this is not popular at all. Maybe it’s that the usefulness of a bit of Clerics is shrouded in doubt; maybe it’s just that too many build for themselves for more independence than team compositions.

It probably isn’t as popular because when you invest in Cleric’s gear something has to give. Giving up 1000 vitality for 1000 healing power is almost unthinkable considering in large zerg fights your HP can go down fairly quickly, much before the tradeoff between healing power and vitality favours healing power.

If you choose not to give up vitality, the next logical thing to give up would be power which some people would also be hesitant to unless they want to be more of a support build, which in that case a hybrid cleric guardian would probably be better.

It would probably be very rare to see 5 warriors together in the same guild that are more or less running shout builds and coordinating gear with each other. I don’t even know if that exists. But certainly it would be interesting to see.

It is not that you lose only vitlity. You damage output will be non existant. 4% crit chance and 1.7-1.8k power? You will also lose some thougness.

Combining all these factors and the crappy scaling of the shouts with healing power, you can better invest in damage/own survivability than in trying to heal your group for a few Ks more. Waterfields and blasting those is way more efficient.

The only difference between Soldiers and Clerics is the vitality and healing power, and for Clerics the healing power is the major stat. Killahmayne is right that in large fights HP goes down pretty quickly, which is why PTV is so popular despite the damage decrease. But, is a 30k+ health pool really necessary? I’d imagine if a group of Warriors dropped a bit of that for Clerics it would be better.

Changing excessive health pool to Knights for precision or Clerics is another problem, which would be better. But then again, most hammer warriors aren’t speccing for raw damage, but for the CC.

Bushido.2184:

The only difference between Soldiers and Clerics is the vitality and healing power, and for Clerics the healing power is the major stat. Killahmayne is right that in large fights HP goes down pretty quickly, which is why PTV is so popular despite the damage decrease. But, is a 30k+ health pool really necessary? I’d imagine if a group of Warriors dropped a bit of that for Clerics it would be better.

Changing excessive health pool to Knights for precision or Clerics is another problem, which would be better. But then again, most hammer warriors aren’t speccing for raw damage, but for the CC.

having tried both, having some clerics is the way to go for running hammer warrior in organized groups. i use clerics armor, pvt weapons, 2 celestial trinkets, 2 cleric rings, and zerk amulet and back.

also using healing power stacks for sigils.

this gives ~27k hp, 3100 armor. 3k power.

shouts heal for 2k.

you have enough sustain to survive the initial clash, just jump back to your group for blast healing if you get low.

Cleric’s gear is only good for group healing warriors.

Solo/small teams is always better for PTV.

Still however, healing for warrior is probably the worst. Warriors are the class that, in truth, probably needs the most out of their healing due to where their playstyle puts them in fights, but they fail to meet their healing needs.

Seems we have a new FASTCAR in town. Be careful not to make the mistake that player did and claim the warrior is the healer in Guild Wars 2!

https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/professions/warrior/Best-healer-in-game-II/first

I played full support healing/cleric scepter/dagger ele, staff ele, Guardian and warrior in WvW group fights. Warrior is the worst, unfortunately due to lack of boon sharing/stabiltiy etc etc.

If you go full cleric you are squishy. I have full cleric exotics and full toughness line and I still am squishy.

You can have a mix of the two warrior relevant healing gear: cleric and the precision/vitality/healing one. That way you get vitality and toughness while still getting the healing bonuses.

The problem with going 300 into defense to get the healing stat and survivability as well as 30 to get the healing shouts and banners is you are left with only 10 extra points thus gimping your self severely.

You struggle so much to put out a constant regen which ticks for 330/second best case scenario -roughly- which does not stack with regular regen and does not stack with any other fellow warrior banner healing.

The shout heals might be nice for solo or small group situation but the main problem is the bonus from shouts is the effect and the heal. If you only want the heal..you wasted the effect..if you only want the effect..you wasted the heal.

I run with 5-10 mans all the time and the team that has the most guardians wins. The imbalance in this game is just too much with the holy trinity -guardian/thief/mesmer- . Guardians bring Aegises, Virtues, healing, 2 CCs -one of which interrupts blocking- group stability, retaliation etc etc. With the lack of boon duration and retaliation nerfs then they are even more OP than spvp.
They also have better dps while dishing out all that support than a banner healing warrior. CC? Well stability kinda negates all your CC from the opposing team guardians AND stability stacks so 2 guardians can give 16 seconds of stability at least.

This game does not tailor to healing your buddies at all and so every time you go into that line of thinking you get punished by not being rewarded as say if you went dps. The terrible returns from healing power is the best example.

They made a huge mistake in pvp by removing the healer class and this caused a lack of group synergy as well as OP classes that can do everything.

XII.9401:

I played full support healing/cleric scepter/dagger ele, staff ele, Guardian and warrior in WvW group fights. Warrior is the worst, unfortunately due to lack of boon sharing/stabiltiy etc etc.

This game does not tailor to healing your buddies at all and so every time you go into that line of thinking you get punished by not being rewarded as say if you went dps. The terrible returns from healing power is the best example.

Ottohi.2871:

Cleric’s gear is only good for group healing warriors.

Solo/small teams is always better for PTV.

Still however, healing for warrior is probably the worst. Warriors are the class that, in truth, probably needs the most out of their healing due to where their playstyle puts them in fights, but they fail to meet their healing needs.

You guys are right, and I’m starting to have second thoughts. Yeah it’s nice to have a bit of healing power because with such a high health pool you can afford a little, but the returns are indeed awful. The only reason it can even be remotely considered is because of the fact that in WvW the AoE cap is often reached. Even then, it just seems better if it was Knights instead of Clerics,

because as Ottohi said, we are the class that need heals the most but are the worst for that role. Probably better to just embrace the extra damage since going the healing route is not rewarded enough; let the Eles and Guardians do that. And almost always hitting the full meleecleave means that the benefit from precision is even better. (and the crit damage from 30 pts for burst mastery if you grab it)

I’ve changed my mind, Clerics suck. Cheers.

Also, +1 health per Healpower for Healing Surge is laughable.

Stumbled across this on youtube. I believe its a 0/0/30/30/10 build with full clerics. I use this myself, I’m no expert in warrior class, but it works for me~ I find it to be useful in pushing organised zergs forward.

shimmerless.4560:

People insisting that shout heals are working just fine without any definitive proof are really holding the trait back. ~2k heals tied in an awkward marriage to DPS shouts in full healer gear is not terribly impressive. You could triple those numbers and the utility would still honestly be questionable (what else is your character doing when not shout healing?)

The video posted is footage of a semi-large zerg train and it’s almost impossible to tell how effective anything he’s doing is. I could find footage of an uplevelled just running around hitting #1 and achieving the same survivability, we have no idea where his heals and boons are even coming from. In fact he’s under so little pressure thanks to the safety of the herd he isn’t even using his utils that often.

I think the hallmark of a strong build is hard evidence of it holding up under heavy stress testing and I haven’t seen any evidence of the sort to prove the effectiveness of a shout heal Warrior.

the purpose of the build in the video and the one i run (partial clerics) is to be able to charge into an enemy zerg, provide cc via hammer, and not die even when standing in millions of red circles. anything else is a bonus.

if you can run clerics while achieving that, then you’re providing much greater team support than you would otherwise if you just ran pvt.

clerics armor, and more specifically shout healing is definitely not an optimal build in general, but it’s very well suited for running in organized groups and zerg busting.

Like I said, I’m not an expert with the warrior class. I’ll just tell you what I feel about the build from my experience.

I heal and condition remove (soldier runes) the group with shouts. Some people might argue that you lose condition removal opportunities when you use the shouts for heal and vice versa. For me, in zerg fights, it doesn’t really matter coz theres so much stuff going on the shouts are going to benefit both ways anyway. When I’m not shouting, I use hammer/mace&shield for CC while waiting for shout cooldowns, this also offers my zerg attack opportunities.

Is it a good build? I don’t know. Is it viable? Certainly works for me

Quite simply, PVT vs Healing is a matter of time.

There’s no skills that heal you based on a percentage of your HP, so the only benefit to having high vitality is a buffer against incoming damage. Once the buffer’s been used up, it serves no further purpose. So assuming you’re in a fight and losing HP, it’s all a question of how much longer you’ll last with extra HP, or with more healing.

Healing power doesn’t scale well with your healing skill, though it always does provide some benefit. It can, however, greatly increase what you get out of regeneration or shouts. Without getting into details that have been visited before, you can get somewhere around 67% more HP out of shouts (2000 vs 1200) and about double out of regen (255/s instead of 130/s) with 1000 healing power.

You can fire off any given shout at least twice a minute, traits can make it faster. Without considering allies, assuming you’re using two shouts (with a third utility skill like Balanced Stance) that means you can spam about 3200 HP a minute. Your healing skill will kick in another 500-800 with the extra healing power per use, which is also at least twice a minute. So the bottom line is:

If the fight lasts more than two minutes, Cleric’s gear will keep you in the fight longer. By being more efficient you can argue that down to 1.0-1.5 minutes.

Vitality will always win out in a short fight, less than a minute, but guilds that promote it on support shout warriors seem to have tunnel vision. A number of mutually supporting shout warriors give the full effect of healing power to those they heal as well. If two shout warriors heal each other it becomes twice as good.

Regeneration numbers, surprisingly, work out about the same. It takes 80 seconds of that extra regen to make up for 10k HP.

In my experience there aren’t many situations, if you’re a healing shout warrior, where you should ever use PVT over Cleric’s. The key difference is if you’re relying just on your healing skill, the extra healing power doesn’t pay off.

The math is pretty easy. Taking into account the .8 shout and 1.0 mending/healing surge coefficients, we’ll just say they’re both 1 to make it simple, 1 pt healing power = 1 hp/skill use. So with just shouts and a heal, you need 10 skill uses to equal the 1 vit = 10 hp ratio. That’s obviously ignoring the support you’re providing, but I just figured I would throw that out there to give some perspective to the differences in personal survivability.

I run apothecary gear on my shout condi bunker and and do great and melt my foes in the process. Healing power is definitely the way to go. I feel like people often neglect apothecary gear since it’s only been adapted to the game with the Karka event, and more often than not people sneer at condition damage. However, a single combustible shot into a sea of an enemy zerg can quickly melt the opposition since the AoE pulses 5 times with a potential to stack 5s of burning that’s doing 1200 damage per tick on 25 people.