Gabe
11-12-2008, 12:25 PM
First, let me say I really like this game. I'm not leaving, but I am parking my healer for a bit due to the reasons listed below. I'm writing because I'd like to see some improvements in a game I enjoy playing, and without voicing my opinion, how will the developers know what I think.
This post isn't about the 35% HOT nerf. It's about the state of healers (non-melee) in the game. I post it here because MJ has stated this is only one of a series of patches, and hopefully these thoughts reach someone while they're working on the classes in future patches, and hopefully things will change in a more fun direction. It is my feeling that 1.0.5 does more to hurt healers across the board than to help them, and something is needed other than a 10% boost to our extremely low damage dots to make the class appealing enough for people to play.
This is my opinion. Healing in this game feels like a never ending game of wack-a-mole.
We have 2 jobs on the battlefield: healing, and rezzing. If we do anything that deviates from this, other than an occassional debuff, we get blasted by our realm mates, called noobs, and any other number of unpleasant encounters.
We can do damage, but everyone else can do it better. They however cannot heal, so we're expected to do that when we play. All the time. Every time. Regardless of how much damage we do or do not do, NO ONE WANTS A DPS HEALER IN THEIR GROUP.
The answer, in my opinion, is not to give us more damage. If we were even on par with say, a magus or engineer, who would play a magus or engineer?
The answer in my opinion is to give us more core abilities that make us feel like we're making a difference, and really puts us in the action. Not mastery skills we may never see due to our spec, but core abilities that we can enjoy regardless of spec.
Here are some ideas I've been thinking about. The idea here is to allow us to be more active in the battle without taking us away from our core duty of keeping people alive. These are core abilities all non-melee healers should get (and some should apply to melee healers too). The mastery trees should affect these skills in different ways by augmenting these skills with additional bonuses, but the idea is to give these to all healers so they have something more to do on the battlefield than just heal and rez without getting blasted by other players.
I'm not a math guru, so all numbers are arbitrary for example puproses. I don't pretend to know how these numbers would affect large scale end game RvR, I just made them up to illustrate an idea.
- Passive for all healers: Heal scaling: If you're the only healer in a group, you get a 30% healing bonus. If there are 2, you get a 10% healing bonus. No bonus for 3 or more healers. Bonus only affects group members.
- Add a damage element to our direct heals. Have it only work while healing other players, not yourself.
Since we seem to be shying away from dots, have our single target and group direct heals do damage to surrounding enemies within X feet (melee range or a little longer). This way we're still contributing to the death of our enemies without taking time out of our healing duties to see it happen.
I'm not going to pretend to know what an adequate amount of damage should be, but enough to make it fun. Not a 25% chance of doing 25% damage kind of thing that requires a tactic. This should be attached to all direct heals (not hots), and should do some damage with each heal.
- Make our damage scale based on Willpower, not Int. Make Int do something else for us, like a chance to bypass resists, or avoid setbacks while casting our big heals.
- Righteous Bomb: instant cast 5 second buff, if placed on a player and they die in this period of time, have it explode placing a HOT on nearby groupmates.
- Revenge: instant cast 5 second buff, if placed on a player and they die in this period of time, have it explode placing a DOT on nearby enemies. (We get credit for the damage done)
or
- Corpse explosion: Allow us to turn our fallen ally's corpse into a one-time bomb, affecting all nearby enemies. (We get credit for the damage done).
or both :)
- Mind control. (whistles inncoently). Yeah, I miss it.
- Shield spell: instead of just absorbing damage, the shields should bounce all damage against your ally back to the attacker up to the amount of damage it absorbs, and giving you credit for the damage done.
- Leap (20s cooldown). Remove snare / root / stun, and leap forward X feet, similar to the SH's Run Away skill.
Well, you get the idea. These are the kind of things I want from my healer. Things that make playing the class feel fun, not feel like work.
Leap, I feel, is badly needed. We're way too fragile given the amount of damage done on the battlefield and the HOT nerfs are only going to make this worse. We need something, anything, to help out here in this respect. We can't keep our team alive if we can't even keep ourselves alive.
The rest of it, while mostly fluff, is the exact kind of fluff I would enjoy playing. It allows me to spend hours at a time keeping my team alive while also contributing some damage and utility to the fight, in a way that isn't going to have our realm mates screaming down our throat, or distracting me from my primary goal. It's a win / win for everyone.
Thank you for reading.
This post isn't about the 35% HOT nerf. It's about the state of healers (non-melee) in the game. I post it here because MJ has stated this is only one of a series of patches, and hopefully these thoughts reach someone while they're working on the classes in future patches, and hopefully things will change in a more fun direction. It is my feeling that 1.0.5 does more to hurt healers across the board than to help them, and something is needed other than a 10% boost to our extremely low damage dots to make the class appealing enough for people to play.
This is my opinion. Healing in this game feels like a never ending game of wack-a-mole.
We have 2 jobs on the battlefield: healing, and rezzing. If we do anything that deviates from this, other than an occassional debuff, we get blasted by our realm mates, called noobs, and any other number of unpleasant encounters.
We can do damage, but everyone else can do it better. They however cannot heal, so we're expected to do that when we play. All the time. Every time. Regardless of how much damage we do or do not do, NO ONE WANTS A DPS HEALER IN THEIR GROUP.
The answer, in my opinion, is not to give us more damage. If we were even on par with say, a magus or engineer, who would play a magus or engineer?
The answer in my opinion is to give us more core abilities that make us feel like we're making a difference, and really puts us in the action. Not mastery skills we may never see due to our spec, but core abilities that we can enjoy regardless of spec.
Here are some ideas I've been thinking about. The idea here is to allow us to be more active in the battle without taking us away from our core duty of keeping people alive. These are core abilities all non-melee healers should get (and some should apply to melee healers too). The mastery trees should affect these skills in different ways by augmenting these skills with additional bonuses, but the idea is to give these to all healers so they have something more to do on the battlefield than just heal and rez without getting blasted by other players.
I'm not a math guru, so all numbers are arbitrary for example puproses. I don't pretend to know how these numbers would affect large scale end game RvR, I just made them up to illustrate an idea.
- Passive for all healers: Heal scaling: If you're the only healer in a group, you get a 30% healing bonus. If there are 2, you get a 10% healing bonus. No bonus for 3 or more healers. Bonus only affects group members.
- Add a damage element to our direct heals. Have it only work while healing other players, not yourself.
Since we seem to be shying away from dots, have our single target and group direct heals do damage to surrounding enemies within X feet (melee range or a little longer). This way we're still contributing to the death of our enemies without taking time out of our healing duties to see it happen.
I'm not going to pretend to know what an adequate amount of damage should be, but enough to make it fun. Not a 25% chance of doing 25% damage kind of thing that requires a tactic. This should be attached to all direct heals (not hots), and should do some damage with each heal.
- Make our damage scale based on Willpower, not Int. Make Int do something else for us, like a chance to bypass resists, or avoid setbacks while casting our big heals.
- Righteous Bomb: instant cast 5 second buff, if placed on a player and they die in this period of time, have it explode placing a HOT on nearby groupmates.
- Revenge: instant cast 5 second buff, if placed on a player and they die in this period of time, have it explode placing a DOT on nearby enemies. (We get credit for the damage done)
or
- Corpse explosion: Allow us to turn our fallen ally's corpse into a one-time bomb, affecting all nearby enemies. (We get credit for the damage done).
or both :)
- Mind control. (whistles inncoently). Yeah, I miss it.
- Shield spell: instead of just absorbing damage, the shields should bounce all damage against your ally back to the attacker up to the amount of damage it absorbs, and giving you credit for the damage done.
- Leap (20s cooldown). Remove snare / root / stun, and leap forward X feet, similar to the SH's Run Away skill.
Well, you get the idea. These are the kind of things I want from my healer. Things that make playing the class feel fun, not feel like work.
Leap, I feel, is badly needed. We're way too fragile given the amount of damage done on the battlefield and the HOT nerfs are only going to make this worse. We need something, anything, to help out here in this respect. We can't keep our team alive if we can't even keep ourselves alive.
The rest of it, while mostly fluff, is the exact kind of fluff I would enjoy playing. It allows me to spend hours at a time keeping my team alive while also contributing some damage and utility to the fight, in a way that isn't going to have our realm mates screaming down our throat, or distracting me from my primary goal. It's a win / win for everyone.
Thank you for reading.