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Astral Shield has been completely destroyed
zarchos
Member Posts: 47
Just a FOREWARNING Astral shield has been completely destroyed on the Preview/Test server go have a look for yourself and take a look at it's duration, it's really just abysmal now.
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Whether people realize it, o want to admit it, Astral Shield is the ONLY thing that is keeping the cleric from being <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> at their role in a group. If you don't believe me go do the last boss of Temple of the Spider without Astral Shield (assuming you get there in the first place). Those blade masters will shred your entire group apart between CW CC and you can't heal through it even if you wanted to. You NEED that damage reduction from AS.
Note: I am happy about the AS stacking nerf though.
so about 66-70% up time, with the usual cooldown from recovery.
It would be nice if there was a dev that actually played a cleric, and knew how they worked, wouldn't it?
I feel ya. At least I have a guardian fighter I can play, but these changes are likely to make clerics go extinct.
Fair enough. I had high hopes for this update. I feel VERY let down.
Nerf AS stacking. Ok fine. Thats sending the message that they dont want people running 2DC and standing in all the bad. Kewl I can deal since I like to solo heal anyway.
Nerf the duration on AS to 66% uptime. Thats sending the message that they want us to run 2DC to maintain AS uptime. WTF?
It like two different Devs were told to address the AS stacking issue, once came up with *no stacking* to counter 2DC, the other came up with *reduce the uptime*. Both would have worked as a counter to 2DC alone, although the uptime redux would have suited 2DC groups better. The memo's passed back were BOTH put in the patch notes. Just seems like over kill to me.
Stop the stacking seems to be the best option. People that wanna run 2DC will just have a wide area to work with (Over lapping circles) and people who wanna solo heal will have to bring thier A game to the table. The duration nerf + Stack nerf seems to be just too much, if it was intended as a way to counter 2DC it wont work .. now people will feel they HAVE to take 2DC to maintain AS uptime ... /boggle
It really feels like an attempt to enforce a 2 CW meta instead, in all honesty. If you can't have uptime of your shield/healing ability constantly, then the alternative is to constantly have control of the ludicrous number of mobs.
I can confirm that Righteousness still doesn't affect Shield and Forgemaster, so there's that.
Personally I wish they would just destroy the **** ability, Astral Shield is just too good or mandatory.
There's just too much passivity and no customization when it comes to Cleric in this game.
You pretty much HAVE to use shield and sunburst, and hallowed ground, and the same feat build, and astral seal etc.
And it's all basically passive healing and dmg reduction. Same goes for Cleanse and even our threat reduction, completely passive, the new Cleanse is terrible with a 20 second cooldown.
Considering it's an action rpg they need to make everything the cleric does more ACTIVE. Instead you just put everything on cooldown and run around in circles while the game does it's job for you.
Find it rather strange how they've gone about "fixing" the cleric issues, I am glad they've stopped the stacking, and I am glad they are actively looking at solving threat. (Threat is much better in groups!)
I wouldn't even mind astral shield having a large period of down time in all honesty, as long as they give us the tools to actually support our group in terms of keeping them alive. Buffing our healing skills would be a good start, fixing our feats to better support our "leader" role. Rather than such changes as making cleanse a 1/3 feat with silly over the top cool downs, it may as well be a 1/1 trait at this point and remove the +1 divine pip, and be replaced with something that is actually worth 3/3, perhaps it could be Healing skills cool downs are reduced by 10/15/20%.
I'll run some dungeons with guildies on the test shard over the weekend, expect me to come back and rant.
Threat wasn't even an issue for me on live shards. I never slotted Sooth. If you pug a lot, then I guess it's a fix. My static GF and CW do such a good job of keeping adds off of me, it's ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're fixing it for people that pug, but really, they're making way too many negative changes/ignoring the things that need to be fixed.
Have you had a chance to test threat? Mobs seem to completely ignore me until I do something.
EDIT: Disregard that.
It seems like they're mandating that we take double clerics into dungeons.
Why have the cooldowns for skills like bastion of health not been halved at least?
Don't even get me started on cleanse... might as well just afk at campfire in pvp now.
If those changes really are implemented, time to quit cleric. Then there'll be more threads on "where are all the clerics?".
I think any feedback should be posted on the "General" section of the forum, seeing as I've never seen a dev/mod post in this section, so it's kind of safe to assume they don't read anything posted here (if they did, they'd have fixed righteousness by now).
Regardless, I think we need more than a few hours of testing and build making before we all go "Chicken Little" here. Yes the old AS Build is dead, but it sounds like Linked Spirit is insane now. I think they are trying to push us away from using AS as a crutch to see what we can come up with. Personally I'm not throwing in the towel on the class, I like it. I'll rough the storm out we are the only healers in the game atm, so either we'll find a way to make it work or they'll hot fix us, or swap it before it goes live.
Regardless, I still think we need to do more testing before we start throwing hissy fits, reserve those for after a few days of testing, and Constructive Feedback.
40 dungeons are already giving me hell due to crazy aggro and lack of healing capabilities(Low up-time on FF, healing words just gives me tons of aggro)...i was just whining the other day of how i wish i had astral shield now since its probably only thing thats keeping Clerics PLAYABLE...dafuq.
Worst of all, They could at least BUFF up the other skills more in order to compensate the loss from Astral shield since we were relying on it a lot but noooo....its just MORE NERFs...
P.S sorry for my rant...just needed to get it out of my system.
Will more testing change the AS duration from ~10 seconds back to 20 seconds or even 15 seconds?
Can you honestly say that the cleric is NOT on net significantly weaker with these changes, particularly in PvP?
I don't need a few more days of testing to answer those questions.
I'm worried now and need encouragement to hit 60..
just share us the build after that LOL
I agree with you, with decrease time in AS combine cleanse only 20 sec per debuff I think adds in most dungeons need to be reduced too or devs is forgot that most adds attack in most dungeon are fill with debuff
AS was already broken overpowered anyway (its overpoweredness was just the only thing allowing us to actually do our jobs in the face of all of the other broken-in-a-bad-way class mechanics and threat).
I welcome AS not having 100% uptime. It puts more questions of tactical timing into the ability and puts some of the burden of the party's survival back onto people other than the cleric(s) and the CW(s).
Well..... sunburst is still there, doesn't heal very much although it's quite spammable.
If your party is dying because AS is on cd (which will now be 33% of the time), sunburst won't cover it.
Bastion of health has a ridiculous cd (double of sunburst), so that won't cover it either. This heal is your only other reliable AOE heal, along with sunburst. (and the AOE is huge, which will reliably cover all your party members).
Healing word? Really hard to target!
Forgemasters flame, requires targets to be standing beside the mob you cast it on. Also, when throwing it into a stack of mobs, it's near impossible to choose which one you throw it onto, and if the one you throw it onto dies quickly, there goes the heals
Astral seal? Running around in circles nonstop, you'd rather use the rare opportunity you get to cast something to throw out sunburst, since that at least gives you some heal (and nets excellent AP gain). Also, for you to gain healing, you'd have to hit the mob after with brand of the sun. That's 2 hits on mob, and in that time you'd likely to have died assuming astral shield ran out and is on cooldown. Still, it's possible to preemptively seal + brand as many mobs as you can before AS runs out.
On top of all that..... you still have the -40% self heal, and that -40% self heal now extends to include that from Astral shield (because now it's a heal over time as opposed to regeneration), which it didn't before.
Go figure.
There might be a distinct possibility that there are possible builds not using astral shield, but more testing needed. Main problem is the super long cd on bastion of health.
PS: this is why I hate "balancing" class only take PvP basis without considering the PvE side
No.
The absolute lowest CD you will ever get on Astral Shield is 12 seconds, but that would require ALL rank 10 silvery and I'm not even sure that would get you 12 seconds.
7,951 recovery = 31.5%
21 Int = 11% (campfire needed)
24 Cha = 14% (campfire needed)
Total = 56.5% = 12.7 second CD on AS
You won't ever get it much lower than that.
i see, plus with no power the healing power which counted as HoT is at lowest too. it more and more like pushing the cleric to become a DoT striker rather than healer support