Yep, I read all your posts. But its better for the DPSs to focus on power, crti and Arm Pen and have shield than having 500hp + less stats and a warlock buffer.
Tbh solving class (dis)balance would have to happen by following a particular case scenario.
Similarly to how we choose Artifacts to allow us to deal more damage under specific conditions what if class variety gave bonus %dmg and incoming/outgoing healing by 0.5%? If you get 5 different classes in your team, you get double bonus! It is that simple to fix class (dis)balance and everyone would be happy.
You got a [random]tank? 1% bonus dmg You got a [random]healer? 1% bonus dmg Is that a Warlock? 1% bonus dmg A wild Barbarian? 1% bonus dmg Is that a Ranger? 1% bonus dmg
5 different classes with you? +2% dmg per class!
A variety of 5 classes in total would lead to 10% bonus dmg in a trial followed by 5% Incoming/Outgoing healing. And these classes do not even have to be huge dmg dealers, can go with debuff artis. Still beneficial in trials.
This damage boost should be very small, but enough to allow people to run content as they choose.
That way even if someone plays a sub-optimal class, their very presence would be beneficial for the party, however slightly...
To combat elitism and actually help people learn the game, at least slightly, if there is a variety of classes in the party, loot table becomes better. Newer the player's account, better the loot for the entire party. Account should be at least 2-3 months old, in order to prevent griefing/exploits. This gives newbies enough time to finish few campaigns, get some gear maybe and prepare for dungeons all whilst watching others how they play and beat harder content.
This would allow people to constantly help new players around and teach them to be better in this game. Doesn't have to be a huge benefit, but having one newbie in the team should give a bonus to people. Like, 2 Scrolls of Mass Life as a guaranteed drop or bonus gold or bonus RP. We already got that concept for Master Expedition and it works like a charm. It's easy, it's not breaking the game either.
True Neutral
Left the Game due to heavy Damage Control & Missing Spanish Language
With that being said, recent healing changes are some of the worst I've seen in this game.
Were Paladins overperforming? - Yea Did they deserve to be punched in the dust till they bleed their eyes out? - No
It's always either nerf 2% or nerf 70%, for two years. Like, don't do that guys. You're not really going to make ppl invest in other classes by doing so.
True Neutral
Left the Game due to heavy Damage Control & Missing Spanish Language
Its similar, not the same. Here is an easy example that shows why. Lets say you have 200k hp and an OP shields you for 200k. After factoring in mitigation from defense, you can now survive a hit for 800k damage. Alternatively, the Cleric reduces the incoming hit by 30%, you can now survive a hit for 400/0.7 = 571k. Sounds worse in this context, but lets scale it up. Say you had 1 million HP and the incoming hit was mitigated by 30%, you can now survive a hit for 2000/0.7 = 2.857m damage, making it better than the shield, which would only take you from 2m to 2.4m.
This lacks foresight. I'll make a list of scenarios for this point.
If paladin helps more for smaller hp targets, he will still be optimal because its the low hp dps who need the shield, not the beefy tanks. Cleric would be entirely outclassed in this way.
If the 1mill hp is referring to dps who have 1 mill hp, than who's to say paladin will be stuck at healing ~200k forever? If dps are building more HP, than it's only reasonable to assume that paladins are also getting much, much more power, and in that case, would heal for much more than 400k, also outclassing cleric. An example: the hit is going to do 1.2mill (already accounting for def) to 1mill hp targets. Cleric would reduce that to 840k. If a paladin healed for even 400k, (which doesn't seem unreasonable considering the context for this), they would still be better than a cleric, by a margin of about 40k hp.
This is also extremely biased towards lategame content, and would essentially wipe other healers off the map if it was pushed too far. With the current way the game is set up, there is a cap on how much power you can build, because there is a max rank for empowereds/radiants/insignias/companions. Pushing that far into endgame is a little unreasonable right now, as even 1 mill hp is hard for tanks, and nonsensical for dps.
It can also be implemented differently in terms of gameplay, for example, things like Astral Shield. The group needs to stand inside of it to get the mitigation. Lastly, because the cleric in this hypothetical can actually heal, it is different in that respect. It makes the cleric different at doing different things.
Some boss attacks force players to spread out and not overlap. If cleric can't apply damage reduction during those attacks, it would be very bad. Paladin's shield would be much more convenient and better at that.
And that is their job, isn't it? Along with making the game, they have to balance it. Sure its more difficult than if all classes do the same thing, but it also makes for a more interesting game.
The more mechanics you add on, the more nightmare-ish it becomes to balance. Given what the community thinks of balance right now, it's best not to go down that path. And if they do end up balancing around cleric and paladin, then warlock will get tossed aside unless they have their own mechanic that increases effective hp. Warlock as a debuffer that increases dps will not be viable then.
This is where I believe things should change. It is all well and good for every encounter to be designed exactly the same way, but if different encounters were designed in different ways it could encourage the addition of different gameplay styles as well as add more variety to the game. Think of it this way, content is already intended to demand 3 roles, a tank, a healer and a dps. I think there is nothing wrong with on occasion, it demanding something specific from some specific class, provided there is some variation over time in which specific class is being demanded.
I am perfectly fine with some classes only being good at AoE and others only being good at single target, provided there is some content which is designed for AoE and some content which is designed for single target. The goal should be to push for more diverse content, not less diverse classes.
Honestly, in my opinion, this is a bad, bad idea. Ideally, all classes should be picked equally for all content. No one wants to be excluded from some content simply because their class is bad. Letting them be the best pick in certain content is never going to make up for that. I addressed this too.
For example, it would be unholy of Cryptic to make LoMM accessible to only classes that deal good AoE dmg, and make IC for only single-target classes. Everyone wants to be able to do all of the content, and making another character takes a ton of time and investment.
If you were talking about inside a single dungeon, than it would still be unfun to be useless during some parts of the dungeon. It would feel awkward if you were getting out-dps'd by 2x despite having equal gear and skill. This is why people already dislike how much stronger Arbiter is than other dps, and they're not even better by such a large margin as
If all healers excel more or less the same way at the same thing there may as well be 1 healer class, because in my eyes there is then no diversity at all. For diversity of choice to truly exist your choices need to matter, you need to be picking something which is functionally different to something else.
I really don't like this. It's like in a game of boats, surfboards, and jetskis, you ask for a minivan. It's just a wild request that restricts the game by, funnily enough, forcing it to encompass too much. It's not fun when you're playing rock-paper-scissors and someone pulls out gun. Similarities aren't necessarily bad. However, having a game where you can't even play half of it because you didn't choose the right class is not fun.
Take a moment to stop and read over my posts again and read them slowly. I never denied there was a problem with the state of healers in the game at the moment, but I am arguing that the problem is not because shields exist but because of how they are implemented. I very specifically proposed changes to the implementation of them, as well as proposed redefining the roles of the cleric and the warlock. Notice, I said that paladins should either heal very little, or not at all. That was 1 of the things I mentioned. I also mentioned other things, like shield decay, as well as better defining the other 2 roles. You know what else I talked about? Content design.
My whole argument was, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets fix it." Rather than, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets remove it from the game."
I did. I have. You're not wrong that it's possible. I even said I agree it's technically possible if the whole game was redesigned into a completely different game. I'm just facing the reality of what NW is. And that's what people are saying here. It's not that we think it is in a technical sense impossible; it's that we know what you are asking for is not on the bargaining table and are being realistic. I'm sorry, but while we wait on the whole game to be rebuilt from the ground up, I'll take three relatively equal playable classes in the meantime.
Why bother to have a closed testing? Theses 11th hour changes are the kind of debate that belongs in closed testing. Instead we get huge changes with no patch notes, no explanation and zero engagement. Well done.
Yes disappointed in the lack of patch notes and explanations. Worried how finding the right targets with TAB powers will be.
Healing over Time is ideal way to deal with sustained damage Direct Healing is to deal with burst damage. Shields is what's now is used to avoid attacks that else would 1 shot people.
To big change for now but could change so shields Only worked on the first attack that hit target for more than 25% of damage A delayed heal trigged by massive damage.
So far after the all turmoil caused by their "subtle"; sorry roguish patch... no developer has come here to make things clear for all players that - i think - deserve some explanation. Lame.
2
thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
edited June 2020
Before I respond to anyone, I just wanted to add that after thinking some more about warlock's I think that giving them damage buffs is not a good idea because it makes their role far too different from the other healers and it (probably) means that long term there will be too many problems with them being the go to healer. Here is my alternative:
So instead I think their "niche" should be lowering the enemies damage by a flat amount, in addition to healing. They could have powers that allow them to curse enemies which subtracts a large flat amount of damage from their outgoing hits (for example, "the next hit an enemy deals is reduced by 400k) for big boss attacks and then for things like trash they could have say a persistent aura they could activate which would continuously drain divinity but reduce the damage allies take by a flat amount by some small amount (say 20-40k).
This kind of approach has the following advantages:
+ It is really, really good against small hits, mitigating almost all damage.
+ It allows for more reckless gameplay in dungeons.
If paladin helps more for smaller hp targets, he will still be optimal because its the low hp dps who need the shield, not the beefy tanks. Cleric would be entirely outclassed in this way.
Not true, I will provide some scenarios that illustrate this point. Let us say for example, there is a boss with an attack which deals 3 hits in quick succession, each hit dealing 800k damage (400k after mitigation) and the DPS has 500k hp. In this scenario lets say the paladin shields for 200k. What will happen?
Lets say the paladin casts a shield before each hit, but using my design specifications from above, they are unable to heal much lost hp (lets say they can heal ~50k after each hit). Result:
Before the first hit, 500k hp, 200k shield.
After the first hit 300k hp.
Paladin heals + shields - 350k hp, 200k shield.
After the second hit 150k hp.
Paladin heals + shields - 200k hp, 200k shield.
After the third hit - DPS is dead.
In contrast, now lets have a healer who cannot provide shield, but can mitigate ~30% of the incoming damage and heal for lets say 200k HP per heal. Result:
Before the first hit, 500k hp.
After the first hit, 500k - 0.7*400k = 220k.
DPS is healed for 200k - Up to 420k.
After the second hit, 420k-280k = 140k.
DPS is healed up to 340k.
After the third hit, 340k - 280k = 60k.
Even though the cleric "shielded" less damage with their multiplicative mitigation, because they were able to restore hp in the interim, in this scenario they were the better healer.
If the 1mill hp is referring to dps who have 1 mill hp, than who's to say paladin will be stuck at healing ~200k forever? If dps are building more HP, than it's only reasonable to assume that paladins are also getting much, much more power, and in that case, would heal for much more than 400k, also outclassing cleric. An example: the hit is going to do 1.2mill (already accounting for def) to 1mill hp targets. Cleric would reduce that to 840k. If a paladin healed for even 400k, (which doesn't seem unreasonable considering the context for this), they would still be better than a cleric, by a margin of about 40k hp.
The point of the scenario was to illustrate that there were various break points at which 1 is better than the other and like I illustrate above, this is true not just for tanks but also for dps. It all depends on how you build encounters. Obviously, this means that when designing boss fights you need to take into account the abilities of various different classes. You could for example design a boss attack in a 10 man raid which has a base damage equal to 250% of the player's HP, instead of a fixed damage value. With your DPS who have 500k hp, this would deal 625k damage after mitigation and both the OP's shield and multiplicative mitigation could reduce this to a survivable level. For a tank however, the OP's shield would not save them but multiplicative mitigation would.
If you do not view changes in a vacuum and instead look at the broader picture you will see it is possible to make shields function just fine, as well as other class roles.
This is also extremely biased towards lategame content, and would essentially wipe other healers off the map if it was pushed too far. With the current way the game is set up, there is a cap on how much power you can build, because there is a max rank for empowereds/radiants/insignias/companions. Pushing that far into endgame is a little unreasonable right now, as even 1 mill hp is hard for tanks, and nonsensical for dps.
It is not, I am using late game content for my examples because its the only content in the game that currently really has "stat requirements" to speak of, but you can do the same thing when designing mid game content. Say you are designing a 5 man dungeon intended for a player round about 20k item level. Say you decide, from your metrics, that a player of that item level who is playing a dps could reasonably survive a hit for 300k after mitigation, either from a combination of healer+gear, or just gear on its own. You then use that as your reference point when tuning that kind of content. Does it matter that a player who is completely bis would enter there and facestomp it? Not really no, the content wasn't designed to be challenging to them in the first place.
Some boss attacks force players to spread out and not overlap. If cleric can't apply damage reduction during those attacks, it would be very bad. Paladin's shield would be much more convenient and better at that.
And as far as I can tell, all the mechanics in the game which currently require you to spread rather than overlap can be survived without either shields or multiplicative mitigation, which is good, because they shouldn't require additional mechanics to live aside from just HP in the first place. When you die to those mechanics, its when you do not spread, which is intended.
The more mechanics you add on, the more nightmare-ish it becomes to balance. Given what the community thinks of balance right now, it's best not to go down that path. And if they do end up balancing around cleric and paladin, then warlock will get tossed aside unless they have their own mechanic that increases effective hp. Warlock as a debuffer that increases dps will not be viable then.
What I think is if you look at how mind numbingly boring the classes are right now, how they essentially all boil down to just spamming 1 button and you can literally macro the gameplay of the entire class down to a single key, is that if you remove anything else from the classes for the sake of "balance" then there will be nothing left to remove. I would rather they attempt (and possibly fail) to balance diverse classes, then succeed at turning this game into checkers, where all the units are the same, play the same and have nothing to distinguish them.
Honestly, in my opinion, this is a bad, bad idea. Ideally, all classes should be picked equally for all content. No one wants to be excluded from some content simply because their class is bad. Letting them be the best pick in certain content is never going to make up for that. I addressed this too.
For example, it would be unholy of Cryptic to make LoMM accessible to only classes that deal good AoE dmg, and make IC for only single-target classes. Everyone wants to be able to do all of the content, and making another character takes a ton of time and investment.
If you were talking about inside a single dungeon, than it would still be unfun to be useless during some parts of the dungeon. It would feel awkward if you were getting out-dps'd by 2x despite having equal gear and skill. This is why people already dislike how much stronger Arbiter is than other dps, and they're not even better by such a large margin as
In my opinion its fine for classes to be bad in 1 piece of content, so long as there is some other piece of content they are good in. Example:
Lets say there are 3 dungeons, dungeon A, dungeon B and dungeon C. In dungeon A, clerics are far and away the best healers. In dungeon B, Paladins are far and away the best healers and in dungeon C, the warlock shines. Then you put the best warlock gear in dungeon C, the best paladin gear in dungeon B and the best cleric gear in dungeon A. How about DPS and tank gear? In this example lets split the DPS and tank gear between all 3 dungeons, so they need to run all 3 in order to get their gear. What is the result?
The result of doing this should be pretty obvious, the 3 healers all have "the same amount of content" and because that content is designed specifically for their class to feel good in it, they should have more fun running it as well. I know you are going to say, "but now the dps and tanks run more content than the healers" and I know, but this is just for the sake of the example. I could make an example where you split classes evenly between a set number of dungeons, but that would make my post unnecessarily long (and its already long as is) and I am sure you can see how you can extrapolate this idea to all of the classes instead of just the healers.
Now, I am not suggesting you make it flat out impossible for the other classes to run that piece of content, but it is fine if it is more difficult for them, because that content was designed around a different class in the first place.
However, even if you don't design specific pieces of content for specific classes, you can still design content in a way such that the different healers all have a chance to "excel" and I will illustrate this by modifying the design of the Zariel for you hypothetically to show how it would work.
In Zariel currently the major healer check is Weight of Virtue, which requires you to have ~500k hp + shields in order to survive. In its current iteration it very clearly favors a paladin. So, how can we change this so that all 3 classes have an opportunity to shine? Well, lets do it by adding in another 2 phases. Currently Zariel is like this:
Phase 1 (sort of a warmup)
Phase 2 (2 demons dps check)
Phase 3 (the "main coarse")
Phase 4 (the 2 angels dps check)
Phase 5 (Zariel seems pretty tired and doesn't really do much)
Lets say you added 2 more phases before phase 1, in the new first phase the current Weight of Virtue is replaced with a new Weight of Virtue which deals substantially less damage and can be healed by all 3 healers. At the start of the new 2nd phase, the floor of the arena is divided into 3 differently coloured sections like so: Inside each of the 3 sections there is a "totem pole" which is charging up and the dps need to destroy 1 of the 3 of them. After 10 seconds, a barrier would be erected along the red lines, preventing people from moving between the sections. The dps would have 30 seconds in whichever section the group picked to destroy their chosen totem. The phase would start with the boss saying something like, "Face divine justice, face divine wrath and face divine fury!" with the boss pointing at 1 totem for each dialogue line (wrath being 1 totem, justice being another totem and fury being the last totem).
Now, here is the catch:
If they pick the "Cleric" totem, then the healer check will favor a class combination of warlock and paladin. It would do this by having the current weight of virtue, to incentivize taking a paladin healer. In addition to that, it would have 10-20 hits per second for say 20-40k damage, to build into that warlock niche I specified above. The healer check could last for say 5-10 seconds.
If they pick the "Warlock" totem, then the healer check would favor a class combination of paladin and cleric. It would do this by having the current "Weight of Virtue" check interspersed with the cleric check I illustrated above, where you have multiple hits for semi high damage values.
If they pick the "Paladin" totem, then the healer check would favor a class combination of cleric and warlock. It would do this by having multiple hits for semi high damage values as well as lots of small hits, as I explained in point 1.
In essence, by picking a totem, they are picking which mechanic they don't want to face and disabling it. During the check itself, the healers will have to outheal the 2 mechanics which they have chosen to deal with continuously while the dps beats down the totem. If they don't manage within a 30 second window, everyone wipes. After the group has successfully beat this phase, in all of the remaining phases whenever the boss would normally cast weight of virtue, it instead uses the healer check which the group has chosen to deal with.
And by making this small adjustment, you have not only made the fight more interesting, you have tailored it towards all 3 healer niches while making very limited adjustments to the fight itself.
I really don't like this. It's like in a game of boats, surfboards, and jetskis, you ask for a minivan. It's just a wild request that restricts the game by, funnily enough, forcing it to encompass too much. It's not fun when you're playing rock-paper-scissors and someone pulls out gun. Similarities aren't necessarily bad. However, having a game where you can't even play half of it because you didn't choose the right class is not fun.
Yeah sure, NW, the game that encompasses too much, tell me another joke will you. The game where you can literally keymap your entire build to a single key and still be competitive. Want proof? Here is a fine example of Wizard gameplay courtesy of Skullelf:
It wouldn't take me much effort to make a bind like that for other classes either. NW is the game where all the classes do pretty much the same thing. Don't act like its deep or complicated, it isn't. With the sole exception of Arbiter, there are tablespoons with more depth than the classes in NW currently. But no, the classes should definitely be restricted even more because clearly there is too much depth to the current system, rather than trying to actually make things work.
And funnily enough, whilst there is an issue with balance, the issue is nowhere near as big as you make it out to be. All the healers do work in all the pieces of content. One of them is better than the others sure, but its not like if you don't take that specific 1 class, you cannot finish the content.
@thefabricant You have some really good suggestions.
I hope the dev team look at them, and put some serious consideration into them. It's a bit late now for them to implement them into this mod, but I think they could make all three healing spec's viable, different, fun to play, but also rather than a case of "oh, we need to run with a pally and then either a warlock and a cleric", it would be a case of "we need two different class of healers". I miss the old AA, the way the damage mitigation of it worked, (I also miss the power share, but lets face it, we're never going back to that), I'd love to see something like that back again, but maybe as an encounter power, so that we can compete with the pally's. I even mentioned it earlier in this thread.
Before I respond to anyone, I just wanted to add that after thinking some more about warlock's I think that giving them damage buffs is not a good idea because it makes their role far too different from the other healers and it (probably) means that long term there will be too many problems with them being the go to healer. Here is my alternative:
Not bad, but I think some attacks don't always come from enemies, and so maybe that has to be changed a bit. But, this also brings up the point of this literally being pointless. Weak hits can always be healed up, even by paladin, and a 200k hp pally shield will also soak up lots of small hits, mitigating all hp damage. The large hit block is just a 400k hp "shield" anyways. The theme of it being weakening the enemy is cool, but everyone knows it's just a shield. Aesthetic changes are silly and not really needed, since you're not fooling anyone on what it actually is.
Not true, I will provide some scenarios that illustrate this point. Let us say for example, there is a boss with an attack which deals 3 hits in quick succession, each hit dealing 800k damage (400k after mitigation) and the DPS has 500k hp. In this scenario lets say the paladin shields for 200k. What will happen?
This is kinda weird, since paladins heal for just as much as they shield. If we said that they shield for 200k, they would also heal for 200k. With that in mind, dps would've taken 0 damage. However, I don't know if you were referring to crits or not. If it was with 3 crits, then that's a little silly, since you're banking on a 12.5% chance just to survive for cleric, even if you were perfect. That would be straight up bad game design. Also, stones of health exist, and would let dps survive.
The point of the scenario was to illustrate that there were various break points at which 1 is better than the other and like I illustrate above, this is true not just for tanks but also for dps. It all depends on how you build encounters. Obviously, this means that when designing boss fights you need to take into account the abilities of various different classes. You could for example design a boss attack in a 10 man raid which has a base damage equal to 250% of the player's HP, instead of a fixed damage value. With your DPS who have 500k hp, this would deal 625k damage after mitigation and both the OP's shield and multiplicative mitigation could reduce this to a survivable level. For a tank however, the OP's shield would not save them but multiplicative mitigation would.
There are other sources of damage mitigation in NW, too. Paladin sigil can give you 15% DR, Forgehammer of Gond at 50%, and one of paladin's daily can also give 10% DR, etc. And when you specifically balance around one specific class in order to make it shine, of course it's going to look good in your ultra-specific scenario. However, that's not what's in the game, and designing content like that is not good. I'll address that later in my post.
If you do not view changes in a vacuum and instead look at the broader picture you will see it is possible to make shields function just fine, as well as other class roles.
Ironic, considering you ignored stones of health and other forms of DR.
What I think is if you look at how mind numbingly boring the classes are right now, how they essentially all boil down to just spamming 1 button and you can literally macro the gameplay of the entire class down to a single key, is that if you remove anything else from the classes for the sake of "balance" then there will be nothing left to remove. I would rather they attempt (and possibly fail) to balance diverse classes, then succeed at turning this game into checkers, where all the units are the same, play the same and have nothing to distinguish them.
Not every class is the same. Sure, the differences are not that big, but they're still there. Your changes really don't add much either, you essentially still are providing more EHP in barely unique ways, considering those concepts already exist. Warlock is changed into a barkshield + debuffs that already kinda exist through artifacts like Wyvern Knives and Swarm mount. Cleric is essentially just Astral Shield/Paladin sigil with your changes. Plus, everything else in the game is still there, so...
The result of doing this should be pretty obvious, the 3 healers all have "the same amount of content" and because that content is designed specifically for their class to feel good in it, they should have more fun running it as well. I know you are going to say, "but now the dps and tanks run more content than the healers" and I know, but this is just for the sake of the example. I could make an example where you split classes evenly between a set number of dungeons, but that would make my post unnecessarily long (and its already long as is) and I am sure you can see how you can extrapolate this idea to all of the classes instead of just the healers.
I addressed this, not restating it. I am quite sure most people don't want that. And not to mention, making a different dungeon for every single style takes a ton of time and hard work. Content doesn't poof itself out of thin air, y'know.
And by making this small adjustment, you have not only made the fight more interesting, you have tailored it towards all 3 healer niches while making very limited adjustments to the fight itself.
Sure, I guess? It works, so fine by me. That's not what NW is though, and that doesn't seem likely for the devs to implement. Look at kythelion's post, that's all that needs to be said.
Yeah sure, NW, the game that encompasses too much, tell me another joke will you. The game where you can literally keymap your entire build to a single key and still be competitive.
First of all, I never said NW encompassed too much. I said that's what you wanted. And clearly, I was right. Super specific dungeons for multiple super specific play styles. People don't play NW for the extreme skill based gameplay, they play it because they like the rpg elements, like the D&D theme, and are okay with the combat. Even endgame players want challenging content, but not super high-skill based gameplay. This isn't a fighting game or a team-based shooter, it's an MMORPG. I know NW is quite easy when compared to other games, because skill isn't a huge part of this game.
I thought this was gonna be a video of some dps in ToMM/LoMM/IC/Zariel. Nope. It's just a wizard sitting in a stronghold doing rotations at a dummy. What did you expect? A game of osu? Did you want skill like a competitive SSBM match? And I'd love to see how that works when there are actual enemies and boss mechanics. NW is quite simple, but not always to that degree. Don't throw non sequiturs, please. None of your changes are going to show any skill whatsoever, and I never even brought up skill, so I don't see why you needed to show me that.
And funnily enough, whilst there is an issue with balance, the issue is nowhere near as big as you make it out to be. All the healers do work in all the pieces of content. One of them is better than the others sure, but its not like if you don't take that specific 1 class, you cannot finish the content.
Of course I know balance is mostly fine. Balance only really matters in endgame content. No one's gonna complain that warlock is too weak to do the Chult campaign. I just wanted to address some of the larger (not necessarily large) issues that exist right now. Although it is ironic you say this, considering you want to make some classes not be able to finish certain content (I know you said it shouldn't be flat out impossible for others, but with endgame content, it will be) not designed for them, just so you can have diversity.
Can we please stop arguing? Your ideas are extremely grand and good, but I'm just saying that they're unlikely to be added. Also, when you inherently believe that content should be tailored specifically to certain classes, there's nothing I can say, except that the devs don't really see it that way. You're not wrong for wanting that, but at that point it's 100% opinion, and there's nothing to say. Kythelion said it, face the reality of what NW is; those ideas aren't inherently wrong, it's just unrealistic right now. I really, truly don't mean to be rude here, but those kinds of ideas aren't going to make it.
nerfing he shield without nerfing the big shield: use an old paladin power, binding oath.
-the shield is big (no more than 100%), after x sec you lose the shield -after you lose the shield you take half the damage the shield shielded for you -if you reapply the shield before it expire you will still take the half damage forced on the red hp bar under the shield.
here you have big shield that help survive big hit, but need a good healer to keep ppl alive. if needed you could make it a feat: 1-you make big shield but when they expire ppl will take half shielded damage, the shield will not heal and last for 6-7sec 2-you can shield up to a%, and every 1 sec part of the shield is used to heal, the shield last 3-4 sec.
on choice 1 the shield willl not heal, so the paladin need at least 1 power that doesn't put up a shield (so that this can work nice in 5 ppl content)
for cleric and warlock i suggested to increase the damage reduction, and decrease outgoing damage in an early post, the power i sudgester to use them on was divine glow on cleric (with the old graphic effect, i need that graphic effect, i loved it) and the curse on warlock (you can apply curse with arrowstorm (i think is the name, the green healing windy thing) so easy to keep on mob encounter and on boss) while divine glow is bound to a cooldown (it could be lowered so that it match or is a bit bigger that the duration effect if needed).
First u call we reduce the incoming and outgoing heal by 60% and increase the Magnitute about 50%. thats ok ... after that u reduce the the Paladin crit Shield from 100% to 50% thats also ok. after that u reduce the critical damage for 50% and at the top u remove the Magnitute increase. So over all u nerv us to 20% heal as we do in mod 18...
Near BiS Paladins (200k power / 35% outgoing / avg lionheart weapon dmg) heal now on a target with full tacticals for
~44k heal + ~44k barrier on non crit
~75k heal + ~110k barrier on crit
with one shelter (group heal) costing 120 divinity. A crit and a non crit shelter make up for around 2 ticks of ToMM heatwaves. Using up the whole divinity bar (8 shelters) ends up for ~1m group healing /barriers. After that the pally can go afk / at will spamming for 40s to regain a full divinity bar. And it is not that there are no mechanics in between.
If everyone with 500k+ zariel gear takes a healthstone charge, that is half the divinity bar. And only 20s cd.
If everyone uses instead a potion and taking the group healing potion boon, they receive healing for ~350k, about 35% of the divinity bar.
And then there are insignia bonis ..
A healer is around another healthstone charge every 20s.
Make bubbledin an option and instead of shielding others, they put shield on themselves and protect the group with bubble. Of you wanna go down weird routes that is
Impactful Shields: Give the Paladin the ability to shield about 300k-400k on a BiS setup. However this adding of the shield power does not actually heal the target when applied and costs about 250-500 divinity. This shield does not block all the damage when you take a hit, just 50% of the incoming damage is blocked and the rest gets through to your Hp, much like Unyielding Champion works on the Justicar. Another option would be to also have this shield drain away much like the Bloodcrystal raven skull artifact does with it's shield. and thus making the timing of these shield somewhat important. Of course you would need to make adjustments to the damage of certain mechanic with which you want to be only survivable with this Shield.
Healer Balance: So, you would say, "this doesn't balance the paladin healer with the other healers!". No it does not, it just puts the paladin in a whole different category. They don't actually heal you, other than perhaps on an at-will and the daily sanctuary. Just prevent you from getting one shot from certain mechanics
At-Wills: Since the Paladin Healer (Shielder) is only really in a party to give those nice and full shields equally to everyone, with Critical Touch, I suggest changing the Feat back to how it was originally. It makes our damage at-will have a purpose and give us the feeling that we are always doing something in combat, grinding for that critical touch proc, and not just standing afk to regenerate our divinity back, like it is currently. If you reverted back to the original Critical Touch, and thus having it only proc with Divine Touch, I think that would be a good thing as long as it got an increase in its division floor magnitude.
Cure Wounds: Consider reducing the divinity cost and magnitude of Cure Wounds, so we can use it to grind critical touch. I feel reducing it back to it's original form would suffice. 10 divinity cost with a low heal magnitude.
Prayer of Opportunity: The old version of Prayer of Opportunity also gave us a purpose to use our at-wills, since it could proc while using them. In it's current form it is nice. But with my suggestions of the ability to create bigger shields without a heal and Prayer of Opportunity having a 20% chance. Consider giving us an option to proc this easier, with perhaps a cheaper Cure Wounds.
I believe it needs a longer duration once it procs, or that the effect won't expire while channeling your Hand of Divinity. Since it can only proc from a healing encounter, I generally don't have to actually heal for at least 5-10s after it procs. And when I actually do decide to use it for the free cast, when I need to heal, I just expires while I'm Channeling my Hand of Divinity and I end up using the Divinity anyway.
So it either needs a longer Duration before it expires or it won't expire once you start channeling your Hand of Divinity. However if you decided to use my idea with the alternative method to charging up Hand of Divinity, where you need to tap a second time to cast, the feat as it is with it's 12s duration would be fine.
Divine Touch: I like the thought how it could be more versatile, but it's just not, with a floor magnitude of 120, especially in a 10 man trial. Buff it to 400 and I'd probably use it as my primary. But as of now, give me five encounter power slots, and it'll be my fifth, with bond of virtue as my fourth. We currently can't do without scared weapon and circle of divinity for divinity regeneration, and with Sheltering Light as the best aoe heal, we can only take it as our only and primary heal.
Hand of Divinity: I would love for it to have the ability to instantly cast for a big heal. The only time you really want to heal a tank is when they are getting low on Hp, otherwise you might just waste a load of resources healing the Hp that they could just regenerate overtime. The Lay on Hands Daily is a perfect example on a very good instant heal for a tank. You want to be able to just hit one button, and bam! a big heal and you prevent the tank from dying. Currently it's magnitude is too low that I would need multiple casts to heal a tank sufficiently, and thus with casting it multiple times your just wasting the shield you created on the previous heal. So I suggest, definitely increase the magnitude to at least 1,500 or even 500 more. I would prefer if it had a higher magnitude and didn't give a shield. Especially since I need to cast divine Shelter to protect the Dps anyway and it will just override the shield I just gave the tank.
An idea would be a kind of double tap thing. You Channel your Hand of Divinity and then when you release, it doesn't cast until you tap it again. So basically you charge it and then you can do other stuff, and when you need it you just tap it once to discharge it. It would be an awesome solution to how you could have it as effectively an instant heal with one button click.
Warlock Suggestions
In order for the Paladin to not be the only one who can perform this role, give the Warlock the ability to give temporary Hp (much like Shield, just yellow) and they also have the ability to stack this temporary Hp. One stack being about 25%-50% of the shield a paladin gives, depending on the cost per stack. This ability will not heal the target and the temporary Hp will block similarly just 50% of the incoming damage, but perhaps if temporary Hp is stacked on a target, a stack will expire after you get hit, unless the stack was already used to block the hit, but if it was a small hit it would still expire that stack of temporary Hp. Making timing crucial here, but they will still be just as potent.
This ability of the Warlock being able to give Temporary Hp would just be replacing the feat Hellpact. Leave it have the Feypact feat, so it can compete with the Cleric at actual healing.
The Cleric
Well, other than perhaps buffing it's ability to actually heal, I see it just fine as being the best actual healer. With shields and temp hp only blocking 50% of incoming damage and the application of them not healing, you will play a vital role in keeping the party alive through, continuous healing.
I dont know if devs have thought on this: after these enormous nerfs many many people will fail in dungeons the did easily before and they will blame the healers.
Yeah, top 1% will find a way probably, running without healers or something. But rest of the people who do randoms and campaigns mostly, the majority of the people, will be hit very very hard by this.
And people dont like to see that they cant do now what was easy yesterday. Thats exactly the opposite of what people want to feel.
When i put the pictures of how hard to see is Soulstorm (more if there are enemies or PoP) i realized that ppl won't stand in it even if visible cuz latest content is "move around to not die!". Feedback
Pillar of Power in my honest opinion is just sad. Sad buffs and has the one mechanic that latest content don't allow: "Move around or die", with the exception of the Worm in Lomm.. But even then, Soul Barrier should do the trick.
Change Pillar of Power into an active aura (yes, active as in "only disapear if you get CC or turn it off) around the warlock (around 60'-100'), this way we can move around with it and follow the dps/tank without slowing down the peace. Soulstorm could synergice (sorry if its misspelled) with it and instead of placing it on the ground it will spin inside the new Pillar of Power. Duration and Heal tics not changed. For more variety you could change a feat or class feature to make that more powers synergice with it, like: BoVa: Spin around the new PoP and deal less dmg but increase Dmg Res. Infernal Barrier: Applies shield to everyone inside the circle. Cost 30-40 Soulweave per objective. Warlocks Bargain: Sacrifice 10%-20% hp to make everyone in the circle deal more dmg for 6-10 seconds, cool down stay the same. Or, sacrifice 10%-20% hp to double the effects of PoP for 6-10 seconds. Wraith's Shadow: is changed to aoe, deal less dmg the more enemies there are, applies debuff. This one could be the replacement for the Curses that you take out. Vampiric Embrace: If there is no target, you lose 30% hp (can't be used if you have 30% or less hp left) but the heal given is increased (like a vampire lord giving its blood to its minions). This is mostly cuz since the cleanse its there, its kinda useless without a target. Dreadtheft: You can't move while chaneling. While chaneling, all enemies inside PoP aura deals less dmg. Soul Reconstruction: Heal everyone inside pop for 200-250 mag. Cost 70-100 Soulweave per second or 40-50 per ally healed.
You could make it so they doesn't stack with other Soulweaver. With this kinda kit, even if we don't heal like a DC or protect like a Pally, we would still have a place. And this way is more than just one build (in encounters at least) to play. Making PoP a core encounter again and making it synergice with other powers it gives more choices to addapt to different situations or trials if there isn't a Pally or DC. We can compensate our lack in heals with actuall support powers. The tooltip could even be "Your knowledge of the other realm is so big, you became the conduit. Now you are the pillar of power that helps your team." or something like that.
I know this changes won't happen cuz most ppl will think its "op" in papper and cuz it's really rare to see our feedback take really into account, but it would be cool if you could at least have it into consideration.
Have a lovely day. With love, a Soulweaver.
The meta it's just a guideline. And guidelines are boring.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
Not bad, but I think some attacks don't always come from enemies, and so maybe that has to be changed a bit. But, this also brings up the point of this literally being pointless. Weak hits can always be healed up, even by paladin, and a 200k hp pally shield will also soak up lots of small hits, mitigating all hp damage. The large hit block is just a 400k hp "shield" anyways. The theme of it being weakening the enemy is cool, but everyone knows it's just a shield. Aesthetic changes are silly and not really needed, since you're not fooling anyone on what it actually is.
Only because they are infrequent, which was incidentally why in my example I said this:
If they pick the "Cleric" totem, then the healer check will favor a class combination of warlock and paladin. It would do this by having the current weight of virtue, to incentivize taking a paladin healer. In addition to that, it would have 10-20 hits per second for say 20-40k damage, to build into that warlock niche I specified above. The healer check could last for say 5-10 seconds.
Frequent small hits would easily outpace anything an OP could heal. You could have 10 million damage occuring over 1 second in 20k intervals if you wanted and absolutely nothing except flat reductions would help you.
This is kinda weird, since paladins heal for just as much as they shield. If we said that they shield for 200k, they would also heal for 200k. With that in mind, dps would've taken 0 damage. However, I don't know if you were referring to crits or not. If it was with 3 crits, then that's a little silly, since you're banking on a 12.5% chance just to survive for cleric, even if you were perfect. That would be straight up bad game design. Also, stones of health exist, and would let dps survive.
1. Drastically reduce the values of Paladins heals (not their shields), to the point where if hitpoints are missing, it is divinity inefficient for them to try to restore them.
Literally in the first post I made I addressed this. There is no reason it needs to remain this way, the heals can be mostly removed from the class without touching the shield, which further emphasizes the point that shields are paladin's thing.
There are other sources of damage mitigation in NW, too. Paladin sigil can give you 15% DR, Forgehammer of Gond at 50%, and one of paladin's daily can also give 10% DR, etc. And when you specifically balance around one specific class in order to make it shine, of course it's going to look good in your ultra-specific scenario. However, that's not what's in the game, and designing content like that is not good. I'll address that later in my post.
I know and since I was referring to multiplicative mitigation (not additive mitigation) it makes no difference. The devs can either design the piece of content assuming that this mitigation from other sources is in play and then balance the content with healers in mind around it, or assume it is not in play. For difficult content it is likely better to assume it is in play and for easier content it is probably better to assume it is not and you will end up with content that works just fine. Reason being because if you balance hard content assuming that people are using artifacts etc, then naturally the incoming damage values would be much higher to reflect this. Easier content is obviously designed with players who are either not using these items or do not have access to them, so its fine if players who are BiS have an easy time in it.
Ironic, considering you ignored stones of health and other forms of DR.
I did not ignore other forms of DR, because I was specifically referring to another layer of (multiplicative) mitigation and you will notice in every single calculation I did, I used multiplication, not addition. I also referred to it very consistently as a multiplicative reduction, not an additive one.
I ignored health stones because they should quite frankly be deleted from the game and never again see the light of day, as the post by @nevertwi so clearly illustrates:
Near BiS Paladins (200k power / 35% outgoing / avg lionheart weapon dmg) heal now on a target with full tacticals for
~44k heal + ~44k barrier on non crit
~75k heal + ~110k barrier on crit
with one shelter (group heal) costing 120 divinity. A crit and a non crit shelter make up for around 2 ticks of ToMM heatwaves. Using up the whole divinity bar (8 shelters) ends up for ~1m group healing /barriers. After that the pally can go afk / at will spamming for 40s to regain a full divinity bar. And it is not that there are no mechanics in between.
If everyone with 500k+ zariel gear takes a healthstone charge, that is half the divinity bar. And only 20s cd.
If everyone uses instead a potion and taking the group healing potion boon, they receive healing for ~350k, about 35% of the divinity bar.
And then there are insignia bonis ..
A healer is around another healthstone charge every 20s.
Btw to add to your comparison @nevertwi on a tank Paladin the feat Sheltering Light causes everyone to be healed for 50% of the value a tank gets healed for while under the effect of Shield of Faith, so if they activate SoF then use a health stone, since a tank has roughly twice the HP of DPS its equivalent to healing them all with another health stone. So there is another health stone every 60 seconds for everyone, given out freely by a tank.
Not every class is the same. Sure, the differences are not that big, but they're still there. Your changes really don't add much either, you essentially still are providing more EHP in barely unique ways, considering those concepts already exist. Warlock is changed into a barkshield + debuffs that already kinda exist through artifacts like Wyvern Knives and Swarm mount. Cleric is essentially just Astral Shield/Paladin sigil with your changes. Plus, everything else in the game is still there, so...
"There are barely any differences now, so lets remove all of them!" I know there are barely any differences now, which is why I don't want to remove them. Just because I didn't go into 20 pages of micro design to explain exactly how to make every class "feel unique" doesn't mean that in the process of giving them their niche, you couldn't do that. The fact that they have strengths and weaknesses in other areas makes it very easy to do that. For example, paladin using these concepts is very good at preventative shielding but very bad at reactively fixing things. SW needs to prioritize applying debuffs to enemies instead of directly focusing on allies and cleric is half way between reactive and preventative.
If people want 20 pages of micro design on a topic, I can do just that. I have done that before (it was 41 pages actually, the last time I did so), specifically with the intention of covering any potential issues before people raised them. What did people do? They complained I wrote too much.
I addressed this, not restating it. I am quite sure most people don't want that. And not to mention, making a different dungeon for every single style takes a ton of time and hard work. Content doesn't poof itself out of thin air, y'know.
I know it doesn't, but even if there is only 1 dungeon per mod, it is fine imo to cater to some niches in that mod and not all of them, so long as you don't cater to the same niches every single mod.
First of all, I never said NW encompassed too much. I said that's what you wanted. And clearly, I was right. Super specific dungeons for multiple super specific play styles. People don't play NW for the extreme skill based gameplay, they play it because they like the rpg elements, like the D&D theme, and are okay with the combat. Even endgame players want challenging content, but not super high-skill based gameplay. This isn't a fighting game or a team-based shooter, it's an MMORPG. I know NW is quite easy when compared to other games, because skill isn't a huge part of this game.
Expecting the bare minimum from a game should not be considered to be expecting too much. Expecting too much is expecting every module to be designed for you, or every dungeon to be designed for your class. I wasn't complaining when Infernal Citadel came out that it wasn't designed for me (although I did argue it failed to appeal well enough to the audience it was intended for).
I thought this was gonna be a video of some dps in ToMM/LoMM/IC/Zariel. Nope. It's just a wizard sitting in a stronghold doing rotations at a dummy. What did you expect? A game of osu? Did you want skill like a competitive SSBM match? And I'd love to see how that works when there are actual enemies and boss mechanics. NW is quite simple, but not always to that degree. Don't throw non sequiturs, please. None of your changes are going to show any skill whatsoever, and I never even brought up skill, so I don't see why you needed to show me that.
If you really want I could get someone to record themselves doing exactly that for you. Maybe you find it hard to believe but the order you press buttons in on most of the classes really don't matter, so binding every key to 1 button and then pressing that button will make the class perform just fine. It does exactly the same thing as what you would do normally, with just less buttons to press. Out of the remaining classes where the order does matter a little bit, even slight modifications to add in that tiny bit of order would achieve the same result.
Of course I know balance is mostly fine. Balance only really matters in endgame content. No one's gonna complain that warlock is too weak to do the Chult campaign. I just wanted to address some of the larger (not necessarily large) issues that exist right now. Although it is ironic you say this, considering you want to make some classes not be able to finish certain content (I know you said it shouldn't be flat out impossible for others, but with endgame content, it will be) not designed for them, just so you can have diversity.
Zariel and ToMM have been done with group compositions using all of the healers and ToMM has also been done using none of the healers. They are all viable, even there. Sure OP was better, but in no way are they not "viable." Quite frankly, I would rather have an unbalanced game with diverse classes (especially in the case when all of them work in all the content) than a balanced game where they are all the same.
Can we please stop arguing? Your ideas are extremely grand and good, but I'm just saying that they're unlikely to be added. Also, when you inherently believe that content should be tailored specifically to certain classes, there's nothing I can say, except that the devs don't really see it that way. You're not wrong for wanting that, but at that point it's 100% opinion, and there's nothing to say. Kythelion said it, face the reality of what NW is; those ideas aren't inherently wrong, it's just unrealistic right now. I really, truly don't mean to be rude here, but those kinds of ideas aren't going to make it.
When M16 was in beta, 1 of the reasons stated for removing most of the feats was that apparently, with whatever remained, they could not only balance the classes but they could make them distinct. I fully intend to hold them to that statement. And no, I won't change my opinions or not voice them for being "unrealistic" because if we keep on lowering our expectations, eventually we won't have any.
You may not like them, you may believe they will never happen (and this is most likely the case, I am not denying this), but even if there is a 0.0000001% chance that a big change could happen, I would rather argue for that 0.0000001% chance then settle for the dregs.
I checked my soulweaver ath the beginning of m19 preview and it was sort of ok, i checked it again now due to my guildies comments and omg, plus the nerfing to pally shield. Are you guys out of your mind???? this is m16 all over again, tomm would be unplayable again plus the added zariel now (idk except for some crazy ultra endgame party which is not even 0,1% of the playerbase, healers are all the same and boring af. You always say that you prepar things for 6 months on, yet you pull this disaster 5 days before m19 live????
Don't do it, postpone m19 launch before you HAMSTER it all up again
I checked my soulweaver ath the beginning of m19 preview and it was sort of ok, i checked it again now due to my guildies comments and omg, plus the nerfing to pally shield. Are you guys out of your mind???? this is m16 all over again, tomm would be unplayable again plus the added zariel now (idk except for some crazy ultra endgame party which is not even 0,1% of the playerbase, healers are all the same and boring af. You always say that you prepar things for 6 months on, yet you pull this disaster 5 days before m19 live????
Don't do it, postpone m19 launch before you HAMSTER it all up again
Don't think they will, and more since there are more ppl playing due the quarentine. I will keep playing my Soulweaver, put too much effort on it, but i can see in my future plenty of kicks from pugs due to heals (mostly cuz ALL my build is based around Life Bind and now i need to change nearly 87%-90%).
The meta it's just a guideline. And guidelines are boring.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
I don't normally talk on the forums but with the recent changes to the heals I wanted to speak up. To heal in the new mod is uninspiring. Pallys went from being exciting and a class I love, to a class that is there. the healing in the new mod does not flow well. I have been healing since the beginning starting with cleric and then paliy and have loved doing so there were a few mods were not so good. But this newest mod. Makes me dread healing. Yes I have been testing with groups on mimic. I know you are looking tward the future of the game but this makes a lot of healers I have talked to looking at other classes and moving away from much needed healing in the game. I just wanted to give my honest opinion on what I think.
I think instead of making huge walls of text, or making suggestions we need to get a breakdown from a dev. Why they made the change and what they actually want healing to be. Then suggestions and or changes that are in line with what they are looking for would be much more constructive.
@thefabricant you obviously have direct line to the devs due to you being in the closed preview and You are already a few steps ahead of us. Is it possible instead of making huge pages of suggestions would it be possible to just get a dev to comment on what they want and why.
Comments
But its better for the DPSs to focus on power, crti and Arm Pen and have shield than having 500hp + less stats and a warlock buffer.
Similarly to how we choose Artifacts to allow us to deal more damage under specific conditions what if class variety gave bonus %dmg and incoming/outgoing healing by 0.5%? If you get 5 different classes in your team, you get double bonus! It is that simple to fix class (dis)balance and everyone would be happy.
You got a [random]tank? 1% bonus dmg
You got a [random]healer? 1% bonus dmg
Is that a Warlock? 1% bonus dmg
A wild Barbarian? 1% bonus dmg
Is that a Ranger? 1% bonus dmg
5 different classes with you? +2% dmg per class!
A variety of 5 classes in total would lead to 10% bonus dmg in a trial followed by 5% Incoming/Outgoing healing. And these classes do not even have to be huge dmg dealers, can go with debuff artis. Still beneficial in trials.
This damage boost should be very small, but enough to allow people to run content as they choose.
That way even if someone plays a sub-optimal class, their very presence would be beneficial for the party, however slightly...
To combat elitism and actually help people learn the game, at least slightly, if there is a variety of classes in the party, loot table becomes better. Newer the player's account, better the loot for the entire party. Account should be at least 2-3 months old, in order to prevent griefing/exploits. This gives newbies enough time to finish few campaigns, get some gear maybe and prepare for dungeons all whilst watching others how they play and beat harder content.
This would allow people to constantly help new players around and teach them to be better in this game. Doesn't have to be a huge benefit, but having one newbie in the team should give a bonus to people. Like, 2 Scrolls of Mass Life as a guaranteed drop or bonus gold or bonus RP. We already got that concept for Master Expedition and it works like a charm.
It's easy, it's not breaking the game either.
Were Paladins overperforming? - Yea
Did they deserve to be punched in the dust till they bleed their eyes out? - No
It's always either nerf 2% or nerf 70%, for two years. Like, don't do that guys.
You're not really going to make ppl invest in other classes by doing so.
- If paladin helps more for smaller hp targets, he will still be optimal because its the low hp dps who need the shield, not the beefy tanks. Cleric would be entirely outclassed in this way.
- If the 1mill hp is referring to dps who have 1 mill hp, than who's to say paladin will be stuck at healing ~200k forever? If dps are building more HP, than it's only reasonable to assume that paladins are also getting much, much more power, and in that case, would heal for much more than 400k, also outclassing cleric. An example: the hit is going to do 1.2mill (already accounting for def) to 1mill hp targets. Cleric would reduce that to 840k. If a paladin healed for even 400k, (which doesn't seem unreasonable considering the context for this), they would still be better than a cleric, by a margin of about 40k hp.
- This is also extremely biased towards lategame content, and would essentially wipe other healers off the map if it was pushed too far. With the current way the game is set up, there is a cap on how much power you can build, because there is a max rank for empowereds/radiants/insignias/companions. Pushing that far into endgame is a little unreasonable right now, as even 1 mill hp is hard for tanks, and nonsensical for dps.
Some boss attacks force players to spread out and not overlap. If cleric can't apply damage reduction during those attacks, it would be very bad. Paladin's shield would be much more convenient and better at that. The more mechanics you add on, the more nightmare-ish it becomes to balance. Given what the community thinks of balance right now, it's best not to go down that path. And if they do end up balancing around cleric and paladin, then warlock will get tossed aside unless they have their own mechanic that increases effective hp. Warlock as a debuffer that increases dps will not be viable then. Honestly, in my opinion, this is a bad, bad idea. Ideally, all classes should be picked equally for all content. No one wants to be excluded from some content simply because their class is bad. Letting them be the best pick in certain content is never going to make up for that. I addressed this too.- For example, it would be unholy of Cryptic to make LoMM accessible to only classes that deal good AoE dmg, and make IC for only single-target classes. Everyone wants to be able to do all of the content, and making another character takes a ton of time and investment.
- If you were talking about inside a single dungeon, than it would still be unfun to be useless during some parts of the dungeon. It would feel awkward if you were getting out-dps'd by 2x despite having equal gear and skill. This is why people already dislike how much stronger Arbiter is than other dps, and they're not even better by such a large margin as
I really don't like this. It's like in a game of boats, surfboards, and jetskis, you ask for a minivan. It's just a wild request that restricts the game by, funnily enough, forcing it to encompass too much. It's not fun when you're playing rock-paper-scissors and someone pulls out gun. Similarities aren't necessarily bad. However, having a game where you can't even play half of it because you didn't choose the right class is not fun.Worried how finding the right targets with TAB powers will be.
Healing over Time is ideal way to deal with sustained damage
Direct Healing is to deal with burst damage.
Shields is what's now is used to avoid attacks that else would 1 shot people.
To big change for now but could change so shields Only worked on the first attack that hit target for more than 25% of damage
A delayed heal trigged by massive damage.
This kind of approach has the following advantages:
Lets say the paladin casts a shield before each hit, but using my design specifications from above, they are unable to heal much lost hp (lets say they can heal ~50k after each hit). Result:
In contrast, now lets have a healer who cannot provide shield, but can mitigate ~30% of the incoming damage and heal for lets say 200k HP per heal. Result:
Even though the cleric "shielded" less damage with their multiplicative mitigation, because they were able to restore hp in the interim, in this scenario they were the better healer. The point of the scenario was to illustrate that there were various break points at which 1 is better than the other and like I illustrate above, this is true not just for tanks but also for dps. It all depends on how you build encounters. Obviously, this means that when designing boss fights you need to take into account the abilities of various different classes. You could for example design a boss attack in a 10 man raid which has a base damage equal to 250% of the player's HP, instead of a fixed damage value. With your DPS who have 500k hp, this would deal 625k damage after mitigation and both the OP's shield and multiplicative mitigation could reduce this to a survivable level. For a tank however, the OP's shield would not save them but multiplicative mitigation would.
If you do not view changes in a vacuum and instead look at the broader picture you will see it is possible to make shields function just fine, as well as other class roles. It is not, I am using late game content for my examples because its the only content in the game that currently really has "stat requirements" to speak of, but you can do the same thing when designing mid game content. Say you are designing a 5 man dungeon intended for a player round about 20k item level. Say you decide, from your metrics, that a player of that item level who is playing a dps could reasonably survive a hit for 300k after mitigation, either from a combination of healer+gear, or just gear on its own. You then use that as your reference point when tuning that kind of content. Does it matter that a player who is completely bis would enter there and facestomp it? Not really no, the content wasn't designed to be challenging to them in the first place. And as far as I can tell, all the mechanics in the game which currently require you to spread rather than overlap can be survived without either shields or multiplicative mitigation, which is good, because they shouldn't require additional mechanics to live aside from just HP in the first place. When you die to those mechanics, its when you do not spread, which is intended. What I think is if you look at how mind numbingly boring the classes are right now, how they essentially all boil down to just spamming 1 button and you can literally macro the gameplay of the entire class down to a single key, is that if you remove anything else from the classes for the sake of "balance" then there will be nothing left to remove. I would rather they attempt (and possibly fail) to balance diverse classes, then succeed at turning this game into checkers, where all the units are the same, play the same and have nothing to distinguish them. In my opinion its fine for classes to be bad in 1 piece of content, so long as there is some other piece of content they are good in. Example:
The result of doing this should be pretty obvious, the 3 healers all have "the same amount of content" and because that content is designed specifically for their class to feel good in it, they should have more fun running it as well. I know you are going to say, "but now the dps and tanks run more content than the healers" and I know, but this is just for the sake of the example. I could make an example where you split classes evenly between a set number of dungeons, but that would make my post unnecessarily long (and its already long as is) and I am sure you can see how you can extrapolate this idea to all of the classes instead of just the healers.
Now, I am not suggesting you make it flat out impossible for the other classes to run that piece of content, but it is fine if it is more difficult for them, because that content was designed around a different class in the first place.
However, even if you don't design specific pieces of content for specific classes, you can still design content in a way such that the different healers all have a chance to "excel" and I will illustrate this by modifying the design of the Zariel for you hypothetically to show how it would work.
- Phase 1 (sort of a warmup)
- Phase 2 (2 demons dps check)
- Phase 3 (the "main coarse")
- Phase 4 (the 2 angels dps check)
- Phase 5 (Zariel seems pretty tired and doesn't really do much)
Lets say you added 2 more phases before phase 1, in the new first phase the current Weight of Virtue is replaced with a new Weight of Virtue which deals substantially less damage and can be healed by all 3 healers. At the start of the new 2nd phase, the floor of the arena is divided into 3 differently coloured sections like so:Inside each of the 3 sections there is a "totem pole" which is charging up and the dps need to destroy 1 of the 3 of them. After 10 seconds, a barrier would be erected along the red lines, preventing people from moving between the sections. The dps would have 30 seconds in whichever section the group picked to destroy their chosen totem. The phase would start with the boss saying something like, "Face divine justice, face divine wrath and face divine fury!" with the boss pointing at 1 totem for each dialogue line (wrath being 1 totem, justice being another totem and fury being the last totem).
Now, here is the catch:
- If they pick the "Cleric" totem, then the healer check will favor a class combination of warlock and paladin. It would do this by having the current weight of virtue, to incentivize taking a paladin healer. In addition to that, it would have 10-20 hits per second for say 20-40k damage, to build into that warlock niche I specified above. The healer check could last for say 5-10 seconds.
- If they pick the "Warlock" totem, then the healer check would favor a class combination of paladin and cleric. It would do this by having the current "Weight of Virtue" check interspersed with the cleric check I illustrated above, where you have multiple hits for semi high damage values.
- If they pick the "Paladin" totem, then the healer check would favor a class combination of cleric and warlock. It would do this by having multiple hits for semi high damage values as well as lots of small hits, as I explained in point 1.
In essence, by picking a totem, they are picking which mechanic they don't want to face and disabling it. During the check itself, the healers will have to outheal the 2 mechanics which they have chosen to deal with continuously while the dps beats down the totem. If they don't manage within a 30 second window, everyone wipes. After the group has successfully beat this phase, in all of the remaining phases whenever the boss would normally cast weight of virtue, it instead uses the healer check which the group has chosen to deal with.And by making this small adjustment, you have not only made the fight more interesting, you have tailored it towards all 3 healer niches while making very limited adjustments to the fight itself.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/666779963470512128/698669424189636658/VID_20200412_020018.mp4
It wouldn't take me much effort to make a bind like that for other classes either. NW is the game where all the classes do pretty much the same thing. Don't act like its deep or complicated, it isn't. With the sole exception of Arbiter, there are tablespoons with more depth than the classes in NW currently. But no, the classes should definitely be restricted even more because clearly there is too much depth to the current system, rather than trying to actually make things work.
And funnily enough, whilst there is an issue with balance, the issue is nowhere near as big as you make it out to be. All the healers do work in all the pieces of content. One of them is better than the others sure, but its not like if you don't take that specific 1 class, you cannot finish the content.
Soulstorm is almost invisible. In a fight you won't see it at all and ppl would almost never know where to stand.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
I hope the dev team look at them, and put some serious consideration into them. It's a bit late now for them to implement them into this mod, but I think they could make all three healing spec's viable, different, fun to play, but also rather than a case of "oh, we need to run with a pally and then either a warlock and a cleric", it would be a case of "we need two different class of healers".
I miss the old AA, the way the damage mitigation of it worked, (I also miss the power share, but lets face it, we're never going back to that), I'd love to see something like that back again, but maybe as an encounter power, so that we can compete with the pally's. I even mentioned it earlier in this thread.
Co-Guild Leader
Ghost Templars L20
Alliance: Tyrs Paladium
Main: Cleric (Heals|DPS)
Alt: Warlock
Look at kythelion's post, that's all that needs to be said. First of all, I never said NW encompassed too much. I said that's what you wanted. And clearly, I was right. Super specific dungeons for multiple super specific play styles.
People don't play NW for the extreme skill based gameplay, they play it because they like the rpg elements, like the D&D theme, and are okay with the combat. Even endgame players want challenging content, but not super high-skill based gameplay. This isn't a fighting game or a team-based shooter, it's an MMORPG. I know NW is quite easy when compared to other games, because skill isn't a huge part of this game. I thought this was gonna be a video of some dps in ToMM/LoMM/IC/Zariel. Nope. It's just a wizard sitting in a stronghold doing rotations at a dummy. What did you expect? A game of osu? Did you want skill like a competitive SSBM match? And I'd love to see how that works when there are actual enemies and boss mechanics. NW is quite simple, but not always to that degree. Don't throw non sequiturs, please. None of your changes are going to show any skill whatsoever, and I never even brought up skill, so I don't see why you needed to show me that. Of course I know balance is mostly fine. Balance only really matters in endgame content. No one's gonna complain that warlock is too weak to do the Chult campaign. I just wanted to address some of the larger (not necessarily large) issues that exist right now. Although it is ironic you say this, considering you want to make some classes not be able to finish certain content (I know you said it shouldn't be flat out impossible for others, but with endgame content, it will be) not designed for them, just so you can have diversity.
Can we please stop arguing? Your ideas are extremely grand and good, but I'm just saying that they're unlikely to be added. Also, when you inherently believe that content should be tailored specifically to certain classes, there's nothing I can say, except that the devs don't really see it that way. You're not wrong for wanting that, but at that point it's 100% opinion, and there's nothing to say. Kythelion said it, face the reality of what NW is; those ideas aren't inherently wrong, it's just unrealistic right now. I really, truly don't mean to be rude here, but those kinds of ideas aren't going to make it.
-the shield is big (no more than 100%), after x sec you lose the shield
-after you lose the shield you take half the damage the shield shielded for you
-if you reapply the shield before it expire you will still take the half damage forced on the red hp bar under the shield.
here you have big shield that help survive big hit, but need a good healer to keep ppl alive.
if needed you could make it a feat:
1-you make big shield but when they expire ppl will take half shielded damage, the shield will not heal and last for 6-7sec
2-you can shield up to a%, and every 1 sec part of the shield is used to heal, the shield last 3-4 sec.
on choice 1 the shield willl not heal, so the paladin need at least 1 power that doesn't put up a shield (so that this can work nice in 5 ppl content)
for cleric and warlock i suggested to increase the damage reduction, and decrease outgoing damage in an early post, the power i sudgester to use them on was divine glow on cleric (with the old graphic effect, i need that graphic effect, i loved it) and the curse on warlock (you can apply curse with arrowstorm (i think is the name, the green healing windy thing) so easy to keep on mob encounter and on boss)
while divine glow is bound to a cooldown (it could be lowered so that it match or is a bit bigger that the duration effect if needed).
Near BiS Paladins (200k power / 35% outgoing / avg lionheart weapon dmg) heal now on a target with full tacticals for
- ~44k heal + ~44k barrier on non crit
- ~75k heal + ~110k barrier on crit
with one shelter (group heal) costing 120 divinity.A crit and a non crit shelter make up for around 2 ticks of ToMM heatwaves.
Using up the whole divinity bar (8 shelters) ends up for ~1m group healing /barriers. After that the pally can go afk / at will spamming for 40s to regain a full divinity bar. And it is not that there are no mechanics in between.
- If everyone with 500k+ zariel gear takes a healthstone charge, that is half the divinity bar. And only 20s cd.
- If everyone uses instead a potion and taking the group healing potion boon, they receive healing for ~350k, about 35% of the divinity bar.
- And then there are insignia bonis ..
A healer is around another healthstone charge every 20s.Paladin Thoughts & Suggestions
Impactful Shields: Give the Paladin the ability to shield about 300k-400k on a BiS setup. However this adding of the shield power does not actually heal the target when applied and costs about 250-500 divinity. This shield does not block all the damage when you take a hit, just 50% of the incoming damage is blocked and the rest gets through to your Hp, much like Unyielding Champion works on the Justicar. Another option would be to also have this shield drain away much like the Bloodcrystal raven skull artifact does with it's shield. and thus making the timing of these shield somewhat important. Of course you would need to make adjustments to the damage of certain mechanic with which you want to be only survivable with this Shield.Healer Balance: So, you would say, "this doesn't balance the paladin healer with the other healers!". No it does not, it just puts the paladin in a whole different category. They don't actually heal you, other than perhaps on an at-will and the daily sanctuary. Just prevent you from getting one shot from certain mechanics
At-Wills: Since the Paladin Healer (Shielder) is only really in a party to give those nice and full shields equally to everyone, with Critical Touch, I suggest changing the Feat back to how it was originally. It makes our damage at-will have a purpose and give us the feeling that we are always doing something in combat, grinding for that critical touch proc, and not just standing afk to regenerate our divinity back, like it is currently. If you reverted back to the original Critical Touch, and thus having it only proc with Divine Touch, I think that would be a good thing as long as it got an increase in its division floor magnitude.
Cure Wounds: Consider reducing the divinity cost and magnitude of Cure Wounds, so we can use it to grind critical touch. I feel reducing it back to it's original form would suffice. 10 divinity cost with a low heal magnitude.
Prayer of Opportunity: The old version of Prayer of Opportunity also gave us a purpose to use our at-wills, since it could proc while using them. In it's current form it is nice. But with my suggestions of the ability to create bigger shields without a heal and Prayer of Opportunity having a 20% chance. Consider giving us an option to proc this easier, with perhaps a cheaper Cure Wounds.
I believe it needs a longer duration once it procs, or that the effect won't expire while channeling your Hand of Divinity. Since it can only proc from a healing encounter, I generally don't have to actually heal for at least 5-10s after it procs. And when I actually do decide to use it for the free cast, when I need to heal, I just expires while I'm Channeling my Hand of Divinity and I end up using the Divinity anyway.
Divine Touch: I like the thought how it could be more versatile, but it's just not, with a floor magnitude of 120, especially in a 10 man trial. Buff it to 400 and I'd probably use it as my primary. But as of now, give me five encounter power slots, and it'll be my fifth, with bond of virtue as my fourth. We currently can't do without scared weapon and circle of divinity for divinity regeneration, and with Sheltering Light as the best aoe heal, we can only take it as our only and primary heal.
Hand of Divinity: I would love for it to have the ability to instantly cast for a big heal. The only time you really want to heal a tank is when they are getting low on Hp, otherwise you might just waste a load of resources healing the Hp that they could just regenerate overtime. The Lay on Hands Daily is a perfect example on a very good instant heal for a tank. You want to be able to just hit one button, and bam! a big heal and you prevent the tank from dying. Currently it's magnitude is too low that I would need multiple casts to heal a tank sufficiently, and thus with casting it multiple times your just wasting the shield you created on the previous heal. So I suggest, definitely increase the magnitude to at least 1,500 or even 500 more. I would prefer if it had a higher magnitude and didn't give a shield. Especially since I need to cast divine Shelter to protect the Dps anyway and it will just override the shield I just gave the tank.
Warlock Suggestions
In order for the Paladin to not be the only one who can perform this role, give the Warlock the ability to give temporary Hp (much like Shield, just yellow) and they also have the ability to stack this temporary Hp. One stack being about 25%-50% of the shield a paladin gives, depending on the cost per stack. This ability will not heal the target and the temporary Hp will block similarly just 50% of the incoming damage, but perhaps if temporary Hp is stacked on a target, a stack will expire after you get hit, unless the stack was already used to block the hit, but if it was a small hit it would still expire that stack of temporary Hp. Making timing crucial here, but they will still be just as potent.This ability of the Warlock being able to give Temporary Hp would just be replacing the feat Hellpact. Leave it have the Feypact feat, so it can compete with the Cleric at actual healing.
The Cleric
Well, other than perhaps buffing it's ability to actually heal, I see it just fine as being the best actual healer. With shields and temp hp only blocking 50% of incoming damage and the application of them not healing, you will play a vital role in keeping the party alive through, continuous healing.I dont know if devs have thought on this: after these enormous nerfs many many people will fail in dungeons the did easily before and they will blame the healers.
Yeah, top 1% will find a way probably, running without healers or something. But rest of the people who do randoms and campaigns mostly, the majority of the people, will be hit very very hard by this.
And people dont like to see that they cant do now what was easy yesterday. Thats exactly the opposite of what people want to feel.
When i put the pictures of how hard to see is Soulstorm (more if there are enemies or PoP) i realized that ppl won't stand in it even if visible cuz latest content is "move around to not die!".
Feedback
Pillar of Power in my honest opinion is just sad. Sad buffs and has the one mechanic that latest content don't allow: "Move around or die", with the exception of the Worm in Lomm.. But even then, Soul Barrier should do the trick.
Change Pillar of Power into an active aura (yes, active as in "only disapear if you get CC or turn it off) around the warlock (around 60'-100'), this way we can move around with it and follow the dps/tank without slowing down the peace.
Soulstorm could synergice (sorry if its misspelled) with it and instead of placing it on the ground it will spin inside the new Pillar of Power. Duration and Heal tics not changed.
For more variety you could change a feat or class feature to make that more powers synergice with it, like:
BoVa: Spin around the new PoP and deal less dmg but increase Dmg Res.
Infernal Barrier: Applies shield to everyone inside the circle. Cost 30-40 Soulweave per objective.
Warlocks Bargain: Sacrifice 10%-20% hp to make everyone in the circle deal more dmg for 6-10 seconds, cool down stay the same. Or, sacrifice 10%-20% hp to double the effects of PoP for 6-10 seconds.
Wraith's Shadow: is changed to aoe, deal less dmg the more enemies there are, applies debuff. This one could be the replacement for the Curses that you take out.
Vampiric Embrace: If there is no target, you lose 30% hp (can't be used if you have 30% or less hp left) but the heal given is increased (like a vampire lord giving its blood to its minions). This is mostly cuz since the cleanse its there, its kinda useless without a target.
Dreadtheft: You can't move while chaneling. While chaneling, all enemies inside PoP aura deals less dmg.
Soul Reconstruction: Heal everyone inside pop for 200-250 mag. Cost 70-100 Soulweave per second or 40-50 per ally healed.
You could make it so they doesn't stack with other Soulweaver. With this kinda kit, even if we don't heal like a DC or protect like a Pally, we would still have a place. And this way is more than just one build (in encounters at least) to play.
Making PoP a core encounter again and making it synergice with other powers it gives more choices to addapt to different situations or trials if there isn't a Pally or DC.
We can compensate our lack in heals with actuall support powers. The tooltip could even be "Your knowledge of the other realm is so big, you became the conduit. Now you are the pillar of power that helps your team." or something like that.
I know this changes won't happen cuz most ppl will think its "op" in papper and cuz it's really rare to see our feedback take really into account, but it would be cool if you could at least have it into consideration.
Have a lovely day.
With love, a Soulweaver.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
I ignored health stones because they should quite frankly be deleted from the game and never again see the light of day, as the post by @nevertwi so clearly illustrates:
Btw to add to your comparison @nevertwi on a tank Paladin the feat Sheltering Light causes everyone to be healed for 50% of the value a tank gets healed for while under the effect of Shield of Faith, so if they activate SoF then use a health stone, since a tank has roughly twice the HP of DPS its equivalent to healing them all with another health stone. So there is another health stone every 60 seconds for everyone, given out freely by a tank. "There are barely any differences now, so lets remove all of them!" I know there are barely any differences now, which is why I don't want to remove them. Just because I didn't go into 20 pages of micro design to explain exactly how to make every class "feel unique" doesn't mean that in the process of giving them their niche, you couldn't do that. The fact that they have strengths and weaknesses in other areas makes it very easy to do that. For example, paladin using these concepts is very good at preventative shielding but very bad at reactively fixing things. SW needs to prioritize applying debuffs to enemies instead of directly focusing on allies and cleric is half way between reactive and preventative.
If people want 20 pages of micro design on a topic, I can do just that. I have done that before (it was 41 pages actually, the last time I did so), specifically with the intention of covering any potential issues before people raised them. What did people do? They complained I wrote too much. I know it doesn't, but even if there is only 1 dungeon per mod, it is fine imo to cater to some niches in that mod and not all of them, so long as you don't cater to the same niches every single mod. Expecting the bare minimum from a game should not be considered to be expecting too much. Expecting too much is expecting every module to be designed for you, or every dungeon to be designed for your class. I wasn't complaining when Infernal Citadel came out that it wasn't designed for me (although I did argue it failed to appeal well enough to the audience it was intended for). If you really want I could get someone to record themselves doing exactly that for you. Maybe you find it hard to believe but the order you press buttons in on most of the classes really don't matter, so binding every key to 1 button and then pressing that button will make the class perform just fine. It does exactly the same thing as what you would do normally, with just less buttons to press. Out of the remaining classes where the order does matter a little bit, even slight modifications to add in that tiny bit of order would achieve the same result. Zariel and ToMM have been done with group compositions using all of the healers and ToMM has also been done using none of the healers. They are all viable, even there. Sure OP was better, but in no way are they not "viable." Quite frankly, I would rather have an unbalanced game with diverse classes (especially in the case when all of them work in all the content) than a balanced game where they are all the same.
When M16 was in beta, 1 of the reasons stated for removing most of the feats was that apparently, with whatever remained, they could not only balance the classes but they could make them distinct. I fully intend to hold them to that statement. And no, I won't change my opinions or not voice them for being "unrealistic" because if we keep on lowering our expectations, eventually we won't have any.
You may not like them, you may believe they will never happen (and this is most likely the case, I am not denying this), but even if there is a 0.0000001% chance that a big change could happen, I would rather argue for that 0.0000001% chance then settle for the dregs.
Don't do it, postpone m19 launch before you HAMSTER it all up again
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
@thefabricant you obviously have direct line to the devs due to you being in the closed preview and You are already a few steps ahead of us. Is it possible instead of making huge pages of suggestions would it be possible to just get a dev to comment on what they want and why.