Healing Breeze Part II

Heal over time per cost for HBreese is bad. The best example to show this is actually the build that is most prominent in its use: 55 monks

A 55 is designed to take advantage of Protective Spirits 10% damage maxim to reduce all damage to 5 HP. Then Healing Prayers becomes exceptionally efficient as its heal over time with maximum regen is 20 HP per second, allowing the monk to take an excess of "damage" per second and still see health returns.

But the HP regen is capped at 20 HP per second. You have to be maxed to get that efficiency, and your HP has to be low enough for Prot Spirit to negate so much MORE damage than what it would under normal play circumstances. proof of concept can be found very easily: go outside and try to solo farm with a 55 build and only minor runes. heck, do it without the cesta. the difficulty to stay alive doubles with an addition of a mere 50 HP.

Take this scenario and apply it to the PvE environment. In GWP, you get Breeze early, and its not a horribad heal. But then you ask why. Early in GWP, everything is lower level, dealing lower damage...and you, your henchmen and your low level PuGs are low in HP. As stated--and hopefully proven to forum goers satisfaction--above, HBreeze IS more efficient with lower HP and lower damage packets.

The more HP you have, the harder it is for HBreeze to keep up. Once you reach 600HP (standard HP ranges for level 20s) Healing Prayers is healing for 1/3 damage with prot spirit equiped, sans armor and other defense skills. Less actually. even at 16 Healing Prayers, Breeze only deals 9 regen. Now factor condition pressure negating some of that regen...hexes taking more. it becomes more efficient over time to simply remove the conditions, prevent or remove the hexes than to let them sty on and hope your Hreezed player doesn't gain max degen to completely negate your 10 energy cost (which is, in this game, easier to produce than max regen).

So by the time you hit level 20--as happens quickly in this game--you and the mobs you face have more than outgrown the HoT of healing Breeze.

The efficiency of these healing prayers skills can be subtly boosted through the use of healer's Covenant because its health loss does not effect enchantments. In a build with power heals (Heal Other, heal area, DKiss) and enchantments, the HoT of such a build can actually be quite solid and its energy managment...semi-respectable.

But maintained enchantments are a questionable gamble at best in a game so inundated with enchant strips, and running a support bar that is filled to bursting with 1 second cast time skills is screaming to get interrupted.

Protection skills, on the other hand are quicker to cast, better recycle with reasonable uptimes for team support (some of them anyway; just like most other support skills, powercreep and excessive nerfs have hampered the prot skill line since Factions was introduced and done a solid job of breaking most prot based builds as the game continued). This makes protection as a whole more efficient for team support in PvP and PvE. In PvP, monks have to worry about "smart shutdown"; players taking an active role in breaking the backline from start of match to end. In PvE, players need to worry about massive packets of damage being sent to a target...more than 20HP per second, to be sure.

So Healing Breeze fails as much of the HPrayers fails. Not enough overheal to make the skills reach efficiency, not enough utility to make the skills do more than just make red bars go up.

I'm not a bit surprised that players use HBreeze. its an easy to get skill and capable of keeping players up in NM. But what they fail to realize is...they're playing Normal Mode (Easy mode). against a unified attack to the backline, HoT crumbles. Against power damage from high level mobs...HoT fails in GW.

This is not WoW. Don't think of it so. We're are at the other extreme of utility in this game. In WoW, its all about the HoTs. Healing is the basic--the only serious--utility that players can bring to combat damage. GW is more diverse, requiring different methods due to this diversity. Prot synergizes with other skills to create a defense "web", making damage low enough to the team that you don't require as much healing. The other side of the spectrum is an HBoon with LoD and a BLight. One player largely responsible for team cleaning, another player responsible for anit-pressure, and the last--the HBoon--responsible for massive overheal to targets under pressure. there is no room on any of those bars for a 10 energy strippable buff that heals for excessively small health over time.

This post is--I hope--merely a summing up of the 8 page discussion. If no one has said all of it before, somewhere, its said now.

So...close? Continuing to attempt a discussion of Breeze's merits is just plain stubborn. it doesn't matter what playstyle you are attempting to define the skill inot, shoehorn its use into your build. Some skills just get outgrown (in HBreeze's case, literally).

Most to all serious players who started in GWP have used it. That doesn't prove that the skill was ever good. it only serves to show that we had limited skill choices at that time.

GGS