Tbh if paladin healers need an adjustment, i would rather have the base heal of the paladin be increased instead of nerfed and making the over shields equal to 50% of the healing magnitude rather than decreasing it altogether, nerfing the paladin to this extent is over the top. Rather giving appropriate buffs to the other healers would be more better in the long run instead of having to go back to fix the paladin at a later date... We dont want to see more classes excluded after we come this far in terms of balance overall especially on support classes
Please undo the recent changes you have done to the healing classes. This was a big mistake. You have destroyed the paladin to ruin. I will no longer be playing mine next mod and shelve him hopefully when the class is fixed down the road. I play in fact all 3 healing classes and what you have done is pretty much hurt them all. I feel that your development team tends to listen to screamers who rant and rave and bleed all over toxicity in the forums. Shall I scream now how Barbie is OP vs all the pure DPS classes and should be nerfed into oblivion? Since the barbarian has the best tank option as well? If I rant and rave and put up numbers will that get that class ruined for next MOD so I can play my preferred class and get picked for the dungeon instead? Thus destroying the enjoyment for someone else for my gain? I feel this game has become cut throat island where the loudest most demanding personalities get rewarded and the good decent players who are loyal for years are told to shut it and deal with it. I know it sounds like ranting, but its not.This is observation and my experience from the past 7 years since beta on this game. Not many of my kind left since your listening to the wrong crowds most of the time for what should happen. I am predicting a heavy decline of player base once they are able to get the campaign done. Since the changes make game play even less enjoyable. I'll just Wait and be hopeful for true balance to the game. Many players already came to you with ideas on this already. If you honestly want some of my opinions and ideas, please contact me cryptic. You already created these things in your other games...just carry them over. I prefer to talk one on one to present to you some of my ideas that you already have created. Does not mean you have to do them, but honestly contact me if interested in hearing about it. Over the years I have talked to a wide variety of your player base in game and I actually listened to them what drives them to play what they liked and hated. You are on honestly on the the right track with some of what you have done already. Thank you for the legendary mounts account wide, the recent enchant packs, and hopefully more like this to come. But please please consider what you have done to the healing classes and undo this. I am sure soon the numbers will start rolling in from the player base. I'll do the best I can to adapt, but many will not.
well to be completely honest the recent changes on the healing nerf... made me think i should stop playing my 27k cleric completely it seems i can't heal a tank.. leave the whole party.. making a single person alive would be hard.
If these changes get implemented on live server i would rather start playing other classes.
The worst Dungeons and Dragons game I ever played. Unfortunately I have to say that now.
and to think that the quick, easy, and normal fix would be to increase warlocks magnitude a bit and to nerf palas shield a bit i really dont think the devs play the game at all
It seems they are trying to weaken all healers so people will buy more scrolls and stones of health to make them the new constant source for income. It’s a shame if they keep nerfing people more and more will leave it’s getting a joke now maxing out your gear to be nerfed to a pulp 😢
@the whole dev team you guys are a complete and utter joke at this point do you guys even play this game and the class's and run end game dungeons/trails if you start nerfing the healers no one will be able to do any end game content at all cause there will be no healers left in the game. you should all take a good hard look at yourself really and fix this HAMSTER right now and as for there being no more nerfs to the game mission failed big time all trust has been lost again.
Bastion of Health, from 2500 to 1500 magnitude. Divine Touch, from 1500 to 600. Both divided by the number of people in the circle. Nerf of 1000 and 900 magnitude? Is this some kind of joke or what?
As if coming up with terrible, boring and weak *New Mechanics* wasn't enough. Now even the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> of a heal that we had is nerfed again in huge values.
Fam, i discover the reason of this adjustments on healing. My theory is that the Bard is finally comming, and you know what Bards do right? This is just Devs roleplaying Bard on us. And we are the Dragon.
The meta it's just a guideline. And guidelines are boring.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
When we called for changes, this is not what we meant. We didn't ask you to nerf the ever living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of all healers. We asked for some minor tweaks to the pally's OP shield, and you went all out war on all of us. You ignore us in the dedicated healing thread. You can't even face us to tell us the changes. Cowards. It wasn't long ago that we were promised better communication than this.
ok went to test my op finally after getting so frustrated with my dc and god damn.. i dont think we are gonna see much dc's.. op is much more versatile than dc now. Also one thing i noticed that gives paladin advantage over cleric (no idea on warlock tho as i dont play that) is the tab heal charge.. For op i can charge it full and hold it and release the heal when i want. On cleric i can fuly charge but then it casts the heal and i will have to have crystall ball to know when that heal is needed.
My initial reaction to this was outrage. Pure, gut-wrenching outrage. All of these changes designed to make healing more difficult skill based, the stupid ST system, and now yet another yank down to make it even harder. Those were my first thoughts, but the more I sat and tinkered and thought about it, a very, very tiny seed of hope grew. This is Asterdahl's answer to the first like four pages of this thread where we (myself and many others) said healing is too much standing around and doing nothing. Healing is boring we said. Smaller heals means we need to cast them more means we are doing more things. The essence of this round of changes is actually *trying* to address the always be casting idea. He wants to fix the boredom problem. Now, this seed of hope is very, very tiny because I have *serious* misgivings about these numbers actually being able to keep people alive if HAMSTER goes sideways. For this sort of design to work the one-shot and death mechanics will have to be tweaked down a little bit to compensate for the fact that we no longer have a huge heal on hand to deal with a sudden 1 mil HP deficit. But, I see what the intent was. And before I start crying tooo much, I want to see where the numbers land.
Part Two:
The overshield. The very tidy side effect of just slashing the size of heals is that you also slash the size of the shields because the shield is a function of heal. So yes, this is one way to deal with that. And I will wait to see how the shields look in the coming days to know if this is successful or not for the time being, but I will point out right now that this is at best a stopgap measure to doing something to handle the shields permanently going forward: either removed or limited in a fashion not based on heal amount or separate from heals altogether (lots of very thoughtful ideas have been proposed that would preserve the integrity of the *unique identity* but lessen the gap for the other classes). It looks like for right now the overshield problem *might* be a little bit bettter, but honestly, even a small shield is better than no shield so the gap isn't actually addressed. Pallyheal will still be inherently better as long as it can perform everything the other two classes do plus more.
And what about when we find a way to optimize our heals again? What about power creep? We are going to find the most efficient way to use this and get the biggest heals and shields possible out of it. At some point in the future, possibly tomorrow possibly next year, the eight or nine pages of this discussion pleading for the overshield to be limited so they can't overshadow the other two classes will just be repeated and then Pallyheal will be nerfed again. We are absolutely tired of major revolutions to this game. I don't even play Pallyheal, and I don't want them to have to live through all of this again. Just take the damn overshield in hand and make the fundamentally necessary changes to it *now* while we're already hiking through Wonderland.
After my Wizard got nerved to something similar to a DPS class my thoughts were: OK, I have a Paladin that can shield everyone around him. Let´s play as healer as long as it takes to make the Wizard great again. I have invested at leas 15 Milion AD and an load of real Money to bring him back to where he was with mod 15. And now this. Are you serious? Realy? No Joke? Not funny Guys and girls, not funny. My english is bad, but you hopefully get the point
My initial reaction to these newest changes was fury. Absolute, gut-wrenching fury. Yet another round of changes to make healing harder. BUT, I've been sitting and tinkering and thinking, and a very, very tiny seed of hope has grown. Smaller heals means we need to use them more means we are busy for more of our time. This set of changes is *intended* to address the first several pages of this thread where many people, myself included, complained of boredom. We said there wasn't enough to do and our time wasn't spent in valuable fashion. He's trying to address that. Now, this seed of hope is very, very tiny because I have *serious* misgivings about how well these numbers will keep people alive if HAMSTER goes sideways. With smaller heals we no longer have the ability to handle a very sudden 1 mil HP deficit, and I foresee problems with a few of the one-shot and death mechanics. But I see the intent of the changes. So I will refrain from crying toooo much until I see where the numbers land.
Part Two:
The overshield. The very tidy side effect of slashing all the heal values is that you also slash the shield values since they are a function of heal. As an avid proponent of severely limiting/removing the shield, I'm glad for that. Big shields break the game. But I will point out right now that this is at best a stopgap measure to actually addressing the problem and addressing the inequity of the classes. Even a small shield is better than no shield, so Pallyheal will still be inherently better unless you nerf the heal ability completely into the ground such that they can't even keep anyone alive. No one wants that. That's just a reversal of problems. And, for right now the problem might be a little bit better because the shields are smaller, but what about moving forward? We will take what you give us and run it through the wringer and distill it down to the absolute best heals and shields that can be done. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in six months, this problem will be full tilt again. This entire conversation and yet another round of major changes will still have to happen in the future if this isn't addressed while we're already hiking through Wonderland. As long as Pally can do everything the other two classes can do *plus more* balance cannot exist. Please, please, please for the love of whatever pantheon you adhere to, make the fundamentally necessary changes *now* so that all three classes are where they should be and we don't have to relive this all over again.
Have they figured out what this means to the cocoon phase while fighting arcturia? Can you heal a tank who has 900k hp to full in 4 seconds? What about the first boss in IC when the tank takes the tail jab and then the spines?
Or do tanks now have to grab aggro and kite the boss’s now to limit all the high damage spikes?
I see what they are trying to do. But I don’t think they are taking into consideration previous dungeons/mechanics. With these changes to healing you will need to take a look at all previous mechanics to make sure someone with 100-140k power and 0% outgoing healing can heal through those mechanics.
Keep in mind any changes also reflect the 99% of the rest of player base... and not the Just 1% who have 200k power and max stats. Based on these changes you are also affecting the poor souls who can’t heal through fbi/malabogs/lomm etc etc etc
I understand that there needs to be a bandaid because they are already making your top tier dungeons and mechanics trivial but keep in mind this is a complete broad change that effects EVERY instance of the game from the skirmish in black Lake District to the new zariel challenge.
1. Some players in this thread were concerned about the viability of playing this single target healing paradigm on Console. After all, console players couldn't bind keys to heal the tanks to bypass the absolute terrible targeting system this game has. I'd like to inform these players that the developers fixed this on the last patch: they removed the "target" command. Now it's impossible to bind a key to heal the tank on PC too. Thank you Cryptic for being so inclusive and for making sure everyone gets HAMSTERed in the HAMSTER equally by your terrible targeting system.
So, this wasn't what us console players had in mind. Just saying.
I haven't played on my Cleric in preview for a few weeks and was, for the most part, happy about the changes. I will get on Sunday late late morning my time (UTC+1) and during stream will speak about the more recent changes and see how it pans out. If anyone is interested in joining, swing by and let's have a fireside chat about Devout.
Just call me Enna... Enna Backpetal Cleric Enna F Backpetal Fighter
Naaahhh, end game content = WE WANT TO SURVIVE = paladin this does not solve the problem of balance between healers
I know its hard for the paladins to accept, but the shields are too overpowered
or every healer has the shield or none of them
"unique identity", man i see this as an excuse, just make another feature to make them unique, but this shield is a problem.
ppl are already strong, they dont want to take risks..... come on
*I liked your idea of reducing the shield over time, it requires more skill of the player*
There is nothing inherent to shields that automatically makes them better than other forms of healing, they are just different. The problem with them is not that they exist, it is how they are implemented. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of a shield when compared to traditional healing:
+ Shields are preventative, you can cast them before damage is taken.
+ Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar.
- Shields are not HP, if your HP hits 0 it doesn't matter how much shield you have (even if you have 5 million shield), you are dead.
Obviously simply removing them from all healers "solves" the problem, but that is not actually the solution that anyone here really wants and the reason why is obvious - it makes all the healers play the same way. If you are going to make them all play the same way, I can save you some time, just delete 2 of the 3 healer classes and you have achieved the same result. So the question is, can you balance shields in such a way so that they are not automatically more desirable than regular healing and the answer to that is yes.
Now, here is my argument for why and how you can "balance" shields with relation to other forms of healing:
First I will address how my recommendation gets a good way towards addressing the problem. By making shields decay over time, you lower the overall power of preventative shielding, such that timing comes back into play and there is an element of skill added. You cannot just cast them 10 seconds before someone gets hit and expect that to work. This helps to balance the preventative side of things. Secondly, by drastically lowering the OPs ability to heal (so an AoE heal will only heal each person hit for ~5-10% of their hp and a single target heal will heal a tank 10-20% of its hp), you take advantage of the negative of shields, that being that if someone is damaged for more HP than the shield prevents, it becomes difficult for the OP to "fix" that.
The rest comes down to content design. First off in 5 player content, any boss attack which is intended to 1 hit you if you take it, should not do "slightly more damage than you have hp" it should just kill you. Hit you for 1 billion damage or something along those lines, the possibility of shields allowing you to survive it should not even be a question. This deals with the issue of shields allowing you to survive more HP than your entire life bar, because it means that any hits that remain in 5 player content, are hits that you are intended to survive through.
Say you want some of the remaining hits to remove 60% of a players hp normally when they get hit and these are hits you intend the player to take. Well, you balance shields by taking the stats of the average paladin you intend to be able to run this piece of content and then you balance the magnitudes around getting the shield value to being ~50%. This way the sum total of the shield + the heal should restore the player to full HP. You can then have some hits which are intended to remove 80% of a players hp if they get hit, which they are intended to dodge and these hits would then act as the "acceptable difficulty states."
For 10 man trials, you can design boss attacks which are intended to do slightly more than 100% of the average player's HP, with the intention that either the mitigation from the cleric (in my example of how I would make cleric distinct I mentioned giving them mitigation) or the shields from OP would allow the group to survive them. The group then has the option of running 1 of the 2 of them, or both of the 2 of them, with the advantage of running 1 of the 2 of them being that the warlock (the last healer type) would be able to boost the team's dps.
If Cleric and Warlock don't have shields, than they are guaranteed to be subpar options compared to Paladin.
This is not true. If a cleric has mitigation buffs which reduce incoming damage by ~20-30% in addition to healing, they are a strong alternative. Especially considering the proposal to drastically lower the paladin's ability to heal. Shields are very good at doing 1 thing, mitigating large hits which are > your HP pool. They are very poor at doing things like mitigating very rapid small hits which sum to a large total, in contrast to something like a heal over time + damage mitigation. More intelligent content design coupled with the class changes I recommended should allow for all 3 classes to have their own niches.
And tbh, I feel that this thread is a very good example of people "getting what they deserve." People complain endlessly about the mod 16 removal of feats, but then soon after are trying to remove what little actual diversity remains from the game, instead of making it work properly. Balance for the sake of balance is all well and good, but when trying to balance things you shouldn't lose sight of what makes them fun, because its very easy to just remove all the diversity in the name of balance and end up with a bland plate of food with nothing that stands out.
Sharp, that's all well and good, but your idea of how Neverwinter should be lacks one thing. Fun. Yes, people want healers to be similar. Because it works. Because that way DPS doesn't have to invest into 600k hp, tanks tank and healers heal.
You would sacrifice fun for the sake of diversity and balance.
Going by that train of thought, "people get what they deserve" for wanting a fun game that has some reasonable choices, yet the Devs keep pushing you to use one by making content obnoxiously hard?
Sounds about right. We went down from 3 paths, all of which had 10 feats, and there were 12 or 15 baseline feats... Down to 5.
This is about as diverse, fun and entertaining as a plutonium dental implant placed with the carefulness and precision of a shotgun blast.
Loved the ideas, but only one concern: If you give that much mitigation, there won't be ppl that will want a warlock for trials even if we give 150% extra dmg. The synergy between those two would be just perfect. And yes, i know it was just an example. Imo the problem its in the Soulweaver itself since the begining. Every change they do, they somehow make the class worst and to "fix" it they choose to bring the other two healers down. They said they don't want the Soulweaver to be at the same level of the other two but gave us thing of both, and by doing that they encounter the problem that AGAIN we ain't even as good as they thought so their fix was to bring the other two down AGAIN. Sadly, there won't be a "fix" until they find out what they want to make with the Soulweaver. And looks like it will take a long time since this next mod we only have one usefull encounter, feat, class feature and at-will from all the new kit.
Pallys should have their shields, and if they love pallys that much they could just make the shields 10% hp and give 20% dmg res when a shield is on. Dcs should have 10% dmg res and 20% extra dmg. SW should be debuffers mostly.
Something like that would make ppl take any healer in any content, and more in a game where most end game content one shot you. But then again, unless they figure out what to do with the SW (either make it actually good or just delete it) there won't be real improvement for the other two healers. They will only put them on a roller coster of "adjustments".
The meta it's just a guideline. And guidelines are boring.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
Naaahhh, end game content = WE WANT TO SURVIVE = paladin this does not solve the problem of balance between healers
I know its hard for the paladins to accept, but the shields are too overpowered
or every healer has the shield or none of them
"unique identity", man i see this as an excuse, just make another feature to make them unique, but this shield is a problem.
ppl are already strong, they dont want to take risks..... come on
*I liked your idea of reducing the shield over time, it requires more skill of the player*
There is nothing inherent to shields that automatically makes them better than other forms of healing, they are just different. The problem with them is not that they exist, it is how they are implemented. Here are the advantages and disadvantages of a shield when compared to traditional healing:
+ Shields are preventative, you can cast them before damage is taken.
+ Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar.
- Shields are not HP, if your HP hits 0 it doesn't matter how much shield you have (even if you have 5 million shield), you are dead.
Obviously simply removing them from all healers "solves" the problem, but that is not actually the solution that anyone here really wants and the reason why is obvious - it makes all the healers play the same way. If you are going to make them all play the same way, I can save you some time, just delete 2 of the 3 healer classes and you have achieved the same result. So the question is, can you balance shields in such a way so that they are not automatically more desirable than regular healing and the answer to that is yes.
Now, here is my argument for why and how you can "balance" shields with relation to other forms of healing:
First I will address how my recommendation gets a good way towards addressing the problem. By making shields decay over time, you lower the overall power of preventative shielding, such that timing comes back into play and there is an element of skill added. You cannot just cast them 10 seconds before someone gets hit and expect that to work. This helps to balance the preventative side of things. Secondly, by drastically lowering the OPs ability to heal (so an AoE heal will only heal each person hit for ~5-10% of their hp and a single target heal will heal a tank 10-20% of its hp), you take advantage of the negative of shields, that being that if someone is damaged for more HP than the shield prevents, it becomes difficult for the OP to "fix" that.
The rest comes down to content design. First off in 5 player content, any boss attack which is intended to 1 hit you if you take it, should not do "slightly more damage than you have hp" it should just kill you. Hit you for 1 billion damage or something along those lines, the possibility of shields allowing you to survive it should not even be a question. This deals with the issue of shields allowing you to survive more HP than your entire life bar, because it means that any hits that remain in 5 player content, are hits that you are intended to survive through.
Say you want some of the remaining hits to remove 60% of a players hp normally when they get hit and these are hits you intend the player to take. Well, you balance shields by taking the stats of the average paladin you intend to be able to run this piece of content and then you balance the magnitudes around getting the shield value to being ~50%. This way the sum total of the shield + the heal should restore the player to full HP. You can then have some hits which are intended to remove 80% of a players hp if they get hit, which they are intended to dodge and these hits would then act as the "acceptable difficulty states."
For 10 man trials, you can design boss attacks which are intended to do slightly more than 100% of the average player's HP, with the intention that either the mitigation from the cleric (in my example of how I would make cleric distinct I mentioned giving them mitigation) or the shields from OP would allow the group to survive them. The group then has the option of running 1 of the 2 of them, or both of the 2 of them, with the advantage of running 1 of the 2 of them being that the warlock (the last healer type) would be able to boost the team's dps.
If Cleric and Warlock don't have shields, than they are guaranteed to be subpar options compared to Paladin.
This is not true. If a cleric has mitigation buffs which reduce incoming damage by ~20-30% in addition to healing, they are a strong alternative. Especially considering the proposal to drastically lower the paladin's ability to heal. Shields are very good at doing 1 thing, mitigating large hits which are > your HP pool. They are very poor at doing things like mitigating very rapid small hits which sum to a large total, in contrast to something like a heal over time + damage mitigation. More intelligent content design coupled with the class changes I recommended should allow for all 3 classes to have their own niches.
And tbh, I feel that this thread is a very good example of people "getting what they deserve." People complain endlessly about the mod 16 removal of feats, but then soon after are trying to remove what little actual diversity remains from the game, instead of making it work properly. Balance for the sake of balance is all well and good, but when trying to balance things you shouldn't lose sight of what makes them fun, because its very easy to just remove all the diversity in the name of balance and end up with a bland plate of food with nothing that stands out.
LOL Disagre, "Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar." yes, this IS overpowered compared to the other classes man, and YES, this makes paladins better than the other classes. Why ppl requests a Paladin for TOMM? bc they have shields.... u can run paladin and cleric, paladin and warlock, but warlock and cleric is almost impossible, any guess? bc of the shields.... so paladin always have there position in this trials, and they can play whenever they fell comfortable to play, but warlocks and clerics doesn't have their position guaranteed in this content, at least warlocks doesn't, but guess what, shields man.... this trials have on shot mechanics because of the shields.....
Yes, ppl want paladins because they have shields, if you change them, like you proposed, paladins would still be better. I have a question, if we change, warlocks w shields and paladins with semi heals, agree? or change with clerics. Its not about being unique, its about the shield and being requested for the end game content.
Recent changes in healers are very bad in my opinion. At least roll back the changes a week ago.
See, the thing is.... if they make changes like these, then in theory, we'd be happy to accept the HAMSTER they had for us a week ago. No, I don't think so, this is rubbish, and they'll realise this within a week of the new mod going out, when they have no healers. And then they have to rush to fix things.
What I'm waiting for, is the communication that we had been promised.
We were told after mod 16 that we would have better communication, that things like this would NEVER happen again. Yet here we are. So soon after mod 16. No lessons learned.
Sharp, I have a great deal of respect for you, but 2/3rds of healers don't even get to run endgame content as healers because of the shielding. They, for all intents and purposes, may as well have been deleted since we only play REDQ and RTQ and the occasional IC. So your state of "not fun" already exists, and it exists because of shielding. In new game content and in your post you're designing content in your head that would kill us purposely if we did not have a shield. Which is the whole HAMSTERing problem. Content has to be designed to take into account that people *could* have as much as much as X amount of HP + Y amount of shield, so enemies need to be able to deal X+Y damage in order for the fail state to exist. And once you start doing that, people *have* to have X amount of HP AND Y amount of shield just to run the content. Which puts us where we're at with people not getting to run the content.
In a perfect world, shielding is possible. I've played other games with it; in fact I currently play another on the side that has multiple forms of "healing". But the situations in which this works are very, very different environments than NWO. The environments where shielding and healing coexist are small, frequent damages or DoTs. That way heals can cope with the damage just as well as shields. The HP does not need to be stretched because there is no attack that will take someone from 100% to dead in a single hit. Shields do not heal. This way there is balance. The unique identities are in fact unique. No one does both. In THIS game the way it is RIGHT now, Pallyheal gets to do what the other two do, heal, AND it gets to be unique. Shields won't and can't work without substantial changes to the entire game's healing and content structure. It would have to be redesigned from the ground up *again* to properly differentiate all of the classes in the roles and all of the enemies attacks and damage tables get redesigned to match against those. Since that isn't on the table, yeah, I'll settle for at least all three classes being playable by advocating for removal.
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thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
Sharp, that's all well and good, but your idea of how Neverwinter should be lacks one thing. Fun.
Wrong. Fun is subjective. Different people find different things to be fun and in an "ideal world" there should be a little of everything to cater to different people. Which is why incidentally, the classes should be diverse in how they play and not all fulfill exactly the same thing in the same way, because if they do so, you may as well only have 1 class.
Yes, people want healers to be similar. Because it works.
And just because one thing works, does not mean other things work as well. I made the argument that a game can have more than 1 type of healer and the different types can all be desirable for different reasons. Yes, it means that more effort needs to be put into solving the problem than just making them all the same, but just because something takes more effort doesn't mean it shouldn't be done.
Because that way DPS doesn't have to invest into 600k hp, tanks tank and healers heal.
So lets say we have 2 scenarios. In 1 scenario there is only 1 type of healer. They all heal the same way, by just restoring HP. Lets say in this scenario, there is a new raid which requires you to have 500k hitpoints in order to live (after mitigation) as a DPS. In this scenario, you have no choice. Your only option is to stack to 500k hp.
In scenario 2, you have 3 different kinds of healers like I proposed. Now, for arguments sake lets say the "shield" healer can give out an AoE barrier of 200k. Lets say that the cleric can mitigate 30% of incoming damage. What options do we have here?
Option 1 - Take 2 of a single healer class. This would be strictly inferior to rainbow because the benefits would not stack, to encourage more diverse parties.
Option 2 - Take 1 Cleric and 1 warlock. After mitigation that 500k is reduced to 350k. DPS can stack less HP, put it into some other stat they want and still finish the content.
Option 3 - Take 1 Paladin and 1 warlock. In this case the DPS only need 300k HP, but you get the idea.
Option 4 - Take 1 Paladin and 1 Cleric. In this case the DPS would only need 210k HP to live.
Obviously, in the game you wouldn't just "sacrifice that hp," you would be choosing between having a safer run where more mistakes can be made and a faster run where if you make any mistakes you will be penalized heavily. The point however, is that in scenario 2, nothing has been removed from scenario 1 but there is more choice in how people get to play. Thus if people have more fun playing it safe (stacking the 2 defensive classes) vs playing it more reckless, that choice is available to them.
Going by that train of thought, "people get what they deserve" for wanting a fun game that has some reasonable choices, yet the Devs keep pushing you to use one by making content obnoxiously hard?
Some people like content which is hard, others do not. Content which is hard is designed for the people who want to play content which is hard, it is not designed for the people who want to play content that is easy. Likewise, not everyone likes PVP, but some people do. PVP is designed for the people who do like PVP, it is not designed for everyone else.
Furthermore, "content which is hard" does not force a single choice onto people. One choice may allow for more mistakes over another, but the other choice allows for faster runs. Thus once people are familiar with the content, they will probably prefer making parties that favor the more aggressive approach.
Loved the ideas, but only one concern: If you give that much mitigation, there won't be ppl that will want a warlock for trials even if we give 150% extra dmg. The synergy between those two would be just perfect. And yes, i know it was just an example.
Not true, you vastly underestimate how much DPS classes value their "big numbers." My fear is not that the warlock will be left out, its that the other classes will feel left out because of how much dps chase those "big numbers." Look back to module 15, people would run with sub optimal group compositions, just because it would inflate their damage numbers. Alternatively, look to module 16. People used darks, despite the fact that it was exceptionally obvious that tacticals at that point were much, much better.
The role that I am least concerned about not being wanted in that hypothetical is the warlock.
LOL Disagre, "Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar." yes, this IS overpowered compared to the other classes man, and YES, this makes paladins better than the other classes.
You did not even bother to read my post did you. There is an entire section in spoilers that addresses this. But lets go over the strengths and weaknesses of the other roles I proposed.
Cleric (Mitigator):
+ Against large numbers of small hits which sum up to large values, HoTs + flat mitigation vastly out perform shields.
+ Reducing damage you take allows you to survive hits you would otherwise be unable to survive.
+ The proposed role has decent heals, which allows it to restore HP to classes as their HP drops, unlike the paladin.
- The values are multiplicative on HP and not added separately which means their effectiveness scales with how much HP the DPS has. The value of shields however scales with the gear on the OP.
Put it simply, damage mitigation via multiplicative buffs are just another method of shielding.
Warlock (Force Multiplier):
+ Has damage buffs. These reduce the amount of time spent in combat, thus there is less time to make mistakes, thus failure is reduced as a result.
+ Has heals, allowing to top up players as they drop.
- Does not have mitigation or shields, thus when players do make mistakes they are more costly.
Why ppl requests a Paladin for TOMM? bc they have shields.... u can run paladin and cleric, paladin and warlock, but warlock and cleric is almost impossible, any guess? bc of the shields.... so paladin always have there position in this trials, and they can play whenever they fell comfortable to play, but warlocks and clerics doesn't have their position guaranteed in this content, at least warlocks doesn't, but guess what, shields man.... this trials have on shot mechanics because of the shields.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ue9ZE6fOEU You can run ToMM without a healer at all, you don't need a cleric, warlock or paladin. But the point of these hypotheticals was not to say there was no issue with the current state of things, its to show that the problem does not lie with the shields, the problem lies elsewhere and the problem can be fixed without making every class the same. Be creative and think critically about the problem instead of just saying, "well if we make everything the same then the problem goes away."
Yes, ppl want paladins because they have shields, if you change them, like you proposed, paladins would still be better. I have a question, if we change, warlocks w shields and paladins with semi heals, agree? or change with clerics. Its not about being unique, its about the shield and being requested for the end game content.
They would not, they would be different. Lets say there is a hit incoming for 1 million before mitigation and 500,000 after mitigation (a very real consideration people make). With my proposal, you could:
Have an OP shield you for lets say hypothetically 200k, allowing you to reduce your hp to 300k if you so wished to and still survive. Or you could leave it at 500k, after getting hit you would be left with 200k and then because the OP does not have good healing (as I proposed) they would have no easy way to heal you up.
Have a Cleric reduce the damage you take by 30%, so you can survive anywhere from 350k HP upwards. After you get hit, they have an easy time healing you, because unlike the OP, they have tools for healing.
Have 500k+ HP and take a warlock, for extra damage + heals.
You are looking at the problem from the perspective of the game as it is now, not from the perspective of what it would be like after changing things.
Sharp, I have a great deal of respect for you, but 2/3rds of healers don't even get to run endgame content as healers because of the shielding. They, for all intents and purposes, may as well have been deleted since we only play REDQ and RTQ and the occasional IC. So your state of "not fun" already exists, and it exists because of shielding. In new game content and in your post you're designing content in your head that would kill us purposely if we did not have a shield. Which is the whole HAMSTERing problem. Content has to be designed to take into account that people *could* have as much as much as X amount of HP + Y amount of shield, so enemies need to be able to deal X+Y damage in order for the fail state to exist. And once you start doing that, people *have* to have X amount of HP AND Y amount of shield just to run the content. Which puts us where we're at with people not getting to run the content.
In a perfect world, shielding is possible. I've played other games with it; in fact I currently play another on the side that has multiple forms of "healing". But the situations in which this works are very, very different environments than NWO. The environments where shielding and healing coexist are small, frequent damages or DoTs. That way heals can cope with the damage just as well as shields. The HP does not need to be stretched because there is no attack that will take someone from 100% to dead in a single hit. Shields do not heal. This way there is balance. The unique identities are in fact unique. No one does both. In THIS game the way it is RIGHT now, Pallyheal gets to do what the other two do, heal, AND it gets to be unique. Shields won't and can't work without substantial changes to the entire game's healing and content structure. It would have to be redesigned from the ground up *again* to properly differentiate all of the classes in the roles and all of the enemies attacks and damage tables get redesigned to match against those. Since that isn't on the table, yeah, I'll settle for at least all three classes being playable by advocating for removal.
Take a moment to stop and read over my posts again and read them slowly. I never denied there was a problem with the state of healers in the game at the moment, but I am arguing that the problem is not because shields exist but because of how they are implemented. I very specifically proposed changes to the implementation of them, as well as proposed redefining the roles of the cleric and the warlock. Notice, I said that paladins should either heal very little, or not at all. That was 1 of the things I mentioned. I also mentioned other things, like shield decay, as well as better defining the other 2 roles. You know what else I talked about? Content design.
My whole argument was, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets fix it." Rather than, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets remove it from the game."
Giving cleric damage reduction buffs doesn't somehow make it "different". I would be very happy if cleric got damage reduction, but to think that that is a perfect solution is a little naive. The same exact things are being accomplished, in the exact same way. It's essentially just a shield that serves the exact same purpose and has the same feel as paladin's overshield. There's really not going to be any gameplay differences with cleric and paladin if you do that. It'll basically just have different visuals, while not being actually unique. They'll just play exactly like paladins did. You've essentially created another paladin, which isn't most fun idea, but it would be balanced and "different", I guess.
+ Shields are preventative, you can cast them before damage is taken. + Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar. + - Shields are not HP, if your HP hits 0 it doesn't matter how much shield you have (even if you have 5 million shield), you are dead.
A damage reduction buff would literally fit all the points of this. But, damage mitigation also brings up the problem of how it will be balanced alongside shields. They might end up being too strong if used together.
On the point of niches, Cryptic seems to want all classes to be equal in terms of uses, but different in terms of feel and gameplay. For example, consider dps; it'd be terrible if you gave some classes great single-target but bad aoe, and some the other way around. The game is clearly biased towards a certain style. Even if you wanted to make aoe dps more important, it would still be unfun to be good for one portion of a dungeon, but bad for another.
Having some healers be good at blocking huge hits, while some good at blocking DoTs is like the dps argument I talked about. They should all be able to accomplish the same thing, at least in many people's eyes, and maybe even in Cryptic's if we take the new changes as the direction they want to push the game in. Fake "diversity" is not what most people want, and the gameplay for each class should feel slightly different, not just carbon copied off another character and renamed from shields to damage mitigation. There's no point in making different mechanics only for them to be exactly the same; just make all healers be able to shield in unique and slightly different ways.
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thefabricantMember, NW M9 PlaytestPosts: 5,248Arc User
Giving cleric damage reduction buffs doesn't somehow make it "different". I would be very happy if cleric got damage reduction, but to think that that is a perfect solution is a little naive. The same exact things are being accomplished, in the exact same way. It's essentially just a shield that serves the exact same purpose and has the same feel as paladin's overshield. There's really not going to be any gameplay differences with cleric and paladin if you do that. It'll basically just have different visuals, while not being actually unique. They'll just play exactly like paladins did. You've essentially created another paladin, which isn't most fun idea, but it would be balanced and "different", I guess.
Its similar, not the same. Here is an easy example that shows why. Lets say you have 200k hp and an OP shields you for 200k. After factoring in mitigation from defense, you can now survive a hit for 800k damage. Alternatively, the Cleric reduces the incoming hit by 30%, you can now survive a hit for 400/0.7 = 571k. Sounds worse in this context, but lets scale it up. Say you had 1 million HP and the incoming hit was mitigated by 30%, you can now survive a hit for 2000/0.7 = 2.857m damage, making it better than the shield, which would only take you from 2m to 2.4m.
It can also be implemented differently in terms of gameplay, for example, things like Astral Shield. The group needs to stand inside of it to get the mitigation. Lastly, because the cleric in this hypothetical can actually heal, it is different in that respect. It makes the cleric good in different scenarios and different to play, because you need DPS to stand inside of your shield to benefit.
A damage reduction buff would literally fit all the points of this. But, damage mitigation also brings up the problem of how it will be balanced alongside shields. They might end up being too strong if used together.
And that is their job, isn't it? Along with making the game, they have to balance it. Sure its more difficult than if all classes do the same thing, but it also makes for a more interesting game.
Having some healers be good at blocking huge hits, while some good at blocking DoTs is like the dps argument I talked about. They should all be able to accomplish the same thing, at least in many people's eyes, and maybe even in Cryptic's if we take the new changes as the direction they want to push the game in. Fake "diversity" is not what most people want, and the gameplay for each class should feel slightly different, not just carbon copied off another character and renamed from shields to damage mitigation. There's no point in making different mechanics only for them to be exactly the same; just make all healers be able to shield in unique and slightly different ways.
This is where I believe things should change. It is all well and good for every encounter to be designed exactly the same way, but if different encounters were designed in different ways it could encourage the addition of different gameplay styles as well as add more variety to the game. Think of it this way, content is already intended to demand 3 roles, a tank, a healer and a dps. I think there is nothing wrong with on occasion, it demanding something specific from some specific class, provided there is some variation over time in which specific class is being demanded.
I am perfectly fine with some classes only being good at AoE and others only being good at single target, provided there is some content which is designed for AoE and some content which is designed for single target. The goal should be to push for more diverse content, not less diverse classes.
Having some healers be good at blocking huge hits, while some good at blocking DoTs is like the dps argument I talked about. They should all be able to accomplish the same thing, at least in many people's eyes, and maybe even in Cryptic's if we take the new changes as the direction they want to push the game in. Fake "diversity" is not what most people want, and the gameplay for each class should feel slightly different, not just carbon copied off another character and renamed from shields to damage mitigation. There's no point in making different mechanics only for them to be exactly the same; just make all healers be able to shield in unique and slightly different ways.
If all healers excel more or less the same way at the same thing there may as well be 1 healer class, because in my eyes there is then no diversity at all. For diversity of choice to truly exist your choices need to matter, you need to be picking something which is functionally different to something else.
Comments
If these changes get implemented on live server i would rather start playing other classes.
The worst Dungeons and Dragons game I ever played. Unfortunately I have to say that now.
Have fun with upcoming mod.
i really dont think the devs play the game at all
Nerf of 1000 and 900 magnitude? Is this some kind of joke or what?
As if coming up with terrible, boring and weak *New Mechanics* wasn't enough. Now even the <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> of a heal that we had is nerfed again in huge values.
This game is less than a joke at this point.
This is just Devs roleplaying Bard on us. And we are the Dragon.
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
We didn't ask you to nerf the ever living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of all healers. We asked for some minor tweaks to the pally's OP shield, and you went all out war on all of us.
You ignore us in the dedicated healing thread.
You can't even face us to tell us the changes.
Cowards.
It wasn't long ago that we were promised better communication than this.
Co-Guild Leader
Ghost Templars L20
Alliance: Tyrs Paladium
Main: Cleric (Heals|DPS)
Alt: Warlock
it may be time for an endgame strike...
Also one thing i noticed that gives paladin advantage over cleric (no idea on warlock tho as i dont play that) is the tab heal charge.. For op i can charge it full and hold it and release the heal when i want. On cleric i can fuly charge but then it casts the heal and i will have to have crystall ball to know when that heal is needed.
My initial reaction to this was outrage. Pure, gut-wrenching outrage. All of these changes designed to make healing more
difficultskill based, the stupid ST system, and now yet another yank down to make it even harder. Those were my first thoughts, but the more I sat and tinkered and thought about it, a very, very tiny seed of hope grew. This is Asterdahl's answer to the first like four pages of this thread where we (myself and many others) said healing is too much standing around and doing nothing. Healing is boring we said. Smaller heals means we need to cast them more means we are doing more things. The essence of this round of changes is actually *trying* to address the always be casting idea. He wants to fix the boredom problem. Now, this seed of hope is very, very tiny because I have *serious* misgivings about these numbers actually being able to keep people alive if HAMSTER goes sideways. For this sort of design to work the one-shot and death mechanics will have to be tweaked down a little bit to compensate for the fact that we no longer have a huge heal on hand to deal with a sudden 1 mil HP deficit. But, I see what the intent was. And before I start crying tooo much, I want to see where the numbers land.Part Two:
The overshield. The very tidy side effect of just slashing the size of heals is that you also slash the size of the shields because the shield is a function of heal. So yes, this is one way to deal with that. And I will wait to see how the shields look in the coming days to know if this is successful or not for the time being, but I will point out right now that this is at best a stopgap measure to doing something to handle the shields permanently going forward: either removed or limited in a fashion not based on heal amount or separate from heals altogether (lots of very thoughtful ideas have been proposed that would preserve the integrity of the *unique identity* but lessen the gap for the other classes). It looks like for right now the overshield problem *might* be a little bit bettter, but honestly, even a small shield is better than no shield so the gap isn't actually addressed. Pallyheal will still be inherently better as long as it can perform everything the other two classes do plus more.
And what about when we find a way to optimize our heals again? What about power creep? We are going to find the most efficient way to use this and get the biggest heals and shields possible out of it. At some point in the future, possibly tomorrow possibly next year, the eight or nine pages of this discussion pleading for the overshield to be limited so they can't overshadow the other two classes will just be repeated and then Pallyheal will be nerfed again. We are absolutely tired of major revolutions to this game. I don't even play Pallyheal, and I don't want them to have to live through all of this again. Just take the damn overshield in hand and make the fundamentally necessary changes to it *now* while we're already hiking through Wonderland.
Not funny Guys and girls, not funny.
My english is bad, but you hopefully get the point
My initial reaction to these newest changes was fury. Absolute, gut-wrenching fury. Yet another round of changes to make healing harder. BUT, I've been sitting and tinkering and thinking, and a very, very tiny seed of hope has grown. Smaller heals means we need to use them more means we are busy for more of our time. This set of changes is *intended* to address the first several pages of this thread where many people, myself included, complained of boredom. We said there wasn't enough to do and our time wasn't spent in valuable fashion. He's trying to address that. Now, this seed of hope is very, very tiny because I have *serious* misgivings about how well these numbers will keep people alive if HAMSTER goes sideways. With smaller heals we no longer have the ability to handle a very sudden 1 mil HP deficit, and I foresee problems with a few of the one-shot and death mechanics. But I see the intent of the changes. So I will refrain from crying toooo much until I see where the numbers land.
Part Two:
The overshield. The very tidy side effect of slashing all the heal values is that you also slash the shield values since they are a function of heal. As an avid proponent of severely limiting/removing the shield, I'm glad for that. Big shields break the game. But I will point out right now that this is at best a stopgap measure to actually addressing the problem and addressing the inequity of the classes. Even a small shield is better than no shield, so Pallyheal will still be inherently better unless you nerf the heal ability completely into the ground such that they can't even keep anyone alive. No one wants that. That's just a reversal of problems. And, for right now the problem might be a little bit better because the shields are smaller, but what about moving forward? We will take what you give us and run it through the wringer and distill it down to the absolute best heals and shields that can be done. Maybe tomorrow, maybe in six months, this problem will be full tilt again. This entire conversation and yet another round of major changes will still have to happen in the future if this isn't addressed while we're already hiking through Wonderland. As long as Pally can do everything the other two classes can do *plus more* balance cannot exist. Please, please, please for the love of whatever pantheon you adhere to, make the fundamentally necessary changes *now* so that all three classes are where they should be and we don't have to relive this all over again.
What about the first boss in IC when the tank takes the tail jab and then the spines?
Or do tanks now have to grab aggro and kite the boss’s now to limit all the high damage spikes?
I see what they are trying to do.
But I don’t think they are taking into consideration previous dungeons/mechanics. With these changes to healing you will need to take a look at all previous mechanics to make sure someone with 100-140k power and 0% outgoing healing can heal through those mechanics.
Keep in mind any changes also reflect the 99% of the rest of player base... and not the Just 1% who have 200k power and max stats. Based on these changes you are also affecting the poor souls who can’t heal through fbi/malabogs/lomm etc etc etc
I understand that there needs to be a bandaid because they are already making your top tier dungeons and mechanics trivial but keep in mind this is a complete broad change that effects EVERY instance of the game from the skirmish in black Lake District to the new zariel challenge.
Enna Backpetal Cleric
Enna F Backpetal Fighter
Twitch Me Baby One More Time
- + Shields are preventative, you can cast them before damage is taken.
- + Shields allow you to take more damage than your entire life bar.
- - Shields are not HP, if your HP hits 0 it doesn't matter how much shield you have (even if you have 5 million shield), you are dead.
Obviously simply removing them from all healers "solves" the problem, but that is not actually the solution that anyone here really wants and the reason why is obvious - it makes all the healers play the same way. If you are going to make them all play the same way, I can save you some time, just delete 2 of the 3 healer classes and you have achieved the same result. So the question is, can you balance shields in such a way so that they are not automatically more desirable than regular healing and the answer to that is yes.Now, here is my argument for why and how you can "balance" shields with relation to other forms of healing:
The rest comes down to content design. First off in 5 player content, any boss attack which is intended to 1 hit you if you take it, should not do "slightly more damage than you have hp" it should just kill you. Hit you for 1 billion damage or something along those lines, the possibility of shields allowing you to survive it should not even be a question. This deals with the issue of shields allowing you to survive more HP than your entire life bar, because it means that any hits that remain in 5 player content, are hits that you are intended to survive through.
Say you want some of the remaining hits to remove 60% of a players hp normally when they get hit and these are hits you intend the player to take. Well, you balance shields by taking the stats of the average paladin you intend to be able to run this piece of content and then you balance the magnitudes around getting the shield value to being ~50%. This way the sum total of the shield + the heal should restore the player to full HP. You can then have some hits which are intended to remove 80% of a players hp if they get hit, which they are intended to dodge and these hits would then act as the "acceptable difficulty states."
For 10 man trials, you can design boss attacks which are intended to do slightly more than 100% of the average player's HP, with the intention that either the mitigation from the cleric (in my example of how I would make cleric distinct I mentioned giving them mitigation) or the shields from OP would allow the group to survive them. The group then has the option of running 1 of the 2 of them, or both of the 2 of them, with the advantage of running 1 of the 2 of them being that the warlock (the last healer type) would be able to boost the team's dps.
And tbh, I feel that this thread is a very good example of people "getting what they deserve." People complain endlessly about the mod 16 removal of feats, but then soon after are trying to remove what little actual diversity remains from the game, instead of making it work properly. Balance for the sake of balance is all well and good, but when trying to balance things you shouldn't lose sight of what makes them fun, because its very easy to just remove all the diversity in the name of balance and end up with a bland plate of food with nothing that stands out.
Fun.
Yes, people want healers to be similar. Because it works. Because that way DPS doesn't have to invest into 600k hp, tanks tank and healers heal.
You would sacrifice fun for the sake of diversity and balance.
Going by that train of thought, "people get what they deserve" for wanting a fun game that has some reasonable choices, yet the Devs keep pushing you to use one by making content obnoxiously hard?
Sounds about right. We went down from 3 paths, all of which had 10 feats, and there were 12 or 15 baseline feats... Down to 5.
This is about as diverse, fun and entertaining as a plutonium dental implant placed with the carefulness and precision of a shotgun blast.
Loved the ideas, but only one concern:
If you give that much mitigation, there won't be ppl that will want a warlock for trials even if we give 150% extra dmg. The synergy between those two would be just perfect. And yes, i know it was just an example.
Imo the problem its in the Soulweaver itself since the begining. Every change they do, they somehow make the class worst and to "fix" it they choose to bring the other two healers down. They said they don't want the Soulweaver to be at the same level of the other two but gave us thing of both, and by doing that they encounter the problem that AGAIN we ain't even as good as they thought so their fix was to bring the other two down AGAIN.
Sadly, there won't be a "fix" until they find out what they want to make with the Soulweaver. And looks like it will take a long time since this next mod we only have one usefull encounter, feat, class feature and at-will from all the new kit.
Pallys should have their shields, and if they love pallys that much they could just make the shields 10% hp and give 20% dmg res when a shield is on.
Dcs should have 10% dmg res and 20% extra dmg.
SW should be debuffers mostly.
Something like that would make ppl take any healer in any content, and more in a game where most end game content one shot you. But then again, unless they figure out what to do with the SW (either make it actually good or just delete it) there won't be real improvement for the other two healers. They will only put them on a roller coster of "adjustments".
Soulweaver: The Lovely Red
Minstrel: The Rose Troubadour
Yes, ppl want paladins because they have shields, if you change them, like you proposed, paladins would still be better.
I have a question, if we change, warlocks w shields and paladins with semi heals, agree? or change with clerics. Its not about being unique, its about the shield and being requested for the end game content.
What I'm waiting for, is the communication that we had been promised.
We were told after mod 16 that we would have better communication, that things like this would NEVER happen again. Yet here we are. So soon after mod 16. No lessons learned.
@cwhitesidedev#9752
Co-Guild Leader
Ghost Templars L20
Alliance: Tyrs Paladium
Main: Cleric (Heals|DPS)
Alt: Warlock
In a perfect world, shielding is possible. I've played other games with it; in fact I currently play another on the side that has multiple forms of "healing". But the situations in which this works are very, very different environments than NWO. The environments where shielding and healing coexist are small, frequent damages or DoTs. That way heals can cope with the damage just as well as shields. The HP does not need to be stretched because there is no attack that will take someone from 100% to dead in a single hit. Shields do not heal. This way there is balance. The unique identities are in fact unique. No one does both. In THIS game the way it is RIGHT now, Pallyheal gets to do what the other two do, heal, AND it gets to be unique. Shields won't and can't work without substantial changes to the entire game's healing and content structure. It would have to be redesigned from the ground up *again* to properly differentiate all of the classes in the roles and all of the enemies attacks and damage tables get redesigned to match against those. Since that isn't on the table, yeah, I'll settle for at least all three classes being playable by advocating for removal.
So lets say we have 2 scenarios. In 1 scenario there is only 1 type of healer. They all heal the same way, by just restoring HP. Lets say in this scenario, there is a new raid which requires you to have 500k hitpoints in order to live (after mitigation) as a DPS. In this scenario, you have no choice. Your only option is to stack to 500k hp.
In scenario 2, you have 3 different kinds of healers like I proposed. Now, for arguments sake lets say the "shield" healer can give out an AoE barrier of 200k. Lets say that the cleric can mitigate 30% of incoming damage. What options do we have here?
- Option 1 - Take 2 of a single healer class. This would be strictly inferior to rainbow because the benefits would not stack, to encourage more diverse parties.
- Option 2 - Take 1 Cleric and 1 warlock. After mitigation that 500k is reduced to 350k. DPS can stack less HP, put it into some other stat they want and still finish the content.
- Option 3 - Take 1 Paladin and 1 warlock. In this case the DPS only need 300k HP, but you get the idea.
- Option 4 - Take 1 Paladin and 1 Cleric. In this case the DPS would only need 210k HP to live.
Obviously, in the game you wouldn't just "sacrifice that hp," you would be choosing between having a safer run where more mistakes can be made and a faster run where if you make any mistakes you will be penalized heavily. The point however, is that in scenario 2, nothing has been removed from scenario 1 but there is more choice in how people get to play. Thus if people have more fun playing it safe (stacking the 2 defensive classes) vs playing it more reckless, that choice is available to them. Already addressed this above. Some people like content which is hard, others do not. Content which is hard is designed for the people who want to play content which is hard, it is not designed for the people who want to play content that is easy. Likewise, not everyone likes PVP, but some people do. PVP is designed for the people who do like PVP, it is not designed for everyone else.Furthermore, "content which is hard" does not force a single choice onto people. One choice may allow for more mistakes over another, but the other choice allows for faster runs. Thus once people are familiar with the content, they will probably prefer making parties that favor the more aggressive approach.
The role that I am least concerned about not being wanted in that hypothetical is the warlock. You did not even bother to read my post did you. There is an entire section in spoilers that addresses this. But lets go over the strengths and weaknesses of the other roles I proposed.
Cleric (Mitigator):
- + Against large numbers of small hits which sum up to large values, HoTs + flat mitigation vastly out perform shields.
- + Reducing damage you take allows you to survive hits you would otherwise be unable to survive.
- + The proposed role has decent heals, which allows it to restore HP to classes as their HP drops, unlike the paladin.
- - The values are multiplicative on HP and not added separately which means their effectiveness scales with how much HP the DPS has. The value of shields however scales with the gear on the OP.
Put it simply, damage mitigation via multiplicative buffs are just another method of shielding.Warlock (Force Multiplier):
You can run ToMM without a healer at all, you don't need a cleric, warlock or paladin. But the point of these hypotheticals was not to say there was no issue with the current state of things, its to show that the problem does not lie with the shields, the problem lies elsewhere and the problem can be fixed without making every class the same. Be creative and think critically about the problem instead of just saying, "well if we make everything the same then the problem goes away." They would not, they would be different. Lets say there is a hit incoming for 1 million before mitigation and 500,000 after mitigation (a very real consideration people make). With my proposal, you could:
- Have an OP shield you for lets say hypothetically 200k, allowing you to reduce your hp to 300k if you so wished to and still survive. Or you could leave it at 500k, after getting hit you would be left with 200k and then because the OP does not have good healing (as I proposed) they would have no easy way to heal you up.
- Have a Cleric reduce the damage you take by 30%, so you can survive anywhere from 350k HP upwards. After you get hit, they have an easy time healing you, because unlike the OP, they have tools for healing.
- Have 500k+ HP and take a warlock, for extra damage + heals.
You are looking at the problem from the perspective of the game as it is now, not from the perspective of what it would be like after changing things. Take a moment to stop and read over my posts again and read them slowly. I never denied there was a problem with the state of healers in the game at the moment, but I am arguing that the problem is not because shields exist but because of how they are implemented. I very specifically proposed changes to the implementation of them, as well as proposed redefining the roles of the cleric and the warlock. Notice, I said that paladins should either heal very little, or not at all. That was 1 of the things I mentioned. I also mentioned other things, like shield decay, as well as better defining the other 2 roles. You know what else I talked about? Content design.My whole argument was, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets fix it." Rather than, "the current implementation of shields isn't working, so lets remove it from the game."
On the point of niches, Cryptic seems to want all classes to be equal in terms of uses, but different in terms of feel and gameplay. For example, consider dps; it'd be terrible if you gave some classes great single-target but bad aoe, and some the other way around. The game is clearly biased towards a certain style. Even if you wanted to make aoe dps more important, it would still be unfun to be good for one portion of a dungeon, but bad for another.
Having some healers be good at blocking huge hits, while some good at blocking DoTs is like the dps argument I talked about. They should all be able to accomplish the same thing, at least in many people's eyes, and maybe even in Cryptic's if we take the new changes as the direction they want to push the game in. Fake "diversity" is not what most people want, and the gameplay for each class should feel slightly different, not just carbon copied off another character and renamed from shields to damage mitigation. There's no point in making different mechanics only for them to be exactly the same; just make all healers be able to shield in unique and slightly different ways.
It can also be implemented differently in terms of gameplay, for example, things like Astral Shield. The group needs to stand inside of it to get the mitigation. Lastly, because the cleric in this hypothetical can actually heal, it is different in that respect. It makes the cleric good in different scenarios and different to play, because you need DPS to stand inside of your shield to benefit. And that is their job, isn't it? Along with making the game, they have to balance it. Sure its more difficult than if all classes do the same thing, but it also makes for a more interesting game. This is where I believe things should change. It is all well and good for every encounter to be designed exactly the same way, but if different encounters were designed in different ways it could encourage the addition of different gameplay styles as well as add more variety to the game. Think of it this way, content is already intended to demand 3 roles, a tank, a healer and a dps. I think there is nothing wrong with on occasion, it demanding something specific from some specific class, provided there is some variation over time in which specific class is being demanded.
I am perfectly fine with some classes only being good at AoE and others only being good at single target, provided there is some content which is designed for AoE and some content which is designed for single target. The goal should be to push for more diverse content, not less diverse classes. If all healers excel more or less the same way at the same thing there may as well be 1 healer class, because in my eyes there is then no diversity at all. For diversity of choice to truly exist your choices need to matter, you need to be picking something which is functionally different to something else.