18 replies to this topic

[binidj]

Please note this applies to PvE only.

After having noticed the massive nerfs to healing skills in the recent stress test (15 August 2012) and also being fairly dim when it comes down to it, I was wondering, are healing specialists (ie. those who trait heavily into +Healing) better or worse off than they were before? Clearly (it seems to me) they are worse off if one takes a pre-stress healer and a post-stress healer and just compares numbers; however is it possible that because of the amount of +Heal added by traits, the gulf between non-specialist and specialist characters as widened? If this is the case then is healing more desirable than ever in a group situation? Or is it largely pointless given the base nerf?

By the way, please don't trot out the "no healers" line, I know there aren't traditional MMORPG healers in GW2 and I have no issue with that. However healing is still a part of the game (you can tell, there are traits and skills and everything), it's just become more fluid and dynamic ... in just the same way as tanking has.

[heatzzz]

Tbh how often will you need to heal in a DE?
Not very often as there's always enough people take part in it.

The 1's that need healing are melees but from what I notice & they only often died when in range while facing a champion using 1hko skills which makes a healing spec somewhat not useful & there's will be always people reviving.

Though things might change in higher level DE when they are maybe more wide-spread and lesser people taking part in that particular DE.
As for dungeons, I have no idea if healing skill are essential.

Edited by heatzzz, 16 August 2012 - 01:56 PM.

[golden_radish]

heatzzz, on 16 August 2012 - 01:54 PM, said:

Tbh how often will you need to heal in a DE?
Not very often as there's always enough people take part in it.
...

If the Aug15 stress test is any indication, healing is constantly required in Dynamic Events with waves of opponents.  And very few players will do it.  They just die in the first wave and lie there, then come to the forums and complain about the lack of healing/support.
5 NPCs focus firing each player in turn = dead player.
The more support players, the better, from what I've seen so far.

[heatzzz]

Healing is the least effective component of support as it really doesn't scale well, maybe other support such as control base skill are much better.

Example placing traps or mines on entrance of wave attacks.

[tbox]

Seems to me going balls to wall plus healing does not payoff well. Dunno why they felt to nerf support builds so much. I am sorry people are not going to bother with shit ass healing. Healing for 200 a tick don't mean jack when the warrior bursts for 8k.

[heatzzz]

tbox, on 16 August 2012 - 02:16 PM, said:

Seems to me going balls to wall plus healing does not payoff well. Dunno why they felt to nerf support builds so much. I am sorry people are not going to bother with shit ass healing. Healing for 200 a tick don't mean jack when the warrior bursts for 8k.

Mind you we are talking in a sense of PvE not PvP.

[misterdevious]

Something I noticed yesterday... the amount of health I gained from Leaping through Water went up dramatically... from ~1100 to ~1800.  (These values are both from the same amount of Healing Power.)  I wonder if Blast + Water went up as well.

[heatzzz]

misterdevious, on 16 August 2012 - 02:42 PM, said:

Something I noticed yesterday... the amount of health I gained from Leaping through Water went up dramatically... from ~1100 to ~1800.  (These values are both from the same amount of Healing Power.)  I wonder if Blast + Water went up as well.

I tested with 0 compare with 1388 healing power:
With 0 a blast finisher in a water field is 1320
With 1388 a blast finisher in a water field is 1598

[ShezuTsukai]

Balancing the numbers especially for the squishy classes like thief and ele is going to be difficult considering the skill and style differences.

Face it the dodgy thief is gonna get hit eventually and all classes run out of condition removal and need to heal.

I hope there is a plan here that doesn't involve constant respawns and Rez stones.

[Maxtofunator]

My philosophy is that it is a very useful trait as it stands currently and probably more useful now, and I personally feel that the nerf was there because of how long 1v1 fights could last in PVP, and they feel that PVE has been okay for a while so they don't even seem to take it into effect when messing with balance issues personally.

[Clockwork Bard]

I think they're going to keep balancing, but I don't know that that excludes +Compassion from being a meaningful bonus.  +300 Compassion to a L80 is close to a +30% (+28.8% by my math) improvement to the amount a L80 regeneration boon heals.  The same investment of traits into Concentration is +30% boon duration.  I think that's a pretty good deal for something I can get a lot more of through gear.

Self-healing is always going to be necessary, no matter how nerfed down they get.  In balancing, we should expect it to be roughly in the running with Vitality and Toughness in terms of survivability worth.  The trade-off being the loss of spike mitigation vs. the added group benefits (a significant loss in this game, but you can't have it all).

Group healing should be measured with the mentality that it should provide the statistical advantage of a boon or three.  If a +300 Compassion heal can average healing back an extra amount equivalent to an extra second or two of protection or the added damage of a couple stacks of might, it's doing its job as intended.

Is it performing to those standards?  I'm not positive yet.  I need more time and numbers.  But I thought I'd try to establish where the bar lies a little better.

Edited by Clockwork Bard, 16 August 2012 - 07:27 PM.

[darkblue]

Healing is not balanced around the idea that it should be as good as vitality in solo-play (you can't compare healing to toughness as easily even if they work together). People should mainly get some healing if they have some way of healing others or giving them regen ... otherwise it's worse than vitality (on a moderately long fight) and I'm good with that. For boss fights though, since they tend to last quite a while (but the damage come in burst) it tends to work better with vitality than with toughness.

Just as an example, you need 80s of regeneration to get 3k more healing from someone with 300 more healing stat. Obviously, it also add to the self heal but it's easy to understand that you'll get past this threshold faster if your regeneration is ticking on 5 people than just yourself (but then I guess you are not the only one benefiting from it).

[Drekor]

heatzzz, on 16 August 2012 - 02:51 PM, said:

I tested with 0 compare with 1388 healing power:
With 0 a blast finisher in a water field is 1320
With 1388 a blast finisher in a water field is 1598

Seems like they nerfed the coefficient then, used to go up to about 2500 (seemed like 100% of healing power). That's a pretty big change.

[Morghana]

I don't think healing others it's going to be mandatory.. I mean, if they keep dieing they are doing something wrong, not only skill usage wase, but their positioning, builds, weapons, utilities..

More sooner than not, people will realize than a dead glass cannon does even less than cero dps if a team mate loose his time rezing him.

If you make up everyone else's mistakes, they are not learning to do the things properly.

That been said, if compassion was somewhat bugged last stress test, I'm sure they will fix it.

Edited by Morghana, 17 August 2012 - 05:44 AM.

[Clockwork Bard]

darkblue, on 16 August 2012 - 07:52 PM, said:

Healing is not balanced around the idea that it should be as good as vitality in solo-play [...]

Aye, I got a bit ahead of myself.  I'm currently trying to find numbers to get a ballpark idea where compassion lies against vitality (I agree, it shouldn't be "as good as", just "in the running with"), but compassion contribution multipliers I'm finding are all over the place, ranging from 80% to as much as 500%.  On the unlikely chance that a self-heal really does give 5x Compassion to a self-heal, then it would only take two heals to match an equal investment in Vitality, but for something more moderate like 100% on a 30 second cooldown, it would take 5 minutes of straight fighting to match it.  I see I have testing to do next opportunity.

But yes, I didn't mean to encourage wild self-heal builds.  I really meant to emphasize the "heal other" portion.  Healing really gets bashed in this game by being measured against other games' healing, rather than against its support brothers like might or protection.

[binidj]

I asked this question with specific reference to a Necromancer life-siphon/support build in mind (again, strictly PvE) so healing may well form a more intrinsic part of solo gameplay than, say, an Elementalist. However I wanted to get a general feel from the community, specifically the theorycrafters, about where healing stands now as opposed to where it was in BWE3.

[Lyall]

I'm going to have to lean towards Protection as the best form of support in PvE. Prevents melees (and everyone else, for that matter) from being insta-gibbed and just reduces a lot of damage overall. Also scales better than healing.

[Baughbright]

Lyall, on 17 August 2012 - 09:07 PM, said:

I'm going to have to lean towards Protection as the best form of support in PvE. Prevents melees (and everyone else, for that matter) from being insta-gibbed and just reduces a lot of damage overall. Also scales better than healing.

Most builds getting good uptimes on Protection are also going to have a lot of healing going on.  I mean, it's not like this is a "one or the other" type situation.  The two things work together.  The slower people die, the longer you have for healing CDs to come back up.

[Lyall]

Baughbright, on 17 August 2012 - 09:14 PM, said:

Most builds getting good uptimes on Protection are also going to have a lot of healing going on.  I mean, it's not like this is a "one or the other" type situation.  The two things work together.  The slower people die, the longer you have for healing CDs to come back up.

True enough.

I also found that as a Ranger (at least up to level 30+), Healing Spring was a very potent source of group healing. Made it very difficult for mobs to kill anyone.