Official M16: Class Roles and Adjustments to Tanking and Healing

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Class Roles in Module 16

In this post I’ll be discussing some of the overarching changes coming to tanks and healers, as well as the general design rationale behind those changes and the direction for class roles in Neverwinter moving forward.

I’d like to preface the discussion of class roles with a bit of Neverwinter history to provide some context. If that doesn’t interest you feel free to skip ahead.

The History of Class Roles in Neverwinter

Early in development; before launch, there was no distinct effort to make the game’s classes fit into the classic trinity (tank, healer, dps) or the even more classic quaternity (tank, healer, support, dps.) However, being a high-fantasy game with D&D classes, many actions and spells were created which skewed towards a specific role.

Fast forward to a bit after release, the lack of focus had allowed crowd control and other support effects to get completely out of hand. The game presented classes that appeared to fit into neat roles but then failed to provide an environment where those roles made sense.

Remaining in this bizarre limbo was not an option, so the team debated which direction to take the game and ultimately decided to move towards solidifying the role of each class. Although the decision was made; the damage of directionless early development was done. A number of fundamental design choices were simply incompatible with providing enjoyable role based gameplay.

Little by little, changes have been made over the years, but the problems were widespread. Many fundamental issues were impossible to change without destabilizing the balance of the entire game.

The State of Class Roles on Live

On the live server, the game acknowledges three distinct roles: tank, healer and DPS. These roles are enumerated in the queue system but referenced almost nowhere else. More importantly, anyone playing at endgame will know that no one need play a dedicated healer and that in reality a “support” role exists.

This support role is fundamental, and a party should be comprised of as much support as can be mustered. With the multiplicative nature of buffs, supercharging a single DPS is far superior to forming a group with multiple DPS. Healing is barely required due to the abundance of ultra-powerful mitigative abilities and passive sources of healing.

Moving Forward With the Trinity

The game’s concept of class roles being divorced from reality serves no one, and so we are taking this opportunity to correct course and that means making sweeping adjustments so that the suggested 1 tank, 1 healer, 3 DPS party composition (for 5-player content) is the actual ideal composition. These changes will mean that when a player rolls a healer, tank, or DPS during character creation, they’ll be able to play that role as advertised at endgame.

Improvements to Content Thanks to Role Adjustments

Endgame content is currently built so that any valid group composition can clear it. This means that groups with very little support can actually clear the content but that they must often execute the mechanics flawlessly. Meanwhile, groups at the same item level that maximize the use of support can deal exponentially more damage, often initiating early stage skips in encounters or circumventing mechanics entirely. As such, completing the content with a less support heavy group is significantly slower, and generally viewed as impossible or at least not worth it.

With the changes in Module 16, we can finally assume that any valid group composition at the same item level and player skill level should be outputting a fairly similar amount of DPS. In addition, major overhauls to tanking and healing allow for two new axes of challenge.

These changes aren’t just allowing the team to provide more difficult challenges, but more accurate challenges as well. Enemy abilities that felt un-survivable under many circumstances due to the overwhelming mitigation some groups could muster can now be brought in line. Adjustments to healing also allow us to bring down the damage values of enemies and bring combat back to a place where your health bar actually moves up and down at a fathomable speed.

Support — Neither Gone Nor Forgotten

All of these changes do not mean that support or utility actions are being removed from the game. Although some actions will see major overhauls or removals, new actions will be added and support and utility actions will continue to be available. Support actions will merely be brought in line with other actions. An action that increases the target’s damage taken will no longer also itself be an excellent source of direct damage. Support abilities will be best put to use, of course, in a group, where there are others to take advantage of their effects.

Various classes and paragon paths will have more or less support options, so those that enjoy providing support can look to build their loadouts with that in mind. One of the largest changes to support actions is that increasing the target’s damage taken is now split among three different effects that enhance damage taken from various categories (physical, projectile, and magic.) A post on adjustments to status conditions will address this more in-depth, but this change will allow opportunities for synergy when choosing which powers to bring as you form your party and note the group composition.

As a final note on this topic: we did consider what it would mean to maintain a fourth role in the form of a dedicated support. Ultimately, even had we moved to a quaternity with a required support role, many of these same changes would have been required to prevent bringing more support from remaining optimal. Those who enjoy the focus on buff stacking would still have been disappointed and we would have simply placed an additional hurdle on group formation.

Alternatively, if we established a paradigm where support was interchangeable with 1 or 2 of the 3 DPS in the group that would differ little from our current approach of offering DPS with some support actions. Support classes in that world could not provide significant mitigative or healing utility due to their not being required, and would have to provide some additional DPS since they are taking a slot that could have been used for a DPS.

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Tanking Adjustments

Guarding will receive a major overhaul. The behavior of guard has been unified between all tank classes and altered from the ground up. For classes that can guard, stamina now provides a layer of hit points (HP) equal to a percentage of your maximum HP. That HP is only active when your shield is raised and while raised your stamina does not regenerate. Currently, your shield provides a layer of HP equal to 100% of your maximum HP though that value is subject to change during development.

For example: if you have 100,000 HP, your shield is also able to provide 100,000 HP of cover. If your shield is not currently raised, and you take a 150,000 damage hit, you will die as the 150,000 damage will exceed your total HP. If you raise your shield, that same 150,000 damage hit would not kill you—100,000 damage would be absorbed by your shield, your stamina would be emptied and your guard would break and the remaining 50,000 damage would be dealt to your HP leaving you at 50,000 HP. With your shield lowered, your stamina would begin regenerating, and you can raise your shield again at any time, giving you a layer of HP based on the amount of stamina returned.

To accompany this change, the way the guard meter is being displayed has been changed, and paladin now see a guard meter instead of the standard stamina chevron above your action points. The guard meter will be easier to read and will feature the same slow and fast health bar paradigm as your primary health bar, allowing you to see how much of your guard meter has been taken off in the last hit.

This is a substantial overhaul to the way guard works and will take some getting used to, but we encourage you to give it a try. In our internal playtests of new endgame content, it’s felt great. Guard adds a strategic layer that gives tanks a substantial survivability advantage that still feels finite, with lots of opportunity to optimize the use of the shield, and chances for the meter to rise and fall.

The second major change to tanking is the way threat is handled. Neverwinter currently handles threat poorly, with most tanking relying on hard taunts—abilities that force the enemy to attack you regardless of your position on their threat table—to keep the enemy from attacking your party members. Hard taunts are not interesting, leave the tank with very little choice when it comes to actions and ultimately remove an entire dimension of tanking gameplay. Hard taunts will be removed with Module 16.

Of course, tanks still need to keep threat, and to be able to get it back in emergencies. All tanks will have a unified passive increase to the amount of threat their actions generate. In addition, many tanking abilities will now generate additional threat on top of their base damage.

A new threat gauge in the party pane will also help you to keep track of threat on your target. You’ll be able to see if you have threat or who you lost it to, so you can react accordingly. In addition, threat will be balanced such that if you primarily take actions that generate additional threat you shouldn’t have to worry about it too much.

For cases where you need to get aggro quickly, such as joining a fight a bit after it started, recovering after being KO’d, or in multi-tank situations like 10-player trials, some actions will be capable of setting your threat to the top of the target’s threat list. You can use this to re-establish your position at the top of the list, but failure to continue generating threat will result in losing threat, unlike the old hard taunt system.

Healing Adjustments

Healing is also receiving large scale adjustments, moving forward all healing classes will have a resource pool from which the majority of their healing actions will pull. For clerics and paladins this will be their divinity meter which has been completely reworked.

For those familiar with mana or MP in other RPGs, you can expect this resource meter to work similarly. Certain encounter powers will cost divinity. This cost will be displayed clearly on the tooltip and when using these encounter powers, the cost will be subtracted from the divinity gauge which will be visible on your HUD.

These encounter powers will have a very short cooldown so they can be used in rapid succession; however, your divinity gauge will refresh at a set pace. Some actions and feats will help you to restore or manage your divinity, and your class mechanic can be channeled to restore divinity at quicker pace (though you will be unable to execute other actions.) A spell with a divinity cost cannot be cast if you do not have sufficient divinity.

The primary reason for this change is so that most content can have a natural, default failure case of your healer running out of resources based on party members making mistakes. When healing is entirely based on static cooldowns as it is on live, there is a certain amount of health per second (HPS) you can provide to heal your party, if the enemy’s DPS exceeds that, even temporarily, your group will perish. If their DPS falls short, your group will live.

In that state, there’s either almost no room for error, or the error has little consequence. A resource pool ensures that the stakes for any given heal aren’t as high, because you should be able to heal again right afterwards. Additionally, if your party members make a mistake and get hit by something, you can spend some extra resources to heal them. However, those mistakes are also not entirely without stakes because if they make them repeatedly, your resource pool will deplete. If they perform fine after making a few mistakes, your resource pool should have time to recover.

The resource pool controlling healing was a key missing element to allowing for balanced healing gameplay. This is a big change that we know is going to take some getting used to. Additionally, the regeneration rate of these pools and cost of spells will be fluctuating quite a bit during development. The pool may feel too restrictive or you may barely notice it from build to build, and we ask for your patience and feedback as we proceed.

Of course, these changes would be largely irrelevant if we weren’t also removing the myriad sources of passive and proc-based healing in the game. Individual elements of these changes are likely to appear in other topics, but readjustments to basic stats, boons and other non-healer classes themselves will see a dramatic reduction in the non-healer sources of healing. The average fight against an open-world enemy will see players taking significantly less damage, so they won’t need to be healing constantly in order to survive. In group content, players’ health bars will be moving more predictably with the healer controlling most of the healing they receive during combat.

Closing Thoughts

Thank you for reading this post! Hopefully it has been illuminating. As always, everything is subject to change, and there are many adjustments large and small still to come. We hope you take the time to play and check out the changes first hand on preview.

Many of the changes being made hinge largely on the fine-tuning of numbers, and depending on what the current preview build is at the time you are reading this, we may still be quite a ways away from final numbers. However, that is where we need your help, and we look forward to hearing your feedback.