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.
Wrong. All players need to use potions and learn how to get healed by the cleric. Also they need to learn to dodge.
A faithful spec cleric is not the only spec that is viable. I have solo healed T2's with only 2 heal spells and specced into a hybrid heal/dps cleric. Also I find it more effective to not use astral shield as using astral shield gives the other players a false sense of security.
Thank you for all our options btw Cryptic. Astral Shield 10sec, Forgemasters 5 sec, spam Sun Burst every time it's up for the massive amounts of DP we need too keep two divine skills going every 15 secs. Not that it matters much, because all our other heals are trash. I am a maxed geared Cleric and I enjoyed healing much more before the patch. Then I could actually do things like debuff mobs or clear trash with Daunting Light. Now I'm just a rotation of 3 skills.
Astral Shield wasn't a heal. It was the baseline. You would stay in AS or you die. AS was the safe place you could retreat to as you nearly die instantly if you got a pull on you without it. You can talk about "Oh but we can't allow one skill to be too powerful blah blah". OF COURSE YOU CAN! Balance isn't made on a skill by skill basis! The cleric worked just fine with 100% uptime on AS. Don't get me wrong, I am geared out with my Ioun Stone and 12.1k gs, I can cope easily. The new and improved healing just annoys me. It's is less fun than before. It is -worse-. You made playing clerics -worse-. I don't even want our trash heals improved. I want 100% astral shield back. Because it was a good playstyle. Either make Astral Shield 100% again, or just remove the skill and reimagine the cleric. Cause what you have now is not good.
*edit*
If you need to balance AS, change the damage reduction or the healing from it. And let us use other heals to make up for the damage taken, but let AS have 100% uptime.
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited June 2013
Late game dungeons, even after the change, require Astral Shield. No other ability is an absolute must like Astral Shield. That's a problem but it really isn't as point blank obvious as it was before.
The level of defense and healing over time that Astral Shield gives is just far, far too strong compared to the rest of the other spells.
It's honestly better than even daily abilities!
But the thing is late game dungeons, especially due to the adds, requires that healing output. So at this point in time with the current timing I feel the issue isn't that Astral Shield is way too strong but the other spells are way too weak.
Sunburst - Great AoE effect but the heal is way too weak in the late game. It's just a filler spell which a good clutch knockback. The heal isn't helpful much at all.
Healing Word - Good healing effect but probably should have a lot more oomph with the initial cast and taper down to be useful as a clutch save spell. The number of charges should be increased and/or the recharge time reduced a bit more too. As of now it regens a lot but it's single target, heals less than AS, and regens too slowly for clutch situations.
As it is now you can cast it on an ally with low health and they'll die within a second due to the damage they are receiving from mobs or from a big hit they couldn't dodge.
Astral Seal - GREAT ABILITY which has picked up a lot of slack from the loss of Astral Shield but it's hard to target in groups due to the automatic aiming. Please make it prioritize unmarked targets AND reset the debuff on currently effected targets
Bastion of Health - Reduce Cooldown and casting time for such a minor heal at higher levels.
I could go on but generally I can summarize my experience with this: The cleric is not clutch enough.
The heals, other than astral shield, can not turn a bad fight around. Astral Shield was simply boring the way it was and even without the stacking effect it was simply bland but currently the spells which should be more rewarding and more useful aren't. The spells which should be clutch and allow a cleric to save allies don't do their job. The entire late game cleric revolves around AS and everything else is fillers for when astral shield is down now.
I really don't have a hard time keeping myself up at all even with righteousness and that's why I think every person who complains about it is misdirecting their issues due to a silly word. Clerics have more than enough sustain as it is. In fact if you buff the rest of the heals to be where they should be in late game, especially taking note of the more challenging to use heals like Healing Word, for all I care you could even increase the righteousness penalty.
The issue has, and will continue to be, that spells other than Astral Shield didn't and still do not provide enough power for the late game.
I really don't have a hard time keeping myself up at all even with righteousness and that's why I think every person who complains about it is misdirecting their issues due to a silly word. Clerics have more than enough sustain as it is. In fact if you buff the rest of the heals to be where they should be in late game, especially taking note of the more challenging to use heals like Healing Word, for all I care you could even increase the righteousness penalty.
I agreed with everything but that part...
Ugh why do you keep defending that <removed> debuff? Lol we can read the description to. They just added the title Righteousness to make it seem cool and like it's not a big deal, so people wouldn't mind it. -40% healing to myself is a big deal to me.
Anyway, pretty much what ambisinisterr said, we got that the glitches of Astral Shield were suppose to be fixed but further nerfing it was a bit extreme. Didn't even look at other good potential heals to boost so we can have somewhat of an edge.
The cleric class here is completely boring and useless. It's just no fun anymore. Might as well just axe the class imo, just like GW2 did. Seems like they just made it at the last minute because there is suppose to be clerics in DnD. Everyone can just use potions!
This class is a big joke and I have gladly moved on to something more fun.
Edit: And if a lot of players are enjoying the new changes, why defend your decision? I don't know if you guys know how to read or not but I see more against than for the changes. It's not just only about Astral Shield. Please learn to understand what your playerbase has a problem with.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I am glad about the AS changes -- all of them. I'm also glad about the threat changes. (I figure that we should leave the majority of the cleritanking to the Battle Cleric, when it's inevitably made and released.)
Prior to the patch, I didn't like the way that the Devoted Cleric as a class (and the endgame as a whole) kept feeling like they were designed entirely around AS being up all the time. It was boring and simplistic, and I'm glad that is going away, in favor of an effort at balancing the content and the other aspects of the class. Kudos to Cryptic on that.
Since the AS nerf, some areas/fights are indeed pretty rough to solo heal (Syndryth at the end of Epic Spider comes to mind, and even though I haven't been into Castle Never on my DC since the patch, I would expect Castle Never to be rougher as well without the permanent AS), but the vast majority seem reasonable. Frozen Heart's final boss never really depended on AS all that much to begin with (the fight was, and still is, a hectic kite-fight); Epic Pirate King still isn't hard if the party doesn't stand in too much red; Karrundax seems downright easy as long as you have a competent CW. I haven't done Epic Dread Vault since the update. I did Mad Dragon on my GWF alt since the update and can say with decent security that the fight at least looks easier to heal than it was back when a Shocktrooper was part of the final add phase.
I have ended up playing my GWF alt a lot, oddly, because my GWF is a Sentinel, and I got so used to tanking with my cleric before the aggro fixes that I guess I have caught the (off)tanking fever. xD But I'm not particularly unhappy with my DC and still play her often, particularly when my duo partner and I (he's a CW) are having trouble finding a cleric.
I would love to see some improvements / alternatives for single target healing in particular (currently AoE is pretty much the only game in town, even though Healing Word does still see some use in highly mobile fights like Hrimnir in Epic Frozen Heart). I would particularly like to see better options for actually aiming our heals (trying to target the player we want when several are hurt can be... difficult!)
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mastersputnik666Member, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 3Arc User
edited June 2013
wellwell, interesting reading, and a lot of BS also
AS was nice to have 100% of the time, for players who didn't care or have the skills to play there own class, we was coming to a point where the cleric was saving the day, for the entire party, tbh that was not the right way to play the game. It made it extremely boring specially with the "must have 2xDC" for stacking AS.
I have a okay geared Cleric my self, and I still enjoy playing him. Some Cleric has notes, but most have not, "Linket Spirit" works, and it's works wonderful, specially if the Cleric, know how to pros it, on CD.
I won't give away the "wise-stone" for doing it, but let it be up to the Cleric to find his own way. (or rather I know delv. will nerf us again, when all the cleric starts to use linked spirit, in the way some of us are doing it now) so I will just enjoy it for the time being.
And the BS our dear delv. are giving as reason for the neft AS, well you can all believe it or not, it not me to judges what you think about it. but have in mind that this game is P2W, what ever we like it or not, Delv. basic don't want the Cleric, to be able to keep a party alive, without heavy use of healing pots, call it conspiracy if you want, I don't care. - but ask you self, why do we not have a strong single target heal ability, that can compete with a healing pots, when it comes to raw healing output??.....However there is means and ways to get around the use of healing pots atm.....if preformed in the right way, if you have an idea what I'm talking about here, then you are more than welcome to contact me on Beholder, for stats and gear discussing, I'm still not perfect, and I will love to have some good input and suggestion, on some of the Cleric aspect and issue we currently have, but discuss it here on the forum, with all the "SUPERUBBERPROFFLOOKHOWAWESOMEAWESOMECOOLBADASSCLERICISAM" people this game already has created, is kind of pointless in my opinion.
Els stay sharp and have fun, maybe we meet, maybe we don't.....
Best Regards
Sha Nudin
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ambisinisterrMember, Neverwinter ModeratorPosts: 10,462Community Moderator
edited June 2013
At this point in time doing dungeons I die when I fail to keep the rest of the team alive and the truth of the matter is that there's two main reasons why the rest of the team dies:
First of all for some reason, especially in pugs, there's a lot of players who simply don't understand that there's a Shift Key which will get them off of red circles.
I literally, and quite often, end up staring at my screen in wide eyed horror mentally screaming at people who just stand in one spot and try to tank everything...especially the rogues. I'm sure just about every other cleric has had to deal with this nightmare if they have ever done a dungeon.
The second problem actually stems off the first: Clerics simply do not have the ability to support players who refuse to accept they have to dodge at least once in a while. As myself and others said the only spell with a powerful enough heal to keep people alive is Astral Shield.
I recently failed to beat the mad dragon due to one random mage who failed to control anything and never dodged the Hellfire Magus AoE. We had two clerics and one focused on keeping our Guardian Fighter alive and I focused on the two Control Wizards and I just could not keep this person alive. She simply refused to dodge and spent more time on her rear end than on he feet.
But that leads to the righteousness issue. It's not one.
I rarely, use potions until I fail to keep another person alive. Healing the rest of the team can and does sustain me and keep me near or at full health even since the changes to Astral Shield. Unless we have less than five players the only time I end up using a potion is if I fail to dodge something.
I'm defending it because it's not a problem. I don't die because I can't heal myself. I die because after players were unable to rely on Astral Shield I can't keep them alive and once they die I follow suit as every lost player is simply more damage on me.
If clerics could keep the rest of the team alive with more healing powers Righteousness would remain a non-issue.
And of course by buffing the healing on the rest of the team the clerics themselves will heal theselves more even with righteousness. Clerics do not need 100% healing to survive. When clerics didn't have righteousness the game the game beyond trivial and that needed to stop.
And of course by buffing the healing on the rest of the team the clerics themselves will heal theselves more even with righteousness. Clerics do not need 100% healing to survive. When clerics didn't have righteousness the game the game beyond trivial and that needed to stop.
Unless it's PvP. Removing Righteousness still won't save your *** from all the spike damage and CC there.
PvE wise, it was already trivial pre-patch (only additional decisions was when to cast spells because stopping at the wrong time was basically a death [which was made trivial by Cleanse removing revive sickness]). Now it still is, only you don't need to know when to cast since you don't have the dungeon gunning for you anymore. We have 1 single rotation (which hasn't changed much pre-patch, only back then we could put anything on the 3rd skill to make it work [hint:Give another encounter as much AP generation as Sunburst, will make for Perma-Hallowed Ground builds]). Now it's basically Astral Shield, Pop a heal on the downtime, spam as much sunburst rinse and repeat.
But that leads to the righteousness issue. It's not one.
I rarely, use potions until I fail to keep another person alive. Healing the rest of the team can and does sustain me and keep me near or at full health even since the changes to Astral Shield. Unless we have less than five players the only time I end up using a potion is if I fail to dodge something
The minimum latency I can play at is about 300ms, typically I play at between 350ms-600ms. This is because I live in Australia and over a Km from the local exchange. If I don't cater for incidental damage because of failed dodges then I or my group will die anyway, the only safe HP level I'm comfortable with in T2 epic dungeons is 100%.
I've played with an all Aussie group and watched 2 people die even though they weren't standing in red on their screens or mine. I've died because I dodged out and rubberbanded back, more than once.
I'm glad for you that you can play without this HAMSTER, but it's pretty irritating when it happens.
Yeah, the same thread regarding the "healing class" as in a hundred other games. No real surprise here
as I still am looking for a game where actually playing a healer is challenging and , well yes, "fun". Doesn't
exist! I'm still convinced IT WON'T EXIST.
If I can have fun and and heal PvE content then I must be punished in the PvP side of things. If I can
dish out reasonable damage with utility/heals in PvP, then I'm useless in PvE. Yeah...same ole..same ole.
Funny, there's never that issue in ANY other game regarding a DPS or tanking role.
Half the people don't care about PvP half don't care about PvE and ever the twain shall argue. The
bottom line here is the entire class is simply NOT FUN TO PLAY from EITHER standpoint.
There are absolutely no options for 95% of the abilities this class is given. Why would I ever choose
a class for one single purpose (healing in this case) and only be able to accomplish that purpose 50%(?)
of the time based on less than 10% of the abilities given to me?
I'd much rather play a class dynamic enough to utilize at least 50% of their abilities in different
combinations and be able to accomplish that purpose (control,dps,tank) 100% of the time...which
describes every other class and the mere definition of FUN.
Perhaps the solution would be to remove the healing from astral shield completely and give it a different divinity bonus. Extra crowd control resistance maybe?
After the patch I have been able to solo heal without even using astral shield.
If the following was true I think clerics would be in a good place:
-make healing word affected by recovery
-buff the heal from sunburst by a moderate amount
-buff the heal from bastion of health by a lot and reduce it's cool down by a few seconds
-Buff some of their damage dealing encounters by a moderate amount.
Basically, we have been forced to make easy paths so clerics can complete them successfully. We have had requests from clerics for quests that they can solo.
Now, why should this be? Why do we have to make special easy quests for clerics only? I think the answer is clear.
Perhaps the solution would be to remove the healing from astral shield completely and give it a different divinity bonus. Extra crowd control resistance maybe?
After the patch I have been able to solo heal without even using astral shield.
If the following was true I think clerics would be in a good place:
-make healing word affected by recovery
-buff the heal from sunburst by a moderate amount
-buff the heal from bastion of health by a lot and reduce it's cool down by a few seconds
-Buff some of their damage dealing encounters by a moderate amount.
Some very viable alternatives..
But let's simply start simple here...
Feats
Initiate of Faith: 1% more power for 5 points??? Really? Useless....
Domain Synergy: The more you have Recovery on gear, the less this returns for 5 points...BEST case is < 1%...Useless
Initiate of Power: So you stack Crit...and that 1% will yield at most what?....Uselsss
Templar's Domain: This should be in Virtuous or Righteous tree rather than in base feats..
The Trees...Typically 7 out of 27 you can choose and there will always be the same 5 chosen regardless...
And then theree are whole threads on the Powers....
Perhaps the solution would be to remove the healing from astral shield completely and give it a different divinity bonus. Extra crowd control resistance maybe?
That would be stupid. It would be useless in PvE, and we have so many useless powers already... Astral Shield is fine the way it is now. What we need is some other buffs to make our other powers as useful as AS, and not simply useless.
If the following was true I think clerics would be in a good place:
-make healing word affected by recovery
-buff the heal from sunburst by a moderate amount
-buff the heal from bastion of health by a lot and reduce it's cool down by a few seconds
-Buff some of their damage dealing encounters by a moderate amount.
I agree, but Healing Word also makes me cry for another issue:
If you cast a normal no critical Healing Word, and cast a Divinity critical Healing Word right after, the regen ticks won't be critical, only the instant heal will be critical. This is because it extends the previous Healing Word duration and doesn't take the critical dHW in account...
Have anyone else experienced this annoying mechanic ?
Bottom Line, AS perhaps deserve the nerf it needed because it's being highlight "must have" for long time, which personally kind of stupid to think of.
But other cleric healing deserve buff. Especially healing word, i mean seriously, this skill is horrible due you have to target specific player, which is very hard when there are army of mobs in the field. Even at worst, it's a slow heal over time, nothing helping much either.
Seeing how this game end beta with this, it's sad really....o well, waiting for Wildstar
AS was mandatory, the problem is that it still is mandatory, even after the nerf.
You tried the wrong approach, instead of reducing its duration, you should had reduced it "effectiveness". Because we go from having an area where everything is more or less "safe" when AS is up, to nothing at all, with no real other decent skills to counter the incoming damage, when AS expires and its on cooldown.
In my humble opinion, other approaches would had been better:
1) reduce AS mitigation, but keep it duration as it was before, so it is possible to have it always active with enough Recovery. This could be done by swapping the feats that increase it mitigation with other feats that increase healing done by other skills. (ie. reduced cd on Bastion of Health, increasing the amount of people sun burst affects (for 20man)...)
2) totally remove AS. decrease dungeon monsters damage by 10-15% and increase all other heals by 10-15%. Add a new life leech encounter skill instead, so we can deal with reighteousness.
3) make AS a daily, give us instead a powerfull "targetable" "aimed" heal "ray" skill encounter that can link to 1-2-3 other close party members with an appropiate feat.
About pvp... remove righteouness there. Or make it 10% as mutch.
My main concern is that currently, if someone new comes to the game, and reach 60 as a DC, there is no way in hell that he can progress unless he pays for gear in the AH, witch is not rewarding at all for many of us. Most of the people that can clean t2's now are the ones that geared and learnt the tactics with AS overpowered, and the gap between those and "newcomers" that may have to fight against them in new guild based gauntlet is an almost impossible to reduce one in many many months... frustration to newcomers? kill-your-game?
Please reconsider how your healing class work, and make progression viable for new-comers again or this will be a game that will never increase its population, so it will die eventually soon, what its a shame considering its potential.
This is written from a mostly PvE standpoint, for T2 dungeons, though some points may apply to PvP.
The Devoted Cleric is a utility class. I’ve rolled with a variety of party compositions post patch mostly by PUGs or zone chat parties (solo DC, duo DC, party with no GF, no GWF, no CW, no TR) without a respec yet with more or less unexpected success. Yes, the DC is still playable but severely lacks utility, made only all the more prominent by the AS duration nerf.
In the state the game is in, we have 2 passives, 3 encounters and 2 dailies. It’s an interesting mechanic, but the 3 encounter limit is what really limits a cleric’s potential and in my opinion the key reason why we all rely on Astral shield. Anyone who’s played a cleric will know we need to (or want to) do most of the following in a dungeon/boss fight, in no order or importance:
-survive (righteousness = potions)
-mitigate enemy damage
-control party positioning
-tank adds and or kite them while surviving (in the old days), now just aggro management and peeling mobs off CWs and TRs
-heal party members
-buff party members
-debuff enemies/boss
-clutch heal party/tanks who took spike damage
-revive (not always our main role, but not many other classes watch other party members closely enough)
-build action points
-build divine power
-actually deal damage and kill stuff, even use knockbacks in right situations
Why is Astral Shield such an important ability? If you look at the list, astral shield manages to achieve at least 5 of those roles and help you have a much easier/safer time doing the rest. AS is a decent heal to the whole party, it’s fire and forget. It definitely helps mitigate damage off bosses/elites who hit really hard and can otherwise 1-2 hit a party member, along with trash mobs with combat advantage. It also helps those with lesser health come back to full fairly quickly without extra intervention. If you have aggro you can run/slide around or inside it and heal yourself back up while waiting for the 12 seconds potion cooldown.
More importantly the position of AS dictates where a party is to fight- people have come to know (largely through trial and error) they’ll survive in the circle. As PUGs rarely use voice chat and there’s too little time for text chat, AS is a handy way of ensuring a party fight at a favourable position. How many times have the GF/GWF been frustrated they draw aggro to a place but nobody is following, or the CW casts a singularity but everyone pulls the mobs elsewhere? How many times have you tried to heal when the whole party is scattered miles apart from each other? Astral shield is like a beacon that the DC uses to shepherd the party towards those advantages positions. As a result, fights go a lot easier and everyone has a better time. It’s not appreciated or often mentioned, but makes a difference in making dungeons go faster.
The issue of opportunity cost
Because of the 3 encounter limit, we have to choose the best abilities to do what we need to do. Astral shield is a no brainer not because it’s an OP spell, but because the opportunity cost of not slotting it is much higher and limits our encounter selection. If we get 4-6 encounter slots then yes, I’ll be happy not to cast AS anywhere near as often as I do, but with 3 encounter slots, it’s worth its slot in party management. Can we have two sets of power slotted that we can alternate with a button? The way most clerics roll, AS takes care of healing/regen/defense buff/positioning, sunburst takes care of top up heals/AP/DP gain and you have one other ability for DPS or buff/debuff. 100% AS uptime means the 3rd slot can be 100% something else like daunting light or divine glow. 66% AS uptime means the 3rd slot may need to be some form of heal/survival at least 33% of the time and borderline useless the other 66% of the time. That makes us inefficient. In some cases, it also means we need 2-3 powers requiring divine power and no time for divine power gain. Case in point: post patch had 2 different matches where the CW died early in Epic Temple of Spider boss fight (actually all CWs post patch had premature deaths in most boss fights....I could talk about our 3 man Karrundax but might save for another time) and we had to finish with either 2TR/GWF/DC and GF/GWF/TR/DC. I had to heal with divine astral shield and knockback with divine sunburst and switch skills back and forth mid fight between HG/divine armor/hammer and forgemasters/chains/daunting hoping nobody gets ganked by blademasters or rooted by the web.. most painful fights ever. More encounter slots would have made it jussst a tad more manageable.
Why AS nerf is painful:
A lot of the rage against the AS nerf is valid, a lot of it is the NON cleric players failing to adapt and survive. It’s still a painful transition because everyone’s builds and gear are not optimised to changes in party dynamics. Many are still tunnel visioned into building their DPS meters while DC APM (actions per minute) AND blood pressure are going through the roof. Whilst it’s nice they trust clerics to have their backs 100% there’s only so much we can do without them using health pots. It hurts clerics because we’d like to ensure party survival but our limited healing utility cannot compensate for other classes not playing skilfully. Clerics are complaining because we get blamed often regardless of party skill. We used to be able to clutch in a lot of situations, and now that aggro is off us (and on CWs) if the CW goes downs he’s down, plain and simple and no amount of healing will mitigate that.
This IMO is not the fault of the developers and just a teething process. In time everyone will learn to play and position smarter and this helps everyone, especially clerics because it means we have to heal/clutch less often from other’s laziness and mistakes. However, useful supplementary survival tools for DCs or other classes may help boost party survivability. Another point: the uncleansable revive sickness nerf also means everyone gets to be revived once in a boss fight and that’s it, which punishes mistakes severely and increases frustration at bosses. Ok, makes fights challenging, but can you reset it when the whole party wipes so we don’t spend minutes waiting at campfires (with optional party member finger pointing).
What we need is versatility and improvement on our other encounters
Ideally I’d like to ask for more encounter slots or a secondary skill slot to switch to because more than any other class, we really need our utility. Not holding my breath, and I get the design mechanic to make every encounter count but if that doesn’t happen then the solution is not to think that AS is an OP spell, but why the other spells are not viable options. As you can see above AS fulfils a multitude of class roles well. That makes it a good skill, a useful skill. Sunburst is probably the next most versatile spell (AOE heal/damage/DP/AP/knockbacks). Most other spells are very one dimensional, and bad at what it does. Case in point, Bastion of heal has a long cooldown, is slow to cast, mediocre heal and small area of effect. This is why most clerics take forgemasters as a 3rd encounter, because it can be an extra AOE heal and do some damage. Unless utility are added to our other spells, clerics are always going to be unhappy because we are forced (or expected by the party) to slot the same 3 encounters to cover core our class roles. If you don’t want us to use AS exclusively for healing, don’t nerf AS, make BoH, healing word and even soothing light an actually attractive option with consideration to how much damage mobs deal to players in dungeons (with or without help from feats). If you don’t want groups to fight on a 20’ radius circle for 10 of every 15 seconds, either adjust the number of mobs and their DPS in dungeons or give us (and other classes) better survivability tools. I love the concept of divine mode and adding effect to powers too, but we also struggle to keep divine power up a lot of the time for various heals and clutches.
I would also mention that many of our set bonuses are borderline useful or downright unreliable and useless because of short uptime (check the other threads on Cleric bugs). Having our gear supplement the DC’s skills in different areas can help maintain diversity and variety of builds.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate the feedback and the presence of this thread on the forum, thank you devs for continuing to listen and work with us to enhance our gaming experience.
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Wrong. All players need to use potions and learn how to get healed by the cleric. Also they need to learn to dodge.
A faithful spec cleric is not the only spec that is viable. I have solo healed T2's with only 2 heal spells and specced into a hybrid heal/dps cleric. Also I find it more effective to not use astral shield as using astral shield gives the other players a false sense of security.
How can you say i'm wrong? Have you played with my character and my team? I know that they don't drink much potions because i often play with them on the teamspeak. This is why they like having me on a dungeon by the way.
If you and your team can't achieve that then don't start assuming is impossible. Humility is a quality.
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.
What, precisely, are these so called "buffs" that clerics have received?
Do tell.
Sorry Combat Designer,
I dont believe u when u say u have received "positive Feedback". Just look at the Forums (especially the Cleric Forum).
I mean: U cant count people who just hit lvl 60 and do some easymode T1 Dungeons and say "woa its still cool".
The real Clerics, who played since day1 closed beta and have BiS since ~ 1 month are the ones u should listen to!
Buff our ohter abillities is the key to make the DC viable again. This means:
- reduce self heal debuff to -30% instead 40
- make healing word charges speed up by more recovery
- reduce bastion of health cooldown (this CD is sooooo much too high - I would recommend to subtract ~40% of the current CD time)
and last (this is a bonus - u get a piece of my chocolate if u do this):
- I personally think the nerf for AS is OK (adressing the stacking issue here) - but the uptime is reduced too much imo. But I dont know how this turns out if u do the other things I sayed before. But maybe u should think about making the uptime ~70-75%.
Another interesting thing would be, to make the recovery softcap higher. Currently its about 3k recovery where - when u continue stacking recovery - dont get much out of it. This could be also something to tweak.
Greetings - and PLEASE do something! Thanks
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toetaterMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 2Arc User
edited June 2013
Combat designer, the cleric was broken before you balanced the class (yeah right) now your considering more balanceing (nerfage) that's MY POSITIVE FEED BACK. Worst healing mmo EVER!
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mewbreyMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Hero Users, Neverwinter Guardian Users, Neverwinter Knight of the Feywild UsersPosts: 517Bounty Hunter
edited June 2013
Bastion of health needs a cooldown reduction.
Healing word needs to be effected by recovery.
Healing words "power" would not get out of control by lowering its cooldown via recovery as it's a heal over time that only stacks in duration, improving targeting could help but is not vital. Adding a healing paragon path would go along way to adding an identity to the class too.
I do agree with the astral shield change in general however. But you should have had the foresight (no pun intended) to increase our other healing skills before removing 33% healing from one skill and lowering the duration on damage reduction. Bastion of health is a solid skill when it hits 5 targets, it has its purpose but it is not friendly to new players. Healing word is the same, its fairly solid but due to its punishing cool down and poor targeting it punishes again new players. It leads me to question the design philosophy of the company and the class designers and gives cause for concern for the future of the class and how it will be laid out before us.
Love the game and will continue to hang in there for future changes, truly looking forward to a healing paragon class choice opposed to the current one "choice", will it ever come? that's another question!
and it seems that many Clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes.
So people are enjoying the buffs and fixes? what ones the fix to divine glow or the 100 extra healing per tick from soothing light or perhaps the fix stopping prophecy of doom giving the mobs 20% increased mitigation.
In general the patch was fairly poor and ill thought out when looking at the cleric changes, while I agree with many of them I don't think I could say I enjoy "all" the other buffs and fixes. More that I expected skills that buff enemy mobs and nerf my groups damage to be fixed.
Unless ofcourse you mean clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes "some" other classes got such as the threat fix... that should have been solved during beta weekend three.
I'm still a little confused as to ambisinister's "righteousness doesn't affect me at all" stance. I believe a previous justification was that clerics get free backheals for everyone they heal (so should always be pretty much topped up regardless of healing debuff), but as far as I have found, that applies to: healing word, soothing light, and sunburst (and that's only really because you can't NOT be in the AoE of something that originates on yourself). Of those, I only ever use sunburst, and as noted by many other posters, that's almost exclusively for the hawt AP/DP generation, because the heal is pretty rubbish.
Astral shield will heal you....if you cast it on yourself, but it's more common (especially post threat-fix) to stick that over the big cluster of angry monsters + tanks/melee dps, where the mitigation & heal will really help. I might skoosh over there to fire off a sunburst, but I'm mostly going to be in the backlines whenever possible, keeping an eye on the CW. Astral shield doesn't give me free backheals, it gives me just the same heals it gives everyone else (now minus the righteous tax, since it became HoT -you really really notice this difference in solo play pre/post patch, incidentally), if I want to go stand in it.
Ditto for divine forgemasters: it'll heal me if I go and stand next to the monster I've stuck it on, but given that it's now my go-to skill for surviving AS downtime, I'm using that in the exact same way I use AS: to keep the tanks alive. Over there, where all the red is.
So mostly my self heals come from sunburst, skooshing through AS/FF radius on my way to fire off sunburst/panic running from monsters, comedy astral seal heals (which are based on damage, something I, as a healer, have TOTALLY SPECCED INTO, OFC) and potions. In bosses, where I have to keep an eye on a fairly separated group, my own healing is almost exclusively potions. There are no 'free backheals' in there at all.
Maybe if I ran healing word and used soothing light I'd be topped up more often by backheals, but I don't run those because they're terrible heals in the first place, and the one benefit they might have over the other skills (backheal) is affected by righteousness, so why bother? If I'm using soothing light or healing word on myself, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It's much better for the team as a whole for me to use a potion on myself while using my DP to fire off something else (anything else) to keep THEM alive. Like, say, astral shield, which I will then do my best to skoosh through so I can grab some super awesome 0.6x heals.
Righteousness just has zero redeeming qualities as a concept. It's absolutely a debuff, and rephrasing it as "your heals are 66% more effective on other people" would make no difference, other than to make all our skills look even more rubbish outside of parties. No other game I've ever played (including many with backheals) has incorporated something like this.
So there's that.
Regarding astral shield itself, I'll just reiterate what many others have said: the nerf/fix means clericing is still viable, but it's just no longer any fun. It's still the best skill on the bar, and sunburst is too good at generating DP/AP to drop, but now we also have to have a heal in the third slot to cover AS downtime, meaning our one "choose your fun power" is now basically...forgemasters, or BoH if you can handle the cooldown. Or HW, I guess (!). It has to be a heal. We've gone from being healer/buffer/debuffer to...healbot.
And again, healer with an inherent nerf to self healing, is pretty silly in single player. Foundries at 60 are...interesting.
Actually, as a corollary to that: pre-duration nerf, you could still be a healbot if you wanted to, and 100% AS uptime gave you flexibility. Maintain AS all the time, but if stuff goes...weird, you've got backup clutch heals ready to be deployed.
Now you NEED to save that backup heal for AS downtime, which means if, say, you notice that the TR has gone off piste and started 1v1ing something that might actually kill them, far from the magic blue, and the magic blue is going to drop soon anyway, you have to decide "do I forgemaster the monster the rogue is dueling, saving the rogue, or do I stick it on the monster the tank is fighting, saving the tank?" -Basically, someone is going to either pot or die, and I have to decide who that'll be. Sophie's choice as MMO. Who'd've thought it?
Hell, I find myself keeping an eye on healbars for the distinctive OMG HEAL spike of a potion being used, and somewhere in the back of my head I'm keeping a running total so I can preferentially save people who have already used a lot of pots, because it spreads out the burden that way and nobody ends up ragequitting. Healbot AND armchair counsellor. Funtimes. :-/
We made some changes to Astral Shield after finding that it was not balanced in line with the rest of the Cleric's abilities
Your guys' absolute lack of foresight astounds me. You couldn't tell, in all the months and months of beta, that a skill that gives the entire group a lot of damage mitigation, and AE healing, would be out of line with any other skill a cleric possesses? Have you ever looked at the skills available to clerics? The very first time I looked at the cleric powers, I knew AS would be a staple for healing. The fact that you let it stack for so long (or, in the first place), is again, incredible lack of attention paid to this class.
it seems that many Clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes. Please continue to let us know your feedback, about Astral Shield and everything Cleric-related!
Like other people have said... what buffs? Focused Poise and Soothing/Punishing Light - those aren't buffs. Every other thing was a fix, because either a tooltip was wrong, or the spell didn't work like it should have.
I almost logged in this weekend for the "event," but there's betas of games that are actually fun out there.
I don't get why people complain about being a healbot. If you didn't want to heal your party then you rolled the wrong class, roll a wizard.
I rolled a cleric because I wanted to heal, and I enjoy the way healing works in this game. I have no problem with being a healbot.
If clerics went on DPS spec, then who would heal the party ? Potions ?
Again if you don't like the idea of healing people, then roll something else.
How could one say that Soothing Light sucks ? Seriously ?
I use it alot, really. Put BotS on many mobs, AS, and mitigate individual damages with Soothing Light.. Then Sunburst to get that divinity back if BotS wasn't enough.. It's great if you know how to use it. And of course, it is WAY better with the 4th Divinity pipe. Playing with this AS nerf isn't a big deal to me, and shouldn't be to any good cleric. In the first place I thought this nerf would burry the cleric, but the aggro fix made our life so easier that we can fill our task even better than we used to do it before.
My only regrets are those Healing Word and Bastion of Health which are either bugged or useless or using bad mechanic.
As I have said many times before, Healing Word have to be affected by Recovery. Plus, if you cast Healing Word on a target which already benefits from a previous HW, it would be great if it took the best HW in account, instead of simply extending the previous HW. Because if you cast normal HW with no critical, and then cast a divinity HW critical, the ticks won't be critical, because the previous HW was not critical. It need to take the most powerful HW between the previous and the new one, not simply the previous one......
Bastion of Health needs a rework. It is useless the way it is. How about some heavy cooldown reduction and slight buff to healing ?
And to people complaining about not being able to spam Daunting Light like a twit, then again, how about you roll some GWF or CW ? And leave the cleric class to healers. I really hate clerics focusing more on their DPS meter instead of their party HP.
I don't get why people complain about being a healbot. If you didn't want to heal your party then you rolled the wrong class, roll a wizard.
I rolled a cleric because I wanted to heal, and I enjoy the way healing works in this game. I have no problem with being a healbot.
If clerics went on DPS spec, then who would heal the party ? Potions ?
Again if you don't like the idea of healing people, then roll something else.
How could one say that Soothing Light sucks ? Seriously ?
I use it alot, really. Put BotS on many mobs, AS, and mitigate individual damages with Soothing Light.. Then Sunburst to get that divinity back if BotS wasn't enough.. It's great if you know how to use it. And of course, it is WAY better with the 4th Divinity pipe. Playing with this AS nerf isn't a big deal to me, and shouldn't be to any good cleric. In the first place I thought this nerf would burry the cleric, but the aggro fix made our life so easier that we can fill our task even better than we used to do it before.
My only regrets are those Healing Word and Bastion of Health which are either bugged or useless or using bad mechanic.
As I have said many times before, Healing Word have to be affected by Recovery. Plus, if you cast Healing Word on a target which already benefits from a previous HW, it would be great if it took the best HW in account, instead of simply extending the previous HW. Because if you cast normal HW with no critical, and then cast a divinity HW critical, the ticks won't be critical, because the previous HW was not critical. It need to take the most powerful HW between the previous and the new one, not simply the previous one......
Bastion of Health needs a rework. It is useless the way it is. How about some heavy cooldown reduction and slight buff to healing ?
And to people complaining about not being able to spam Daunting Light like a twit, then again, how about you roll some GWF or CW ? And leave the cleric class to healers. I really hate clerics focusing more on their DPS meter instead of their party HP.
Good for you on enjoying healbot.
This isn't a healer class, it's a leader class (sub control class [with 1 control spell woop]), we're supposed to fill gaps and sh*t for your party, not just fill their green bars. Support isn't just healing, it's about much much more. Buffs, Debuffs, support damage, support healing. Now it's "make up for AS downtime or suck it".
What Cryptic, and Neverwinter have promised was to stray the Cleric away from the stereotypical healbot that other MMOs offer. A more dynamic, fun way of supporting other than watching the green bar go up. You make it sound like people don't like healing, well we do like healing, but we also want to do something else other than healing.
This isn't a healer class, it's a leader class (sub control class [with 1 control spell woop]), we're supposed to fill gaps and sh*t for your party, not just fill their green bars. Support isn't just healing, it's about much much more. Buffs, Debuffs, support damage, support healing. Now it's "make up for AS downtime or suck it".
What Cryptic, and Neverwinter have promised was to stray the Cleric away from the stereotypical healbot that other MMOs offer. A more dynamic, fun way of supporting other than watching the green bar go up. You make it sound like people don't like healing, well we do like healing, but we also want to do something else other than healing.
You beat me to it +1!!!
The Dev's spent a lot of time making the focus for DC to be actually doing stuff rather than staring at health bars! Kudos to them.. I just hope they keep that playstyle
Comments
Wrong. All players need to use potions and learn how to get healed by the cleric. Also they need to learn to dodge.
A faithful spec cleric is not the only spec that is viable. I have solo healed T2's with only 2 heal spells and specced into a hybrid heal/dps cleric. Also I find it more effective to not use astral shield as using astral shield gives the other players a false sense of security.
Astral Shield wasn't a heal. It was the baseline. You would stay in AS or you die. AS was the safe place you could retreat to as you nearly die instantly if you got a pull on you without it. You can talk about "Oh but we can't allow one skill to be too powerful blah blah". OF COURSE YOU CAN! Balance isn't made on a skill by skill basis! The cleric worked just fine with 100% uptime on AS. Don't get me wrong, I am geared out with my Ioun Stone and 12.1k gs, I can cope easily. The new and improved healing just annoys me. It's is less fun than before. It is -worse-. You made playing clerics -worse-. I don't even want our trash heals improved. I want 100% astral shield back. Because it was a good playstyle. Either make Astral Shield 100% again, or just remove the skill and reimagine the cleric. Cause what you have now is not good.
*edit*
If you need to balance AS, change the damage reduction or the healing from it. And let us use other heals to make up for the damage taken, but let AS have 100% uptime.
The level of defense and healing over time that Astral Shield gives is just far, far too strong compared to the rest of the other spells.
It's honestly better than even daily abilities!
But the thing is late game dungeons, especially due to the adds, requires that healing output. So at this point in time with the current timing I feel the issue isn't that Astral Shield is way too strong but the other spells are way too weak.
Sunburst - Great AoE effect but the heal is way too weak in the late game. It's just a filler spell which a good clutch knockback. The heal isn't helpful much at all.
Healing Word - Good healing effect but probably should have a lot more oomph with the initial cast and taper down to be useful as a clutch save spell. The number of charges should be increased and/or the recharge time reduced a bit more too. As of now it regens a lot but it's single target, heals less than AS, and regens too slowly for clutch situations.
As it is now you can cast it on an ally with low health and they'll die within a second due to the damage they are receiving from mobs or from a big hit they couldn't dodge.
Astral Seal - GREAT ABILITY which has picked up a lot of slack from the loss of Astral Shield but it's hard to target in groups due to the automatic aiming. Please make it prioritize unmarked targets AND reset the debuff on currently effected targets
Bastion of Health - Reduce Cooldown and casting time for such a minor heal at higher levels.
I could go on but generally I can summarize my experience with this: The cleric is not clutch enough.
The heals, other than astral shield, can not turn a bad fight around. Astral Shield was simply boring the way it was and even without the stacking effect it was simply bland but currently the spells which should be more rewarding and more useful aren't. The spells which should be clutch and allow a cleric to save allies don't do their job. The entire late game cleric revolves around AS and everything else is fillers for when astral shield is down now.
I really don't have a hard time keeping myself up at all even with righteousness and that's why I think every person who complains about it is misdirecting their issues due to a silly word. Clerics have more than enough sustain as it is. In fact if you buff the rest of the heals to be where they should be in late game, especially taking note of the more challenging to use heals like Healing Word, for all I care you could even increase the righteousness penalty.
The issue has, and will continue to be, that spells other than Astral Shield didn't and still do not provide enough power for the late game.
Ugh why do you keep defending that <removed> debuff? Lol we can read the description to. They just added the title Righteousness to make it seem cool and like it's not a big deal, so people wouldn't mind it. -40% healing to myself is a big deal to me.
Anyway, pretty much what ambisinisterr said, we got that the glitches of Astral Shield were suppose to be fixed but further nerfing it was a bit extreme. Didn't even look at other good potential heals to boost so we can have somewhat of an edge.
The cleric class here is completely boring and useless. It's just no fun anymore. Might as well just axe the class imo, just like GW2 did. Seems like they just made it at the last minute because there is suppose to be clerics in DnD. Everyone can just use potions!
This class is a big joke and I have gladly moved on to something more fun.
Edit: And if a lot of players are enjoying the new changes, why defend your decision? I don't know if you guys know how to read or not but I see more against than for the changes. It's not just only about Astral Shield. Please learn to understand what your playerbase has a problem with.
Reasons stated in first 4 pages of this thread.
Healbot? Check
Astral Shield still end for all clerics? Check
Other heals are still sh*tty? Check
Thank you for daunting light though. Pew pew lasers from the sky is always a good thing.
PVP: How to make your life less miserable as a Devoted Clerics -- Still in it's Unfinished Glory
Dragon
Prior to the patch, I didn't like the way that the Devoted Cleric as a class (and the endgame as a whole) kept feeling like they were designed entirely around AS being up all the time. It was boring and simplistic, and I'm glad that is going away, in favor of an effort at balancing the content and the other aspects of the class. Kudos to Cryptic on that.
Since the AS nerf, some areas/fights are indeed pretty rough to solo heal (Syndryth at the end of Epic Spider comes to mind, and even though I haven't been into Castle Never on my DC since the patch, I would expect Castle Never to be rougher as well without the permanent AS), but the vast majority seem reasonable. Frozen Heart's final boss never really depended on AS all that much to begin with (the fight was, and still is, a hectic kite-fight); Epic Pirate King still isn't hard if the party doesn't stand in too much red; Karrundax seems downright easy as long as you have a competent CW. I haven't done Epic Dread Vault since the update. I did Mad Dragon on my GWF alt since the update and can say with decent security that the fight at least looks easier to heal than it was back when a Shocktrooper was part of the final add phase.
I have ended up playing my GWF alt a lot, oddly, because my GWF is a Sentinel, and I got so used to tanking with my cleric before the aggro fixes that I guess I have caught the (off)tanking fever. xD But I'm not particularly unhappy with my DC and still play her often, particularly when my duo partner and I (he's a CW) are having trouble finding a cleric.
I would love to see some improvements / alternatives for single target healing in particular (currently AoE is pretty much the only game in town, even though Healing Word does still see some use in highly mobile fights like Hrimnir in Epic Frozen Heart). I would particularly like to see better options for actually aiming our heals (trying to target the player we want when several are hurt can be... difficult!)
AS was nice to have 100% of the time, for players who didn't care or have the skills to play there own class, we was coming to a point where the cleric was saving the day, for the entire party, tbh that was not the right way to play the game. It made it extremely boring specially with the "must have 2xDC" for stacking AS.
I have a okay geared Cleric my self, and I still enjoy playing him. Some Cleric has notes, but most have not, "Linket Spirit" works, and it's works wonderful, specially if the Cleric, know how to pros it, on CD.
I won't give away the "wise-stone" for doing it, but let it be up to the Cleric to find his own way. (or rather I know delv. will nerf us again, when all the cleric starts to use linked spirit, in the way some of us are doing it now) so I will just enjoy it for the time being.
And the BS our dear delv. are giving as reason for the neft AS, well you can all believe it or not, it not me to judges what you think about it. but have in mind that this game is P2W, what ever we like it or not, Delv. basic don't want the Cleric, to be able to keep a party alive, without heavy use of healing pots, call it conspiracy if you want, I don't care. - but ask you self, why do we not have a strong single target heal ability, that can compete with a healing pots, when it comes to raw healing output??.....However there is means and ways to get around the use of healing pots atm.....if preformed in the right way, if you have an idea what I'm talking about here, then you are more than welcome to contact me on Beholder, for stats and gear discussing, I'm still not perfect, and I will love to have some good input and suggestion, on some of the Cleric aspect and issue we currently have, but discuss it here on the forum, with all the "SUPERUBBERPROFFLOOKHOWAWESOMEAWESOMECOOLBADASSCLERICISAM" people this game already has created, is kind of pointless in my opinion.
Els stay sharp and have fun, maybe we meet, maybe we don't.....
Best Regards
Sha Nudin
First of all for some reason, especially in pugs, there's a lot of players who simply don't understand that there's a Shift Key which will get them off of red circles.
I literally, and quite often, end up staring at my screen in wide eyed horror mentally screaming at people who just stand in one spot and try to tank everything...especially the rogues. I'm sure just about every other cleric has had to deal with this nightmare if they have ever done a dungeon.
The second problem actually stems off the first: Clerics simply do not have the ability to support players who refuse to accept they have to dodge at least once in a while. As myself and others said the only spell with a powerful enough heal to keep people alive is Astral Shield.
I recently failed to beat the mad dragon due to one random mage who failed to control anything and never dodged the Hellfire Magus AoE. We had two clerics and one focused on keeping our Guardian Fighter alive and I focused on the two Control Wizards and I just could not keep this person alive. She simply refused to dodge and spent more time on her rear end than on he feet.
But that leads to the righteousness issue. It's not one.
I rarely, use potions until I fail to keep another person alive. Healing the rest of the team can and does sustain me and keep me near or at full health even since the changes to Astral Shield. Unless we have less than five players the only time I end up using a potion is if I fail to dodge something.
I'm defending it because it's not a problem. I don't die because I can't heal myself. I die because after players were unable to rely on Astral Shield I can't keep them alive and once they die I follow suit as every lost player is simply more damage on me.
If clerics could keep the rest of the team alive with more healing powers Righteousness would remain a non-issue.
And of course by buffing the healing on the rest of the team the clerics themselves will heal theselves more even with righteousness. Clerics do not need 100% healing to survive. When clerics didn't have righteousness the game the game beyond trivial and that needed to stop.
Unless it's PvP. Removing Righteousness still won't save your *** from all the spike damage and CC there.
PvE wise, it was already trivial pre-patch (only additional decisions was when to cast spells because stopping at the wrong time was basically a death [which was made trivial by Cleanse removing revive sickness]). Now it still is, only you don't need to know when to cast since you don't have the dungeon gunning for you anymore. We have 1 single rotation (which hasn't changed much pre-patch, only back then we could put anything on the 3rd skill to make it work [hint:Give another encounter as much AP generation as Sunburst, will make for Perma-Hallowed Ground builds]). Now it's basically Astral Shield, Pop a heal on the downtime, spam as much sunburst rinse and repeat.
PVP: How to make your life less miserable as a Devoted Clerics -- Still in it's Unfinished Glory
Dragon
I've played with an all Aussie group and watched 2 people die even though they weren't standing in red on their screens or mine. I've died because I dodged out and rubberbanded back, more than once.
I'm glad for you that you can play without this HAMSTER, but it's pretty irritating when it happens.
as I still am looking for a game where actually playing a healer is challenging and , well yes, "fun". Doesn't
exist! I'm still convinced IT WON'T EXIST.
If I can have fun and and heal PvE content then I must be punished in the PvP side of things. If I can
dish out reasonable damage with utility/heals in PvP, then I'm useless in PvE. Yeah...same ole..same ole.
Funny, there's never that issue in ANY other game regarding a DPS or tanking role.
Half the people don't care about PvP half don't care about PvE and ever the twain shall argue. The
bottom line here is the entire class is simply NOT FUN TO PLAY from EITHER standpoint.
There are absolutely no options for 95% of the abilities this class is given. Why would I ever choose
a class for one single purpose (healing in this case) and only be able to accomplish that purpose 50%(?)
of the time based on less than 10% of the abilities given to me?
I'd much rather play a class dynamic enough to utilize at least 50% of their abilities in different
combinations and be able to accomplish that purpose (control,dps,tank) 100% of the time...which
describes every other class and the mere definition of FUN.
After the patch I have been able to solo heal without even using astral shield.
If the following was true I think clerics would be in a good place:
-make healing word affected by recovery
-buff the heal from sunburst by a moderate amount
-buff the heal from bastion of health by a lot and reduce it's cool down by a few seconds
-Buff some of their damage dealing encounters by a moderate amount.
Basically, we have been forced to make easy paths so clerics can complete them successfully. We have had requests from clerics for quests that they can solo.
Now, why should this be? Why do we have to make special easy quests for clerics only? I think the answer is clear.
Some very viable alternatives..
But let's simply start simple here...
Feats
Initiate of Faith: 1% more power for 5 points??? Really? Useless....
Domain Synergy: The more you have Recovery on gear, the less this returns for 5 points...BEST case is < 1%...Useless
Initiate of Power: So you stack Crit...and that 1% will yield at most what?....Uselsss
Templar's Domain: This should be in Virtuous or Righteous tree rather than in base feats..
The Trees...Typically 7 out of 27 you can choose and there will always be the same 5 chosen regardless...
And then theree are whole threads on the Powers....
I agree, but Healing Word also makes me cry for another issue:
If you cast a normal no critical Healing Word, and cast a Divinity critical Healing Word right after, the regen ticks won't be critical, only the instant heal will be critical. This is because it extends the previous Healing Word duration and doesn't take the critical dHW in account...
Have anyone else experienced this annoying mechanic ?
- DRAGON - ( Mehrea DC 13.1k ) - ( Volsung TR 11.7k )
But other cleric healing deserve buff. Especially healing word, i mean seriously, this skill is horrible due you have to target specific player, which is very hard when there are army of mobs in the field. Even at worst, it's a slow heal over time, nothing helping much either.
Seeing how this game end beta with this, it's sad really....o well, waiting for Wildstar
You tried the wrong approach, instead of reducing its duration, you should had reduced it "effectiveness". Because we go from having an area where everything is more or less "safe" when AS is up, to nothing at all, with no real other decent skills to counter the incoming damage, when AS expires and its on cooldown.
In my humble opinion, other approaches would had been better:
1) reduce AS mitigation, but keep it duration as it was before, so it is possible to have it always active with enough Recovery. This could be done by swapping the feats that increase it mitigation with other feats that increase healing done by other skills. (ie. reduced cd on Bastion of Health, increasing the amount of people sun burst affects (for 20man)...)
2) totally remove AS. decrease dungeon monsters damage by 10-15% and increase all other heals by 10-15%. Add a new life leech encounter skill instead, so we can deal with reighteousness.
3) make AS a daily, give us instead a powerfull "targetable" "aimed" heal "ray" skill encounter that can link to 1-2-3 other close party members with an appropiate feat.
About pvp... remove righteouness there. Or make it 10% as mutch.
My main concern is that currently, if someone new comes to the game, and reach 60 as a DC, there is no way in hell that he can progress unless he pays for gear in the AH, witch is not rewarding at all for many of us. Most of the people that can clean t2's now are the ones that geared and learnt the tactics with AS overpowered, and the gap between those and "newcomers" that may have to fight against them in new guild based gauntlet is an almost impossible to reduce one in many many months... frustration to newcomers? kill-your-game?
Please reconsider how your healing class work, and make progression viable for new-comers again or this will be a game that will never increase its population, so it will die eventually soon, what its a shame considering its potential.
The Devoted Cleric is a utility class. I’ve rolled with a variety of party compositions post patch mostly by PUGs or zone chat parties (solo DC, duo DC, party with no GF, no GWF, no CW, no TR) without a respec yet with more or less unexpected success. Yes, the DC is still playable but severely lacks utility, made only all the more prominent by the AS duration nerf.
In the state the game is in, we have 2 passives, 3 encounters and 2 dailies. It’s an interesting mechanic, but the 3 encounter limit is what really limits a cleric’s potential and in my opinion the key reason why we all rely on Astral shield. Anyone who’s played a cleric will know we need to (or want to) do most of the following in a dungeon/boss fight, in no order or importance:
-survive (righteousness = potions)
-mitigate enemy damage
-control party positioning
-tank adds and or kite them while surviving (in the old days), now just aggro management and peeling mobs off CWs and TRs
-heal party members
-buff party members
-debuff enemies/boss
-clutch heal party/tanks who took spike damage
-revive (not always our main role, but not many other classes watch other party members closely enough)
-build action points
-build divine power
-actually deal damage and kill stuff, even use knockbacks in right situations
Why is Astral Shield such an important ability? If you look at the list, astral shield manages to achieve at least 5 of those roles and help you have a much easier/safer time doing the rest. AS is a decent heal to the whole party, it’s fire and forget. It definitely helps mitigate damage off bosses/elites who hit really hard and can otherwise 1-2 hit a party member, along with trash mobs with combat advantage. It also helps those with lesser health come back to full fairly quickly without extra intervention. If you have aggro you can run/slide around or inside it and heal yourself back up while waiting for the 12 seconds potion cooldown.
More importantly the position of AS dictates where a party is to fight- people have come to know (largely through trial and error) they’ll survive in the circle. As PUGs rarely use voice chat and there’s too little time for text chat, AS is a handy way of ensuring a party fight at a favourable position. How many times have the GF/GWF been frustrated they draw aggro to a place but nobody is following, or the CW casts a singularity but everyone pulls the mobs elsewhere? How many times have you tried to heal when the whole party is scattered miles apart from each other? Astral shield is like a beacon that the DC uses to shepherd the party towards those advantages positions. As a result, fights go a lot easier and everyone has a better time. It’s not appreciated or often mentioned, but makes a difference in making dungeons go faster.
The issue of opportunity cost
Because of the 3 encounter limit, we have to choose the best abilities to do what we need to do. Astral shield is a no brainer not because it’s an OP spell, but because the opportunity cost of not slotting it is much higher and limits our encounter selection. If we get 4-6 encounter slots then yes, I’ll be happy not to cast AS anywhere near as often as I do, but with 3 encounter slots, it’s worth its slot in party management. Can we have two sets of power slotted that we can alternate with a button? The way most clerics roll, AS takes care of healing/regen/defense buff/positioning, sunburst takes care of top up heals/AP/DP gain and you have one other ability for DPS or buff/debuff. 100% AS uptime means the 3rd slot can be 100% something else like daunting light or divine glow. 66% AS uptime means the 3rd slot may need to be some form of heal/survival at least 33% of the time and borderline useless the other 66% of the time. That makes us inefficient. In some cases, it also means we need 2-3 powers requiring divine power and no time for divine power gain. Case in point: post patch had 2 different matches where the CW died early in Epic Temple of Spider boss fight (actually all CWs post patch had premature deaths in most boss fights....I could talk about our 3 man Karrundax but might save for another time) and we had to finish with either 2TR/GWF/DC and GF/GWF/TR/DC. I had to heal with divine astral shield and knockback with divine sunburst and switch skills back and forth mid fight between HG/divine armor/hammer and forgemasters/chains/daunting hoping nobody gets ganked by blademasters or rooted by the web.. most painful fights ever. More encounter slots would have made it jussst a tad more manageable.
Why AS nerf is painful:
A lot of the rage against the AS nerf is valid, a lot of it is the NON cleric players failing to adapt and survive. It’s still a painful transition because everyone’s builds and gear are not optimised to changes in party dynamics. Many are still tunnel visioned into building their DPS meters while DC APM (actions per minute) AND blood pressure are going through the roof. Whilst it’s nice they trust clerics to have their backs 100% there’s only so much we can do without them using health pots. It hurts clerics because we’d like to ensure party survival but our limited healing utility cannot compensate for other classes not playing skilfully. Clerics are complaining because we get blamed often regardless of party skill. We used to be able to clutch in a lot of situations, and now that aggro is off us (and on CWs) if the CW goes downs he’s down, plain and simple and no amount of healing will mitigate that.
This IMO is not the fault of the developers and just a teething process. In time everyone will learn to play and position smarter and this helps everyone, especially clerics because it means we have to heal/clutch less often from other’s laziness and mistakes. However, useful supplementary survival tools for DCs or other classes may help boost party survivability. Another point: the uncleansable revive sickness nerf also means everyone gets to be revived once in a boss fight and that’s it, which punishes mistakes severely and increases frustration at bosses. Ok, makes fights challenging, but can you reset it when the whole party wipes so we don’t spend minutes waiting at campfires (with optional party member finger pointing).
What we need is versatility and improvement on our other encounters
Ideally I’d like to ask for more encounter slots or a secondary skill slot to switch to because more than any other class, we really need our utility. Not holding my breath, and I get the design mechanic to make every encounter count but if that doesn’t happen then the solution is not to think that AS is an OP spell, but why the other spells are not viable options. As you can see above AS fulfils a multitude of class roles well. That makes it a good skill, a useful skill. Sunburst is probably the next most versatile spell (AOE heal/damage/DP/AP/knockbacks). Most other spells are very one dimensional, and bad at what it does. Case in point, Bastion of heal has a long cooldown, is slow to cast, mediocre heal and small area of effect. This is why most clerics take forgemasters as a 3rd encounter, because it can be an extra AOE heal and do some damage. Unless utility are added to our other spells, clerics are always going to be unhappy because we are forced (or expected by the party) to slot the same 3 encounters to cover core our class roles. If you don’t want us to use AS exclusively for healing, don’t nerf AS, make BoH, healing word and even soothing light an actually attractive option with consideration to how much damage mobs deal to players in dungeons (with or without help from feats). If you don’t want groups to fight on a 20’ radius circle for 10 of every 15 seconds, either adjust the number of mobs and their DPS in dungeons or give us (and other classes) better survivability tools. I love the concept of divine mode and adding effect to powers too, but we also struggle to keep divine power up a lot of the time for various heals and clutches.
I would also mention that many of our set bonuses are borderline useful or downright unreliable and useless because of short uptime (check the other threads on Cleric bugs). Having our gear supplement the DC’s skills in different areas can help maintain diversity and variety of builds.
Thanks for reading, I appreciate the feedback and the presence of this thread on the forum, thank you devs for continuing to listen and work with us to enhance our gaming experience.
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How can you say i'm wrong? Have you played with my character and my team? I know that they don't drink much potions because i often play with them on the teamspeak. This is why they like having me on a dungeon by the way.
If you and your team can't achieve that then don't start assuming is impossible. Humility is a quality.
What, precisely, are these so called "buffs" that clerics have received?
Do tell.
I dont believe u when u say u have received "positive Feedback". Just look at the Forums (especially the Cleric Forum).
I mean: U cant count people who just hit lvl 60 and do some easymode T1 Dungeons and say "woa its still cool".
The real Clerics, who played since day1 closed beta and have BiS since ~ 1 month are the ones u should listen to!
Buff our ohter abillities is the key to make the DC viable again. This means:
- reduce self heal debuff to -30% instead 40
- make healing word charges speed up by more recovery
- reduce bastion of health cooldown (this CD is sooooo much too high - I would recommend to subtract ~40% of the current CD time)
and last (this is a bonus - u get a piece of my chocolate if u do this):
- I personally think the nerf for AS is OK (adressing the stacking issue here) - but the uptime is reduced too much imo. But I dont know how this turns out if u do the other things I sayed before. But maybe u should think about making the uptime ~70-75%.
Another interesting thing would be, to make the recovery softcap higher. Currently its about 3k recovery where - when u continue stacking recovery - dont get much out of it. This could be also something to tweak.
Greetings - and PLEASE do something! Thanks
Healing word needs to be effected by recovery.
Healing words "power" would not get out of control by lowering its cooldown via recovery as it's a heal over time that only stacks in duration, improving targeting could help but is not vital. Adding a healing paragon path would go along way to adding an identity to the class too.
I do agree with the astral shield change in general however. But you should have had the foresight (no pun intended) to increase our other healing skills before removing 33% healing from one skill and lowering the duration on damage reduction. Bastion of health is a solid skill when it hits 5 targets, it has its purpose but it is not friendly to new players. Healing word is the same, its fairly solid but due to its punishing cool down and poor targeting it punishes again new players. It leads me to question the design philosophy of the company and the class designers and gives cause for concern for the future of the class and how it will be laid out before us.
Love the game and will continue to hang in there for future changes, truly looking forward to a healing paragon class choice opposed to the current one "choice", will it ever come? that's another question!
So people are enjoying the buffs and fixes? what ones the fix to divine glow or the 100 extra healing per tick from soothing light or perhaps the fix stopping prophecy of doom giving the mobs 20% increased mitigation.
In general the patch was fairly poor and ill thought out when looking at the cleric changes, while I agree with many of them I don't think I could say I enjoy "all" the other buffs and fixes. More that I expected skills that buff enemy mobs and nerf my groups damage to be fixed.
Unless ofcourse you mean clerics are enjoying all the other buffs and fixes "some" other classes got such as the threat fix... that should have been solved during beta weekend three.
Sorry for ranting ><.
Astral shield will heal you....if you cast it on yourself, but it's more common (especially post threat-fix) to stick that over the big cluster of angry monsters + tanks/melee dps, where the mitigation & heal will really help. I might skoosh over there to fire off a sunburst, but I'm mostly going to be in the backlines whenever possible, keeping an eye on the CW. Astral shield doesn't give me free backheals, it gives me just the same heals it gives everyone else (now minus the righteous tax, since it became HoT -you really really notice this difference in solo play pre/post patch, incidentally), if I want to go stand in it.
Ditto for divine forgemasters: it'll heal me if I go and stand next to the monster I've stuck it on, but given that it's now my go-to skill for surviving AS downtime, I'm using that in the exact same way I use AS: to keep the tanks alive. Over there, where all the red is.
So mostly my self heals come from sunburst, skooshing through AS/FF radius on my way to fire off sunburst/panic running from monsters, comedy astral seal heals (which are based on damage, something I, as a healer, have TOTALLY SPECCED INTO, OFC) and potions. In bosses, where I have to keep an eye on a fairly separated group, my own healing is almost exclusively potions. There are no 'free backheals' in there at all.
Maybe if I ran healing word and used soothing light I'd be topped up more often by backheals, but I don't run those because they're terrible heals in the first place, and the one benefit they might have over the other skills (backheal) is affected by righteousness, so why bother? If I'm using soothing light or healing word on myself, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. It's much better for the team as a whole for me to use a potion on myself while using my DP to fire off something else (anything else) to keep THEM alive. Like, say, astral shield, which I will then do my best to skoosh through so I can grab some super awesome 0.6x heals.
Righteousness just has zero redeeming qualities as a concept. It's absolutely a debuff, and rephrasing it as "your heals are 66% more effective on other people" would make no difference, other than to make all our skills look even more rubbish outside of parties. No other game I've ever played (including many with backheals) has incorporated something like this.
So there's that.
Regarding astral shield itself, I'll just reiterate what many others have said: the nerf/fix means clericing is still viable, but it's just no longer any fun. It's still the best skill on the bar, and sunburst is too good at generating DP/AP to drop, but now we also have to have a heal in the third slot to cover AS downtime, meaning our one "choose your fun power" is now basically...forgemasters, or BoH if you can handle the cooldown. Or HW, I guess (!). It has to be a heal. We've gone from being healer/buffer/debuffer to...healbot.
And again, healer with an inherent nerf to self healing, is pretty silly in single player. Foundries at 60 are...interesting.
Now you NEED to save that backup heal for AS downtime, which means if, say, you notice that the TR has gone off piste and started 1v1ing something that might actually kill them, far from the magic blue, and the magic blue is going to drop soon anyway, you have to decide "do I forgemaster the monster the rogue is dueling, saving the rogue, or do I stick it on the monster the tank is fighting, saving the tank?" -Basically, someone is going to either pot or die, and I have to decide who that'll be. Sophie's choice as MMO. Who'd've thought it?
Hell, I find myself keeping an eye on healbars for the distinctive OMG HEAL spike of a potion being used, and somewhere in the back of my head I'm keeping a running total so I can preferentially save people who have already used a lot of pots, because it spreads out the burden that way and nobody ends up ragequitting. Healbot AND armchair counsellor. Funtimes. :-/
Your guys' absolute lack of foresight astounds me. You couldn't tell, in all the months and months of beta, that a skill that gives the entire group a lot of damage mitigation, and AE healing, would be out of line with any other skill a cleric possesses? Have you ever looked at the skills available to clerics? The very first time I looked at the cleric powers, I knew AS would be a staple for healing. The fact that you let it stack for so long (or, in the first place), is again, incredible lack of attention paid to this class.
Like other people have said... what buffs? Focused Poise and Soothing/Punishing Light - those aren't buffs. Every other thing was a fix, because either a tooltip was wrong, or the spell didn't work like it should have.
I almost logged in this weekend for the "event," but there's betas of games that are actually fun out there.
I rolled a cleric because I wanted to heal, and I enjoy the way healing works in this game. I have no problem with being a healbot.
If clerics went on DPS spec, then who would heal the party ? Potions ?
Again if you don't like the idea of healing people, then roll something else.
How could one say that Soothing Light sucks ? Seriously ?
I use it alot, really. Put BotS on many mobs, AS, and mitigate individual damages with Soothing Light.. Then Sunburst to get that divinity back if BotS wasn't enough.. It's great if you know how to use it. And of course, it is WAY better with the 4th Divinity pipe. Playing with this AS nerf isn't a big deal to me, and shouldn't be to any good cleric. In the first place I thought this nerf would burry the cleric, but the aggro fix made our life so easier that we can fill our task even better than we used to do it before.
My only regrets are those Healing Word and Bastion of Health which are either bugged or useless or using bad mechanic.
As I have said many times before, Healing Word have to be affected by Recovery. Plus, if you cast Healing Word on a target which already benefits from a previous HW, it would be great if it took the best HW in account, instead of simply extending the previous HW. Because if you cast normal HW with no critical, and then cast a divinity HW critical, the ticks won't be critical, because the previous HW was not critical. It need to take the most powerful HW between the previous and the new one, not simply the previous one......
Bastion of Health needs a rework. It is useless the way it is. How about some heavy cooldown reduction and slight buff to healing ?
And to people complaining about not being able to spam Daunting Light like a twit, then again, how about you roll some GWF or CW ? And leave the cleric class to healers. I really hate clerics focusing more on their DPS meter instead of their party HP.
- DRAGON - ( Mehrea DC 13.1k ) - ( Volsung TR 11.7k )
Good for you on enjoying healbot.
This isn't a healer class, it's a leader class (sub control class [with 1 control spell woop]), we're supposed to fill gaps and sh*t for your party, not just fill their green bars. Support isn't just healing, it's about much much more. Buffs, Debuffs, support damage, support healing. Now it's "make up for AS downtime or suck it".
What Cryptic, and Neverwinter have promised was to stray the Cleric away from the stereotypical healbot that other MMOs offer. A more dynamic, fun way of supporting other than watching the green bar go up. You make it sound like people don't like healing, well we do like healing, but we also want to do something else other than healing.
PVP: How to make your life less miserable as a Devoted Clerics -- Still in it's Unfinished Glory
Dragon
You beat me to it +1!!!
The Dev's spent a lot of time making the focus for DC to be actually doing stuff rather than staring at health bars! Kudos to them.. I just hope they keep that playstyle