Saintgaroo or Bunny Saint build is Support Meta in WvW

[hainese.9216]

2 hours ago, Zenith.7301 said:

 

 

The problem with Herald is it sucks as a support, when it's SUPPOSED to be the support spec, yet eclipsed by renegade as a support spec despite the fact renegade is designed to be a condition damage spec.

 

Vindicator is just a repetition of the same mistakes done with Herald. It's not a good thing. Stretching elite specs thing trying to cover all roles rarely works out well for the spec, whereas having more of the traits and mechanics dedicated toward customizing for a particular role works far better.

 

Anet is just terrible at dutifully balancing their game, balance patches come out once every blue moon, and when the changes do come out, they are marginal and ill thought out with no public test realm, and they rarely if ever adjust their patch notes they vomit out to player feedback.

 

So you get monstrosities like Renegade, Scourge, and Firebrand eclipsing all else because Anet doesn't bother to fix reaper, herald, weaver, chronomancer (support, which is what the spec should be, power should be virtuosos and mirage condi),  or soulbeast. Hell, even deadeye has its issues on its intended weapon set. Scrapper by some miracle was fixed nearly 5+ years later, it's really disgraceful how negligent the class balance and changes are in this game.

 

But it's because they have a skelenton crew in the class balance team, and they don't have a unified direction from a gameplay lead, just rotating project teams that abandon their predecessors' endeavors the moment they rotate in, so there's never any continuity.

 

 

Perhaps we want different things out of the game, which I can respect. I don't have the time nor the energy to point out all of the things that I don't agree with in what you are saying 

 

TL;DR - Guild Wars 2, by design wants to give options and do away with a holy trinity.. holy trinity is strong and the community creates selective roles and responsibilities out of efficiency for content

 

Game can be played with options in mind and a lot of things are pretty balanced (besides some PoF Bloat) and there are devs actively communicating with the community about decision making (which has not historically been the case)

 

Is Scourge a "dedicated support" because of blood magic and barrier, what about the corrupts and DPS options for the spec? Is a Core revenant a "dedicated support" because it has Ventari and Salvation as options? What about Corruption or Devastation? Is Mirage only a Condi DPS build? It might be the most efficient, but that's not to say that mirage isn't used in other ways in different content...

 

Herald has just as many traits in the line for personal selfish DPS as it does for traits effecting allies.. it's not "supposed" to be a support.. some people just say that it is. Alacrity of Renegade is desired more than the offensive boons + protection uptime of herald. This is how you get renegade support over herald as meta

 

Scrapper can go support because of med kit and elixir gun, it can also go Power DPS because of traits and offensive gyros, I'm sure someone can make a condi build of it too.... That's the beauty of the game...Super fun, rich mechanics, hard to balance 100% and make everyone happy

 

 

 

Edited September 30, 2021 by hainese.9216

[Jthug.9506]

5 hours ago, Zenith.7301 said:

The problem with Herald is it sucks as a support, when it's SUPPOSED to be the support spec, yet eclipsed by renegade as a support spec despite the fact renegade is designed to be a condition damage spec.

Yeah I don't find that to be true. Herald is a way better healer than renegade, it's regeneration is the most powerful in the game and it hits 10 targets, it also has a 10 target heal to anyone you give a boon to every 3 secconds, and also a pulsing 1s cd 10 target heal from the f2 while in ventari. In addition the f2 while in glint is a 10 target 20% outgoing boon duration buff.  So all in all a great support. All of the herald's facet buffs are 600 radius which is pretty fantastic for healing. Unfortunately it doesn't give 10 target alac, or quickness, but it does not suck as a support. 

Edited September 30, 2021 by Jthug.9506

[nosleepdemon.1368]

2 hours ago, Jthug.9506 said:

Yeah I don't find that to be true. Herald is a way better healer than renegade, it's regeneration is the most powerful in the game and it hits 10 targets, it also has a 10 target heal to anyone you give a boon to every 3 secconds, and also a pulsing 1s cd 10 target heal from the f2 while in ventari. In addition the f2 while in glint is a 10 target 20% outgoing boon duration buff.  So all in all a great support. Unfortunately it doesn't give 10 target alac, or quickness, but it does not suck as a support. 

 

So a support that cannot give out the one buff that is truly desired from a support? Yeah I dunno I think that kind of sucks.

[Jthug.9506]

11 minutes ago, nosleepdemon.1368 said:

 

So a support that cannot give out the one buff that is truly desired from a support? Yeah I dunno I think that kind of sucks.

I suppose you are talking about alac? I guess so, although right now the best way to give 10 target alac is on staff mirage which also gives 10 target 25 might and does decent dps. Heal ren got the nerf bat when they changed the kalla elite, I went back and tried it again when they upped the healing on it in a recent revision. It still sucks. Imo if you want to give alac on renegade these days, you do dps, you don't try to heal.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Jthug.9506

[RabbitUp.8294]

On 9/25/2021 at 7:56 PM, Infusion.7149 said:

Sure, if you consider the barrier which has poor scaling (1550+0.5* healing power barrier and heal , so with 1500 healing power about 2.3K of barrier and healing). It really isn't a support because you don't have reliable burst healing without Ventari and a staff. It's similar to using Sand Cascade on scourges or a shout on a tactics warrior not specced for heals.

A one dodge barrier on impact where you can still be hit while in the air is not a suitable healing spec. The alliance skills , other than the meme urn  which is a potential death sentence, all have 0.22 heal coefficients (i.e. 1500 heal power = added 330 healing) with below 800 base heals.

I hope vindicator gets more DPS focused, as it is now it is only openworld PVE spec at best ( 5 target cleave GS): from what I've seen people haven't been able to break 31K on the PVE golem either. You'd think with two power weapons (GS has higher coefficients vs multiple targets) it should be able to do better than herald or renegade so probably the longer cooldown skills could have some damage added and the damage dodge can give more raw damage (not damage modifier) as a tradeoff for the long airborne duration.

At the very least it can be made similar to alacrity renegade before soulcleave nerf but with offensive/defensive boons (might, stability, vigor, protection on Awakening or with the Vassals of the Empire dodge, resistance are all accessible on core  rev anyway) and less potential heals.

 

Revenant's healing potential is in the % outgoing healing modifiers they can stack. Vindicator can reach like 120% in healing gear, so that 2.3k healing is actually 5k. Every 3-4 seconds. 

[RabbitUp.8294]

1 hour ago, nosleepdemon.1368 said:

 

So a support that cannot give out the one buff that is truly desired from a support? Yeah I dunno I think that kind of sucks.

Desired in pve. There are other game modes.

Also, you can totally take a support herald in raids and hard carry the group, which most pugs should be doing, instead of trying to copy speedrunners and wipping.

 

 

[Infusion.7149]

7 minutes ago, RabbitUp.8294 said:

 

Revenant's healing potential is in the % outgoing healing modifiers they can stack. Vindicator can reach like 120% in healing gear, so that 2.3k healing is actually 5k. Every 3-4 seconds. 

Anything you can stack on Vindicator you can also stack on herald or renegade

[Jthug.9506]

I think the unique thing that the heal vindicator brings is really the 200% vigor uptime for it's party. It's actually pretty nice, especially if you really like vigor like mirage, thief and hopefully dps vindicator if they buff it and make that a thing. There are a few pve fights where being able to dodge as often as possible is also just generally a good deal, Q1cm and largos come to mind, certain strike missions too. And in competitive modes 100% vigor uptime is potentially huge for survivability. It's not a super obvious dps boon like alac or quickness, but it's potentially really nice to have.

Edited September 30, 2021 by Jthug.9506

[draxynnic.3719]

6 hours ago, RabbitUp.8294 said:

Desired in pve. There are other game modes.

Also, you can totally take a support herald in raids and hard carry the group, which most pugs should be doing, instead of trying to copy speedrunners and wipping.

 

 

Isn't that build still pretty much a DPS build, though, albeit a DPS build that splashes a lot of boons around and helps ensure that there aren't any gaps in boon coverage?

[Zenith.7301]

12 hours ago, Jthug.9506 said:

Yeah I don't find that to be true. Herald is a way better healer than renegade, it's regeneration is the most powerful in the game and it hits 10 targets, it also has a 10 target heal to anyone you give a boon to every 3 secconds, and also a pulsing 1s cd 10 target heal from the f2 while in ventari. In addition the f2 while in glint is a 10 target 20% outgoing boon duration buff.  So all in all a great support. All of the herald's facet buffs are 600 radius which is pretty fantastic for healing. Unfortunately it doesn't give 10 target alac, or quickness, but it does not suck as a support. 

 

 

It sucks as a support, for the same reason heal scrapper and tempest are deficient supports. You only need so much healing to beat content. That is, healing can be redundant. Boosting your group DPS is never redundant, because DPS does not have diminishing returns or a point where it becomes superfluous.

 

Herald is not taken over renegade simply because all it provides is "useless". Just like with a heal scourge or tempest, you don't need a tempest or even heal renegade's level of healing to survive encounters. The lower end firebrand and druid healing is more than enough. Hell, druids, being the worst throughput healer in the game, can solo heal most of the raid encounters.

 

Healbrand puts out mediocre healing, but that is besides the point because it heals just enough as it's needed, and on top easily maintains all boons except for alacrity, plus as a guardian being the monopoly on continued stability and particularly aegis and resolution in the game. All these utilities increase group DPS by reducing interruptions to the DPS performing their role. Herald does none of that. For that same reason, regen is worthless, any healer can heal through damage auras trivially, and what kills a group is burst damage, of which regen won't do anything about.

 

Herald absolutely sucks as a support because the way that GW2's design functions, healing throughput is of marginal value. There's nothing like WoW or FFXIV where healers have to triage encounters, deal with cost efficiency, different types of heals, or have any remote level of depth to healing or healer specific fail checks in encounters that require dedicated healer strategies and varying tools in the healer's kit.

 

Healing was introduced with the druid to this game after they realized that removing the trinity created an even worse problem where you just stack the top DPS class and then enough boon providers to enable the DPS, and made for really stale encounter design. And they've done a half assed job out of it, becase the main problem continues to be how powerful boons are relative to other utility and the fact that boon provision encourages a very strict positioning regimen for the raid. Compare that to WoW's many concurrent role and range dependent mechanics, and it's evident how underdeveloped GW2's organized PvE content is. Not that spvp and WvW are any better when you compare them to GW1's rich variety and depth.

Edited October 1, 2021 by Zenith.7301

[Infusion.7149]

What are you even on about, heal scrapper is more than servicable in WVW (what this thread is about) and also in PVE when you have external might/fury sources. It's actually quite strong on W2 Matthias and W5 Soulless Horror due to incoming conditions.

Heal tempest could easily replace druid if you have someone bring spirits on soulbeast for example and arguably it's stronger healing and 10 man. Nobody runs heal druid seriously in WVW and before gyro reworks auramancer was a viable alternative to running double firebrands due to coverage of 2 subgroups...

[Charybdis.3695]

19 hours ago, Jthug.9506 said:

I suppose you are talking about alac? I guess so, although right now the best way to give 10 target alac is on staff mirage which also gives 10 target 25 might and does decent dps. Heal ren got the nerf bat when they changed the kalla elite, I went back and tried it again when they upped the healing on it in a recent revision. It still sucks. Imo if you want to give alac on renegade these days, you do dps, you don't try to heal.

 

 

If you reach 100% boon duration and trait yourself with Core Value, you can cycle permenant alacrity on 5 members with Herald by using True Nature on Glint. Fractal groups are easily carried this way in T4s and CMs. As you said it's not meta, but it works great.

 

I know it's like nails on a chalkboard for some to hear that something else works, but the reality is not everyone is at the same skill level to use the speed clearing build that was referred to them by experienced players (edit: also some of these players just want to get accepted into groups and clear content without having to wipe over and over).

Edited October 1, 2021 by Echo.6310

[Jthug.9506]

11 hours ago, Zenith.7301 said:

 

 

It sucks as a support, for the same reason heal scrapper and tempest are deficient supports. You only need so much healing to beat content. That is, healing can be redundant. Boosting your group DPS is never redundant, because DPS does not have diminishing returns or a point where it becomes superfluous.

 

Herald is not taken over renegade simply because all it provides is "useless". Just like with a heal scourge or tempest, you don't need a tempest or even heal renegade's level of healing to survive encounters. The lower end firebrand and druid healing is more than enough. Hell, druids, being the worst throughput healer in the game, can solo heal most of the raid encounters.

 

Healbrand puts out mediocre healing, but that is besides the point because it heals just enough as it's needed, and on top easily maintains all boons except for alacrity, plus as a guardian being the monopoly on continued stability and particularly aegis and resolution in the game. All these utilities increase group DPS by reducing interruptions to the DPS performing their role. Herald does none of that. For that same reason, regen is worthless, any healer can heal through damage auras trivially, and what kills a group is burst damage, of which regen won't do anything about.

 

Herald absolutely sucks as a support because the way that GW2's design functions, healing throughput is of marginal value. There's nothing like WoW or FFXIV where healers have to triage encounters, deal with cost efficiency, different types of heals, or have any remote level of depth to healing or healer specific fail checks in encounters that require dedicated healer strategies and varying tools in the healer's kit.

 

Healing was introduced with the druid to this game after they realized that removing the trinity created an even worse problem where you just stack the top DPS class and then enough boon providers to enable the DPS, and made for really stale encounter design. And they've done a half assed job out of it, becase the main problem continues to be how powerful boons are relative to other utility and the fact that boon provision encourages a very strict positioning regimen for the raid. Compare that to WoW's many concurrent role and range dependent mechanics, and it's evident how underdeveloped GW2's organized PvE content is. Not that spvp and WvW are any better when you compare them to GW1's rich variety and depth.

In a perfect world a solo druid is all you need to heal any pve encounter. However in my world people screw up, so over healing is nice. As to your assertion that herald's healing is mediocre and not good for burst I have to disagree. The passive 10 target stuff can kick up to over 2500hp/s (the regen alone is over 1khps) per target before you factor in the tablet healing and staff skills. Also the boon duration buff from herald f2 is super nice for less than perfect teammates who could use a little help maintaining their boon output. As to your points about trinity or gw2 vs the rest I don't really have a strong opinion other than to say I am glad to be out of the wow gear tread mill and toxic environment. Never played ff14 so I can't comment. I did do healing in wow raids many many years ago, and it was certainly a much more serious and demanding task than gw2 iirc.

Edited October 1, 2021 by Jthug.9506

[Aeolus.3615]

3 hours ago, Jthug.9506 said:

In a perfect world a solo druid is all you need to heal any pve encounter. However in my world people screw up, so over healing is nice. As to your assertion that herald's healing is mediocre and not good for burst I have to disagree. The passive 10 target stuff can kick up to over 2500hp/s (the regen alone is over 1khps) per target before you factor in the tablet healing and staff skills. Also the boon duration buff from herald f2 is super nice for less than perfect teammates who could use a little help maintaining their boon output. As to your points about trinity or gw2 vs the rest I don't really have a strong opinion other than to say I am glad to be out of the wow gear tread mill and toxic environment. Never played ff14 so I can't comment. I did do healing in wow raids many many years ago, and it was certainly a much more serious and demanding task than gw2 iirc.

Just a side note: its more like close to 1.3k heal per sec x 10(note this with regen alone)  if  ur herald tune for it or stronguer direct heals but for 5 players something like less heal but spreadded to 10 or more stronger and compact heal.

Herald support is extremelly underrated but understandable since is not a spammy class people think heals like 200-500 per sec max.

Dwayna runes to improve Herald regen.

Monk runes to improve Herald and ventari direct heals.

Ive heard Anet will have content that will scale dificulty this probably teamed with a druid  both will be great since both herald and druid dont need to be on low pwoer stats to heal this much(they sacrifice vit and the criticals),and for having a support  rev  party will have to search utility somewhere else since thats the trade off the strong heals for the party.

Edited October 1, 2021 by Aeolus.3615

[Thon.3780]

IMO. If you set healing build and compare between healing mechanic then you will see it clearly.

herald:  small heal over time, and have some big amount heal from shield.  Can do moving heal.

Ren :  big heal and then small heal.  Another heal from drain elite. Fix area. 

Bunny :  big heal  every 50 endurance. By jump jump. And some small heal from util skill.  Move and area. In between herald and Ren

 

now it is up to situation which Elite is fit for. 

Edited October 3, 2021 by Thon.3780

[RabbitUp.8294]

On 9/30/2021 at 10:19 PM, Infusion.7149 said:

Anything you can stack on Vindicator you can also stack on herald or renegade

The whole point of this discussion is the healing dodge, how are you getting that on herald or renegade?

And you are wrong anyway, since vindicator gets 20% more outgoing healing, and more sources of healing. Herald only gets a regen trait, and renegade gets a legend that doesn't work outside of pve and no supportive traits.

 

Edited October 3, 2021 by RabbitUp.8294

[RabbitUp.8294]

On 10/1/2021 at 5:15 AM, draxynnic.3719 said:

Isn't that build still pretty much a DPS build, though, albeit a DPS build that splashes a lot of boons around and helps ensure that there aren't any gaps in boon coverage?

Aren't all boon supports dps builds that splash boons on the side?

[draxynnic.3719]

On 10/3/2021 at 3:13 PM, RabbitUp.8294 said:

Aren't all boon supports dps builds that splash boons on the side?

To a degree, but there's a distinction between bringing boons that are in high demand (quickness, alacrity) and where their rotation is dedicated towards maintaining those boons and doing DPS in between, and bringing boons that are fairly commonplace and having a rotation focused on maximising DPS. Herald tends to be more of the latter, unless the group really wants lots of Protection.

 

The F2 is also valuable in its own right, but that's just a two-pip tax on your energy.

[RabbitUp.8294]

1 hour ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

To a degree, but there's a distinction between bringing boons that are in high demand (quickness, alacrity) and where their rotation is dedicated towards maintaining those boons and doing DPS in between, and bringing boons that are fairly commonplace and having a rotation focused on maximising DPS. Herald tends to be more of the latter, unless the group really wants lots of Protection.

 

The F2 is also valuable in its own right, but that's just a two-pip tax on your energy.

But that's literally all mirage and alacrigade do, play dps and generate boons at the same time. Mirage doesn't even have to do anything different to a dps build, and alacrigade has to press one whole new button.

 

Only healer builds really don't do dps rotations.

[nosleepdemon.1368]

4 hours ago, RabbitUp.8294 said:

But that's literally all mirage and alacrigade do, play dps and generate boons at the same time. Mirage doesn't even have to do anything different to a dps build, and alacrigade has to press one whole new button.

 

Only healer builds really don't do dps rotations.

 

I actually think it's more like one *other* button, as don't you drop citadel bombardment in favour of orders from above?

[draxynnic.3719]

20 hours ago, RabbitUp.8294 said:

But that's literally all mirage and alacrigade do, play dps and generate boons at the same time. Mirage doesn't even have to do anything different to a dps build, and alacrigade has to press one whole new button.

 

Only healer builds really don't do dps rotations.

Groups don't generally don't want boon support that only offers regen, fury, swiftness, might (capping at around 12, IIRC), and protection.

 

It's because Facet of Nature (Glint) closes any gaps created through imperfect play by the alacrity and quickness givers.

 

Other than that, it's basically a mediocre DPS 

[Jthug.9506]

7 hours ago, draxynnic.3719 said:

Groups don't generally don't want boon support that only offers regen, fury, swiftness, might (capping at around 12, IIRC), and protection.

 

It's because Facet of Nature (Glint) closes any gaps created through imperfect play by the alacrity and quickness givers.

 

Other than that, it's basically a mediocre DPS 

Mediocre is pretty forgiving. It’s 28k while your typical dps is 37-40k so your other supports would have to make that up by dropping boon duration for damage. Unless of course you are getting Facet of Nature Dragon from a healing herald.

Edited October 5, 2021 by Jthug.9506

[Aeolus.3615]

On 10/3/2021 at 6:00 AM, RabbitUp.8294 said:

The whole point of this discussion is the healing dodge, how are you getting that on herald or renegade?

And you are wrong anyway, since vindicator gets 20% more outgoing healing, and more sources of healing. Herald only gets a regen trait, and renegade gets a legend that doesn't work outside of pve and no supportive traits.

 

humm idk Herald has more than the regen trait....at least mine has.

The 20% boost  didnt fell that much sadly, imo one of the skills that i liked and was surprised was  Tree Song,  was expecting to like better batle dance but felt weak even when using with other trailines, on combat its support is only based on leap... wich is kinda idiotic imo and way to much telegraphed, make a tea while vindicator is somewhere in Mars and cc it to death on arrival.

The leap radios is also 240...everything in Vindicator is a 240 radios, this makes support real clunky, its like trying to heal while ur a T-Rex with short arms...

Selfless Spirit was healing alies slightly more than the Herald passive regen heals on a 600 radios, selfless Spirit needs some boost since its only 5 ticks (and if i recall Vindicator cant atack while using it), and its range its a bit to short 240.

Victor Urn is what every one knows..hope Anet devs note how bad that skill is since cant even self heal nor recover with self heals while using the urn, nor cant atacks, looses way more health that it heals (2.2k healing power test with all outgoing modifiers possible).

Not sure why but i feel Herald Elevated Compassion is even better than Redemptor's Sermon wich has a 30 ICD and health needs to reach 50% of the Vindicator while Herald elevated compassion can be pulled arround 1.5k every 3sec(mine are 1.2k heals since i dont  use direct heals boost runes..
 

Wich stats from the current ones u guys would fit better for Vindicator (note that Herald suport can use zealot, clerics so it can somehow still support with damage since has a fury and m8 traits as well and give good reocovers on health bars).

 

 

Edited October 12, 2021 by Aeolus.3615