Healing Prayers, too effective??

You know it. I know it. Healing is too cheap in this game.
Spec healing prayers to 10 and bingo, you can heal 2x more damage than can be dealt by any other class combo.

This isn't so much abusive by primary monks, whome should heal good anyways. Secondary monks who throw 10 leftover points into heal for healing breeze and heal area for teh self heal is abusive though.

The way I see it, any combination should be a viable spec. No one combo should give you the easy win over another. But if a Nonmonk/Nonmonk goes up against a ?Mo/?Mo, that secondary/primary monk has quite a big advantage, because healing prayers was designed to overcompensate damage by a good 50%, cause its "reactive" or some BS.

What I would suggest is simple, and fair. Rework Healing Prayers to be on par with any other path, be it a DOT, or a DD. Do the math and that'd be approximately a 33% nerf to healing prayers effectiveness.

This would simply make monk secondary as viable as every other secondary instead of being vastly superior.

To counteract this, and to reward dedicated healers, increase the passive Divine Prayer bonus by 150%. (one and a half) Do the math and that would bring Divine/Healing monks back to where they would be anyways.

You want an example of abuse, ok. An PRIMARY elementalist spends 25 mana to set you on fire (-7 blips) for 18 seconds. Then 5 mana every second for 40 damage flares. NOTE: this is the MOST mana efficient example I could come up with...

An SECONDARY monk spends 10 mana to healing breeze (+8 blips) for 10 seconds. Then 5 mana every 2 seconds for 60.

Or, say the primary elementalist tosses an obsidian flare for 15 mana, 2 second cast, 20 second cooldown, and a massive total of 105 damage!!!

...
And your lame secondary monk casts a heal area or heal other for 10 mana, 3/4 second cast, 3 second cooldown, and 150 health...

This is secondary monk abuse. And this isn't even touching on resurrection. Play some of the the best groups and you'll notice they will only have a couple primary healers, and a lot of secondaries that spend 10 leftovers in healing, and that magically lets them overcompensate for a non-monk opponent.

How do you devs feel about this? I'd be interesting to hear your logic behind making healing prayers 50% more effective than any other line. And thats before divine prayers.

You have to remember that spending energy on healing significally lowers most of the classes' damage output. Also remember, this is a mesmer's home turf. Energy denial, interrupts and enchantment removal can own any monk, and especially secondary monks hurt from this.

Uh.

I'm a primary healer. I heal a whole hell of a lot. I cannot "out-heal any class combination." I can get knocked down. I can be poisoned and bled. I can be hexed. I can be meteored. I can be maelstromed. I can be frozen. I can be interrupted. I can be pinned down. I can be distracted. For me to out-heal a good warrior (even with clever temporary enchantments juggled), I'm pretty much sacrificing my team. If I trust another monk to heal me, that monk has to rely on me to save the rest of our team. If I'm attacked by two players with a modicrum of talent, strategy, and communication between them, I'm very likely to die unless someone on my team noticed. Healing breeze is powerful, but putting 10 attribute points into healing will NOT give you 8 regen. Mine gives me 9 or 10, and it's way up there...and it's still not enough to counter a single good PvP player.

If healers are so scary, investigate scourge healing and smiting prayers. Play a mesmer. Play a necromancer. Hell, play an elementalist subbing as either. You can be the scariest anti-healer ever. If you don't like casting, look at distracting shot and distracting blow. What good is my 15 healing if I can't cast my healing spells?

Trust me, there are players who make me wet my loincloth when I see their names pop up in the distance. Understanding how good healers work is the key to stopping them and destroying them flawlessly. I speak from experience: healers are not the unstoppable juggernaut you make them out to be. If they were, no team with two healing monks would ever lose. Ever.

As for secondary healers - or what I think you mean: monk subs - these people are sacrificing other abilities for healing. If they take two monk abilities that means they have two slots missing. Their skill combos are severely limited, their skill output is now 3/4 of its optimal level. The only players not hurt by this are defensive players who only act in the interest of saving themselves and their teammates...which actually sounds like...a monk. Other classes suffer by taking healing abilities, simply because it limits their actions. In PvP you need to come dressed for business and ready to close the deal. What might (might) work against mob AI in PvE is going to be an easily-recognizeable "cheap trick" by the PvP crowd. Once they see your crutch...let's just hope you can crawl fast.

[ ]

I play as a Necro, in my skill bar right now i have 3 health degeneration spells.. and when casted on 1 target have roughly a degeneration of 6 or 7, even with healing breeze thats still a degen of 3.. and bone minions/fiends (providing corpes available) beating on a monk and also vamipric gaze/touch.. its going to be hard to out heal that in a 1v1. IMHO a good Necro can degen/siphon quicker then a monk can heal.

Every character has a weakness, in this case....

The Mesmer is SPECIFICALLY designed to be a LOCKDOWN character.

Maybe if you're complaining about a guild doing a 8 Monk Primary build with the sole purpose of making the other team leave then I would agree with you.

By the way, Monks are very bad about not being able to heal theirself very well.

Erm you can always keep monks from using Healing Prayers with Backfire or interrupting arrows....there's many ways so it's not TOO effective!

Healing is underpowered. Why? Spec to 10 and you can only heal more than 2x the damage output of another character.

Damage is not and cannot be equivalent to healing. Simply put, healing needs to be much more powerful and efficient compared to damage in order for it to be playable.

That's because damage is a threat and healing is a response under threat/answer theory. Another way of putting it would be move/counter-move. Damage is the aggressor and healing is the defender. You heal in response to damage not simply to heal on itself. You heal, of course, because you want to stay alive but damage vs. healing could just as easily be spell-casting versus interruption or melee damage versus blocking/evading. In all those circumstances the threat, the initial move, is the one with flexibility. There are a lot more ways of dealing damage, for example, than there are of healing. It can come from spells, from weapons, from traps, from DD, from DOT, from spiked damage, from sustainted damage, and from everything else that can cause damage. Healing is in the game to deal with all those different sorts of damage. It's the natural counter for when someone is being damaged (And since GW is a complex, extended game there are more counters and other ways of preventing or stopping damage but we're going to keep things simple here) but in order for it to be an effective counter it has to blow damage out of the water and then go to damage's house and mess up its family. Healing will be more efficient and more effective in terms of cost, effect, and any other measure than dealing damage will ever be so long as healing remains a viable option.

Imagine you're trying to damage and I'm trying to heal. Let's say you can deal 10 damage and I can deal 20. What happens? Well, I'll always be able to outheal your damage. I've managed to successfully counter what you're trying to do and rendered your strategy moot. In other words, I've won that race before it's even started and you're in trouble. If, on the other hand, I could only heal for the same amount as you could deal damage then what we have is a stalemate. You chip off 10 from me and I put it back just as quick. No one wins, no one loses, it's just a matter of who's going to slip up and not hit the right button at the right time or slugging away at each other until someone disconnects. And, if damage were to outpace healing. If you could deal 10 damage to my 5 healing, then healing becomes not a counter to damage but merely a speedbump. So, it might take you 10 swings to kill me if I didn't bother to heal with healing you're still going to kill me it's just going to take 15 swings. Or 20 or whatever it would be because I can never outheal your damage output. There's no point to playing healing in that scenario because the payout isn't worth it. Instead of trying to match up to your damage, which is impossible, the smart move is to find a way to deal 11 damage a swing. In other words, beat you at your own game ("bring a heavier rock").

Now, that's only considering damage versus healing. As I said before GW is an extended game, a complex one, and healing and damage are not your only two options. Healing stymies damage and does so convincingly but there are other strategies that will destroy healing just as utterly. Disruption, for example. I can't heal if I don't have energy or I can't use any skills. And then disruption is countered by something itself such as resource management. And eventually it all loops around until some counter or another is trumped by being able to deal rawdog damage. That's how a complex and dynamic meta-game can develop. Threats, strategic options designed to give a player an advantage, arise and need to be countered. Those counters in turn can be countered and eventually the whole system loops in on itself until an original threat becomes a counter to an nth generation counter. So that, like a game of Rock, Papper, Scissors, you know that you can do something (throw a rock) that someone can't beat (throwing a scissors) but that one strategy cannot become dominant - become the only viable strategy - because it can be beaten by someone playing the right move (throwing papper) and that counter to your move cannot be dominant because it, too, has a counter and that has a counter and that has a counter and so on.

If healing did not trump damage then there would be no reason for anyone to play it. It wouldn't be an answer to the threat of damage because it wouldn't solve the problem just assuage it. One on one, if healing is to remain something useful to a player, then a healer has to be able to outheal a damage dealer.

But that's one on one and GW is a team game and that brings further complexity into the mix. It's not just you as a damage dealer versus me as a healer. It's your team with you dealing damage versus my team with me healing. And just as healing can be out-countered so too can it be overwhelmed. One damage dealer shouldn't be able to overpower a healer. But two? Three? Four? Eventually there's a breaking point where a single healer can't compensate for the output of all the people on your team attempting to break through their defenses. This is why teams focus their fire, why they coordinate their damage, because it ups the threat level against that single target, often to the point where healers don't have the time or ability to react, rather than diversifying and spreading out to attack multiple targets. If healing were only slightly better or equivalent to damage, then that lone healer would have no chance of keeping up with even two damage dealers. And my team would need to have a healer for each damage dealer on your team if we wanted a chance at surviving. That would be degenerate because there's only one profession that can adequately serve in the healing role and that's Monk. Dropping the efficiency of healing means that in order to compete each team would have to be comprised of a majority of Monk players and that's limiting the strategic meta-game rather than expanding it (And, we are seeing a lot of Monk heavy teams, teams with three and even four healers, which leads to two conclusions 1) damage is overpowered compared to healing and healing needs to be improved or damage reduced or 2) we're in the intial stages of the game and people don't know what they're doing. People are relying on sheer brute force whether that's raw damage or raw healing. More complex and intricate strategies relying on disruption and resource denial have yet to become popularized and it's now mainly just a contest to see who's damage can outrace who's healing. I tend to think it's the later option, myself). Healing can be overcome either by finding its counter or by overpowering or outlasting it - healers are more efficient than damage dealers, by and large, but they are not perfectly efficient, low-cost high-damage sustained output of damage can eventually wear down a healer's reserves and allow damage to triumph (I said it was complex, didn't I?) - and, really, is in pretty good design space at the moment.

What causes secondary Monks to be a poor-man's option is the effects of Divine Favor. It makes primary Monks much more efficient at healing than secondary Monks can ever be - they can heal more for less. But because it raises their efficiency so, healing needs to be kept to reasonable levels because a Monk healer will be walking around with the DF-boosted healing. The net effect is that healing with DF is efficient enough to do the job yet not so efficient that it becomes overpowering and that leaves DF-less healing at subpar levels of efficiency.

While i agree with a great deal of what you said, I have to disagree with the conclusions you draw here. If disruption trumps healing to the degree healing trumps damage (thus being an effective counter by the definition you provided) then you might be seeing healing heavy teams not because damage is overpowered, but because the counter to disruption is underpowered. Having healing redundancy is there not to stop damage, but to make sure you have some healing always available even if the opponent has disruption, thus trumping damage while overwhelming disruption. That it only takes 4 to pull this feat off argues that healing is overpowered.

There is also, as you state, the option that people don't know what they're doing, and thats quite likely at this stage.

Still, I can definitely see arguments being made that healing is overpowered simply because if you bring enough of it you'll be able to overwhelm its counters.

Laz

Interesting. And another way of looking at it that I hadn't considered.

You can overwhelm any counter by bringing *more*. That's part of why GW is so complex. It's never so simple as healing > damage. And disruption > healing. Battles and strategy don't happen on a 1v1 basis. The point is that when planning strategy a counter weighs more than what it counters - otherwise it's not much of a counter (see enchantment removal if you want an example of that). One healer is going to be able to outpace one damage dealer. But if you have eight damage dealers and only one healer then damage is going to win out (of course, that leaves the second team seven slots to devote to damage themselves and while the full damage team might get one of two of the light healing team, that lone healer will slow the other team enough that the all-damage team's lack of healing to lead to probably lead to their defeat.) just as if you stack up enough healing you'll be able to overwhelm efforts based at defeating it through redundancy. Of course, to do so you're sacrificing other slots and roles available to your team. You only get 4~8 characters, after all, and if you bring 4 healers that means you have only 4 slots for the rest. That might be enough to out-heal the team with that one or two disruptors but they might be able to pack in more damage with their slots than your crippled healing base - which while not disabled, is still suffering from disruption - can deal with. It's just a question of how much more you'll need and whether or not that's going to going to leave you with enough to deal with everything else. There are other ways of countering damage, for example, and even "disruption" is a very broad statement that covers everything from interrupts to hexes like Scourge Healing or Backfire to straight up energy denial.

I'll agree that it's not a perfect balance yet - nor will it probably ever be with as many moving parts as GW has (RPS has 3 possible choices and 3 outcomes. GW has 450 skills, dozens of weapons and armor, and more that can influence events, changing just one of them can have ripple effects that are difficult to predict) - but it's a very delicate process that needs to be carefully considered and weighed before it's monkied with.

I think my later option is far more the cause of any apparent imbalances. No one's much good at this game yet. If it's still around in a year, two years, or more, even if the developers never add another skill or tweak a single one, we'll look back on what we were doing and thinking now and laugh. We're all scrubs and we're all learning. Disruption can be seen as more "difficult" because it requires a greater understanding of how the game works in order to pull off well. I'd say that's not exactly true, and you don't need any great skill to pull off effective disruption - you don't have to time interrupts, use Shame, You don't have to time Power Leak to deny energy, use Energy Drain, you don't have to hit a cast with Concussion Shot, use Arcane Conundrum, and so on - but that most people aren't very well geared by previous experiences nor taught by in-game experiences (PvE is supposedly a training ground of sorts for PvP but I find most PvE battles to be highly unlike a good PvP battle. Mobs don't work like a player team from their tactics to just the design of their makeup - you get two or three professions to deal with at a time and little synergy, just an attempt to batter you into submission by throwing more at you) to rely on disruption so we're scrabbling to figure them out.

The main problem i have with disruption right now is that its either hex based (and thus easily removed by monk-heavy teams) or timing based - and monk healing is *fast*. I realize the dazed status effect offers perfect interruption as long as you keep attacking, but i believe only two skills cause it and the status can be removed quickly by a monk-heavy team, requiring at least a 1:1 on each monk to disable them. As you said, we're all still learning and i'm sure timing will become much more effective later on in the games life, its just that it seems that most disruption is only best done on a 1:1 basis, which means overwhelming it with healers isn't too hard. Ideally is seems any counter could not be overwhelmed by less than a 2:1, probably no less than 3:1, just as you state in your first post.

This point conveniently ignores the fact that disruption works against every primary caster and thus can be used as a sort of damage mitigation rather than healing mitigation if the needs arise. As you say, guild wars is a very complex game and its 'roles' overlap quite a bit.

I'm curious as to what you mean by 'resource denial' and how thats different from disruption - it seems like you're talking about mana drains or recharge timer increases, but i'd figure that falls under the heading of disruption.

Laz

I'm a mes/nec and I'm having problems dealing with healers, ether in pvp or in pve. Chances are arenanet isn't going to nerf healing, but maybe they should improve the counters instead. One thing that really annoys me about power spike, and power lag(I think that's the name?) is they have a good 5-6 second recharge, so if I stop one healing spell chances are the other 2 or 3 are going to work. Then there are the almost instant cast ones, which can be next to impossible to intrrupt , this being with other spells and probably not the point in this case..

I think if you make mesmers abilites, or on that matter any spell counter ability have a lower recharge time that should help counter casters better.

Jab, you need to read your skills more carefully. power spike has a 15 second timer, power leak has a 20, power drain has a 25. The hex interrupts are all at 30.

That said, landing three interrupts in a row like power spike, leak and drain cripples a healer while giving you almost full mana. You've made them waste the mana when they were trying to cast the spell, sucked some mana away from them and hurt them a bit...and whoever they were trying to heal is probably dead due to your buddies.

If the timing interrupts were spammable i'd argue that they were overpowered, as you could just shut down any caster with them at no real cost.

Btw, mantra of recovery (elite mes skill) decreases recharge timers.

Laz

This forum is so much better than VN, its wonderful.

I've seen a lot of people whoop out mesmers as the cure to any abusive strategy. That seems to be their niche, to be used as a justification for powerful healing.

Nevermind that it takes a full time mesmer to "lock down" a part time monk.
You really have to load up your bar with anti casting spells and pay damn good attention. It may be better stated that the secondary monk locked YOU down just by being a secondary monk.

And theoretically, 8 Me/Mo's would dominate all, because they have the tools to counter any strat. If you have the skills of a world champion RTS player. Which 99% of GW players do not.

And I totally agree that healing NEEDS to overcompensate for damage. But should 10 points into one attribute REALLY be enough to counter any assortment of damage? Its too cheap. I can spec for heavy damage AND overcompensating healage. Why then should that single line be 50% more powerful than anything else? It makes every other secondary role less effective and gimp. Thats boring.

My warriors secondary was an obvious choice. Too obvious. Same for mesmer. And elem. Even ranger.

You look at the counters to healing. 50% healing effectiveness on the target, for a cheap cost of 25 energy, and a really long cooldown. Backfire, less damage at 14 than a heal-other/heal-area at 10.

And i'm not saying destoy healing prayers, weaken it. By 33%. The current disparity between it every other attribute. Then make passive divine give its current bonus + 4.16% bonus to the base value of the spell. (per point)
Make people spend at least 6 in another line to make their healing 50% better than any damage combo.

Guess i just disagree with being able to obtain optimum damage + even better healing. Just doesnt smell right. But until they fix it, I have no choice but to continue abusing it.

And to the misinformed necro dude.
Unfortunately, your 20+ mana and multiple skill slots on dots are undone by one healing breeze. Sad isn't it? Half the mana, half the skill slots, 1/8th the cast time. Just isn't right, is it? And if ya decide to DD 2 times with another 20+ mana, skill slots, and 4sec+ casting time, a monk with 10 healing can undo that all with 1 other skill slot, 10 mana, and 1/2 second cast time. Sounds balanced to me.

Resource denial and disruption do overlap somewhat, especially if you consider energy denial to be disruption (and I do and it's the answer to teams that are too good at removing hexes while still not requiring as much timing as interruption. They can't cast if they don't have energy. And they're not going to outheal damage with Signet of Devotion, that's for sure.) but, simply put disruption is preventing someone from doing something when they want it done. Maybe not forever, maybe not permanently, but long enough to give yourself a window of opporunity. Denying resources would be to prevent your opponent from gaining or controlling a resource - whatever that would be. Could be energy, could be corpses, could be important spots on the map. If it's positioning, you outposition them. If there's a flag-stand you don't let them cap it. If there's a way to get morale you don't allow them to do so and you build up their DP. It's much more something left to tactics and strategy than through skill usage, as far as I can tell, and it's not very developed, but I see it as the eventual counter to disruption heavy teams. If you can figure out a way of countering their disruption by making better usage of your resources, you'll be able to thwart them.

Basically, I see five stopping points on the meta-game as far as ur-strategies (basic, underlying strategies) are concerned. They mix and blend and you can go about them a lot of different ways but there are five core strategies you can follow to victory.

The first is a "balanced" approach. This is where we start out with and it's a team where you get a good mix of everything. You have some damage, some healing, some disruption, a little bit of this and that and stir it in a big pot. It's balanced towards the offensive because you want to actually go out and kill things so you could also call this "Aggressive" but overall it's a team that can both do and deal with a lot of things. Just none of them spectacularly well. It's a team of 2~3 defense with Monks, 2~3 damage with Warrior/Rangers/Elementalist, and 2~3 utility with Mesmer/Necromancer, the basic prototypical well-rounded squad.

The balanced team gets devoured by the next sort of team, though, the hyper-aggressive or "trick" teams. These are teams that gamble it all on one thing and one thing only succeeding. If they catch you off guard, you're going to lose. If you're prepared, if you can counter that specific, critical link of their plan, they're going down in flames. But either way it's going to be quick and dirty. This sort of team overwhelms the balanced approach because they can bring more power to a point and break through the other sides strategy in some way or manner. That can be through damage, that can be through healing, that can be through anything you like but the poitn is they're trying to find something and maximize it as far as they can.

However, a trick build won't find much success against the next type of team - the one out to block their single, powerful punch - a disruptive or "counter" team. This is a team that's designed to be able to stop whatever you throw at them and then win the battle afterwards. They're not trying to overpower you as with a Trick team, they're trying to slow you down, trip you up, and tire you out until you collapse by up-ending your own efforts. It's Akido, they turn their opponent's effort against them. It's a team of interruptors, energy denial, protection prayers, and the rest. They won't blow your doors off but they wil make you ineffectual and since they're designed to operate in such a situation you'll be in trouble.

Unless, that is, you're already planning for winning a war of attrition in the first place. That's what you're doing when you're planning for a "defensive" team or to go back to previous terminology a hyperdisruptive plan. Note that this doesn't necessarily mean straight healing, just defense. Your goal is to outlive and outlast the other team and deliver the coup de grace as they wear down. While a disruptive team wants to use your energy against you, the defensive team just wants to you to waste your energy on not accomplishing anything. They just blanket stop everything confident that they'll be able to outlast you.

But there's a final strategy and it's to make sure you don't burn through your resources so that you can't be outlasted. It forgoes attacking, it forgoes defending, and it just concentrates on building up advantages and that's resource control or just a "control" team, also it can be called Tempo. The goal here is to dictate the terms of the battle, whether by pressing your opponent when they're prepared to sit back and wait or by outwaiting your opponent when they're prepared to rush forward. It relies on disruption to punch a quick hole in things and can swiftly capitalize but if that initial punch doesn't work it's able to fall back and regroup because it's been acruing all the advantages in terms of resource - whether that's time or energy or health or positioning or anything else.

And what can trump a control based strategy? A team that's balanced and has enough offense because a tempo strategy isn't paying much attention to protecting itself, just in being able to control the flow of things through the interplay of advantages and disadvantages. But a balanced team is too diverse to be easily thwarted and can put such a team down while they're building up those advantages.

Now, obviously those are pretty broad and I'm not exactly sure how some of them are going to work - at the moment most teams are stuck trying to figure out how to throw the hardest rock with hyperaggression and the best teams, the teams that used to populate the top of the ladder were the ones that had figured out how to be disruptive, as with Fianna's Fear Me! build from the last BWE, but progress has been rather slowed and blunted because most of the really hardcore teams are still farming away or have been soured on things. The people who *know* these things already aren't smacking people around with them and the result is that everyone doesn't have to get better in order to compete. Probably the best and most sustaining teams will eventually hit upon hybrids of these various ideals but once you get past "we're trying to win" those are the various ways people are going to try to win. Resource denial, resource control is going to take a while to see develop here because everyone's still learning the basics and it's the basics that trump control - the teams that try it now are going to get slaughtered. But that's what I eventually expect to see happening because it's what's developed in other strategic games I've seen and herad of such as StarCraft and Magic: The Gathering - Generalized Aggession < Specific Aggression < Specific Disruption < Generalized Disruption < Controling Resources < Generalized Aggression. Something like that, anyway, if the game is as deep and competitive as I hope it is.

We try. But I'm going to turn around and there'll be a pirate class thread one of these days, mark my words...

Anyhow, I think the problem with Healing is, as Lazarous points out, not so much healing in and of itself, but that the counter to it is weakened and easily held by those who's healing is being countered in the first place. People don't understand how to run effective disruption yet. Those who can will scoff in the face of healing but those who are just exploring the possibilities will be frustrated. And it's not just Mesmers. Warriors, Rangers, and Mesmers all offer excellent ways of disrupting targets and, to a lesser extent, so do Elementalists and Necromancers. Just as there are a lot of ways of dealing damage. Healing is the lone exception as there's really no other way to deal healing without going to Monk - it's been centralized there in the service of making things easy and understandable by novices by making them recognizable on the battlefield and, again, it's the degenerative effects of DF that prevent someone who's a secondary Monk from diversifying things away from that primary Monk.

It's important to remember that the goal of disruption is not to prevent someone from doing something. That's very hard in Guild Wars to accomplish. There are very few ways of completely and utterly shutting someone down - you can daze someone but that won't stop them from casting unless you can provide consistent and frequent hits on them, you can sap their energy but they'll get it back eventually, you can Pacify an attacker (and that's the closest you can get to completely removing someone from the board) to keep them from attacking but that breaks if they get hit or cast on at all, blinding and evading only provide a miss chance and it's less than 100%, you can still cast through Backfire if you're careful, and on and on. The goal of disruption is to prevent someone from doing something when they want to in a timely fashion. It's about opening windows of opportunity that your team can exploit. It's keeping that big heal from arriving in time to prevent that opponent from dying either by making sure they don't have the energy to cast it or they'll take to long to cast it or they'll be prevented from finishing casting it, and so on. That's it. You don't have to stop the heal from going off. You have to stop it from making a difference.

Healing prayers are not too effective. but, if they are used correctly, they are effective. as they should be.

You are probably here complaining because you ran into an excellent healing monk. And he didn't get there by saying Mesmer's are overpowered . So, rather than sitting around, learn how to counter it.

I'd say that this point is really the kicker for this thread. There hasn't been much time yet for serious pvp between well stocked and coordinated teams, so saying a particular class/skill/item is overpowered right now is jumping the gun.

Guess i'll go back to trying to figure out effective disruption with my mes.

Laz

Its late now and i didnt read the whole thread i will do this tomorrow.

But i like to bring in my experience. I played Mesmer since the E3 Event. I never had a problem to kill Monks fast so i normaly was the first who got targeted. Even with some foes striking at me i could finish my job an kill one Monk.

But they changed something in the last two BWEs. So i have no change to take out a Monk anymore (i think its the recharge time). On the other Hand most teams fight with 3-4 Monks now. A Mesmer cant deal with Monks healing each other. But if u bring in more Mesmer they go down so fast by the Warrios because of there weak armor! I Rember having 90 Armor as Mesmer now its about 60. I cant realy do my job well atm.

Actually im a secondary monk. Me/Mo here. The descision was an easy one. I can interrupt and stack donts, do it fast, and what else... hmm guess i'll pick up some free high powered heals while im at it. I mean why not. I got the offense an utilities on my bar, may as well maximize my effectiveness by getting 130+ self heals and insta +7 hot.

I guess this thread is just too early. There is still doubt in peoples minds that the balance is perfect. That massing secondary monks isn't cookie cutter yet. People will go with the flow in this ladder type game just like every other ladder type game. Some people attribute the massing of secondary monks as a natural thing as people will just want to diversify their characters.

Well not so much in diversity, monk cookie cutting is a looong way from ever becomming uncommon, but diversity in being able to different things. I just don't see it that way. I think its so commonplace because healing prayers is just way more effective than anything else. At least thats why I never go pvp without healing breeze, heal area, and heal other. Heck no. Because if a situation arises where our healers are all under heavy stress, I know that I can eliviate that with my cheap attribute point costing, cheap mana point costing, overcompensatingly powerful healing prayer spells.

I mean, I WISH I COULD GET CREATIVE! I WISH I could choose something else, but that would be gimping myself and my group. So I go secondary monk. For the win.

Sweetie...healing breeze is an enchantment. What can mesmers and necros do to enchantments? Heck, what can monks do to healing and enchantments? I've been completely owned by some really awesome necros, mesmers, and even rangers/warriors. Look at the effectiveness of Maelstrom. Half the monks out there aren't really coordinated enough to sidestep the miniumum range so they can continue casting. Skilled monks chain spells so quickly that they're likely to lose at least two spells to a maelstrom unless they're adept at interrupting their own actions. If a teamie successfully distracts a monk after that, he's probably lost more than half his energy and access to one of his skills. That sounds a little like crippling, to me...espcially if you're one of the better players who knows the monks who carry focuses tend to have 20+, -regen focuses and become non-threatening once you deplete their energy. You don't need to siphon it all away...in fact, forcing him to heal works just as effectively. I specialize in energy management, so I almost never run out of heal juice. Against certain strategies I still find myself depending on signet of devotion to give me some precious regen time.

Many players learn a secret near the "end" of the game: monks cannot, on their own, out-heal an entire team. Many teams don't go straight for the monk. They go straight for someone else. Why? Even your three monks can't out-heal a focused and well-planned assault.

This thread really sounds like it's being argued by people who don't have good strategies for defeating healers, those who do, and those who are healers and have had good strategies employed against them. I assure you again, if healing were overpowered, an all-monk team would win the HoH every single time. "Mesmer" isn't the answer to stopping heals. Strategy is. Without strategy, yeah...you'll get your ass kicked by a pansy little girlie healing man. With strategy, you'll send him and his little pajamas he claims is a set of armor packing.

[ ]

Nothing you can't reverse in a moment. All enchantment removers are on a hell of a lot longer timer than 2 seconds for breeze. They all cost a pretty penny in mana to cast as well.

I will agree that strategy is the key to winning battles, but enchantment removal is a weak strategy right now.

Laz

Right, but you can hex my target to bait me into a long cast of my own, shatter enchantment, then scourge heal that target as I prepare to repair what you've just done. Right there I'll have wasted between 15-30 energy and all of my focus for about 10 seconds.

[ ]

How precisely do you bait a healer into a long cast as a mesmer or necro? There are no burst damage spells available to either class that don't require the willing cooperation of the target, except for possibly dark aura + blood magic or a smaller burst from timing wastrels worry and shatter delusions on something like phantasm. Breeze is fast and totally counters your dots - in fact as a mesmer i view phantasm as a way to mitigate breeze, not the reverse. A way that, while not winning at least can recycle fast enough to keep breeze from doing anything substantial to the target - unlike the enchant removes. Not to mention remove hex - 5 mana, 2 sec cast, 5 recharge. Enchant removal wishes it had a spell this powerful, but as is your scourge is going to be quickly removed unless you pile on a ton of hexes.

For enchant removal, you have to only consider 2 cases to see if it was worth it. First is - you remove an enchantment and the healer doesn't feel the need to renew it. This is often the case with breeze, reversal of fortune, any of the quick, cheap fire and forgets a monk has.

Second is the healer does care, and you are actually disrupting what they're doing. Thats the case with stuff like healing seed, healing hands, mark of protection, but also if they simply recast breeze.

In the first case, your enchantment removal has merely brought you even with the game. It cost more than the healing enchant, and the target already benefitted from divine favor. Its still a bit of a loss, really, but at least shifts momentum.

In the second case, if they recast something like breeze, you lost. Flat out, you used a skill that has a long cooldown timer and noticable cost to offer perhaps a second of non-enchantment. If its a bigger spell like seed, you have to ask yourself if this is every going to happen. How many healers dump a healing seed on someone and then fail to shield it with something like healing breeze or reversal of fortune? The enchant removal is fighting against the cheapo disposable enchants, not the big ones underneath and only in the case of rend will it be able to break through. Yet rend has some high costs - 40 life per monk enchant removed (so you're looking at minimum 80 life loss on any target you actually want to cast this on), 30 second cooldown and not insubstantial cost of its own in mana and cast time.

Yet rend is the only enchant removal i would seriously consider bringing to pvp. There are cheaper spells in a mes/nec arsenal that are more effective at keeping healing from happening than fighting a losing war against defensive enchantments with substandard weapons like shatter enchant or inspired enchant. You can make a case for drain enchant merely as a mana refill, but as an enchant remover on a focus fired (and focus healed) target? no. The cooldowns on all these skills make them unusable except to offer momentary (1-2) second - if that - weakness on a target every 30 seconds.

If monks are overpowered - the fault lies with this mechanic. Teams can deal with spammed orison with enough damage, they can't deal with healing hands, mark of protection or the other flat out invulnerabilities monks can dump on targets. These require a target change or a rend which has a good chance to kill the necro casting it.

Laz

Healing breeze is about mitigating damage as it comes in. You cast it on someone who's taking damage, whom you don't think you'll need to suppliment with much healing once they have breeze. It costs more than the quick-cast heal spells most monks stock for PvP (word, kiss, orison). If you break that enchantment while its bearer is taking damage, I have to focus my healing on that person. If I recast breeze, I lost 20 energy for my effort. That alone is 40% of my mana, which assumes I haven't cast anything else. If I healed with anything other than sig of devotion, I've lost more than that, totalling half or more of my energy.

As for baiting, not all monks just sit idly while their teammates get hexed. I'll perform hex removal if hexes get called, it's a pretty common practice.

Healing hands doesn't cause invincibility. That's why rangers, monks, and elementalists can switch damage types...hands only heals on physical damage. It also doesn't heal much, depending on how you're focusing attacks. Hands may be cheap yet expensive to counter, but that's just it...a lot of monks don't work under the premise their enchantments will be countered or otherwise stopped. That's one of their biggest weaknesses and liabilities.

[ ]

refer to post above.

Substitute mark of protection, and then continue with your point.

So a retarded monk casts healing seed on someone and doesn't cast breeze or some other mask immediately after...this makes enchantment removal good?

Laz

The point of enchantment removal is to waste the monk's mana. If you nullify a healing seed or a mark of protection, you've eaten 15 of their mana. You can then combine that with other interrupt or energy-stealing abilities to cripple a monk. With long recharge times and reasonably large energy costs (for monk spells), it's an effective strategy. It's not as effective against "cheap" spells like reversal or healing hands, no. But then, those aren't the most effective monk enchantments either.

[ ]

The way I see it, using mesmers to shut down healing is unrealiable theorycraft.
There is a very specific way to shut down monk-massing. I'm currently trying to convince my guild to give it a try.

It involves targetting the tanks first. Yeah, the tanks.
3x Mo/Me, standard healing and support.
3x DPS... R/E or some other damage dealer. W/? would work too.
1x extremely specific char to attempt to counter the monk massing... an E/N to spend 35 mana and 30% health to lower healing of the target to 17%.
1x Me/Mo to maximize smiting prayers to like 16 or some such. Spread out the scourge healing and mana tap/drain. Just keep spreading it.

Now this would work a few times maybe before people start recognizing E/N and taking them out first, crippling the strat, and losing to the monk-massers.

Me/Mo can't get 16 smiting prayers. Mo/Me can.

IMHO it has no chance. You leave three monks open to defend one guy, and a W/Mo at that, he ain't dying. Aside from that, generally groups only carry one or two warriors.

Mesmer shutdowns are insanely reliable. Our shutdowns include more than just backfiring -- generally they'll just run around and it's very uneffective. Personally I like to mana drain my targets.

I dont know, I think it'd work pretty well.
The idea is to actually let the warrior live through the focus fire, tricking the monks into healing him for 30ish damage and nuking themselves for 90ish.

Mesmers to counter healing really just doesn't work that well. Throw spell breaker on yourself and your immune for a good while. And no group is gonna run with a mesmer for each monk. You'd be left with no dps. Congrats you shut down the healing. Now wand them to death?

Lol that happened to me yesterday during elona's reach mission. Only me a Me/N and a Mo/E were left to fight a mesmer boss. Due to all the ether feast and my one power spike , it took us 5 minutes to kill the boss with my crappy cane and her crappy wand.

Ok its midnight here so I read the first couple posts and the ones on this pagethen gave up, so forgive me if this has already been said. But I'd just like to throw in this small point.

From what little I've read, the healing monk is being compared against one other character. In which case fine, yes, it is overpowered. But nowhere in guild wars (unless both PvP teams get down to one player left each) is it just one on one. And the point is that a monk which focuses on healing has to concentrate on more than one player. So they either heal only one player and let the other 2/4/6 die, or they spread between all the players and either get killed themselves, or only prolong the lives of their team long enough to hopefully wipe out the other team.

One on one damage vs heal, damage would stand no chance. But when you have perhaps 3 people chipping away at one character and one monk attempting to heal that, no way can you outheal. you can only pray that the person you are healing has the strategy, self heal and brains to be able to take out at least one of those 3, if not all 3, before your healing reaches the point that it is useless. And this is also assuming no one uses something like distracting shot on the monk.

Il be honest, i personally think the W/M are abit overpowered, Guildwars needs to balance it. Everytime i go to PvP everyone is just a W/M... 4v4 people just use 2 W/M and 2 primary monks and can pritty much maul everyone that doesnt use the same sub class. I keep hearing people say that mesmers and necros can pritty much shut them down.. Well that isnt very helpful if your a W/E, doesnt it difie the point of pick up and play?, which is what the game is about. Instead it seems to be that PvP is just about finding skills and changing your subclass to take out W/M and primary monks.. I think it gets boring fast.. Finding when i go into PvP and i see only W/M running around mauling people with different subclasses, and even when you get into a 1v1 with them, they just heal themselves back to full health?.. :sigh:. I was originally a W/E, and after constantly getting mauled i had to change to W/N just to stand a chance to taking on W/M..

My solution to solving it, "Make healing prayers cost more energy, and give the primary monks more energy capacity". Just my thoughts

The problem is that the monks aren't going to fall for such a pathetic trick. They'll just remove the hex and keep going, or go ahead and cast through it since it doesn't matter if they're taking damage -- no one is attacking them anyway. They'll heal themselves when they get too low.

Nobody brings three mesmers to counter three monks. Well, actually, some groups do, and they make it work well. The way my group often does it is attack your main focused monk, and have a mesmer on your team keeping another one busy. Feel free to use your elite slot on Spell Breaker -- I hope that 15 seconds is worth it when your Ghostly Hero on King of the Hill or Relic Runner could use a Word of Healing to keep 'em going.

I must agree with first post there are WAY WAY too many secondary monks. plus if none of you have noticed whenever your going for the hall of heroes all anybody cares about is monk primary or warrior monk. I think the devs should think of a fair way to make this sort of thing not happen. I have A Raised from scratch R/E that can deal massive long range damage with air magic and arrow attacks (ignite arrows). I spent about 30 min looking for a group in hall of heroes area. I through together a pvp warrior/monk.....boom in zone not 5 sec before im in a group, what do u know everyone in it is a primary or secondary monk. we get to last round and lose to spirits of war....thier good. but do you see my point, the devs need to fix these types of problems.

Another thing to realize is that you don't have to be a monk secondary to heal yourself. The monk secondary is just a go to guy for the healing because it doesn't require much skill to use, and since people still don't know what they're doing, its a good place to start. Really, the only difference between my W/N and a W/Mo is that my healing is conditionalized. Healing breeze for 10 sec? try 20 and your damging the guy at the same time (dual life syphon or life transfer for less time). Getting smacked and need health fast? try unholy feast (large radius really if you haven't tried it), vamp gaze/touch, or soul feast if your really really lucky. Hate monks? you'll love them now, for about 80pts with mark of subversion. Yes the hexes can be smote, but so can enchantments and they will be packing for both. The only huge difference (highly notworthy strategy wise) is that you can't help your teamates except by trying to take the heat. Or giving them an energy regen bonus, but warriors usually don't tip you for that.

See, the problem here is not so much the power of the spells but the usage of the classes. Monks are terribly easy to use, yet countering monks is VERY tough 1 on 1.

I'd actually clarify: monks are easy to use if you're only using the class for one or two abilites. Any class is "easy to use" if you just stack in some skills and hope you do okay. No class is easy to use well, not if you're up against skilled and talented players familiar with strategy.

I've had my ass kicked by several anti-healing builds. They exist, and they're incredibly effective at what they do. That it isn't necessarily common knowledge to put one together, well...it's pretty much like the elite skill capturing argument. You have two sides to the argument and neither will ever be persuaded to agree with the other. :P

[ ]