Guild Wars 2

hey,

I’ve been full clearing the raid since the second week and have played mostly heals. Druid is the best healer because of unique damage buffs. In a very experienced group you can also go full zerk on Druid, whereas other healers would struggle in this armor. Other than a dozen or so full clears on druid, I have successfully done VG and Gors on a Guard healer and have done VG on a Rev healer.

As for OP’s questions:
1. For armor+weapons I go zealots, and for trinkets I use celestial or berserker (no matter what class). Celestial gives you a lot of wiggle room and I generally suggest using them at all times. I use monk runes and sigils are water and force. The only raid timer so tight that you need a healer in berserkers is a Gorseval no updraft run :P

2. Druid, Guard, Ele, and Rev are all viable. For ease of use I would suggest against Rev. Druid outshines all others in terms of versatility (movement, cc, ranged heals) and party damage, and will make first clears easier and smoother. I haven’t actually tried tempest heals (someone else in our guild sometimes runs it and is successful), but both tempest and guard generally need to be in melee range to be effective which limits the amount of other roles/jobs you can do (such as range tanking Sabetha).

3. I haven’t done fracs since HoT, but some guildmates said a druid can be nice for higher levels (if in zealots+zerks). I believe the toughness has been standardized across 50-100 so you no longer benefit from everyone in condi.

edit: read through the comments a bit and seems like people are curious about guard. I actually really enjoy guard on VG because you can aegis the lightning group if you time it correctly and still stay near melee range. I ran zeal for damage (valor is awesome for communal defenses and monks focus though), honor, and virtues. Slot skills were Healing Breeze, mercy sig, merciful intervention, retreat, and courage sig (RF also works). Weapons were zealots mace/shield and hammer, force+water on both. Zealot armor with monk runes and celestial trinkets.

yes, while strength runes do help, I think you should mention sigil of strength seeing as it is a larger increase in might stacks than strength runes while also giving up less DPS than switching from scholar to strength runes.

Just something I haven’t seen mentioned – the icd for Shared Empowerment (give 1 might to allies when you apply a boon) is 1sec. Your herald boons sync with the server and refresh every 3s so you are effectively getting 1/3rd of the potential from the trait. If you stagger your utilities a little you’ll get better might sharing. If you run sigil of strength you can get, on average, a sustained 4 extra might shared to allies (tested in the mists). While this is a loss in personal dps from an air sigil and you will easily cap at 25 might, it’s definitely worth noting you can get some insane might sharing for such a small price.

Here’s the breakdown if anyone is interested:

baseline (just facet of darkness and nature): 4-5 might
w/ Facet of Strength: 10-11

w/ Sigil of Strength: 9-10
w/ Sigil & Facet: 15-16

w/ Sigil & Runes of Strength: 11-12
w/ Sigil & Runes & Facet: 18-19

*all tests had 86.85% crit chance and had facet of darkness and nature maintained. Number range is the amount of maintained might applied to a nearby ally. This was against the indestructible golem in the mists. Note that more enemies will allow more sigil procs so the sigil might actually average 1 or 2 might higher in multiple enemy scenarios.

If you’re in a pve scenario where your party has little might or you are the sole might provider, definitely consider sigil of strength and maybe strength runes! Or if your war doesn’t want to run PS!

Hi I wrote a reply to the Druid feedback that I think is also very relevant to raid feedback in general:

Here was my major issue with the fight as a druid:

The increase in healing power scaling and decrease in base healing is a great decision that will force people out of berserker druid. However, there are no useful ascended stat distributions to support this change (specifically for the vale guardian fight). I ran zealots armor and staff with a mix of berserker and clerics trinkets to attain ~800 healing power. The problem is that clerics (and many other healing power stat sets) adds toughness – the only aggro mechanic for the Vale Guardian. Running clerics forces my tank to run more toughness than needed just to keep aggro, hurting the min-max nature of raids.

suggestion: consider adding some ascended zealots trinkets to the game, or perhaps a stat set with healing power, ferocity, and not toughness. I understand that exotic zealot trinkets are essentially the same, but I would rather just have them available for fracs. At the least, add more magi’s trinkets than just the two accessories (attained from an honestly quite annoying source).

Yes I got the boss through all his phases and it seemed a little strange that spirits didn’t seem to die to the lightning orbs ‘rain’. That was the only aoe that I feel should have killed spirits. Many of your other concerns could be fixed by better placement and positioning of spirits and allies.

The lightning counting allied summons is gimmicky and a major issue. Hopefully fixing this bug will not cause all summons to take damage, but I don’t think this one bug is grounds to say “the lack of damage to summons was a bug.” Unless a dev specifically mentioned that was the plan.

Many of the skills the vale guardian used intentionally seemed to target only players, such as the seekers, lightning, and blue orbs. This seemed purposeful, but I know there’s a history of incredibly obvious things being ‘bugs’ (RIP power block).

There will generally always be melee burn phases to bosses and that’s where I think GoE is going to have a rightful place. If it gets buffed, all the better. Also spirits buff in a predictable way – the closest allies to them. Good positioning and teamwork will not make spirit buffs overlap.

overall – good positioning and play should be rewarded, and I hope that they do not add massive damage to allied summons. Other than the lightning count issue, nothing about summons is particularly overpowered.

@discussion on spirits in raids (this thread moves fast!)
while it would be nice to get some synergy between spirits and druids (despite no elite specs having specific traits with their core class utility skills), the idea that spirits were bad in raids is downright false. Your tanking player decides where the boss moves and can keep your entire party within the large radius of the spirit effect. The spirits also did NOT die from aoe damage during the raid. I found that they almost always lasted their entire duration unless a seeker passed directly over them.

side note – I used both sun spirit and frost spirit to great effect during the raid boss encounter. With frost spirit and glyph of empowerment you are adding extremely strong damage support to you team as it is extra multiplicative modifiers – rangers/druids are the ONLY class that can bring this kind of damage support to the team, making them highly desired for sustained party damage. These two skills alone could probably make a second druid, not using a staff, a strong party pick.

Hi Irenio,

I’m loving druid. I played it for around 5 hours in raids and we got the boss past its final phase a couple times before being kicked when the beta ended. I loved nailing down the rotations for healing and the supplemental longbow damage with quickdraw making rapid fire strong dps – every bit helps in the vale guardian fight.

Here was my major issue with the fight as a druid:

The increase in healing power scaling and decrease in base healing is a great decision that will force people out of berserker druid. However, there are no useful ascended stat distributions to support this change (specifically for the vale guardian fight). I ran zealots armor and staff with a mix of berserker and clerics trinkets to attain ~800 healing power. The problem is that clerics adds toughness – the only aggro mechanic for the Vale Guardian. Running clerics forces my tank to run more toughness than needed just to keep aggro, hurting the min-max nature of raids.

suggestion: consider adding some zealots trinkets to the game, or perhaps a stat set with healing power and ferocity. At the least, add more magi’s trinkets than just the two accessories (attained from an honestly quite annoying source).

(also – tangent – are there any plans to bring some support specs of other classes onto the same level as druid?)

Thanks again for creating an elite spec I am excited to play after my two main classes’ specs felt lackluster.

thief can give some fun boons and healing if people sit in stealth…doing nothing…but having stealth. Venoms do not heal enough per use compared to their cd. Maybe if there were some significant health gain from having the revealed (de)buff?

I think it’s important to understand how much of a different level tempest, druids, and guardians are in comparison to the rest of the current professions. This is what I find worrisome. There needs to be some recognition that if healing is in fact necessary, there are only three or four professions at the moment who can deal with it. These are not casual builds with supplementary healing that we’re going to need if the druid is any indication.

Guardian can get over 800 health per second (symbol, regen, resolve) with a sizable bump from courage (over 1500) every 10s. What I’m afraid guardian lacks is any on demand healing, which is where pure of heart should shine – but instead is a lackluster 2000 heal that might not even trigger given how short aegis duration is. Access to protection is notable, but it certainly is not on top of heals by a long shot.

Tempest has 4 shouts, 3 of which give auras (3000 heal with powerful auras & elemental bastion), soothing mist (200/s), water attunement swap & skills, magnetic aura heal, and evasive arcana (frost field blast +3000 and 10s cleansing wave). Ele can definitely compete in chunk healing, but has little regen access and other than soothing mist no heals per sec.

Druid obviously has a lot of healing.

I’m still quite underwhelmed by Ventari but we will see for sure. I’ll look at mesmer healing but I believe they have better utilities and skills to bring to the table than mantra healing. Mantra healing also has no range, the same issue with engie healing. Guardian also has little range, an important fact to keep in mind during build testing.

I thought about warriors for a bit but unfortunately I don’t think they’ll see much use because banners are so strong. Perhaps on a party’s second warrior it could see some use? Definitely an example of low investment healing though – just one trait and a few skills and you have some intermittent burst party healing available.

I didn’t give much attention to reaper traits, but onslaught could make an interesting healer! Although I don’t think you really need much heal power to make it effective and the ‘heal when leaving shroud’ competes with vampiric aura (which scales on power). Perhaps it’s worth it to invest a bit in HP since most people will be taking reaper and blood traits.

I think the comments so far have raised an interesting question:
Would it be more fun or easy (not having to wait for a fully specced ele or druid) to have a few supplemental healers than one or two totally specialized healers?
Or do you not want to have to spec for healing at all if you are taking dps role? Because while the supplemental healing could work with multiple people, it certainly could not contend with druid or ele specialized for healing.

This post is made entirely with the assumption that healing, on the scale that druid provides, will be vital to clearing raids. If your issue with this post is because of your concerns with the dps meta, healing being useless, etc., please voice your opinion elsewhere.

I must make some speculation on the power of druid healing because we do not have skill coefficients. However, after seeing the numbers in the stream with no healing power, it’s hard to argue they will not be competing for strongest healer in the game.

The Elite Specs:
Currently we have two largely healing elite specializations. The first being druid, the second being tempest (with a staff). The main issue: druid only needs one trait line to be an effective healer, while tempest needs three (water, arcane, tempest). This allows druids to run dps traits (marks, skirm) in addition to getting amazing healing options (with quick draw you can keep the flower wall up half the time, or chain two back to back!). Tempest you must run a very strict template (powerful aura, evasive arcana, elemental bastion) and skills (all the aura shouts) to attain the healing prowess of druid’s staff, celestial form, and glyphs.

While tempest might be able to outcompete druid healing depending on celestial form’s cd and shroud buildup, tempest will lose massively when it comes to supplementing damage. (you can run spotter, frost spirit, AND outgoing damage glyph as a druid, c’mon now!)

The Core Specs:
Ventari is meant to heal, and roy recently posted on rev forums that ventari has “sustained” healing while druid was “burst healing.” You can get some pretty high numbers on the delayed tablet heal especially with the insane amount of outgoing healing rev can build up so I won’t speculate much on ventari healing until this weekend. As with druid, this one traitline provides formidable healing. However, due to rev’s profession mechanic, I doubt ventari will be anything more than a supplemental healer.

Guardian. The spiritual successor to monk. (1) The aegis application on guardian is being buffed (shield 4), and pure of heart is an extremely unique and clutch way to play healer (dare I say protter?). Too bad it has pitiful base healing and coefficient. Communal defenses will probably see play in raids because it has no target limit. I really want aegis guard healing to be wanted in raids, and hopefully we can see some buffs to pure of heart and aegis duration OR cd on communal defenses for HoT pve. Guardian has amazing heals per second, but is missing any good way to burst heal. (2) You need to spec into valor (communal), honor (EVERY gm trait is good), and virtues to get a good amount of heals per sec. This spreads your traits thin and avoids any dps lines, like tempest.

I am largely unfamiliar with engie healing. They have some really awesome healing traits, and I’m fairly certain we will see a medkit buff soon. It looks like inventions with alchemy can provide some good healing, but will lack ranged burst healing (water blasts are great but limiting position-wise).

Mesmer mantras are cool but I think chronomancer will have enough on its plate keeping alacrity, quickness, and other fun party support up without the need to supplement healing.

tl;dr
Druid and Tempest provide excellent healing options that will see use in raids. Some healers (guardian, tempest) require too many traitline investments compared to other healers (druid, ventari), therefore reducing their effectiveness at other jobs. Please consider these ideas and builds in the upcoming beta so that we can have a discussion on the future of viable healers in GW2. I want to see more than ele and druid in the healer role for raids.

Who would you like to see as a viable healer in raids, and should you need to invest in multiple traitlines to provide viable healing?

Ps – we need some stat spreads with ferocity and healing power for healer deeps. And yes I’m salty about tempest.

I’ve done a lot of 49s as a guard and have recently started running 49s on my ele as well. I run with a full zerk team and my traits are 30/10/10/20/0, although 30/10/10/10 for vigor or blasting staff is also useful. I use staff mostly.

Your questions specifically – Use ether renewal as your heal here. I usually have the blast as my heal, but against Mai DPS/might stacking is not particularly useful. I would not suggest switching to defensive gear, though – you should almost never down to Mai even in full zerk as her attacks are pretty spaced apart giving you plenty of time to heal. Try your best to dodge the lightning spin, remember that you want to be at max range kiting until she is down to 4 or less stacks (preferably 2 or less). The spin does half your health, sure, but ether renewal is on an insanely short cd and if you can dodge even a couple lightning spins you should be fine. It also has a really unique sound that you can reaction dodge to as well if you’re at range. If she comes up to melee you (you are face to face with her), wait a half a second second then dodge through her and keep running forward (away from her). She will root herself with a long rapier combo and you will be 1200+ units away from her. As for the one hit un-evadable shot – it is reflectable. When you reflect it you will teleported to her and deal some good damage to her, just walk away from her as she will have some aftercast delay. In general your team should be covering this attack, not you. Either a guard with WoR + shield 5 or a mesmer with feedback and traited focus 4/wardens will be able to stop every bullet alone. If your team is unreliable, you can use staff earth 3 or switch to focus (I believe there is time to ooc after the agony to switch if you don’t have an ascended focus). You can use focus air 4, earth 4 and 5 – these will all stop the bullet.

For Mai Trin in general – don’t even worry about doing damage until she has 4 or less stacks left. Once she gets to 2 stacks your team can melee her and her health goes down to the next phase almost instantly. Otherwise you want to be kiting away from her. Keep track of who has Mai’s aggro and who has Horrik’s aggro. When you have the cannon aggro and the last shot was a fire bomb, run up to Mai and stay there because you will be the target of the static bomb which removes Mai’s buff. Dodge through her (remember you have fire staff 4 as well) and hopefully she roots herself in her rapier combo when the bomb drops. You have two dodges and firestaff 4 to kite her inside the static bomb if she does not root herself. Trap her in the static bomb two or three times and she will be ready to DPS down to the next phase.

Hope that helps, and let me know if there are other questions!

edit: also if your team is looking shaky, earth golem is an absolute beast. He can tank almost anything, even in 49 frac, for 10+ seconds. If a person or two go down, pop earth golem and he will hold aggro. This is true for many fights, including fire shaman. The golem also has your agony resistance. If you’re not using fgs, definitely use earth golem, and frequently.

Twice now our team has made it to the end of the Molten Facility fractal and we have been unable to get the NPC dialogue to begin. The large weights pound down on the ground, then nothing happens – no dialogue, Rox and Braham just follow us around. We tried wiping but that did not solve the issue. We successfully completed this fractal on lower fractal levels before the Wintersday update. Both times the bug has happened we were doing 49 runs.

We will now be rerolling when this fractal appears because it is simply not worth the time. Please look into this issue.

If anyone knows possible explanations for this issue, let us know.

Edit: Our party sent in bug reports each time.

The Aspect arena patch got me thinking about how a similar mechanism could be used to bring back a GW random arena play style into GW2. There would be four gates with certain popular pvp skillsets – like the crystals in AA – of GW professions (more skillsets could be added in later – there would be a lot of room for elaboration/future updates). Once a skillbar is taken, the gate locks to other players.

There would be no dodging or downed state. An initiative bar, or perhaps the endurance bar, would be used for casting skills. Warrior and Dervish profession bars would use a mix of adrenaline and initiative. Auto-attacking would just be an additional skill on the bar that has no cost or cooldown and deals damage in accordance with GW’s auto-attack. As in GW you would have a critical hit chance determined by your weapon and it would be increased by flanking a moving enemy.

All of these parts are already in GW2 and making an arena that mimicked the original GW spirit of random arenas would really give a sense of nostalgia and accomplishment to the Guild Wars title. Except skill activation bars (and hexes, but let’s consider those later), all of these aspects are implemented in GW2. Adding in a little icon above caster’s heads (such as the necro’s fear) and hopefully adding in viewable cast time bars would be easily implemented. This really doesn’t seem too difficult to create based on what I have seen in the Aspect Arena, and I really hope you all consider it!

In Depth Ideas:
Concerning Team Balance
Personally I would make overall categories of GW builds such as damage, interrupter, and healer. These would be analogous to the “crystals” of the aspect arena; just as you chose the wind crystal for wind aspect skills, you would choose healer and get a skill bar based on healing. There would be a few different healing skill bars and one would be randomly assigned to the player who steps into the “healer” category crystal. Skill bars would not be mirrored across teams. By this I mean an enemy healer might have a ritualist skillbar and you might receive a monk skillbar. Every category skillbar will be balanced against each other (ritualist healing will not be subpar to monk healing and vice versa). Unlike the aspect arena, once you choose a gate (crystal), it becomes unavailable to other players.

Here I’ve listed some possible skillbars. I’m leaning towards initiative because it is very easy to read and is intuitive. Each point of initiative counts for an equivalent of 5 energy. A caster would have 8 initiative points whereas a warrior would have 4 and an ele would have 15. Hopefully it is not difficult to manipulate initiative regen rate. I didn’t really want to go into initiative cost, cast times, recharge times, etc. because really there doesn’t even need to be much change from the original skills.

Protection Monk – I’m assuming support skills would be ground targeted as opposed to ally targeted based on how GW2 functions. Perhaps they could target the ally closest to the center of the aoe? Monks are a bit of a hassle to figure out.

Dwayna’s Kiss – heal target area, with an additional heal per boon.
Guardian – give protection for 6 seconds.
Healing Breeze – give regeneration for 6 seconds. (lower initiative cost to 1).
Shield of Deflection – create a symbol that lasts for four seconds and gives aegis every second.
Draw Conditions – Transfer all conditions from allies in target area to yourself.
Mending Touch – remove up to two conditions from yourself and heal for each condition removed.
Return – cripple nearby foes, then teleport to the nearest ally.
Dark Escape – grant yourself swiftness and protection for 10 seconds.

Domination Mesmer – This can be make or break depending on whether GW2 differentiate between spells and attacks. I’m trying to show a possible no hex Mesmer build.

Power Leak – interrupt target spell. Target foe loses 3 initiative.
Psychic Instability – interrupt target foe. If that skill is not an autoattack, they are
knocked down.
Cry of Frustration – interrupt target foe. If that attack is not an autoattack, all enemies in 600 range are interrupted and take damage.
Ether feast – Target foe loses 1 initiative and you are healed.
Empathy – give all allies in target area gain retaliation for 8 seconds.
Shatter Enchantment – target foe losing one boon. If you removed a boon, they take damage.
Blackout – Target touched foe’s skills are disabled for 6 seconds and your skills are disabled for 5 seconds.
Resurrection Signet – Revive one ally in target area.

The first thing to know is that you can do damage with a guard while also supporting. You do not need to spec into any support to give the kind of support that other classes sorely lack, and speccing into some of them require only adept traits. Wall of Reflection, Stand Your Ground!, and Shield of the Avenger are all amazing and only require adepts to receive their CD/length traits. I personally love sanctuary as well (despite its size – if you view it as only blocking 3 directions instead of all 4 it’s pretty awesome). You do not need to “soak” hits; Shelter is amazing as well as timing your virtue of courage. Paired with dodges you can easily take down enemies with minimal downs. My perspective is mostly from end PvE – dunegons, fractals, etc.

P/V/T is tank armor, as said earlier. If you wish to deal damage, you need either Knight’s armor (somewhat more damage) or zerks armor (much more damage). Personally I like to use Knights for the helm/chest/legs because if those armor pieces were zerks they wold give bad crit damage ratios per point (wiki “item nomenclature” if you don’t know what stat armor ratios are). That way you can take a hit or two with ~2900 armor. Also crit damage has a funny stat plateau at around 50% (after which point it is [almost] always better to stat prec or pow), so knight’s is pretty great.

Also note boon duration runes can give you more effective power/damage (through might stacking) than power statted runes.

The cookie cutter (and superbly effective) build is 0/0/30/30/10 (like many have said). A lot of traits are viable depending on your playstyle: whatever adept in valor (purity vs. strength in numbers), retributive armor, and AH. In honor: superior aria/larger symbols, empowering might, writ of the merciful (this is a huge healer on hammer and scales well with HP), the now fixed battle presence, and 2H mastery (with GS) are all contenders. Virtues also has some awesome traits – unscathed defender (amazing with scepter and some smart dodging), spirit weapon duration (haven’t tried shield after the change, can’t tell you if its worth it anymore), and also master of consecrations with WoR. Remember you can always change them out at any time, as well as your utilities! I will change from a shout build (SYG!, SY!) to a defense (SoA and WoR) depending on which fractal I am in.

I had changed from that build to a 20/0/30/20/0 build since battle presence and pure voice were/are bugged. While writ of the merciful was nice for hammer, I wanted the 10% against burning foes (with two guards in a party foes are ALWAYS burning) and 5% scepter damage. It would probably be better to drop down to 10/0/30/20/10 for the virtues adept traits though, I just wanted to see what it was like to spec into power :P. Also note this is for a hammer (which gets its base damage from auto attacking, UNLIKE the GS which gets a much larger benefit from the 2H mastery trait for 30 in honor).

A mix of zerks, valks/soldiers, and knights is probably your best armor if going for 30 in valor. I suggest at least 2750 armor (which is really easy with 30 valor, DON’T GO FULL ZERK get around 16k health) and a decent attack (closing in on 3000 is good). If you’re surviving in full zerks that’s nice, but honestly the people who do that don’t keep the aggro very well and don’t use AH to its full potential. They do amazing dps with the scepter (like seriously – unscathed defender), but you’re just not going to survive long hitting with a gs.

Things I would not suggest: using points in radiance. Sorry but missing out on 10 virtues for VoJ on trash mobs is not worth it. Blind exposure is decent against trash mobs after you pull them together… if that bug still works. Again prioritizing trash mobs is just silly when you could have +% damage. Blinding every 25ish seconds … not useful.

Other things: always activate virtue of courage when you lose your first aegis, you only miss out on one passive every 90 seconds. I repeat – JUST one. you give a partywide aegis and 3 seconds of protection with 5 in virtues.

ALSO please use your virtues and renewed focus. They’re so good and your elite has SUCH a low CD. Just do it, I’ve saved so many people with that spike heal (as well as myself!).

1. well most weapons do around 1000 damage averaged which is what toughness divides into. Power is therefore multiplied by 1000, and then divided by armor. This is obviously not applicable to individual situations, but is applicable to a majority of situations. Sorry I didn’t exactly go into all the details because the post would be enormous, but that’s the reasoning behind the power/1000 idea. I always assumed that enemy weapon damage would be around 1000 and their power would increase, but I could be wrong, I have no evidence to suggest that this is correct. Just an assumption based on the ease of implementing it – as in it would be easier to increase the power of an enemy than their weapon damage.

2. I’m using a lot of averages, which apparently you don’t think are appropriate, but in your thread (which is amazingly useful, I’m really glad you made it!) the hammer is about 1.35:1 while the great sword is… what like 1.66:1? I also specifically said it depends on weapon choice. Anyways power is definitely a great coefficient to be prioritizing. These averages/damage done/anything I said are also per second, which I realized I didn’t specifically state so sorry for that.

3. Sorry, this was explained poorly – again didn’t want to go into a whole lot of details because it would be an enormous post. Basically I went and got all the healing coefficients (from traits etc.) and applied them to the hammer. Since the hammer has a persistent symbol (writ of the merciful), many boons, and good overall damage, it was the weapon I used. Mace would add a small amount more through it’s auto attack and regen abilities, which are… not terrible when brought to heal/sec (~0.4/sec? don’t know how fast the mace rotation is, but it’s still nowhere near 1:1). Altuistic healing is a joke when healing power is applied to it, I got around a 0.03/sec health per heal power point invested, that’s obviously not where I am getting my calculations from and I stated that. But the damage lost fro a mace is generally more than the amount healed compared to the damage done by the hammer. The only real use of healing power is selfless daring, which the mace impedes as its auto attack is faster than the amount of time necessary to regain endurance to dodge again, whereas the hammer rotation lines up almost perfectly.

Hope this clears up some of my less obvious point calculations.

edit: didn’t know about the reddit post, did all the heal power calculations myself a few weeks ago. Would’ve helped, we should have the power coefficients and healing power coefficients stickied!

ps – you’re not really taking the stat investment into healing power into consideration. Sure you could get a large amount of health per second, but it would cost a large investment of points that could otherwise be doing more output than you are healing for the same investment.

Healing isn’t the best. It’s not terrible, but it’s hard to justify prioritizing heal power for PvE since toughness reduces damage more against higher damage since it divides damage done. Power for instance has a ~1.2-1.7 ratio for each invested point depending on the weapon’s skills. Toughness then divides into this by + 1 for every 1000 points invested – note that this means diminishing returns. 100 Precision gives about 5% critical damage, which in turn increases damage (power) by 2.5%; this is without any critical damage (in which about 1% critical damage is equal to every 25 points invested in another stat). Heal power in contrast deals with damage by straight healing it, however only heals for around ~0.3 per heal point on a hammer, and a little bit more for a mace (maybe as high as 0.4? haven’t actually mathed it out). I have no idea where “ComeAndSee” got his 1:1 ratio – it’s not possible. Also healing power grows stronger the higher your toughness is because toughness increases your effective health. But stacking toughness and heal power means your damage is pathetic. Vitality is kinda weird, just put that to whatever level you feel is necessary to survive against the enemies you are against (I like ~16-17k, but I’m also usually against 20+ fractal enemies doing 30%+ of your health in a hit).

So take this as you will, but also remember that the higher damage from enemies in dungeons will be reduced better by toughness since it is multiplicative as opposed to heal power which just heals. In PvP this is different since there is a much smaller cap on damage dealt.

Also the valor line does almost nothing in terms of applying your heal power ratio, while the honor line contains most of the applications of heal power.

reserved for showing the math/forum spazzed out on me and kept giving me 502.

So the forum won’t let me copy and paste from word, but here are the final numbers from my build:
Important note – I used 25% critical chance in this calculation. Critical chance scales with healing power through altruistic healing when using Empowering Might and also with Sigil of Strength (both used in my calculations, each using the following formula):
(critical chance/100) * (# of nearby allies) * (# of attacks per second) * (0.01*Healing Power).

Results:

Healing Sources:
Altruistic Healing (hammer/combo field, sigil, traits, shout, virtue of justice)
Writ of the Merciful
Shelter
Virtue of Resolve
Selfless Daring

Overall I found over 30 seconds I healed myself for 16,501 + 9.99*HP. This is in an “average” situation where only my guardian and one other person are receiving the boons from symbol of protection, empowering might, etc. With each increasing person, the results jump a bit – an additional 2,414 + 0.475*HP. The healing done to other allies is 5,460 + 7.25*HP per person (note that this is if that one person remains inside the symbol and you are capable of dodge roll healing them once every 6 seconds).

Interpretations:
If people want all of my calculations I will post them but the forums are not letting me copy-paste from word. It’s pretty simple math, it just takes in a lot of different healing sources with minimal healing power coefficients. What is important to note is that Altruistic Healing makes up the majority of the base healing (~7,000 health per 30 seconds), while making up the minority of healing power coefficient (only ~1.0*HP over 30 seconds). Half of the heal power coefficient comes from dodge rolling at least once every 6 seconds. Therefore if you are really wanting to maximize the potential of the heal power stat, there are probably better ways than going into valor. However if you want to be a in the frontline, 30 valor is pretty much mandatory seeing as it heals for as much as 1000 healing power would heal with 30 in honor. Together, you are not only tanky but sustainable.

RESULTS (tldr) : While using a 0/0/30/30/10 Hammer build crafted specifically to maximize healing power, the average healing is 1 health per second for every 3 healing power invested. Please let me know if there are suggestions or questions or criticisms. I will explain anything that I did not explain especially well, which I am certain will be the case since I was not able to copy-paste everything from word onto this post.

This is somewhat comparable to preventing 1 damage every second from 3 toughness. An enemy with a 1000 damage weapon with 1700 power using an attack with a 1.0 multiplier (these are my stats wielding a greatsword) would deal 607 damage to someone with 2800 armor.* At 2803 armor, it would deal 606. I do not want to actually figure out the weapon damage range and power stat of each individual enemy, just to show the breaking point at which toughness reduces 1 damage for every 3 toughness. Obviously enemies at higher level play have more than 1700 power, but they also hit far less often. I’m not sure how to approach that topic yet, nor how to properly apply my results to find a perfect balance between toughness and healing power.
*this is from the wiki damage page. I am unsure about how to find the actual power coefficients for individual skills; it’s a lot more difficult than I previously thought because I’m not sure if there is a set base damage for skills or if the base scales off power in addition to the coefficient scaling off power.

background:
I was a protection monk in GW. Healing was never fun for me. Ether Renewal Infusers were boring and ridiculous. Anet did leave intact some of the more fun dynamics of prot, such as Shield of the Avenger and Wall of Reflection. And like GW, these two protection skills will prevent much more damage than the damage healing could ever dream of healing. Although this got me wondering, if I specced for healing, how much passive healing could I get going? What is the maximum effectiveness of healing power for a guardian? These results are really astonishing to me, especially given the bad reputation heal power has.

My stats:
I wanted to hit 1000 Healing Power on my guardian just for fun. I didn’t really think it was the most effective use of stat points, but I wanted that tanky/healer feel to my guardian. What can I say, green numbers just make me happy. I tried fairly hard to balance my build otherwise; around 2800 attack, 2900 armor, 24% crit chance, 40% crit damage, 1000 Heal Power, 16,500 health (this is without consumables).

My traits and slotted skills:
I use a 0/0/30/30/10 build, including strength in numbers, retributive armor, and altruistic healing; writ of exaltation, empowering might, and writ of the merciful; and improved spirit weapon duration. For skills I use Shield of the Avenger, Wall of Reflection, “Stand Your Ground!” and Renewed Focus. I use shelter because it eats up far more damage than other healing skills can if used properly. Just watch those 4 glowing agony orbs from the raving asura turn into 4 stacks of might. It’s thrilling.

For the Hammer rotation there are a few things that you should know. You can spice up you skill rotation in a few different ways, but it always includes a full chain, mighty blow, and a roll dodge. This can be performed once every 6 seconds (Mighty Blow is on a 5 second recharge with a 3/4 second cast time). The most important thing to the hammer chain is to think of it as two separate attacks: the first two hits versus the one second channel (Symbol of Protection). After the first two attacks you can dodge or walk around before initiating the channeled 3rd strike. This is important because the melee third strike of your chain is pretty pitiful, while the Symbol itself will target an enemy even if you’re at a pretty far range. This allows you to time your rolls to dodge enemy attacks without interrupting your chain, and also allows flexibility when trying to roll heal allies. Mighty Blow then brings you right back into the action even from a range. The hammer can function as a mid-range weapon if you want to play it that way. If you stay right up next to an enemy the entire time you could get in an additional one or two basic hits, but at higher difficulties this means death (especially agony bosses).

JonPeters.5630:

Yeah, the formula is 15+((Level^2) x 0.05)+(Healing x 0.18)

So for example a Level 80 guardian with 1000 points in healing would heal for:
15+320+180=515

would you consider listing the formulas for damage and healing from our weapons (even if it might, and probably will, change in subsequent patches)? It would really help get some concrete answers as to the effectiveness of healing power compared to say precision or condition damage. At the moment only anecdotal accounts have really surfaced, and many shun the idea of healing power in any form without much evidence other than “it didn’t increase healing enough.”

I have been playing it pretty flawlessly on my 2009 macbook 13 inch (no crashes, no glitches, the only complaint is sometimes if I go too fast through an area the enemies don’t physically appear but thats only happened twice in my 20+ hours I’ve used my laptop to play. It’s also probably a RAM problem and not a client problem). So it’s pretty old, but it works perfectly. Just make sure you’re updated to at least 10.6.8.

Once you buy the game I am 100% confident you won’t have to buy new “released” client.

I believe that it also turns Smite Condition and Merciful Intervention into stun breaks but I have not tested that out personally. I like the idea of ground targeting, although I’m not very experienced in PvP so I can’t say if that would be too powerful. MI would become an amazing retreat that I assume would heal yourself if no one was nearby, as well as an amazing support skill. It’s a fine line between MI being useless and godly.

I was curious about the unscathed contender trait (10% under aegis):

How do blocks prioritize themselves? Is it by time (as in, the first one applied is the first one to block)?

Here’s a hypothetical: If I am wielding a mace and focus, and I know that my aegis passive is about to come up and I want to receive the 10% on the burst from the shield pop. What would be the best skill order to use? Protector’s, Shield, Aegis? And maybe add in shelter – that would ensure the shield pops.

Could be a funny little might stack, burning proc, % increase, burst chain. Not really viable, just curious.