JusticeRetroHunter.7684

> @"Cyninja.2954" said:

> This thread would have been very useful IF it had been done with the mainstream support builds,

Since you won't do the calculation, which you are free to do, I will calculate both the meta Heal Druid... and one of Kitty's druid builds just for you. Trust me you will be very surprised by what you will see.

> @"Obtena.7952" said:

> I don't really get the point ... theoretical limits on how much you can heal for are as useful as theoretical limits on how much DPS you can do ... neither help you play the game how you want. I guess it's a cool academic discussion ... but the practical implications for the game are questionable.

It's the same logic that's used in other areas of research, where measuring the limit of something can help you figure out how to achieve that limit, even if it's theoretically impossible to reach.

For example, the theoretical maximum running speed of a human is thought to be 40mph. The fastest runner in the world, Usain Bolt, has ran at a speed of 27.5 mph. This at least informs you, that the theoretical maximum run speed is incredibly difficult to attain...and people who are interested, find out why that is the case...In this case, the reason is because of the structure of muscle tissue. At that maximum speed, you would have to exert so much force in a short period of time, that your muscle fibers would rip apart.

The same logic is used here in the same manner. You find out the maximum healing you could ever think to imagine to do...and is in theory possible given exactly perfect ideal conditions...which are highly improbable to meet. So this limit informs you on a number of things, based on the proportion of which you are meeting this limit. It's useful for improving rotations, or improving skills that you would have otherwise thought were not useful to see if you can get closer to that limit.

So yes there is a point...It's up to you whether you want to use information to improve your builds, improve your performance, or to test your limits (ie: solo healing encounters)

> @"Threather.9354" said:

> Holos are pretty good but main issue is that it isn't easy to play. Like it has large radius AoE pull + pulsing cleansing field with inventions traited.

Pulsing Cleanse field? Which field would that be. Also what inventions trait are you talking about?

> @"fuzzyp.6295" said:

> I don't play tempest much, so perhaps I'm under-reacting here, but really this is not a terrible nerf... at all?

You're not underreacting. You're just completely wrong. It's nothing but one of the biggest nerfs for Elementalist supports for WvW...probably in the history of it's time in WvW since core maybe...

>Its also a buff for Tempest in PvE which is probably a good thing

Yes it was buffed for PVE.

>making it a more competitive choice for raids/fractals.

The change has no effect on fractals...but for raids and strike missions yes...epic win for raids and strikes.

>Honestly, having five tempests being able to cover 50 people...

~~huh....now here you are overreacting. 50 people is not how that worked.~~ it was 10...maximum. Edit: Read that line incorrectly wierd...my bad.

>... in shocking or magentic auras always felt a bit weird to me. I've always thought that Tempets's niche was suppose to be in a small parties (5 man) which is what set them apart from other support classes. It brought more of a dynamic utility to the group instead of just raw healing/damage mitigations, which kind of felt lost in zergs. When it was buffed to 10 players, I mean that was great but, I will hardly miss it.

And this niche you think tempest fulfils only exists in your own world... not in the world of the game... Tempest had to compete with other classes like Scrapper and Guardian for the spot in the zerg, and those spots are not changed so long as guardian provides stability, and scrapper provides the most cleansing and exceptional healing...so Ele needed SOMETHING to deserve a spot in the group...

The idea was to have it's aura's, which are Ele's unique mechanic, to be applied to 10 people instead of 5 people, justifying the removal of one scrapper for an ele in a group of 10. It was also justified by the fact that Ele could heal and do cleansing in competition with Scrapper, and this made it useful and actually "almost" meta for a while in WvW.

Once February came, it received huge nerfs to it's healing and cleansing capabilities...putting it now at parity with the those other classes. How it became meta to me after that is a mystery...but from what i know, due to the overall shift in the meta, WFT Tempest became favored for it's usefulness in condition based comps...so it still had it's place in the group...this time more as a condition cleanser and buffer than so a straight healer.

Now with today's patch, the healing and cleansing again received a heavy tax from this singular change (another half of it's condition cleanse output...gone.) So it's condition cleanse capability and it's 10 man target capabilities are gone...there's no longer a reason to justify it's position in a squad when guardian and scrapper are needed in the party. Not to mention that Ele just sucks now in comparison...forget about looking for a tempest...it's just not good anymore. Everything that made it useful and wanted in WvW has been taken away...and that's it for it.

Also on the bright side, PVE tempest got a new build because 10 man targets on shouts aren't connected to the trait anymore, and so you can now take Latent Stamina -> Invigorating Torrents to upkeep Regen and Vigor using shouts, and that's just one of the few possible builds that opened up. Awesome new build combinations for PVE. Huge wasted potential for WvW.

> @"lodjur.1284" said:

> You're right why would anyone pick up crappy skills like Earth Overload and Rebound on their tempest builds, clearly tempest is meant to be played without "Singularity" trained.

Last time i checked you never played zerg/gvg you said you were 100% roamer so you clearly don't know much about zerg and gvg skills. In small scale and roaming, you'll encounter a WET Tempest, but in zerg/gvg all those skills are considered training wheels (with the exception of Rebound)

> @"RisenHowl.2419" said:

> you don't need to use anything during the channel if your issue is getting locked down in melee, which shouldn't be the case on a support tempest in the first place. You can already melee dive on full glass dps toons, no reason you can't do it on a support tempest. If you're unable to do it currently on tempest, the issue is player skill or build. If the player has little positioning knowledge or skill on tempest, you have access to a plethora of escape skills: mist form, lightning flash, obsidian flesh, earth shield, earth overload, harmonious conduit, lucid singularity, stone heart, arcane shield, rebound....

what am i listening to right now. Nobody is gonna take those crappy skills into zerg/gvg. If Aftershock was that OP, they would have nerfed Aftershock...not the trait that effects the entirety of all Tempest builds.

It's obvious what happened here. They are normalizing 10 target cap builds to be 5 target across the board, in an attempt to "balance" the game mode...except they don't understand that this will just drive Tempest out of the meta, and make Guardian/Scrapper/ the required comp for every single party.

> @"CutesySylveon.8290" said:

> Edit: This is also only possible because Thief is forever jailed to Trickery. If we were trying to run with only 12 ini again, then LOL have fun never being able to cast anything.

You mean 10 Ini...but ya basically. We're only allowed to play one build...that is the build that anet wants us to play....do as you are told!

> @"LadyKitty.6120" said:

> Meanwhile the build Kitty's using has about max. 25-29k potential if there's no waste when calculated with Kitty's method (and note: Kitty's math uses harrier's trinkets+weapons, magi's armor and Earth+Water specs instead of pure magi water+arcane healer you use which has over 40k potential by quick estimation) and thus you only used 55-66% of the build's max. healing potential even if you're running the lower healing boonbot version. In other words that's far more than enough for the boss even if you actually brought boons on top of healing. And considering that big portion of tempest's heals hit more than 5 peoples, tempest even gets further boost in numbers over other healers in healing that takes effect in arcdps. And those numbers just further confirm the numbers Kitty's used earlier in this thread with "Boneskinner, the most damage intensive boss by good margin in popular no torch-strat, does 2500-3000 damage per second. " referring to damage per person and if 10-target heals are even 20% of total healing, that's already bringing the healing done by you within that range as 16000 = 0,8 x 5 x 2750 + 0,2 x 10 x 2750, 2750 being the healing per person by average if tempest were a normal 5-target healer.

Kitty... 16,000 / 10 people is 1.6k healing per person. This is the amount I healed during that boss fight. The potential of the build i could have had in that fight is 11 million healing....Which means i could have healed 45,800 / 10 people is 4.5k healing per person...1.6k as a ratio to 4.5k is 35% efficacy.

>" if 10-target heals are even 20% of total healing,"

A ) The problem with your calculations kitty, is you have too many "If's" that you are just adding into it. "If 10 target heals is 20% of total healing" comes out of nowhere, and really there is no reason to believe that the 10 target healing is 20% of total healing. Where did you even get this figure from?

B ) Another "If" in your equations is the boss damage. The boss damage is different for all bosses and different on every encounter... You don't need this figure to find out the same information...Even if you go around trying to find how much damage the boss has done, that only applies for that particular encounter...it's not an average, and the average ranges anywhere from "Did all my allies stand in the ooze" to "did none of my allies stand in the ooze" This variable is to subjective and that's why your numbers become wishy washy.

C ) your number of 2.7k...i'm not sure what it's supposed to represent...because again it's an HPS in a vacuum.... is this the maximum potential healing someone can heal for? Is this the average amount of healing a Tempest can do in a fight? Is this number pulled from a rotation that you used? There's no logical explanation for arriving at this number of 2.7k...

Again you can prove this by just doing calculation backwards...if i healed 2.7k HPS per person, then my total healing should come out to 4 million in 4 minutes right?

2.7 x 10 allies = 27,000 per second. 27,000 x 240 seconds = 6.48 million healing. What am i missing here? Where did this extra 2.48 million healing come from?

> @"God.2708" said:

> Not to ruin the doom saying, but eles healing and cleansing is fine. It's just that over the border you have the same cleansing and healing (good) with added stealth, purity of purpose, and better superspeed uptime. Eles need some arbitrary utility to compete with that, and/or scrappers need their extra utility brought down to the utility level of eles.

I mean, Tempest was bad already after the OW nerfs, but they at least had their fire condition cleanse build or whatever...This change will reduce that condition cleanse output by half...on top of the healing that is now also reduced by half again. In addition to that, because everything is now 5 man target skills, there will be no space for tempest when the much superior scrapper which will be able to cleanse at least 5x more conditions will be picked always.

Every Tempest support player knows that this change is the killer of support tempest in WvW...it was the one change that brought it into the "viable" catagory and its been undone with no repentance.

> @"God.2708" said:

> You are wrong. Anet once again forgot to nerf conjure weapons. 4 Conjure weapon eles feeding our spellbreaker friends superior weaponry is it hand. RISE.

Yep new meta, Elemental Minion Meta with conjurer fire axe, lightning, water and human racial healing uwu.

> @"Len.1879" said:

> It's funny. Players keep asking for balance patches. And when it rolls around the corner threads like this immediately pop up: https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/119399/goodbye-tempest#latest

>

> inb4 Tempest players "hurr, this isn't balance, this is gutting!!1"

ya good luck finding space in a 5 man team comp...as if anyone is gonna now pick you over a scrapper? Get real.

>Tempestuous Aria: This trait no longer increases the maximum number of targets of shout skills.

>Shout Skills: Increased the maximum number of targets from 5 to 10 in PvE only.

Tempest officially gutted.

> @"Psykewne.3025" said:

> So essentially either a) you’ve explained it so poorly no one gets it b) you’re so smart no one is on your level to understand it c) your initial premise is so irrelevant everyone is discussing things that are actually relevant d) you’re entirely wrong

You left out the option E) Some people are too stubborn to take the time and do the (very simple) math in order to figure out objective properties about something.... clearly you missed that there are people here that do understand and are interested enough to ask questions about it.

This method isn't some crazy magic dude...its literally adding stuff together...it can not be more simple than that. It's the same as taking the total amount of healing done at the end of a fight, and then dividing by the time of the fight to get an HPS, which is how Kitty does her calculation... It's the same thing except you are figuring out the potential of what could possibly be done in a fight and then comparing it to that number to see how well you are using the build...Because HPS alone in a vacuum isn't enough information to determine how well you are using a build.

Example...Above in a previous comment, I did 4 million healing in a 4 minute boneskinner engagement. Take that number, divide it by 4 minutes, and you get 16,500 heal per second. But what does this number tell you? It doesn't say much unless you have some value to compare it to. People who use HPS meters usually compare this number to other people, to determine relative performance with other players. The method i'm using uses the potential you could ever possibly imagine to heal in a fight as a way to compare what you did, to what you can do on that build....it's literally in essence the same exact thing as Kitty's calculation, but taken a step further. This method is better because it takes values from specific skills, so that you can compare those skills to one another too...something an HPS meter in a vacuum can't do.

> @"Psykewne.3025" said:

> I find it interesting that no one has actually said anything in support or agreement to anything you have laid out in this thread yet you simply refute or ignore all contrary points. Either you are the smartest guy in the thread or you're severely off the mark.

Most of the points made in this thread have nothing to do with the actual topic though. One of the main points people are discussing here is that boons are more important than healing...which I don't disagree with or agree with...but it has nothing to do with the topic since some boons are used to increase damage, while other boons are used to increase healing. You can supplement these things by just hedging what you have verse what you don't have. If you don't have access to protection, but you can heal for the same amount that protection would have supplemented in the fight, then both are just equivalent to one another, and likewise, if you have protection and a lower amount of direct healing. So neither is "more important" if you can measure that they have the same value...and this informs your decisions. If a squad leader is forcing you to take protection, when you could just heal through an encounter without protection because your class doesn't have access to it, then the method give more power to you. Having both is ideal...but some builds (classes) just don't have that kind of luxury.

The other point people are trying to make here is trying to use the method in order to compare builds to one another, when this isn't the point of the method. You CAN compare builds on different classes to each other using this method, but that's not what you should be using it for. The design of the method is meant to pick a (any) build, find out it's potentials and see how well you are meeting that potential.

Anyway, pick a build...any build you want to play, find out it's potential, then find out how well you are meeting that potential and it tells you some information you can use to better your gameplay, find different strategies, or mix and match different skills, traits and sigils etc. Only way to do this is to actually do the calculation rather than argue about whether it's a useful calculation for you or not. The calculation is not exclusive to just healing...it applies to anything that can be broken down into components of damage or healing. If you require stability or immobilize for an encounter, then you bring stability or immobilize... that has nothing to do with the potential healing of your build since it can't be broken down into components of healing that you can measure.

> @"Psykewne.3025" said:

> Ugh. Look I think re-reading the thread, your ego is just in your own way on this one. You obviously think very highly of yourself and you're obviously more than competent at the game and that's fine, but this thread seems less and less like a useful thought piece and more and more like tooting your own horn. I think maybe this topic just isn't aimed at me because I really don't have a problem with my healing performance and there's nothing you've said that is of any use to me.

This thread is about giving you a tool you can use...that's all this is. Has nothing to do with whether you have problems in your healing performance or not...this is just a method to measure aspects of it so you can inform yourself...you can use it to theorycraft builds...or just for fun calculations if you have ideas for a build... it really doesn't even matter what you use it for...its just a tool.

This is nothing to do with ego either...this has to do with me trying to give people something they can use to improve themselves if they want to or not...I'm like literally trying to help using as much objective logical reasoning as possible (and math) so that they themselves can confirm it to be the case without having to "take my word" for it.

Lastly, I think it's you and your ego is preventing you from learning a different way to look at the game...I mean you assumed in your first comment, that I was motivated to make this thread by being made fun of for running a full heal tempest...which believe me I was made fun of still am for a very long time. Of course that's not my motivation for making this thread otherwise i would have made it a long time ago. And of course when I start showing you pictures where it's is in support of what I'm talking about, all of a sudden its MY ego? (and believe me I could BLOW your mind with some pictures and videos...) But that's not even necessary...in fact I hate making videos and taking pictures just to prove a point when its all there in the math that one can do themselves to find out on their own.

> @"Psykewne.3025" said:

> It is all reactionary or preparatory effects. For instance, healing condition damage is simply not as effective as cleansing at the right moment.

I'll just say this...that you can apply the same methodology of calculation to cleansing just like you could healing effectiveness, because essentially they are the same thing that can be broken down into components of healing. Because of how cleansing works, you can rather than breaking it all down into how much healing cleansing does, you can just optimize the amount of cleansing you can theoretically do in a fight by looking at the potential and efficacy of those cleansing abilities...again using the same procedure.

Just a personal example. Around the time of the February Mega balance patch I had made a scrapper because my guild wanted me to run one. I had never played an engineer or scrapper before. But after looking at the class for a couple hours and calculating it's cleansing potential, it took me less than an hour to cleanse the most conditions in my squads by nearly 2x/3x margins, and these players are not scrubs. The only way the below picture was even possible, was to look at the potentials of skills, and then using that information figure out which skills were actually important enough to use in a fight, and which ones i should actually keep on cooldown.


The point is that you think healing is somehow the exclusion to the rule for gw2 mechanics...but in reality all everything actually is in the game, is some form of healing or some form of damage...with the exception of a few mechanics (like stability) which are just mechanics that can't be measured to any reasonable effect.

>Aegis negates far more damage than most heals can heal for.

This is actually not true. You can read my previous comment for more insight into that. Aegis can be broken down into components of healing just like pretty much anything else, and you can quantify how much negation it does to compare it to other skills. I apply the same method for Bulwark Gyro in terms of damage mitigation and the numbers are all there.

> It is so easy to start doing complicated mathematics

uhh...dude it's not complicated. Its literally an exercise in addition and subtraction. i actually don't even understand why people are arguing about it...why be so confrontational to very easy to understand math because it might shatter some belief you've held for 5 years about the game which is based on intuition or whatever wooo wooo that someone told you a long time ago?

>If you are standing around pumping about heals trying to make the big numbers then you are simply doing it wrong, it's not efficient at all to play like this.

You mean how every DPS class does in the game? You can literally replace the word "heals" in this sentence with "damage" and you'd see how silly this sentence sounds as it's a contradiction to the most common behavior in gw2.

>True efficiency is doing the healing and support that is necessary and then filling in everything else with damage. Every bit of damage you do also limits the healing you need to do as things die faster.

This is mildly true...but your also not thinking hard enough about it. If your group uses 2 druids to get the job of support done...rather than each druid doing 5k dps and a little bit of support, you can have someone go full support so a damage dealer can do 30k dps. You don't lose damage if you are hedging it with someone who specializes in doing damage and someone who specializes in doing only support. This way if there is a situation that actually demands a higher potential for healing, you can actually meet that demand via specialization. not to mention it's actually just easier to play like this...mashing 100 buttons focusing on 10 different sub tasks when you can hard focus on a single task to perfection.

>

> The efficiency maths you are doing is about the least relevant stat you could possibly care about in guild wars 2. You are way too defensive to even see it however and you're getting aggressive with anyone with a differing opinion acting like you are the smartest guy in the room, which you clearly are not as you just hand wave and dismiss any evidence that you are incorrect.

I'm actually very open to any and all ideas about many things. In fact every time i lead strike missions, i literally have 0 requirements for pugs to enter the strikes... My LFG message is "Bring whatever you want I don't care." My position here has always been one of exploration of ideas and dispelling false truths...I am a theorycrafter at heart and have been theorycrafting for 15ish years since guild wars 1.

In my brief time of leading strikes, I've experienced an array of just straight up lies that people are taught and I hear these in some of my pug groups sometimes, because the ones that teach these false truths actually don't do proper theorycraft or essential math in order to understand how the skills in the game actually perform in comparison to one another to make rational decisions about their builds.

I've had pugs that never even played strikes before, let alone understand their class to do competitive dps... but you know what? We still manage to defeat Boneskinner in one or 2 tries maximum...

I've been in experienced well comped groups that have wiped more times on Boneskinner on average than my typical pug groups...I know exactly why this happens...it's because people have in a general sense no idea the actual mechanisms going on when it comes to how to make the most efficient use of their class. They are taught a rotation, then they follow this rotation based on memory. But if something happens and rotation is broken all of a sudden? Group wipe...because players panic and have no idea which button to press next...or I just observe players that even though they are playing their class, they are using abilities that are just waste of their potential...so people want to go 4 healer on Boneskinner when it's totally not necessary. I've been in 4 healer Boneskinner groups and people will still full-wipe with 4 healer. what's sad about this is actually not just seeing it happen, it's people not understanding WHY it happens.

> @"God.2708" said:

> Edit: I do want to say that I don't disagree with the premise of changing those things as important, but changing the skills and traits is not the only way to change the META. And, at this juncture, is not even the most important though probably the most simple/accessible given ANETS history.

Sure. I agree, that I think there are many ways one could change the meta. Aside from what I mentioned, What you mentioned is the game outside the game which is the consensus to which people can agree on what the best strategies are.

If metabattle and all relevant sites shutdown or if some website appears that somehow encourages competition like Teapot tourneys, or if some new streamer plays a hot build and people pick up on it, then the meta might change... Of course this isn't the only way to change the meta. It's just one of the many ways that a meta can change.

None of the ways that a meta can change are set in stone either. Suppose some computer did find the most optimal build, if that computer doesn't share the build, the meta won't change. Likewise, if the streamer plays a hot build, but nobody watches their stream, they will have no impact on the meta.

So ya if I misinterpreted your comment, my bad,. I just thought what you said implied that changes to traits and skills don't change the meta.

Ya i agree. Everything is relative. If we increase damage across the board, the relative Tanky-ness of bunkers will go down. If tanky-ness increases, damage relative to the tanky-ness goes down.

The truth is that there is no middle ground, and most people believe that there is a middle ground... but there really is no such thing it's an illusion since it's all relative to each other. The only way to have this middle ground is if all things were exactly the same in every single way. It's a hard pill for people to swallow but that's the inevitable conclusion to the dilemma.

The powercreep wasn't good. But neither is the reverse powerdip we are in now. IMO there is a barrier for entry when it comes to builds being at least useable, and that involves whether a build can actually accomplish something. If nearly all off meta builds are wiped off the face of the map to address a single outlier, we open ourselves up to another outlier, in which an off meta build could have been able to deal with it if it wasn't for the nerf to the previous outlier.

It also doesn't help how the changes that were made, actually went out of their way to make things purposefully more clunky to use, or took away nuance that was once there.

Blinding Powder was one of my favorite abilities on the thief class. It had a lot of nuance that allowed it to be used in many types of situations. With the changes, that nuance took a nose-dive ... and arguably that skill wasn't even changed all that much. They gave it stability, increased the cast time and that's about it...but those simple changes completely neutered the possibilities to which one could use that skill.

> @"God.2708" said:

> "Most effective tactic available" is a made up term. It's important to understand the history behind the term because "Most effective tactic available" loses a lot of context without it. Meta-gaming is the game outside of the game. If you know what the enemy is going to do, you adapt to their playstyle and adjust builds accordingly. There isn't a 'best' build or 'most effective' build. There's simply a point at which trying to seek an advantage stops being worth the effort. Which gets derived from a lack of competition.

>

> The 'Metabattle' builds and general 'meta' is formed to be usable by pugmanders to make easy party forming. It isn't the best set up. It's simply the easiest to understand. Again, game outside the game. Playing to and understanding expected userbase.

Even though what you said is true, it's not the entire picture. There is a most optimal build. But it is as you said, impractical to identify it in any meaningful amount of time.

The way you think about this kind of thing, is if you were to imagine a super computer that can analyze every single choice and combination of choices. The computer will eventually find this most optimal path, in some finite amount of time, and the time it takes is based on the complexity of the system.

There is a thread i would invite you to read that goes full in depth into how this is the case

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1376183#Comment_1376183

I also wanted to respond to this quote here

>You can't change the meta by changing traits and skills, as silly as that sounds.

>META is the game outside the game. In order for the meta to change, people have to actively engage in analyzing what other people are doing and how to beat them. That doesn't require changes to traits and skills, though that can initiate such build movement. It just requires competition. Which WvW sorely lacks right now.

I don't disagree with this statement, but i don't think it's true either. I agree that competition is the driving force for all changes in the meta. 100% agree with that. But what i disagree with is that changes to traits and skills don't change the meta, cause they do. However, some changes don't do anything, and these changes are in the realm of moving numbers around in an attempt to make skills equal. In this comment here i show this to be the case.

https://en-forum.guildwars2.com/discussion/comment/1344346#Comment_1344346

Along with a few other analysis of the problem, you can logically conclude that the changes that need to be made must be certain kind of changes, in particular to skill design and how those skill designs have to be more meaningful in order to encourage a larger possibility space for different builds to appear. That's talked about in the previously mentioned thread.

> @"Wisty.4135" said:

> I am curious as to these calcs - I've run boon auramancer, shoutbreaker, and heal scrapper and of those the healing style seems so wildly different between them. I'd bring auramancer for solohealing stuff like VG or SH (xtra spicy), but scrapper for stuff like Rainbow Road or WvW. Is there a methodology for accounting for the nature of healing (burst, mitigation, over time), or are all of these numbers on theoretical raw values at 100% efficiency?

>

> Just curious!

Thanks, I'm glad you are curious, and I took the time to address each point below in sections to answer that question

The potential is the theoretical maximally efficient value for each individual skill, then just added together to give you a total. Then when you play your build in a fight, you see how much you did and you compare that to the potential value as a percentage. If you have a potential of 100,000 healing, and you did 10,000 healing in a fight, then your healing efficacy in that fight is 10% of the potential. You use that information to analyze the performance, the build and/or the fight in order to make more informed decisions.

**Burst**

Burst is a different kind of thing all together. For example, a boss can do 10,000 damage every 10 seconds in two ways. Either 1000 damage per second, or 10,000 damage in 1 second and do nothing for the remaining 9 seconds. In both situations, a skill that heals for 1000 healing per second will at the end of 10 seconds, heal all 10,000 damage in both scenarios. Likewise, just as an enemy can inflict burst damage on you, the same applies for when you apply burst healing to allies. You can either heal 1000 healing per second, or do 10,000 healing in one second, and do nothing for the remaining 9 seconds. In practice, it's always a combination of both happening in tandem, where a burst will occur followed by pressure, or pressure is followed by a burst, and will always go back and forth between the two, and one of your jobs as the healer is to respond to each situation with the appropriate counter situation so that you and your allies health is always returning to100% as soon as possible so you can deal with the next phase of bursts and pressure.

So there is probably a specific calculation to figure out burst potentials, but this calculation in the thread is not it. If I were to take a guess (cause I've never really gave much thought to it before), it would be a comparison between the amount that can be healed, versus the time it takes to heal that number. So If you have Skill A B and C, each doing 2000 healing, and it takes 5 seconds total to use them all, then the burst potential would be 6000 over the course of 5 seconds....My first inclination would be that you want the largest number you can attain, in the shortest period of time spent casting the skills in question, and the way you'd analyze that kind of information is by creating different arrangements of sequences that allow you to do the biggest bursts in the shortest time frames.

**Mitigation**

In general nearly all forms of utility with the exception of a few can be broken down into components of damage, or healing. This includes mitigation like Protection, Blocks, Aegis, etc... The way you think about these kinds of utilities is thinking about it as a healing skill that heals before the damage is done, and then you can use that to give you a general idea of how much the potential of those utilities are in comparison with other healing abilities.

For example, Aegis blocks an attack. Theoretically, the potential "preventative healing" from an aegis is infinite, if it blocks an attack that does an infinite amount of damage. But in order to be more practical, you would use an "average" value that an aegis would block for and then provide a general range for that value to give you an idea of the scope to which that mitigation compares to other healing abilities. The most practical average is to use the amount of damage it would take to otherwise kill you. So if you have 20,000 health, then the potential for Aegis to preventatively heal you is some number between 0 and 20,000. So in this case, 20,000 is the potential, and the average potential would be 10,000.

You can aim for a more practical potential by taking samples of fights and using that information to find the average amount of damage that occurred in that fight to figure out the average damage you could have mitigated. For example, let's say you took 1k, 5k, 3k, 10k, 2k. You find the average number, and that tells you the average damage of that particular fight, in this example that would be 4,200. If you were using your aegis to maximal efficiency, then this number is the average potential of Aegis in that fight, rather than 10,000. This kind of measurement is useful only for specific fights, while the previous method above is useful in a more general sense for any fight.

Now I'm not sure if there is a way to calculate the efficacy of damage mitigation, because I'm not sure if ARCDPS has anything to record it. If anyone knows feel free to tell me. But you can use that potential at least as a way to guage how much you can expect to preemptively heal people with blocks and stuff.

**Other Nuances**

Some mechanics simply can not be measured with an equation in the game. I would call these kinds of mechanics "practicalities" in which some things are just more practical to use than other things, for reasons having to do with the design of the skills themselves. Medblaster is a great skill with high healing potential. But it's effective area is essentially a cone, and relies heavily on quickness and boons in order to reach those big juicy numbers. In fights that make you spread out, the effectiveness of a cone shaped heal plummets the efficacy of your healing, and things like this need to be taken into account when comparing abilities. For example, Revenants Staff 1 skill when used with healing orbs has an incredibly high healing potential. But in practice, it's almost impossible to land Revenant staff 1 in WvW, and it's a pain to heal people that are spread out in an engagement on a boss fight...so your healing efficacy of staff 1 plummets.

Hope all that info helped answer the question.

> @"LadyKitty.6120" said:

>And also, if you play pure healer instead of boon value,

who ever said this and why do people keep bringing this up? No one is telling anyone here to bring a pure healer over a booner...

If you don't find the exercise useful than don't use it and continue playing how you play what is so hard about that? You'll just be playing without knowing all information. That's up to you and you are perfectly fine with living in that world than so be it

This stuff isn't pulled from the vacuum either btw. This is one of the ways people from WoW community use to make Priority rotations. They're calculations are WAY more exact, but it's essentially the same principles. So continue to live in that bubble that's fine. It's just a shame really that's all.

> @"Kuma.1503" said:

> What we're doing here is trying to pidgeon-hole reaper into only being good at a few things (teamfighting, melee dps) any time an option exists that lets them adapt outside of that, we say "Reaper wasn't meant to do that" and we rally to nerf or remove it.

>

> Mentioning Lich instead of Speed Rune just pushes the issue back a step, but the issue still remains.

To quote Sam Harris, "The buck never stops."

If it's not Rune of Speed, It's Lich Form. If it's not Lich Form, it'll be Axe weapon skills... If not Axe skills, it will be staff...then Spectral Walk, then Spectral Wurm... Anything that does not fit a singlar build design will be removed, and then the complaints will be "Can't ever win against thief or ranger (or literally any class that can walk)....plez nerf"

The buck will never stop with the nerf this mentality until we arrive at stick wars 2 and the death of the game....which arguably it's on right now.

> @"wevh.2903" said:

> Again , wheneven i use the word roles you use it to tergiverse my argument . I gived you and entire explanation about how attributes works on conquest , and you didnt even reply to it until i say "roles" .

>

It's cause those attribution of roles are subjective. Kuma even called you out on one of them...that's the problem with using anything subjective or too specific like roles...which i already said earlier are delineations created by players to help organize information. it's obvious that roles exist, but in no way does that mean that roles create balance. Balance and diversity are part of science that games use to design them. Roles is just that result of a systems design (since what drives their creation is human behaviour)

edit: also not to mention that designing for roles falls into that trap i keep mentioning...except you completely ignore that fact constantly and i keep responding to constant strawmen. Me and Kuma have both illustrated with in-game examples how designing a game for classes that are inherently different to have specific roles is detrimental to diversity because it annihilates player choice. that is what this thread is about...diversity....and you can have both diversity and balance, my posts are meant to illustrate that concept, and nature (and complexity science) PROVES that is possible, that highly diverse systems are balanced.

> @"wevh.2903" said:

> You dont need to play meta classes to play ranked , meta is only strictly required when it comes to full competitive enviroments like mothnly ats .

Then I don't want to play the one build on one of the three meta classes in order to be considered viable in AT.

> I get what you say , but again , having 3000 builds would make pvp unskilled and unfun.

There is nothing that would say this to be the case. Gw1 is a perfect example of a system with more diversity, that is in fact more fun to play because there were many builds to play. It was also very skillful too, even if you didn't know what you were up against. The skill is in the theory-craft of the build rather than ones ability to play a single build. but those two things are not mutually exclusive. What ends up happening, is because of how skills and things are designed, powercurves, cielings and floors are just inherent in nearly any build you create...so the skillful play actually emerges from the process of learning how to play the build you created and we saw this in gw1.

> Maybe you can call it "balance" but it is a twisted balance that has cero correlation with what a instanced competitive game is.

No this is how balance works everywhere...in all systems including those outside of gw2. You, talking about roles is a watered down version of the process mentioned before...except it's with 9 builds instead of many builds.

Like I said earlier, balance lies on a spectrum of diversity....where one side is maximally homogenous and the other side is maximally heterogenous. Both ends of the spectrum there is complete balance, and on both sides of the spectrum it is impossible to find an optimal path to win the game. The difference between the two sides of the spectrum should be obvious...that one favors all things being equal, the other favors all things being different.

GW2 is a heterogenous game BECAUSE there are 9 distinctly different classes, and it's therefor impossible to balance it into homogeneity because that would mean making every class do exactly the same thing in order to be considered balanced. This is why the balance approach should be to go for heterogeneity, in which choices allowing for things to be more different, leads you to the other side of the spectrum, where balance is also found.