Test Discussion GU 122: The Clarion Artifact

We've got a new midseason artifact release on the way: The Clarion! Information below:


The Clarion - Healer artifact
Functionality:

Restorative Melody
Using the power of the Clarion, gain the ability to heal up to 4 nearby players with the lowest health upon executing weapon attacks (2.5%/2.5%/2.5%/5%) of a priority heal. This effect is temporarily empowered when activating your [Weapon Buff](10%/10%/10%/20%) of a priority heal. (0.5s internal cooldown)

Clarion's Guard
When empowered targets healed by Restorative Melody that are above 95% health receive a shield for 12 seconds. This shield's effectiveness is increased by (0%/0%/0%/100%). Players shielded by this effect can only receive it once every 30 seconds

Arion's Might
When empowered weapon Attacks deal (15%/15%/15%/30%) of your Restoration and (5%/5%/5%/10%) of your Precision as damage to all enemies near the targeted foe every 12 seconds.

5% restoration
4% Precision
3% Health

Rank 80: Unlock healing
Rank 120: Unlock shield when empowered
Rank 160: Unlock damage when empowered
Rank 200: All values potency increase

Developer notes
Howdy everyone, Ranmaru here with a new artifact. "The Clarion" is a new artifact for Hybrid Precision based healers, and below i'll outline my general thoughts on the artifact.

Artifact Design
The design for this artifact was to help encourage a more active DPS style for healers to engage with, as well as add additional support for Hybrid healers. We started with the idea of providing tools to allow you to continue to do dps while still providing healing output for you team.

The intention is not to replace healing altogether but instead allow The Clarion to provide spot healing for small aoe spikes and residual damage so that you can use those precious seconds making another attack instead of casting your priority heal or a group heal.

Although it is not required that you run your weapon buff, I tied several additional features to having the weapon buff active to encourage you to edit your loadout to complement this new move.

Recommended Loadout
Artifact Suggestions

1. The Clarion (obviously)
2. Venom Wrist Dispenser (increased DPS from weapon buff allowing you increased throughput in terms of overall dps, easy include)
3. FLEX SPOT
   • Demons Fang (even more DPS output as well as power back - the power back has less use but still a great dps increase)
   • Purple Healing Ray (if you're gonna go purple healing ray, I'd drop your priority heal and focus on a full sustain loadout using group heals, field heals, & shielding to mitigate the majority of damage)

Loadout Suggestions

1. Add your weapon buff (adding this move to you loadout will allow you to increase your DPS throughput)
2. Drop that group heal (since The Clarion will allow you to supplement the healing that you were doing from that ability)

As always I am looking forward to your feedback on this new artifact and your general thoughts on the design of it.

Bug Report
Some early bugs that I'm seeing.

1. The description is being displayed twice at level 200.

2. Clarion's Guard doesn't seem to be working at all at Level 200.

3. Restorative Melody is healing all nearby ungrouped characters. I'm guessing it is only meant to heal up grouped team members.

I've got a fix for 1 & 3 coming in the next build, i'll need to review with RedFive on why the strings are repeating, thanks for the feedback

As this is a midseason artifact (Not the artifact launching with Episode 43) yes.

Are any of these abilities locked to Healer Role?

Does the Player equipped with " The Clarion" count as a "nearby character"?

Is "lowest Health" based on the actual health number(current health), percentage (current health / max health), or difference (max health - current health)?

Is the shield from "Clarion's Guard" limited to once every 12 seconds from a single character "The Clarion" or all equipped characters with "The Clarion" in the group?

I am just curious how effective 1 tank, 1 troll(buff troll?), and 6 precision Dps(equipped with The Clarion) would fair without a healer. As everyone in the group would constantly be healing, (and maybe activating shields).

Testing with sorcery, the artifact changes your circle of protection to protection of clarion which i believe it's clarion's guard, same thing happened to water.

Oh, crabs that was some old functionality I'll make sure to remove that feature.

From what I gather your character becomes empowered when you use a weapon buff(when equipped with "The Clarion")
So...
Shouldn't there be a comma after empowered in the description of Clarion's Gaurd ?

So it would read
"When empowered, targets healed..."
As I don't believe we can make empowered targets.

Sorry to be nitpicky.

You can be any role to gain the healing effects.

When I tested it, I was receiving heals from it too but never saw a shield pop on myself. Thou I was testing on bosses so my health was probably never above 95%.

The "lowest health" works just like any heal that has that description. Look at how group heals work.

1 tank, 1 troll, 6 dps will not be functional. For one thing all 6 players will need to have it equipped and at max rank. On top of that the healing only procs 1x per hit. Multi Hit attacks will only proc it one time each. And the 5% of a priority heal is a very tiny amount. Any raid that you would need a healer for would not be a good idea to run with this set up. On top of that, it still scales with resto so unless the dps want to spec into resto and probably also put point into the healing crit, it will not be good as the dps would be lowering their total damage to add not run with a heal. This is more for battle heals than for dps. I can even see tanks using this to battle tank too since this will help them self sustain. I see a potential with this and earth in particular. But 6 dps, You wont be seeing this in endgame raids, unless the team is very well coordinated.

Yeah I want this one like yesterday. It fits exactly with my current build and replaces the 1 artifact I'm running that doesn't really fit.

It will work under any role, and I would say the observation here is correct. I would not want to enable an optimal playstyle that would keep healers from being able to find a slot in a raid, but that being said I did try to lean some value in having a Hybrid Prec DPS with a high amount of SP in Resto to be able to provide spot healing to his raid group while still getting a bit of added damage from this artifact.

Artifacts should be more specific to power sets, not one size fits all. After a while playstyles become stagnant, for both might AND prec. Though it takes more work, freedom of playstyle for loadouts and DIFFERENT weapon attacks should be the goal. The current system doesn't allow for freedom, only cookie cutter loadouts and brawling into martial arts and dual wield into bow flurry spams. I like the devs, but nothing changes blindly agreeing with them. Criticism, HONEST criticism brings change.

I could not see any shield animation, and my healing log did not show any damage mitigated by the shield. I know I met the conditions that should have produced the shield. Despite the recommended artifact pairings, I, instead, enjoyed placing it alongside Transformation Card and Strategist Card, as those will proc both healing and damage from the Strategist Card, nicely complementing this artifact to allow the healer to not feel the need to stop attacking to heal.

If I'm being honest, knowing the cost (either through time or cash) of an artifact, this doesn't feel worth it if it's not useful for end game content, namely raids. It seems funs, and I did have fun with it in open world. However, I wouldn't mind another aspect added to the artifact to make it viable for raids, possibly by adding a buff heals/dps when in a group of 8. I don't know. I actually love it healing nearby players and npcs that aren't in my group (in its current form, although it was mentioned that this would be removed). I mean, if this isn't recommended for raids, I would find it easier to get behind if it had less limitations on how many it healed against, for example, open world bosses.

Actually, I know what would make me consider it for raids. I have a 4 player shield and the artifact provides a 4 player shield (how much does it mitigate?); if it was worked to cause those shields to work together to cover all 8 players (each covers 4 in raids but stacks in alerts), I'd pay the money to level this artifact to 200 on day 1.

Healing over time in this game is weak sauce. If you wanna heal, you need to use burst heals. I’m gonna have to pass on this art.

Intentions noted. But it needs to be absolutely the case that you can’t heal a raid without a proper healer, or this will become the new meta. There is a damage stacking mentality that will never change.

I like the concept behind this art, probably because I have serious pro-prec bias. But I do worry that this makes electricity even more the meta than before.

At the moment on the test server, at 31000 restos you get 800 healing per attack in normal mode and 3000 when activating the weapon buff...
The extra damage on the test server happens every 12 seconds, and the damage is less than the damage from the blast adapter mod...
And for this you have to sacrifice DPS artifact, this is an interesting option for... Omnibus, for solo, but definitely not for elite content...

Clarion's Guard
When empowered targets healed by Restorative Melody that are above 95% health receive a shield for 12 seconds. This shield's effectiveness is increased by (0%/0%/0%/100%). Players shielded by this effect can only receive it once every 30 seconds

Does this have to be at 200 can we not get a % at 160 I mean come on your talking months and months to get there if you focused on just it. with millions of experience of a difference

all of us aren't just going to fork over tons of money for these things

Whoa! Sound like an interesting artifact. Page of Destiny and Purple Healing Ray are the staples, the meta, and this artifact fits nicely on its own in the third slot.

My healer either runs Transformation Card or EoG (+ 25% SC) in the third slot. With The Clarion, I could see myself replacing my SC for the Weapon Buff. The additional healing sounds nice, but ultimately I think it'll all come down to the additional shields; if those shields are strong (at all ranks) this artifact will be mighty tempting for pure healing and hybrid healing.

As for the bonus damage, that's gravy. My healer already runs the Brawling WM so more AoE damage for me.

I would love to see a longer cooldown for Restorative Melody (with some trade-off ofc). There are several weapon rotations that don't land a hit every 0.5 seconds so I feel such a short cooldown would further push players towards weapons with fast mastery combos like dual wield and brawling - which the meta is already saturated with.