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Suggestion: Tweak astral shield
oxydum
Member Posts: 37 Arc User
As a Healing Devoted Cleric I don't really have choicies when I want to set up my encounters. Astral Shield is just mandatory for keeping the party alive, and sun burst for generating more divine power.
Also we have very little control over its output. The only way I can influence my astral shield through gear and stats is by reducing its cooldown. It heals more than bastion of health or healing word while reducing the damage taken.
Now for the sake of balance and diversity, please nerf it and buff everything else.
What about turning healing word into an At-Will spell? Or giving us Encounters for dealing with parties that don't want to stick together? Like big fat single player heals.
Thanks for reading.
Also we have very little control over its output. The only way I can influence my astral shield through gear and stats is by reducing its cooldown. It heals more than bastion of health or healing word while reducing the damage taken.
Now for the sake of balance and diversity, please nerf it and buff everything else.
What about turning healing word into an At-Will spell? Or giving us Encounters for dealing with parties that don't want to stick together? Like big fat single player heals.
Thanks for reading.
Post edited by oxydum on
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Comments
But I am with you. Playing a DC as well and there is basically no way to bypass the use of AS once you play T2 dungeons. The rest of the abilities just can't keep the team alive on their own. So basically it is one slot that is always reserved (in dungeon play) for AS unless you play T1 dungeons with high GS parties, then you can skip this.
If clerics would heal significantly more while doing something else except for healing, that'd be awesome! Like doing damage and healing through it - that would be a viable replacement for astral shield.
the blue circle is for bads. I rarely use it on my cleric as a primary heal, except for harder fights or parties with bad players. However, the need to have it on your bar whether you end up using it or not is still there. If i could get my ap regen back up to pre-sunburst nerf levels I could probably get away with only using hallowed ground, but I can't, so AS stays.
I prefer the buff/debuff approach to clerics rather than heal bots, and nerfing our regen healing abilities and replacing them with single target direct healing would focus clerics to be heal bots rather than buff/debuffers.
Don't get me wrong, I'd like to use more other stuff as well. Most of the abilities are only useful in PVP (and even there not really equivalent to those of other classes). I'd like to see more debuffs or buffs as well. If the DC would have a 4 encounter ability then there would be much more diversity.
Random example off the top of my head.
Boon of Health: 12 second cooldown, 1.5second cast time. Heal party member for 2650-3500health. Boon of Health will arc out in a 10'radius adding 28%damage reduction to allies, leaving the temporary affect for 5 seconds.
Boon of Health in Divinity: 15 second cool down, instant cast. Heal party member for 3500-4500 health. Boon of health will arc out in a 15' radius adding 28%damage reduction to allies, leaving the temporary affect for 5 seconds, as well as adding a Heal Over Time affect equal to 35% of the heal.
Something like this would be absolutely amazing, and I believe you could completely get rid of Astral Shield. Not sure how it would be with both of these abilities, may be too powerful.
Thoughts?
I think when the new paragon paths comes out, there will be more choices like ou guys are saying.
If you want to move towards more direct healing then the direct heal needs to be more in the 10k heal range, before factoring in crit.
Was a start of an idea
The uptime on the DR would be more frequent then AS though if using both Divine mode and normal. I think it would be much, much better then Healing Word...in every way. Because of the amount of the initial heal. Healing Word is a HoT, not burst. This spell would be burst, and with high crit, could rock over 10k instant heals, and switching to Divine quickly and casting on same person, could potentially give someone from near death, to full health in a matter of a second. As well as, adding a very healthy HoT from divine mode depending on large the heal was. With enduring relief, mark of mending and healers lore slotted. This spell could be reaching the 15k+ instant heals.
I figured a 12 second cool down because of how powerful a spell like this would be. Most heal clerics have a disgusting amount of recovery, bringing it down to 8-9 second area, and cast time down to 1 second or less.
Maybe start with an 8 second cool down, bringing it down closer to 5 seconds CD. I would leave the cast time though. I believe this spell would be very powerful
Not to mention the benefit of the DR, and the ability to use 2 of them would be incredible. Cast it on a close member for DR for you and party, and cast it on someone in the distance, giving everyone spread out the benefit of DR
I don't think that it's necessary to buff all other stuff if they keep AS as it is. However, I think that AS shouldn't be a "must have". One way of achieving this very goal would require nerfing AS and consequently improving everything else.
With the current way of gaining Diving Power DCs will always have to hit thus there's little room for building a heal bot. However, if we could build our characters to fit our own playstile and preferences that would be great (i.e Buffing DCs, healbot DCs... even pure dps DCs and so on)
I understand what you are trying to say but what you typed is worse than healing word, which, btw is a direct heal + hot from divine mode.
The reason AS is mandatory for anything remotely challenging (as long you don't have a good tank) is it's DR bonus. The cleric has six ways of giving their allies DR, Foresight 6% (Increased via feat to a total of 11%), Power of oppression 5% (feat, and requires you to tag everything with Seal), Restoration mastery 5% (feat, and requires you to critically heal them), Astral Shield (24.5%), Hallowed Ground 30%, Divine Armor 30%. Of these options, only foresight and Astral shield are easily used and gives quite large amounts of DR easily.
Giving our allies migration is so much more important than actually healing them, healing is quite easy, have enough ways of making them survive via high DR, is not.
I don't care if we get new, burtstheals, AS is here to stay until we find another way of giving people 24.5% DR 66% of the time.
I think what the original intention of this thread was better direct healing spell so that we could use more encounter spells for things other than healing. Ie in bad groups you need healing word, sunburst, and astral shield just to keep up wIth the dudes standing in red. If clerics were better healers outright we could get away with less encounters dedicated to healing.
In good groups astral shield is used only for dr but in bad ones it is seen as the primary healing ability.
Giving our self-heal reduction, AS is one of our main sources of self-heals.