If Willbender made the list, why didn't Virtuoso, which while not a serious healer can pump out way more healing (almost by accident) than a Willbender?.. Now I'm not a healer, so I could be making a stupid mistake in my assumption here, it's just I knocked about on an Open World Cele Vituoso for a wee bit, and it threw out some half decent healing just as part of doing its thing. Like I think it's easier than a Willbender also :)
I would say an offensive dps runthrough next and then consider which of those classes provide complementary boons/utility to 'cover' the weaknesses of some of the healers mentioned. For example, qdps herald can cover stability at x dps loss with dwarf making it a solid pairing with any other alac heal that sucks on stability (scourge and mech for instance).
“Every single healer here, are healers that can do the job. If youre in a group with any of these people and they know what they’re doing, you can clear 95% of the content in the game.” The most relevant and important comment in this video
@@MuklukUA-cam I appreciate the intent behind that, but these lists have the subtext of "Please don't learn Healer Specter". It was always higher on bad lists and lower on good lists
An additional note on Necromancer's Spectral Grasp. It shoots out 5 projectiles that chill enemies and pull them to you. While you are fighting an enemy with a large hitbox, such as Sloth or Samarog, if you have good positioning you can place yourself within their hitbox and get multiple/ all of the projectiles to hit a single target for a very large burst of CC
10:40 I understand what you mean, but playing Herald a quite bit, I'm less overwhelmed by these skills than I am with Firebrand. facets flip over, yes. but you activate them routinely and only use the skills when you need them. not on the regular. with fb, I have 5x2 weapon skills and then 5x3 book skills, which is much more confusing to me personally.
Not forgetting facets have decent duration so you can almost " set and forget" while you go to the other legend or focus on weapon cc etc. I love my Heal Herald!
I'm an FB main and to me it's quite the opposite. Herald is confusing, why are my utility skills changing? Half the time i think I need to swap them and I end up swapping weapons instead. The books are easy once you "simplify them" to dmg and pull, healing and cleanse and, protection and reflect. I guess it's a practice thing rly.
May I have a question? I am now considering getting Harrier/Giver gear for my Herald so I can heal play him as a healer... My question is: Are the energy costs such a big deal as Mukluk makes them up to be? Currently I am running Power QDPS Herald in full berserker gear and have no problems keeping the boons up, but with the dps option it's kinda rotational, where as with Heal Herald, I fear that you can get "caught with your pants down" quite a lot... Like not having the energy to do something, or having legends swap on cooldown... Do you turn the facets/other legends' drain skills off on occasion to recuperate some of the lost energy(while the boons are still up because of concentration gear), or how does it work when trying to do healer's job? I don't mind having to mash a lot of buttons at once to do one thing, I just need to know if my fears are unwarranted... Thank you very much for any response...
@@brakhai5605 If you play heal Herald you have no problem with energy costs since you have so much boon duration that you could forget to press buttons for 20 seconds and probably still have 10 seconds of boons. If i am out of energy i usually just swap legends to have something to do at all. Mukluk also says stab is bad and i disagree. you got 'the road' on dwarf everyone knows of but you also got f2 in dwarf and if you swap *into* dwarf you get stab too. In edge cases you could even run both dwarf and centaur for its elite but i don't think anyone does that or needs that much stab to begin with.
in regards to the healers you didn't try: heal mirage is just a worse heal chrono, but you can find an example of it as a heal kite on ht cm. heal cata on the other hand is amazing at giving literally 99% of its boons at range, so you can kite very easily on it, but compared to tempest you have barely any healing. you really depend on running frost bow, water elemental and signet of water. but if you have a low pressure fight or one where you want your healer to kite, it's actually quite good
Oh hey, my friend used to do the Heal Cata with the same setup. Though I remember him doing heal just fine on Boneskinner. Didnt think it would be so unpopular that you cant find a guide for it haha
For the Heal Mirage example I saw the same thing for Heal Quick Deadeye where the only example of it was in HTCM. So yes there are 2 different healer roles for every class. Just some of them are better than their counterpart lol.
The downside with heal mirage is that there is no relic to complement the play style. With the Manipulation trait and Defender relic, i can pump out near infinite Aegis on heal chrono. Using a similar setup on heal mirage, the near infinite rifle ambushes is kinda wasted unless there's a new relic that can convert the over heal into barrier
for heal catalyst, can also use arcane wave over frostbow now with karakosa relic. scepter/wh and never felt like I had a lack of healing when I needed it.
@@wcocytus you have two main problem as cata , either you play staff and you will heal just fine but your energy fill up is gonna be scuffed hard (staff has no big multihit ability) or you play whatever/warhorn and there you gonna lack healing but have full energy all the time.
I love that preface, because you know people take these kinds of information as argument points to exclude players (WHO ARE SUPPORTING THEM BY THE WAY) because they (for whatever reason) see it as sub optimal
You can play an easy variant of Heal Herald by pulsing Regeneration, Swiftness and Protection (which also gives might and quickness) and simply autoattacking with staff. That way you have really strong sustained healing that gets you through many encounters easily. If shit hits the fan swap to Ventari and use your omega burst heal to top everyone off with one low cooldown utility. Swap back to Dragon afterwards and continue autoattacking. When energy runs out on Dragon attack further and let energy build up again until 50 or so before pulsing boons again. If you are daring you can instead swap to Ventari, activate your bubble and continue autoattacking. It is a way to ease someone into playing Heal Herald without worrying about the awkward scepter stuff and energy management. A nice way of learning the build and gradually using legend swaps more regularly and at some point use scepter / shield as main weapon set and keep staff in reserve for big CC or additional emergency heals, plus a block. Heal Herald can be an awesome healer, but it takes some time and effort to play it the "meta way".
I think that scepter gives more barrier/sec than staff does in raw healing, also you're constantly giving might around which also helps proccing the boon share heal.
Exactly! Heal Herald is actually one of the easiest healers to play, because with this playstyle it becomes super reactive and ready to do anything you need at the drop of a hat with insane range.
I was thinking myself that heal herald should be higher that heal tempest at least in the 'easy to play' category. Both have similar barriers to entry - tempest requires learning a lot of buttons, herald requires learning a lot of buttons, tempest requires developing a routine of swapping between attunements, herald requires a routine of swapping between attunements, tempest can be caught out if water is on cooldown or they're mid-overload, herald can be caught out if they're in the wrong legend. However, herald has a much more forgiving zone of effect, is less disadvantaged by being caught out because a lot of the healing is coming from traits and weapons while tempest is very reliant on water, and is simpler to reach skill floor in general (you can pretty much do your job in most content by setting the right upkeep skills after weapon swapping and just focusing on avoiding mechanics until your energy runs out, and then you can just keep adding to it from there).
I think there was another factor you should have considered, that being tanking capability. A tank in raids is most often a healer and some classes (firebrand, chrono) are significantly better at self-damage mitigation than for example tempest (who can't dodge during overloads and only has one block which they have to spend a utility on, making tanking Xera or Deimos an unnecessary hard process)
Not that hard to tank deimos on tempest. The bigger downside is the boon range since the stack is usually on the other side of the boss. For Mindcrush you have arcane shield and rebound, or if you want an extra conjure earth shield. Though arcane shield is always up if you only use it for mind rush. There's also aftershock which is group aegis, if people are out of bubble (or doing cm). Also you can dodge during overloads, it just interrupts the overload. For Xera you can run armor of earth for a big chunk of barrier against her multi-hit, and the conditions can be cleansed easily. Not sure how many QoL buff tempest got since that comment 7 months ago, the 3-cleanse on the healing shout is certainly new and boon uptime especially protection got easier.
Pro tip for chronomancers: do not be seduced by the Chicken Glyph, as cool as Muk makes it sound you have a better option: Gravity well. Chicken vs well does 600 vs 550 defiance bar break - that would mean chicken is better for single targets, but Gravity well is, well... a well! That means it *also* heals on top of all that CC and therefore helps you to keep those poor, unfortunate melee classes in the fight right when they most need it. Gravity well also creates a dark combo field meaning more healing or CC if people trigger combos in it, so you may even break even with the chicken on the CC front.
While everything you've said is correct, there are factors you failed to consider. One, signet is instant, while Well applies its effects overtime and has a long cast time, making it poorly suited for quick cc bars (SH, Q1), although on the other hand it allows you to precast it (you can even precast it on yourself on Mattias or Samarog fights). Secondly and most importantly, a heal chrono is likely using a sigil of paralysation (30 % increased stun duration) which affects the signet, but not the well, so in practice you are comparing 800 breakbar damage to 550 which is a very significant difference.
Adding onto what Sasha said, the CC you get from humility can furthermore be doubled if you time it well with CS. If you need a really good burst of CC you take a chrono with humility, well of senility and mantra of distraction with a well timed CS for massive breakbar damage.
@@sasha9796 haha, are you sure about that precast on Matthias? I've tried self CC on there before and instead of CC'ing me it swaps sides and CC's my party lol.
@@campioneri that's curious. I have never tried mattias with the well, but i have tried it with guardian's sanctuary (although not recently) and have assumed it would work the same way. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, it would be curious to test it out
@@sasha9796 Guardian sanctuary for yourself on Matthias is also a big nono... you just prevent your teammates from getting into melee to cc you or use any projectile that CCs (ranger lb 4, mech mace 3, etc). And yes grav well on yourself on Matthias will do the same to allies. But for samarog, go right ahead, because you are cc-ing the boss not yourself
Nice video, can't believe I watched the entire 1 hour of it. While I played most of these healer builds, there are some that I haven't touched like Willbender, Specter, and Scrapper. And it is nice to be told in detail what their pros and cons are compared to the other healers.
I tried heal alac willbender on fractals after watching your video, and fell in love with the mobile gamestyle of it instantly. I also found it fun for myself compared to healbrand. Huge thanks to all these works on detailed guides!
Chrono definitely belongs in the “Are people happy to see you” category too. Chrono jail was a thing for a while and you can flex quick/alac with a single trait change. It’s wonderful.
@@Werkzeug-100Is chrono the only actually viable sword and board tank? From what I’ve seen so far it seems most other tank builds don’t use that combo.
Yea, also ive seen people specifically ask for HFB but then i joined as healchrono and they were more than fine with it, imo Chrono > HFB, also chrono is just waaaay more fun to play
I only relatively recently started playing healers in GW2 but I'm definitely going to try out chrono next, gives me another opportunity to use Predator on something as well.
@@piedpiper1172 Herald will use scepter+shield, firebrand will also use shield. Unless you're strictly looking for sword along with the shield because FB will typically run mace/axe and herald obviously scepter. Condi quickness zerker could work as a tank perhaps because you would use the shield for mitigation probably along with the sword, which is a condi weapon. Otherwise warriors will prefer mace with shields for the bar break. But using a shield instead of a warhorn misses out on extra boon share along with a solid amount of barrier. Then you have s'n'b engineers too. And I think that's it really.
Revive power it's Druid/Tempest, then Scourge in my books. Glyph of Stars revive is much quicker than what Scourges do and can carry where the wells revive simply is too slow. Also it is on a 48s CD, not 1 minute. You can cast it pre-emptively to even rezz yourself (lets say a tear took your aegis at deimos). GoS is the most broken skill in the game. Staff tempest has 2x geyser (water3 Range+16s CD and trait 20s CD), Signet of Water AoE rezz (20s CD too), Glyph of Renewal (Basically Signet of Undeath) and Rebound which basically is an instant revive.
I agree that the tricks possible with tempest are massive!! Nonetheless transfusion is still stronger on pugs. To be able to pull out 5 people from puddles instantly! is just too good in regards to rez power Search and rescue can do it too or also the glyph of renewal in air - but only 1 person But gor has a 90 second cd so its very flexible but if used up? Things become difficult during that time Scourge can transfuse every 15 seconds - without alac which you will give yourself then Those 3 are the ones which can pull people out of s*** which is amazing carry potential And all 3 are very good! Just wanted to clarify the pull out specifics 😊
@@Cross_111 I mean there's exactly 1 encounter where this is really useful and only with a very bad group. And it only works if all the other people press F too or it often is too slow. On every other encounter, where the party is more split and people go down all alone (running away with poison at Mattias/Sloth etc) or even need to save yourself and others from insta death mechanics (bad timing at MO CM, shield fail at CA) I'd rather have the tempest toolkit with double geyser and rebound.
@@dfg12382 nope there are many encounters where people can relax in puddles ^^ Dhuum, Mathias, vale guardian if the pizza phase starts, Sloth poisons, sabatha with her wall, QtP fire circles or in CM fire paths, XJJ puddles and the list goes on and on... And the scourge range is 600 around himself which is huge Additionally if your group is good then its better to tackle a healer which does not focus more on pug carry but increasing the potential of the whole group like with HFB or Heal Chrono If you pug, you will need to rez continuously - if you want or not And as I said before - all these options are viable and you are free to do what you want 😁 But scourge is the better rez machine and pulling people out ir bad spots in comparison The others can do it too of course - but not as good and as regularly 15 seconds is quite mad
Necro's well of power has self-stability because it's a stun break with a cast time. After all it would suck if your stun break got interrupted lol. For example, thief's black powder originally had no cast time. But when they added the cast time to it, they gave it 1 stack of stab as well.
Been out of GW2 for nearly a decade, this is the exact kind of content I was looking for to re-affirm my old feelings for the Druid and try to bring that joy back into pubs...where the rules are made up and your pain doesn't matter. Thanks, Muk!
20:10 Scourge Well Stability: The reason that skill gives you a tiny bit of stability is to prevent you getting stunned out the cast. It's also a (self) stunbreak and it pulses might (irrelevant) and pulses condi cleanse (mildly relevant and even then only in the most extreme scenarios). I do bring the well to fractal Pugs for SS and Mai Trin and Siren's Reef boss if the instabilities warrant it. Fun fact: when bringing the well, Scourge averages more than 1 group cleanse per second. Edit: 35:35 DPS: Cele Scourge does 7-8 k easily and up to 12 on fights like MO and you lose out on some healing but not all that much. You keep the full condi cleanse and rez-ability and only lose a minor part of your healing. I wouldn't bring it to Boneskinner, but most other things are fair game.
I'm maining heal herald in fracs and raids/strikes and disclaimer: I don't consider myself being a super computer. I manage just fine. Once you learn the basics you will never really think of energy that much - simply because swapping legends becomes a key part of your rotation - swapping legends brings a 10sec 20% outgoing healing buff so you want to be swapping off CD anyways. Ventari brings a lot of stability if you spam your ulti skill on top of condi cleanse and a ton of healing so ventari in my mind is pretty much about spamming that single skill. In herald stance you just alternate the facets, ideally keeping prot up all the time and swinging between swiftness and fury facets. It's not that hard once you get it. You can even afford to not keep 6 pips of upkeep all the time for quickness just for the fact how easy it is to generate in both stances. You can also use the prebuff tactic where you open up with regen+fury+swiftness facet and crank that up on allies for easier start rotations when fight begins. I'd say it's easier to play than firebrand, honestly. A lot of times I get compliments for healing and saving stray players with my ventari tablet, which is an extremely powerful thing because you can control it even if you're knocked down/disabled. Really cool stuff to play with. As to targeting the tablet - it's not half as bad as it looks once you figure out that you can move tablet mid cast too - just cast a skill you want and direct the tablet towards the player. Hits much more reliably than for example warrior staff 3 which takes ages to arrive to location with a small radius and many times by the time you get there people (especially pugs) will just dodge out and you will heal nothing. Edit: Oh and another thing - save your weapon skills for when you're in herald stance in case of on demand healing. Exception being shield 4 for aegis spam for pre-emptive protection. Use facet of nature constantly. Preferably herald stance for extending boons.
Which one do you find better for fractal cms, healbrand or herald? I usually do old cms as dps and it's always a firebrand carrying the team. Just curious if heal herald is good for fractal cms..
@@Casual_Lucas so here's the thing. Firebrand is an amazing class. The amount of aegis and stab it can provide on top of quickness and ranged heal is among the best in the game and can easily help the group skip certain boss mechanics, allowing for a faster clear. Saying that though, its strength is also its weakness - the boons a FB gives have a short radius and especially mantras feel extremely bad because the AOE is a small cone shape - this means that you need a very good group that knows how to stack properly. If you can have that FB will feel amazing and will elevate the group. One upside of FB, similarly to a Herald is also the following: While people favoring low intensity build usually say FB are high APM because every skill only gives a couple seconds of a specific boon - this is actually better in my book as opposed to large boon time applications with large CDs for one simple reason - fights with boon strip. It's very easy to reapply boons with a FB or Herald while a warrior for example suffers when a boon strip takes swiftness away and your warhorn skill4 is on a CD. It's more debilitating to the group but it's easier to play. Now to herald : Herald has a higher healing output to a FB. It is also the tankiest of the healers. Meaning, it can compensate for a lower aegis application with raw healing. Ventari tablet is one of the most amazing tools for healing once you get a grip of it because you can float it around in a decent range and still heal people for massive amounts, cleanse, apply stab etc. You can do this while ressing too which means you can easily heal the group and ressing another guy. It's no scourge though, that's for sure (in terms of ressing). Important note: Mukluk criticizes the tablet for a clunky boon application because it takes a while before the tablet explodes and applies stab or heals - what he missed though is that you can pre-cast the skills and use the tablet reposition skill on spam to follow the person/group you want to apply stab/heals/condi cleanse to. This is especially important to learn if you really want to have a fluid ventari gameplay. I don't mean it in a condescending manner though - just constructive criticism to help fellow heralds out. It can provide aegis, can cleanse condis pretty decently well, perma quickness/prot/fury/swiftness/regen/25might and here's the deal - has great stability on demand. Wait, a herald has great stab on demand? Yes. Although of course it's not as easy as it is on a FB but with knowledge of the fight and its mechanics, you simply switch to ventari and break the tablet, which will apply a very good heal, condi cleanse and stab at the same time - a solid 3x stab for 10 seconds if you run 100% boon duration - very easy to do as well. You don't even need a sigil of concentration. This essentially means that you can provide enough stab duration with enough stacks to fully offset the CD of glint stance and exactly by the time the stab runs out, you can already swap to ventari and pulse even more stab. This way it is possible to actually nearly perma mantain 3 stacks of stability which is something not many classes (if any) can actually do. In raids/strikes where boon coverage is already fullfiled, you can drop glint stance and go ventari/jalis and literally perma maintain a large stack of stab - while still providing perma quickness - but that's pure overkill. On top of that, you can double stack stab if stab is all you need (energy cost) which will in turn give you 6 stacks of stab for 10 seconds - that's a lot of stab. You will never run out of stab if a team stacks and you rotate legends correctly. On top of that if the need arises Herald can tank extremely well - because of salvation trait "resilient spirit". That gives 339 barrier per active boon, stacking up to 5 times, every 3 seconds - since it is extremely easy to keep 5 boons up all the time, this essentially translates into a 1.5kish heal every 3 seconds, just from existing, on top of a very powerful version of regen, buffed by herald trait "Elder's Respite". Add relic of the flock on top of that for extra heal and barrier + ventari and infuse light heal from glint stance and you basically cannot die even if you stand in a 1 hit zone (as long as you have infuse light active). So as you can see, the situation is similar to FB - you need to know the encounters but honestly you will have an easier time with a heal herald, especially if you're dealing with a pug group. That's where Herald really shines because it is immensely easier to keep the group going as opposed to a FB. All those boons mean nothing if your mantra only hits one guy because they aren't stacked properly. All the while when Herald is easily applying all essential boons permanently in a 600 radius. The main thing a Herald is missing though is a group stun break. Meaning if you don't know the encounter in advance and the stun happens when you didn't manage to apply stab - you will have to wait the stun out. Good thing is that you can swap to ventari and still operate and heal with the tablet even if you are still being stunned. That's a big wall of text, I'll stop here lol. In conclusion yes, you definitely can do CM fracs with a Herald, very much so and in a pretty relaxed and easy fashion if you know the mechanics.
@@blastmanutz7798 wow ty for all the info. Honestly muk should pin this comment lol I appreciate your explanation and it makes me want to keep learning herald and do endgame content with it. Thxx! :D
Thank you very much for all the time you put into this! Because of you doing these it has helped me mess around with other specs to help alleviate stagnation of just maining Druid heal for too long. You're the best!
Heal Mirage uses many of the same things as Heal Chrono (Chaos and Inspiration traits, Rifle) but needs Staff to provide Alacrity, and I personally use a Sigil of Energy instead of something like Water. Relic of Febe I think would be best (since your Swiftness is spotty due to being procced from Chaos Aura) but I tend to use Flock. Mirage traits are 1/2/3. Self-Deception (1) is used for the elite Jaunt which will create a clone if you have at least one already out. Mirage Mantle (2) is the Alac trait and thus necessary. Dune Cloak (3) gives you Mirage Cloak (and thus, your Ambush) if you shatter with at least 2 clones out. For skills, Mantra of Recovery and Mantra of Pain for mantra healing (and clone generation on the former), and Jaunt elite for more clone generation. Your other two utility slots are pretty flexible like with Chrono. If you want to bring, for example, Signet of Humility for CC you can instead bring a Deception utility. I prefer Jaunt for the shadowstepping, and it's also a Leap finisher so you can use that in addition to Staff 2 for more Chaos Aura application when used in Staff 5. So the general concept is that you use Staff and create a bunch of clones to Ambush a lot (both via "dodging" and via Dune Cloak) while spamming your mantras, and once you have a healthy buffer of Alac or need more immediate healing you swap to Rifle, where you can immediately Ambush (Heals+Vigor+Fury) thanks to the Sigil of Energy. You stay there using Rifle's skills (Might+Fury from Rifle 3 is important here) until you need to swap back to Staff, where thanks to the Sigil of Energy you can immediately Ambush to get your Alac back up (though make sure you have at least two clones up for Dune Cloak). You should be able to provide permanent high (if not 25) Might, Fury, Alac, Regen, and Prot, and high uptime on Vigor (100% on you thanks to Mirage shatters giving you Vigor), while being able to provide stuff like Stability if you need to. In short...it's mostly just a worse Chronomancer. But certainly feels different to play.
20:25 I think Well of Power has a second of self stability, because it breaks stun and the developers probably felt like Necro needed some sort of skill to counter heavy CC, without going too far over the edge. Well of Power is the only skill that behaves like this for Necro and I think that's fine.
I like the fact that Necromancer Scourge is still at the top of the ladder when it comes to reviving people. Like c'mon, it's in their job description to actually be good at resurrecting people.
As tempest you can run earth spec instead of arcane, it gives aoe stability for your group for short duration each time you attune to earth. I were always using tempest as alac healer for ibs5+DS runs because of this, the only healer which have more than 1 stack of stab for covering jumping Braham in DS ( -renegade, weird choice of healer)
Thank you Muk for this. I really appreciate the perspective from your standpoint. Especially from someone who PUG's then having a static group. The only down side is that this eventually get dated with balance patches as time goes on but for now it works. Plus better then a tier list.
Just dipping my toes into support - starting with boon DPS, but this was such a great series to understand what's going on from the healer's point of view. Loved this. please do more!
Just a slight correction for heal untamed. It's damage in full harriers can get up to ~12-15k. There is a rather legthy discussion about it in the Ranger channel on the SC Discord
Thanks for taking the time to cover all the various healing builds. We have alot of people in our guild who simply play one class and might want to try healing so its a nice referral point! Any plans on mucking about with offensive supports? Have a lovely day!
Love that you gave a recap video. But, I really think auramancer staff tempest should have had its own category. While it has less boonsharing than warhorn, the pug carry potential goes way up, as does the heal throughput stability. And, you can press "Feel the Burn!" during overloads instead of going to make a sandwich. Overloads grant auras (Unstable Conduit), auras - including staff earth 3 & water 4 and the fire, earth, and ice utility shouts - grant regen and vigor (Invigorating Torrents), and I like taking Elemental Bastion to enable healing on granting auras; Transcendent Tempest is a good choice for when I'm more confident. I also like swapping between Cleansing Water and Powerful Aura in the water traits depending on what I need. Even with Cleansing Wave and "Wash the Pain Away!", I find that I like having tons of condi cleanse. In addition to Arcane Resurrection, I like Arcane Restoration and Evasive Arcana in the arcane traits. Set up this way almost every button I hit does some sort of healing, unless it is a weapon skill, and many of them make or proc auras which trigger the above traits. Soothing Ice also keeps me safe against sudden damage spikes. In addition, staff water 2 and earth 2 and "Aftershock!" can blast the different staff AoEs depending on what blast effect we need - fire for might, water for a more direct heal, or ice for more frost aura (and the aura trait effects). Because I keep generating regen, I usually skip getting Concentration on my gear and use Marshal's stats instead for its damage boost. For sigils (transference/renewal), runes (monk), and relic (mercy works well with Arcane Resurrection, but monk and dwayna are good too), I stick to the ones common to healers. Glyph of Elementals is the obvious choice for the elite skill.
I'm always super confused about the firebrand cone thing. Mained it a couple years ago and afaik, the cones are just a visual and the boons get applied aoe. You can see a thin white circle around you when casting, at least for the mantra-cones I'm pretty sure. my memory isnt too firm on the tomes.
FB gives buffs in a tiny (180) circle around him and in a longer (300 something) cone in front of him. Because the circle is so tiny in practice you want to vomit buffs on your teammates.
I survived the back-to-back watching of the giga-length Muk videos, let's go! I have rarely played heal-spec builds in GW2 outside of WvWvW. Having watched this, I may give a few a try. Looked interesting and it would be a nice change of pace after running either pure DPS or boon-support DPS since 2012! Thanks Muk!
Healbrand got to be the most fun i had healing in a game. you have pretty much everything to your disposition and it feel like the old days of playing Monk in Guild wars I
For flex slots..while heralds don't have individual flex utilities, they flex swap a legend based on the fight [dwarf/centaur/demon]. It's only really in issue if you need 2 of choices (mostly stab/bubble)
Also that the biggest heals and cleanses you have comes from centaur. So if you bring dwarf instead in order to get mondo stab then you kneecap your AOE healing and condition removal. And if you go demon to... I actually haven't played revenant enough to know exactly what the demon does, but I seem to remember it having one of those cheerful "grab all conditions from allies and rub them all over yourself" abilities, something that applies short duration resistance, and a heal that heals you for more depending on how many conditions you have on you? Does the elite even do anything useful for a healer, I seem to recall it just being a pulsing condi field thingy, I guess it drains enough energy to proc quickness?
I hardly ever use demon outside specific content. It mainly gives group resistance, and mass amounts of boon rip. (For example: it's very nice for dealing with avatars of gluttony in convergences)
@@chrisgoal only time ive ever taken demon stance was against vg, cus youre healing is enough there without vent, so having the boonrip for blue guardian is nice but only if literally no-one else has any
Quick note on teammate targeting. Druid and Untamed also have some teammate targeting with Staff 1 and 2. Chrono rifle can also target and heal teammates with the auto attack.
True the staff 1 and 2 can target allies but they also hit allies by just shooting at the boss. Whereas the specter and rev scepter HAVE to target allies to function.
Sorry Muk, I meant to ask this yesterday but had to take a call: Is the scourge build tested in this video YOUR scourge build (the one you put out like a year or two ago) or from the snowcrows site? PS great video, I loved all the categories and would love to see a dps version of the same if you have time. Thanks!!
So I have been playing mirage for a while now and I can with confidence say, with staff staff you can be a very capable off healer, or even focused healer but never for more than 4 other people and there is a really high requirement for stacking to maintain your boons. You can consistently pop out both regen through ambush or mirrage and stability through shatter, resolution from skills and even a good amount of aegis from false oasis on a 10s cd with alacrity but it's rough to focus on healing while maintaining alacrity stacks on the party as mirage. You strongest tools for healing is staff 5 and false oasis, both of these things are stationary small well style zones, both of these have short windows of applying boons. Rifle is (was) used in pvp a lot for the 5th ability tp but the evade is a flame thrower that gives vigor, rifle is inconsistent though but I've used it on claw of Jormag a lot in smaller groups. Chaos armour is amazing for snapshots, but it's so hard to use at the right time. You have a decent invulnerability window for yourself but that's not really healing and rakes away a lot of your AoE boon application. In general viper staff staff mirage dps is just significantly better and more fun and still provides a lot of boons to the party with almost no investment in healing at all.
Adding to Chrono: Chrono has more sources to stability than just well of precognition! It has distortion (which you can combine with continuum split) and mantra of concentration. Chrono does have a revive "illusion of life" but well... the player will die again unless they killed something xD
In a raid context, it's virtually useless, but Chrono does have a revive skill, though it comes with a big caveat: you have to kill something you would normally rally off of within 15 seconds. That skill is illusion of life. If you are using the healer in pve or wvw, that's a good skill to have, but it can be tricky in pvp and in raids it's near-useless.
40:10 Shoutout to darkrazor's daring on renegade. 12 sec cd skill that does 600 AoE breakbar damage. I often solo cc the wyvern at Qadim using darkrazors daring (600 BB), Staff 5 (up to 1350 BB) and ventari elite (300BB). 3 skills doing about 2250 AoE BB in about 1 second. Cooldown on all of this is only 20 seconds cause of staff 5. Don't think any other class beats that.
For allied targetting you can bind a key, you just press a button and you'll target the low health teammate for you to do your thing, then you can press the target enemy button and move on with your rotation
Awesome video. I might try out some of these. Slight correction: Scrapper has 2 revive tools. You are most likely not gonna use 1 of them, but Elixir R toolbelt skill does exist.
57:56 I think the theme around the shortbow could've been much better, if it was some Mad Max style loading the bow with explosive arrows and other whack stuff. The first ability I thought of being a thing for shortbow, when they revealed that weapon type, was lobbing a barrage of grenades slung from a shortbow. That would've been fun.
By the way, did you try Deadeye quick healer? It's like Spectre heal, except with even more swapping between ally and enemy targets, no resistance or stability, worse heals and its sneak attack never got updated to do AoE healing. Sounds fun right? :D p.s. A small tip regarding 44:36 where you said you can't use Spectre skills due to them being shadowsteps: click (literally mouse over the icon and click) your skill twice and it'll shadowstep on the spot regardless of terrain.
Cc wise, specter is the best cc character for support, so much in fact Its a pain in certain encounters to bring since is doing cc all the time, should be at least second in that classification, since it has: Basilisk venom Well of gloom The 3 and 5 of shadow shroud Pistol off hand head shot (quick) The steal gives slow The 3 of specter dagger gives chilling Well of silence Shadowfall Spike trap ( can be prepared) Can paralyzed a target with certain traits every single time he is poisoning the target The share venom that paralyzed. Now if you mean how quick can deliver all this then it's true, is not that fast, only head shot and basilisk venom.
25:40 I play tempest healer and I switch to water only when its needed to avoid situation where its on cooldown and I must heal party :P 32:49 Chrono has Ilusion of life which can revive too if revived player kill a foe (like downstate 3 (??) on warrior) 42:00 I personally think ele has lot of CC too.
I love playing my Healbrand in fractuals, but it has the same issue with a quickbrand. My boontime will be all over the place, if the party is all over the place. And when you mix in people dodging/moving out of shit.. keeping that up time above 80% basically never happens. I wish they would get rid of the cone and replace it with the same sized circle as the Herald. When someone complains about not getting boons, its usually an issue with where they aren't stacking with the majority of the group. Hurts!
Every time in Sunqua Peak. Everyone is spread out across the entire field, people are running all over the place like headless chickens, I'm trying to keep them alive, and then someone just goes "Are you SURE you know how to apply boons?"
on the dps rankings, I think that scourge and healbrand should be mentioned. I am by no means an expert with either as a dps class, but while doing full healing (but not tank) I can usually hit 5-6k dps on heal alac scourge and pretty dead on 5 on heal quickbrand, both in real fights (not on the golem).
On the note on Specter shadowsteps... I have on more than one occasion killed myself on Kaineng Overlook. Not because I ported into bad, but it has a small area where the geometry is weird, and it just instakills you if you port on top of it
I've played quickheal Catalyst. It's weird. Unlike usual cata playstyle where you're pairing jade spheres across the four elements, on quickheal you cast triple jade spheres with the rotation fire->air->earth ... fire->air->water repeat. Frost bow is a must have for frost bow 3 to build energy quickly, and picking up the dropped frost bow is important because the healer goes from feeling workable but awkward to really not workable if frost bow goes on CD. The build "works" in that if everything is done right it can put out all the boons and solid healing, but why have an "if" when we have alacheal tempest that is so much more consistent?
Yeah ever since they switched Druid Alac generation to Celestial Avatar I have wanted them to either remove the CA CD or swap around the Glyph of stars. Let us have the res version when we’re not in CA, that way we can drop out of it in an emergency and get people up. A res spell *needs* to be on demand. It *cannot* be locked behind a 10 second cooldown of something you need to constantly use to provide the reason you are in the group.
Did you try signet of courage with the willbender to boost your healing a little? Wouldve liked to know if that made any difference on the content youve tried with the willbender. Edit: i really like the idea of this chart and you explaining everything. That makes it really easier for me to make decisions. Keep it up 😁👌
I'm currently DPS but want to change to healer. Still new to the game. I thought of going for QHFB but I saw a comment saying it wasn't so good on raids because of his range during the mechanics that make the group separate, which made me wonder: what is the best overall healer, the one that has no problems doing all type of content? Also which gear stat to choose? Most of them use Harriers but in my view why the power as healer when you can switch it with toughness on Givers and be more tanky, or even Minstrel that is a mix. But then also saw someone say that on raids the boss focus the most tanky one and because of that they should have no toughness
For Chrono in "caught in the wrong moments" column you were probably thinking of weapon swap locking you out of situationally useful cooldowns, something might come up you want to block with shield or heal through more effectively with rifle.
You've played every *boon* healer in the game, but what about *DPS* healers with no alac/quick/prot grouped with 2 boon DPS and rate them in terms of group risk vs reward 🤔 You could really reinvent the wheel here!
I believe he tried with Druid when they did the Alac rework and people didn't like it, which is sad. I would've love to see more non quick/alac healers for more squad flexibilities like having 2 quick dps & alac dps in a group with 1 healer & 2 dps. It might be less dps but it might also be fun.
@@Alphenis That is 100% true because of the current meta mindset and because it would be an overrall dps loss since you're sacrificing a dps slot for a boon dps to make up for the lack of quick/alac. But for a group that wants to play an off meta comp it would be a fun challenge.
@@Papakakadu Honestly yes, we should just bake the quick/alac benefits into the skills then remove them entirely so we can have more varieties of builds like possibly seeing a Heal Vindi in raids.
As a druid player I can confirm allies somehow die the moment you leave celestial. I don't know how, I don't know how they know. But they do. Half of the group just waits for you to press F5 to stand in EVERYTHING.
11:20 Re: Hitting the F1 key constantly. Allow me to introduce my friend the small dense weight. Fishing line weights, small paper weights, or a hunky bolt. Anything that sits nicely on your key. It now lives on your F1 key. Your tendons are saved! Note: Some keyboards have different repeat rates for held keys, you can usually turn it down if it’s repeating so fast you find it disruptive. Just google your KB model and “change held key behavior.”
There is a faster way for bladesworn to swap to staff: F1. After you Dragon Slash, you simply swap to staff with F1, since F2 is the slash, and F1 is the gunsaber. And at absolute worst, F1 has a...... maybe 2 secs cooldown? So you can swap quickly with bladesworn, if you remember that you can weapon swap with F1 as well as regular swap with whatever button you use for it. Also, chrono can use Illusion of Life to help ress, but you only have 15 secs to kill someone to fully revive a person, and in a boss fight, you may not have an enemy that you can kill that quickly for a full ress.
I recently discovered berserker healing. I love the build and as someone who has mained warrior since beta, it feels like a normal warrior build to me. I'm looking forward to running it in more content.
With some setup you can heal on Quick Deadeye. You give boons and have ways to heal. You will be missing Aegis, Stability and Protection 🎉 but it can do the job 😅 basically worse specter.
I love playing my heal Scourge in any of the harder open world group content because it's such a good noob carrier. It's also fun never dying cause I am a barrier god, lol. I don't even need to dodge most of the time because of all the barrier I can provide 😅
Convergences and Knaebelag are like crack for me on heal scourge. They're not super hard but they seem to have a lot of downs most of the time. If it's Demon Knight in the convergence and people just don't run the huge numbered aoe markers out there's sometimes like half a dozen (or more lol) people going down at once.
as someone who plays heal mirage from time to time, I can def say it's kinda wonky, but I still love it. It has access to a lot of the same tools as chrono, though it's limited by needing to run staff/staff (though if you want pure heal instead of alac, you could go rifle/scepter). It also has some forced movement based on staff 2 mostly. though, since you'll often be running the mirage elite, you can mitigate this by bouncing back immediately. also, you're so much dodging, but that's mirage for you.
This was a fun video for sure! Loved hearing your thoughts, it sounds like your against the unga bunga, but next tier list for your fav dps builds :) come the muk on 🤞
I think you're selling willmender's CC short a bit. You have sanctuary, willbender elite, hammer 4, bane signet, and heel crack all available since no utilities are required to give alac.
at the same time where Firebrand was so dominant in fractals, druid was as dominant in Raids. 10 man Might, Fury, Prot and Heals were insane, especially when all other boons were covered by BoonDps (RRs and QuickFirebrands).
Bladesworn is not as much of an issue to swap because if you use rune of the warrior and the F1 swap off of gunsabre, you're in it for less than a second. It is not zero, but it definitely is way way less of an issue. Though after thinking about it I realize that it's a playstyle difference, I fully charge my dragon trigger when I probably really don't need to. Which "saves" me all that time that mukluk is noticing.
Love the video Mukluk, but you missed one. I play an almost full celestial Vindicator healer. They do lack boons but make up for it with good healing, barrier and cleansing. I have cleared all T4 fractals with the build I run and it works great in almost all situations. Plus what is nice is I still do decent dps as well.
Chrono player here, chrono does have to weapon swap in quite a few cases (unless you meant that chrono camps the shield weapon rather than rifle, which i doubt) because chrono has their healing and boon generation on two different weapons and if you only sit on rifle your boons, especially might and protection will start to fall off unless your boon dps fills in the gaps. You kind of rely on your shield 4 and 5 or on additional shatters from scepter to upkeep those. Rifle alone does not generate clones at sufficient rate.
@@lugnut1206 rifle 3 can give boons or heal. In high healing pressure situations you lose one or the other. You do get protection from shatters, but a, it is not 100 uptime, b) rifle clone generation is very low and all of your clones on rifle are conditional. Rifle 2 gives clone only if you hit an enemy with it (so no clone if you use it to heal someone off stack, like kiter on ko for example) and phantasm has long cooldown and sometimes need to be held for cc. So if you are the only source of protection on your sub, you will not upkeep it from rifle alone and you likely won't get 25 might either, but that's easier, since a lot of dps and most boon supports have some might. And of you are tanking and have gear with lower boon duration both of these become even worse. So you might be fine in theoretical perfect conditions on a golem, but rarely in an actual fight
Am i mistaking or is there no heal vindicator build? dont they have the blue fraction abilitys and ventary as well as the trailine in vindicator that heals? maybe its because they dont give alac or quick idk i dont play that xDbut a healer in the end.
Is it pretty much down to the Alac or Quickness issue. That's what the "Meta" wants from it's boon support healers. I am thinking about looking at vindicator more closely just cos I have a full set of Harrier gear for my herald.
It's the same with soulbeast, dragonhunter, spellbreaker, and even holosmith. They all have interesting healing tools that have been left by the wayside because they don't have meta boons.
STABILITY: scrapper by default runs stab on function gyro as well and you can run elixir B for even more. so you have 3 ranged sources of stab with multiple stacks each. you will never need more than that. specter has stab on shroud 5 with 16s cd which you never need to use in your rota and you have well of bounty on top. if you lean into it with earth traitline and staff on tempest, you can have very high stability output, but at the cost of uptime of some other boons, especially you lose your boon extension. REVIVE CAP: scrapper actually can take elixir R whose toolbelt skill is also an aoe revive, so it's quite good if you desire it. tempest with staff and normal+lesser geysir is really nice, but obviously it's not as great as a scg or druid. specter has shadow refuge which is an aoe revive field. it's not great, but better than nothing. RANGE: i would say druid and specter are quite good because they can give a LOT of their boons at like 900 range if you give up boon uptime on yourself. CC: my biggest complaint, druid cc with double mace, storm spirit and glyph of equality has WAY more cc than even a chrono on a much shorter cd. i can literally do 12k cc in a single sammy run with my group doing normal cc. renegade with darkrazor has an instant cast 600 ranged aoe cc button (which is on a 12s cd, so infinitely better than moa) which herald doesn't have, so it's definitely more than herald. scrapper can take personal battering ram for being top of the cc table in any normal group, but even without you have double cc with sb 5 twice and blast gyro plus you can put lightning fields for others to leap in for daze finishers. firebrand can take sanc and even hammer of wisdom if necessary, so you can do quite a lot if necessary. other than that i can't find any problem with these lists. you make a lot of good points. i would like to add one column with skill ceiling or performance in high-level groups: you would definitely want a druid, herald, chrono or scrapper in the current meta. scg is good, but limited in it's tools and output. meanwhile you wouldn't want a heal renegade, untamed or willbender in your group
I was really interested in the potential for heal specter and had even cobbled together some ritualist gear for my thief a while back, but Gw2 healers have rarely had to actually target their allies to heal, so it feels much more awkward compared to just spamming an aoe... I'll still give it a shot, but my favourites atm remain Druid and Tempest. :) 👍
As one of the few specter mains in-game, I will say I agree on heal herald being more complicated to learn than heal specter XD IMHO, heal specter may be clunky at the beginning, but once you get used to how it works, you'll begin to understand the 'rhythm'...of healing with specter, if that makes sense lol. Herald on the other hand... Oh god, imagine having to balance between cooldowns AND upkeep?! AND also ally targeting with the scepter main hand? Heal specter is a lot easier XD
Tempest in staff is really great to play. Big change with dagger/focus or so. Huge crowd control. But longer cast time. So mastering the rotation and positioning are important. Other advantage: very long range. It's my main and I love playing it.Sure give it a try ;)
I play a weird off meta Firebrand build which is pretty fun, but it's definitely not for everyone, as it reminds me of playing piano on ele pre HoT, as i moved towards Necro after PoF, but healers are probably the most important and underrated player in a team.
The "caught in the wrong mode" list could also include the engineers as much as it does chrono :P The main reason why I never liked playing heal mech was because the kits would just mess me up, and I'd try to use weapon skill thinking I was out of a kit when I wasn't. Even died to those few times. I main HAT (now swapping to chrono) so bunch of skills and changing skill bar is no issue to me, its just the way you swap between them. Also when playing HAT, I often kinda skip water during my rotation, if I know regen should be enough for everyone, just so I can go back to it whenever I need. (also I use air overloads quite often, especially at the start of the fight to stack plenty of alac quickly so that if I get interrupted it doesn't drop alac)
As an Untamed Support I had a commander in strikes think I was a DPS that was just doing low damage because they never saw an untamed healer and then in a convergence I kept the rat alive by myself. Untamed Support would be my go to if not for the stupid snot cloud.
Chrono might have landed in Wrong Mode Moments for Mantras. Good Chronos probably dont show it nearly as much, but I have definitely had moments where I've needed to use a Mantra that wasn't charged, and it feels bad taking that much longer to hit the button.
I've played "heal" mirage plenty, but that wasn't a true healer (it may be possible, though). I played it as part of a jack-of-all-trades build that I use (still) for hero point trains. A little condi damage, alacrity, might, portals, blinks, and still a bit of healing with 0 cast time, but not really enough healing for a raid.
Heal Cata is shockingly effective when you play it right, but it is also shockingly easy to meme yourself and your group. Heal cata actually does more healing than tempest as the empowered empowerment increase your healing power by up to 10%, but it doesn't have stab at all and it's aegis is part of the rotation so you don't have aegis on demand. The main issue with heal catalyst is generating energy. If it wasn't for the way catalyst generates energy, heal cata would actually see play as ice-bow heal cata can pump some series heals. I have healed bone skinner on catalyst before, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't find a quick-heal for the group. I did it, it worked, and I hope to never have to do it again. Unless you have mained ele and catalyst for a while, I would 100% recommend you not try heal catalyst.
Scourge stability is 10-man. It has a role in good compositions that can stack well. Everyone in both subgroups can advantage of the sand. If you are off the stack, then its survival of the fittest.
0:00 Intro
1:52 Easiest to Learn
11:07 APM
13:36 Stability
17:41 Aegis
21:19 Sabotages Teammates
24:14 Caught in the wrong mode moments
29:40 Revive Carry
33:05 Flex Utility Slots
34:19 Powerful Toolbox
35:35 DPS
36:30 Healing/Boon Range
38:30 CC Carry
42:22 Teammate Targeting
43:03 Forced Movement
45:00 Healing Output Issues
45:40 Annoying Quirks
48:07 Are people happy to see you
50:04 Personal Enjoyment
If Willbender made the list, why didn't Virtuoso, which while not a serious healer can pump out way more healing (almost by accident) than a Willbender?.. Now I'm not a healer, so I could be making a stupid mistake in my assumption here, it's just I knocked about on an Open World Cele Vituoso for a wee bit, and it threw out some half decent healing just as part of doing its thing. Like I think it's easier than a Willbender also :)
@@CarnaghSidhe Because it doesn't provide a 5 man group alacrity or quickness.
@@MuklukUA-cam ahhh, gotcha, fair shout :)
how about wvw? for the healer
I would say an offensive dps runthrough next and then consider which of those classes provide complementary boons/utility to 'cover' the weaknesses of some of the healers mentioned. For example, qdps herald can cover stability at x dps loss with dwarf making it a solid pairing with any other alac heal that sucks on stability (scourge and mech for instance).
“Every single healer here, are healers that can do the job. If youre in a group with any of these people and they know what they’re doing, you can clear 95% of the content in the game.” The most relevant and important comment in this video
I tried very hard to make that clear. Don't want some crazy person kicking people from groups cause "hur dur mukluk said..."
@@MuklukUA-cam I appreciate the intent behind that, but these lists have the subtext of "Please don't learn Healer Specter". It was always higher on bad lists and lower on good lists
@@charastar3 Heal specter got some major buffs since this video was released. It is in a much better place now.
An additional note on Necromancer's Spectral Grasp. It shoots out 5 projectiles that chill enemies and pull them to you. While you are fighting an enemy with a large hitbox, such as Sloth or Samarog, if you have good positioning you can place yourself within their hitbox and get multiple/ all of the projectiles to hit a single target for a very large burst of CC
Would it still work if there are no ads in range?
@@tauronmitronion377 No, it needs to see them in range to target them. 1 target it only gives 150 CC
Doubt. I main necromancer. In my thousands of hours of experience, it only shoots out 1 projectile per target in range.
10:40 I understand what you mean, but playing Herald a quite bit, I'm less overwhelmed by these skills than I am with Firebrand.
facets flip over, yes. but you activate them routinely and only use the skills when you need them. not on the regular.
with fb, I have 5x2 weapon skills and then 5x3 book skills, which is much more confusing to me personally.
Not forgetting facets have decent duration so you can almost " set and forget" while you go to the other legend or focus on weapon cc etc.
I love my Heal Herald!
I'm an FB main and to me it's quite the opposite. Herald is confusing, why are my utility skills changing? Half the time i think I need to swap them and I end up swapping weapons instead. The books are easy once you "simplify them" to dmg and pull, healing and cleanse and, protection and reflect. I guess it's a practice thing rly.
May I have a question?
I am now considering getting Harrier/Giver gear for my Herald so I can heal play him as a healer...
My question is: Are the energy costs such a big deal as Mukluk makes them up to be? Currently I am running Power QDPS Herald in full berserker gear and have no problems keeping the boons up, but with the dps option it's kinda rotational, where as with Heal Herald, I fear that you can get "caught with your pants down" quite a lot... Like not having the energy to do something, or having legends swap on cooldown...
Do you turn the facets/other legends' drain skills off on occasion to recuperate some of the lost energy(while the boons are still up because of concentration gear), or how does it work when trying to do healer's job?
I don't mind having to mash a lot of buttons at once to do one thing, I just need to know if my fears are unwarranted...
Thank you very much for any response...
@@brakhai5605 If you play heal Herald you have no problem with energy costs since you have so much boon duration that you could forget to press buttons for 20 seconds and probably still have 10 seconds of boons. If i am out of energy i usually just swap legends to have something to do at all.
Mukluk also says stab is bad and i disagree. you got 'the road' on dwarf everyone knows of but you also got f2 in dwarf and if you swap *into* dwarf you get stab too. In edge cases you could even run both dwarf and centaur for its elite but i don't think anyone does that or needs that much stab to begin with.
in regards to the healers you didn't try: heal mirage is just a worse heal chrono, but you can find an example of it as a heal kite on ht cm. heal cata on the other hand is amazing at giving literally 99% of its boons at range, so you can kite very easily on it, but compared to tempest you have barely any healing. you really depend on running frost bow, water elemental and signet of water. but if you have a low pressure fight or one where you want your healer to kite, it's actually quite good
Oh hey, my friend used to do the Heal Cata with the same setup. Though I remember him doing heal just fine on Boneskinner. Didnt think it would be so unpopular that you cant find a guide for it haha
For the Heal Mirage example I saw the same thing for Heal Quick Deadeye where the only example of it was in HTCM. So yes there are 2 different healer roles for every class. Just some of them are better than their counterpart lol.
The downside with heal mirage is that there is no relic to complement the play style. With the Manipulation trait and Defender relic, i can pump out near infinite Aegis on heal chrono.
Using a similar setup on heal mirage, the near infinite rifle ambushes is kinda wasted unless there's a new relic that can convert the over heal into barrier
for heal catalyst, can also use arcane wave over frostbow now with karakosa relic. scepter/wh and never felt like I had a lack of healing when I needed it.
@@wcocytus you have two main problem as cata , either you play staff and you will heal just fine but your energy fill up is gonna be scuffed hard (staff has no big multihit ability) or you play whatever/warhorn and there you gonna lack healing but have full energy all the time.
I love that preface, because you know people take these kinds of information as argument points to exclude players (WHO ARE SUPPORTING THEM BY THE WAY) because they (for whatever reason) see it as sub optimal
You can play an easy variant of Heal Herald by pulsing Regeneration, Swiftness and Protection (which also gives might and quickness) and simply autoattacking with staff. That way you have really strong sustained healing that gets you through many encounters easily. If shit hits the fan swap to Ventari and use your omega burst heal to top everyone off with one low cooldown utility. Swap back to Dragon afterwards and continue autoattacking.
When energy runs out on Dragon attack further and let energy build up again until 50 or so before pulsing boons again. If you are daring you can instead swap to Ventari, activate your bubble and continue autoattacking.
It is a way to ease someone into playing Heal Herald without worrying about the awkward scepter stuff and energy management. A nice way of learning the build and gradually using legend swaps more regularly and at some point use scepter / shield as main weapon set and keep staff in reserve for big CC or additional emergency heals, plus a block.
Heal Herald can be an awesome healer, but it takes some time and effort to play it the "meta way".
I think that scepter gives more barrier/sec than staff does in raw healing, also you're constantly giving might around which also helps proccing the boon share heal.
can u share ur build...thanks
Exactly! Heal Herald is actually one of the easiest healers to play, because with this playstyle it becomes super reactive and ready to do anything you need at the drop of a hat with insane range.
@@ArlanHomestead snowcrow has the build for it.
I was thinking myself that heal herald should be higher that heal tempest at least in the 'easy to play' category. Both have similar barriers to entry - tempest requires learning a lot of buttons, herald requires learning a lot of buttons, tempest requires developing a routine of swapping between attunements, herald requires a routine of swapping between attunements, tempest can be caught out if water is on cooldown or they're mid-overload, herald can be caught out if they're in the wrong legend. However, herald has a much more forgiving zone of effect, is less disadvantaged by being caught out because a lot of the healing is coming from traits and weapons while tempest is very reliant on water, and is simpler to reach skill floor in general (you can pretty much do your job in most content by setting the right upkeep skills after weapon swapping and just focusing on avoiding mechanics until your energy runs out, and then you can just keep adding to it from there).
I think there was another factor you should have considered, that being tanking capability. A tank in raids is most often a healer and some classes (firebrand, chrono) are significantly better at self-damage mitigation than for example tempest (who can't dodge during overloads and only has one block which they have to spend a utility on, making tanking Xera or Deimos an unnecessary hard process)
Not that hard to tank deimos on tempest. The bigger downside is the boon range since the stack is usually on the other side of the boss. For Mindcrush you have arcane shield and rebound, or if you want an extra conjure earth shield. Though arcane shield is always up if you only use it for mind rush. There's also aftershock which is group aegis, if people are out of bubble (or doing cm). Also you can dodge during overloads, it just interrupts the overload.
For Xera you can run armor of earth for a big chunk of barrier against her multi-hit, and the conditions can be cleansed easily. Not sure how many QoL buff tempest got since that comment 7 months ago, the 3-cleanse on the healing shout is certainly new and boon uptime especially protection got easier.
Pro tip for chronomancers: do not be seduced by the Chicken Glyph, as cool as Muk makes it sound you have a better option: Gravity well. Chicken vs well does 600 vs 550 defiance bar break - that would mean chicken is better for single targets, but Gravity well is, well... a well! That means it *also* heals on top of all that CC and therefore helps you to keep those poor, unfortunate melee classes in the fight right when they most need it. Gravity well also creates a dark combo field meaning more healing or CC if people trigger combos in it, so you may even break even with the chicken on the CC front.
While everything you've said is correct, there are factors you failed to consider. One, signet is instant, while Well applies its effects overtime and has a long cast time, making it poorly suited for quick cc bars (SH, Q1), although on the other hand it allows you to precast it (you can even precast it on yourself on Mattias or Samarog fights). Secondly and most importantly, a heal chrono is likely using a sigil of paralysation (30 % increased stun duration) which affects the signet, but not the well, so in practice you are comparing 800 breakbar damage to 550 which is a very significant difference.
Adding onto what Sasha said, the CC you get from humility can furthermore be doubled if you time it well with CS. If you need a really good burst of CC you take a chrono with humility, well of senility and mantra of distraction with a well timed CS for massive breakbar damage.
@@sasha9796 haha, are you sure about that precast on Matthias? I've tried self CC on there before and instead of CC'ing me it swaps sides and CC's my party lol.
@@campioneri that's curious. I have never tried mattias with the well, but i have tried it with guardian's sanctuary (although not recently) and have assumed it would work the same way. Thank you for bringing this to my attention, it would be curious to test it out
@@sasha9796 Guardian sanctuary for yourself on Matthias is also a big nono... you just prevent your teammates from getting into melee to cc you or use any projectile that CCs (ranger lb 4, mech mace 3, etc). And yes grav well on yourself on Matthias will do the same to allies. But for samarog, go right ahead, because you are cc-ing the boss not yourself
Nice video, can't believe I watched the entire 1 hour of it. While I played most of these healer builds, there are some that I haven't touched like Willbender, Specter, and Scrapper. And it is nice to be told in detail what their pros and cons are compared to the other healers.
Hey muk!
Firstly, cheers for the series, as a support enjoyer, I had lots of fun watching you go through all of them, both old and new
I tried heal alac willbender on fractals after watching your video, and fell in love with the mobile gamestyle of it instantly. I also found it fun for myself compared to healbrand. Huge thanks to all these works on detailed guides!
Ngl i tried it. Its pretty simple. Quickness really does help. It deals out constant heals and cleansing. Buffs might be a bit tricky tho.
Do you use the elite signet? If not use it - it makes your life sooo much easier
And you dont have to use the fury elite… 😊
@@Cross_111 yeah I use that signet, definitely helps with overall healing output.
Chrono definitely belongs in the “Are people happy to see you” category too. Chrono jail was a thing for a while and you can flex quick/alac with a single trait change. It’s wonderful.
“Hi I can play everything”
@@Werkzeug-100Is chrono the only actually viable sword and board tank?
From what I’ve seen so far it seems most other tank builds don’t use that combo.
Yea, also ive seen people specifically ask for HFB but then i joined as healchrono and they were more than fine with it, imo Chrono > HFB, also chrono is just waaaay more fun to play
I only relatively recently started playing healers in GW2 but I'm definitely going to try out chrono next, gives me another opportunity to use Predator on something as well.
@@piedpiper1172 Herald will use scepter+shield, firebrand will also use shield. Unless you're strictly looking for sword along with the shield because FB will typically run mace/axe and herald obviously scepter.
Condi quickness zerker could work as a tank perhaps because you would use the shield for mitigation probably along with the sword, which is a condi weapon. Otherwise warriors will prefer mace with shields for the bar break. But using a shield instead of a warhorn misses out on extra boon share along with a solid amount of barrier.
Then you have s'n'b engineers too. And I think that's it really.
Revive power it's Druid/Tempest, then Scourge in my books. Glyph of Stars revive is much quicker than what Scourges do and can carry where the wells revive simply is too slow. Also it is on a 48s CD, not 1 minute. You can cast it pre-emptively to even rezz yourself (lets say a tear took your aegis at deimos). GoS is the most broken skill in the game. Staff tempest has 2x geyser (water3 Range+16s CD and trait 20s CD), Signet of Water AoE rezz (20s CD too), Glyph of Renewal (Basically Signet of Undeath) and Rebound which basically is an instant revive.
Transfusion is just too good with pugs
I don't think tears take your aegis
I agree that the tricks possible with tempest are massive!! Nonetheless transfusion is still stronger on pugs. To be able to pull out 5 people from puddles instantly! is just too good in regards to rez power
Search and rescue can do it too or also the glyph of renewal in air - but only 1 person
But gor has a 90 second cd so its very flexible but if used up? Things become difficult during that time
Scourge can transfuse every 15 seconds - without alac which you will give yourself then
Those 3 are the ones which can pull people out of s*** which is amazing carry potential
And all 3 are very good! Just wanted to clarify the pull out specifics 😊
@@Cross_111 I mean there's exactly 1 encounter where this is really useful and only with a very bad group. And it only works if all the other people press F too or it often is too slow. On every other encounter, where the party is more split and people go down all alone (running away with poison at Mattias/Sloth etc) or even need to save yourself and others from insta death mechanics (bad timing at MO CM, shield fail at CA) I'd rather have the tempest toolkit with double geyser and rebound.
@@dfg12382 nope there are many encounters where people can relax in puddles ^^
Dhuum, Mathias, vale guardian if the pizza phase starts, Sloth poisons, sabatha with her wall, QtP fire circles or in CM fire paths, XJJ puddles and the list goes on and on...
And the scourge range is 600 around himself which is huge
Additionally if your group is good then its better to tackle a healer which does not focus more on pug carry but increasing the potential of the whole group like with HFB or Heal Chrono
If you pug, you will need to rez continuously - if you want or not
And as I said before - all these options are viable and you are free to do what you want 😁
But scourge is the better rez machine and pulling people out ir bad spots in comparison
The others can do it too of course - but not as good and as regularly
15 seconds is quite mad
Necro's well of power has self-stability because it's a stun break with a cast time. After all it would suck if your stun break got interrupted lol.
For example, thief's black powder originally had no cast time. But when they added the cast time to it, they gave it 1 stack of stab as well.
Been out of GW2 for nearly a decade, this is the exact kind of content I was looking for to re-affirm my old feelings for the Druid and try to bring that joy back into pubs...where the rules are made up and your pain doesn't matter. Thanks, Muk!
20:10 Scourge Well Stability: The reason that skill gives you a tiny bit of stability is to prevent you getting stunned out the cast. It's also a (self) stunbreak and it pulses might (irrelevant) and pulses condi cleanse (mildly relevant and even then only in the most extreme scenarios). I do bring the well to fractal Pugs for SS and Mai Trin and Siren's Reef boss if the instabilities warrant it.
Fun fact: when bringing the well, Scourge averages more than 1 group cleanse per second.
Edit: 35:35 DPS:
Cele Scourge does 7-8 k easily and up to 12 on fights like MO and you lose out on some healing but not all that much. You keep the full condi cleanse and rez-ability and only lose a minor part of your healing. I wouldn't bring it to Boneskinner, but most other things are fair game.
I'm maining heal herald in fracs and raids/strikes and disclaimer: I don't consider myself being a super computer. I manage just fine. Once you learn the basics you will never really think of energy that much - simply because swapping legends becomes a key part of your rotation - swapping legends brings a 10sec 20% outgoing healing buff so you want to be swapping off CD anyways.
Ventari brings a lot of stability if you spam your ulti skill on top of condi cleanse and a ton of healing so ventari in my mind is pretty much about spamming that single skill. In herald stance you just alternate the facets, ideally keeping prot up all the time and swinging between swiftness and fury facets. It's not that hard once you get it. You can even afford to not keep 6 pips of upkeep all the time for quickness just for the fact how easy it is to generate in both stances. You can also use the prebuff tactic where you open up with regen+fury+swiftness facet and crank that up on allies for easier start rotations when fight begins. I'd say it's easier to play than firebrand, honestly.
A lot of times I get compliments for healing and saving stray players with my ventari tablet, which is an extremely powerful thing because you can control it even if you're knocked down/disabled. Really cool stuff to play with.
As to targeting the tablet - it's not half as bad as it looks once you figure out that you can move tablet mid cast too - just cast a skill you want and direct the tablet towards the player. Hits much more reliably than for example warrior staff 3 which takes ages to arrive to location with a small radius and many times by the time you get there people (especially pugs) will just dodge out and you will heal nothing.
Edit: Oh and another thing - save your weapon skills for when you're in herald stance in case of on demand healing. Exception being shield 4 for aegis spam for pre-emptive protection. Use facet of nature constantly. Preferably herald stance for extending boons.
Which one do you find better for fractal cms, healbrand or herald? I usually do old cms as dps and it's always a firebrand carrying the team. Just curious if heal herald is good for fractal cms..
@@Casual_Lucas so here's the thing. Firebrand is an amazing class. The amount of aegis and stab it can provide on top of quickness and ranged heal is among the best in the game and can easily help the group skip certain boss mechanics, allowing for a faster clear.
Saying that though, its strength is also its weakness - the boons a FB gives have a short radius and especially mantras feel extremely bad because the AOE is a small cone shape - this means that you need a very good group that knows how to stack properly. If you can have that FB will feel amazing and will elevate the group.
One upside of FB, similarly to a Herald is also the following: While people favoring low intensity build usually say FB are high APM because every skill only gives a couple seconds of a specific boon - this is actually better in my book as opposed to large boon time applications with large CDs for one simple reason - fights with boon strip. It's very easy to reapply boons with a FB or Herald while a warrior for example suffers when a boon strip takes swiftness away and your warhorn skill4 is on a CD. It's more debilitating to the group but it's easier to play.
Now to herald : Herald has a higher healing output to a FB. It is also the tankiest of the healers. Meaning, it can compensate for a lower aegis application with raw healing. Ventari tablet is one of the most amazing tools for healing once you get a grip of it because you can float it around in a decent range and still heal people for massive amounts, cleanse, apply stab etc. You can do this while ressing too which means you can easily heal the group and ressing another guy. It's no scourge though, that's for sure (in terms of ressing). Important note: Mukluk criticizes the tablet for a clunky boon application because it takes a while before the tablet explodes and applies stab or heals - what he missed though is that you can pre-cast the skills and use the tablet reposition skill on spam to follow the person/group you want to apply stab/heals/condi cleanse to. This is especially important to learn if you really want to have a fluid ventari gameplay. I don't mean it in a condescending manner though - just constructive criticism to help fellow heralds out.
It can provide aegis, can cleanse condis pretty decently well, perma quickness/prot/fury/swiftness/regen/25might and here's the deal - has great stability on demand.
Wait, a herald has great stab on demand? Yes. Although of course it's not as easy as it is on a FB but with knowledge of the fight and its mechanics, you simply switch to ventari and break the tablet, which will apply a very good heal, condi cleanse and stab at the same time - a solid 3x stab for 10 seconds if you run 100% boon duration - very easy to do as well. You don't even need a sigil of concentration.
This essentially means that you can provide enough stab duration with enough stacks to fully offset the CD of glint stance and exactly by the time the stab runs out, you can already swap to ventari and pulse even more stab. This way it is possible to actually nearly perma mantain 3 stacks of stability which is something not many classes (if any) can actually do. In raids/strikes where boon coverage is already fullfiled, you can drop glint stance and go ventari/jalis and literally perma maintain a large stack of stab - while still providing perma quickness - but that's pure overkill.
On top of that, you can double stack stab if stab is all you need (energy cost) which will in turn give you 6 stacks of stab for 10 seconds - that's a lot of stab. You will never run out of stab if a team stacks and you rotate legends correctly.
On top of that if the need arises Herald can tank extremely well - because of salvation trait "resilient spirit". That gives 339 barrier per active boon, stacking up to 5 times, every 3 seconds - since it is extremely easy to keep 5 boons up all the time, this essentially translates into a 1.5kish heal every 3 seconds, just from existing, on top of a very powerful version of regen, buffed by herald trait "Elder's Respite". Add relic of the flock on top of that for extra heal and barrier + ventari and infuse light heal from glint stance and you basically cannot die even if you stand in a 1 hit zone (as long as you have infuse light active).
So as you can see, the situation is similar to FB - you need to know the encounters but honestly you will have an easier time with a heal herald, especially if you're dealing with a pug group. That's where Herald really shines because it is immensely easier to keep the group going as opposed to a FB. All those boons mean nothing if your mantra only hits one guy because they aren't stacked properly. All the while when Herald is easily applying all essential boons permanently in a 600 radius.
The main thing a Herald is missing though is a group stun break. Meaning if you don't know the encounter in advance and the stun happens when you didn't manage to apply stab - you will have to wait the stun out. Good thing is that you can swap to ventari and still operate and heal with the tablet even if you are still being stunned.
That's a big wall of text, I'll stop here lol. In conclusion yes, you definitely can do CM fracs with a Herald, very much so and in a pretty relaxed and easy fashion if you know the mechanics.
@@blastmanutz7798 wow ty for all the info. Honestly muk should pin this comment lol I appreciate your explanation and it makes me want to keep learning herald and do endgame content with it. Thxx! :D
@@Casual_Lucas keep going at it if you like the way the class plays, learning the "stance dance" and ventari flow will reward you greatly :)
Thank you very much for all the time you put into this! Because of you doing these it has helped me mess around with other specs to help alleviate stagnation of just maining Druid heal for too long. You're the best!
Heal Mirage uses many of the same things as Heal Chrono (Chaos and Inspiration traits, Rifle) but needs Staff to provide Alacrity, and I personally use a Sigil of Energy instead of something like Water. Relic of Febe I think would be best (since your Swiftness is spotty due to being procced from Chaos Aura) but I tend to use Flock.
Mirage traits are 1/2/3. Self-Deception (1) is used for the elite Jaunt which will create a clone if you have at least one already out. Mirage Mantle (2) is the Alac trait and thus necessary. Dune Cloak (3) gives you Mirage Cloak (and thus, your Ambush) if you shatter with at least 2 clones out.
For skills, Mantra of Recovery and Mantra of Pain for mantra healing (and clone generation on the former), and Jaunt elite for more clone generation. Your other two utility slots are pretty flexible like with Chrono. If you want to bring, for example, Signet of Humility for CC you can instead bring a Deception utility. I prefer Jaunt for the shadowstepping, and it's also a Leap finisher so you can use that in addition to Staff 2 for more Chaos Aura application when used in Staff 5.
So the general concept is that you use Staff and create a bunch of clones to Ambush a lot (both via "dodging" and via Dune Cloak) while spamming your mantras, and once you have a healthy buffer of Alac or need more immediate healing you swap to Rifle, where you can immediately Ambush (Heals+Vigor+Fury) thanks to the Sigil of Energy. You stay there using Rifle's skills (Might+Fury from Rifle 3 is important here) until you need to swap back to Staff, where thanks to the Sigil of Energy you can immediately Ambush to get your Alac back up (though make sure you have at least two clones up for Dune Cloak).
You should be able to provide permanent high (if not 25) Might, Fury, Alac, Regen, and Prot, and high uptime on Vigor (100% on you thanks to Mirage shatters giving you Vigor), while being able to provide stuff like Stability if you need to.
In short...it's mostly just a worse Chronomancer. But certainly feels different to play.
20:25 I think Well of Power has a second of self stability, because it breaks stun and the developers probably felt like Necro needed some sort of skill to counter heavy CC, without going too far over the edge. Well of Power is the only skill that behaves like this for Necro and I think that's fine.
I'm impressed you maintained your sanity in this exercise.. fantastic information!
I like the fact that Necromancer Scourge is still at the top of the ladder when it comes to reviving people. Like c'mon, it's in their job description to actually be good at resurrecting people.
As tempest you can run earth spec instead of arcane, it gives aoe stability for your group for short duration each time you attune to earth. I were always using tempest as alac healer for ibs5+DS runs because of this, the only healer which have more than 1 stack of stab for covering jumping Braham in DS ( -renegade, weird choice of healer)
Thank you Muk for this. I really appreciate the perspective from your standpoint. Especially from someone who PUG's then having a static group. The only down side is that this eventually get dated with balance patches as time goes on but for now it works. Plus better then a tier list.
Just dipping my toes into support - starting with boon DPS, but this was such a great series to understand what's going on from the healer's point of view. Loved this. please do more!
Just a slight correction for heal untamed. It's damage in full harriers can get up to ~12-15k. There is a rather legthy discussion about it in the Ranger channel on the SC Discord
17:41 Renegade have the same aegis as Herald, since it comes from a weapon.
What? Revenants have no way of giving group stability from a weapon.
@@baronoke5432 My bad, I meant Aegis. Shield 4.
Thanks for taking the time to cover all the various healing builds.
We have alot of people in our guild who simply play one class and might want to try healing so its a nice referral point!
Any plans on mucking about with offensive supports?
Have a lovely day!
Love that you gave a recap video. But, I really think auramancer staff tempest should have had its own category. While it has less boonsharing than warhorn, the pug carry potential goes way up, as does the heal throughput stability. And, you can press "Feel the Burn!" during overloads instead of going to make a sandwich.
Overloads grant auras (Unstable Conduit), auras - including staff earth 3 & water 4 and the fire, earth, and ice utility shouts - grant regen and vigor (Invigorating Torrents), and I like taking Elemental Bastion to enable healing on granting auras; Transcendent Tempest is a good choice for when I'm more confident. I also like swapping between Cleansing Water and Powerful Aura in the water traits depending on what I need. Even with Cleansing Wave and "Wash the Pain Away!", I find that I like having tons of condi cleanse. In addition to Arcane Resurrection, I like Arcane Restoration and Evasive Arcana in the arcane traits. Set up this way almost every button I hit does some sort of healing, unless it is a weapon skill, and many of them make or proc auras which trigger the above traits. Soothing Ice also keeps me safe against sudden damage spikes. In addition, staff water 2 and earth 2 and "Aftershock!" can blast the different staff AoEs depending on what blast effect we need - fire for might, water for a more direct heal, or ice for more frost aura (and the aura trait effects). Because I keep generating regen, I usually skip getting Concentration on my gear and use Marshal's stats instead for its damage boost. For sigils (transference/renewal), runes (monk), and relic (mercy works well with Arcane Resurrection, but monk and dwayna are good too), I stick to the ones common to healers. Glyph of Elementals is the obvious choice for the elite skill.
I'm always super confused about the firebrand cone thing.
Mained it a couple years ago and afaik, the cones are just a visual and the boons get applied aoe.
You can see a thin white circle around you when casting, at least for the mantra-cones I'm pretty sure.
my memory isnt too firm on the tomes.
FB gives buffs in a tiny (180) circle around him and in a longer (300 something) cone in front of him. Because the circle is so tiny in practice you want to vomit buffs on your teammates.
I can only picture the Berserker headbutting the F1 key over and over
I survived the back-to-back watching of the giga-length Muk videos, let's go!
I have rarely played heal-spec builds in GW2 outside of WvWvW. Having watched this, I may give a few a try. Looked interesting and it would be a nice change of pace after running either pure DPS or boon-support DPS since 2012!
Thanks Muk!
Great job! The struggle is real with scrapper, I learned it and give myself repetitive motion injury in both wrists.
Healbrand got to be the most fun i had healing in a game. you have pretty much everything to your disposition and it feel like the old days of playing Monk in Guild wars I
For flex slots..while heralds don't have individual flex utilities, they flex swap a legend based on the fight [dwarf/centaur/demon].
It's only really in issue if you need 2 of choices (mostly stab/bubble)
Also that the biggest heals and cleanses you have comes from centaur. So if you bring dwarf instead in order to get mondo stab then you kneecap your AOE healing and condition removal. And if you go demon to... I actually haven't played revenant enough to know exactly what the demon does, but I seem to remember it having one of those cheerful "grab all conditions from allies and rub them all over yourself" abilities, something that applies short duration resistance, and a heal that heals you for more depending on how many conditions you have on you? Does the elite even do anything useful for a healer, I seem to recall it just being a pulsing condi field thingy, I guess it drains enough energy to proc quickness?
I hardly ever use demon outside specific content.
It mainly gives group resistance, and mass amounts of boon rip. (For example: it's very nice for dealing with avatars of gluttony in convergences)
@@chrisgoal only time ive ever taken demon stance was against vg, cus youre healing is enough there without vent, so having the boonrip for blue guardian is nice but only if literally no-one else has any
@Mukluk amazing guide, this was a fun watch as well :). Thank you Global Icon
Quick note on teammate targeting. Druid and Untamed also have some teammate targeting with Staff 1 and 2. Chrono rifle can also target and heal teammates with the auto attack.
True the staff 1 and 2 can target allies but they also hit allies by just shooting at the boss. Whereas the specter and rev scepter HAVE to target allies to function.
Sorry Muk, I meant to ask this yesterday but had to take a call: Is the scourge build tested in this video YOUR scourge build (the one you put out like a year or two ago) or from the snowcrows site? PS great video, I loved all the categories and would love to see a dps version of the same if you have time. Thanks!!
Old scourge is very different than the new one. Go to snowcrows to see what is used currently
So I have been playing mirage for a while now and I can with confidence say, with staff staff you can be a very capable off healer, or even focused healer but never for more than 4 other people and there is a really high requirement for stacking to maintain your boons. You can consistently pop out both regen through ambush or mirrage and stability through shatter, resolution from skills and even a good amount of aegis from false oasis on a 10s cd with alacrity but it's rough to focus on healing while maintaining alacrity stacks on the party as mirage.
You strongest tools for healing is staff 5 and false oasis, both of these things are stationary small well style zones, both of these have short windows of applying boons. Rifle is (was) used in pvp a lot for the 5th ability tp but the evade is a flame thrower that gives vigor, rifle is inconsistent though but I've used it on claw of Jormag a lot in smaller groups. Chaos armour is amazing for snapshots, but it's so hard to use at the right time.
You have a decent invulnerability window for yourself but that's not really healing and rakes away a lot of your AoE boon application.
In general viper staff staff mirage dps is just significantly better and more fun and still provides a lot of boons to the party with almost no investment in healing at all.
Adding to Chrono: Chrono has more sources to stability than just well of precognition! It has distortion (which you can combine with continuum split) and mantra of concentration. Chrono does have a revive "illusion of life" but well... the player will die again unless they killed something xD
In a raid context, it's virtually useless, but Chrono does have a revive skill, though it comes with a big caveat: you have to kill something you would normally rally off of within 15 seconds. That skill is illusion of life. If you are using the healer in pve or wvw, that's a good skill to have, but it can be tricky in pvp and in raids it's near-useless.
40:10 Shoutout to darkrazor's daring on renegade. 12 sec cd skill that does 600 AoE breakbar damage.
I often solo cc the wyvern at Qadim using darkrazors daring (600 BB), Staff 5 (up to 1350 BB) and ventari elite (300BB). 3 skills doing about 2250 AoE BB in about 1 second.
Cooldown on all of this is only 20 seconds cause of staff 5.
Don't think any other class beats that.
I'm so glad that mes has a healing option, and a good be too. Rifle is super fun to play. Very refreshing.
For allied targetting you can bind a key, you just press a button and you'll target the low health teammate for you to do your thing, then you can press the target enemy button and move on with your rotation
Awesome video. I might try out some of these.
Slight correction: Scrapper has 2 revive tools. You are most likely not gonna use 1 of them, but Elixir R toolbelt skill does exist.
57:56 I think the theme around the shortbow could've been much better, if it was some Mad Max style loading the bow with explosive arrows and other whack stuff. The first ability I thought of being a thing for shortbow, when they revealed that weapon type, was lobbing a barrage of grenades slung from a shortbow. That would've been fun.
By the way, did you try Deadeye quick healer? It's like Spectre heal, except with even more swapping between ally and enemy targets, no resistance or stability, worse heals and its sneak attack never got updated to do AoE healing. Sounds fun right? :D
p.s. A small tip regarding 44:36 where you said you can't use Spectre skills due to them being shadowsteps: click (literally mouse over the icon and click) your skill twice and it'll shadowstep on the spot regardless of terrain.
Cc wise, specter is the best cc character for support, so much in fact Its a pain in certain encounters to bring since is doing cc all the time, should be at least second in that classification, since it has:
Basilisk venom
Well of gloom
The 3 and 5 of shadow shroud
Pistol off hand head shot (quick)
The steal gives slow
The 3 of specter dagger gives chilling
Well of silence
Shadowfall
Spike trap ( can be prepared)
Can paralyzed a target with certain traits every single time he is poisoning the target
The share venom that paralyzed.
Now if you mean how quick can deliver all this then it's true, is not that fast, only head shot and basilisk venom.
25:40 I play tempest healer and I switch to water only when its needed to avoid situation where its on cooldown and I must heal party :P
32:49 Chrono has Ilusion of life which can revive too if revived player kill a foe (like downstate 3 (??) on warrior)
42:00 I personally think ele has lot of CC too.
This was eye opening.... as I've only every tried and played Specter. My reality has shifted.
Same :) now trying chrono for speed crac :)p
I love playing my Healbrand in fractuals, but it has the same issue with a quickbrand. My boontime will be all over the place, if the party is all over the place. And when you mix in people dodging/moving out of shit.. keeping that up time above 80% basically never happens. I wish they would get rid of the cone and replace it with the same sized circle as the Herald. When someone complains about not getting boons, its usually an issue with where they aren't stacking with the majority of the group. Hurts!
Every time in Sunqua Peak.
Everyone is spread out across the entire field, people are running all over the place like headless chickens, I'm trying to keep them alive, and then someone just goes "Are you SURE you know how to apply boons?"
@@Reddotzebra haha, classic dps. It's not just about the numbers, if you're not on the boss or stacked you're not doing your job
on the dps rankings, I think that scourge and healbrand should be mentioned. I am by no means an expert with either as a dps class, but while doing full healing (but not tank) I can usually hit 5-6k dps on heal alac scourge and pretty dead on 5 on heal quickbrand, both in real fights (not on the golem).
On the note on Specter shadowsteps... I have on more than one occasion killed myself on Kaineng Overlook. Not because I ported into bad, but it has a small area where the geometry is weird, and it just instakills you if you port on top of it
I'm not really even playing GW2 anymore, but I loved watching this series. Great work!
I've played quickheal Catalyst. It's weird. Unlike usual cata playstyle where you're pairing jade spheres across the four elements, on quickheal you cast triple jade spheres with the rotation fire->air->earth ... fire->air->water repeat. Frost bow is a must have for frost bow 3 to build energy quickly, and picking up the dropped frost bow is important because the healer goes from feeling workable but awkward to really not workable if frost bow goes on CD. The build "works" in that if everything is done right it can put out all the boons and solid healing, but why have an "if" when we have alacheal tempest that is so much more consistent?
As a fellow heal/support enjoyer and Druid main, this is very useful as I try and find a "quick heal" class as heal untamed doesn't tickle my fancy xD
Yeah ever since they switched Druid Alac generation to Celestial Avatar I have wanted them to either remove the CA CD or swap around the Glyph of stars.
Let us have the res version when we’re not in CA, that way we can drop out of it in an emergency and get people up.
A res spell *needs* to be on demand. It *cannot* be locked behind a 10 second cooldown of something you need to constantly use to provide the reason you are in the group.
Doesn't chronos have problem to pre stack boons when there are no foes around?
Did you try signet of courage with the willbender to boost your healing a little? Wouldve liked to know if that made any difference on the content youve tried with the willbender.
Edit: i really like the idea of this chart and you explaining everything. That makes it really easier for me to make decisions. Keep it up 😁👌
I'm currently DPS but want to change to healer. Still new to the game. I thought of going for QHFB but I saw a comment saying it wasn't so good on raids because of his range during the mechanics that make the group separate, which made me wonder: what is the best overall healer, the one that has no problems doing all type of content?
Also which gear stat to choose? Most of them use Harriers but in my view why the power as healer when you can switch it with toughness on Givers and be more tanky, or even Minstrel that is a mix. But then also saw someone say that on raids the boss focus the most tanky one and because of that they should have no toughness
For Chrono in "caught in the wrong moments" column you were probably thinking of weapon swap locking you out of situationally useful cooldowns, something might come up you want to block with shield or heal through more effectively with rifle.
You've played every *boon* healer in the game, but what about *DPS* healers with no alac/quick/prot grouped with 2 boon DPS and rate them in terms of group risk vs reward 🤔 You could really reinvent the wheel here!
I believe he tried with Druid when they did the Alac rework and people didn't like it, which is sad. I would've love to see more non quick/alac healers for more squad flexibilities like having 2 quick dps & alac dps in a group with 1 healer & 2 dps. It might be less dps but it might also be fun.
Healers that don't provide a key boon (alac or quick) will not find a group in PvE.
@@Alphenis That is 100% true because of the current meta mindset and because it would be an overrall dps loss since you're sacrificing a dps slot for a boon dps to make up for the lack of quick/alac. But for a group that wants to play an off meta comp it would be a fun challenge.
@@Alphenisso that’s an issue then, those buffs shouldn’t be in the game - problem solved 😂
@@Papakakadu Honestly yes, we should just bake the quick/alac benefits into the skills then remove them entirely so we can have more varieties of builds like possibly seeing a Heal Vindi in raids.
Great list however I do wish you included 1 more category - ease of maintaining Alac / Quickness uptime while in the thick of things.
As a druid player I can confirm allies somehow die the moment you leave celestial. I don't know how, I don't know how they know. But they do. Half of the group just waits for you to press F5 to stand in EVERYTHING.
11:20 Re: Hitting the F1 key constantly.
Allow me to introduce my friend the small dense weight. Fishing line weights, small paper weights, or a hunky bolt. Anything that sits nicely on your key.
It now lives on your F1 key.
Your tendons are saved!
Note: Some keyboards have different repeat rates for held keys, you can usually turn it down if it’s repeating so fast you find it disruptive. Just google your KB model and “change held key behavior.”
25:30 Water Elemental 12k nuke heal. Water signet 4k heal. Wash the pain away 9k nuke heal. If that wont be enough your water is already ready 😂
Is Vindicator not considered a "real" healer, since it is missing the essential boons of either alac or quickness??
isnt core hammer guard still more efficient then willbender?
Oh my god, when your computer’s taskbar comes up at 5:46- what computer do you have that is running all of those programs all at once?!
why deadye doing stealth will cause interrupt of your allies auto attacks ? is this a bug or ANet impresive features/balances ! ?
There is a faster way for bladesworn to swap to staff: F1. After you Dragon Slash, you simply swap to staff with F1, since F2 is the slash, and F1 is the gunsaber. And at absolute worst, F1 has a...... maybe 2 secs cooldown? So you can swap quickly with bladesworn, if you remember that you can weapon swap with F1 as well as regular swap with whatever button you use for it.
Also, chrono can use Illusion of Life to help ress, but you only have 15 secs to kill someone to fully revive a person, and in a boss fight, you may not have an enemy that you can kill that quickly for a full ress.
I recently discovered berserker healing. I love the build and as someone who has mained warrior since beta, it feels like a normal warrior build to me. I'm looking forward to running it in more content.
With some setup you can heal on Quick Deadeye. You give boons and have ways to heal. You will be missing Aegis, Stability and Protection 🎉 but it can do the job 😅 basically worse specter.
I love playing my heal Scourge in any of the harder open world group content because it's such a good noob carrier. It's also fun never dying cause I am a barrier god, lol. I don't even need to dodge most of the time because of all the barrier I can provide 😅
Also, fantastic video Muk 👊🏽
Convergences and Knaebelag are like crack for me on heal scourge. They're not super hard but they seem to have a lot of downs most of the time. If it's Demon Knight in the convergence and people just don't run the huge numbered aoe markers out there's sometimes like half a dozen (or more lol) people going down at once.
as someone who plays heal mirage from time to time, I can def say it's kinda wonky, but I still love it. It has access to a lot of the same tools as chrono, though it's limited by needing to run staff/staff (though if you want pure heal instead of alac, you could go rifle/scepter). It also has some forced movement based on staff 2 mostly. though, since you'll often be running the mirage elite, you can mitigate this by bouncing back immediately. also, you're so much dodging, but that's mirage for you.
This was a fun video for sure! Loved hearing your thoughts, it sounds like your against the unga bunga, but next tier list for your fav dps builds :) come the muk on 🤞
I think you're selling willmender's CC short a bit. You have sanctuary, willbender elite, hammer 4, bane signet, and heel crack all available since no utilities are required to give alac.
at the same time where Firebrand was so dominant in fractals, druid was as dominant in Raids. 10 man Might, Fury, Prot and Heals were insane, especially when all other boons were covered by BoonDps (RRs and QuickFirebrands).
Bladesworn is not as much of an issue to swap because if you use rune of the warrior and the F1 swap off of gunsabre, you're in it for less than a second. It is not zero, but it definitely is way way less of an issue. Though after thinking about it I realize that it's a playstyle difference, I fully charge my dragon trigger when I probably really don't need to. Which "saves" me all that time that mukluk is noticing.
Love the video Mukluk, but you missed one. I play an almost full celestial Vindicator healer. They do lack boons but make up for it with good healing, barrier and cleansing. I have cleared all T4 fractals with the build I run and it works great in almost all situations. Plus what is nice is I still do decent dps as well.
Díky!
Thank you!
Short bow on Mechanist was overlooked its giga, it gives a long protection. extra aegis that u can dubble up. good healing good CC and barrier..
Chrono player here, chrono does have to weapon swap in quite a few cases (unless you meant that chrono camps the shield weapon rather than rifle, which i doubt) because chrono has their healing and boon generation on two different weapons and if you only sit on rifle your boons, especially might and protection will start to fall off unless your boon dps fills in the gaps. You kind of rely on your shield 4 and 5 or on additional shatters from scepter to upkeep those. Rifle alone does not generate clones at sufficient rate.
how does rifle lose Might stacks? Don't you have like 20 might uptime with rifle 3 alone?
Doesn't prot come from shatters or somewhere else?
@@lugnut1206 rifle 3 can give boons or heal. In high healing pressure situations you lose one or the other. You do get protection from shatters, but a, it is not 100 uptime, b) rifle clone generation is very low and all of your clones on rifle are conditional. Rifle 2 gives clone only if you hit an enemy with it (so no clone if you use it to heal someone off stack, like kiter on ko for example) and phantasm has long cooldown and sometimes need to be held for cc. So if you are the only source of protection on your sub, you will not upkeep it from rifle alone and you likely won't get 25 might either, but that's easier, since a lot of dps and most boon supports have some might. And of you are tanking and have gear with lower boon duration both of these become even worse. So you might be fine in theoretical perfect conditions on a golem, but rarely in an actual fight
Am i mistaking or is there no heal vindicator build? dont they have the blue fraction abilitys and ventary as well as the trailine in vindicator that heals? maybe its because they dont give alac or quick idk i dont play that xDbut a healer in the end.
Is it pretty much down to the Alac or Quickness issue. That's what the "Meta" wants from it's boon support healers.
I am thinking about looking at vindicator more closely just cos I have a full set of Harrier gear for my herald.
It's the same with soulbeast, dragonhunter, spellbreaker, and even holosmith. They all have interesting healing tools that have been left by the wayside because they don't have meta boons.
Love the format. This definitely needs to be replicated for the other types, offensive supports and DPSers. Or I'll fight you in these comments! 🥊😁
STABILITY: scrapper by default runs stab on function gyro as well and you can run elixir B for even more. so you have 3 ranged sources of stab with multiple stacks each. you will never need more than that. specter has stab on shroud 5 with 16s cd which you never need to use in your rota and you have well of bounty on top. if you lean into it with earth traitline and staff on tempest, you can have very high stability output, but at the cost of uptime of some other boons, especially you lose your boon extension.
REVIVE CAP: scrapper actually can take elixir R whose toolbelt skill is also an aoe revive, so it's quite good if you desire it. tempest with staff and normal+lesser geysir is really nice, but obviously it's not as great as a scg or druid. specter has shadow refuge which is an aoe revive field. it's not great, but better than nothing.
RANGE: i would say druid and specter are quite good because they can give a LOT of their boons at like 900 range if you give up boon uptime on yourself.
CC: my biggest complaint, druid cc with double mace, storm spirit and glyph of equality has WAY more cc than even a chrono on a much shorter cd. i can literally do 12k cc in a single sammy run with my group doing normal cc. renegade with darkrazor has an instant cast 600 ranged aoe cc button (which is on a 12s cd, so infinitely better than moa) which herald doesn't have, so it's definitely more than herald. scrapper can take personal battering ram for being top of the cc table in any normal group, but even without you have double cc with sb 5 twice and blast gyro plus you can put lightning fields for others to leap in for daze finishers. firebrand can take sanc and even hammer of wisdom if necessary, so you can do quite a lot if necessary.
other than that i can't find any problem with these lists. you make a lot of good points.
i would like to add one column with skill ceiling or performance in high-level groups: you would definitely want a druid, herald, chrono or scrapper in the current meta. scg is good, but limited in it's tools and output. meanwhile you wouldn't want a heal renegade, untamed or willbender in your group
I was really interested in the potential for heal specter and had even cobbled together some ritualist gear for my thief a while back, but Gw2 healers have rarely had to actually target their allies to heal, so it feels much more awkward compared to just spamming an aoe... I'll still give it a shot, but my favourites atm remain Druid and Tempest. :) 👍
As one of the few specter mains in-game, I will say I agree on heal herald being more complicated to learn than heal specter XD
IMHO, heal specter may be clunky at the beginning, but once you get used to how it works, you'll begin to understand the 'rhythm'...of healing with specter, if that makes sense lol. Herald on the other hand... Oh god, imagine having to balance between cooldowns AND upkeep?! AND also ally targeting with the scepter main hand? Heal specter is a lot easier XD
Perfect length video, 10 min would be too short
Tempest in staff is really great to play. Big change with dagger/focus or so. Huge crowd control. But longer cast time. So mastering the rotation and positioning are important. Other advantage: very long range. It's my main and I love playing it.Sure give it a try ;)
I play a weird off meta Firebrand build which is pretty fun, but it's definitely not for everyone, as it reminds me of playing piano on ele pre HoT, as i moved towards Necro after PoF, but healers are probably the most important and underrated player in a team.
The "caught in the wrong mode" list could also include the engineers as much as it does chrono :P
The main reason why I never liked playing heal mech was because the kits would just mess me up, and I'd try to use weapon skill thinking I was out of a kit when I wasn't. Even died to those few times.
I main HAT (now swapping to chrono) so bunch of skills and changing skill bar is no issue to me, its just the way you swap between them.
Also when playing HAT, I often kinda skip water during my rotation, if I know regen should be enough for everyone, just so I can go back to it whenever I need. (also I use air overloads quite often, especially at the start of the fight to stack plenty of alac quickly so that if I get interrupted it doesn't drop alac)
As an Untamed Support I had a commander in strikes think I was a DPS that was just doing low damage because they never saw an untamed healer and then in a convergence I kept the rat alive by myself.
Untamed Support would be my go to if not for the stupid snot cloud.
Chrono might have landed in Wrong Mode Moments for Mantras. Good Chronos probably dont show it nearly as much, but I have definitely had moments where I've needed to use a Mantra that wasn't charged, and it feels bad taking that much longer to hit the button.
So Specter is the Braham of healers?
I've played "heal" mirage plenty, but that wasn't a true healer (it may be possible, though). I played it as part of a jack-of-all-trades build that I use (still) for hero point trains. A little condi damage, alacrity, might, portals, blinks, and still a bit of healing with 0 cast time, but not really enough healing for a raid.
Heal Cata is shockingly effective when you play it right, but it is also shockingly easy to meme yourself and your group. Heal cata actually does more healing than tempest as the empowered empowerment increase your healing power by up to 10%, but it doesn't have stab at all and it's aegis is part of the rotation so you don't have aegis on demand. The main issue with heal catalyst is generating energy. If it wasn't for the way catalyst generates energy, heal cata would actually see play as ice-bow heal cata can pump some series heals. I have healed bone skinner on catalyst before, not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't find a quick-heal for the group. I did it, it worked, and I hope to never have to do it again. Unless you have mained ele and catalyst for a while, I would 100% recommend you not try heal catalyst.
Regarding untamed - you can just not use F3, also you can not use staff either considering how good MH mace is
Scourge stability is 10-man. It has a role in good compositions that can stack well. Everyone in both subgroups can advantage of the sand. If you are off the stack, then its survival of the fittest.