Curse

Randvek · Feb 15, 2008, 04:52 AM // 04:52

I still think Healing Prayers beats out Protection Prayers when it comes to the raw mathematics of Guild Wars. I think where Protection Prayers wins out is when you start factoring in reaction time, lag, interrupts, and decision making skills. Prot gives you some room for (minor) human error; Healing gives you zero room for error, and nobody plays perfect.

LifeInfusion · Feb 15, 2008, 05:15 AM // 05:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randvek

I still think Healing Prayers beats out Protection Prayers when it comes to the raw mathematics of Guild Wars. I think where Protection Prayers wins out is when you start factoring in reaction time, lag, interrupts, and decision making skills. Prot gives you some room for (minor) human error; Healing gives you zero room for error, and nobody plays perfect.

Raw Mathematics also says that there's diminishing returns (i.e. having more than 2-3 heals is redundant) and that Gift of Health on 10 spec > 14 spec Orison/ethereal light/words of comfort.

I guess you could argue Healer's Boon/Word of Healing is better in raw healing power.

Captain Robo · Feb 15, 2008, 07:02 AM // 07:02

For a while, I forayed into WoW as a Priest, and it came as no surprise that healing in WoW is completely different than Guildwars. However, it is interesting to note that healing in WoW is completely red-bars-go-up, with the exception of very few "protection" style spells.

I made a post some time ago detailing the contrast between the healing styles of both games, with the overarching view of why Guildwars has no real concept of a "Heal over time". HoT skills are just about the closest you can get to "protection prayers" in the healing line, because they are constant healing sources that counter damage input.

If you want a simple answer to why healing kind of sucks in Guild Wars, its because the health pools are just too low in relation to the damage output of the characters (as was stated in the OP). Look at how high character health and +heal interplay in WoW. Decent tanks will have upwards of +16000 Health, and the biggest heals will hit for anywhere between 4k-8k (from a priest).

Guild Wars, on the other hand, has a much deeper healing system than World of Warcraft, in that you have less skills to work with, and must manage people's health in real time (Fastest straight-up heal in WoW is 1.5 seconds... anyone for dshot?). It is the quick pace and disruption-based tactics of Guild Wars which REALLY discourage "raw healing" as a viable play style.

You tread a fine line between overpowered and underpowered with respect to viable healing skills. Take WoH, for example; it's probably the largest, most mana-efficient healing skill in the game, and really constitutes the best that Healing Prayers has to offer. If such power was available in non-elite form, such a skill would be broken; yet comparatively speaking, everything else is strictly worse than WoH.

Tweaking the recharge/activation time/energy also won't work in order to introduce better healing skills because disruption is such a big part of the game, and energy is tight enough on a monk as it is. However, you can't have bigger heals without some sort of drawback in this respect, because then the skill would be broken. So pick your poison: useless or broken.

IMMORTAlMITCH · Feb 15, 2008, 07:50 AM // 07:50

This whole argument is retarded.

Yes you need more prot than healing.

No this isn't a problem, in fact it makes for more interesting plays.

Riotgear · Feb 15, 2008, 12:59 PM // 12:59

The problem is that healing is dumb. Red bar is down, therefore red bar must go up. It's also horribly inflexible in that by the time you need to do it, your target's already lost health and is more prone to spiking.

If rewarding gameplay is going to be maintained, healing needs to be one of those things you want to spend as little of your energy pool on as possible.

Needless to say, HB and WoH 2.0 don't exactly support this. HB in particular basically takes a brainless style of play and makes it even more brainless, YAY?

Oh yeah, and the healing "style" of WoW = furious button-mashing.

frojack · Feb 15, 2008, 01:53 PM // 13:53

Quote:

Originally Posted by Riotgear

Needless to say, HB and WoH 2.0 don't exactly support this. HB in particular basically takes a brainless style of play and makes it even more brainless, YAY?

Oh yeah, and the healing "style" of WoW = furious button-mashing.

Indeed. If healing was good enough alone to sustain bars, the game would be incredibly dull. Healing/protection should always be a somewhat fragile delaying tactic against death.
Out-side of ridiculous clean spiking, the more dangerous the environment, the better in my opinion. Even if teams roll in 5 minutes due to miss-calculation ^_^.

ZB for example is a much better skill than WoH for enchancing the feeling of danger (the price of interruption or bad usage being far more severe), thus promoting skillful play.

... But then... You all know this crap already...

Shendaar · Feb 15, 2008, 03:29 PM // 15:29

Prots are part of what makes GW what it is. Without them, GW would be just like all the others(ie crap).

romO · Feb 15, 2008, 07:40 PM // 19:40

Welcome to summer 2005.

shoogi · Feb 15, 2008, 07:56 PM // 19:56

One thing I disagree about is you saying that this situation is a flaw in guildwars. I can't see why this is a flaw, Imo this is a great bonus to pvp because it means that bad monks that randomly spam skills like GoL fail. If you want to win, then you will need to know how to prot, which means you need to be a decent player. GW PvP rocks (or used to rock before it got messed up) because it demands skill, understanding, communication, knowledge and so on.

Regarding restorits, weapon spells and spirits were supposed to be their protection methods. Spirits are a problem in GvG because reliance on them heaviliy limits the mobility of the team, which is unbearable in gvg atmosphere. However, in HA the battle grounds are much smaller, and rarely require constant mobility. That's why ritualist defensive spirits do see play there. Defensive Weapon Spells, the ritualist version of protection enchantments, don't work because- a. they cannot be stacked, b. they aren't nearly as good as protection enchantments. Add that to the fact that restorits need to have spirits around if they want to heal properly, and to the lack of defensive utility (wor and mb&s are fishy condition removals, and there isn't a single hex removal skill!), and here is why restorits are inferior to monks.

Cirian · Feb 16, 2008, 03:11 AM // 03:11

Historically in GvG it's always been Monks in the backline, mainly because of the prot line. Every other backline healer has been a N/Rt or Healer's Boon N/Mo gimmick that abused Soul Reaping with spirits or Jagged Bones for infinite energy.

In part the Monk is perfect because they are the Core class, and they were made all-singing and all-dancing from the start to heal, prot and clean in one package. So, when the Ritualist and others followed they were competing against an already perfect class and were either going to clone the Monk or be a trashy gimmick by comparison. We got the latter.

I would have preferred other Core classes to beat the Monk in various areas. Necromancers could have dominion over conditions and could have had Draw Conditions (in Blood Magic) and Martyr. Likewise, Mesmers could have been the best hex manipulators with the best removals. Elementalists could have had the best protection enchantments split between the Water and Earth lines, and some heal over times like Healing Breeze in Air. Finally Monks could have been acceptable with respect to cleaning and prot, but with the best direct healing. It's not like Monks should lose any particular area completely, I just think it's bad for them to be the best at so many things.

Unless the GW2 Monk's abilities are split up, there won't be room for any similar classes. With such a perfect class, it's just not possible, there's no point.

If the original Core Monk had been weakened, then perhaps the Ritualist could have come along with robust heals and condition removal and a bit of unique prot and had a chance. As the Ritualist is, their heals are ok but all their condition removals are gimmicky and their prot is severly limited. The Monk just blows them away in every department and then some.

I love the monk, but I don't want them to dominate the GW2 backline as much as they do in GW1.

My 2c.

Akaraxle · Feb 18, 2008, 09:46 AM // 09:46

Stick this thread, I'll send every new monk player I come across here.

JR · Feb 18, 2008, 10:11 AM // 10:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cirian

Historically in GvG it's always been Monks in the backline, mainly because of the prot line. Every other backline healer has been a N/Rt or Healer's Boon N/Mo gimmick that abused Soul Reaping with spirits or Jagged Bones for infinite energy.

In part the Monk is perfect because they are the Core class, and they were made all-singing and all-dancing from the start to heal, prot and clean in one package. So, when the Ritualist and others followed they were competing against an already perfect class and were either going to clone the Monk or be a trashy gimmick by comparison. We got the latter.

I would have preferred other Core classes to beat the Monk in various areas. Necromancers could have dominion over conditions and could have had Draw Conditions (in Blood Magic) and Martyr. Likewise, Mesmers could have been the best hex manipulators with the best removals. Elementalists could have had the best protection enchantments split between the Water and Earth lines, and some heal over times like Healing Breeze in Air. Finally Monks could have been acceptable with respect to cleaning and prot, but with the best direct healing. It's not like Monks should lose any particular area completely, I just think it's bad for them to be the best at so many things.

Unless the GW2 Monk's abilities are split up, there won't be room for any similar classes. With such a perfect class, it's just not possible, there's no point.

If the original Core Monk had been weakened, then perhaps the Ritualist could have come along with robust heals and condition removal and a bit of unique prot and had a chance. As the Ritualist is, their heals are ok but all their condition removals are gimmicky and their prot is severly limited. The Monk just blows them away in every department and then some.

I love the monk, but I don't want them to dominate the GW2 backline as much as they do in GW1.

My 2c.

I wonder if that is as much of a problem with Warriors (as an example) as it is with Monks.

If you have classes in the game that make big domage then you need classes that can counter it. It's much like the dominance of Soldiers and Medics in TFC; damage and healing are the two core factors of any direct PvP game.

The other classes are what stop the metagame swinging too much between those two classes. Elementalists (wards, blinds, snares) to a large extent are why people don't run 3+ Warriors. Without anyone running 3+ Warriors there is no real need for 2+ Monks.

In a game where Warriors did comparable damage to Elementalists you could probably get by with just one pure Monk in a team. To back the Monk up you could take an extra support/utility character like a Rit or a Smiter, and generally be much more flexible.

This reasoning is why I was so sad to see AoE Smiters get nerfed out of play. They had just the right balance of offensive and defensive capability to actually allow one (heal/prot) Monk builds (gimmicky as triple smite was) to see play. I feel with a few nudges in the right direction it could even have spread to an option for general balanced builds too.

However this is an awful lot of theorycrafting for a Monday morning.

frojack · Feb 18, 2008, 11:07 AM // 11:07

I've have always felt this way about the game and have written so in the past. The game has always been about monks and warriors. Having them as the linchpin just makes things annoying as hell when Anet effectively turn the contrast up to max on the TV that is Guild Wars.

Everyone bitched about having to run Splinter in farm meta. I always wondered why no one ever felt the need to say the same about these two classes (perhaps it happened during beta, I dunno..). I guess they're just too entrenched in the essence of what this game is...

EDIT: Theorycraft on Monday's gives you +1 on the curly white beard scale... Ok I'm going back to work...

Ensign · Feb 18, 2008, 09:33 PM // 21:33

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

Elementalists (wards, blinds, snares) to a large extent are why people don't run 3+ Warriors.

Err, no. Aegis and Wards are the only defenses keeping people from running 3 Warriors - blind and snares, defenses that trade 1:1 with Warriors, lose effectiveness as you add more physicals. This is one of the reasons Paraspikes are so effective, you cannot possibly shut down that many physicals.

You rarely see the 3rd Warrior anymore due to opportunity costs; given the roles he fills he's not that much better than a damage Paragon most of the time, and you sacrifice a good amount of utility to get him into a build.

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

Without anyone running 3+ Warriors there is no real need for 2+ Monks.

Huh? Disruption and, to a lesser extent, the fragility of a solo Monk are what make people run multiple Monks. It's the knockdowns, Diversions, and interrupts that necessitate multiple Monks, not the number of physical attackers. A single Warrior can and does kill a solo Monk with only moderate support from a Domination Mesmer. Multiple defensive characters are all about surviving disruption.

Captain Robo · Feb 19, 2008, 04:13 PM // 16:13

Quote:

Originally Posted by JR

If you have classes in the game that make big domage then you need classes that can counter it. It's much like the dominance of Soldiers and Medics in TF2; damage and healing are the two core factors of any direct PvP game.

fix'd

If I recall correctly, the medic in TFC was pretty awful at healing. They were used more or less as a better version of the scout.

TF2 on the other hand......

Ekelon · Feb 19, 2008, 06:33 PM // 18:33

Guys, it's okay. Guild Wars will never become a full protection prayers game.

As long as there is blood spike there is healzz!!!!11one

Sir Tificate · Feb 20, 2008, 12:17 PM // 12:17

Speaking of TF2...
Medic healing in TF2 can extend someone's health past their maximum temporarily, up to 50% more, but then it quickly degenerates when the person is not constantly healed.

Maybe something like that would work in GW? Just want to throw an idea out here.

Skills that "heal" an ally (as opposed to "gaining health" or "stealing health") can bring an ally's health past their maximum by up to 30% of their maximum health. Healing past their maximum is reduced in effectiveness by 20%, and the healed person suffers constant 10 health degeneration while healed past their maximum.

Numbers fail me and it'll probably be not quite balanced as is, but I'm certain someone can modify the numbers or quickly shoot down the idea if that is true.
Consider?

Div · Feb 20, 2008, 02:40 PM // 14:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Randvek

I still think Healing Prayers beats out Protection Prayers when it comes to the raw mathematics of Guild Wars. I think where Protection Prayers wins out is when you start factoring in reaction time, lag, interrupts, and decision making skills. Prot gives you some room for (minor) human error; Healing gives you zero room for error, and nobody plays perfect.

You're bad. Prot prayers give less room for human error/lag, because if you miss a prot you don't have as much raw healing power to pump it back up, especially in the case of a spike. A perfect example is spirit bond vs infuse. I only ever infuse spikes if a) it's against pure spike/ench removal heavy spike or b) I missed my prot because I'm bad at the game, and I make it up by infusing to look pro with an epic save.

Riotgear · Feb 20, 2008, 04:22 PM // 16:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sir Tificate

Speaking of TF2...
Medic healing in TF2 can extend someone's health past their maximum temporarily, up to 50% more, but then it quickly degenerates when the person is not constantly healed.

Maybe something like that would work in GW? Just want to throw an idea out here.

Skills that "heal" an ally (as opposed to "gaining health" or "stealing health") can bring an ally's health past their maximum by up to 30% of their maximum health. Healing past their maximum is reduced in effectiveness by 20%, and the healed person suffers constant 10 health degeneration while healed past their maximum.

Numbers fail me and it'll probably be not quite balanced as is, but I'm certain someone can modify the numbers or quickly shoot down the idea if that is true.
Consider?

I think it's an interesting concept, but would be far too much of a shock to the game. Would be interesting to see in GW2, for example.

However, I think that from a practical standpoint it doesn't matter much. If someone gets speed-healed that quickly, chances are they're also getting protted six ways to hell and are going to be quite resilient to whatever else you throw at them for a while already, which I think is a bit better than a bit of extra shock absorption.

Hayashi · Feb 21, 2008, 02:50 AM // 02:50

well, yes prot exist for a reason... so i dont know what ur getting at.

thats why prot + heal = keep party alive