non divine sun burst cc's target that are suppose to be cc immune. it also controls guardian fighters that i guarding.
if this is intended then i can understand
So they added all the extra add-on's from the feats to make these healing spells effective. But it really falls far short of what the DC was and what they are making him. Half of the healing encounters is gone, and replace with the healing encounters the DC didn't want to use in the 1st place because it was never really any good, so now they are forcing us to play with these halve.... healing encounters.
There is only one conclusion to all these changes that makes sense to me, they have to nerf the DC healing in a way to make way for an
additional healer like a Paladin/Monk or what ever class so that when they bring it out that class can also contribute to the healing aspect of classes.
They've been converted into feats. Cleansing Fire means as long as you're attacking (which you should be to build divinity) you'll have a free AOE heal, Shield of the Divine and Test of Faith will just heal people by themselves. Also, with how quickly divinity now builds, soothing light looks a lot more viable.
So, my question is: WHY do you want to make cleric useless and worthless on PVE again? WHERE are any debuffs/dmg-buffs feats? WHY ARE ALL OF THEM REPLACED WITH HEALING buffs WHEN HEALING isn't needed but buffs ?!
Bear Your Sins = +10% damage to enemies affected by DoTs (and with Fire of the Gods your crits proc DoTs) Condemning Gaze = +15% damage to enemies for 15 seconds for every 5 encounters you use. With Divine Encounters not having a cooldown, this will be easier than it sounds.
Feedback: Walking speed I feel like I move at the speed of a myopathic exhausted turtle. By all means, increase at least slightly our base movement.
Should we be the slowest class ? Then that would (also) be because we have heavy armor. So I feel like we could use some more Armor Class if we are to remain slower (but please not THAT slow).
HR have 5 shifts, Cw have 3.5 shifts, TR now 3 shifts. And they class have heroic or other feats which increase regen stamina. Suggestion: Give DC feat (25% increase stamina regen) or shift reduce stamina cost to 30%(down from 50%)
P.S. Without Healing step and immunity from Exaltation, DC with 2 shifts will be die on arena.
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crewellMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 10Arc User
edited October 2014
I don't understand the need to rework Devoted Clerics as drastically as is being done. Why is there a whole new layer of mechanics being added? I don't see the need for this new empowered mechanic. The things that really need fixing to me are the following.
1: Our paragon feats are just terrible. I like that this is being addressed.
2. Leveling is a lot more difficult for a DC because the class is very reliant on encounter powers. To me having Divine mode cooldowns being separate from regular more solves a lot of problems with that.
3. One of our best gear sets is the tier 1 High Prophet set. Maybe redo one of the tier 2 sets to have similar 2 and 4 piece bonuses, o look at all cleric sets in general.
I don't think the whole empowered addition needs to be added. There is already going to be enough micromanagement going on trying to maintain both divine and regular versions of spells.
"we have made a prodigious overhaul to all Cleric Encounters, Feats, and Divinity itself to try and facilitate more active gameplay..."
Great... so you "fixed" a bunch of stuff no one cares about, nerf our best spell (AS), make another spell useless in PvE (sunburst), and totally fail to address ACTUAL player concerns (like heroic feats and at will damage)? WTG...
since so much development time has been wasted on this I'm sure its going to happen now regardless, so here is the one thing that MIGHT make me keep playing DC as my main after this:
Bug: Action Point Gain A lot of the encounters I was using (Healing Word, Divine Glow, Astral Shield, Daunting Light... um...) wern't generating AP on cast. Most didnt generate AP at all (which is a big problem for like divine glow and daunting light). =\ Before, even though AS wasnt an attack it still generated AP, but now even dev dauting light isnt doing anything. I know they don't generate dev now, but they dont seem to be generating anything, which makes using daily abilites super hard to charge.
Feedback: Burning Guidance without the heal from AS will be interested to see how that goes. Couldnt get a party to test. Also, very hard to keep track of Empowered. Some sort of symbol, stacking indicator or SOMETHING would be awesome so I can see which spells have empowered and how many stacks of it they have.
They gave a lot of improvements to the other non-popular encounters.. such as bastion of health. On the bright side, divine glow heals now...
But i agree what they did to div AS and FF is somewhat drastic... probably should at least make normal version do healing too since they are not as spammable... I guess we cant have it all..
OK I've already made it clear I don't like many of the changes and think the new mechanic is overly complex, but here is something positive to think about if truly feedback can result in changes.
We already (pre this nerf/re-balance) can heal areas pretty well, but what we can't do it shoot a big meaty single target heal to that one guy that is not on the pile (bc he is off killing ranged mobs or whatever). At least we can't do it without divinity cost and even then its not that great.
Regardless of whether this crazy complicated mechanic goes live, couldn't you give us some power to slot that lets us juice a big fast single target heal?
Why not? C-L-E-R-I-C... Healer right?
Granted I'm PvE centric but wouldn't this also make cleric a lot more viable in PvP? So they can counter focused dps?
I also think this is related to the lifesteal concerns. People need to itemize for lifesteal because they know there is no big heal coming to save them from a healer. The big saving heal doesn't exist, there is only regenerative heals in an area. so at that point, it makes sense to itemize for lifesteal to maximize self sufficiency. Strange for group play...
I don't know how bugged it is... I've only recently made a DO Faithful DC. The changes indicate to me that I'll be able to output a hell of a lot more healing than I'm seeing now. Granted, I haven't seen much healing since I've just been soloing stuff to level, but I did group up a few times for the regular dungeons... I tried the healing way, but found that I had better results while DPS-ing/(de)buffing. Once I manage to hit 60, I'll see what all the fuss is about, but as I said, the numbers and changes look appealing for the Faithful tree.
If anything, they're making people use less encounters now.
My situational primary aoe encounter Searing Light is nerfed in its aoe effect.
And they made Sunburst undesirable to use.
And making divinity fill by only at wills is good for pve. But horrible for pvp. As you cannot stay still long enough to get much of anything (cause everyone thats smart targets you first, meaning you cannot stand still for very long. Which is required for using you non divinity at will.. that charges your divinity)
Took the healing from forgemasters flame.
The healing from Astral Sheild
RUINED the primary use for Exhaltation
And encounters arent granting AP as they should currently.
If you take out the bugs in various things, I feel like my cleric is lesser and forced to go into a static generalized build/method of playing.
After analysing the changes a bit more I realised they are overall bad.
Divinity is the worst part of it. First, gaining it from at-wills only will make things things so much more difficult, especially in situations when you need to move all the time to avoid red and have only short time to cast anything. The necessity of spamming at-wills is especially painful because of their non-existend dmg.
Normal/divine/empowered - this is unecessary complicated and totally not needed. Bottom line: "if it is not broken, do not fix it", and divinity was not broken! In practice it'll make casting divine spells harder, and empowered will be probably cast less frequently than dailies.
Encounters: hm.. let's see... Sunburst killed, Forgemaster's was only good because of heals so now it is killed, Astral shield gutted, Daunting light nerfed (less dmg in divine mode- why devs, why? Do you have any idea how hard it is to hit anything with it in normal mode?), exaltation nerfed... So is any encounter improved? Hm... Chains of blazing light: " Damage is no longer reduced for hitting additional targets" - that's one little improvement. Divine glow: got some extra healing effect, which is meh. This power's biggest problem is a tiny radius - if the effect was party-wide, now that would mean something.
Paragon paths: Faithful: totally useless, mostly because you can't heal mobs to death, and my team doesn't need me for healing either. I cannot imagine why would anybody choose it.
Virtuous: It offers some dmg mitigation, which is good, but not good enough. Again, my team mates can heal themselves just fine, they don't need me for that.
Righteous: the only reasonable choice: some debuffs, and dmg buffs that should increase cleric's dmg, but I'm afraid it is not enough. Clerics need a huuge dmg increase (like, twice if not tripple as much as we do now)
Problems that were not adressed:
Righteousness - it simply should go away, there is exactly 0 reason for it to exist. I cannot understand why a healing class is suppose to have the worst self-healing of all.
Heroic feats: just need to be reworked. There is like 2 of them that do anything (the +3/6/9% hp one that every class have and the extra divinity one), the rest could not exist and nobody would see the difference. Something like +5/10/15% dmg for all at-wills or 2/4/6/8/10% reduced cooldowns for example.
Lack of CC immunity in any form: especially painful in pvp. How about adding this effect to Exaltation or/and some other encounter? How about removing "3 hits and over" from Anointed army? It's effect is short even without it.
Lack of dmg: even with the new virtuous path, DCs dmg will be much too low. Currently we do less dmg than a tank while being as squishy as a dps class. We either need some really good dps heroic feats or/and the base dmg of our spells (especially at-wills if we are forced to spam them even with encounters out of cooldowns now) significantly increased.
Well, almost nothing to add here
I'l try to sum it.
We can divide the main problems with DC class as
1) for PVP:
a) lack of dps
b) lack of anti-CC means
2) for PVE:
c) niche place left for clerics in groups because of the fact that almost everything a DC can do other classes eigher don need or can do even better (except buffing/debuffing - and even that is not always so taking into consideration other aspects)
Also we can add some notorious minor troubles with DC like the worst heroic feats of all existing classes but lets concentrate on the main problems.
So how r they being addressed now when the devs r presumably trying to turn their blind eye away from DC's poor condition for the 1st time?
Well as 4 PVP
a) dps is being addressed (how successfully is another matter, but at least they try)
b) lack of anti-CC means is NOT being addressed
c) on top of that we have a complication of divinity gain AND removal of healing step feat
Summary 4 PVP: the same poor condition as be4. Any possible gains in a) are nullified by c) while b) - which is the worst of all - stays as be4.
as 4 PVE - I hardly see how exactly the proposed changes address c) in meaningful way. Why a good group wants a DC now after this changes are implemented and cleric got some love? What exactly is BETTER now than before from other group members pov? Anybody?
Feedback: I also agree on the heroic feats on the DC. but its ALL the classes that could use that. An what about the ASTRAL SEAL? it stays the same right?
Also we can add some notorious minor troubles with DC like the worst heroic feats of all existing classes but lets concentrate on the main problems.
So how r they being addressed now when the devs r presumably trying to turn their blind eye away from DC's poor condition for the 1st time?
Well as 4 PVP
a) dps is being addressed (how successfully is another matter, but at least they try)
b) lack of anti-CC means is NOT being addressed
c) on top of that we have a complication of divinity gain AND removal of healing step feat
Summary 4 PVP: the same poor condition as be4. Any possible gains in a) are nullified by c) while b) - which is the worst of all - stays as be4.
as 4 PVE - I hardly see how exactly the proposed changes address c) in meaningful way. Why a good group wants a DC now after this changes are implemented and cleric got some love? What exactly is BETTER now than before from other group members pov? Anybody?
Dont forget to to consider the AP gain is somewhat nerfed too by :
1. removal AP gain in divine mode (especially hurts HW's major contribution to gain AP)
2. HG & DA disable AP gain while active
And with the FF healing gone.. good luck getting great success @ HE
Guys there's no need to pointlessly argue with eachother.
Clerics can be healers, buffers or do a bit of both. Clerics on live excel at doing a bit of both, that's why people like them. No cleric on live is only doing buffing, if he says he does he's a liar. I've yet to see a 16-18k DC not using astral seal or astral shield. And if he wasn't it would be his last run with me, because both spells are too good to be skipped.
The new design clearly improves healing and buffing to some extent (although the mitigation feats could be stronger, because virtous is by far the less appealing and weakest tree) but doesn't allow to do both anymore to the same level. In other words clerics will be better healers and better buffers but worse at doing a bit of everything. That's the new design philosophy, and it means one thing: gentlemancrush will have to do something about lifesteal or the cleric class will be flushed into the toilets. It's bound to happen if this rework goes live unchanged.
Not because clerics should be healer but because the huge loss in terms of mitigation and healing when picking the righteous tree makes the cleric too specialized in areas it has clearly not being designed for. Lack of AoE spells, long cooldowns, horribly long casting times - so yeah righteous clerics will do a nice amount of damage, will increase damage a bit more but what's the purpose, killing a rage drake 2s faster in lair of lostmauth? Killing lostmauth itself 15, 20s faster? Yeah, that's pointless.
When experienced players said clerics are buffers that's true, they are buffers but increasing the team's damage output is clearly NOT where the cleric shines. The cleric shines at reducing incoming damage and that's the element that should be emphasized IN ALL TREES and/or in more spells, unless the intent is to nuke lifesteal when this goes live. Break the spirit should be AoE. Bastion of health should provide some limited damage resistance, and clerics shouldn't have to go virtous for this. Astral shield should just give a flat DR increase instead of increasing character's DR by 30% - what's the point otherwise?
I think there should be a feat that improves chains from an immobilize to a stun. I think diogene0 has a point and it should be placed at tier 3 of virtous path
Is there an internal cooldown on the feat that gives you attack spells a healing effect ? i didnt have the patience to find out. More information on icd would be appreciated in tooltips.
Anointed action feat: currently improves damage after a daily. I think it would be interesting to change it to bonus effect on an empowered spell rather than a daily. It would make this feature more useful. I think it would give divine oracles sustained damage through the use of terrifying insight and give annointed champions better burst damage. As this feat is currently written, i would never use it. And i have tried running an ap generating glass cannon daily build. Fun, but far too specialized. maybe with the ap generating artifacts and armour its a more reliable build, but i would credit that with power creep.
exaltation, astral shield, hallowed ground and divine armour are just downright boring to cast at the moment. They are all doing just about the same thing atm, each to a different level of ability. Do we really need so many spells that do the same thing ? 2 of them are dailies, and we have so few of those. In the live incarnation of cleric, we can feat our dailies do to an additional effect, which gave them more character. Annointed army seems to be the only daily improvement feat that mad it into the new build on preview - and i would suggest that it because the dev's felt the spell was underpowered.
All of our dailies, except for flame strike, seem to be in this weird there, not there, state. we use them because they are there, not because they are useful. Currently, the only dailies i use are guardian of faith for its , flame strike for group damage, and its "stun", and annointed army for it protection and group burstyness
Please take another look at our dailies as i do not feel they fit very well with the planned power changes.
perhaps a simple interface change, for example exaltation's bubble is around the target to show he is getting the dr buff. Maybe it just feels like they are not doing anything.
Also Exaltation does not warrent such a long cooldown anymore without it divine immunity potential, it should be reduced down to 9 or 10 seconds. Make it just over double its up time to account for recovery. so if its a 5 second buff, it should have an 11 second recovery. I think you want for 50% uptime. or make it a longer duration buff. This is our "Divine Power" spell and it deserves its place on our loadout.
Dont forget to to consider the AP gain is somewhat nerfed too by :
1. removal AP gain in divine mode (especially hurts HW's major contribution to gain AP)
2. HG & DA disable AP gain while active
When experienced players said clerics are buffers that's true, they are buffers but increasing the team's damage output is clearly NOT where the cleric shines. The cleric shines at reducing incoming damage and that's the element that should be emphasized IN ALL TREES and/or in more spells, unless the intent is to nuke lifesteal when this goes live.
yep. mitigation - the 2d role after buff/debuff - got nerfed daylies - nerfed. as - nerfed. whats left - forsight? nerfed or gonna to be nerfed?
yep. mitigation - the 2d role after buff/debuff - got nerfed daylies - nerfed. as - nerfed. whats left - forsight? nerfed or gonna to be nerfed?
Mitigation is a buff. When you add 20% damage resistance to another character it's like increasing their effective hitpoints pool by 20%. That's what people mean when they say clerics are buffers. Damage increase spells and feats are mostly irrelevant outside of sustained fights (there used to be sustained fight, back when the devs made challenging content, but this is gone for now), and there's no such thing anymore, except a few boss fights maybe.
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crewellMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 10Arc User
edited October 2014
Here is my feedback (in a more structured format than I posted above which may have come off slightly as a rant)which I think is a much simpler class balancing change and less risky in terms of bugs and other issues that are likely to happen with the drastic changes posted originally.
1. Buff at-wills damage output by 50-75% to be on par with other classes. This will also make leveling a little less painful. DC is definitely the hardest leveling class I've played.
2. Instead of having separate cool downs for regular and divine mode encounters, lower encounter cool downs by approximately 25%.
3. Leave encounter spells that work well alone. Buff spells that are unused. For instance people use Astral Shield because it heals well and provide defense in a targeted area instantly. Bastion of Health might find more use if the base version was an instant big heal and the divine mode added on top of that such as it could temporarily weaken enemies in the effect.
4. Fix/find a better way to cast targeted heals. Healing ward (a probably exaltation) don't get used in groups because of this. Maybe it could be as simple as when they are cast it will automatically target the person in the group with the lowest health percentage remaining.
5. Feats definitely need adjusting. I just don't think the class needs two healing paths. How many higher GS DCs actually spec to heal? They don't because it's not needed. They spec to buff/debuff and do damage. We take healing feats because they are forced on us to get to an occasional good feat further down the tree. Why not make Virtuous be the healing tree, Righteous be a tree that buffs divine mode, and Righteous be the one for damage. That way we have a healer, buffer, and a damage tree.
6. Scrap empowered idea. There really is nothing wrong with the basic play style DCs have now. It takes a new DC player a while to learn how to use divine mode as is. Adding a third layer of complexity will likely turn more players away from the class instead of making it more appealing.
Bastion of Health still is far weaker than what the tooltip says. It says 10-12k, but it only heals that much when fully empowered and I have 1/3 of my health remaining.
Ok so i've tried running some group content (including a dungeon) with a righteous DC build. My conclusions aren't really positive. The DC is just a divine chains spammer class now. Once you're done with your 2 or 3 stacks of chains everything is dead, if it's not you your team cleared everything anyway. Empowerement is completely useless. Spam chains, stuff died in under 3s. Any other spell has a too long casting animation for the new cleric gameplay. And chains can almost wipe entire packs of mobs anyway.
No more tactical choices to do. No more fine class knowledge required, timing is not required, just spam chains, as long as you have this spell nothing else matters. That's all we have time to cast before the team is done with the NPCs anyway if you don't spam it, given the crazy amount of debuffs we can stack.
So yeah the new DC gameplay is just garbage in a team. I thought it would be great but casting times as they are on preview is just a killer for anything but spammable spells. For now it's just a stupid two keys to press berserker gameplay. By the time i was done collecting empowerement with divine chains to cast astral shield everything was dead or dying. What's the point?
Maybe the issue is that content is now clearly obsolete. We were 3 DCs too so debuffing was absolutely insane. It might be that, but it's all the content we have anyway. If these changes go live without significantly altering some key values and limiting the debuff stacking well my cleric will go on the shelve for sure, I didn't roll a support class to end up playing a GWF#2 spamming the only spell we have time to use before all the things died. OR 5 DCs party wiping entire rooms just faster than 5 overgeared CWs did in the past.
isnt that the entire point of taking righteous? To be a DPS?
altho i get what you're saying that the content is somewhat obsolete..
probably youre partying with high GS members.. thats why it's too easy?
Lacking a bit on info .. which dungeon, party gs.. etc
also, i heard the mobs @ preview are somewhat weaker than @live.. need confirmation
Bastion of Health still is far weaker than what the tooltip says. It says 10-12k, but it only heals that much when fully empowered and I have 1/3 of my health remaining.
the amount refers to the total amount it heals.. (with the REGEN)
isnt that the entire point of taking righteous? To be a DPS?
altho i get what you're saying that the content is somewhat obsolete..
probably youre partying with high GS members.. thats why it's too easy?
Lacking a bit on info .. which dungeon, party gs.. etc
also, i heard the mobs @ preview are somewhat weaker than @live.. need confirmation
There's a difference between being a dps and being a dps relying on ONE spell. There's also a difference between trying to play a support DC and ending up being a dps because you don't have the opportunity to cast any other spell given the horribly long casting times. Want to cast an empowered astral shield? nope, stuff is dead already. I'm sorry, cleric, your spell with the shortest animation you found wiped the entire dungeon already!
Note that I'm not saying chains should be nerfed (I must confess that my DC is a power/crit ***** having more offensive stats than most CWs on live), I'm merely stating that if casting times remain unchanged it's all DCs will have the opportunity to do: casting chains and then seeing that any other spell isn't required because their debuffs and damage are so insane that everything died. The damage+debuffs synergy is crazy. Fire of the gods + bear your sins, high crit stat, high prophet, medium damage aoe spells with 0s cooldown... That's madness.
I'd love to be able to cast something else but chains, unfortunately, I could fall asleep before I'm done casting anything else 3 times, and the team will be heading to the next group of npcs already.
Edit: note that my first impression could be because there's clearly an issue (the one i've reported two days ago) with debuffs. I've had 70k crit chains and the TR was reporting 30k at-will hits...
CON :
* Divine version doesnt give AP anymore, resulting substantial lost in AP gain compared to current live version.. mind you, HW + Divine Fortune is our best AP generator currently @ live
* Wont be able to chain stack & keep critical heals... Which take SKILLs to manage appropriately
* Wont be able to keep regen indefinitely (because now it stacks simultaneously & the div version is kinda trashy spammie)
Combined with HG & DA not giving AP....
Ones taking faithful / virtuous wont be as useful in regards to buff & debuffing.. there is much less flexibility in exchange for more healing
Bastion of Health
PRO :
* 100% increase in the burst healing
* Strong regen buff
CONS :
* Normal casting miss a lot due to casting time, and now we have to cast it in normal for the good effect
Exaltation
PRO :
* Better buff when empowered 3x
CON :
* No more bubble immunity, which was actually the identity about Exaltation..
I think the main problem is the spammability in itself. If it was Daunting Light, then you'd might complain about it and would like to cast other spell beside Daunting Light. So, it is of my strong opinion that encounters should not be as spammable.. Even divine healing word which @ live has separate cooldown than its normal version has 3 sec cooldown.
I really do appreciate the devs for taking the time to give this MAJOR overhaul.. giving the DCs some love... but seriously, it is (in regards to divinity rework) unnecessary, giving more new bugs (like divine HW isnt giving temp HPs at all), etc .. i dont want to be as ungrateful, but it is what it is.
IMO divinity system isnt what's broken.. Why do they need to 'fix' this while NO ONE ASKED for it in the first place.
Does not seem to be correctly empowering some abilities: Daunting Light, Break the Spirit, Forgemaster's Flame, Healing Word. There may be more.
2) Lance of Faith.
This ability has now been substantially reduced from the previous build of the test server. Animations also feel inconsistent between modes as in sometimes hits 1+2 flow well and other times it is noticeably slower.
3) Prophecy of Doom.
Currently not applying double damage in divine mode, in fact, I think it deals reduced damage in divine mode.
4) Daunting Light
Not benefiting from empowerment. Also, there's a discrepancy between the in game description of empowered mode and the patch notes. In game description for Empowered: Daunting Light gains 33% increased damage per stack. Patch notes description: Increased crit chance and crit severity by 10% per stack.
Empowered: This is now a global resource that is applied by any divine power and can be consumed by any non-divine power. When you reach 3 stacks you will get floater text to notify you that you are fully Empowered.
Feedback: Empowered floating text Any posibility of making the empowered floater text stand out more compared to the other floater texts that pop up? Fully empowered is generally something I can keep pretty easy track of but the floater text loses its usefulness because it can get swamped with all the other floater text.
Do players generally use their fully empowered state immediately? If not I wonder if there is a better, more lasting reminder of being fully empowered. Floater text only really serves as an instant temporary notification.
Edit: Would it be too hard, too much UI clutter or too confusing to players to have a copy of the current divine stack indicator mirror imaged on the right hand side of the UI and coloured differently (?blue) to indicate empowered stacks.
I suggest Battle Aura - like an energy rising from the cleric.
also - i think empowerment state needs to last longer, it would be nice if it was easier to carry over empowerment from one mob fight to the next - or let us wait to use it more strategically - i think 20 to 30 seconds would be ideal. it stands at 9 now doesn't it ?
Comments
if this is intended then i can understand
Bear Your Sins = +10% damage to enemies affected by DoTs (and with Fire of the Gods your crits proc DoTs) Condemning Gaze = +15% damage to enemies for 15 seconds for every 5 encounters you use. With Divine Encounters not having a cooldown, this will be easier than it sounds.
I feel like I move at the speed of a myopathic exhausted turtle. By all means, increase at least slightly our base movement.
Should we be the slowest class ? Then that would (also) be because we have heavy armor. So I feel like we could use some more Armor Class if we are to remain slower (but please not THAT slow).
Suggestion: Give DC feat (25% increase stamina regen) or shift reduce stamina cost to 30%(down from 50%)
P.S. Without Healing step and immunity from Exaltation, DC with 2 shifts will be die on arena.
1: Our paragon feats are just terrible. I like that this is being addressed.
2. Leveling is a lot more difficult for a DC because the class is very reliant on encounter powers. To me having Divine mode cooldowns being separate from regular more solves a lot of problems with that.
3. One of our best gear sets is the tier 1 High Prophet set. Maybe redo one of the tier 2 sets to have similar 2 and 4 piece bonuses, o look at all cleric sets in general.
I don't think the whole empowered addition needs to be added. There is already going to be enough micromanagement going on trying to maintain both divine and regular versions of spells.
Great... so you "fixed" a bunch of stuff no one cares about, nerf our best spell (AS), make another spell useless in PvE (sunburst), and totally fail to address ACTUAL player concerns (like heroic feats and at will damage)? WTG...
since so much development time has been wasted on this I'm sure its going to happen now regardless, so here is the one thing that MIGHT make me keep playing DC as my main after this:
DONT'T EFFING NERF ASTRAL SHEILD!!!
A lot of the encounters I was using (Healing Word, Divine Glow, Astral Shield, Daunting Light... um...) wern't generating AP on cast. Most didnt generate AP at all (which is a big problem for like divine glow and daunting light). =\ Before, even though AS wasnt an attack it still generated AP, but now even dev dauting light isnt doing anything. I know they don't generate dev now, but they dont seem to be generating anything, which makes using daily abilites super hard to charge.
Feedback:
Burning Guidance without the heal from AS will be interested to see how that goes. Couldnt get a party to test. Also, very hard to keep track of Empowered. Some sort of symbol, stacking indicator or SOMETHING would be awesome so I can see which spells have empowered and how many stacks of it they have.
But i agree what they did to div AS and FF is somewhat drastic... probably should at least make normal version do healing too since they are not as spammable... I guess we cant have it all..
We already (pre this nerf/re-balance) can heal areas pretty well, but what we can't do it shoot a big meaty single target heal to that one guy that is not on the pile (bc he is off killing ranged mobs or whatever). At least we can't do it without divinity cost and even then its not that great.
Regardless of whether this crazy complicated mechanic goes live, couldn't you give us some power to slot that lets us juice a big fast single target heal?
Why not? C-L-E-R-I-C... Healer right?
Granted I'm PvE centric but wouldn't this also make cleric a lot more viable in PvP? So they can counter focused dps?
I also think this is related to the lifesteal concerns. People need to itemize for lifesteal because they know there is no big heal coming to save them from a healer. The big saving heal doesn't exist, there is only regenerative heals in an area. so at that point, it makes sense to itemize for lifesteal to maximize self sufficiency. Strange for group play...
Can't we get a big phat heal?
My situational primary aoe encounter Searing Light is nerfed in its aoe effect.
And they made Sunburst undesirable to use.
And making divinity fill by only at wills is good for pve. But horrible for pvp. As you cannot stay still long enough to get much of anything (cause everyone thats smart targets you first, meaning you cannot stand still for very long. Which is required for using you non divinity at will.. that charges your divinity)
Took the healing from forgemasters flame.
The healing from Astral Sheild
RUINED the primary use for Exhaltation
And encounters arent granting AP as they should currently.
If you take out the bugs in various things, I feel like my cleric is lesser and forced to go into a static generalized build/method of playing.
Well, almost nothing to add here
I'l try to sum it.
We can divide the main problems with DC class as
1) for PVP:
a) lack of dps
b) lack of anti-CC means
2) for PVE:
c) niche place left for clerics in groups because of the fact that almost everything a DC can do other classes eigher don need or can do even better (except buffing/debuffing - and even that is not always so taking into consideration other aspects)
Also we can add some notorious minor troubles with DC like the worst heroic feats of all existing classes but lets concentrate on the main problems.
So how r they being addressed now when the devs r presumably trying to turn their blind eye away from DC's poor condition for the 1st time?
Well as 4 PVP
a) dps is being addressed (how successfully is another matter, but at least they try)
b) lack of anti-CC means is NOT being addressed
c) on top of that we have a complication of divinity gain AND removal of healing step feat
Summary 4 PVP: the same poor condition as be4. Any possible gains in a) are nullified by c) while b) - which is the worst of all - stays as be4.
as 4 PVE - I hardly see how exactly the proposed changes address c) in meaningful way. Why a good group wants a DC now after this changes are implemented and cleric got some love? What exactly is BETTER now than before from other group members pov? Anybody?
Dont forget to to consider the AP gain is somewhat nerfed too by :
1. removal AP gain in divine mode (especially hurts HW's major contribution to gain AP)
2. HG & DA disable AP gain while active
And with the FF healing gone.. good luck getting great success @ HE
Clerics can be healers, buffers or do a bit of both. Clerics on live excel at doing a bit of both, that's why people like them. No cleric on live is only doing buffing, if he says he does he's a liar. I've yet to see a 16-18k DC not using astral seal or astral shield. And if he wasn't it would be his last run with me, because both spells are too good to be skipped.
The new design clearly improves healing and buffing to some extent (although the mitigation feats could be stronger, because virtous is by far the less appealing and weakest tree) but doesn't allow to do both anymore to the same level. In other words clerics will be better healers and better buffers but worse at doing a bit of everything. That's the new design philosophy, and it means one thing: gentlemancrush will have to do something about lifesteal or the cleric class will be flushed into the toilets. It's bound to happen if this rework goes live unchanged.
Not because clerics should be healer but because the huge loss in terms of mitigation and healing when picking the righteous tree makes the cleric too specialized in areas it has clearly not being designed for. Lack of AoE spells, long cooldowns, horribly long casting times - so yeah righteous clerics will do a nice amount of damage, will increase damage a bit more but what's the purpose, killing a rage drake 2s faster in lair of lostmauth? Killing lostmauth itself 15, 20s faster? Yeah, that's pointless.
When experienced players said clerics are buffers that's true, they are buffers but increasing the team's damage output is clearly NOT where the cleric shines. The cleric shines at reducing incoming damage and that's the element that should be emphasized IN ALL TREES and/or in more spells, unless the intent is to nuke lifesteal when this goes live. Break the spirit should be AoE. Bastion of health should provide some limited damage resistance, and clerics shouldn't have to go virtous for this. Astral shield should just give a flat DR increase instead of increasing character's DR by 30% - what's the point otherwise?
I think there should be a feat that improves chains from an immobilize to a stun. I think diogene0 has a point and it should be placed at tier 3 of virtous path
Is there an internal cooldown on the feat that gives you attack spells a healing effect ? i didnt have the patience to find out. More information on icd would be appreciated in tooltips.
Anointed action feat: currently improves damage after a daily. I think it would be interesting to change it to bonus effect on an empowered spell rather than a daily. It would make this feature more useful. I think it would give divine oracles sustained damage through the use of terrifying insight and give annointed champions better burst damage. As this feat is currently written, i would never use it. And i have tried running an ap generating glass cannon daily build. Fun, but far too specialized. maybe with the ap generating artifacts and armour its a more reliable build, but i would credit that with power creep.
exaltation, astral shield, hallowed ground and divine armour are just downright boring to cast at the moment. They are all doing just about the same thing atm, each to a different level of ability. Do we really need so many spells that do the same thing ? 2 of them are dailies, and we have so few of those. In the live incarnation of cleric, we can feat our dailies do to an additional effect, which gave them more character. Annointed army seems to be the only daily improvement feat that mad it into the new build on preview - and i would suggest that it because the dev's felt the spell was underpowered.
All of our dailies, except for flame strike, seem to be in this weird there, not there, state. we use them because they are there, not because they are useful. Currently, the only dailies i use are guardian of faith for its , flame strike for group damage, and its "stun", and annointed army for it protection and group burstyness
Please take another look at our dailies as i do not feel they fit very well with the planned power changes.
perhaps a simple interface change, for example exaltation's bubble is around the target to show he is getting the dr buff. Maybe it just feels like they are not doing anything.
Also Exaltation does not warrent such a long cooldown anymore without it divine immunity potential, it should be reduced down to 9 or 10 seconds. Make it just over double its up time to account for recovery. so if its a 5 second buff, it should have an 11 second recovery. I think you want for 50% uptime. or make it a longer duration buff. This is our "Divine Power" spell and it deserves its place on our loadout.
yep. mitigation - the 2d role after buff/debuff - got nerfed
Mitigation is a buff. When you add 20% damage resistance to another character it's like increasing their effective hitpoints pool by 20%. That's what people mean when they say clerics are buffers. Damage increase spells and feats are mostly irrelevant outside of sustained fights (there used to be sustained fight, back when the devs made challenging content, but this is gone for now), and there's no such thing anymore, except a few boss fights maybe.
1. Buff at-wills damage output by 50-75% to be on par with other classes. This will also make leveling a little less painful. DC is definitely the hardest leveling class I've played.
2. Instead of having separate cool downs for regular and divine mode encounters, lower encounter cool downs by approximately 25%.
3. Leave encounter spells that work well alone. Buff spells that are unused. For instance people use Astral Shield because it heals well and provide defense in a targeted area instantly. Bastion of Health might find more use if the base version was an instant big heal and the divine mode added on top of that such as it could temporarily weaken enemies in the effect.
4. Fix/find a better way to cast targeted heals. Healing ward (a probably exaltation) don't get used in groups because of this. Maybe it could be as simple as when they are cast it will automatically target the person in the group with the lowest health percentage remaining.
5. Feats definitely need adjusting. I just don't think the class needs two healing paths. How many higher GS DCs actually spec to heal? They don't because it's not needed. They spec to buff/debuff and do damage. We take healing feats because they are forced on us to get to an occasional good feat further down the tree. Why not make Virtuous be the healing tree, Righteous be a tree that buffs divine mode, and Righteous be the one for damage. That way we have a healer, buffer, and a damage tree.
6. Scrap empowered idea. There really is nothing wrong with the basic play style DCs have now. It takes a new DC player a while to learn how to use divine mode as is. Adding a third layer of complexity will likely turn more players away from the class instead of making it more appealing.
No more tactical choices to do. No more fine class knowledge required, timing is not required, just spam chains, as long as you have this spell nothing else matters. That's all we have time to cast before the team is done with the NPCs anyway if you don't spam it, given the crazy amount of debuffs we can stack.
So yeah the new DC gameplay is just garbage in a team. I thought it would be great but casting times as they are on preview is just a killer for anything but spammable spells. For now it's just a stupid two keys to press berserker gameplay. By the time i was done collecting empowerement with divine chains to cast astral shield everything was dead or dying. What's the point?
Maybe the issue is that content is now clearly obsolete. We were 3 DCs too so debuffing was absolutely insane. It might be that, but it's all the content we have anyway. If these changes go live without significantly altering some key values and limiting the debuff stacking well my cleric will go on the shelve for sure, I didn't roll a support class to end up playing a GWF#2 spamming the only spell we have time to use before all the things died. OR 5 DCs party wiping entire rooms just faster than 5 overgeared CWs did in the past.
isnt that the entire point of taking righteous? To be a DPS?
altho i get what you're saying that the content is somewhat obsolete..
probably youre partying with high GS members.. thats why it's too easy?
Lacking a bit on info .. which dungeon, party gs.. etc
also, i heard the mobs @ preview are somewhat weaker than @live.. need confirmation
the amount refers to the total amount it heals.. (with the REGEN)
There's a difference between being a dps and being a dps relying on ONE spell. There's also a difference between trying to play a support DC and ending up being a dps because you don't have the opportunity to cast any other spell given the horribly long casting times. Want to cast an empowered astral shield? nope, stuff is dead already. I'm sorry, cleric, your spell with the shortest animation you found wiped the entire dungeon already!
Note that I'm not saying chains should be nerfed (I must confess that my DC is a power/crit ***** having more offensive stats than most CWs on live), I'm merely stating that if casting times remain unchanged it's all DCs will have the opportunity to do: casting chains and then seeing that any other spell isn't required because their debuffs and damage are so insane that everything died. The damage+debuffs synergy is crazy. Fire of the gods + bear your sins, high crit stat, high prophet, medium damage aoe spells with 0s cooldown... That's madness.
I'd love to be able to cast something else but chains, unfortunately, I could fall asleep before I'm done casting anything else 3 times, and the team will be heading to the next group of npcs already.
Edit: note that my first impression could be because there's clearly an issue (the one i've reported two days ago) with debuffs. I've had 70k crit chains and the TR was reporting 30k at-will hits...
That's what I was refering to. Even with the regen, it only heals for a little over half of what it says it should.
Healing Word
PRO :
* Wide line targeting (AoE)
CON :
* Divine version doesnt give AP anymore, resulting substantial lost in AP gain compared to current live version.. mind you, HW + Divine Fortune is our best AP generator currently @ live
* Wont be able to chain stack & keep critical heals... Which take SKILLs to manage appropriately
* Wont be able to keep regen indefinitely (because now it stacks simultaneously & the div version is kinda trashy spammie)
Combined with HG & DA not giving AP....
Ones taking faithful / virtuous wont be as useful in regards to buff & debuffing.. there is much less flexibility in exchange for more healing
Bastion of Health
PRO :
* 100% increase in the burst healing
* Strong regen buff
CONS :
* Normal casting miss a lot due to casting time, and now we have to cast it in normal for the good effect
Exaltation
PRO :
* Better buff when empowered 3x
CON :
* No more bubble immunity, which was actually the identity about Exaltation..
Yes i agree with you
I think the main problem is the spammability in itself. If it was Daunting Light, then you'd might complain about it and would like to cast other spell beside Daunting Light. So, it is of my strong opinion that encounters should not be as spammable.. Even divine healing word which @ live has separate cooldown than its normal version has 3 sec cooldown.
I really do appreciate the devs for taking the time to give this MAJOR overhaul.. giving the DCs some love... but seriously, it is (in regards to divinity rework) unnecessary, giving more new bugs (like divine HW isnt giving temp HPs at all), etc .. i dont want to be as ungrateful, but it is what it is.
IMO divinity system isnt what's broken.. Why do they need to 'fix' this while NO ONE ASKED for it in the first place.
Bug List
1) Empowered
Does not seem to be correctly empowering some abilities: Daunting Light, Break the Spirit, Forgemaster's Flame, Healing Word. There may be more.
2) Lance of Faith.
This ability has now been substantially reduced from the previous build of the test server. Animations also feel inconsistent between modes as in sometimes hits 1+2 flow well and other times it is noticeably slower.
3) Prophecy of Doom.
Currently not applying double damage in divine mode, in fact, I think it deals reduced damage in divine mode.
4) Daunting Light
Not benefiting from empowerment. Also, there's a discrepancy between the in game description of empowered mode and the patch notes. In game description for Empowered: Daunting Light gains 33% increased damage per stack. Patch notes description: Increased crit chance and crit severity by 10% per stack.
Neither of these seem to be given.
Feedback: Empowered floating text
Any posibility of making the empowered floater text stand out more compared to the other floater texts that pop up? Fully empowered is generally something I can keep pretty easy track of but the floater text loses its usefulness because it can get swamped with all the other floater text.
Do players generally use their fully empowered state immediately? If not I wonder if there is a better, more lasting reminder of being fully empowered. Floater text only really serves as an instant temporary notification.
Edit: Would it be too hard, too much UI clutter or too confusing to players to have a copy of the current divine stack indicator mirror imaged on the right hand side of the UI and coloured differently (?blue) to indicate empowered stacks.
also - i think empowerment state needs to last longer, it would be nice if it was easier to carry over empowerment from one mob fight to the next - or let us wait to use it more strategically - i think 20 to 30 seconds would be ideal. it stands at 9 now doesn't it ?