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Reasoning behind Astral Shield change
lordgallen
Member, NW_CrypticDev, Cryptic Developers Cryptic Developers › Posts: 91
We made some changes to Astral Shield after finding that it was not balanced in line with the rest of the Cleric's abilities, or those of the other classes. At its most OP, some players could simply ignore defensive gear and just stay in the circle, which is no fun. 
If a single skill on a single class is up "only" 66% of the time, that's a red flag for us that there may be some balance issues with that skill. We're currently looking into high-level dungeon scenarios where difficulty may be inappropriately scaled, leading some parties to feel like the previous version of Astral Shield was required just to make progress.
We've received a lot of positive feedback about the changes to Astral Shield, and it seems that many Clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes. Astral Shield is still a really good skill, and we're monitoring to make sure that Clerics are just as useful in a group as they're intended to be.
Please continue to let us know your feedback, about Astral Shield and everything Cleric-related!
If a single skill on a single class is up "only" 66% of the time, that's a red flag for us that there may be some balance issues with that skill. We're currently looking into high-level dungeon scenarios where difficulty may be inappropriately scaled, leading some parties to feel like the previous version of Astral Shield was required just to make progress.
We've received a lot of positive feedback about the changes to Astral Shield, and it seems that many Clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes. Astral Shield is still a really good skill, and we're monitoring to make sure that Clerics are just as useful in a group as they're intended to be.
Please continue to let us know your feedback, about Astral Shield and everything Cleric-related!
Post edited by lordgallen on
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Comments
The problem with the whole healing situation is that Astral Shield is all clerics have. Let's look at the following
- Single target healing is VERY hard to pull off effectively all of the time with Healing word
- Bastion of Health is absolutely miserable
- Sun burst is decent but does not heal enough in higher level dungeons
- Astral shield is basically all we have, and it's been nerfed where people are sprinting to get into that circle as quickly as they can because they're about to die.
We need something else that's actually effective, do you see the incoming damage in some of these T2 dungeons? It's very high and our healing is really just about some of the worst healing I've ever experience in any MMOG.
The stacking of AS needed a change, the duration of it did not. Righteousness made it a requirement for the single DC team (that wasnt pro)...
My biggest qualm with DC aside from the AS nerf is the just plain worthlessness of our Divine mode at wills. Desperate renewal when feated should be under 50% and specifically byass righteousness.
The problem of a cleric is really not a problem with too small of heals, it is with the constant need to avoid red circles and stay mobile without any powerful heals, and to top it off if you wind up taking a hit and getting down low.... thanks to righteousness it takes an age to heal yourself...
Yes in parties with players of great skill you can survive the AS downtime, but it requires 100% focus. The flip side to this is PUBS, I never pub now because 80% of the time the party will fail because people either can't dodge, won't be bothered to dodge when needed, they think its ok to aggro everything, can't be bothered to spec some defense, or are too broke/greedy/lazy/etc to buy pots. I would be the only person able to survive... Perhaps the average joe will adapt and improve, but I'm not confident. Pubbing now is mostly getting ranted at/ignored when the run fails. Therefore I only run with guildies or people on my friends list since a few days after the patch.
So basically the cool down nerf hurts the average player and raises the bar of entry to higher tier dungeons for them. Perhaps this is inline with your goals, but I can only see it as demoralizing in the long run for those unwilling/unable to adapt.
No one here is going to sanely argue that the stacking didn't need a nerf, it did. It's the fact that when 1 healing ability defines our entire class that's a really big problem. The developers need to look at the other healing abilities we have, specifically how bad Bastion of Health is.
Please go solo heal mad dragon and get back to us with your thoughts
I have played lots of different mmo's (including tera which is kinda similar to neverwinter in many ways) and I have to say the healing here is the worst I have ever encountered. It leads to a general feeling that you want the healing to be poor in order to encourage use of health stones and therefor zen purchases.
This 100X
This is the worst healing game I've ever played.
I'm sure there will be challenges, but that's fine with me. They asked for an opinion and I gave mine.
I've been able to solo heal castle never today with 3 spells (sun burst, healing word and astral shield) and a good build. There aren't many good possibilities but it is what it is, you want people to use potions (or buy stones from your store) and our heals are rather weak and our mitigation is way too powerful (ie: allowing people to stand in red stuff). This is why the class feels less dynamic since the last patch, no more adds to kite and casting mitigation is all we have to do.
Our heals are ok, although most people don't know how to build a good cleric (critical heals ftw), but a bit less mitigation and a bit more healing would be a welcome change for me.
It's difficult to master the class by the way, so people will complain that their heals are weak, since most of them are spread into feats they don't even care about. Of course it's wrong, but you should expect such comments.
-- One thing that would help on "Healing Word" is if we could simply activate it and click on the team player's avatar in the top left as opposed to trying to fish through all the adds/mobs to heal them. This alone would make many of us consider using it more often.
-- Bastion of Health SHOULD be an AOE version of Healing Word, except with a longer cooldown (referred as a lengthy buildup), but as it stands now, even with Invigorated Healing & Warding Shield feats buffing it, this encounter power is simply too ineffective to consider as we would much rather tab something else in its place.
Sorry but you seem to be contradicting yourself.
On the 1 hand you say our heals are weak.
On the other hand you say our heals are fine and infer that its just bad clerics who don't know how to spec who think they are weak.
Agreed, I was confused by the very same thing.
Its up to you how you address balance issues, but just saying its ok for healers to be second class citizens is not a very good plan.
If they have a system of rewards in place for both, then they need to balance for both.
In PvE we are basically forced to do AE heals, since a) single targeting in a chaotic battle situation is very near impossible, b) Healing Word is not exactly a huge heal able to cope with the damage output of T1/2 mobs, and c) Soothing light not only is underwhelming, heal-wise, it also eats our Divinity, which we'll end up needing for better powers anyway.
We're still forced to use AS, and just have to try and survive its downtime with sub-par tools.
Is it doable? Sure, depending on gear and party (i.e. Don't try it in a pug, 90% of the time).
Is it fun? For me it's not. I honestly had more fun when the mobs were chasing me around but I, at least, felt I could do something about it.
It's also not letting us pick any grand selection of powers. Essentially we're forced into picking ONLY healing powers and nothing else. Sure, Sun Burst and Forgemaster's Flame do damage and/or debuff as well, but that's not really giving us options, is it?
In PvP -- or any area where credit is given for kills/damage, we're just screwed, royally. PvP went from being fun to being... well, I'm trying to be kind here, so calling it a disappointing cesspit of frustration and annoyance probably wouldn't do, but it's accurate.
I mean you give us 40-whatever powers to choose from, but essentially make it so that 35 of them will not be useful at all.
I don't know. I used to have fun as a cleric, now I don't even feel like logging in.
- What Class Are You? -
- We had one fantastically overpowered healing ability, and a bunch of really bad ones; You nerfed the former while ignoring the latter
- Righteousness is ridiculous. If the fear was that clerics used fewer potions while leveling, so what? They use the most potions in dungeons, the endgame
- Clerics in PvP are high priority targets. They're squishy as heck once AS drops, even if geared fully for defense and regen. It's a terrible experience, one long beat-down against which you can do little
I am aware that clerics are still functional in well organized groups, whether in PvP or PvE. But even then, it's a class with no real options and almost nothing interesting to do. You did need to fix AS stacking, and it is good design to cast a wary eye on any single ability that appears to be mandatory for all builds of a class. However, you can't nerf that ability, leave all the other problems and just move right along to the next class. Not without shedding a whole lot of players.
Of course I could change my spec to accommodate a slightly better pvp participation award, but then I would be an anchor when I pve'd. Since I can't get decent gear via pvp, I can't think of doing this. So basically I have to play other characters and shelve my cleric.
But i agree they need some kind off buff, they are like gwf before the balance patch.
Free kills in pvp.
Either they need a healing buff (including selfhealing) a damage buff or a bit off both.
I would like to second what Oghier has written.
Sorry for the confusion. Our class is fine in pve, weak in pvp. And i think our heals are a bit weak and that we rely too much on mitigation. But still the class is fine. Just not as dynamic as it could be.
yea, and everybody who says this game is F2P it is not. It is P2W.
F2P my <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>$
tl;dr nerf potions, buff our healing and stop being terrible at making video games
Ah well, yes, we can't score first and get some of the nice blue items and the extra glory. Kills (with tower rush, which is always a nice bonus) get more credits than assists, and that's what clerics can do: assisting. Supporting others isn't rewarded at all.
That's nonsense.
Bastion of Health needs a serious buff or a rework, currently it is the worst heal power ever. Sunburst outclass it and gives much AP/DP + damage enemies + Knock back ability.......
Fix both and cleric is fine for PvE.
Maybe disabling Righteousness in PvP would help clerics. But we need our heals to grant us with assists...
- DRAGON - ( Mehrea DC 13.1k ) - ( Volsung TR 11.7k )
You destroyed healing cleric's in PVP. Period. There is no justification to this. Before if there was only 1 DC (and so 1 AS) we could survive 1v1 and sometimes kill the other person. 2v1 was a mad dash sometimes surviving by kiting and hoping more came. 3v1 and so on we would die. Anything outside of the 1v1 scenario we wasn't killing anyone and only surviving at best which was fine. Now? We are fodder for the mill, I no longer PVP on my cleric, and the short time after the update I did try I quickly learned to stop healing my teamates because that was a beacon for the other team to hone in on the easy kill. This is the result of the nerf to AS that you gave us, your "intention" is irrelevant.
In PVE it is just as bad. After much juggling some of us have finally figured out how to heal the content again, but the death toil is up much higher than before and for the endgame dungeon's there is now a large amount of pure "luck" involved in being able to successfully heal. You have forced players to stock up on pot's and pop them like candy to complete the content. You have made heal pot's just as effective if not more so than clerics. You have regulated the cleric class into a 1 dimensional heal-bot with no hope of contributing to the group aside from helping the Heal Pot's heal the group to full. Gone are the days of healing the group AND nuking/debuffing (having fun). Now it's 3 spells, all of which MUST have some form of healing to them or the group wipes.
Bottom line, before the cleric class could heal his group and have fun DPSing/Debuffing/relax and enjoy the dungeon run. Post patch the cleric class is a support heal-bot that cannot DPS/Debuff/relax and enjoy the dungeon. The nerf to stacking AS was warranted. The nerf to it's refresh time reek's of greedy developer's wanting to force people to spend zen to do the content. I forsee while some will spend zen to do the content, many more will either quit or reroll. The longer you take to correct this will only make it worse.
With our mitigation tools, players should only use potions in two scenarios: the cleric is terrible or they enjoy standing in red circles like idiots. The regular melee/archer damage can be outhealed and mitigated. Of course a bad cleric can just be someone not having all the little pieces of heal you can grab from a good build with the right feats.
Indeed, the required skill to play the pve game has been increased. Is it that terrible? I'm not sure, i'm enjoying it, even if some details could be improved.