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DC Rework Discussion Points v1.2
vorphied
Member Posts: 1,870 Arc User
Revisiting this topic. Inspired by all of the discussion following the PvP patch, but not limited to PvP functionality.
1. Healing Depression stacking with Righteousness? With this level of handicap, we ought to have our own priority parking stickers.
2. Guardian of Faith: almost a year later and still in the running for most underwhelming Daily Power in the game. Make the damage/prone component a targeted AoE, and then it might be worth calling a Daily.
3. Feats (special mention for Heroic and Virtuous): Need to trim the fat. Half of these feats are so bad that they feel like false choices designed to encourage corrective respecs.
4. Anointed Army: Great idea, but power buff and immunity need to persist for a minimum duration to make it truly impactful, especially in PvE.
5. Prophecy of Doom: What's up with the ridiculously long casting animation? It's already not a popular choice. Maybe if it had its own epic theme music to go with the epically long wind-up?
6. Lance of Faith: Looks good on paper, but loses out to Sacred Flame in pretty much every way. No reason to use it.
7. Sooth (sic): What exactly is this for? No one is going to waste a class feature slot for this. If we can't get it changed to something useful, can we at least get the spelling fixed? Sooth is a word, but I'm pretty sure Soothe is what they were going for, here.
8. Hammer of Fate: Still waiting for this Daily to be made viable again after the nerf that pretty much no one asked for or thought was necessary, including players of other classes.
1. Healing Depression stacking with Righteousness? With this level of handicap, we ought to have our own priority parking stickers.
2. Guardian of Faith: almost a year later and still in the running for most underwhelming Daily Power in the game. Make the damage/prone component a targeted AoE, and then it might be worth calling a Daily.
3. Feats (special mention for Heroic and Virtuous): Need to trim the fat. Half of these feats are so bad that they feel like false choices designed to encourage corrective respecs.
4. Anointed Army: Great idea, but power buff and immunity need to persist for a minimum duration to make it truly impactful, especially in PvE.
5. Prophecy of Doom: What's up with the ridiculously long casting animation? It's already not a popular choice. Maybe if it had its own epic theme music to go with the epically long wind-up?
6. Lance of Faith: Looks good on paper, but loses out to Sacred Flame in pretty much every way. No reason to use it.
7. Sooth (sic): What exactly is this for? No one is going to waste a class feature slot for this. If we can't get it changed to something useful, can we at least get the spelling fixed? Sooth is a word, but I'm pretty sure Soothe is what they were going for, here.
8. Hammer of Fate: Still waiting for this Daily to be made viable again after the nerf that pretty much no one asked for or thought was necessary, including players of other classes.
Sacrilege - Warlock
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Post edited by vorphied on
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But simply cryptic's build for this game wouldn't allow this, as other games you will carry in 20-30 buttons to use for battles, having the small size we do have doesn't give enough room to rework that.
Hey, I ran a match with your DC a couple nights ago, its always fun to see people online who post here! You were superior to me in every way, but It was fun holding nodes together!
If they scaled back righteousness (the feat has no real use in PVE, who cares if you survive anything, we can do that already in pve landscape) and reworked half the feats we have I would be happy.
Ive never used prophecy of doom, never even when I went to test server, it just seems like some sort of random enounter that other games have for the JUST for FUN we are making this odd skill up so you can use a situational skill, which is fine , but to feat it, slot it seems like a waste to me.
I dont honestly know if cryptic has a actual plan for the DC, seems like it doesnt thats for sure, but the TR, GF can complain just as loudly, even with the GFs rework, it doesn't solve the games fundamental problems with them.
I resurrect the comprehensive list of gripes every now and then just in the hopes that it might draw attention to some longstanding issues. For all we know, there could be a number of improvements in the pipeline for Icewind Dale (one can hope!), but DCs have been in need of some fixes for a very long time. The fixes that allowed ArP and crit chance to apply to more powers were nice, but the problems go all the way down to the design of the class.
Healing needs to remain viable in PvP, false choices need to be worked out of the feat trees, and some Powers need serious love.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Exaltation does not provide immunity to TRs shocking execution
Nor dodge does. Btw now i feel like healing quite well in pvp (pug) with 25 points in faithful path and 22 str/wis, however when i met premades it is like cc/proned till the end so i wonder if i got some good teammates maybe i can heal better in pvp without any interruptions. Healing is nerfed but by balancing our stats and get the optimal healing boost to overcome HD (>50% bonus heals), we can heal too!! The nearer to 50% bonus heals, the better we heal~~ Still in progress and i will update my pvp healer guide in a month. As a healer, my target is profound virtuous set. (1/6 pieces atm)
A good list thank you.
I'm 95% PVE focused, but I'd love to see:
1) fixes to all bugged powers
2) full proccing of Repurpose Soul from all crits
3) powers/attacks using ArPen correctly
PoD is nice on big bosses but yes the animation is epic - too many of our attacks are slow and hugely telegraphed (awful for PVP)
How about a feat that synergises with life-steal to make sense of giving DCs such a weird stat on gear - heal your allies instead of yourself for a percentage kind of shtick.
The thing is people aren't used to us not being tanky anymore... so no one really "protects" DCs. So sad that we are semi-dependent now
You made my day!
But seriously, worst patch ever. They didnt even gave a respec token to DC. In fact they didnt even took 5 sec to think on how this patch would affect clerics.
Santa Claus --GF
Gargamel --CW
And yet it cost 76k AD to respec as they lower the zen price, still is a better option than none.
I'll be interested to see how it goes for you. Since the patch I've been advocating a more support/heal/buff/debuff type thing for hgih end premde PVP. I think that's where it could work because what you can offer to your team that way is greater than just some damage you can output with other spells. I would probably run DG/AS/and then something else, would have to test it out. I don't really PVP quite at this level yet though.
My only issue is you'll probably be kinda squishy without added HP etc and likely to be a focus for the other team. Since we heal ourselves 90% less we need other people to help protect us. So long to the days of solo tanking and acting as a good point holder. But then if you're in a premade the idea is it's more organized, there's a strategy and you're part of it.
I'd say this about the new pvp though, it feels a lot better to me, we get more options at least and I do think 90% healing reduction on ourselves is a bit steep on top of not really having much of an ability to play solo. I do understand how if you want to be a dedicated healer in pvp this is very frustrating. I would say to combat healing depressiong though you'd really only need to increase heals by about 30%. Due to tenacity most everybody will be somewhere around the 20% DR mark. That's the idea here is that you can't insta burst people down anymore or people who just become crazy tanky of dedicated healing on them. Healing depressiong > Teancity DR so you can't outheal damage but since the burst damage is less it's easier to heal up a little bit keeping yourself alive. Allowing for a greater use of skill and tactics. It seems to me the idea was to make fights, not endless or instantly over and allow for pvp mechanics to develop a little more. If you're being targeted by 3 people who aren't being attacked by somebody and can just put dmg into you then you are probably going to die which is somewhat logical
we cannot kill as quickly as other classes and we only have two dodges
tr's have stealth, cw's 3 teleports and multiple types of cc, gwf unstoppable, gf block... they took out one of our key survival mechanics leaving all the other classes somewhat intact (although cw's and gwf's took a slight hit)
Seems somewhat silly if I can't dmg a gwf b/c he has 40k+ hp and I don't do that much dmg but his crits still hit me for 5k each perhaps overtime wearing me down b/c I cannot heal enough to sustain the damage being taken. All I can do is keep my hp at the same level while a gwf threatening rushes me over and over before they finally decide to prone me or something...
If dc had burst damage for 5k currently perhaps I'd be ok with the changes but the fact is, even before the module the most we could hit was perhaps a 9k crit with chains now with crit surpression the most I've seen is 3k crit with chains on a very undergeared individual...
We should be able to outheal the damage of one person of we cannot deal equal damage to them...
1) This may need to change, but until a cleric manages to complete a profound PvP set with full tenacity accessories it remains to be seen just by how much Righteousness needs to be reworked.
2) Guardian of Faith actually peaked in PvP before the present changes. It was a high damage, single strike ability that worked very well against rogues and great weapon fighters - they couldn't just stealth/rage after getting hit thanks to the prone effect. You're not expected to kill stuff with it on your own, but with an ally it was easily one of our strongest dailies for small-scale (1, 2 vs 2) PvP battles and almost guaranteed a kill when used correctly. The heal was just icing.
Now with the nerf to heal and prone it's one of the worst dailies in the game. Especially considering that it was already a very poor PvE power to begin with.
3) There's nothing particularly bad about Virtuous, except perhaps Restoration Mastery. Everything else has a counterpart "meh" in other paragon paths, except perhaps Righteous. Righteous, for some reason, gets almost all the good stuff - only Righteous Flames is suspect, really. To balance this all the "meh" feats from Faithful/Virtuous should be improved/reworked.
4)
5) Indeed. Nevermind that it can't be dodged, given the current meta it needs to come out f-a-s-t-e-r.
6) Lance gives more AP on the third hit and more AP overall as long as you end with a third hit, especially if you stack recovery and +%AP. IIRC, the difference between casting times of Lance of Faith/Sacred Flame is a mere 0.3 seconds. If we're not counting scenarios where for some reason the cleric is standing still spamming LoF/SF then bottomline I guess is that it costs 1 less power point to max out and becomes even better when feated. It's basically something of a freebie for non-AC Virtuous clerics.
That said, I guess it does need to be more accessible to other paragons.
7) Sooth. Now useless given current meta, needs to be reworked.
8) Hammer is back (at least for the moment). Blame the healing/temp HP nerf, but a well-placed Hammer is now much more difficult to recover from. Sadly that damage is only going to go down as people become more geared, so ultimately I also think that it does need a buff at some point in the future.
Thanks for your well-considered feedback:)
My feedback on your feedback...
1) You do have a point about how this could change to some degree as more players acquire Profound equipment, but on the other hand, I suspect that there will be a point (if it isn't actually here already) where it's not worth the additional Tenacity gains to use the PvP store gear in lieu of otherwise superior items. My DC's total DR in PvP is already ridiculous with 1k+ Tenacity and AC spec, but that just highlights how ineffective most of his sustain powers have become since only the weakest DPS can be healed through even with Divinity spam. I'd frankly rather suffer higher damage with the ability to counter sustain through skillful gameplay than die oh-so-slowly to an insistent swarm of mosquitoes.
2) Guardian of Faith's only real selling point is that it's one of two Prone abilities DCs have, and the Prone is over in an eyeblink, especially now. It's not a useless power, but it's a really poor excuse for a Daily. The damage is weak, the heal is weak, and the animation is even slow on top of all that. Even before this patch, I considered it a poor choice. If I wanted a single target prone, I'd ask a GWF to do it for me and save me the AP for something a bit more useful.
6) Lance lacks even Sacred Flame's small benefit of adding temp HP, which synergizes with Deepstone Blessing. Not that I use either of those At-Wills anymore, but one should at least expect Lance to do significantly higher damage considering that it's the only At-Will without some kind of bell or whistle on it. That's why it makes my list.
8) I still find Hammer of Fate to be pathetic. True, sustain is down across the board, but for it to do any damage worth acknowledging, all three waves need to connect. With players being proned for less time, it's even more difficult to unload a full Hammer of Fate successfully. I love it when enemy DCs use Hammer of Fate, because that means they've blown the AP they might have used for a Hallowed Ground or something. The CC immunity and added DR are nice and all, but I think we've established that tankiness is even greater for the post-patch DC, and you're rooted and unable to perform other actions during the animation anyway, so the CC immunity is of debatable practical usefulness.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
Chains does not always trigger even when a person is standing still on it
Feytouched enchantment doesn't apply to a large majority of DC encounters, and yes, I'm talking about the offensive ones
I still use SF just for that amazing divinity gain:)
3k? weird since i can still crit for like 6k with my chains and outside of divinity, forgemasters flame is a nice 1k per tick on crit, daunting light is like 6-10k, hammer of fate hits 3k x 3 (although 1-2 usually get dodged).
i can kill wizards easily in 1 vs 1 if they don't spam stuns on me and some hunters occasionally, but the rest i won't reliably beat in a 1 vs 1 fight and that is fine since i focus on hitting multiple targets with brand of the sun and aoes.
once i almost ended a match with the most kills, but the enemy team decided to focus-fire me down which ruined the best score i will ever have. normally though, it's like me with 70% of the kills of the person on the team with the most kills (10 kills for me vs 14 for them). other times my score completely sucks because i get focused just for being a cleric even if i don't heal or i am dealing with a perma-rogue frequently.
You don't want righteousness removed from pve right? That's what makes tanks required. Because when you have heals on allies healing you (like, healing word or exaltation), it's a bit too much. If you really insist on making clerics immortal in pvp (hello, 20k crit healing words), removing righteousness is a step in the right direction. Maybe making it 20% instead of 40% in pvp only would make everyone happy, because, as I said, when you heal others a lot you heal yourself even more in the process.
Actually it used to be good before the patch. A single target prone hitting for 10-15k (crit) and healing for 2k wasn't that bad, but you had to stack power to insane levels. Now that the prone has been made irrelevant in pvp (way too short), the heal effect could use some love. Compared to the game breaking Emblem of Seldarine, healing up to 50k per use (sad but true) because the heals have no internal cooldown, Guardian of faith is a pathetic heal, even though it's the only daily healing spell we have, not counting feating hallowed ground.
Yeah, virtuous doesn't seem right at all. All we have in faithful is either better or easier to use, with better synergies.
What's wrong with this one? Ah, it's long. It's not a popular choice because it's a single target effect, no debuff is worth it if it's not aoe.
It's a levelling spell, and when you're level 60, you cry because you've spent 3 points into it, and feel forced to use a respec token.
Just one point to add:
I don't care if Righteousness gets removed from PvE or not, and it frankly has nothing to do with tanks being necessary or not. Completely unrelated issues.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
This just comes across as a complete apologists post for a class with significant issues.
Righteousness - needed to make tanks useful? If you want I can put a list here of games that need tanks where the healer doesn't have a 40% penalty. It would be a very long list.
Wanting Clerics to be immortal in pvp - now that did make me laugh. Clerics are so far off being immortal in the current pvp conditions they can be considered as being on life support before the match even starts.
Cry about spending points in useless skills? Now why do you possibly think people would be dissatisfied with having to do that. After all there's plenty of points to be thrown around so why not just waste a few for the sheer hell of it.
Alternatively they could actually revise some of these useless skills to make point allocation effective - but why bother when people like yourself seem quite happy with dumping points into the class's waste disposal bin, and mock other's comments about improving the class so this didn't happen.
As I said - complete apologists post, based on blind love for a class badly in need of improvement.
"Mod 6. Oh my f****** god. It gutted the game pure and simple. And what wasn't gutted was messed up by the poorly thought out new level cap and equip. The game never recovered from that atrocity".
..............not this one then.............
Plus it means that a healing word cast on an ally heals for 2.5x as many hitpoints (total) as one cast on yourself.
A simpler fix would simply have been to make HW and soothing "give you 60% of the heal when cast on allies", so you're encouraged to cast them on allies if you can, but if you really really need to spaff a HW into your own face, you can do so and get the full benefit. As it is, if you really need to heal yourself up you're better off just firing one off into an ally, since you're gonna get gimpy heals either way, but that way you get 2.5x as much total healing done (or more likely, just drink a potion, coz we have too much gold apparently?).
And astral seal, and the crit hits heals feat, and exaltation, and sun burst, and... All our heals actually have a direct extra benefit for us. It may be huge or small, righteousness just there to make sure the cleric plays the leader role and not the tank one, being completely immortal. It's kinda hard to die in pve and, to some extent, in pvp already, since clerics don't die faster than any other squishy class, it's actually the opposite, while providing strong support to the team, so, no righteousness just means clerics can fill several roles, which isn't the design philosophy the devs chose for the class.
Short of a dev coming here to discuss the current design philosophy behind DCs, there is no way that we can know what they are thinking on that topic. In fact, they've been extremely quiet overall when it comes to DCs, and they seem reluctant to discuss DC issues in any detail.
Righteousness still has absolutely nothing to do with tanking. Nothing. I don't understand why this is a point of discussion. DCs cannot effectively manage threat or ignore 99% of CC effects by lifting a shield. As you said, DCs already survive well in PvE, so that's not the issue, either. A DC's tanking ability is limited to A) rushing in first and eating a couple of hits before everything turns on the party and
You could remove Righteousness tomorrow, and no one doing end-game PvE would notice a difference. However, baby DCs and the casual or otherwise up-and-coming lvl 60 DCs would experience a significant improvement in their quality of life.
Just to drop a huge anvil on this point, let's drive it home one more time:
Righteousness has no impact on PvE tanking; its presence or absence does nothing to change which roles a DC can effectively play. Whether you heal yourself for 60% or 100%, you still lack the tools to fill other roles.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
YES. This basically sums up all of my feelings on the matter.
Kind of hard to die in PVP? are you serious? I can get my butt handed to me by any hunter, cw, gwf, or gf 1v1. And I'm not bad at what I do, either. Before the healing depression debuff I was kicking total butt.