Heal Specter thoughts

[RagingRube.2540]

So, my main point is that heal specter feels pretty good. I've healed a ton of fights so far, and have found the build to have certain advantages, and also a pretty surprising amount of flexibility.

However, I have found it struggles a bit on some of the higher-pressure fights in the game. Dark phase Ai, skipping greens on VG (at least while tanking) and boneskinner have been doable, but quite sweaty. I think a huge part of this is the unreliable protection uptime (I literally use Durability runes to help smooth it out), as well as the clunkiness of ally-targeted skills.

Prot uptime: This could easily be fixed by simply making the boon portion of ally-targeted skills not be halved, or just not half the effect at all for the splash (which tbh I don't think would break anything - hell nerf the base barrier and buff the heal scaling if you have to). This would help counter the 'I have to click on each member of my subgroup to give them prot' scramble that attempting to upkeep prot is on this class. Another solution could be adding it to a well. Well of Tears currently does absolutely nothing interesting, so it could go there, though I would prefer to see it somewhere like Well of Gloom (heal well), as well as perhaps a shroud skill or pulsing effect.

Ally targeting: The main issue with ally targeting currently is the boon application. It's very unfun to try to click on your squadmates, or click on them via the UI (which is different for squads vs parties) rapidly to spread boons appropriately. I would love to see the reduced boon duration for the aoe removed (to be honest I would love to see the aoe effect reduction removed entirely), and this all of a sudden becomes a very smooth and fun class to play.

Very 'meh' skills: Well of Tears and Shadowfall are both very underwhelming skills - one (Well of Tears) is not synergistic with any specter build in any way (ok maybe wvw), and the other (Shadowfall) is generally not as good as Basilisk Venom for CC, and has a 75sec cooldown, so isn't super appealing for the shadowstep (healing and shadow force generation). Other than that, skills like Shadow Refuge (and tbh we don't really want to stealth) have poor scaling with inflated cooldowns, and most skills are not super useful to us - it would be cool if all five wells were able to help fill these gaps. Well of Tears could be a prot source, or simply could have a more interesting supportive effect. Shadowfall I am unsure of what to do with, but I would love to see specter get its revive power back (rip old shadestep zaps), so it would be cool to see this have an aoe rez when Traversing Dusk is traited (this is pure cope I know). Regardless both of these skills are very underwhelming, and are generally just long/very long cooldown 1-2k heals (depending on build) with some shadow force generation and minimal mobility too.

3rd Trait line?: Your choices for the third trait line after Specter and Trickery (which are both pretty great at the moment) are basically Shadow Arts or Deadly Arts. Shadow arts is extremely feels-bad to take - you literally only benefit from 2 traits in the whole line because it revolves around stealth, which specter doesn't really do (not that a healer wants to mess with stealth, that's a great way to annoy your teammates). The other choice is deadly arts, which most healspecter builds at the moment synergise well with, due to most people opting for plaguedoctor stats. This line is a pretty significant damage increase because you synergise with all the traits. You only lose out on a 1-2k additonal aoe healing on shadowstep and about 2k barrier on your healing skill, as well as several stealth-relate traits which are hard (and often counterproductive) to leverage.

 

Obviously this is all my opinon, but I do think healspecter is in a strong place at the moment, it's just monumentally mechanically punishing to play on the higher pressure fights, and could perhaps do with some more options and QoL improvements.

Edited July 1, 2023 by RagingRube.2540
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