The official thread (
http://forum.arcgames.com/neverwinter/discussion/1214507/oathbound-paladin-devoted-cleric-changes#latest) collects together the comments from OPs e DCs and it's a mess to follow the cleric related discussion.
While the official thread is mainly in "blaming and shaming" mode at this stage, I kindly ask you to
be constructive and pratical (i.e. don't invent features that have 0% probability to be implemented - even if I'm not optimistic that we will be listened anyway).
The aim of this thread is to improve the current cleric design, given the latest changes. Even if you're not affected by GoH, probably you've ideas on how your feats and powers should perform and which ones should be reworked.A bug list is already available here:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1211087/dc-bugs-listPlese don't duplicate what's is already known and try to focus on an overall DC review, while the current state is reported here in WIP mode (
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter#/discussion/1213089/elfs-mod-9-guide-placeholder-under-construction)As an example, I'm not a faithful expert: reviews from that path would be appreciated. The same about the rigtheous.
I'll make it short about the virtuous: the new GoH mechanic makes the virtuous path less and less relevant. Whoever can take GoH and the difference between a virtuous and another path is not important anymore.
Looking at the virtuous path, now:
- too many healing feats which create an overlap with the faithful in terms of healing power even if the heal mechanic is different.
- few mitigation feats of which only "have faith" deserves to be 5/5.
- 1 power buff feat if AC, another heal source is DO
- GoH: it's now a flat AP over the time feat where being virtuous, faithful or rigtheous is irrelevant.
Too many powers and passives are useless or close to useless: searling light, exaltation, soothe, prophetic action, warding flare, geas, hastening light (due to bug) just to list the main.
Now the constructive part, following my preferences and without disrupting too much the current design.
The following are my preferred metas that match better with the current design : if you want to focus on heals go faithful, if you want to focus on mitigation go virtuous, if you want to focus on buff go righteous. Very simple.
As I said in the official thread, the mitigation feats from the virtuous should be empowered if the new GoH implementation remains unchanged: as an example unbreakable devotion was a pre-mod 6 design when the incoming damages were at 10^3 level of magnitude. At that time, UD worked very well. After mod 6, the level of incoming damages went up to 10^4+/10^5+ magnitude, making UD useless.
Cleansing fire could be reworked to provide mitigation and not another sources of healing/GoH. Even the capstone could be reworked to provide mitigation istead of a different heal mechanic.
An advice from
@jazzfong is to fine tuning the GoH mechanic a bit while keeping the virtuous path unchanged.
On my side I can live even with the current implementation, but I feel a bit "depressed" because changes like this one are only nerfs,
they are not and never a constructive moment for a real design review. Let's try to do the job that we would like the devs to implement.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
Comments
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
I tried doing similar things with Virtuous + Capstone and 15 points in righteous and then Righteous + Capstone with 15 points in virtuous and noticed little difference in GoH application. I think if Virtuous's main function is damage mitigation then Unbreakable devotion deserves a rework or at least a second look.
Faithfuls have always been great clutch healers. Nothing really appears to have changed that.
Righteous have always been great at buff/debuff- same goes for them.
--
I'll never retrace my steps.
Some of my best friends are Imaginary.
* there were few times we got respec token, and it was when the paragon tree was completely changed - so dont't expect it (save 100K if you feel down)
* this is the end of AP DC. 1%/sec is nothing. its less then cape buff, single divine glow do about 20% and its got 11 sec cool time. they didnt reduce AP gain from all sources, they reduce only GOH. - if you chose virtuous maybe one point in this feat is enogh, idk need to wait and see.
* DC allways get nerf, you should be happy they ony focus on GOH - i am surprised they didnt nerf astral shield (again) and HG (again) so combination with INTF will be less effective
* the changes to OP are so strong that healer DC will be needed and divine astral shield as well. (by some reason there very few GF)
* i am more concern they will touch other "weapon damage" powers and feats. if they will change "fire of the gods" like they did to lostmauth set its the end of rightuous as well
1) We knew this was coming, there was a lot of noise on pvp threads about AP gain ruining AP and a lot of noise on pve about bubble palys (justified)
2) The change will not kill the hate mechanic, if anything the bubble nerf (we knew it was going to happen and I fully expected them to have 0 AP gain while bubble was on similar to our HG nerf) will increase the need for more AP gain from other sources to recharge quickly. Also GF will gain more popularity so everyone who is not familar with running with them will need to get comfortable with them. GF is way better at holding agro currently, OPs will say different but there is a reason why everyone dies the second a bubble drops. It's not that OPs don't have the mechanics to manage threat, its just that the lack of need to hold threat has mis-trained many of these tanks
3) The big question I have with AP gain being gated by time is if the Virtuous capstone is still necessary. So if you get time to test it, I'd love to see the analysis. Is a Faithful/Virt and/or Right/Virt just as potent of an AP buffer now and if so I would expect everyone will be respecing to a different tree The right tree is not about the damage from Fire of the Gods, its about procing Bear your Sins. A change to Fire of the Gods is not paragon breaking and I doubt they will target DC damage specifically unless we start winning DPS charts (which isn't going to happen but the gap will be lower now
My current virtuous build + 3 rigtheous feats
The opposite: rigtheous build + 3 virtuous feats
No differences.
This discussion is not about GoH: it's more about the overall cleric design.
I agree that we will have a better understanding when the changes go live and how they affect the team play.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
The Righteous DC could benefit from a revision of some feats and powers - there are a few which are just utterly useless.
Otherwise it is fine - Leave it alone. From my perspective it seems it's mostly the Virtuous tree that might need a boost now that GoH is next to useless.
Then again. ..I'm not an expert on Virtuous - got 1400 hours of playtime as Righeous and some experience with Faithful.
I do wonder how much more people will want Faithful for that piggy bank now that the bubble safety net is gone. Lack of bubble may push the Foresight/Faithful combo into the forefront now.
I still think I'll stay Virtuous but it will be interesting to see how things flesh out.
Speaking of necessity of DP daily Paladin. I still do ECC/EGWD with my GF+any heal, ETOS with my GF without healer and ETOS with my DC without tank. My GF and DC are only 3k.
I see people in LFG, even 3,5+ demanding Bubble OP for ETOS. When i play with GF i notice how people complain of not being 100% protected, they have no clue about avoiding red areas. Recent players having account with hash+id have this mentality, they get used to play with bubble.
— (The unwritten rule)
--
I'll never retrace my steps.
Some of my best friends are Imaginary.
If anyone gets concrete info via tests on the DC I hope it gets posted. Thanks to real life I'm a few days from doing much testing.
In case any of you have actual numbers, I suggest to publish them in the DC bug list discussion:
http://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/neverwinter/#/discussion/1211087/dc-bugs-list
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
The main thing here is that Hastening Light DOES NOT work. The cooldowns (apparently) dont work and the AP gain does not work when using the artifact class feature.
I want tooltips that do what they say. Is that too much to ask?
if you wana get something from gift of haste u need to put 5 point on it (5 points = 5% over 5 sec)
'cleansing fire' dosn't refresh until it ends --> you need to put 5 points into it and even then you will have problem to proc gift of haste and cleansing light itslef... (and 'have faith' and 'unbreakble dvotion' for exampe)
its only preview or i drank too much but virtuous looks realy bad.
--
I'll never retrace my steps.
Some of my best friends are Imaginary.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
whether its a bug or not, idk.
the result is virtuous is the worst path now.
ill explain:
cleansing fire proc after the effcet over, consider its 50% and you need to cast encounter and time it right, you will only manage to proc cleansing fire once every ~20 sec.
all the virtuous depend on you proc HoT (have faith, gift of haste, unbreakable devotion)
so either you slot helaing word and use ilike a dummy every 5 sec.
or
cleansing fire - active only 75% of time
gift of haste - last 5 sec and refresh with HoT proc, maybe you can make it active half of the time =0.5% AP/sec
have faith - last as long as you have HoT, but there will be time you wont have HoT so it will be active around 80% of the time
unbreakalbe devotion - with 20 sec cool down and you need to proc HoT to trigger. it will be active maybe 6 sec every 25 sec
Virtuous can hardly contribute to a party now, a lillend companion might do better
probably all will go rightuous untill the next nerf
However, this rework effectively kills the feat, making it less powerful than AP gain cloaks. An interesting idea would be to make each HoT stack Gift of Haste up to 5 times. This would give virtuous an edge over other paragons in that others would have to significantly cripple their rotation to focus on haste while virtuous could slot other skills and still stack an effective form of AP generation.
This would also result in gift of haste being more effective in longer fights where lower ilvl/less experienced groups that would actually need more AP generation could benefit.
Also, while I'm here it's worthwile to note that hastening light is now working on preview, so it will make it into my frequently used class features. I'm about 90% sure that the dev team purposefully disabled this power in an attempt to end the AP bug, and with the rework, feel confident enough to turn it back on.
Oltreverso guild leader
Maga Othelma - DC | Svalvolo - SW | Dente Avvelenato- GWF
basicly they can (and should) remove gift of haste but no reason to touch cleanising fire
* gift of haste as on preview is not usefull, removing it completly and put something else might be better. if they are afraid of us buffing AP (TR SE in PVP for example) then make it buff deflect, deflect severity, control resist, runnig speed ...
But... GoH will still be a valuable asset in the Virtuous DC's toolbox. Too many people get focused on only one power/feat of a class ("haste cleric", "bubble pally", "itf gf", whatever) that they fail to realize there are a lot more options for these classes, on pretty much any of the chosen paths.
Regardless.. after running eToS on preview, GoH was refilling AP in 15-20 seconds, all depending. It's not a huge nerf.
"...I grab my wiener and charge!" - ironzerg79