I want to thank all of you for your input, attempts at advice and just good discussion. Hopefully, this will reach the attention of someone who can effect change, but I doubt it.
This game has such great potential, but PW/Crypticare killing it off during its "open beta" phase. It's a shame to see possible greatness do nothing but wither and die because the devs are more concerned with the market, spelling errors and graphical glitches than they are with fixing the myriad of game-breaking issues which are being complained about ad nauseam on the forums.
Anyway, thanks again to all of you.
Consider for a second that maybe just maybe the class works just as intended. Battle Cleric. All the whiner and fools who cant adapt to what the class is obviousely meant to be are killing off the beta. But I lol at that anyway. Everyone whines and says they are quitting and yet here you still are. No matter what you say or how much you complain, you like the game. Period. If you didn't, then you wouldn't be here whining. You be doing something else that you actually enjoyed.
Actually I think I like the change in healing style a lot. I just think threat needs a slight tweak.
Fights are not helped by the fact that they almost all take the same form and it's the adds which come in later which cause issues. A good CW will help a lot obviously but the fact is the first person to get noticed by new waves of mobs is the healer. Sure, we have pots and can take a hit. Sure we should be standing in our circle. But what I'm finding is that it's incredibly stressful to heal when constantly on the move.
I want to be a good healer and my gear score is climbing steadily (currently 9.2). I have read these guides, spec'd for crit etc and respec'd all my powers and feats. It's helped a ton. I use FF etc but I still find dungeons can go wrong a lot. First tier, np. Second tier (I appreciate I'm just getting up there) it really depends so much on your group and the same things stop runs dead.
I also find it kinda weird that the Bosses are scaled up so much from anything you've encountered before. Most of the trash mobs are fine, aside from the odd one with a weird mechanic. I would so love a Boss fight though which just made ONE mob awkward/difficult/tricky because of the way IT behaved rather than 'let's overwhelm the players with a ton of adds'.
No love needed and no agro fix needed. We are battle clerics and everything works as intended. Cleric is sooooo OP in PVE its not even funny. Stop running around is my advice to you. Drop AS, Toss out FF then repeat. Stand in the circle and attack stuff. The only thing can do even the slightest bit of damage (that doesent heal to full nearly instantly) is the red boss floor aoe. Move of course when you are in one of those. I am running all t1's and all but 1 t2 and I couldn't even tell you the last time I used a health pot.
There's 50 levels before Atsral Shield.You do remember how the game played out through that time right ?
If DC was a BC,I'd fully expect to be able to wear heavy armor and wield melee weapons (based on diety) and shield.
While I'm quite happy for others to play the way they like,I'm certainly not thrilled about the circle jerk metagame myself.
I understand your happy with the current status quo,will you be happy if AS is nerfed and the current meta is changed ?
Not trying to inflame you,honest questions,because from reading your posts it seems you've forgotten there is more than level 60 gameplay to sample in Neverwinter.
Edit:The poster above me eldelphia touches on a good point.
Rinse repeat for almost every Boss fight in game is poor development and it's tiresome.I'm sure however that Cryptic will be working on diversifying Boss fights in time.
I could almost believe the class is playing as intended if it weren't for the threat reduction feats/powers. I really don't think those would be in there unless they intended us to not be beat on constantly. And I would think I'd have at least one way, other than dodge, to properly defend myself. Healing would count if not for the debuff.
Threat reduction may actually be working, but I'll never know it. Simply because my hots generate instant aggro from all the adds in every poorly designed boss fight. I will admit, however, that last night I had the easiest time with trash in a while due to a couple really good wizards. Unfortunately, boss adds <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> me on every fight.
Unfortunately, boss adds <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> me on every fight.
Dungeon Boss adds are the only time I ever have problems with stupid-high aggro. We can zerg through an entire dungeon and barely break a sweat, then you get to the boss fight and boom - every single add and every caster focuses almost exclusively on the Cleric, regardless of whether or not you cast a spell or if anyone else attacks them first. I'm beginning to think it's something specific to the coding of boss fights that's the issue, rather than a problem with heal threat/aggro in general.
Its simply the way boss fights are set up. The first set of adds from a boss fight are manageable since I'm trying to control my threat as to not get boss aggro. But once everyone takes a bit of damage I have to start healing. It's all down hill from there. It also seems to me that once I'm kiting and unable to heal properly I just keep accruing adds. Like my threat is this global variable (as in it isn't mob specific) that adds use when they spawn. It may just seem that way to me though, it's hard telling.
There's not as much aoe damage coming in on trash so I can refrain from using big spells back to back for quite a while. This keeps them off of me. I just don't have that luxury in boss fights due to some designer's severe lack of creativity when it comes to encounters.
Surely there's more than one person that designs these boss encounters right? So who is the guy, that in every single meeting about a new boss, that says "You know what this boss needs throughout the entire fight? More adds!"? And then, of course, everyone nods in agreement. I can only imagine it must be the lead encounter designer and all his/her underlings lacks that backbone to call out the BS.
Its simply the way boss fights are set up. The first set of adds from a boss fight are manageable since I'm trying to control my threat as to not get boss aggro. But once everyone takes a bit of damage I have to start healing. It's all down hill from there. It also seems to me that once I'm kiting and unable to heal properly I just keep accruing adds. Like my threat is this global variable (as in it isn't mob specific) that adds use when they spawn. It may just seem that way to me though, it's hard telling.
There's not as much aoe damage coming in on trash so I can refrain from using big spells back to back for quite a while. This keeps them off of me. I just don't have that luxury in boss fights due to some designer's severe lack of creativity when it comes to encounters.
Surely there's more than one person that designs these boss encounters right? So who is the guy, that in every single meeting about a new boss, that says "You know what this boss needs throughout the entire fight? More adds!"? And then, of course, everyone nods in agreement. I can only imagine it must be the lead encounter designer and all his/her underlings lacks that backbone to call out the BS.
Now I'm only a simple level 40 cleric myself but this aggro is so bad its actually changed how I do pve. After doing a day of just dungeons constant mobs on me and my team just picking away at one single unit(though there's always that CW that thinks they can solo entire rooms which you then run after to keep alive). It reached the stage where I'm so used to kiting 8+ mobs at once with the giant mob chucked in, that now when its PVE I'm just running through entire rooms getting all the mobs and killing them that way. Only through that has my PVE experience equealed my dungeon experience.
Now that is when you know aggro is bad that you stroll through single player just to make it hard to equal the single player dungeon we clerics face.
Screw the aggro fix just give us full healing on ourselves and I'd be more than happy to keep being chased by every single mob at once.
Clerics you know we are the real tank of the team right now.
Astral Shield is working fine for me as a temporary fix to the broken threat. The game mechanics are far from perfect I agree, but at least we have to do something instead of just standing on one spot casting healing spells. Especially the dodging is just part of the game, this should stay needed in all fights, PVE and PVP.
I agree.
Honestly? The cleric is the only interesting class to me in this game because the current threat gives the class the most dynamic playstyle. Take away the threat and we're just killing time between circle casts. Once they change threat, I don't see a point to playing unless they revise the class AND make encounters more varied... and I don't see all that happening very soon...
Honestly? The cleric is the only interesting class to me in this game because the current threat gives the class the most dynamic playstyle. Take away the threat and we're just killing time between circle casts. Once they change threat, I don't see a point to playing unless they revise the class AND make encounters more varied... and I don't see all that happening very soon...
No one is asking that threat be completely removed. We're asking to have it toned-down a little bit.
It's just stupid, no matter how much you want to state otherwise, that clerics take so much aggro that the aggro won't clear through death, high DPS, or GF taunting. In such a terribly designed encounter strategy (you know, infinite adds on every boss) system, the threat as it currently stands is broken. Simply broken.
The threat reduction skills we get do not work and they SHOULD work. Not 100% of the time, but as much of the time as I feel I need in order to control infinite adds beating the ever living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of me.
No one is asking that threat be completely removed. We're asking to have it toned-down a little bit.
It's just stupid, no matter how much you want to state otherwise, that clerics take so much aggro that the aggro won't clear through death, high DPS, or GF taunting. In such a terribly designed encounter strategy (you know, infinite adds on every boss) system, the threat as it currently stands is broken. Simply broken.
The threat reduction skills we get do not work and they SHOULD work. Not 100% of the time, but as much of the time as I feel I need in order to control infinite adds beating the ever living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of me.
I didn't say that threat was fine, I said that I like the tense gameplay. I said one thing, and you went a completely different direction with it. Hopefully, they can retain some of that alongside the changes to threat that are already in the works now.
It's not wholly just that we draw aggro, either: it's that we draw so much aggro that a primary purpose of guardian fighters becomes irrelevant. They can taunt and mark and provoke as much as they like, and the adds are still all "whatevs, brah. Brb: ganking a cleric".
A cleric tanking all the adds when in a bad group is one thing, but tanking them all even when you're in a good group complete with peeps enthusiastically trying to pull aggro from you..is another.
I didn't say that threat was fine, I said that I like the tense gameplay. I said one thing, and you went a completely different direction with it. Hopefully, they can retain some of that alongside the changes to threat that are already in the works now.
So you took me out of context, thinking I took you out of context.
I got what you were saying. The "...no matter how much you want to state otherwise..." comment was just a *general* "you," meant more as a blanket statement than as me pointing at you and calling you out.
It's not wholly just that we draw aggro, either: it's that we draw so much aggro that a primary purpose of guardian fighters becomes irrelevant. They can taunt and mark and provoke as much as they like, and the adds are still all "whatevs, brah. Brb: ganking a cleric".
A cleric tanking all the adds when in a bad group is one thing, but tanking them all even when you're in a good group complete with peeps enthusiastically trying to pull aggro from you..is another.
Comments
Consider for a second that maybe just maybe the class works just as intended. Battle Cleric. All the whiner and fools who cant adapt to what the class is obviousely meant to be are killing off the beta. But I lol at that anyway. Everyone whines and says they are quitting and yet here you still are. No matter what you say or how much you complain, you like the game. Period. If you didn't, then you wouldn't be here whining. You be doing something else that you actually enjoyed.
Fights are not helped by the fact that they almost all take the same form and it's the adds which come in later which cause issues. A good CW will help a lot obviously but the fact is the first person to get noticed by new waves of mobs is the healer. Sure, we have pots and can take a hit. Sure we should be standing in our circle. But what I'm finding is that it's incredibly stressful to heal when constantly on the move.
I want to be a good healer and my gear score is climbing steadily (currently 9.2). I have read these guides, spec'd for crit etc and respec'd all my powers and feats. It's helped a ton. I use FF etc but I still find dungeons can go wrong a lot. First tier, np. Second tier (I appreciate I'm just getting up there) it really depends so much on your group and the same things stop runs dead.
I also find it kinda weird that the Bosses are scaled up so much from anything you've encountered before. Most of the trash mobs are fine, aside from the odd one with a weird mechanic. I would so love a Boss fight though which just made ONE mob awkward/difficult/tricky because of the way IT behaved rather than 'let's overwhelm the players with a ton of adds'.
There's 50 levels before Atsral Shield.You do remember how the game played out through that time right ?
If DC was a BC,I'd fully expect to be able to wear heavy armor and wield melee weapons (based on diety) and shield.
While I'm quite happy for others to play the way they like,I'm certainly not thrilled about the circle jerk metagame myself.
I understand your happy with the current status quo,will you be happy if AS is nerfed and the current meta is changed ?
Not trying to inflame you,honest questions,because from reading your posts it seems you've forgotten there is more than level 60 gameplay to sample in Neverwinter.
Edit:The poster above me eldelphia touches on a good point.
Rinse repeat for almost every Boss fight in game is poor development and it's tiresome.I'm sure however that Cryptic will be working on diversifying Boss fights in time.
Threat reduction may actually be working, but I'll never know it. Simply because my hots generate instant aggro from all the adds in every poorly designed boss fight. I will admit, however, that last night I had the easiest time with trash in a while due to a couple really good wizards. Unfortunately, boss adds <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> me on every fight.
Dungeon Boss adds are the only time I ever have problems with stupid-high aggro. We can zerg through an entire dungeon and barely break a sweat, then you get to the boss fight and boom - every single add and every caster focuses almost exclusively on the Cleric, regardless of whether or not you cast a spell or if anyone else attacks them first. I'm beginning to think it's something specific to the coding of boss fights that's the issue, rather than a problem with heal threat/aggro in general.
There's not as much aoe damage coming in on trash so I can refrain from using big spells back to back for quite a while. This keeps them off of me. I just don't have that luxury in boss fights due to some designer's severe lack of creativity when it comes to encounters.
Surely there's more than one person that designs these boss encounters right? So who is the guy, that in every single meeting about a new boss, that says "You know what this boss needs throughout the entire fight? More adds!"? And then, of course, everyone nods in agreement. I can only imagine it must be the lead encounter designer and all his/her underlings lacks that backbone to call out the BS.
+1
/10char
/hi5
newbie rogue extraordinaire
Now that is when you know aggro is bad that you stroll through single player just to make it hard to equal the single player dungeon we clerics face.
Screw the aggro fix just give us full healing on ourselves and I'd be more than happy to keep being chased by every single mob at once.
Clerics you know we are the real tank of the team right now.
I agree.
Honestly? The cleric is the only interesting class to me in this game because the current threat gives the class the most dynamic playstyle. Take away the threat and we're just killing time between circle casts. Once they change threat, I don't see a point to playing unless they revise the class AND make encounters more varied... and I don't see all that happening very soon...
It's just stupid, no matter how much you want to state otherwise, that clerics take so much aggro that the aggro won't clear through death, high DPS, or GF taunting. In such a terribly designed encounter strategy (you know, infinite adds on every boss) system, the threat as it currently stands is broken. Simply broken.
The threat reduction skills we get do not work and they SHOULD work. Not 100% of the time, but as much of the time as I feel I need in order to control infinite adds beating the ever living <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> out of me.
newbie rogue extraordinaire
I didn't say that threat was fine, I said that I like the tense gameplay. I said one thing, and you went a completely different direction with it. Hopefully, they can retain some of that alongside the changes to threat that are already in the works now.
A cleric tanking all the adds when in a bad group is one thing, but tanking them all even when you're in a good group complete with peeps enthusiastically trying to pull aggro from you..is another.
I got what you were saying. The "...no matter how much you want to state otherwise..." comment was just a *general* "you," meant more as a blanket statement than as me pointing at you and calling you out.
Sorry for any confusion.
newbie rogue extraordinaire
newbie rogue extraordinaire