Should every quick/alac have a viable healing build?

[WizardXeze.2860]

A simple question should all following healing options be viable?

1. Heal Quick Berserker
2. Heal Alacrity Bladeswornd
3. Heal Quickness Firebrand
4. Heal Alacrity Willbender
5. Heal Quickness Herald
6. Heal Alacrity Renegade
7. Heal Alacrity Druid
8. Heal Quick Soulbeast
9. Heal Alacrity Specter
10. Heal Quick Deadeye
11. Heal Quick Scrapper
12. Heal Alacrity Mechanist
13. Heal Alacrity Scourge
14. Heal Alacrity Harbinger
15. Heal Alacrity Tempest
16. Heal Quickness Catalyst
17. Heal Alacrity/Quickness Chronomancer
18. Heal Alacrity Mirage

There is also imbalance with boon application between different support builds which directly effects which healers are considered to be Viable. Core boons are: Alacrity, Quickness, 25 Might, Fury, Regeneration and Protection. You also want access to Aegis and Stability. Rest of the boons like Vigor and Swiftness are not usually considered to be important.

• Healers should give permanent Regeneration and Protection. This is the problem with most "not viable" healers like Deadeye.
• Alacrity seems to be paired with 25 might but not always?
• Quickness seem to be paired with Fury but not always?

We can compare Heal Mechanist to Heal Scrapper. Mechanist is giving Alacrity, 25might, Fury, Regen and Protection with access to Aegis and Stability. Meanwhile Heal Scraper is giving Qucikness, 12 might, Regeneration and high uptime Protection with access to some Swiftness, some Vigor and Stability. While Mechanist only needs Quickness the Scrapper needs Might, Protection, Alacrity, Fury and Aegis from the other support. A lot of Heal Builds like Deadeye or Harbinger would work as Heal if they had reliable access to Regeneration and Protection.

So Should Arena Net focus on making all Healing builds Viable over time or should we accept that only healers are: Firebrand, Mechanist, Druid, Tempest and Herald? While Catalyst, Renegade, Specter and Scourge will be B-tied. And rest will stay "unusable"?

[felix.2386]

nop, impossible to balance having 14 specs competing for the same role, especially when anet created elite spec without fulfilling any role in mind ( because if so, there wouldn't be 3 dps warrior and 2 of them are pure power)

 

[Blood Red Arachnid.2493]

Off the cuff I'd say no.  Not because there's anything outright wrong with each boon spec having a viable healer, but because of how difficult it would be to do.  Our specs are barely holding together with just boons right now.  Putting an additional requirement to have a heal weapon, utilities, traits, to have each of them be effectively viable, and yet distinct enough to have their own feel seems like too much of a burden.  

[Cuks.8241]

Nope, because you would need to somehow work in healing and/or boon support traits in every elite specs and they would lose variety in other departments. 

Also dps and boon dps specs usually work very similarly. They use rotations and boons usually just takes a different trait and changes rotation a bit to add the boon. Healing supports work differently, much more reactionary playstyle. Mixing these playstyles in one specialization can bring a lot of problem as we can see with latest patches or just general homogenization. 

I am completely fine with 3-4 viable healing support builds overall and make them good and unique. Yeah players that play only main class and would like to also be healing support are at a loss here. But I think its a good trade off for better class identity and playstyle. I will be hated from warrior mains here but I never imagined or needed warrior as a healing support. It just seems somehow wrong. Battle support, sure, but healer? Just play another class.

[Vidit.7108]

Short answer, No.

Ideally to me, each of the 9 classes should have at least one heal build that is either quick or alac. Ideally one of each. That's never going to happen with the current slate of elite specs and I don't think it ever should. Berserker was far from ever being designed to be a healer, Warrior should have been given an elite spec that could be more support oriented and they never gave it one, and apparently never will. It's doing everyone a disservice to try and shoehorn quick and alac onto elite specs that from their conception didn't create a mechanism for distributing those boons. That doesn't mean I don't think Thief or Warrior should have a quick or alac build, we just shouldn't be in this situation where they've painted the game balance into a corner by axing the idea of ever making new elite specs. 

There is maybe a way we can get to 4 quickness healers easily, there isn't a clear way to get to 6 and with 27 elite specs there probably won't be for years without butchering them. Introducing new weapons on builds only ever fixes one of the four problems stopping it from healing.

Also Specter and Cat are really tied at C-tier at best, B-tier is giving them a lot of credit that's unearned at the moment when heal ren and heal scourge were proven viable before.