Yes, you can always visit snowcrows.com/builds/raids/elementalist/heal-quickness-catalyst for the most up-to-date versions when you're unsure.

I don't intent on making showcases for those encounters since they're quite plain, but I might do some for encounters with special mechanics (reflect on Matthias, anomalies on QtP, ...).

They're only tough choices for hcata to make since it relies on arcane for any comfort in its regen and swiftness uptime. Htemp on the other hand doesn't need arcane to upkeep anything so it just freely can and does swap to any other traitline it wants (an it does have a use for ALL of them which is fun). The moment you have a sylvari hcata you are also free to twap traits without any real downside due to racial heal skill providing an insane amount of regen by itself.

i can use it in hk at deimos too by keeping the same gear, trait and weapon. all i have to is to change few skills you mentioned?

@@mdyousufgazi4030 Right, I made some Minor changes to traits. In Catalyst the First top and in arcan the last where you get lesser arcane shield on elite cast. Just for survivability. Utilitys I took earth shield, arcane shield, earth thing from Catalyst. But I guess you can use water Signet or something Else too.

@@h4n23s6 thank you :D

Oh its definitely! Only issue is you wont get much boons but as long as you combo a bit from time to time and you get regen you should be fine Only thing i dont like is that lightning flash is only one way but you take mist form to get back right?

@@Cross_111 Let's tell you my strat : - Take the west pylon to be ranged of the stack. The east pylon works as well but you're not fully confident to be pylon during the full fight haha. - To take orbs : Flashlight to go and the 4 fire of staff to BACK, and finish by running - Keep stab of earth for phases and nlt be knockbacked. - Self healing with some water skills and your heal skills - Bring boons/heals to your sub-group with spheres and staff skills. That's all

@@nathanbaszynski1408 aaah the fire 4!! Thx 🤩

@@Cross_111 Big brain

@@nathanbaszynski1408 truly! Love what cata is capable now... Even forgot that fortified earth is a 3 sec block 🙈🤣

Possibly but: A) It's a heal build, you're already tanking your DPS may as well go all out because B) A lot of the boons come from stationary pulsing fields and sometimes people have to run out of them (...or don't have to but do anyway,) overcapping your boons gives more wiggle room for repositioning/mechanics/etc without boons falling off.

Overcapping boons comes in very handy when handling mechanics as a healer. The less bd you take, the less you're able to adjust/delay your "rotation". A common example of having to do so is when you're delaying earth attunement for aegis or stab.

So very much true!! Have to say now heal cata plays somehow better to play than heal tempest! (Sure - it lacks the shouts which provide awesome benefits and are somewhat game breaking) but the boon radius of tempest is a mess right now and its necessity to always be near melee range makes it annoying to play Yeah cata is more spammy and one should have a better understanding how combos work but all in all cata is now REALLY nice to play 😻

@@Cross_111 The boon radius of most of htemp's boons can be extended to 600, only alacrity is stuck to 360 (which is still quite big). Hcatalyst has a smaller radius (300-360), but more range. Practically this means htemp is better at spreading, whilst hcata is better at being off-stack. Neither of these are stuck in melee range, but both still want to go into melee from time to time.

@@Dánmander its always the right way to stick to the group ofc 😊 But boon radius for might is with fire overload a bit problematic right (180 as far as I know). Sure with sand squall its possible to extend the boons on 600 range, but for that people must receive the boon first before it can be extended, right? In my eyes the standard for heal tempest should be water and arcane traitlines with no change to traitlines or the need to run "feel the burn" tbh 😊 And very much true - catalyst boon range is with 360 not massive but can be targeted at least and its always the same for all abilities! For tempest its like a completely mixed bag Some are 180, some 360, some 600, others even 450(?) Its pretty hard to memorize which skill has which range 😆

@@Cross_111 Htemp uses heat sync (600 radius) and blasts (360 radius) to not have to hit anybody with that 180 radius fire overload and has the option to not even have to rely on blasts either. Htemp has a lot of different configurations depending on the needs of a fight. On Matthias, for example, we recommend a build that covers big spreads by utilizing a lot of 600-radius boons. As for hcata's boon radius, it's not all the same either. Stab for example is 600, spheres 360, swiftness 240-300 and regen 240-480. They're both unique in how they deal with ranged boons, but neither of them has a big issue with it. Hcata is much easier to learn than htemp through because htemp can be cryptic to figure out.

@@Dánmander thx for clarifying ☺️ The cryptic part to find out may be what makes htemp more challenging to learn true... I am just happy we got heal cata now 🤩

Just so you're aware, swiftness and regen on hcata are close range by that standard. Hcata and htemp have different ways of how their area of boons works. Hcata has long range, medium radius whereas htemp has medium range, large radius if that makes sense. As such htemp can much more easily manage a spread whilst hcata can more easily manage being off-stack.

Staff covers every boon the sphere's don't cover. The closest viable set is sword/warhorn, but it loses healing output, range, boon radius on swiftness/regen, breakbar damage and has no built in stability, the only way that set can get stab is by taking earth traitline which loses it swiftness uptime. So I'd say not flexible at all, staff is just too good of a fit for heal catalyst.

​@@Dánmanderand thats perfect like it is! Finally a good staff ele build 🤩 Thx for sharing ❤

No, not really. Spheres cost 10 energy, but they can also hit enemies up to 6 times, regaining you 6 energy. Additionally, using skills like fire 2/(4)/5 and swapping attunements gives you even more energy, so you never really run out of it. If you need additional energy for whatever reason, you can take a utility skill like Glyph of Storms to generate even more energy.

@@Dánmander epic. thank you so much for explaining. now i can try to be a healer. till i was only dps and alac dps

I even manage to have enough energy as deimos Handkite to provide quickness to my group without the energy on attunement swap trait

Htempest was already an amazing kite for sabetha and dhumm due to its long boon duration. Only funny thing we might gain is Q2 pylon kiting as the second healer.

@@Dánmander Ah okay, my static often said you need to be long-range for that, so I didn't even try with Tempest. I might have to start finding some guides on that. Healer as a pylon kite sounds like something I absolutely need to try xd

@@OuJej1 Luckily for you, there already is a comprehensive guide on heal tempest with boss-specific advice. snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide#vale-guardian

Your best bet is going through all attunements and using their spheres + weapon skills. You can adjust some traits (taking Piercing Shards and/or Bountiful Power for example) if you need more damage. Additionally you've got utility slots which you could use to gain some damage (lightning storm and arcane blast for example). None of the utility skills you see in the showcase are needed, I'd only recommend keeping the heal (as there is no better choice and elite water elemental as it's a massive short cd heal).

Just go with giver..power dps is not so potent on this build anyway Plus without staff you have no stab which really hurts in many encounters…

The only blast finishers on sword/wh are earthen vortex and sand squall, staff has ice spike, eruption and transmute earth which are all lower cd to their sw/wh counterparts. There also other issues with x/wh setups but I'll refrain from going on a tangent here. Would you mind sharing your through process for coming to this conclusion?

You can gain a magnetic aura by using earth staff 3 or comboing in earth attunement to trigger wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Elemental_Epitome which then allows you to detonate it via earth staff 3's flip skill wiki.guildwars2.com/wiki/Transmute_Earth.

@@rm-vn1eq The stability is shared to allies, the aura itself isn't shared (cause we're not taking that trait).

@@Dánmander Well if it's shared, it seems really strong and will probably get nerfed

​@@rm-vn1eqwhy? It is a weapon skill with cooldown and the only way for non tempest to give stab Additionally guardian and mesmer can give much more stab than this here

@@rm-vn1eq Boon-wise it's quite strong, utility wise it's still behind the top picks like chrono. So I honestly doubt it's gonna get a nerf (which would have to be very big for it to stop giving perma 10 boons because it overcaps so hard).

You can give stab with spear 5 in earth or with the rock solid trait. A build who can keep a 100% aoe stability uptime is very likely to be nerfed

I wouldn't swap weapons, as staff is your source of stability. You don't really have another valuable heal skill, but utility skills and elite skills can be swapped to whatever you want, snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide might be able to help you choose your utilities (heal cata doesn't have its own guide yet).

@@Dánmander Thanks for your answer ❤️

People are already testing stuff out at discord.gg/qTs63YH; you can follow their progress in the #elementalist channel.

I would honestly start removing things from every healer if it were up to me. Powercreep is too real these days.

​​@@Dánmanderinteresting take here... But truth be told that would anger a lot of people so they probably wont do it ^^ Am i mistaken or does the heal skill does not heal allies too? Cata does not seem to have other options, right? 😅 Additionally it completely lacks aegis, correct? Correction: think its on eath sphere if i remember it right? 🤔

@@Cross_111 Traited earth sphere is aegis yes, it's even perma in this specific demonstration. As for why this heal skill: it's a blast finisher which helps with might ramp, triggers karakosa and triggers elemental epitome which can help with stab. It doesn't have any other option so that's the best we got.

@@Dánmander thx 🙏🤩

@@Dánmander one more question if I may...why superior sigil of Paralyzation? I see no stun skills worth using tbh (except static field but thats also only mediocre) - isnt renewal better overall?

The main damage is going to come from burning and strike damage, so we maximize those. Boon duration isn't as important, htemp overstacks by a significant margin (even the variants in the sheet still overstack by a large chunk) so going both zeph and arcane is probably overkill. Scepter is an excellent option for cele because it is a burning/power hybrid weapon with many blasts to trigger karakosa, which is precisely what celehtemp wants out of a weapon. The main variants are arcane+balthazar runes and fire+divinity runes, both of which have their own way of balancing damage, healing and boons. The fire variant is best DPS and cleansing-wise as it doesn't rely on # of boons and can easily swap into aura share but it has lower bd; healing wise, they equal. You can find some baseline cele versions (and their build links) in the spreadsheet docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rGpc1JtP1qV5ud5FHU6jBXX5tcD4D4zPZmv94YjEUKY -> Gearsets tab at the bottom -> columns X-Y, Z-AA and AB-AC. Adjust them as you see fit. If you've got any questions feel free to ask.

It's very much possible to upkeep 100% vigor without an aura shout or aura share since the water dagger 3 changes. Latent Stamina can provide 6s per dip so 12s in total, Sand squall can extend it an additional 3s, water dagger 3 itself combos into an area frost aura for your subgroup which triggers Invigorating Torrents for 10s of vigor, and you can use any other blasts (like air dagger 2) to blast the ice field multiple times for an additional 10s each time. So 6+6+3+10+(10)=25 or 35, a loop is somewhere in the 24-33s range so you should always be able to keep up vigor. On a sidenote: Latent Stamina gives endurance to anyone you give vigor to so heal tempest can significantly increase endurance generation past the point of 100% vigor.

@@Dánmander Thank you for a very detailed and quick response! One more question - do you think Harmonious Conduit is worth non-permanent vigor (Vigorous Torrents) tradeoff for a casual pug lfg runs?

@@CombinE54 Earth overload already gives you self stability, so you'd only be taking it for fire overload (Harmonious Conduit is only self stability as well). And in 99.99% of cases where you needed stab, your party needed stab, so you should already be bringing it (think gorse, sama, cairn, ...). Self stab as a support really doesn't do a lot to be honest. Additionally, dropping Invigorating Torrents can have a negative effect on the range of your regen and cleansing water build variations. If you need helpers dealing with stab mechanics, you can always visit the guides (snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide#vale-guardian) (guides are currently a bit broken due to the GW2 API being down).

@@Dánmander greatest thanks for the reply, much appreciated.

Staff still suffers from a small boon radius (very small for might), which makes it bad on fights where people are not tightly stacked or when you're tanking (yes, a lot of bosses are too big for fire overload to hit the stack when tanking). On the other hand, it has some fights where it truly shines (perma stab + big CC on Samarog, support every kiter and easily do anoms on Q2, ...). The best way to play Heal Tempest is to adjust your weapons/traits/utils for every boss (snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide#vale-guardian can help you out here). But if you were, for some reason, to only play one weapon on every fight, it would have to be Warhorn. Warhorn can do everything well, staff can do specific mechanics better but also suffers on a LOT of fights.

If you want to play it in the most straightforward way, one.

TLDR: Karakosa as recommended on snowcrows.com/builds/raids/elementalist/heal-alacrity-tempest The guides (snowcrows.com/guides/builds/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide#relics) do touch on some variations along with a lot of other info if you're interested.

Guild wars instanced content is just made around stacking, as such long ranged healing (especially stationary long ranged healing) is not so valuable in the first place.

Midnight king's might duration is only long enough to upkeep an extra 3 might, which is not enough to remove the reliance on fire overload. On top of this you're also losing a major healing source since you lose karakosa (or monk for non SotO users) relic and using 2/3 of your weapon CC skills.

I understood that reference

If they keep to the changes outlined in the preview, it's still going to rely on fire overload for might (unlike wh) so on moving bosses or when tanking you're still gonna want wh. But on very tight stacks like MO/Xera/Q1, when offhealing on quite some bosses like the entirety of w1 and w3 , or when you have a good consistent might source from the quickdps it could be seeing play.

@@Dánmander I only really raid with my static so it’s usually very easy to coordinate those things so even if the changes aren’t perfect, it’ll still allow me to bring a staff because I trust my friends to play into each other. And even on fights where staff wouldn’t be a great idea, like Matthias for example, well we do have the option to carry two weapon sets even if we have to have make sure we swap to the correct one before the fight starts. It would be awesome if it was just a good all-round option that comes down to preference so that’s it’s more accessible to pugs and stuff, but I’ll take what I can get :)

You don't need any utility skill to upkeep boons as seen on snowcrows.com/builds/raids/elementalist/heal-alacrity-tempest. If you're interested in a full list of utility skills and their use you can visit snowcrows.com/guides/classes/heal-alacrity-tempest-gameplay-guide#slot-skills.

I didn't ask about upkeep boons why you answered with that? Also, flash-freeze is recommended only for one encounter and there is no info about that skill at the "Utility" section. That's why I'm asking.

@@kureysalp As you mentioned regen in the trade-offs and asked about which utility to swap out when needing stab, I wanted to clarify that none of the utility skills are required. As such you can take the utility skills as you see fit (see the utility list I linked previously). Frashfreeze isn't listed there because in general it's just not a good skill, its regen does nothing as you're already well overcapped on regen, its frost aura could be useful if lesser water elementals weren't a better source and frost auras were better in general, and its aura to trigger aura based traits is completely overshadowed by feel the burn being an instant cast. The only place it's taken in the guides is when side tanking on VG which is purely to slow the seekers down.

This explanation is helpful thanks

I wanna clear up a misconception real quick. Htemp generally has quite a big boon radius and boon overcap, with a lot of them being 600 (in some cases optional, in some built-in). Warhorn for example is 360 and 600 radius might (scepter specifically being fully 600 radius might), fury is 600 radius, regen and vigor are 600 with aurashare, protection is 100% 600 radius with earth traitline aurashare and ~70% 600 radius with aftershock, swiftness can be almost perma 600 radius with eye of the storm, and alac is 360 which is quite a large radius already (pre-eod 240 was the norm and that was already enough in most cases). Htemp was one of the original 600 radius boon classes after all so I'm a bit confused how this misconception came to be.

Thank you for clarifying - i am aware of the boons that have 600 range and i did not meant those. Fire overload is especially bad with might range. Its just a bit inconsistent which can be confusing for newer players... Additionally if its necessary to fill up the utility skills with skills just to keep basic boons up like might then thats not such good design. A balanced heal spec should not need that but only in niche scenarios. And i also dont think its good design if a healer must deviate from the standard (water, arcane & tempest) and need to spec to earth just for aura share. I can live with fire instead of arcane for strong condi cleanse but boon giving should be available without twisting the skill lines or supplement with utility skills. While 360 for alac is not bad, there are now quite some classes that have 600 boon radius as standard. I do not think thats necessary, but 450 should help to make the class more accessible. Dont worry Dan, I am also a big fan of Ele since the beginnings of GW2 and i appreciate and love it with my 1,2k hours on one ele character alone 😊 I just want to make it more accessible and easier to use. I do not talk about very organised groups that stack well but for pugs and those (as we know ^^) tend to run around a lot 😅😂 I appreciate the devs giving htemp more live love and i also very much appreciate you keeping the ele community up to date with top knotch information ☺️

@@Cross_111 If you're group runs around like headless chickens, there's a very simple thing you should remember: You cannot outheal stupid. If people aren't stacking, that's their fault. If they run around with no real reason, and therefor dont get your boons, that's on them, not on you.

@@presqpuperze i am in a static which plays quite well 😊 Nonetheless this is no excuse for the devs to give some classes very easy access to 600 range boons and others need to fight with 240 Make it equal/easy enough for all to provide proper boons

@@Cross_111 If you are, then the boonradius should never be a problem, I am a bit confused here. Tempest has 600 range in the vast majority of its applications, Dan already cleared that up. I have never run into any problems with heal or dps alactemp, neither in pugs nor in a static setting.

Agreed! People always expect massive changes but this patch is pretty much trying to bring stuff up that is horribly underdeveloped. The devs said in their stream they try to bring them to useable levels but dont overshoot it. Lets see what will happen 😊

Wakey wakey