GU73: Sorcery

Yeah if shard of life was able to be clipped with offering that would be nice but will have to see about that.

That is why I have been asking for them to make Ritualistic Word give power to Watcher again like it does on live. I have asked repeatedly along with others, only to be ignored. When I heal, everything is slotted where it is for a reason. I don't use a supercharge when I heal either. So for them to force me to give up a slot for a power that only has one benefit is ridiculous.

From what I understand part of this was about giving people more choices. It has not turned out that way. First they took away SOL. Then they brought it back, they changed the way Transmutation worked. A lot of unnecessary changes that didn't need to be made in the first place. Then didn't do anything to the few things that did need to be changed. If it isn't broke, don't fix it.

I know some people are probably tired of hearing the things I have to say or think I am doing nothing but complaining. That is not what I am doing. If they actually release the changes they have so far and people see what a mess Sorcery really is they will not be able to tell me, well you should have spoke up when they where doing the testing.

You seen how long they have let Nature and Electric suffer for. So if it takes me coming on here day after day and speaking up, then so be it. If they still decide to keep the changes they have right now and go to live with them, then so be it. However, I will longer want to play the game. I am not going to pay to play a game that I will no longer enjoy. I will just go spend my money on a game which values their member base's opinions. Cause right now, for this powerset at least, are opinion counts for zero.

I'm really in the same place I see a lot of talk about the dmg abilities of sorcery only which worries me because on test the dmg is comparable to live, so why is time being spent on that when the role the power is meant to be is broken? Sorcery has an effective single heal and 4 man heal, but it has always needed better HoT for Raids. The only thing I see their power 'fixes' have done so far is to take a power type that is challenging to keep a group up with in Raids solo to an impossible one.

I have played as a Sorcery Healer for five years now. I'm willing to change my loadout if they make another that gets the job done, but I am not willing to change my power type. I hope they fix it before it goes live. I've been really excited about the proposed changes, but if this went live today I would not continue playing the game.

I'm really in the same place I see a lot of talk about the dmg abilities of sorcery only which worries me because on test the dmg is comparable to live, so why is time being spent on that when the role the power is meant to be is broken? Sorcery has an effective single heal and 4 man heal, but it has always needed better HoT for Raids. The only thing I see their power 'fixes' have done so far is to take a power type that is challenging to keep a group up with in Raids solo to an impossible one.

On live we all know how the HoT from CoP works right. On test the HoT we get from walking in and out of CoP is gone. My idea is that when you use CoP after the revamp, the HoT you get from walking in and out of it on live should be made to just go to the rest of the group automatically which would give CoP range and it won't be a wasted 8-man heal.

That's the way to fix Circle of Protection.

OK. So far as I can tell, people have been saying the exact opposite of what they mean in this thread.

At issue is NOT whether Offering is clippable. It's whether it's marked beneficial and can be used to clip other abilities. It's not, and it can't.

Fortify Golem is, and it can.

This is likely a bug, and I've reported it.

The easiest way I know to fix this issue is simple. Make it an 8 player heal. Those standing within CoP will get the full benefit of heals. Those who were in it or were never in it would still get the HoT heals but at a reduced rate. Say by half of the amount you would get if you were standing in CoP. For example. If you are in CoP you ( just an example ) say a 400 hp HoT heal. Then you have to move out if it for whatever reason you HoT you would then get would be reduced to 200 hp.

Another possibility would be again 8 man heal and the amount of HoT you would receive would be dependent on how close or how far away from CoP the players are. The closer you are the better the HoT. Those standing in CoP would get the maximum amount of the HoT that is allowed.

That would be a good soultion for cop, but what about soul wells heals its range is decent but idk about its Hots

Cool, I might have said it wrong. Fatal explained it better.

I Don't know about impossible. Remember, if it's broke when it hits live, they can always hot fix something.

I haven't played on test, but for sorcery healing, this is what I'd like to see.

COP, should get the healing as long as you've walked through the circle. If shouldn't be removed just because you leave.
Soul well, weak on live and from notes also on test. How is this power not almost a mirror of the celestial power? Instead of being able to keep 2 to 3 up, I'd rather have one strong one.
Transmute, on live in pve it is horrible, PvP it's great. Why not balance it as make it work the same in both world? It should work as a group burst heal, which heals stronger when BK is applied.

One last thing. Are the descriptions still the same for dps and healing about form changing? Can you still dog people? What power give you the gold soul aura now? I ask because that has never been used much in pve. They stole it from us in PvP years back. This would be a great time to reintroduce it. Would be nice if all healing power granted the gold aura. That combined with BK should be able to transform NPCs to dogs.

Bad for tl;dr

Ritualistic word - does not give power to watcher anymore

Circle of protection - No longer heals you when you leave the circle

Soul well - no longer gives you a burst when an add dies

Soul siphon - gives a CHANCE to heal 4 people when the target attacks someone for around 10 seconds

Soul bolt - a burst heal the people have to be near the target to get the heal from it so its like shard but it can miss, also shard's burst is almost as strong as it plus it has a dot on the end making this ability useless

Transmutation - See soul bolt except it cant miss

Invocation of renewal - the now go to heal since it heals people below 50% for double strength however it has a 15 second cooldown(like all the other channels) i got 15k total heals from this when i had about 10% health left

Watcher - its once again needed in every healing loadout due to sorc range issues.

Bad karma - i am pretty sure bad karma inflicted adds sometimes heal when attacking on live - on stats they dont.


Sorcery is a mess and the way things are going they will likely just buff up the heals and not change any of the fundamental issues it has. If you are a sorcery fanatic that can test do so, sorcery needs all the help it can get. If you cant test beg the devs to make the necessary changes to ensure sorc wont get the short end of the stick.

yup it is a disaster

this should go where testing feedback is, you know before its too late im just saying...

It has been said time and time again, its nothing new there. We need more voices to get the devs attention. Its not even my power and im pissed about i

I cant disagree. I tested early builds and wasnt a fan of what i saw. Now i havent tested the later builds but ive seen feedback and vids. Based on that imo it needs some work. Munitions is another one. I have had no time to test it because of testing other things and playing the live game plus real life. I searched yt vids last night and saw 2. One was from SM with techno music and another was a guy in his base casting every ability 2,3 times for base dmg, both vids from 2 months ago. Not criticizing them, just pointing out there is a lack of testing with the power. But thats for another thread, the munitions one. Sadly there are 6 posts in that thread

Not true. I cannot remember his full Username here but it starts with Celestial and other people have tested as well up to this point.

There were only some things that needed to be looked at and changed when the revamp started. The first thing they did was to remove SoL, RSA, and GSA. Then they started making changes to Fury. Some who tested it like the changes and some others didn't. Then someone decided it would be so great to make Transmute a projectile type power, along with bringing back SoL just in a very different way. SoL was then Juggling ads instead of having it work the way originally did. Also changing CoP so if you leave the circle you get no heals at all. Then there was the ever so brilliant idea, "Hey let's make RT not give power back to Watcher, force people to lose a slot so they have to use Offering. Then the changes to Watcher himself with having an aura that gives off HoTs. Then also increased the range of some powers, one being Soul Well. However, most of those who have tested it said it was only a small increase in range.

In my opinion about 85% of the things that were changed didn't need to be changed at all. Once again it is a case of them fixing something that was not broken to begin with. Now with that all said, Celestial I know has tested and stated what he thought needed changed based on what he tested, cause I read quite a few posts that he made. I also damn near pissed myself when I was reading Sorcery's GU73 notes and saw it said New Ability - Shard of Life. Taking it out then adding it back and calling it new makes no sence, more so for people have played Sorcery for a long time. They probably had the same reaction I did.

I also see people in other parts of the forum asking if we will get a free respect token. Which they should in my opinion. They shouldn't be stuck playing a power that is no longer fun to them. In some cases, such as mine, some people won't want one cause they will be to busy no longer playind DCUO. If the current changes that are in place right now went to live. Both sides of Sorcery need a lot of work, more so the healing side. People have given suggestions, myself included, on possible ways to make things better. More or less they have all be ignored.

I'm curious what loadouts you're using that make Sorcery Healing "impossible". We've been using it internally to solo heal for raid testing with appropriately geared characters (which is well below the max potential entry level for each piece of content).

Core loadout: Rejuvenate, Ritualistic Word, Invocation of Renewal
Supercharge (pick one) : Arbiter of Destiny (feels kinda OP), Transcendence
Flex Slots: (pick 2 of 3) : Circle of Protection, Soul Well, Boon of Souls - OR - Watcher + Offering

From personal experience, it feels like the Watcher build is worse than not using it (contrary to feedback that it's mandatory), which means we may be able to do some buffs there (with Ritualistic Word perhaps).

Shard of Life, Transmutation, Soul Siphon, and Soul Bolt are hybrid Healing/DPS abilities, more intended for situations where you're already comfortable in the content (as in, have farmed some gear from it already) or are acting as a secondary healer and want to contribute a little more damage to the group. With the latest pass, they now skew pretty heavily towards healing in healer role, so they could also fill Flex slots listed above.

Example spec for testing Ultimate Soldier and JFA (with a 5-1-1-1 setup)
- Full Olympian gear - CR 189
- Full T8 mods (not Olympian) - with a mix of Restoration and Power as "primary" stats, depending on your preference - Resto+Power tends to perform better than pure Resto imo
- Full T8.1 generator mods (not Olympian) - Power, Restoration, Precision
- For mods and generator mods, we've also tested with T7s and 7.1s for even lower stats
- 189 skillpoints - maxed weapon combos, movement mode breakout bonuses. Hybrid Focus with maxed healing crits and the rest into Restoration (113 into resto).

Now, healing isn't so strong that you can just ignore all the mechanics (example - you can't just allow Grundy to resurrect a ton of adds or stand in the fire against Gentleman Ghost and expect to survive, at least solo healing with the spec above), but it's more than doable.

Um if u read my post i was speaking about munitions, not sorcery I just added something on at the end about munitions.

Just wanted to pop in here, to everyone who is asking why these changes were done, well your voices should've been in the earlier threads for Sorcery, despite my efforts my voice alone wasn't really going to do all much since there were a lack of people saying similar things. At this point i think it's too late to change anything but it doesn't mean it won't get addressed in a future update.

For Moja, a few things I've said over the course of the whole revamp will be repeated here to which I think Sorcery needs to be competitive, this time it's not just my voice you have for them but all those above mine who don't know why Sorcery was changed so much for the healing side.

Circle of Protection:

What it needs - Allow it to heal anyone out of the circle if they have entered it once just how it is on live.

Why? - No one can stand in this animation all the time, at most it'll be the tank who will receive it since they will remain at a static location until enemies are dead. This makes it extremely inefficient to use, I'm spending 450 power for an ability to heal one person at best slowly.

Well why can't I position it to where allies will stand? Because certain content punishes you for doing this, in Ultimate Solider, people need to move out of the red missile warnings, when they move they won't end up back to the same spot, they won't care about their positioning, it just punishes me. Same thing for gentleman ghost, when he teleports, if you're clustered together you're going to die.

Ritualistic Word:

What it needs - Power the pet again

Why? - Well first, using the combination of two load out slots for the output of the current watcher is not worth it (strength). Second this is basically like carrying the PoT ability, it's mandatory and without it'll struggle for power, for a dps it's a different story since their pet will more than make up for a damage loss of using up two loadout slots. It also restricts a healers loadout which is far more important then what the DPS can do.

Soul Well:

What it needs - A bigger range/much stronger healing through maybe a third well OR double the strength of healing received under 50%

Why? - Firstly, this ability was largely undesirable to use on live servers, so these are suggestions based on what I think it'd need to make worthy of a loadout slot, increased strength because of it's mediocre range, this thing even when double stacked its weaker than celestials admonish combo blight, that has render distance range, why should I struggle using this ability when it doesn't even bring a bigger output than it especially since I have to wait 24s to actually receive the maximum potential for the healing other easier to use HoTs are so much better and easier to use and manage.

Shard of Life:

What it needs - Revert the range back to live servers, increase the strength burst and hot, reduce it's cooldown to 3s

Why? - I wasn't a fan of the changes to range to certain abilities and this is one of them, things limited by range should have a lower cooldown and be stronger than abilities which are easy to use because the downside to using the ability is because it's for a niche purpose, increasing the range just reduces this justification. This ability lost a lot of value too due to the loss of bad karma healing, this isn't reflected in the HoT it puts out, the HoT is very weak.

Transmutation:

What it needs - Keep the new range it has, increase the burst, increase the cooldown to 6s

Why? - I'm indifferent to how the change of functionality to this ability is, since it's so similar to shard and soul bolt I think making it like this would fit the "gaps" of healing sorcery provides, namely through ranged burst.

Soul Siphon:

What it needs - Not to be like this, a chance to heal only four people when using the ability? Power is a commodity in this revamp, for 200 power I have a chance of healing isn't good enough. I would say it'd like it to return it to the live functionality and then base it on whatever power cost or cooldown you'd set for it

Why? - No one in their right mind would waste a loadout slot for an ability doing a chance of something, replace a chance of healing with a chance of doing some damage or a chance to pull aggro from ads, it doesn't make any sense. Also why for my suggestion to return it to live? More access to ranged burst healing, allows people to not be required to run the watcher if they had more options.

Other thoughts, things like Invocation is still too high risk for the reward, the heal is strong but the chance of not being interrupted outweighs to choice to use this, solution for this would be to make it like Bloom where it gives an initial burst heal when you cast it. Also Invocation ticks 7 times, Celestials guardians light ticks 9 times, if you intend to keep Invocation the same, match it to guardians light at least please.

In continuous strenuous content, relying on supercharges isn't possible since you're basically running a 5/6 loadout if you don't have it equipped. Plus not everyone wants to run one but if the power set is only viable with one then what does that say in relation to the rest of the strength of my abilities?

Celestial has two hybrid Burst + HoT abilities which have both a 1.5s cooldown each, have render distance range, and are vastly stronger than the majority of all other HoT abilites, this reference isn't to want those abilities nerfed but rather to highlight that abilities in Sorcery, Nature and even Electrics Electrogenesis are weaker than those abilities, why would anyone who wants to use these power sets competitively pick anything but Celestial if the abilities that are restricted by XYZ are weaker than the abilities that are easier and stronger to use?

Celestial's Admonish into Blight Combo puts out an 8man render distance HoT stronger than Circle, I'm not sure of it's power cost but I don't understand why I would pick Sorcery once I learn Celestial does everything so much better?? Celestial does have problems in power costs but at least it's powers themselves aren't a headache to use, the same thing goes for Nature, alas I'll make posts for those in their respective threads.

Lastly, I'd like to this that these complaints from the above posters aren't posting that the changes make content impossible to pass through, rather it's so different to how it plays to live servers they extremely dislike because of it. Celestial basically retained almost every aspect of it's live server version and Nature has retained some aspects but still needs tweaking. In my eyes Celestial was the strongest and most OP healing power set to use on live, yet here it's basically the same apart from a cooldown increase to admonish, a nerf to divine light due to loss of it's purification PI which was not distributed to it's HoTs and one of the supercharges cost going up to 100%

I'm sorry for another wall of text but with all the responses asking what's happened to Sorcery I just thought I needed to say something again.

I think above solo healing raids we want to able heal sm little easier, and range was a big factor in fos sm. I get in those situations you need to have a second healer but sorcery still seems limited to range and its holding it back. I know some of moves got increase in range but it didnt make much of a difference.

Also, here's my PoV of doing a fairly difficult raid which may not be relevant anymore but we overgear it. There are things in this raid which may need to be adjusted too but it is what it is. The fights were a massive mess and it was just a spamfest of healing. This is on the GU73 version of test.

If you want to see the last fight just PM me, I switched across all four power sets and couldn't beat it regardless. We had to go 2/2/2/2 because regardless of my ability there are just too many restrictions with power/cooldowns/ability functionality

First Boss: 5:15
Second Boss: 13:50