Feedback: Tab one single player is way too hard and clunky!! Would be nice if u bring back old warlock curse, that u can mark up to 3 targets, but the healing is divide between them..
Warlock need to stop overwriting palas shield.. This will generate rate against warlocks that just wanted to help the party.
... facilitate more engaging moment-to-moment gameplay...
...Healing is general has been too easy for well geared groups/healers; in particular group healing is simply too resource efficient for teams that manage to stay in close proximity. There hasn't really been a distinction between between focused healing on a tank or other ally and healing the group as a whole...
Good call, but your solution started badly when you threw away the most engaging healer (Warlock)... that actually preferred more efficient single target at-will heal than throwing sparks around...
I mean, if your ideal already exists, stands right in front of you and begs for your love,... you just throw everything away and start making chimeras of what you deemed bad? That does not make sense.
Also, a feat choice allowed the choice between channeling resource recovery or instantaneous, static resource recovery which single-handedly solved the whole stand praying do nothing problem while maintaing resource recovery as an active management skill. Seriously Asterdahl, I really, really hope you're reading this and can see sense. If what you're saying you want is what you actually want, then it already exists in SW. It just needs the numbers to back it up not a complete overhaul. You just need to adapt Cleric and Pallyheal to be more like live SW instead of reworking everything.
All you'd really have to do is change a feats or two, at-wills, and encounter magnitudes instead of rebuild from scratch. Making the heal at-will worth using is a good idea by raising the magnitude. That needs to stay. The SW method of recovering sparks by attacking should be added to all damaging at-wills for all heals. This gives attacking a purpose in my downtime. I don't even care if you keep or scrap the pray thing tbh, but the SW R1 is neither boring nor intrusive to use, it's just an integrated part of play. Lower encounter heal values and resource costs so we need to cast them more instead of increasing them. We don't need to heal for more. We need to heal more frequently to keep us busy. And for goodness sake make them actual AoEs again. All this targeting is difficult and no fun nonsense. This will fill our time with meaningful activity. Bam, the problem of "boring" has been fixed. Then it's just time to tweak the numbers between classes to make sure they're all in line with providing approximately the same amount of heals.
Can we not have it so that shields overwrite each other only in the event of a higher-value shield replacing an existing one? This would address one of the fundamental incompatibilities of shielding effects in this game, one that, among other consequences, basically guarantees that Soulweavers and Oathkeepers are never deliberately paired together unless the Soulweaver is forced to change to a loadout with the HoT feat.
There are other MMOs that manage, more or less, to allow barrier healers to coexist with pure healers, but it's a very tricky balancing act.
The healer with no shielding usually needs some combination of the below to be effective:
- A strong, exclusive shielding effect that has a hard limit like cooldown (not spammable or universally helpful so as not to take the thunder of the barrier healers, but enough to be an emergency or a stop-gap to perform an essential function occasionallywhen no barrier healer is available)
- Notably higher damage output (probably not applicable in NW since healer DPS is not remotely important to encounter design)
- Notably higher raw healing output and efficiency of AoE healing
Ideally Devout should have the highest healing power with the least challenging resource management and cooldowns.
Oathkeeper should have the lowest healing power with the most effective shielding.
Soulweaver should hold the middle ground between the two and have the advantage of flexibility, swapping between shielding and heal-over-time as needed.
Soulweaver Suggestion: rework the effects of the final Soulweaver feats into Class Features so that they can be more easily swapped on the fly. While many of us have more loadouts than we actually need, it's not going to be terribly intuitive for newer players that they really have to maintain at least two loadouts for Warlock healing due to potential incompatibility with Paladin depending on feat selection. Hell, we still have players who don't understand that they should be switching loadouts in a dungeon while playing DPS, so this will easily be a pain point for the public.
I'll start by reiterating what a few others have said. The biggest issue with healing atm is overshield. Straight up preventing damage is overpowered and always has been. Look at the old immortal temp hp pallies, or even the divine barrier pallies now. For DPS players, being able to ignore defensive stats/hp and just rely on protective barriers is a huge problem. In most groups, a pally is a must have for endgame content.
I play a warlock and I'm happy to see the infernal barrier. It’s a nice change. In single healer settings it does make life a little easier and in group I can just change off the feat to avoid conflicting with pally barriers.
Now to warlock things:
1). Lifemark - this icon gets stuck under player hp bars for anyone that plays with HP bars always visible. Suggestion: Move the icon further up or redesign how to tell whether the target is marked. Maybe have inspirit circle the target player like the little orbs of dark helix.
2). Flames of empowerment - wasted feat since it is just a worse version of Dust to Dust.
3).Vampiric Embrace - cost is way too high. Why is this the same cost as revitalize? It’s a very weak damage ability and has a pretty weak heal as well.
4).Soulstorm - this is a very good change! However, it still suffers from the same problem harrowstorm did - getting players to stand in it. There's a lot of movement in NWO and soulstorm is quite expensive to cast.
Suggestion: Lower the magnitude from 500 to 300, increase the duration to 12 seconds, and change the ability to radiate from the warlock similar to how BoVA works when cast on self. In this scenario I think increasing the radius of the ability to 30' would also be a good idea. What this does is allow the warlock to use soulstorm with proper positioning rather than guessing where the group will be - this also solves the issue of dps players just not paying attention.
5). Essence of Time - this feat is almost really nice. The problem I'm having with it is that in any situation where the healer is being taxed, it's wasted. On the other hand, while weaker in terms of regen, Essence of power is much easier to consistently keep up.
6). Infernal barrier - I briefly addressed this earlier and I agree that overshields should be done away with entirely.
Suggestion: Cleric = best raw healer, SW = strong HoTs and dps(compared to the other healers), Pally = make them the defensive healer and kit them with an assortment of %DR abilities as well as ok healing.
Suggestion 2: In the case that overshields are seen as too important to get rid of, Infernal barriers are very weak. In my mind the point of them on warlock is to slow damage down while the HoTs do the healing. Also, barriers should not be able to overwrite a stronger barrier. Seeing my carefully planned 3/4 hp revitalize shield get replaced with the automatic inspirit one really hurts.
7).Souleater - Replace/Rework. With no way to consistently regen soulweave, I cant see why anyone would use this. (it also has awful synergy with Essence of Time)
8).Revitalize - Like cleric and pally, the -mag for each player inside is unclear. Update tooltip to indicate how much magnitude is lost for each person.
9). Give warlock its cleanse back - im guessing this was an oversight. A healer without a cleanse is incomplete
10). While removing the ability to manually manage resources, you've created a system where healers are going to just take what ever feats/features make their life easier.
11). Soultheft - this requires you to get hit. Against trash packs I guess this is cool, but in any fight where not taking damage is a priority, it kinda blows.
Suggestion: rework to regen soulweave whenever the target marked by lifepact is struck.
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Overall I'm pretty happy with all the changes so far. Like with any new system, this one needs a bit of polish before I think players can fully enjoy it.
Thanks for all the hard work, esp given the state of the world.
POSSIBLE BUG: The marks from the healers are also visible to other players, instead of being visible just to the caster as the post says they should be.
About DC: BUG: You lose all stacks of Cycle of Prayer when using Channel Divinity, even if you want to do something that does not consume divinity (like activating Gathering Light or Angel of Life). Cycle of Prayer stacks should only be dropped if Channel Divinity consumes divinity to cast the single target heal.
I join random queues, solo, for dungeons. As a DPS I can be waiting for considerably long periods of time before a group is found, however as a new healer I am in a group within nanoseconds of pressing the button to join. This tells you something about the popularity, or lack thereof, of those classes. I had just restarted spending real money to gear up, in my case a cleric, as I am sure many people did to their class after the travesty that was mod 16. ( That is on the assumption that they didn’t quit the game completely).
What on earth makes you think that these nerfs will 1) Persuade me to spend more money when I have no idea if things will change yet again, after a month and 2) make already unpopular classes more attractive to people.
Do any of the devs ever play or test the game on Consoles ? I seriously doubt that you do or you would know about the horrendous targeting on Consoles.
For goodness sake just leave things alone and stop tinkering. Put your resources into making a new class that is fun to play
In general, i would make visible to everyone the divinity/soulwave bar. This way, if they die, they can't judge us for their stup--- Bad play.
This would be an amazing addition to the game, even more now that we won't be able to manually recover divinity. This could work just like the stamina bar for tanks.
And to emphasize what others have already said, removing the option for us to recover our resource will only cause us healers to stand or walk around while waiting for it to regenerate again since our at-will damage is pretty insignificant and now we have a reason to use the healing ones instead. I also agree with everything everyone has already said about blue shields, and that warlocks need their cleanse back.
My main issue with this update is the new healing mechanics. Shouldn't players be rewarded for strategic positioning and not punished? When a group stays together they can take advantage of AOE healing, which helps the healer manage divinity, and also other player buffs like Astral Shield, Hallowed Ground and Pillar of Power. If the new healing mechanics get implemented it will incentivize everyone to spread out so the healer can properly target the right player with its single target heal or target the "right amount" of players for the AOE heal, which in my opinion defeats the purpose of having an AOE heal.
The AOE heals have always been a favorite for healers because of how messy it is to target players, and with this update forcing everyone to switch to using mainly single target I can see myself and many others having a lot more frustration over missed targets than fun with the new gameplay style, further driving people away from the role instead of incentivizing it.
After looking at Zariel challenge any group without a pally is going to suffer. One of two things needs to happen, take away shielding or give cleric and sw the ability to overheal in the form of temp hp. Currently this isn't balance. Furthermore the aoe heal changes will be a detriment to console players where the aim is clunky to begin with.
After reading the complaints here and doing some testing of my own, I have a few suggestions to be brought to the team.
Firstly the "Blue Bar" problem:
Paladin Shields are too powerful as they are now, essentially as people have pointed out multiple times, removing any need for Healing and rendering other Healing paragons pointless. However they don't need to be removed as a slight decrease in durability and availability would suffice.
- Shield Health should be damage calc'd as having 0% DR. It is meant to act as a "buffer" and this would better facilitate that rather than being a pseudo replacement for health entirely as it is now. - Add a Debuff CD, active after a shield is depleted before another can be applied as well as removing or vastly decreasing the effectiveness of additional shielding applied while it is still active. 8 seconds should suffice.
As for the new addition of Warlock shields, they need to either be made Additive to Paladin shields rather than replace them or be represented as a different bar color altogether. I'd suggest Green. Due to the much weaker nature of them, at this time I'd suggest them being a separate bar and to be exempt from the debuff the Paladin's should be subject to. However the DR status should still apply.
Secondly, the state of the Warlock: - The Warlock needs a Cleanse attached to one of its proprietary Heals. Without one it cannot function remotely as a Healer. I'd suggest the reworked Harrowstorm. - PoP should have its CD reverted to the previous state. The Warlock is not blessed in the Raw Healing department like the other two classes no matter how you spec. it and use of PoP was and should continue to be central to the proactive nature of the classes' playstyle.
- PoP should have its CD reverted to the previous state. The Warlock is not blessed in the Raw Healing department like the other two classes no matter how you spec. it and use of PoP was and should continue to be central to the proactive nature of the classes' playstyle.
Even putting this aside, long cooldowns are intensely boring.
I was on board with the M16 overhaul to make encounters and dailies less spammy and to encourage more strategic use, but CDs of 20+ seconds are inherently un-fun.
Adding insult to injury is that healers are now waiting for their resources to regenerate, and they have feats that either encourage them to delay spending their resource or to ineffectually tap an enemy to help their pool recover more rapidly. Most healer encounters that are not spenders have painfully long CDs, and most of the desirable At-Wills are actually spenders. The damaging At-Wills are a waste of time without some added benefit, as mentioned previously in this thread.
For some reason I just can't seem to get the cyan text to work, so I'm just gunna write what I've been trying to say.
The changes to healing are too radical at a time period where there are not as many players as there once were. Lots of really good players left due to taking away Life Steal, and the numbers just haven't gone back to what they once were. However, the way that things are in the game currently aren't that bad and if a few things were upgraded, they'd be fine.
First things first, Warlock Healing. Its healing abilities should just be upgraded. How it heals right now is perfectly fine, it's a mobile healing class that needs to be close to effectively heal. That's a really nice and awesome type of healing. Maybe just change Shatter Spark so that it loses magnitude the further away people are, like regular AoE blasts in DnD. If Warlock healing was completely changed to Soulweave instead of Soul Sparks, that's still fine, but please just need it the same mobile healing as it is. It's really fun to play this way, and if you take away the mobile aspect, then it's just... a cleric with a bit of OP shield slapped in it in some places. The way it is currently makes it a super fun and different type of healing compared to the other two healing classes, which is why people both like and dislike warlock healing, but it is really good as it is.
Secondly, Outgoing + Incoming healing % changes. These are waaaaay too big for what you're trying to do. Maybe in a change later on, or the next mod, but changing both of these at the same type as changing how every type of healing works is going to completely crash healing. It's a recipe for disaster as soon as it drops on live. The 6% -> 2% rank 15 tactical change is going to complete negate some of the best items in the game, which will make running endgame content for anyone that isn't top-top end almost completely impossible. As it stands, it's really hard to run The Infernal Citadel or Tower of the Mad Mage with how things are. And with how Outgoing healing is going to completely crash, it's going to make healing anyone anywhere really hard because of how Incoming healing is also crashing. Outgoing healing is one of the very few ways to negate bad incoming healing from players that don't really know what it is, and even then, it doesn't always work.
Lastly, Healing in general. Making each of the classes very similar to each other is going to negate the need to run anything other than a pally heals. The reason why each class is good is because they are different. If you change that, and make all of the classes basically really similar to each other, you might as well just have a bunch of pally healers and maybe the occasional cleric or two, but with this update, pally healers are going to be the only viable healing class. Again. I don't know about anyone else here, but coming from the perspective of constantly running with people that rely on pally shields, it makes it really annoying and tough to run anything with a healer that isn't a pally because people continually run into fire, into the red zones, and everything. And by god, the regeneration! If we can't regen, then a lot of the time we're going to stand around uselessly anyways. This is already a problem with the warlock healers, please don't make it a problem with all of the classes!
Basically, these changes are too much at a time where healing is heavily dependent on pally heals already, and it's going to completely crash and the only way to run content will be with pally healers, especially content like The Infernal Citadel and Tower of the Mad Mage. As someone who loves the current warlock healing and just wants it upgraded a bit, I can confidently say that I'd just rather abandon my healer than continue if this is what next mod will be. I may just completely abandon the game, actually. I love this game, but if the game is going to so heavily crash because the devs want to change something so much that isn't broke, then I'm not going to play it. A lot of players - of all varieties - are going to straight-up leave the game because: A. Healers will be impossible to find B. When they do find them, healers aren't going to be much good at all C. If the healer isn't a paladin, then the group is dead before they've begun
I have already commented but wanted to add a thought.
What is so wrong with people who are end game players and who have spent time, effort and money to spec their healing toons well thus enabling their group to complete dungeons easily. Surely that is the culmination of the ‘work’ they put into the game and more importantly makes it FUN. Isn’t fun why we all play in the final analysis. I am not one of those end game players but I am an aspirational one.
As devs you seem to be determined to suck all this fun out of the game and make all the healers weak cookie cutter versions of each other. Make Clerics and Warlocks stronger enabling them to compete because your changes certainly won’t
I have previously mentioned that I doubt that any of the devs play on Console. I would like to see you play on a stream; on a Console; in a real life situation; in a random queue and then try and do your targeting. I know that you won’t
Clerics should get some buffs for the team like in mod 15 (but no stacking). So they have something special. OP and SW have a shield and the Clerics have nothing special. That's a huge disadvantage.
I have already commented but wanted to add a thought.
What is so wrong with people who are end game players and who have spent time, effort and money to spec their healing toons well thus enabling their group to complete dungeons easily. Surely that is the culmination of the ‘work’ they put into the game and more importantly makes it FUN. Isn’t fun why we all play in the final analysis. I am not one of those end game players but I am an aspirational one.
As devs you seem to be determined to suck all this fun out of the game and make all the healers weak cookie cutter versions of each other. Make Clerics and Warlocks stronger enabling them to compete because your changes certainly won’t
I have previously mentioned that I doubt that any of the devs play on Console. I would like to see you play on a stream; on a Console; in a real life situation; in a random queue and then try and do your targeting. I know that you won’t
you will still complete dungeons easily as an endgame healer. Only the hardest of content (the hard version of Zariels Trial) is more of a challange now, and cant be solohealed by 1 character as easily as before.
Clerics should get some buffs for the team like in mod 15 (but no stacking). So they have something special. OP and SW have a shield and the Clerics have nothing special. That's a huge disadvantage.
Again don't get it wrong, they gave warlocks a mini shield ability so they could try to hide the nerfs, which weren't small...
Pillar of power has almost 30 secs cd with only 10 secs up, thats almost 20 seconds of not doing HAMSTER and god forbids a boss like tiamat uses a random skill and makes your pop useless
They removed the curse mechanic from the healing path, so we lost our main aoe dmg ability, curse bite, they nerfed soul siphon our main daily dmg dealer in the healing path and they also removed wardig curse, now we can't apply a -5% dmg debuff on multiple targets constantly. Instead they gave use 1 ability that that has 23 seconds of cd and can only debuff 1 enemie they took away our cleanse (don't know if it was an oversight) We still have the lowest heals
And on top of all that our micro shield replaces the paladin one, so tell why would you take it instead of a paladin or a cleric??
The (new mod and) healing rework once again does not count with the possibility that players have access to non-augment companions. Please, it is better to remove active companions altogether than just sticking your head to the sand and pretend they do not exist.
In the preview warlock's bargain does not remove negative status effects. This change is not given in the text above. I do not know if the effect will be added when mod 19 goes life but if soulweavers cannot take away those negative effects they are not really healers.
@tom#6998 I am not an end game player and don’t participate in end game dungeons. I would like to but on every occasion that I manage to get within spitting distance of my goal the devs move the goal posts on. I don’t have stacks of AD or other resources and have to pay real money for changes to say companions. This can become pretty frustrating when everything has to be redone.
I have also read from a contributor to this thread that there is a 39.1 % reduction in heals for a cleric. If this is allied to single targeting which is incredibly hard on a Console it may very well mean I move on either from the game or my Cleric. As I have only just returned to NW after the ruination of my OP in mod 16 it does not bode well for the latter.
I have have absolutely no problem with PC players we all have our own preferences as to the medium on which we play the game. Horses for courses lol. I do wish, however, that the differences between playing on a PC and playing on a Console were taken into account by the Devs and we Console players weren’t always treated as second class citizens.
These changes make the classes feel too similar and doesn't address the fact that, at scale, a full HP bar + a shield will always be superior to full HP + HoT. I'd rather it was only a pally mechanic, but if it's impossible to balance, then all healing paragons should have access to it.
In the case where it remains a pally only mechanic, the way to balance it would be for it to come at a cost to the healing. Making an ability half the magnitude of a cleric heal but give as much HP as a shield doesn't cut it as "less healing". The cost needs to make it a choice for the pally. Either through feats or mechanics.
If it's impossible to balance that way, then clerics need access to shields as well. This would kill the flavor some more, but I don't see a way to balance shields as they are otherwise. Since Soothe and Cure wounds are pretty much the same spell at this point, I'd favor rebranding Soothe as an AoE heal over time with the condition that if the target already has a HoT active (previous Soothe, active healing word, warlock HoT, etc.) then the effect becomes a shield instead. Cleric's access to shields would be pretty minor at 500 magnitude, but at least it would be something.
I'm mostly upset about the drastic warlock changes, flavor wise. Why can't curses just heal as this paragon class mechanic ? Party members that hit a cursed target get a small magnitude heal or hot and powers that consume curses trigger a larger magnitude heal ... Keep the pet and some of the other mechanics, but warlocks should curse imo, no matter the paragon.
I've been advocating for tab mechanics that does different spells as you hold the key, so I'm happy about those changes. Can arbiter Clerics get tab hold Spirit Guardians pls ?
And on top of all that our micro shield replaces the paladin one, so tell why would you take it instead of a paladin or a cleric??
There's a few reasons why it would be preferred over Cleric.
For 5-player content, where SW can use the new Infernal Barrier, the "full magnitude" of the main heal will be 3000 (1500 heal + 1500 shield), while Cleric's is 2200. For comparison, DC main heal in M18 is 750 magnitude, higher than the "total" 700 from non-crit OP divine touch in M18 (350 heal + 350 shield). This basically means M19 DC heals aren't really strong enough to compensate the lack of mitigation like they are on M18 and SW, having not only mitigation but also party buffs, will probably be preferred.
For 10-player content, where SW can't use the new Infernal Barrier, SW apparently will have better synergy with the OP. The heal over time feat ("mandatory" to not override OP shield) is good to keep DPS players topped up, the Pillar will increase party damage and OP shield as well. I've seen people asking for "SW heals for Zariel on preview" in the ToMM channel a couple of times before the lack of healers forced them to ask just for "healer for Zariel on preview" if they actually wanted to get something done. It's probably not really a big difference, considering DC will have higher heal magnitude to compensate for the lack of synergy, but the current perception is that SW+OP will be the meta for Zariel.
Tl;DR: as it currently stands (and everything can change because this is preview), OP will stay on top and DC and SW will probably switch places in the "healer desirability rankings". DC and SW will probably be very close to each other in 10-player content, SW will probably have a more pronounced advantage on 5-player due to actually having decent mitigation that can't be compensated by DC heal magnitude like it could pre-M19.
You can HEAL only toons that are loosing HP. In Neverwinter Online damage is very often "one shot, one kill" so heal is a mission impossible. We need some sorta of dot not one shot if we want heal became good again (or for the firs time). And Bluebars not like temp HP but like "we can shield tot numbers of attak" for example 5 or 10 and after, zero bluebar. So bluebar is good and healing too. But for now with one shot healing is not equal to bluebar and in a gropu you need one OP and games are done.
Another idea is some sorta of sinergy. OP cast bluebar and healer have to maintain them up with heals. We need sinergy in MMO not one character that can do everythings alone.....
FEEDBACK: The recent removal of cleansing effects for Warlock's Bargain (I hope this is not intentional BTW) made me think about how underused the cleansing mechanic is. Cleanse is only useful in extremely old content (like Svarborg) or content where it really isn't that needed anyway (those dreadful expeditions). Are there any plans to integrate debuff cleansing as a core mechanic for future dungeons and trials? Most debuffs we get in new content aren't removable and, even if they were, they are mostly the result of a player error instead of an "unavoidable", core mechanic. I know that M19 content is probably "finished" for these design decisions, but given this thread is all about a new healing paradigm, I think it's valid to point out that integrating cleansing mechanics into future fights can bring another aspect to healing, beyond the current used aspects of mitigation and hit point recovery.
in 5 player content 2 healers 1 tank and 2 DPS. More challenge, more funny. Break mechanincs is not funny. And now with hig DPS you can break every mechnaincs....... no good, for me obviously.
in 5 player content 2 healers 1 tank and 2 DPS. More challenge, more funny. Break mechanincs is not funny. And now with hig DPS you can break every mechnaincs....... no good, for me obviously.
Standing around, waiting for supports isn’t fun though. Even right now, the waiting time for queues are sometimes longer than the actual dungeon.
Comments
Feedback: Tab one single player is way too hard and clunky!! Would be nice if u bring back old warlock curse, that u can mark up to 3 targets, but the healing is divide between them..
Warlock need to stop overwriting palas shield.. This will generate rate against warlocks that just wanted to help the party.
All you'd really have to do is change a feats or two, at-wills, and encounter magnitudes instead of rebuild from scratch. Making the heal at-will worth using is a good idea by raising the magnitude. That needs to stay. The SW method of recovering sparks by attacking should be added to all damaging at-wills for all heals. This gives attacking a purpose in my downtime. I don't even care if you keep or scrap the pray thing tbh, but the SW R1 is neither boring nor intrusive to use, it's just an integrated part of play. Lower encounter heal values and resource costs so we need to cast them more instead of increasing them. We don't need to heal for more. We need to heal more frequently to keep us busy. And for goodness sake make them actual AoEs again. All this targeting is difficult and no fun nonsense. This will fill our time with meaningful activity. Bam, the problem of "boring" has been fixed. Then it's just time to tweak the numbers between classes to make sure they're all in line with providing approximately the same amount of heals.
There are other MMOs that manage, more or less, to allow barrier healers to coexist with pure healers, but it's a very tricky balancing act.
The healer with no shielding usually needs some combination of the below to be effective:
- A strong, exclusive shielding effect that has a hard limit like cooldown (not spammable or universally helpful so as not to take the thunder of the barrier healers, but enough to be an emergency or a stop-gap to perform an essential function occasionallywhen no barrier healer is available)
- Notably higher damage output (probably not applicable in NW since healer DPS is not remotely important to encounter design)
- Notably higher raw healing output and efficiency of AoE healing
Ideally Devout should have the highest healing power with the least challenging resource management and cooldowns.
Oathkeeper should have the lowest healing power with the most effective shielding.
Soulweaver should hold the middle ground between the two and have the advantage of flexibility, swapping between shielding and heal-over-time as needed.
Soulweaver Suggestion: rework the effects of the final Soulweaver feats into Class Features so that they can be more easily swapped on the fly. While many of us have more loadouts than we actually need, it's not going to be terribly intuitive for newer players that they really have to maintain at least two loadouts for Warlock healing due to potential incompatibility with Paladin depending on feat selection. Hell, we still have players who don't understand that they should be switching loadouts in a dungeon while playing DPS, so this will easily be a pain point for the public.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
I'll start by reiterating what a few others have said. The biggest issue with healing atm is overshield. Straight up preventing damage is overpowered and always has been. Look at the old immortal temp hp pallies, or even the divine barrier pallies now. For DPS players, being able to ignore defensive stats/hp and just rely on protective barriers is a huge problem. In most groups, a pally is a must have for endgame content.
I play a warlock and I'm happy to see the infernal barrier. It’s a nice change. In single healer settings it does make life a little easier and in group I can just change off the feat to avoid conflicting with pally barriers.
Now to warlock things:
1). Lifemark - this icon gets stuck under player hp bars for anyone that plays with HP bars always visible.
Suggestion: Move the icon further up or redesign how to tell whether the target is marked. Maybe have inspirit circle the target player like the little orbs of dark helix.
2). Flames of empowerment - wasted feat since it is just a worse version of Dust to Dust.
3).Vampiric Embrace - cost is way too high. Why is this the same cost as revitalize? It’s a very weak damage ability and has a pretty weak heal as well.
4).Soulstorm - this is a very good change! However, it still suffers from the same problem harrowstorm did - getting players to stand in it. There's a lot of movement in NWO and soulstorm is quite expensive to cast.
Suggestion: Lower the magnitude from 500 to 300, increase the duration to 12 seconds, and change the ability to radiate from the warlock similar to how BoVA works when cast on self. In this scenario I think increasing the radius of the ability to 30' would also be a good idea. What this does is allow the warlock to use soulstorm with proper positioning rather than guessing where the group will be - this also solves the issue of dps players just not paying attention.
5). Essence of Time - this feat is almost really nice. The problem I'm having with it is that in any situation where the healer is being taxed, it's wasted. On the other hand, while weaker in terms of regen, Essence of power is much easier to consistently keep up.
6). Infernal barrier - I briefly addressed this earlier and I agree that overshields should be done away with entirely.
Suggestion: Cleric = best raw healer, SW = strong HoTs and dps(compared to the other healers), Pally = make them the defensive healer and kit them with an assortment of %DR abilities as well as ok healing.
Suggestion 2: In the case that overshields are seen as too important to get rid of, Infernal barriers are very weak. In my mind the point of them on warlock is to slow damage down while the HoTs do the healing. Also, barriers should not be able to overwrite a stronger barrier. Seeing my carefully planned 3/4 hp revitalize shield get replaced with the automatic inspirit one really hurts.
7).Souleater - Replace/Rework. With no way to consistently regen soulweave, I cant see why anyone would use this. (it also has awful synergy with Essence of Time)
8).Revitalize - Like cleric and pally, the -mag for each player inside is unclear. Update tooltip to indicate how much magnitude is lost for each person.
9). Give warlock its cleanse back - im guessing this was an oversight. A healer without a cleanse is incomplete
10). While removing the ability to manually manage resources, you've created a system where healers are going to just take what ever feats/features make their life easier.
11). Soultheft - this requires you to get hit. Against trash packs I guess this is cool, but in any fight where not taking damage is a priority, it kinda blows.
Suggestion: rework to regen soulweave whenever the target marked by lifepact is struck.
____
Overall I'm pretty happy with all the changes so far. Like with any new system, this one needs a bit of polish before I think players can fully enjoy it.
Thanks for all the hard work, esp given the state of the world.
Lets see m19 start off right
About DC:
BUG: You lose all stacks of Cycle of Prayer when using Channel Divinity, even if you want to do something that does not consume divinity (like activating Gathering Light or Angel of Life). Cycle of Prayer stacks should only be dropped if Channel Divinity consumes divinity to cast the single target heal.
In general, i would make visible to everyone the divinity/soulwave bar.
This way, if they die, they can't judge us for their stup--- Bad play.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
What on earth makes you think that these nerfs will 1) Persuade me to spend more money when I have no idea if things will change yet again, after a month and 2) make already unpopular classes more attractive to people.
Do any of the devs ever play or test the game on Consoles ? I seriously doubt that you do or you would know about the horrendous targeting on Consoles.
For goodness sake just leave things alone and stop tinkering. Put your resources into making a new class that is fun to play
And to emphasize what others have already said, removing the option for us to recover our resource will only cause us healers to stand or walk around while waiting for it to regenerate again since our at-will damage is pretty insignificant and now we have a reason to use the healing ones instead. I also agree with everything everyone has already said about blue shields, and that warlocks need their cleanse back.
My main issue with this update is the new healing mechanics. Shouldn't players be rewarded for strategic positioning and not punished? When a group stays together they can take advantage of AOE healing, which helps the healer manage divinity, and also other player buffs like Astral Shield, Hallowed Ground and Pillar of Power. If the new healing mechanics get implemented it will incentivize everyone to spread out so the healer can properly target the right player with its single target heal or target the "right amount" of players for the AOE heal, which in my opinion defeats the purpose of having an AOE heal.
The AOE heals have always been a favorite for healers because of how messy it is to target players, and with this update forcing everyone to switch to using mainly single target I can see myself and many others having a lot more frustration over missed targets than fun with the new gameplay style, further driving people away from the role instead of incentivizing it.
After reading the complaints here and doing some testing of my own, I have a few suggestions to be brought to the team.
Firstly the "Blue Bar" problem:
Paladin Shields are too powerful as they are now, essentially as people have pointed out multiple times, removing any need for Healing and rendering other Healing paragons pointless. However they don't need to be removed as a slight decrease in durability and availability would suffice.
- Shield Health should be damage calc'd as having 0% DR. It is meant to act as a "buffer" and this would better facilitate that rather than being a pseudo replacement for health entirely as it is now.
- Add a Debuff CD, active after a shield is depleted before another can be applied as well as removing or vastly decreasing the effectiveness of additional shielding applied while it is still active. 8 seconds should suffice.
As for the new addition of Warlock shields, they need to either be made Additive to Paladin shields rather than replace them or be represented as a different bar color altogether. I'd suggest Green. Due to the much weaker nature of them, at this time I'd suggest them being a separate bar and to be exempt from the debuff the Paladin's should be subject to. However the DR status should still apply.
Secondly, the state of the Warlock:
- The Warlock needs a Cleanse attached to one of its proprietary Heals. Without one it cannot function remotely as a Healer. I'd suggest the reworked Harrowstorm.
- PoP should have its CD reverted to the previous state. The Warlock is not blessed in the Raw Healing department like the other two classes no matter how you spec. it and use of PoP was and should continue to be central to the proactive nature of the classes' playstyle.
That is all for now.
I was on board with the M16 overhaul to make encounters and dailies less spammy and to encourage more strategic use, but CDs of 20+ seconds are inherently un-fun.
Adding insult to injury is that healers are now waiting for their resources to regenerate, and they have feats that either encourage them to delay spending their resource or to ineffectually tap an enemy to help their pool recover more rapidly. Most healer encounters that are not spenders have painfully long CDs, and most of the desirable At-Wills are actually spenders. The damaging At-Wills are a waste of time without some added benefit, as mentioned previously in this thread.
Contagion - Cleric
Testament - Wizard
Pestilence - Ranger
Dominion - Paladin
NIGHTSWATCH
The changes to healing are too radical at a time period where there are not as many players as there once were. Lots of really good players left due to taking away Life Steal, and the numbers just haven't gone back to what they once were. However, the way that things are in the game currently aren't that bad and if a few things were upgraded, they'd be fine.
First things first, Warlock Healing. Its healing abilities should just be upgraded. How it heals right now is perfectly fine, it's a mobile healing class that needs to be close to effectively heal. That's a really nice and awesome type of healing. Maybe just change Shatter Spark so that it loses magnitude the further away people are, like regular AoE blasts in DnD. If Warlock healing was completely changed to Soulweave instead of Soul Sparks, that's still fine, but please just need it the same mobile healing as it is. It's really fun to play this way, and if you take away the mobile aspect, then it's just... a cleric with a bit of OP shield slapped in it in some places. The way it is currently makes it a super fun and different type of healing compared to the other two healing classes, which is why people both like and dislike warlock healing, but it is really good as it is.
Secondly, Outgoing + Incoming healing % changes. These are waaaaay too big for what you're trying to do. Maybe in a change later on, or the next mod, but changing both of these at the same type as changing how every type of healing works is going to completely crash healing. It's a recipe for disaster as soon as it drops on live. The 6% -> 2% rank 15 tactical change is going to complete negate some of the best items in the game, which will make running endgame content for anyone that isn't top-top end almost completely impossible. As it stands, it's really hard to run The Infernal Citadel or Tower of the Mad Mage with how things are. And with how Outgoing healing is going to completely crash, it's going to make healing anyone anywhere really hard because of how Incoming healing is also crashing. Outgoing healing is one of the very few ways to negate bad incoming healing from players that don't really know what it is, and even then, it doesn't always work.
Lastly, Healing in general. Making each of the classes very similar to each other is going to negate the need to run anything other than a pally heals. The reason why each class is good is because they are different. If you change that, and make all of the classes basically really similar to each other, you might as well just have a bunch of pally healers and maybe the occasional cleric or two, but with this update, pally healers are going to be the only viable healing class. Again. I don't know about anyone else here, but coming from the perspective of constantly running with people that rely on pally shields, it makes it really annoying and tough to run anything with a healer that isn't a pally because people continually run into fire, into the red zones, and everything. And by god, the regeneration! If we can't regen, then a lot of the time we're going to stand around uselessly anyways. This is already a problem with the warlock healers, please don't make it a problem with all of the classes!
Basically, these changes are too much at a time where healing is heavily dependent on pally heals already, and it's going to completely crash and the only way to run content will be with pally healers, especially content like The Infernal Citadel and Tower of the Mad Mage. As someone who loves the current warlock healing and just wants it upgraded a bit, I can confidently say that I'd just rather abandon my healer than continue if this is what next mod will be. I may just completely abandon the game, actually. I love this game, but if the game is going to so heavily crash because the devs want to change something so much that isn't broke, then I'm not going to play it. A lot of players - of all varieties - are going to straight-up leave the game because:
A. Healers will be impossible to find
B. When they do find them, healers aren't going to be much good at all
C. If the healer isn't a paladin, then the group is dead before they've begun
What is so wrong with people who are end game players and who have spent time, effort and money to spec their healing toons well thus enabling their group to complete dungeons easily. Surely that is the culmination of the ‘work’ they put into the game and more importantly makes it FUN. Isn’t fun why we all play in the final analysis. I am not one of those end game players but I am an aspirational one.
As devs you seem to be determined to suck all this fun out of the game and make all the healers weak cookie cutter versions of each other. Make Clerics and Warlocks stronger enabling them to compete because your changes certainly won’t
I have previously mentioned that I doubt that any of the devs play on Console. I would like to see you play on a stream; on a Console; in a real life situation; in a random queue and then try and do your targeting. I know that you won’t
Pillar of power has almost 30 secs cd with only 10 secs up, thats almost 20 seconds of not doing HAMSTER and god forbids a boss like tiamat uses a random skill and makes your pop useless
They removed the curse mechanic from the healing path, so we lost our main aoe dmg ability, curse bite, they nerfed soul siphon our main daily dmg dealer in the healing path and they also removed wardig curse, now we can't apply a -5% dmg debuff on multiple targets constantly. Instead they gave use 1 ability that that has 23 seconds of cd and can only debuff 1 enemie
they took away our cleanse (don't know if it was an oversight)
We still have the lowest heals
And on top of all that our micro shield replaces the paladin one, so tell why would you take it instead of a paladin or a cleric??
I have also read from a contributor to this thread that there is a 39.1 % reduction in heals for a cleric. If this is allied to single targeting which is incredibly hard on a Console it may very well mean I move on either from the game or my Cleric. As I have only just returned to NW after the ruination of my OP in mod 16 it does not bode well for the latter.
I have have absolutely no problem with PC players we all have our own preferences as to the medium on which we play the game. Horses for courses lol. I do wish, however, that the differences between playing on a PC and playing on a Console were taken into account by the Devs and we Console players weren’t always treated as second class citizens.
In the case where it remains a pally only mechanic, the way to balance it would be for it to come at a cost to the healing. Making an ability half the magnitude of a cleric heal but give as much HP as a shield doesn't cut it as "less healing". The cost needs to make it a choice for the pally. Either through feats or mechanics.
If it's impossible to balance that way, then clerics need access to shields as well. This would kill the flavor some more, but I don't see a way to balance shields as they are otherwise. Since Soothe and Cure wounds are pretty much the same spell at this point, I'd favor rebranding Soothe as an AoE heal over time with the condition that if the target already has a HoT active (previous Soothe, active healing word, warlock HoT, etc.) then the effect becomes a shield instead. Cleric's access to shields would be pretty minor at 500 magnitude, but at least it would be something.
I'm mostly upset about the drastic warlock changes, flavor wise. Why can't curses just heal as this paragon class mechanic ? Party members that hit a cursed target get a small magnitude heal or hot and powers that consume curses trigger a larger magnitude heal ... Keep the pet and some of the other mechanics, but warlocks should curse imo, no matter the paragon.
I've been advocating for tab mechanics that does different spells as you hold the key, so I'm happy about those changes. Can arbiter Clerics get tab hold Spirit Guardians pls ?
For 5-player content, where SW can use the new Infernal Barrier, the "full magnitude" of the main heal will be 3000 (1500 heal + 1500 shield), while Cleric's is 2200. For comparison, DC main heal in M18 is 750 magnitude, higher than the "total" 700 from non-crit OP divine touch in M18 (350 heal + 350 shield). This basically means M19 DC heals aren't really strong enough to compensate the lack of mitigation like they are on M18 and SW, having not only mitigation but also party buffs, will probably be preferred.
For 10-player content, where SW can't use the new Infernal Barrier, SW apparently will have better synergy with the OP. The heal over time feat ("mandatory" to not override OP shield) is good to keep DPS players topped up, the Pillar will increase party damage and OP shield as well. I've seen people asking for "SW heals for Zariel on preview" in the ToMM channel a couple of times before the lack of healers forced them to ask just for "healer for Zariel on preview" if they actually wanted to get something done. It's probably not really a big difference, considering DC will have higher heal magnitude to compensate for the lack of synergy, but the current perception is that SW+OP will be the meta for Zariel.
Tl;DR: as it currently stands (and everything can change because this is preview), OP will stay on top and DC and SW will probably switch places in the "healer desirability rankings". DC and SW will probably be very close to each other in 10-player content, SW will probably have a more pronounced advantage on 5-player due to actually having decent mitigation that can't be compensated by DC heal magnitude like it could pre-M19.
Another idea is some sorta of sinergy. OP cast bluebar and healer have to maintain them up with heals. We need sinergy in MMO not one character that can do everythings alone.....