There is no Healer role in the game though. The “roles” are Support, Control and Damage. Support != Healing
Those are not really roles though because you can do all three on the same character at the same time, and there is nothing you have to sacrifice to be good at any of them.
Nobody recognizes a might share warrior with lots of banners as a particularly helpful character who was built for group support, everyone just thinks any warrior without mightshare sucks and should GTFO. Nobody in the game gets to say “Hey, I built up my warrior to be a tactician who provides the party with lots of useful buffs”, because at no point do you have to make a hard choice about whether or not you want to be that. That’s simply what every single warrior is expected to be.
A role is about being able to dedicate yourself to something. It’s about what makes you different from other people in the game. In GW2 the only really lasting choice you get to make is your class, and essentially no way to distinguish yourself from other characters of that class. There is no reason to ever make two characters of the same class either from a mechanical standpoint, one character can be every possible build instantly.
Like I said, the main reason people look to healing for the support role is because the game has gear, stats, trait lines, weapon sets, runes, sigils and masteries all dedicated to healing. The weight of mechanics for throwing green numbers around is substantial, far more than any other support task, so it only makes sense that that would be the place where dedication to support happens.
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Of course a cleric in D&D doesn’t just sit and heal the entire time, because as I explained, healing skills and items in D&D aren’t there to just be spammed on someone while they are taking a beating, they are there to set the maximum number of encounters you can go through before you need to rest.
It’s the fact that in MMOs people flip their stack ten times as badly when they are made to rest for extended periods unless they find a healer than when they are forced to wait for a healer to fill their group, that lead to the idea of out of combat healing being abandoned in MMOs very quickly. That is unlike trinity which is still not fully gone, because nobody has fully figured out anything that replaces it without losing half the archetypes in the process yet.
D&D character archetypes work very differently than they do in MMOs for a lot of reasons though. For example a D&D Fighter is usually both by far the most durable and most damaging character in the entire party. The tradeoff is that a fighter doesn’t do a whole lot other than fighting. They don’t find traps, they don’t negotiate with potential allies, they don’t have survival skills, they don’t stealthily scout, they don’t have vast knowledge, and they don’t cast any of the hundreds of utility spells that are not combat related. A fighter just kills things, and does so better than just about anyone else.
It’s because in MMOs you can’t ever solve a quest by doing anything other than fighting that the designers had to come up with ways of packing all the nuanced skills, magic and knowledge into the combat.
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yup, it’s a dedicated healer that heals with a tablet. seems like what y’all want right? a class designed to heal.
It’s not about the green numbers, it’s about the ability to dedicate yourself to a role other than damage. The fact that the game has oodles more mechanics for healing than for any other support function with multiple classes, trait lines and gear sets devoted to it just means that people see that as the most logical choice to make a support character happen.
None of what you say adds up to an argument for why there can’t be dedicated support builds that exist to buff other people’s damage instead of inflicting damage themselves for the people who like to play that sort of thing.
The best way to make tank/healer builds viable in a setting where they aren’t needed is to make them able to do what a full dps would do almost as well as a dps would. This is the core of why i think healing power is a bad stat. The more of your stat budget you spend on non-dps stats, the worse your dps is going to be.
Yea, this is definitely true. The damage difference between a DPS geared character and a non-DPS geared character is so huge that it’s just not worth it giving that up. If you want to have healing as your primary stat you lose 80% of your damage, which simply isn’t in any way proportional to what you gain.
This already exists in the form of group aegis, blinds, reflects, stealth, invulns, interupts, dodges etc. A healer remains pointless if you set up your dps classes with these support abilities.
Being able to slot a few abilities that make you provide support isn’t the same as actually being able to create a support character though. Besides, Guardian shouldn’t be the only class that ever gets to play the support role.
And the only way to put them in the meta is make them required. Because even in trinity games, DPS is king. They only take enough healers and enough tanks to maintain maximum DPS.
That seems like another of your random assertions with no reasoning behind them. Even if we wholesale accept the premise that DPS is always king (there are fights in the game where it isn’t, like Mai Trin) it leaves plenty of opportunities for support characters that increase damage without being high damage themselves, and no reason why they would be required to run all content if they become accepted as being part of the fastest way to run content.
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This entire topic is about how to bring back the full range of RPG archetypes without enforcing trinity party compositions. I wouldn’t have to tell people we need to construct a whole new paradigm for how support works if I wanted it to go back to what it was.
Had to look up keeper’s gear.
Zealot does indeed have power/precision/healing, what I meant was healing as primary, but yea, Zealot gear is probably the closest to “reasonable healing gear” you can get with the current system.
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Now look at clerics gear: classic trinity equip. You deal no damage but get good healing. That’s imho a design flaw. It’s like taking the gun from a battlefield medic.
Such a medic would be bad in BF. And such a healer is usually bad in GW2.
There are ways to implement roles, make them useful. See BF where medics are accepted and useful.
To be fair though, the design flaw with cleric’s gear is more in the fact that Power, Precision and Ferocity stack in such an absurd way.
Cleric’s gear has power as a secondary on it. It does have a damage stat. It’s just that 900 power only produces a fourth of the damage of 1300 power + 900 precision + 900 ferocity.
There isn’t even a gear set that gives you Healing, Power, Precision so you could at least get to maybe half the damage of Berzerker.
If they just changed how damage scales exponentially to absurd levels you wouldn’t end up with a situation where a character in Cleric’s gear, which actually has offensive stats even is considered to be dealing no damage.
Yea, but how do you know how easy it will be in Heart of Thorns?
And let’s not forget that the reason the game is so easy is because it has to cater to all DPS parties. It’s this insistence that you should not ever need a healer or tank that keeps the game from being decently challenging to people who play anything other than DPS.
Hitpoints don’t mean the same thing in every game.
Where they come from for the purpose of roleplaying games is stuff like D&D and other table top games. In those games their biggest function is not determining whether or not you die during a fight, but setting limits to how much adventuring you can do before you have to rest. These are also the games that give us the roleplay archetypes that people want to be able to play when they ask for tanks and healers. As a result of games like D&D measuring your progress not only by how quickly you can kill a monster, but by how many monsters you can take on before you have to make camp there is a significant emphasis on having party members that can extend your parties endurance throughout the adventure.
A lot of people say this is where the trinity comes from, and to an extent they are right, but they forget that pen & paper games very much adapt to the players. A good DM can create fun adventures for any party composition, and by simply adding an extra healing potion to the loot of every encounter you can keep a game rolling smoothly even if nobody plays a cleric. Just because you can play trinity in a P&P game doesn’t mean you have to. In a way it’s this ur-state of gaming that I personally really want to get back to. I want to be able to make a party of misfits and have an engaging adventure. To me it’s interesting to have characters with significant strengths and weaknesses that you have to work around rather than always just chasing some ideal configuration.
This kind of combat endurance system was tried in early MMOs, but people became very annoyed with the idea of not being able to keep adventuring without having to rest for extensive periods of time or drinking very expensive potions unless they knew a healer. That’s perfectly understandable of course, nobody wants to sit around for 5 minutes waiting for their health bar to refill.
So that’s how we got to the World of Warcraft model, where originally a bit of cheap food and drink would let you skip the downtime, and in the meanwhile you have to be doing non-stop dungeon combat to actually full on run out of mana on any class. Healers were already much less useful in WoW then they were in games like DAOC, but Blizzard gave healers the ability to deal some damage, and thereby made it so that healers were capable of doing the solo content in the game by themselves. Healers retained their importance in large group content like raids where you simply couldn’t survive for long enough to kill the boss without someone putting health back on you and with someone who loses as little health as possible in every hit standing at the front. That morphed hitpoints from being largely a counter of how much adventuring you get to do into a timer for how long you have to kill the monster, and healers turned into people who put more time on the clock.
The problem with the trinity is that for one, it bothers players to be forced to look for very specific people to fill their party, rather than just being able to go with whoever, and secondly, it’s also broken from a design standpoint, because if you’ve ever played WoW or similar games you know that even though healing is required in boss fights, the bosses all have mechanics that can kill you even if you are being healed. That’s because once you have a playerbase trained in running the trinity a boss is only dangerous if they can disrupt that gameplay.
So here comes guild wars 2, they simply said: Why bother with the trinity, the only thing that makes bosses dangerous in WoW is their mechanics, so we’re just going to do a game where bosses are all mechanics, no noise that you have to heal through. Generally a really good idea, but it left hitpoints in an awkward spot, because they still work the exact same way that they work in a WoW style MMO in the way they are gained and lost, but the game no longer has any primary mechanics that work around hitpoint modification.
Hence why I think the way to actually go forward with the genre is to make hitpoints do something meaningful again. Maybe we have to stop calling them hitpoints, maybe they should just be called “Strength” so that it’s easy to understand why running out kills you, but getting more makes you do awesome stuff.
I think the HP system should no longer just be a clock that counts down how long you have to kill the enemy, but should be more like the endurance of a boxer. In boxing when you get hit a lot you’ll quickly lack the strength to attack, but if you attack too recklessly you’ll also lose the strength to defend yourself.
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Nobody is asking for trinity, people just want other things than maximum damage to have a place in the game too.
This problem doesn’t exist the same way in PvP, because killing the enemy isn’t the main objective. This allows high durability to be a viable tactic, making Bunker builds valuable to how the game mode works.
The arena based PvP is incredibly boring to me, because when it comes to arena based fights there are so many games that do it better because they do nothing else.
The WvW could be cool if it wasn’t so insanely broken. If you happen to be on a server where nobody does WvW then you just don’t get to unless you transfer to a server that does, and that means the servers that don’t have a lot of WvW going on never will.
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I get your idea but it makes the game easier for parties that do have a healer.
So what? The game is currently also easier if your party has a Thief. I’m perfectly on the side of “You shouldn’t need a healer”, but I have no problem with it if a mixed party is potentially the most powerful as long as you can still play the game without it.
The efficiency argument simply doesn’t make any sense, because people who play meta already have enforced builds, enforced gear, enforced party composition, enforced stack spots, enforced spell rotations and even enforced bug abuse. If your party benefited from a healer they would simply enforce that too.
I also see no problem with it if someone who spends a lot of time collecting gear that isn’t as powerful for solo content because they want to be particularly useful in group combat gets to be a little more powerful in a group as a result.
Also the math you’re using doesn’t take into account that whenever the healing potential in the party is being taxed the damage the healer adds disappears when that damage is governed by overheals and spending health. That means, yes, there is more room for screwing up, but the damage potential is only there if everyone plays at their best regardless.
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It’s an interesting point, and you would be correct if direct damage was the only damage type in the game, but its not.
Conditions do damage over time, therefore you need a stat that can diminish over time like HP.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. Why would hitpoints no longer be able to be affected by damage over time effects if there were positive effects to being overhealed just like there are negative effects to running out of HP, or if you could spend HP that you don’t need to survive on more damage?
Without the stats there wouldn’t be anything to keep people who like the idea of actually being able to distinguish themselves in a roleplaying game interested.
I mean let’s face it, this game has basically eliminated all actual character from your characters. Thousands of build options, yet nobody gets to be unique because it’s so easy to switch from one to the other that you’re always just expected to have whatever the meta is. The only thing you can’t switch on a whim is gear because it takes a significant amount of time to earn the various sets, and even here people don’t want to allow anyone to have a shred of uniqueness.
The whole point of busting up the trinity should be to allow people to play how they want. That’s not what you get with GW2 though. It’s more restrictive than ever. Pre-determined builds, everyone in the same gear, every character is just a blank slate for the meta. Flowing neatly into any mold isn’t freedom. Being allowed to have whatever shape you like is.
None of those qualify as being support first, damage second. For that matter, when it comes to warriors maximum might share and maximum DPS are actually the exact same build.
That’s exactly why the system is such a joke to people who actually like playing support. All it is is a bunch of entitled DPSers insisting you’re not allowed to do anything better than them even if you went out of your way to spec for it.
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I agree that the traits are pretty borked. Half the time you pick entire specializations for a single trait and then pick all the rest of them purely by what sucks the least.
Elementalist is an absolute joke with their trait lines, which are element specific rather than weapon specific. Every Elementalist weapon has every element! Switching between elements is the whole point of the class. Why do the trait lines act as though you are supposed to focus on a specific element? With every other class you get to build your traits for what you’re using while skipping the traits for what you aren’t using, rather than being forced to be bad at half the stuff you can do. And yea, I know, Elementalists are really strong right now so nobody cares if their traits are stupid, but if they ever stop being able to nuke the site from orbit to be sure this might be a problem.
There is no good reason why you shouldn’t be allowed to do damage by playing a character that raises everyone else’s damage instead of inflicting it themselves though.
You’re giving up damage, to do more healing. Why should you give up damage, to deal more damage than someone who has built for it ?
You don’t deal more damage, your party deals more damage by having you in it to make up for the damage they lose because you aren’t dealing as much.
What if it is equally powerful as what’s currently meta? The ultimate goal of game balance would be that people can bring whatever kind of character they like to a group and their success depends on how well they play their individual role, not on how mindlessly they copied the builds on metabattle.
In PvP healers and tankier builds are more useful because enemy players can and will kill you if you don’t have enough defense, unlike the monsters in this game.
But then they aren’t “healing” they are just a buff bot which kinda defeats the purpose because you aren’t giving people who enjoy healing a job (because they aren’t healing – they are just seeing green numbers instead of red). Healers like feeling like they saved someone or are critical to keeping the group up, your method of making it viable is based around them not needing to heal but just giving buffs.
Healing still has the possibility of saving someone from death, but since this is a game where people can save themselves it also has the possibility of providing buffs to people who don’t need saving.
Also you have to keep in mind that games are incredibly good at hitpoint modification. There are literally hundreds of different mechanics in the game for moving somethings life bar around, and because hitpoints are measured in thousands they have a very high level of granularity. That means that providing buffs to people via healing has a huge number of systems already in place to draw from. All the essential gameplay already exists, the only thing that’s missing is a good use for the green numbers for people who are good enough to not need them.
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the inherent problem with the trinity system is that for people who don’t enjoy tanking or healing, a tank and/or healer is required for them to have fun. So they must find someone who would rather perform one of those roles or who is willing to sacrifice their own enjoyment to enable others to enjoy playing.
Yea, I want them to change the system so that you can do all the content without a tank or healer, but people who enjoy playing tanks or healers still get to enjoy the game too by changing their function from simply being mandatory to avoid death to helping people who like DPSing do more damage.
Simple example: If you had a support character in the party that did no damage, but raised everyone else’s damage by 25% then that person can play support and enjoy it without having to build the whole game around making you need that person.
So players are supposed to become overpowered?
It’s this thing called balance. You don’t want to make the game so easy that players who use the mechanism can just steamroll over everything.
How could you possibly know how the devs are going to balance it?
First you claim that somehow enemies have to do more damage if a new type of ability is added to the game, then you claim that this completely unspecified ability that hasn’t even been designed yet, but was merely discussed as a possibility is overpowered.
It sounds like you’re trying to argue against a general design idea by just making wild unfounded assertions about how it will be implemented.
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The benefits have to be tied to heal amount, not just putting a single point of health on someone.
If you needed to put 5000 HP on someone who already has full health to kick them into overheal mode or whatever then it simply wouldn’t be effective trying to do that to a whole group without being geared for it.
Somehow nothing you just said makes any sense to me. How exactly does being able to spend excess HP require enemies to hit harder?
Yea, but remember, the whole point of this topic is that if hitpoints do more than kill you you can increase the demand for healing without forcing you to have a healer to survive.
For example, if you could spend half your hitpoints to activate a powerful ability then you would have a constant demand for hitpoints that a healer can fill even from people who never take damage from monsters, but nobody loses anything when they don’t have a healer.
Yea, it isn’t easy to get this right, but it’s not a premise that can simply be ignored if they want to actually move RPGs past the trinity without losing half the archetypes in the process.
Right now this game amputates the right arm and left leg of the genre in an attempt to cure the trinity. I say it can be done without cutting anything off.
This whole “If you don’t want to spec for pure DPS above all else you’re in the wrong game” attitude is honestly what’s stopping this game from actually getting past the trinity.
Instead of working toward a system that moves us beyond forced party composition to a place where you can play whatever you want it’s always just a bunch of DPSers who never want to ask for a tank again trying to have a victory lap without realizing that they are becoming the thing that’s holding the game back at this point.
If ArenaNet doesn’t see that, yea, they are going to be the wrong game for a lot of people the second someone comes along who understands that you can’t just kill off half the RPG archetypes people enjoy because you don’t want to make an effort to make them compatible with a game that doesn’t force party compositions. Half way there just doesn’t cut when someone finally takes it all the way.
It’s sad that so many people don’t believe that this is the game that can actually make everyone happy.
How exactly is anyone who enjoys going the full DPS route harmed by ideas that try to bring other play styles into the game in a way that doesn’t make anyone depend on tanks and healers?
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Look, what I am trying to tell you is that some people really enjoy playing a support specialist character that sacrifices their ability to deal lots of damage for the ability to provide substantial bonuses to a group.
You are absolutely correct in saying that at this point there is no need to sacrifice damage to provide maximum support. However, that is exactly the issue people have. They want to be a support specialist. They want the option to sacrifice DPS to provide more powerful benefits to their group, not a game where if you sacrifice 80% of your DPS your support ability stays exactly the same.
Or what if there were simply something like the Scholar rune bonus but for everyone and spread out across your health bar? What if you got an extra 1% damage for every 10% of your health bar that was full?
Not a bad premise, but since a healing geared character does only about 20% of the damage as a DPS geared character you need a much bigger bonus to the party to justify having a healer.
That also doesn’t increase the actual demand for healing. Unless you can do something to spend any extra health your party can generate the demand for heals will always be extremely low for skilled players.
Devs have said many things over the years. At best that is a “we’ll see”.
Hopefully it won’t involve either of these. Especially 2.
1) Add in some undodgeable and unblockable attacks.
2) Add in a useless suicidal NPC made of tissue paper that you must keep alive or fail the mission.
Both of those are awful ways to make healing heavy characters more useful. The whole point of my suggestion is to make people happy to have healers along because healers make good things happen, rather than merely stopping bad things from happening.
Any kind of system that makes more bad things happen when you don’t have a healer doesn’t make the game more fun, it just takes us back to the kind of mandatory class comp you get with trinity.
Are you seriously going to say you cannot specialize in support and still deal damage ?
If you stat for damage you will deal about 5 times more damage than if you stat for healing and survivability because of how offensive stats multiply on top of each other.
You can have an 80% crit chance, double the crit damage, and almost tripple the base damage as a non-DPS character while still being able to apply boons, aegis, and whatever other support functions exist.
Or you can give all that up for having about twice as much healing power that nobody needs.
So, no, you cannot reasonably specialize in support right now. Any group that cares at all about how well people play and how fast you’re clearing content will not have you along, because you lose very little of your support power as a DPS specialist, but you lose practically all of your DPS as a support specialist, and the extra healing isn’t even needed.
People who want to play support want to play specialists. They don’t want to be a DPS machine that can throw out group support abilities, they want to be so good at support that they contribute to the fight even if their DPS is low.
The ideas I put down are just examples of how the HP system could be expanded, they have nothing to do with the central point. ANets designers would come up with balanced ways to give extra HP a use if they wanted to implement a system in the spirit of what I’m suggesting.
Faster attacks wouldn’t solve the problem. Unless you lose so much health that you die without healing there is still no need to bring a healer, and getting killed unless you have a healer would get us right back to the trinity, so that can’t be the answer.
That’s rather a pedantic way of viewing hp.
Hp does do more than count down to death. You really should look up mmo effective hp calcs and mortality lines, then when you’re done with that, look up some traits that work off of % of hp.
So, uh, which one of your statements do you want to show that you don’t know what you’re talking about?
The part where you called my point of view pedantic and then go on to say it is more complex than what I said. (Pedantic means overly concerned with minute details and intricacies, if you find something too simple it is anything but pedantic!)
Or maybe the part where you are rattling off a bunch of minor details and intricacies of the system that really don’t majorly factor into what HP does. See, if I think that none of those things really matter in the grand scheme of things, so I actually have cause to call your statement pedantic.
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I wish they would add more ways for people to play tanky and healy characters. I don’t want them to bring back the trinity, but I think it’s stupid that there is no benefit at all to be gained from having characters who do other things than just pack on the damage.
It’s also dumb that all of the most powerful support functions like aegis or might share are in no way tied to having healing power, so crippling your damage to have the one dedicated support stat really doesn’t make you exceptional at support.
I think the problem this game has with making tanks and healers useful is that they are still using the exact same primitive HP system that games with the trinity are using. Since health doesn’t do anything but determine when you die classes that are good at keeping their health or restoring health are only useful in situations where any less defense would cause you to die. The second they implement any content where you die if you don’t get healed or have enough armor it would bring the trinity back.
Because of that I think the answer to making defensive and support characters viable again is to expand on what hitpoints can do for you. If you can actually gain benefits by retaining your health and gaining a bunch of extra health even if you wouldn’t have died without it you create a niche for healing and tanks in the game without making them required.
I think a big problem with the GW2 community is that people don’t seem to understand that people who like to play healers or tanks don’t want the trinity back either. They just want to be useful instead of getting kicked out of groups for not being max damage.
I wish I could hide my underwater helmet. It looks so stupid on my character because it simply removes his beard.
Besides, I’m an elementalist, why can’t I just summon a bubble of air around by head, or heal myself through the hypoxia?
Yea, the >90% traits are a good start to this, but they aren’t quite enough, because not everyone has them, and it only takes a tiny trickle of healing to keep people topped off most of the time. You run into the overheal problem, where when someone hits 100% of their health any additional healing leveled at them becomes meaningless. So you rarely need a lot of healing power to keep someone hovering above 90% unless they are taking an absolute wallop.
Maybe people could also have a counter for overheal, where if they receive healing beyond their natural health pool it counts up somewhere and every 5000 points or so give you something nice. That way you would have a way to benefit from receiving heals even if you manage not to get hit, because if you were getting hit all the heals would do is restore your health, but since you did a good job surviving they are charging your overheal instead.
Healing can work just fine with all the sensibilities of GW2, as long as we can get away from the idea that the only reason to have more HP is because not having enough kills you.
There is a flaw in the premise.
Hitpoints currently only have one function:
If you have hitpoints you are alive.
If you don’t have hitpoints you are dead.
This is the root of the problem.Healing, and hitpoint retention, has diminished importance thanks to the Downed State.
Making resurrection quick and easy does contribute to the fact that people are even less afraid of running out of health than they are in other games, that’s true. However I don’t think that is a flaw with my premise, quite on the contrary, it shows that the GW2 devs really want to create a game that has a softer line between being up and fighting and being dead. Adding more ways to benefit from getting extra health even when you aren’t getting pummeled by enemies would be a positive addition to that spectrum.
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You’re saying healing power should give more benefits “ontop” of helping people survive better? Which I think is wrong, because you aren’t suppose to reward people playing bad.
No, I’m saying having high hitpoints should give more benefits, so losing them by playing badly is in no way beneficial to you. If you are good enough to not lose any HP to enemies you should IMO be allowed to spend the HP to get bonuses. That way a healer provides just as much benefit to a good player as a bad one.
played Lord of the Rings Online ?
Warrior-Skald?
Cleansing Flame?
Solitary Thunder?
In old MMOs if you were a healer you literally could not kill any enemies by yourself, or switch to a DPS spec, or do much of anything else. Classes like that haven’t existed in MMOs for over a decade now.
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Did I say that there are, or that there should be pure healers in the game? There haven’t been any pure healers in games since Dark Ages of Camelot. I think you’re the one who’s missing the point of this topic.
It’s about how the mechanics of the hitpoint system are still the exact same thing that games with pure healers used, and as a result it doesn’t provide a matching range of benefit to the possible range of healing ability in the game.
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Since there is no trinity, there are no healers.
Then why is there a whole stat devoted to healing that massively taxes your gear, and why do multiple classes have whole spec trees devoted to healing, and even specific weapon/element choices that are specialized in healing?
Healers definitely exist in the game, they just aren’t useful to the way the game is currently played because the hitpoint system is so primitive that a healer cannot possibly be useful to you unless you would die if there wasn’t one.
This whole “there are no healers” attitude is simply ignorant of the facts. There are way too many abilities and gear choices that exist purely to provide healing to simply dismiss it as nonexistent.
watching red bars go left and right is rarely exciting, engaging or fun.
By that logic everyone should simply be invulnerable. After all, not needing a healer doesn’t stop you from having to mind your health.
For that matter, is putting little rectangles over peoples ability bar more engaging?
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Trying to work out the ideal way to speedrun a dungeon rather than merely completing it is metagaming. Playing the entire game with no pants on is also metagaming however. People are just referring to the findings of speedrunners as “the meta” because that kind of metagaming tends to lend itself well to trying to grind out the various accomplishments in the game.
Healers in Guild Wars 2 are in a bad spot. They aren’t useful, and any attempt to make them useful gets negative reactions because people don’t want them to be required.
The problem is not with the healers however, it’s with the way the hitpoint system works.
Hitpoints currently only have one function:
- If you have hitpoints you are alive.
- If you don’t have hitpoints you are dead.
This is the root of the problem.
You cannot benefit from gaining more hitpoints unless you would die without them!
Guild Wars 2 does not want to make healers mandatory, but because of the primitive way hitpoints work healers cannot possibly be useful without being mandatory.
If hitpoints had more different effects than just being alive or dead a healer could be useful even if people wouldn’t die without the heals.
- Maybe you could spend a portion of your hitpoints to reduce your cooldowns.
- Maybe you could gain boon duration when you stay topped off on health.
- Maybe you could receive a buff for being healed past 100%.
There are hundreds of possible ways hitpoints could have other effects than just life/death that would make getting more hitpoints desirable without killing you if you don’t have them.
The hitpoint system as it currently exists is just as old and outdated as the trinity. In fact, hitpoints governing nothing but when characters die is the whole reason why the trinity exists in games. It’s time to change that!
(edited by Aetrion.8295)
Putting hitpoints back on a person in a system where hitpoints do nothing but count down to your death will never be useful unless you die if nobody does it. (And then you have the trinity)
You cannot fix healing by making people take more damage, because the only way they will want a healer is if they die unless they have one, and that’s exactly what GW2 does not want. The only way to ever make “putting hitpoints back” appealing without flat out killing people unless someone puts their hitpoints back is to make hitpoints do more than just kill you when they reach zero.
A might share warrior can give his whole party 10-15 might permanently without even trying very hard, which means every single member of that party is doing easily 20% more damage than they otherwise would be. The warrior is a high hitpoint, high damage character on top of that, so basically having a warrior in your party makes your party do damage like it had 6 people in it.
Despite that nobody has an issue with “finding a warrior”.
The problem with healing power is that it doesn’t provide anywhere near as useful of a buff to the party and eats up your entire stat budget. A support function that exists purely to keep people from dying simply isn’t useful unless they will definitely die without you.
So, it simply comes down to ability design. If healing was more like Might Share it would be more useful, more desirable to spec for, while at the same time not being required to succeed. It might become required for making the most powerful possible meta party, but then it’s not like there aren’t any requirements for building that right now, so there is nothing lost there except maybe a few berzerker items.
I have never played with the old system, so I can’t say if it was better, but I think the current system leaves a lot to be desired.
Currently the choices look like this to me: “Do you want to be better with a certain weapon, gain a defense bonus when you reach 50% health, or inflict a status effect when you crit?”
The problem is that the answer is almost always obvious. If you use that weapon, then you will pick the weapon. If you have synergies running off that status effect you will pick that effect, if you have neither you will pick the defense. This exact same choice probably crops up 3 or 4 different places in your masteries.
A much better set of choices would be:
“Which one of these weapons do you want to be better with?”
“Which one of these defensive effects do you want to gain at 50% health?”
“Which one of these status effects do you want to inflict on crits?”
To me the biggest issue with random drop chance is that the activities you have to do to get that chance are overly specific usually. If there is a 0.2% chance to get a certain item from a certain world boss and I really want that item then I have to fight that same boss as often as I possibly can. Every single time it’s up I have to schlog there and fight it, every day, multiple times per day if possible.
That’s what ultimately kills the fun in “random drops” because it really isn’t all that random. If the item had just as much of a chance to appear on a bandit as it did on some world boss there would still be that possibility of it suddenly showing up and totally making someones day, without absolutely trashing the freedom to play their own way of people who really want the item. You simply don’t encounter the item randomly if you know exactly what monster you have to farm for it, the only thing that’s random at that point is how much of your time you have to invest into an activity that most likely isn’t your favorite thing in the game.
Maybe instead of dropping stuff like precursors from specific monsters there should simply be a random loot reward whenever an 80 goes up a level. You could still farm levels if you want to generate a lot of chances to get the item, but at least you could do whatever you enjoy to get those.
(edited by Aetrion.8295)
I’d like to have a real RP server, though to be honest, the only thing server even does right now is set your team for WvW, and that system is absolutely screwed up because everyone who likes WvW is on the same few servers while all other servers basically don’t fight at all.
I mean what good would an RP server be if I’m always playing with people from other servers anyways?
It would be better if they implemented an RP preference setting that tries to put you into instances with as many RPers as possible. They need to fix servers in general because of the stupid WvW thing. That’s just a total joke. You can’t WvW with your guild mates and if you’re on the wrong server you can’t really do it at all.
(edited by Aetrion.8295)