Rangers’ Healing Spring is amazing.
I leveled a ranger, and I unlocked Healing Spring for his first dungeon run. It is a medium-sized, 15-second water field with a 30-second cooldown. Water fields combo for healing and regeneration. The base healing is nice, but the ability to proc regeneration and area heals is what makes this great for a group that uses finishers to exploit fields.
Staff elementalists get two water fields. One has a medium duration but small area of effect. One has a huge area of effect but tiny duration, along with a long cooldown and the rare “must stand still to cast” induction. In either case, you need to be in water attunement, which involves either using both in succession or managing your attunement cooldowns. They can, however, be used at a range, while the Healing Spring happens at the ranger’s feet.
50% uptime on a healing field is great, and that first dungeon group had two rangers. Placement options are worse than an elementalist’s fields, but you can hit “6” anytime without attunement issues. Staying in the field while I attack, I can stack enough regeneration to last until the cooldown ends.
You play a ranger for ranged DPS with condition stacking and a pet. I did not expect to get a great support ability as an unadvertised bonus.
: Zubon
While Healing Spring *is* the Ranger’s best heal, it is so purely for the AOE, the amount of the heal, and the uptime – that it acts as a combo field is completely insignificant and, as usual, you would not notice anything happening beyond a few FX, depending on what goes through the field, if it weren’t for the popup that they added (in BWE2, I think it was – definitely wasn’t in BWE1).
As usual, this is wrong. My elementalist runs around with 7 blast finishers, each of which combo for a 1500 hp area effect heal in water fields, and that is before kitting for healing. I can double-finish with 0 casting time using Evasive Arcana and Arcane Wave, so that is 3000-15000 healing in a group, more with pets, more in an open fight like a dragon event, and it does not even interrupt my attack chain.
You keep posting this comment, and I keep repeating: if you are not seeing value in combos, you are playing in lousy groups.
I started to reply and it got so long I ended up turning it into a post over at mine.
Gist is: rangers are kewl!
Question, then: Do you see Healing Spring as overpowered or as a bar for other field skills to reach? Or neither…?
I think the skill by itself is fine, but the huge opportunity window for healing combos it provides may be on the OP side. Not an issue for players like above that don’t use combos, but those who understand their power could turn that into a very powerful healing setup. A scepter Ele can have a LOT of blast finishers …
In that respect, I would not use it as a bar for other skills to reach. A shorter combo opportunity window would be more balanced, but that would raise other issues. How you would visually communicate a difference in skill duration and combo field duration for example.
Yeah, that was about my opinion too. Shorten it to maybe 10 seconds (increase the base healing to compensate) and I bet it wouldn’t seem nearly as amazing, but would still be powerful.