Regarding to that anti cc skill idea, how about after being CC'd ( proned/slowed/stuned)you are immune for such mechanics for 5 seconds. You wont get stunlocked this way and its usefull but not terribly OP. Also one of important issues no one seems to notices is that all cleric instant cast have a visual that takes like 0,5 second which is hell of a long time. The spell should work( or start a cast) the moment you click not after visual, thats a big problem if you have to cast your instant 5 times i na row you start and od not finish cos of knockback or smth.
I like the idea of "Triage" healing in this game. I think its refreshing, but a lot are still not used to this kind of healing, as you can see there are still a lot of players who does not even use their dodge skills.
I do understand the stacking of AShield needed nerfing, that is good. But the downtime i am somewhat not infavor of it.
If only we had a really good "OMG he needs heals quick" kind of skill then i really dont mind the AShield nerf.
This game has to be playable by PUG, we are not always lucky to get a good and competent team all the time.
Not even going to mention clerics in PVP, but in PVE, past lvl 30 our heals are ONLY supplemental. Unless there is some mysterious set of armor that gives you "just the right stats", or once you hit 60 you become just an auto-injector of stimpack juice, the heals just don't cut it. Not that I'm complaining, but there needs to be a character rework to let the cleric actually fit the role. I'm not sure what needs to be done exactly, but here's how my experience has been so far:
Lvl 1-5: Just a caster.
lvl 6-10: gain a heal(it's not great but it's the best one in the game at this point), gain some DPS. Awesome I have some options.
lvl 11-15: new daily, just try to figure out how to play a healer.
lvl 16-20: Get soothe, which is cool, but I shouldn't have to spec for less threat especially when GWF's and GF's are specing for more threat, which doesnt matter because I'm going to aggro anyway.
lvl 20: Get daunting light, for a moment I am the most OP unit in the game. I can easily 1-hit groups of mobs, there is little to clean up after one of these.
lvl 30: since the rest of my abilities suck I've been looking toward Forgemaster's Flame and Prophecy of doom.
lvl 35: Brand of the Sun sucks, Lance of faith is better DPS anyway, especially with Focused Poise, but it doesn't matter I'll just max out PoD and FF
lvl 40: slowly realizing that unless my team has serious DPS my soothing light and Astral Seal just can't provide enough heals, all I do is make potions not be needed as often.
--- Haven't got astral shield yet, but since neverwinter wants the DC to be a controller/leader, that just means buffs, debuffs, and stuns. The DC is the HEALER. The best heals DC has are astral seal, which is based off of your team's DPS and soothing light, which at max devotion is only a couple thousand life returned.
In my opinion the character needs reworked entirely, it needs less threat compared to at least the tank classes, I thought that heals were to scale off Power, I don't know if the scale needs adjusted based on that or what, but the other starts still need relevance or everyone is just going to look for power items, which all the classes already do. The powers need reworked, too many of them just aren't good. There are too many bad choices and too many similar choices. I feel like I'm shopping for turds when I have points. Same thing with the feats. Most of them, even the paragon feats just aren't very appealing. I think there should be different tree choices for the DC, but right now I feel like there is one optimum build, and just a lot of wrong ones.
Again all of my experience is pre astral shied which has already been nerfed. but if 1 power is going to make or break my character, I might as well reroll. But as I said the only heals I see as viable are astral seal, and soothing light which is situational, and a lot of people don't know how astral seal works, so it's lost to them, and too many characters stand in AOE and then ***** about needing a heal.
As the DC currently plays I use Lance of Faith, Astral seal; and then Forgemaster's Flame, Prophecy of Doom, and Daunting light, and I use flame strike as my daily. Pretty much my place in the game is just to cover everything in astral seal, hit QER, and the left click until a cooldown runs out or astral seal needs reapplying, the daily gets used when my team gets overwhelmed(and they always do) I save my divinity usually for the tank, but soothing light doesn't lock on, so some stupid rogue rolls into it and takes some part of heal, even though I wasn't going to give a full health heal anyway.
which brings me to mention that it needs to be easier for us to cast on friendlies.
I'm a software developer, and I'm reminded of a time where I identified a report that was categorizing data in a way that was not intended and didn't really make sense, ie a bug. I made a change to fix that problem. Later on I updated a client with the fixed report. Unfortunately they had incorporated that bug into their daily business process and wanted to keep it that way. Guess what I reverted the report because that's what you do when your clients have a valid argument that runs contrary to your intentions.
You have plenty of responses here, and they pretty much boil down to:
1. No one has a problem with the stacking change.
Solution: Keep it.
2. The duration "fix" creates a gap that isn't adequately filled by other abilities.
Solution: Modify or add new abilities to fill the gap
or
Solution: Revert the change
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vmlinuxMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
I'm a software developer, and I'm reminded of a time where I identified a report that was categorizing data in a way that was not intended and didn't really make sense, ie a bug. I made a change to fix that problem. Later on I updated a client with the fixed report. Unfortunately they had incorporated that bug into their daily business process and wanted to keep it that way. Guess what I reverted the report because that's what you do when your clients have a valid argument that runs contrary to your intentions.
You have plenty of responses here, and they pretty much boil down to:
1. No one has a problem with the stacking change.
Solution: Keep it.
2. The duration "fix" creates a gap that isn't adequately filled by other abilities.
Solution: Modify or add new abilities to fill the gap
or
Solution: Revert the change
Ah, a fellow BI developer. This is pretty common. I have had to fix things like that, but I usually end up doing a sunset version of the older report, so I give them time to ease off of it, and prepare to import the new one. In this case the changes would have been best implemented over a month gradually until the fit was right instead of just shoving them all in at once. Any system with a ton of moving parts is best changed one small piece at a time, so you know if something breaks what actually broke it on the audit trail instead of having to roll back tons of changes at once.
Funny story, once I wrote an audit application as an operations analyst to verify that some processes were being done correctly by my employees, and they would spit out was extremely verbose log files with a date and teme stamp, and other developers found them out on a drive. They actually took that data from the logs and worked the data into a production system. When we did a lift and move of the data center it took them weeks to figure out that some operations analyst had an undocumented program running on a production system. I almost got firedfor breach of protocol, then because I wrote the program in python, and we only had java developers I got a promotion to a BI analyst instead
The Developers will let you all go off on any direction you want and not bother to change anything here or fix anything here unless you stay focused.
To that end:
Dev's, the 99% of the playerbase of DC's are united in saying that the double stack fix is great, the AS time nerf was horrible, and all our other heal spells must have a adjustment if you expect people to continue paying and playing. The ball's in your court, the longer you sit silent/do nothing the worse your game will suffer (more people will get fed up and quit). What are you doing now to bring the fun back to the DC!?
I'm a software developer, and I'm reminded of a time where I identified a report that was categorizing data in a way that was not intended and didn't really make sense, ie a bug. I made a change to fix that problem. Later on I updated a client with the fixed report. Unfortunately they had incorporated that bug into their daily business process and wanted to keep it that way. Guess what I reverted the report because that's what you do when your clients have a valid argument that runs contrary to your intentions.
You have plenty of responses here, and they pretty much boil down to:
1. No one has a problem with the stacking change.
Solution: Keep it.
2. The duration "fix" creates a gap that isn't adequately filled by other abilities.
Solution: Modify or add new abilities to fill the gap
or
Solution: Revert the change
I'm a software developer too but I work for a medium-sized airline and the approach of "we modified our business to incorporate the bug into the business process" would be absurd. If it's a bug, it needs to be fixed. Any issues/inconveniences that the bug fix incurs need to be addressed separately. "incorporating" a bug into the business process as a short term band aid is okay but as a long-term viable solution it is completely HAMSTER. Then again I always assume end-users are complete idiots anyway.
AS was too strong. Encounters were fine-tuned to an overpowered ability. The ability has been fixed but now encounters either need to be made easier or other cleric heals need to be buffed. Reverting the changes is NOT a solution. Fixing heals is.
vmlinux, kalycto hehe spoken like true troubleshooters. Take the limited information given and try and extrapolate the situation.
vmlinux - it was a small change to a single field, I reverted it at the location, not in our source and then added the old one as a "new" report so essentially going forward that one client could have their snowflake report and everyone else could have the fixed one. We are a long way from continuous integration~. But you make an important point, I think the significance of the agro fix in the mix tends to be diminished in peoples minds. Perhaps if we'd had a week or two of mobs now taking less interest in our healing the need to reduce the prominence of AS would be more clear and more generally accepted. Going from tanking and healing or swarm kiting and healing being able to accomplish our role by simply SB/AS would have become very boring very quickly. As is I'm definitely not bored, just frustrated with tooling.
kalycto - In the example I gave it was not a case of modifying business operations in a significant area (such as affecting airline schedules), more like it affected how someone in an accounting office filed archived paperwork. Frankly the process should probably have had the human element removed, and replaced with electronic data flow, but I don't get to dictate those decisions. Regardless what I was getting at is that you develop a solution to a problem and take pride in how you solve it, only to have a user not like it for some reason. This doesn't always mean the user is wrong or stupid (although I'll give you that it doesn't mean they aren't either), and it is important to remember is you can make a piece of software that operates exactly as you intended, and if it doesn't satisfy the end users, taking a hard line stance of "working as intended" will result in the user deciding your product isn't for them.
vmlinux, kalycto hehe spoken like true troubleshooters. Take the limited information given and try and extrapolate the situation.
...is important to remember is you can make a piece of software that operates exactly as you intended, and if it doesn't satisfy the end users, taking a hard line stance of "working as intended" will result in the user deciding your product isn't for them.
I can agree with that, but let's get back to the AS nerf. It was needed. Even now the ability is powerful - especially with divinity. After the nerf, encounters became much more difficult because they were fine tuned to be beatable with an overpowered ability in play.
So they nerfed AS. But they didn't boost healing throughput nor did they fine tune the boss fights to reflect the new changes. I think they wanted to see exactly what happened to encounters before they decide to mess with things which led to a few weeks of rage on the forums. It's obvious cleric healing and/or encounter difficulty would have to be addressed. Or both. The solution, I would argue, isn't to revert the nerfs though since people need to get away from using AS as a crutch.
I'll jump on the bandwagon. Divine Clerics are no longer fun. Most encounter powers are now non-options, as opposed to being poor options before the patch. DC's are in need of a myriad of buffs, and boss encounters are in need of a tune down, since the lynchpin has been pulled. I find myself yearning for the old heal agro, at least I'd still have something interesting to do.
Considering the class is based on the 4E Cleric, which was designed to make playing the necessary healer role fun, this is a major failure.
I just swapped defensive gear from pet onto myself so I'd have more survivability in PvP where I don't get the augment pet.
I have 24.5k HP 2k def 4k power 2k crit 2k recovery 11k GS.
I still get killed in a single rotation of CC abilities or burst damages. Meaning between 2-5 seconds depending on class, and I can't do a single thing about it. I even tried bringing control encounters instead of heals, but CW's are better and the other 3 classes all seem to have some form of immunity to counter my CC.
Dieing and resurrecting with zero Divinity and going into the fight with encounters that aren't worth a dime is an added bonus. Not like having 3 pips helps much, but hey, it'd be nice when they occasionaly aren't focusing the Cleric!
Not a SINGLE friggin thing I can do.
4k AD just isn't worth this humiliation.
Try giving us regeneration instead of life steal on our PvP gear. We might even live until the second round of encounters from our enemies.
Better yet, change life steal to PvP-Defense which stacks additively with regular defense.
There's a reason why other MMOs implemented something similar.
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!
Do you play a cleric? If so, have you tried lvl 60 pvp? And how is that working out for you?
So a "Combat Designer" thinks things are well with the cleric? That explains a lot.
If standing in a circle is considered "no fun" then why did you make AS in the first place? Why not make it like Divine Armor?
You received a lot of positive feedback about the changes to AS? Does "a lot" mean more than the negative feedback? I suspect the "positive" feedback is quite the minority.
If AS was so overpowered before, I suppose clerics ruled PvP without question. Oh wait, that never happened. And where is the cleric now in lvl 60 PvP?
But if you really think these changes made the cleric more enjoyable to play, the total play time of the cleric should be higher than before. Yet I suspect that the playing time of GF and GWF has gone significantly higher, and the playing time of clerics has gone through the cellar.
I can agree with that, but let's get back to the AS nerf. It was needed. Even now the ability is powerful - especially with divinity. After the nerf, encounters became much more difficult because they were fine tuned to be beatable with an overpowered ability in play.
So they nerfed AS. But they didn't boost healing throughput nor did they fine tune the boss fights to reflect the new changes. I think they wanted to see exactly what happened to encounters before they decide to mess with things which led to a few weeks of rage on the forums. It's obvious cleric healing and/or encounter difficulty would have to be addressed. Or both. The solution, I would argue, isn't to revert the nerfs though since people need to get away from using AS as a crutch.
Saying AS is a crutch is sorta like saying healing potions are a crutch. Having a GF tank is a crutch. Or having CC to deal with adds is a crutch.
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xen0phreakMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 14Arc User
edited June 2013
Thank you for that fix, now skilled clerics are actually recognizable and sought after. I have forsaken Astral Shield entirely and am officially running a "circleless" spec at the moment with great success. I have managed to solo heal every T2 instance the game has to offer without dropping a single astral shield, including one epic Dracolich 3man kill (just had to have that delve bonus). To any of my fellow clerics that are complaining about the nerf, I encourage to look at your abilities, specs and gear a little closer and be inspired to make some changes to rise to the challenge. Cheers.
Thank you for that fix, now skilled clerics are actually recognizable and sought after. I have forsaken Astral Shield entirely and am officially running a "circleless" spec at the moment with great success. I have managed to solo heal every T2 instance the game has to offer without dropping a single astral shield, including one epic Dracolich 3man kill (just had to have that delve bonus). To any of my fellow clerics that are complaining about the nerf, I encourage to look at your abilities, specs and gear a little closer and be inspired to make some changes to rise to the challenge. Cheers.
Sorry, but if you are already perfectly equipped it is no nothing to it healing without astral shield. But, if you just start from nothing it is a problem.
DC PvP is like what was said about a gank fest. The inability to cast anything when the cleric is stun locked, crowd controlled, and prone sucks. I have done a lot of PvP and basically its just revive at fire, re enter battle, stun lock, strangle hold, knocked down, dead.
Dungeons on my DC are ok, granted they are very stressful too. I have not seen a reduction in healing aggro. I was healing a dungeon a few days ago, the group was healing up preparing for the boss pull. We were standing well away from the boss room and to speed things up I casted healing word on the tank. The boss pulled because of my cast, go figure.
Hi guys i am new in this game .I am 30 lvl and i need some help how to make my heal better.What is better to up ,power and toughness or recovery and critical?All opinions are wellcome
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zingarbageMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited June 2013
AS was too strong and other abilities are too weak. You nerfed AS. It is still just as mandatory as it was before and the other abilities are still too weak.
What you accomplished is making other encounter abilities mandatory as well. This severely limits play styles and removes any fun in playing the class.
AS was too strong and other abilities are too weak. You nerfed AS. It is still just as mandatory as it was before and the other abilities are still too weak.
What you accomplished is making other encounter abilities mandatory as well. This severely limits play styles and removes any fun in playing the class.
This^^^ so much this. Again, everyone agrees the stacking had to go. Sadly now we must slot three heals and two have to be sunburst and astral shield. The third...what ever....When we could keep astral shield up 100% (because we specced heavily into recovery) of the time, we could at least use one encounter to slot something fun, a DPS spell like daunting light or maybe a debuff like divine glow now that it's fixed but I'll never know how good divine glow is now that it's fixed because yall at cryptic saw fit to pigeon hole us all into slotting three heals. Slotting three heals because you want to and that's your preferred play style is one thing. Being forced to because of bad class design and over nerfing is an entirely different matter. I would dearly love to be able to slot one heal, one dps spell and one debuff and be viable in a group like a D&D cleric should be able to do. I want to slot daunting light, divine glow and astral shield/bastion of health. Make bastion of healths heal a solid burst for double what it does now and cut that CD in half but make it so nothing it does stacks with astral shield. Make forgemaster flame have a larger area of effect. Make healing word....I dunno...do something with that piece of HAMSTER single target spell....We have all these other encounters that are supposedly good yet we can NOT slot them!! I'm not bitter.....I'm not OK!!
Saying AS is a crutch is sorta like saying healing potions are a crutch. Having a GF tank is a crutch. Or having CC to deal with adds is a crutch.
Um... what?
Your reply makes no sense. Devs clearly intended for potions to be one of the primary forms of (self) healing and comparing an OP ability to an entire class? Really? C'mon man. At least try and form a logical retort. I stand by what I said. Encounteres and the rest of our abilities need fine-tuning but the AS nerfs were absolutely needed.
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archdewMember, Neverwinter Beta UsersPosts: 0Arc User
edited June 2013
Just to add my views as a Solo DC, I think that the changes do seem to restrict the utility of the class. The opinion that AS was overpowered is almost a unanimous view, but like so many others have pointed out, the problems with the DC class run far deeper.
While the attempt to reformulate the support-type to a leader-type class was interesting, in practice, the results seem less than inspired. The DC does not heal or buff significantly and neither does it do significant damage. While when used in combination with other classes, the DC can significantly boost a party's gross effectiveness, in isolation (or even with a companion) the DC is somewhat lacklustre. Firstly, the DC cannot withstand one-to-one combat with any class, save its own. Secondly, Solo DCs are forced into a losing strategy in solo pvm. They are forced to use the combination of their DPS and healing skills to outlast their opponents, but the damage dealing capacities of monsters (and players) far outstrip both the dps and healing abilities of DCs and quickly overwhelm what defence the DC has, making this strategy of outlasting inviable. The result is that the player has to dance, weave and run around to make up the difference. Personally, without dodging and weaving continuously, while frantically quaffing potions, I would never have completed some of the normal quest dungeons. Even then, a brief lag is all I need to be sent back to a respawn point- and not only due to boss fights. Thirdly, there isn't enough "flavour" in the DC. The TRs really give the sense of a terrifying stalker assassin, the CW bask in the glory of their arcane splendour, even the GWFs and GFs have their imposing warrior bearing, and the DC... well they can't really heal, or wield significant holy powers, and don't even seem to be any more pious than any other class (who "pray" hourly) with the DCs abilities having nothing to do with their deity of choice, and with nothing much linking them to their deities save the tab divinity mode, which aside from the name, doesn't really have any divine feel to it.
I don't know, I could be being too picky.
Truth is, I enjoy being a cleric, even with all these limitations, although I have to do a little RP in my head, that I'm a cleric on a mission, just so that I don't feel too discouraged. I believe that I am just one of many other clerics who are waiting for the time when clerics would be revamped so that we start to see clerics of different builds and persuasions reflecting the interaction between player personality and class design. Right now though, DCs are very much like the cleric in the opening movie sequence- struggling to fight and heal at the same time and succeeding at neither, hoping that the TR miraculously wakes up in time to do something.
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svearixMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 7Arc User
edited June 2013
Seriously! This class is so boring that i only do invocation and crafting! You need to rework all stats, power, feats...Or Delete it!!
Another consequence of cutting down the duration of AS is the impact this has on divinity gains. Not AP so much, that seems to be fine. The actual divinity gains thou. If you don't get enough people in an AS for long enough, who actually take damage and get a heal there seems to be a significant net loss of divinity.
Spreading seal and BotS or Lance around I am personally finding some holes in my rotation where I get stuck wanting to beable to hit a divine sunburst to reduce some damage momentarily, but I don't have the divinity for it because I need to use the sunburst to get the gains of divinity. Unless you are actually counting the time and spreading your encounters out, you can quite easily get stuck without any divinity for a large amount of time.
perhaps 0 to pip 1 should have a natural regen. It would absolutely make a profound difference to have 3/4 pips after a death in PvP. Trying to cap a point with a stealth build rogue pewpewing you, while you have no divinity is basically dodge hope the sunbusrt hits.. dodge.. dead. I don't think any of the other classes are so negatively affected by the lack of a Tab power regen.
I log on just long enough to play the four arduous, grueling, non-sense, completely out of whack and balance, frustration-fest matches you call "PvP" for Clerics, and do a set of crafting all to build up some AD in a chance I may return to the game again some day.
It saves me money after all. I don't have to spend gas money to drive the church on Sunday to be told I'm a "wretched soul", and what not. I just play a few rounds in this game and I get my daily dose of humiliation.
And in turn, when I consider it's design it's a bit of an ego booster. It makes me feel I like I should join Mensa.
Just to add my two cents as someone who has recently shelved their DC, while you said that AS was overpowered and most of us DC's agreed, you seem to forget that even with the changes/fixes/nerfs depending on your interpretation every DC still has to run with AS in their encounter slot there is no "Choice" it is still the best healing ability clerics have. I would love to switch out AS for another skill but what would I replace it with what would give me the best return? Nothing!
Until we can switch out different encounters then there is no real choice as others have said why not just do away with every other skill and just have AS, Forgemasters and sunburst.... apart from the odd person switching out to bastion or healing word I can guarantee that the majority of people run with this setup.
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vmlinuxMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 0Arc User
Thank you for that fix, now skilled clerics are actually recognizable and sought after. I have forsaken Astral Shield entirely and am officially running a "circleless" spec at the moment with great success. I have managed to solo heal every T2 instance the game has to offer without dropping a single astral shield, including one epic Dracolich 3man kill (just had to have that delve bonus). To any of my fellow clerics that are complaining about the nerf, I encourage to look at your abilities, specs and gear a little closer and be inspired to make some changes to rise to the challenge. Cheers.
Why is it L2P posts never link to a video of them being so awesome? It's not like fraps is that tough to use. Also if you listen to what people are saying, the majority aren't saying that content isn't doable, they are saying the class is lame and not fun anymore. I can do content now, but why would I want to? Even in EQ or Wow I could do something besides just spam heals like mad. In EQ at least clerics had stuns that could be used to stop non epic mobs from casting, and roots to keep them from chasing after you. What is compelling about the cleric in this game over any ANY other game on the market right now? Before the last patch I would tell you what was compelling was that the cleric was the most asskicking fun I had ever had playing a cleric. Afterwards it's just HAMSTER with heals on every skill, and no utilitarian use.
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the02thiefMember, Neverwinter Beta Users, Neverwinter Guardian UsersPosts: 3Arc User
Comments
2 abilities are worth using
25 are **** space fillers
I do understand the stacking of AShield needed nerfing, that is good. But the downtime i am somewhat not infavor of it.
If only we had a really good "OMG he needs heals quick" kind of skill then i really dont mind the AShield nerf.
This game has to be playable by PUG, we are not always lucky to get a good and competent team all the time.
Lvl 1-5: Just a caster.
lvl 6-10: gain a heal(it's not great but it's the best one in the game at this point), gain some DPS. Awesome I have some options.
lvl 11-15: new daily, just try to figure out how to play a healer.
lvl 16-20: Get soothe, which is cool, but I shouldn't have to spec for less threat especially when GWF's and GF's are specing for more threat, which doesnt matter because I'm going to aggro anyway.
lvl 20: Get daunting light, for a moment I am the most OP unit in the game. I can easily 1-hit groups of mobs, there is little to clean up after one of these.
lvl 30: since the rest of my abilities suck I've been looking toward Forgemaster's Flame and Prophecy of doom.
lvl 35: Brand of the Sun sucks, Lance of faith is better DPS anyway, especially with Focused Poise, but it doesn't matter I'll just max out PoD and FF
lvl 40: slowly realizing that unless my team has serious DPS my soothing light and Astral Seal just can't provide enough heals, all I do is make potions not be needed as often.
--- Haven't got astral shield yet, but since neverwinter wants the DC to be a controller/leader, that just means buffs, debuffs, and stuns. The DC is the HEALER. The best heals DC has are astral seal, which is based off of your team's DPS and soothing light, which at max devotion is only a couple thousand life returned.
In my opinion the character needs reworked entirely, it needs less threat compared to at least the tank classes, I thought that heals were to scale off Power, I don't know if the scale needs adjusted based on that or what, but the other starts still need relevance or everyone is just going to look for power items, which all the classes already do. The powers need reworked, too many of them just aren't good. There are too many bad choices and too many similar choices. I feel like I'm shopping for turds when I have points. Same thing with the feats. Most of them, even the paragon feats just aren't very appealing. I think there should be different tree choices for the DC, but right now I feel like there is one optimum build, and just a lot of wrong ones.
Again all of my experience is pre astral shied which has already been nerfed. but if 1 power is going to make or break my character, I might as well reroll. But as I said the only heals I see as viable are astral seal, and soothing light which is situational, and a lot of people don't know how astral seal works, so it's lost to them, and too many characters stand in AOE and then ***** about needing a heal.
As the DC currently plays I use Lance of Faith, Astral seal; and then Forgemaster's Flame, Prophecy of Doom, and Daunting light, and I use flame strike as my daily. Pretty much my place in the game is just to cover everything in astral seal, hit QER, and the left click until a cooldown runs out or astral seal needs reapplying, the daily gets used when my team gets overwhelmed(and they always do) I save my divinity usually for the tank, but soothing light doesn't lock on, so some stupid rogue rolls into it and takes some part of heal, even though I wasn't going to give a full health heal anyway.
which brings me to mention that it needs to be easier for us to cast on friendlies.
You have plenty of responses here, and they pretty much boil down to:
1. No one has a problem with the stacking change.
Solution: Keep it.
2. The duration "fix" creates a gap that isn't adequately filled by other abilities.
Solution: Modify or add new abilities to fill the gap
or
Solution: Revert the change
Ah, a fellow BI developer. This is pretty common. I have had to fix things like that, but I usually end up doing a sunset version of the older report, so I give them time to ease off of it, and prepare to import the new one. In this case the changes would have been best implemented over a month gradually until the fit was right instead of just shoving them all in at once. Any system with a ton of moving parts is best changed one small piece at a time, so you know if something breaks what actually broke it on the audit trail instead of having to roll back tons of changes at once.
Funny story, once I wrote an audit application as an operations analyst to verify that some processes were being done correctly by my employees, and they would spit out was extremely verbose log files with a date and teme stamp, and other developers found them out on a drive. They actually took that data from the logs and worked the data into a production system. When we did a lift and move of the data center it took them weeks to figure out that some operations analyst had an undocumented program running on a production system. I almost got firedfor breach of protocol, then because I wrote the program in python, and we only had java developers I got a promotion to a BI analyst instead
To that end:
Dev's, the 99% of the playerbase of DC's are united in saying that the double stack fix is great, the AS time nerf was horrible, and all our other heal spells must have a adjustment if you expect people to continue paying and playing. The ball's in your court, the longer you sit silent/do nothing the worse your game will suffer (more people will get fed up and quit). What are you doing now to bring the fun back to the DC!?
That suggests a problem with the encounter and not AS. Maybe other priest heals can be buffed ore made to scale better with gear.
If any 1 ability is an absolute must have or all progression stops then the encounter is not fine tuned.
I'm a software developer too but I work for a medium-sized airline and the approach of "we modified our business to incorporate the bug into the business process" would be absurd. If it's a bug, it needs to be fixed. Any issues/inconveniences that the bug fix incurs need to be addressed separately. "incorporating" a bug into the business process as a short term band aid is okay but as a long-term viable solution it is completely HAMSTER. Then again I always assume end-users are complete idiots anyway.
AS was too strong. Encounters were fine-tuned to an overpowered ability. The ability has been fixed but now encounters either need to be made easier or other cleric heals need to be buffed. Reverting the changes is NOT a solution. Fixing heals is.
vmlinux - it was a small change to a single field, I reverted it at the location, not in our source and then added the old one as a "new" report so essentially going forward that one client could have their snowflake report and everyone else could have the fixed one. We are a long way from continuous integration~. But you make an important point, I think the significance of the agro fix in the mix tends to be diminished in peoples minds. Perhaps if we'd had a week or two of mobs now taking less interest in our healing the need to reduce the prominence of AS would be more clear and more generally accepted. Going from tanking and healing or swarm kiting and healing being able to accomplish our role by simply SB/AS would have become very boring very quickly. As is I'm definitely not bored, just frustrated with tooling.
kalycto - In the example I gave it was not a case of modifying business operations in a significant area (such as affecting airline schedules), more like it affected how someone in an accounting office filed archived paperwork. Frankly the process should probably have had the human element removed, and replaced with electronic data flow, but I don't get to dictate those decisions. Regardless what I was getting at is that you develop a solution to a problem and take pride in how you solve it, only to have a user not like it for some reason. This doesn't always mean the user is wrong or stupid (although I'll give you that it doesn't mean they aren't either), and it is important to remember is you can make a piece of software that operates exactly as you intended, and if it doesn't satisfy the end users, taking a hard line stance of "working as intended" will result in the user deciding your product isn't for them.
I can agree with that, but let's get back to the AS nerf. It was needed. Even now the ability is powerful - especially with divinity. After the nerf, encounters became much more difficult because they were fine tuned to be beatable with an overpowered ability in play.
So they nerfed AS. But they didn't boost healing throughput nor did they fine tune the boss fights to reflect the new changes. I think they wanted to see exactly what happened to encounters before they decide to mess with things which led to a few weeks of rage on the forums. It's obvious cleric healing and/or encounter difficulty would have to be addressed. Or both. The solution, I would argue, isn't to revert the nerfs though since people need to get away from using AS as a crutch.
Considering the class is based on the 4E Cleric, which was designed to make playing the necessary healer role fun, this is a major failure.
I have 24.5k HP 2k def 4k power 2k crit 2k recovery 11k GS.
I still get killed in a single rotation of CC abilities or burst damages. Meaning between 2-5 seconds depending on class, and I can't do a single thing about it. I even tried bringing control encounters instead of heals, but CW's are better and the other 3 classes all seem to have some form of immunity to counter my CC.
Dieing and resurrecting with zero Divinity and going into the fight with encounters that aren't worth a dime is an added bonus. Not like having 3 pips helps much, but hey, it'd be nice when they occasionaly aren't focusing the Cleric!
Not a SINGLE friggin thing I can do.
4k AD just isn't worth this humiliation.
Try giving us regeneration instead of life steal on our PvP gear. We might even live until the second round of encounters from our enemies.
Better yet, change life steal to PvP-Defense which stacks additively with regular defense.
There's a reason why other MMOs implemented something similar.
Grrr so mad...
Do you play a cleric? If so, have you tried lvl 60 pvp? And how is that working out for you?
So a "Combat Designer" thinks things are well with the cleric? That explains a lot.
If standing in a circle is considered "no fun" then why did you make AS in the first place? Why not make it like Divine Armor?
You received a lot of positive feedback about the changes to AS? Does "a lot" mean more than the negative feedback? I suspect the "positive" feedback is quite the minority.
If AS was so overpowered before, I suppose clerics ruled PvP without question. Oh wait, that never happened. And where is the cleric now in lvl 60 PvP?
But if you really think these changes made the cleric more enjoyable to play, the total play time of the cleric should be higher than before. Yet I suspect that the playing time of GF and GWF has gone significantly higher, and the playing time of clerics has gone through the cellar.
Saying AS is a crutch is sorta like saying healing potions are a crutch. Having a GF tank is a crutch. Or having CC to deal with adds is a crutch.
Sorry, but if you are already perfectly equipped it is no nothing to it healing without astral shield. But, if you just start from nothing it is a problem.
What you accomplished is making other encounter abilities mandatory as well. This severely limits play styles and removes any fun in playing the class.
This^^^ so much this. Again, everyone agrees the stacking had to go. Sadly now we must slot three heals and two have to be sunburst and astral shield. The third...what ever....When we could keep astral shield up 100% (because we specced heavily into recovery) of the time, we could at least use one encounter to slot something fun, a DPS spell like daunting light or maybe a debuff like divine glow now that it's fixed but I'll never know how good divine glow is now that it's fixed because yall at cryptic saw fit to pigeon hole us all into slotting three heals. Slotting three heals because you want to and that's your preferred play style is one thing. Being forced to because of bad class design and over nerfing is an entirely different matter. I would dearly love to be able to slot one heal, one dps spell and one debuff and be viable in a group like a D&D cleric should be able to do. I want to slot daunting light, divine glow and astral shield/bastion of health. Make bastion of healths heal a solid burst for double what it does now and cut that CD in half but make it so nothing it does stacks with astral shield. Make forgemaster flame have a larger area of effect. Make healing word....I dunno...do something with that piece of HAMSTER single target spell....We have all these other encounters that are supposedly good yet we can NOT slot them!! I'm not bitter.....I'm not OK!!
Um... what?
Your reply makes no sense. Devs clearly intended for potions to be one of the primary forms of (self) healing and comparing an OP ability to an entire class? Really? C'mon man. At least try and form a logical retort. I stand by what I said. Encounteres and the rest of our abilities need fine-tuning but the AS nerfs were absolutely needed.
While the attempt to reformulate the support-type to a leader-type class was interesting, in practice, the results seem less than inspired. The DC does not heal or buff significantly and neither does it do significant damage. While when used in combination with other classes, the DC can significantly boost a party's gross effectiveness, in isolation (or even with a companion) the DC is somewhat lacklustre. Firstly, the DC cannot withstand one-to-one combat with any class, save its own. Secondly, Solo DCs are forced into a losing strategy in solo pvm. They are forced to use the combination of their DPS and healing skills to outlast their opponents, but the damage dealing capacities of monsters (and players) far outstrip both the dps and healing abilities of DCs and quickly overwhelm what defence the DC has, making this strategy of outlasting inviable. The result is that the player has to dance, weave and run around to make up the difference. Personally, without dodging and weaving continuously, while frantically quaffing potions, I would never have completed some of the normal quest dungeons. Even then, a brief lag is all I need to be sent back to a respawn point- and not only due to boss fights. Thirdly, there isn't enough "flavour" in the DC. The TRs really give the sense of a terrifying stalker assassin, the CW bask in the glory of their arcane splendour, even the GWFs and GFs have their imposing warrior bearing, and the DC... well they can't really heal, or wield significant holy powers, and don't even seem to be any more pious than any other class (who "pray" hourly) with the DCs abilities having nothing to do with their deity of choice, and with nothing much linking them to their deities save the tab divinity mode, which aside from the name, doesn't really have any divine feel to it.
I don't know, I could be being too picky.
Truth is, I enjoy being a cleric, even with all these limitations, although I have to do a little RP in my head, that I'm a cleric on a mission, just so that I don't feel too discouraged. I believe that I am just one of many other clerics who are waiting for the time when clerics would be revamped so that we start to see clerics of different builds and persuasions reflecting the interaction between player personality and class design. Right now though, DCs are very much like the cleric in the opening movie sequence- struggling to fight and heal at the same time and succeeding at neither, hoping that the TR miraculously wakes up in time to do something.
Spreading seal and BotS or Lance around I am personally finding some holes in my rotation where I get stuck wanting to beable to hit a divine sunburst to reduce some damage momentarily, but I don't have the divinity for it because I need to use the sunburst to get the gains of divinity. Unless you are actually counting the time and spreading your encounters out, you can quite easily get stuck without any divinity for a large amount of time.
perhaps 0 to pip 1 should have a natural regen. It would absolutely make a profound difference to have 3/4 pips after a death in PvP. Trying to cap a point with a stealth build rogue pewpewing you, while you have no divinity is basically dodge hope the sunbusrt hits.. dodge.. dead. I don't think any of the other classes are so negatively affected by the lack of a Tab power regen.
It saves me money after all. I don't have to spend gas money to drive the church on Sunday to be told I'm a "wretched soul", and what not. I just play a few rounds in this game and I get my daily dose of humiliation.
And in turn, when I consider it's design it's a bit of an ego booster. It makes me feel I like I should join Mensa.
Until we can switch out different encounters then there is no real choice as others have said why not just do away with every other skill and just have AS, Forgemasters and sunburst.... apart from the odd person switching out to bastion or healing word I can guarantee that the majority of people run with this setup.
Why is it L2P posts never link to a video of them being so awesome? It's not like fraps is that tough to use. Also if you listen to what people are saying, the majority aren't saying that content isn't doable, they are saying the class is lame and not fun anymore. I can do content now, but why would I want to? Even in EQ or Wow I could do something besides just spam heals like mad. In EQ at least clerics had stuns that could be used to stop non epic mobs from casting, and roots to keep them from chasing after you. What is compelling about the cleric in this game over any ANY other game on the market right now? Before the last patch I would tell you what was compelling was that the cleric was the most asskicking fun I had ever had playing a cleric. Afterwards it's just HAMSTER with heals on every skill, and no utilitarian use.
Wait till you try Guild Wars 2....