Regarding Cleric self heals, they will likely remain fairly minor for the Cleric. This is to help balance the fact that Clerics don't need to use as many health potions as other classes. Before the self heal reduction, Clerics would pretty much always have more gold than all other classes.
It was also creating situations where Clerics would just self heal tank through encounters.
So as unfortunate as the reduction is, it does make you a more concerned with taking damage in combat, which hopefully leads to a more satisfying experience at the end of the day.
From the Reddit Ask Me Anything session, Lead Content Designer Kevin Stocker -
link
Seems the devs have decided to make the Cleric class a potion spammer - as any Cleric who has played above L30 knows, we had to spam potions a ridiculous amount in BW3 - more than any other class in the game from what I experienced with all of the other classes (played all of them).
They stated the game was to be balanced around a solo player and their companion - what I experienced by 30+ combat indicated that this was not the case for the Cleric.
Healing is the class feature, same as stealth is the Rogue's class feature, and control is the CW's class feature. Right now Clerics can't benefit from their own class feature (healing) unless another Cleric is around to heal them. Or shall we remove those things too, say you can't stealth as a Rogue unless another Rogue is around to help you (he has to cause a distraction so you can disappear).
Without self-heals, in solo leveling the class is just a weak DPS. Only way to level a Cleric will be by leeching xp in groups all the way through the game. For this reason, my bet is there will be even fewer healers at endgame than in any other game I have played.
*edit* adding these two videos, one a Rogue at play (L50), and one a Cleric at play (L41), to demonstrate the difference. Rogue has zero issues, Cleric is having massive problems, and these problems are starting way earlier in game as well.
Just need to watch
the Rogue video to see this (watch how many times the healer goes down, then notice how that Rogue doesn't touch potions - he's perfectly happy letting the Cleric heal him, while the Cleric keeps dying). Not sure he even used ONE potion. And note he's using a Tank companion as well, doesn't even have a Cleric companion.
Then watch this video of a Cleric soloing with a Cleric companion even, and watch use of potions, then at
54 mins to see what happens when a Cleric soloing gets a ton of adds. Potions all used, dodges all used, healing all used, BOOM down you go little Cleric! And that Cleric was only L41. AND had a Cleric companion to help heal her.
Discuss.
THIS IS CLERIC AGGRO IN BW3
Comments
I think a 25% nerf to self-heals is sufficient, but the present 75% is absolutely bat**** crazy without some form of invulnerability spell.
I've played the cleric through to 50 in the bwe's and the nerf is ridiculous. So we have more gold? lolz ok.. that's just WRONG.
Even before the nerf, we had to buy pots too, sure, not as many but trust me, heal tanking was not possible without pots.
Here is what's really happening in my view, and I would really like to see everyone who played the Devout Cleric to post their thoughts on this as well.
1. Self heal is almost pointless, there is no point now stopping to cast a heal when you take more damage in the time to heal than you actually heal yourself for.
2. Stopping to heal in PVP = insta-death ..
3. More gold than anyone else? So what, it's not like we can use the gold to buy anything of use, other than pots, which we already needed to buy anyway.
4. Aggro.. ok this is a big one. While running dungeons with the guild mates (and you can see the video on my twitch channel twitch.tv/myneverwinter) every single time I cast a heal, I had ALL, not some, ALL of the adds on my butt. Even when a lvl 50 CC wiz and a lvl 50 trickster tried to get them off me, I was still being pounded on. Watch me run in circles while they attempt to take the ads off, and I try to get in a heal or two on party mates who need it, while spamming pots like a mo-fo every cool down.
5. With the above said, now Clerics have the LEAST amount of gold because we have to spam pots every cooldown.
The nerf was too much, and you so seriously need to address the agro issue. Otherwise I cant see anyone rolling a cleric, might as well have everyone in the party do DPS with one tank and bring pots. As it is, a cleric is useless as he/she will be running away from mobs they agro as they spam pots.
The ONLY good thing I have noticed is the clerics debuff that heals party members as they do damage. Out side of that. Useless.
Any more thoughts???
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Both are probably bugs. The latter is a known bug by the devs. All u need is Forge anyways, and HW to top u up between fights. Shield is prob your #2 choice.
I interpret it as healing in general playing a very minor role, and the Cleric not being meant as healer. With that in mind I can try to tell myself it's ok to not being able to heal yourself efficiently with your own spells. It's not fun, but the logic behind it I can understand. I just hoped that fun would be more important than balancing classes around healing potions, and that the game would embrace the trinity at least in endgame content.
Out of all the classes so far, the Cleric is the only one I am interested in but last weekend I actually felt useless and more of a hindrance in teams. The tank couldn't pull agro and control the fight. I was getting so overwhelmed with mobs that I struggled to keep myself alive (even with pots) let alone taking care of everyone else.
Solo play was boring as I spent so much time in between fights waiting around to heal up.
In the end I logged out and played another game. It wasn't fun any more.
The cleric - one of the most iconic D&D classes - is now ruined because of a few gold pieces. Good job. This is all done in the grand scheme of forcing the players to use Zen for stuff like health stones and ress scrolls if they want to see the endgame.
Of course there are other aspects to a cleric than healing, but it is always part of the core abilities of most builds. Now if the Neverwinter devs say "Our cleric is different, he does this and that..." then I'm asking why I should ever bring a cleric along in my party when another rogue or CW will offer better debuffs, better control and a ton more dps.
Once the game is launched (or Open beta-ed) the users will give their input, and devs will relook at everything.
Actually I expect massive changes in balances, drop rates, cash shop and difficulty just a few days after open beta (whenever that will be, hopefully next month).
They did that just after launch with CO and then again did something similar with STO and both times it was met with absolute uproar, bad press, etc. The games never really recovered after that.
I would hope that they try to avoid such things. Cryptic doesn't have that great of a name. They NEED Neverwinter to launch well right out of the gates.
It was also creating situations where Clerics would just self heal tank through encounters.
So as unfortunate as the reduction is, it does make you a more concerned with taking damage in combat, which hopefully leads to a more satisfying experience at the end of the day."
Interpreted "After a lengthy discussion with PWE, they concluded that less zen would be purchased for the cash shop healing stones, therefore any and all methods of circumventing these future purchases have been nerfed. After much discussion, we concluded the best way to make money off this MMO is to nix the healing class and force everyone to "buy" their heals. Enjoy the new game model."
"P.S. the healing stones are cosmetic only. please remember that. u don't have to purchase them /giggle" Cryptic dev team
SWEEET !!!!!
Must fix before all else.
I don't even know how they came to that conclusion - all my characters of every different class had around the same gold at around the same level.
..but once again, gold is as useless as you can get. Pretty sure its just the potion currency now.
Worse healer role ever seen...
"Regarding Cleric self heals, they will likely remain fairly minor for the Cleric. This is to help balance the fact that Clerics don't need to use as many health potions as other classes. Before the self heal reduction, Clerics would pretty much always have more gold than all other classes."
Correct, gold will have very limited purpose. But they aren't really concerned that clerics will have more gold than other classes. They are concerned that clerics are using less potions. If they're using less potions, they're less inclined to pay real-life money to purchase the consumable full-health item in the Zen store. This is their real concern.
It isn't about class balance, it isn't about trying to create a new paradigm in class designs. Its about determining what will affect their profits. A cleric class that can keep their own health and their group's health above zero without resorting to using an item that cost real-life money isn't something they want in their game.
Pretty sad IMO. If they continue down this path, the game will be more like D3. Tons of people playing at release, very few playing a few months later. I had high hopes for the game after beta 2, but after this last one, I just don't see myself playing the game for any length of time. And after reading tons of comments on the game, I think that feeling is starting to grow. This is going to be a short term F2P diversion, but people are not going to leave their current MMO's for the long term.
Also healing potions are way better than a cleric. They have better burst healing and almost no cd. A cleric can't hope to compete with the power of a potion. I am unsure if he can even compete with the healing of a companion. Up to lvl 26 I got the feeling he cant.
Also there is pvp...
While hopefully it will be possible to tank in pve, that wont work in pvp. So the will focus the healer. Healing yourself is always more challenging because you will have to dodge, kite and you will get cced. So there is really no need for a self healing reduction in pvp.
So what I would propose:
- Increase the healing of a cleric, at least the healing of a healing specced cleric. He needs more burst healing.
- Increase the cd of pots and make them into a hot. They should be an addition to healing and not the main source.
- If you want to keep the healing reduction in pvm pick a reasonable number. Like -25% self healing in pve combat. If you feel full healing in pvp would make them to strong reduce the dmg of the cleric but dont touch his self healing in pvp. A passive could be like: -25% self healing in pve and -10% dmg in pvp or something like that ( the exact numbers would need testing).
If a cleric can't heal himself in pvp they will just focus him and he will die. That wont be fun.
My stomach is clear and my mind is full of bacon!
as i said in another post:
i don't mind clerics healing as much as they do now:
atm, their heals are useful to top people up and to sustain them, pots in a normal dungeon run are used when people fail to dodge or when they take spike damage, so both are useful.
what i DO mind is that clerics sacrifice too much for those heals:
a)only 2 dodges for a ranged character, i still don't understand why is that and they don't have 4 dodges like the wizard
b)less than half the damage that a dps character has
c)nearly 0 survivability, limited CC, etcetcetc
Cryptic said that they want the LEADER role to help the other members of the group blahblahblah. 5-10% dr and 5%damage boost and some maintainance heals that only serve to mitigrate the use of pots doesn't add up to what a group LOSES when they take up a cleric with them. P.e. a good second control wizard in an organized group could help mitigrating more damage and still do more damage than a cleric.
a reasonable buff to clerics, if they don't want to give us more healing (which once again i am fine with) would be to give us utility that the other roles (striker, tank, control) don't have: REAL buffing power.
p.e. take our aoe heal, make using it with divinity also grant to all friendly targets +5% critical chance and +10%critical damage for 10secs (ennough to have ~50%uptime).
same thing with a lot of our utilitites. daunting light p.e. a really good ability when used with divinity, a really tough ability to hit with when not used with for no apparent reason. make it a bit larger aoe in it's base form and give all party members that also happen to be in it's radious (when used with divinity) gain X% of y stat (where x isn't the crappy 1-5% bonuses that we give, but something real and something that accounts for the fact that we do 50% of the dps a dps class does)
May Gary rest in peace.
Here is what they want for the Cleric:
The Cleric is meant to support their allies by providing additional survivability and damage through buffs and debuffs, in addition to contributing damage of their own.
Reducing the Clerics self-healing does not necessarily lead to Clerics having less survivability than other classes. Yes, during beta 3 this may have been the case, but it is possible for number tweaking to get them in the right spot. Some of their survival can come from damage reduction (they do wear chain), and some from secondary self-healing effects.
There is a key difference with Clerics in this game and other games. In other games, healers generally have to target their heals. They can choose to target themselves, but doing so reduces their healing on others. In Neverwinter, this is not the case. The Cleric can benefit from all their outgoing healing effects just as much as anyone else. This means the cleric doesn't have to choose between healing themselves or healing someone else. Not having that decision makes them exceptionally durable. Reducing the healing they do to themselves is an elegant way to keep their heals effective on others while not making them gods.
Are the numbers for that in the right place? No. Can they be adjusted appropriately? Yes. The self-healing reduction had a bug this weekend that made it more severe than it should be. They can fix that and see where it stands. If it's still too low, it can be adjusted until it's right.
pay to win before its even released.
It already reduces armor by 10% when feated. Couple that with the feat that reduces armor by 30% and Prophecy of Doom AND Divine Glow you actually do not need to build armor penetration like a Trickster Rogue has to to get the most effective DPS.
All they'll do there is nerf the cleric companion.
Do i want to play a Cleric like table top D&D, one that can cast any healing spell, raise death or resurrect (if high level). You bet i will love to do that. But somewhere PW have plans to make money for this F2P and that is buying those (scrolls) for Zen. How do they want the Cleric to buy pots and drain his own cash in game, by lowering the self heals.
But if that have to happen, I will like to see that lowering of self heals happen only during combat and not when out of combat. In reality it was better to run back to the last campfire for healing than stand there and self healing, sadly is kinda annoying to run back heal and then move forward have another fight, stop i have to run back again, I'm back move forward hopping that "hey there is a new campfire" or "man i have to run back again".
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Look, I'm as worried about p2w as the next guy, and I like a good conspiracy theory, but this whole thread is based on a lie.