When I play a healer in ffxiv, its generally far more fun to have bad and undergeared tanks. I suppose you could refuse to heal for knights and get ranger tanks? Something thats a challenge?
Somehow, I don't think "heal a weaker target so you have to heal more" is the best fix to this issue. , its not even that hard. Have heals splash damage and give tanks a reverse proc that does real damage. Also as a bonus, it makes molo with tank merc viable if strong enough.
I'm all for overheals giving some kind of short duration buff that increases damage on the target (make it a single server tick if its a balance issue) We have dps classes on raids doing billions of damage over a raid.. yet I do maybe 70ish million worth of heals (and maybe 30% of that is non 0 overheals). Even if 100% of that non 0 overheal healing was converted into damage we would still be vastly behind every other class...
The community seems to believe if heal good =/= damage good. This comes about every time changes to clerics are discussed, people come up with weird restrictions to a cleric’s ability to help kill enemies. Yet great druids are some of the best damage dealers in the raid and all three priest classes can heal group content, and all have their own healing roles in raids. Personally I don’t mind being dead last damage in raids. It’s frustrating that killing enemies takes me longer to kill a single blue con in Laurion's Inn than my guildmates can clear both LS missions. Cleric self ADPS lines are weak. Avatar’s 600% bonus melee and reduced delay translates to ~80k dps melee w/ a LS valiant raid 2 hander. The effect is strong on paper but not supported by cleric’s weak base melee and melee AAs. The critical spell damage bonus is good but even against undead a cleric’s DDs are half the potency of what could be considered viable damage. The hammer pet cannot be buffed by spells or auras and so is a static 18k (post buff) dps that dies to any riposte and takes a GCD and spell gem to cast. There is something to be said about time utilization and class expectation, druids are not expected to be healing anyone outside of their party in raids and so spend a majority of their time dpsing, shamans can heal through pulses on their splash and spend the downtime with DoTs, clerics are expected to heal a majority of the time and any time doing damage would be at the expense of GCDs on heal spells. Personally I only move into a contra/intra type cycle when outside of add phases where I can dps the boss and heal the MT efficiently. In my opinion some things that can be modified while still keeping current class identity. Vow of Retribution - Some sort of overall modifier to damage here could be good. Even if all damage was modified by 25% at 600k dps (significantly higher than what we can do without a real adps party)would be modified to 750k. Still roughly half of some of the lowest shamans in my raid. Ward charges - could be procced on offense while vow of retribution is active. Hammer Pet - Currently cannot be healed, buffed, or aura’ed. Could have a pet AA line. Slay Undead on spell damage AA
That's because the devs have done a damn good job over the years of convincing players that EQ is a zero sum game...that in order to gain something, something else must be lost. Clerics are a prime example of this philosophy...the devs still believe that Complete Heal defines us, therefore we deserve nothing else. It's absolute nonsense.
End-game Clerics have been falling behind for so long now that only a really substantial DPS increase makes any sense. Every single spell and ability needs to be DPS tripled at least. One other thing that might help them solo/molo effectively in the end-game would be to give us a 60 second dot that starts out really weak but gets progressively stronger every tick. Have a 4 or 5 second cast time. Maybe even proc an undead slow. Design it so that a cleric could kill most current group trash mobs in 30 to 60 seconds but be too slow for much impact on raid trash. Maybe implement resist code so that it's difficult to land on red-con raid minis and bosses. Then a cleric and his tank merc could reasonably kill singles in current content. I don't think there is a fix for the cleric group game. I play shaman, druid, and cleric and there's no way they are going to give a cleric anything that would make them competitive in the group game. To even come close they'd have to make our reverse damage shield damage pulse about 100x stronger and give us weapon ratios and procs like a rogue and the previously mentioned triple dps on all our spells. It's all moot because nobody that currently works at Darkpaw is going to rock the boat. Enough masochists will continue to play clerics to keep most raid guilds afloat. Like me, most clerics will enjoy the group game by playing other classes where we can drag our dead-weight cleric around by the collar.
Kinda related, this reminds me of this one time Ms raided aaryonar (cov) and I topped not only the heal parse, but also the dps parse as a cleric. Good ol' bane damage baby.
I disagree. The zero sum is totally a player thing. The idea of overheal producing damage is rejected because it'll break so many things and change way to much. Its just a bad idea. It suddenly puts healers at the top of charts. Imagine shaman dots plus all thier aoe overhealing? Why bring literally anything else on the raid? More pets = more overhealing = more damage. Think of the overheal of a group or raid wide aoe? Just chain that over and over. This change would be a complete change to how everything in the game works. The end result would be that healing is heavily nurfed so that healers aren't also wizards at the same time. Also this change would just make shamans even better than clerics than they already are. Some ideas are just not good ideas.
To be clear, I think the idea of overheal damage is pants on head stupid and should never be mentioned again. I'm just tired of seeing cleric players willing to give something up in order to get table scraps of DPS that won't actually do anything to help the class. Nothing should have to be given up to make the class useful in a group situation when massive amounts of healing just isn't needed.
doesn't have to be overheal damage, you guys are the ones that ran away with that. It could be used to do SOMETHING though and only apply to cleric/pally. The other classes don't need it and shouldn't have it. But sure, go ahead and put words in my mouth forumquest is good at that. Cleric need help and doing something to turn overheal into adps isn't a terrible idea, the form it takes could literally be anything and should be limited to GROUP only in effect. Even it it wasn't limited in that way, it wouldn't unbalance the super weak raid game that we've seen for 5 years now. It's absurb any of you even think it would giving how pitiful the raid game has become. That's a different can of worms and it absolutely should be fixed and is totally independent of doing something to help those 2 classes out in the group game, meanwhile, I don't see those of you poo pooing everything giving ANY sort of helpful idea, just shooting buckshot into anything you see without actually thinking it through because you have a boatload of assumptions and little to no creative imagination.
keep it simple give them a passive AA that enables their overheals to damage the targets target at a ratio of x:1
To be clear, i don't think clerics need or deserve any kind of help/buff in raids. Not more heals, not dps, not adps, not utility. i'm not jealous of shaman for the greatly increased raid healing role they've been given in recent years (or not so recent? i don't remember.) Frankly, it's made my job easier and allows the raiding forces who are not near top dps/ with a much less optimized cast of classes to get stuff done more cleanly. Especially given recent, easier raid content, a solid cleric team could still get the job done if no Shaman or Druids showed up at all. We are still a very powerful class in that regard. As Rosemond mentioned a few posts earlier, i just want to be able to kill a single blue con mob in current content in a few minutes with some kind of reasonable efficiency, where i'm not giving up all my mana or pulling off some crazy miracle. Maybe 20 - 30 mobs an hour? I'm not even talking solo, Molo is fine. If i get adds i'm still gating or dead, that's fine. Is that asking too much? There's plenty of wiggle room in those numbers, i'm flexible. So i can ACCOMPLISH something, some kind of progress when no one needs a cleric. It always feels like pity when people drop their boxes to let me in a group. Especially a well-run group or a raid geared group where they don't really need heals anyway and i'm doing my pitiful battle cleric thing as best i can. It's SAD. Sometimes it's infuriating because a friend lets you join his box crew to leech some xp or coin or shinies or whatever. And they warn you first "Sure you can join me. It'll be boring, cuz i'm just camping these 3 placeholders, and i'll be AFK a lot because i'm playing at work" Or some similar situation, but you join anyway because these are your best options sometimes and you spend 3 hours and kill 27 mobs, and if you're lucky you get 1% on an evolving item and a few TS drops, coin and AA. And hey, you smile through it and thank your friend for his generosity because you can't be a useless class AND a (this got censored) let's say "jerk". And if you have enough experiences like this you may eventually gain a level, or evolve that piece of gear, or win an aug. And that's Everquest folks. For the non-boxing cleric anyway. Maybe you have a set group and play at the same time exclusively with them. Awesome. Lucky you. i accept that my schedule just hasn't allowed this in a long time, and many attempts to start or join a regular play group have not worked out. The answer, the same one i always get is to learn to box a few toons of my own, and get the equipment/connection to make it work. i'm working on that, but it's quite a slow process. i figure by 2030 i might be there. But i hate that that's the best option, don't you? i LIKE playing my single character, it's more relaxing and less taxing on the brain which is at the heart of the fun that got me playing EQ in the first place. /sigh. Sorry /rant off.
Bumping this dev response to this thread. This was more than TWO years ago...it's been radio silence since then. THEY DON'T CARE. Period.
You are probably correct. Lets not act like this is a crazy complicated fix, either. Buff the out of vow, to get us somewhat close to paladin dps on live. THEN, buff ward proc even MORE. Then we are only decent dps when doing the battle cleric thing. Optionally, also make ward castable on others
While they read threads, they rarely ever respond. Rest assured that Meeko or others are reading this.
