If this is about PvP at a good level…
I’m one of those hated PvEers (and some WvW), so much of what I state is going to be colored by that. Sorry.
All of that talk about how crazy healing signet is seems a bit outdated these days. It is and always has been just a means for good passive healing. With the added handicap of blocking your healing skill slot with a terrible active heal.
It’s “blocking” the healing slot because it serves the purpose of healing, but in an alternative way. The healing slot doesn’t necessarily mean ‘burst heal only,’ even if it is preferred. Like all skills including bread-and-butter bursts, the signet is going to be situationally useful.
A handicap neither revenants and scrappers have to share. They can do everything a melee warrior ( or guardian for that matter ) can and much more.
I can’t speak to that, I’m sorry. Engineers don’t fit my play style, and I haven’t picked up a revenant yet. I do know from 20ish years of mmo experience that it’s really easy to point at something from the outside and say it’s OP in comparison to what you’ve got (especially in PvP), and not realize the weaknesses/flaws the other person is dealing with. So many times I’ve had the class I’ve been playing pointed at as OP, and I’m dumbfounded because I can point to ways I can be negated and overcome.
ArenaNet could turn healing signet into a normal utility signet to make room for any of the active healing skills. It would finally allow for a combination of good passive healing as well as a powerful burst healing skill.
That seems like a really cheap and easy fix even if a pretty effective one. Wouldn’t do anything about the many problems with traits and all, though. It would also be yet another musthave we could add to the already long list.
Not to be too much a stickler to my previous post, but the healing signet heals more per second that the elite signet of the guard. Would you be okay with the healing signet being turned into an elite instead of utility if it got the same kind of burst heal that the guard’s elite got?
The problem has always been the very limited amount of “ulitities” such as blocks, evades, regen, teleports, instant stuff or anything like that coming from actual weapon skills or class mechanics and not your utility choices.
Those calaculations of the entire amount of possible passive healing do sound crazy on paper but they don’t consider the limitations you run into:
You have to pick between Healing Singet or To the Limit, three utility shouts or two shouts and a regen banner.
You need to decide whether you can actually go for shouts without Endure Pain or Balance Stance these days.
You will have to pick something like Defense+Tactics+Discipline and then Healing Signet+Shake it Off+Banner+Balance Stance to get all these stustain options at once.
Leaving each one of them at 1/4 or 1/3 of their full potential.
Look at the entire picture here. Your options for sustain actually exclude eachother or at least weaken the effectiveness of a second or third form of sustain you try to include in your build. What we actually need to see is the combination of a few of these sustain options ( combination of traits, skill type changes, rework to banners, etc.) to ever come close to what other classes can do.
All that math was just to point out that the ‘free’ passive heal the guards get is not worth pointing at as anything special… unless a lot gets invested into it.
In my experience with this particular game, any useful healing of any kind, sustained OR burst, requires it to come from multiple sources. You can’t depend on a single healing skill, or trait line, or whatever. And to do that you have to give something up (usually damage potential or versatility). It is really endemic to the game.
So, yeah, to get all that healing you’re going to have to get it from some/many/all of those sources you pointed out… and doing that you’re going to be giving up other things you could be doing.
Yes it effects all healing but it hurt HS worse because it reduces each tick then does enough damage on top of that to soak up almost all of the remaining healing
I agree that builds should have condi cleanse but that part of the problem with warrior. They only have 3 non traited condi cleanses. 2 of them (mending and signet of stamina ) are pretty lack luster.
Over time something similar could be said about any burst healing: poison nerfs the effectiveness of that healing, and therefore makes it difficult for it to cover for the additional amount of damage that it does once it’s ticked a few times.
Another perspective might be that your healing signet negates poison damage and other conditions, leaving you to use other options for any additional burst healing you require. In this way you’re viewing it as what your skill does to others, and not what others are doing to your skill. At least to me it makes a difference.
~EW
P.S. A conclusion/realization I’ve come to about GW2 is that it’s built so all skills feel/are mediocre until you invest a lot into them with stats, traits, sigils, runes, etc. You can make nearly everything awesome, but it will always come at the cost of other things staying mediocre or even becoming worthless. Healing signet is mediocre out-of-the-box… just like nearly everything else.
