Then where are our heals that are due to our defensive nature? You nukes are nukes and you offensive nature should only increase them as much as templar defensive nature should decrease them. By default the nukes should do the same damage and furies get more with the +int buff. However furies get higher damage by default plus additional damage with then intelligence buff. Templar wisdom buff adds a bit to our power but does not increase our heals. FB is a spell that stuns us. So we can choose between <300pts + < 400pts reactives and FB (which heals <400pts). So FB does not increase the amount we can heal unless we cast group reactive, single target reactive and it in a row. And if FB is really needed, the single target reactive is down before FB is casted and group reactive follows shortly. Besides, the issue now is in the base damage of our basic nukes. Feel free to ask a sage how much disparity there is with the basic nukes along. And by default, they should do the same damage withing priest types. Our utility should then define whether we get extra damage or extra healing power. As it is, all classes heal the same but old versions of different priest classes still exists when it comes to damage. This damage needs to be balanced too.
And when the Fury casts Porcupine she can't heal either...it's no different from Focused Benefaction really, except your's heal, and her's does damage. Again, the concept of "utility" is relegated to a very narrow minded view. Ultimately, for true balance, EVERYTHING, including damage, is "utility." Otherwise you end up with very stale classes. There is no reason, "by default," for all priest types to have the same nukes. Templars are damage reduction priests, and Furies are damage increase priests, and both can heal. EDIT: Burning Question: It's not as if Furies have more spells than you, so if you don't count some of these spells as utility, what the heck ARE they? Message Edited by Sokolov on 11-02-2005 06:37 AM
*snicker* That is exactly what I want to ask the developers sometimes. I gotta admit, those pacify type spells aren't that helpful in a group.
Not all spells are intended for all situations. For example, I've repeatedly had to ask a Paladin in my guild why he continually nukes, heals, and uses AE attacks in group settings where he's the only tank in a group with a crowd control, a healer, and 3 DPS classes. He's essentially using the exact same spells and arts he would use when soloing...and routinely ends fights with around 40-60% less power than everyone else in the group. It took a while to explain to him why he should concentrate on defensively grabbing hate in group settings as opposed to trying to out-damage mages and scouts. The moral of the story is that not all spells are intended for all situations. Honestly, do you know a lot of fighters who use their group taunts when they're out soloing? Just because a spell is situational doesn't mean it's not useful. It can be incredibly useful in the right situation.
Now, one thing that is true in EQ2 that you will find: you don't get something without giving up something else. This is rough, but I believe it to be rather accurrate: Mages: Give up all armor in favor of basically stats for high dps and then that will inversely go down or up with utilities. Scouts: Keep their armor and vary dps inversely with utility and further by offensive/defensive disposition. Fighters: Taunts vary with other utilities, dps varies inversely by armor type and offensive/defensive disposition. Priests: Give up dps in favor of utilities, dps further varies inversely by armor type and offensive/defensive disposition. Templars get smacked twice: once by being a priest, and second by having heavy armor. Is this a fair trade? Some will debate that and it can be argued until people are blue in the face. Templars can wear 100% of all non-class specific armor. Leather restricted can wear (pre-dof) approximately 40% (based on fabled gear). How wonderful the ability to gear yourself however you want is a personal opinion and preference. I can tell you though through personal experience-- leather gear pre-DOF was AWFUL for a priest as far as about 70% of it went (Wisdom was a rare find on much of it and even then it was usually very low)... now you see more druid-specific leather in DOF, probaby for this very reason. Now the matter of interrupts and fizzles needs to be adjusted across the board, as I agree it's silly that temps should get interrupted so much more as a general rule. Tanks are okay with it because their arts take a fraction of a second. So... if templars are base bottom dps... perhaps things were ranked very very roughly, like this... Disregard how useful these may or may not be as it's just an estimation and trying to take a look at what they may be thinking. And further, perhaps SOE views reactive > ward > regen. Ward may be better but it's also at the cost of higher agro. Temp = Temp dps - High physical defense, high hp buff, high damage prevention (stuns, pacify, etc), med magical defensive. Inquis = Temp + 5%, dps - High melee offense buff, high hp buff, something else here. Mystic = Temp + 10% dps - Medium defensive buff, hp/power buff, strong debuffs/damge prevention Defiler = Temp +15% dps - Medium defensive, strongest debuffs, offensive stuff Warden = Temp + 20% dps - Defensive buffs, power buffs, high magical defensive Fury = Temp +25% base dps - Medium melee offensive, power buffs, high magical offensive, low magical and physical defensive. Again this is a very rough guess and far from complete end all be all but seems to be relatively accurrate and I'm sure there's TONS of info you could throw in. Point being, I'm thinking temps got whacked twice and furies just happened to get a benefit from what they buffed and how the things ranked up. Is this fair, or is everything right or as it should be? I highly doubt it, I've no quabble with temps getting a dps boost in some way as boring tedium = lame. I'm just trying to maybe help organize why things may be the way they are. Feel free to agree or disagree.
I agree with you there. I have been incredibly spoiled by the weakness line that we used to have. I spend the most fun times of the game duoing with a squishy elf conjuror. So, the right situation doesn't come up for me as often as it used to.
One thing that I was wondering about. How do priests compare in terms of self wisdom and power buffs? Afterall, a primary deteriminant on "how much can you heal" is dictated by how much power you have. I think my defiler can self increase power by about 8%.
Furies buff group wis by about 65 at 60 at adept 3 Spirit. Power buff at 58 at adept3 buffs power directly by about 650 give or take 25ish I think. Course, it's not all just power either, it's also how much can you buff the HPs by too in order to make sure they can take the hits so that you have hp to heal in the first place. Problably the best average of the two-- hp buffing and power availability through gear and buffs would be an overall winner. For example, I can only buff hp by 280. Can you really imagine trying to safely make a 2k heal when you can only get the tank up to 4500? That'd make me nervous as could be, so makes some sense for the druids to buff hp less but have a more steady flow of hp incoming.
Dalcharis, if the breakdown/tradeoff was as you've guesstimated I think Templars would be content. Unfortunately, the Fury is +300% base dps (or more). Which has the priest balance not very balanced. Your description is approx what everyone thought we'd get with 'balance'.
Now this post made no sense to me at least. I just wrote that if we have equal heals and equal number of utility, our DPS spells should by default do the same damage. This means without any buffs on and with same intelligence and level. This is not the case since fury spells do at that point double the damage a templar spell does.
You're assuming that we have equal heals and utility to other classes. You're also assuming a zero sum equation situation, where everything is balanced on some imaginary line point for counterpoint.
And you are assuming we dont. According to your own posts, all healers can heal the group equally and that is what developers are aiming at. Thus my point is correct according to your own posts. Our utility sucks. Others utility might suck too, but at least ours is not better. And if A=a, B=b, C has to equal c or the is imbalance. As it is all healing is equal and amount of utility is equal, but DPS is not. Thus there is imbalance no matter how much you are moving the goal posts.
I've never said all healing is equal. I've stated that all priests can keep a group standing by an equal baseline standard. Templars are still the best healers by my reckoning. I suspect this is supported by parses that the developers themselves can pull.
A large part of what's going on and being shown in parses however, definately aren't fact though either. If I am actively free to add dps (rather easy content, good tank), my dps is actually just around a guardian's level, while they're defensive. For all practical purposes, I find myself around 120dps in those situations. I'm almost always about the same dps or lower than the defensive guardian I almost never come close to a pally (unless he's slacking) and certainly never a zerker. The only time there's a glaring upswing, is when there's 4+ mobs, and the AOE lands for full on each and Ring of Fire is up, and generally, I'm grouped with 2 mages, so the mobs die in 20s and my 250-350dps that gets displayed means quite a bit less compared to the 900dps and 800dps of the warlock and wizard. One of the big things displayed all over here is a lack of information able to be provided, and all the postulation and theorizing on how eachother works under ideal conditions and how things actually pan out in a real situation. I've had tanks try and go into offensive stance and continue to tank, and it becomes a huge huge pain and I have to tell them to knock it off... "Well I could do it with the templar..." was the response... I'm no slouch, all my spells are adept3 and master I know how to play this class been doing it since launch. So as can be told, I'm generally continuously healing and lobbing nukes isn't always an option, and I'm not always hitting those huge dps numbers people seem to swear we always hit (if we always hit it, we're clearly not doing the healing). So there's apparently some significant differences in defensive capabilities provided by templars that a fury can't quite match (personally I'm thinking it's the hp buffs). Just as there's offensive capabilities that furies have that others can't match. I'm Thinking our base nuke is about 25% over a templars, with the same lower INT, but they then made it double recast with increased cast time, which made that 125 to your 100, turn into 250 to your 100 (for simple numbers, as I hate big math), and that's before the INT bonuses which I am thinking add a % bonus to nukes, not a flat number... so.. enter bigger gap... However, you don't always have the option to chaincast every nuke and dot the instant it pops while we had the option of fewer casts. Course, the big problem I think we'd face is if you up templar dps, you have to go through and do similar to the other priests. Net result will likely be no one perfectly happy Cuz then it gets even closer to fighter, which is slow too, and so on and so forth. The net result is... everyone should go group, as soloing is the absolute pits, it's slow even on my fury.
My opinion: Basic healing is balanced. Utility, which includes secondary healing and other abilities as well as increasing group DPS directly or indirectly, as well as availability of gear, ways to increase self power pool, etc. is also balanced. Others seem to see that everything is mostly balanced, if you exclude DPS. But I don't agree with that. ~ Also, I just realized something: notably absence is any reference to Shamans. Do Templars advocate an increase in Shaman DPS to match Furies too? Or do Shamans have other utility that Templars do not have which match the DPS output of Furies? What about Inquisitors? Are they not Templars with more debuffs (which are arguably less effective than buffing as mobs' levels increase, and increasingly less useful against lower level mobs which die faster).
I like your writing Dalcharis. But for an fyi I've parsed and calculated in and out of group and the numbers I'm throwing around are real.. that's also why I frequently state a range. It really is situational. But it clearly trends to a difference of a factor of 3 in DPS. Now.. you say you think the numbers you've quoted are how it's setup. I believe you. I believe the devs think there's a something along the lines of a 25% difference in our DPS. I believe there's a good chance if you were to make a perfectly analytical and balanced (int, lvls, all factors) hypothetical comparison the numbers would show something like a 25% difference. So why is there a 300% difference in gameplay? In-game environmental factors and plain old bad design. Such as: -- what happens in most groups? Does -any- priest chain nuke in a group? heck no. So what's more valuable to a group? One big nuke every... say... 25 seconds? or one puny nuke every 25 seconds? Kill the mob faster = less healing needed and fewer deaths. Many times MoBs die in 20 sec or less in groups and no healing is even needed -- so which is better -- a Fury contributing a significant amount of DPS to kill the MoB in 10 or 12 seconds instead of 20 seconds or a Templar standing around with nothing to do? In groups when many MoBs aggro and pull there isn't time to cast many nukes is there? So if you get to cast a few is it better that they are a really big nuke every 25 secs or a really puny one? -- what happens in solo? Do solo fights last several minutes for a Fury so their DPS balances w/i 25% of a Templars? no. The Fury kills the mob in 25 seconds (2 casts of the big nuke against whites and 1 cast plus some smaller against blues.. not to mention much greater melee waiting for cast timers) and the Templar takes a minute and a half with worse then pathetic melee to match the pathetic nukes and a liberal sprinkling of interrupts to make the Templar want to lurk SOE websites raising hell. -- what happens with multi mobs in solo? Swear to god if I get 3 or more MoBs on me I can go close to a minute with no more then 1 or 2 spells getting cast (typical with rapidly hitting smaller mobs ... like gators in SS for example). My armor proc out DPS's me for about 2 minutes. Does anyone ... other then other Templar ... know how insanely annoying that is? Those fights take 3 to 5 minutes. For a Fury ... 1 minute OR LESS with their big AoE special. In those situations a Fury DPS is probably 10 times a Templars. Happens all the time when harvesting; you're standing there watching the nodes you've been waiting for get harvested by others while you are incapacitated by pathetic little mobs. Top that off with the Fury invising thru the aggro you have to spend hours and hours to kill (yeah -- real and usable utility and still get heals and DPS) to have a shot at the same number of nodes. It makes for pissed of Templar. -- raids. Entirely situational. Sometimes a Templar will shine depends on the nature of the incoming damage. Good design for raids maybe? It's 300% on average due to bad design and what happens in a typical game scenario (non raid) not the hard numbers on the spells. Taking all that into consideration -- even if SOE did it perfectly in gameplay Templar's are not healing much better for the DPS and utility disparity (both; not one or the other alone). We gave up almost all non-healing utility to get that few percent of utility in healing? Or did we give up DPS for the few percent of healing? Both? Both is too step a price and it's imbalance. Furies are getting picked on... frankly, they are in the same boat Templars were in pre LU13. The least broke priest... so now everyone measures up to you. The good news IMO is the healing is about right. Templar just sucks to play outside of big raids.
Nice post there Bigmak, all in all I think a pretty accurate description so I won't waste time quoting it all. One tiny correction though. That big AoE special is incredibly hard to cast when being hit by multiple mobs. So it's actually quite a bit less disparity in this situation. A lot of my damage in that type of situation is actually from my damage shield. And for mobs you can actually xp on, i.e. anything not green, the difference is even more pronounced.
