Another Fix the Fury thread.

Discussion in 'Fury' started by ARCHIVED-Mzia, Mar 17, 2012.

  1. ARCHIVED-Mzia Guest

    First, I am a raiding Fury, and I'm able to reliably solo heal all Drunder zones (to the end), and EoW. I'm not claiming good players can't play Furies and do what other classes can. I will claim it requires better gear and a much better player to do so, however.

    That said, Sony, you really need to do something about either the healing capability or damage progression of Furies.

    DAMAGE -
    We can't melee spec to increase damage. I suspect Wardens are in the same boat, but I don't know because I've heard of them melee speccing - I've never played a Warden so I don't know how effective this is. Furies can't do melee. For fun, I tried reforging all of my gear to haste/dps/MA and choosing all the melee damage buffs I could get via AA. I ended up with 58.3 DPS mod, 52.8 haste, and 185 MA. I didn't get white adornments yet, but this (copied) toon has full EM raid gear, and with those stats, I got an autoattack doing 2k dps. I was using the Mallet of Barbaric Rites from EM Drunder x4. 2000 dps. That's it. The hit rate was 34% with 10% accuracy mod. So, yeah, Furies can't melee. The only reason we get in melee range is to proc Infusion.
    Our mythical buff no longer increases damage by a noticable amount (it's such a small amount that I can't statistically measure the difference between having the buff on and not having it on).
    What we CAN do to increase damage is increase our crit bonus and potency. That's it. Those are the only two stats we have that give a significant increase at this point (raiding furies are capped on cast speed & recovery while raiding, and capped on reuse for most hard hitting damage spells). Unless you start giving furies significantly more of these stats than other classes which can get use of more of the stats or of AA to increase dps which Furies don't get, this is ridiculous.

    HEALING -
    I know people like to go on about how Druids have the highest HPS potential and all that. Sustained healing potential in Destiny of Velious and beyond means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. The damage profile in Velious is almost entirely skewed towards spike damage. Druids have the worst ability to heal through spike damage of any of the priest classes (Furies being worse than Wardens, when you take Hibernation for what it is - NOT a death prevent). If a tank gets an unlucky series of multiattacks with a Fury healing, they are DEAD. There's nothing the Fury could have done to prevent it.
    We are currently relying on ward procs and the endline ward ability to manage spike damage, or just plain overgeared players, but this is a bandaid that isn't even always up or possible.
    To make matters worse, we also have the shortest duration heals in the game, and they keep getting shorter. I have to cancel the troubador buff "Harmonization" just so I can make my group HoT not have a 2 second gap instead of a half a second gap, on fights with unpredictable AE damage. If I don't leave the HoT up, I don't have enough time to cast a heal before the next attack comes and kills someone. It would be really nice if I could make use of that reduction of time between the ticks, but for me, having a time when no one is being healed for 2 seconds is fatal in some fights.
    In addition to having the shortest heals in the game, only Regrowth can be cast a significant time before it expires. On some fights, there are mechanics which cause players to be unable to cast beneficial spells for a duration (around 5-10s usually). If we got unlucky with our timing (which there's no way to predict on those fights), we can't heal. We can't reliably have healing on the entire time, and we might get unlucky and have none on unless we're spamming Regrowth.
    We also get interrupted frequently when we take any damage, on most AEs in raid content, and have no way to reliably break out of stun/stifle at the rate the AEs come (unless we use a Greater Fervor or similar rune on those fights - I use this rune and almost never have issues because of it, but we shouldn't be required to use it to do our job.. Especially with red runes apparently disappearing in new content).
    Also, we can't cast our heals on the move. This may not sound like a big thing, but consider that if we have to move for more than long enough for our HoTs to expire, people are going to die if we are solo healing. Our HoTs can expire in as little as 3 seconds, with no way we could have possibly made them last any longer (this is the difference between the duration and recast time of Regrowth. A single target HoT. Group ones can be expired immediately).
    To compound the above problem, since I returned to EQ2 last year my movement has been lagged by 1 second to the server. All spell casts happen immediately, so it's not a problem with my network. This is a server design issue.
    This means I have to wait a full second in most cases before I can cast a spell after I stop moving, further reducing the time I have to recast my heals. If a tank takes more than 2 seconds to move, they may or may not live depending on when I was last able to cast my heals.
    We also have the shortest range heals of any priest - we have no AA to increase the range.
    Our healing spells also no longer cast significantly faster than other priests, with cast speed being capped on priests for a while now.
    BUFFS -
    I won't go in to this much, but most of our buffs/debuffs are holdovers from Kunark and before, and haven't been looked at to make them in line with current buffs/debuffs. Energy Vortex is such a buff. 50% reduced heals for a 10% group crit bonus, and it isn't even up 100% of the time. That's such bad tradeoff in current game mechanics it's not even funny. Look at the Inquisitor's "Persecution" ability if you don't believe me. I still use Energy Vortex because it's not the healing amount that matters in DoV most of the time, it's that a heal happened at all (again, spike damage...), but it's really really bad.


    So, in summary:
    Either make us better healers by giving us a way to deal with spike damage and extremely short duration heals.
    Or make us better dps by giving us some way to increase our dps other than straight CB/Potency, which all classes get in addition to the other methods available to them (dps/haste/MA for melee, AA for most mages)

    If you don't, Furies will rot. Most of us still playing them will continue to play them because we are extremely stubborn, but I can see a point where we are not viable in the near future, if things keep going as they are.
  2. ARCHIVED-RogueSpideyChick Guest

    There's so much wrong with your post & frame of thinking, that I'm not sure where to start so I'll just go from your post.

    Mzia@Unrest_old wrote:
  3. ARCHIVED-Mzia Guest

    Arica@Guk wrote:
    I never said Furies were melee. I said they were unable to melee as a way to increase DPS. I also remember saying WE ARE ALREADY CAPPED ON CASTING, REUSE, AND RECOVERY IN RAIDS. Ability mod does very little, wisdom does very little (even WITH the mythical buff on). Spell MA is almost impossible to get. Those things are also things that every other class (with more way to increase dps) have as well.

    The fights I'm talking about specificly are fairly non-predictable because they do not have a cast bar, and depend on how much DPS is on a specific target, and other random factors I doubt even SOE knows about involving HP reduction. Obviously Hibernation is going to be up, but without the ability to predict the AE with 0-5s accuracy, it's not going to be up the entire time. Tortoise shell blocks only the first one, due to the recast timer. I really don't see how a meager damage reduction and pitiful HoT is going to stop DoV named attacks (it doesn't, by the way). Maybe you're used to playing with tanks that do all the healing for you.

    And if you do heroic content, where everyone wants a solo healer? Having the extended range on the group cure is nice, and I have opted for that AA since it was available to me, but it's not a replacement for a heal, and I was speaking of heals. I also don't see how narrowing the Fury's usefulness to a mage group in a raid, and nothing else, is productive for the class, if you're saying that's all we should be doing... And if it isn't, then why are you only considering that case?

    I believe I went over this briefly, but it's not the amount of healing that matters in Destiny of Velious content - it's that a heal happened at all. Shamans have wards that take a cut off all the damage while they are up, and Clerics have heals that happen immediately when damage occurs. Both are usually enough to prevent the damage altogether, and if Furies could get a heal off every time damage happened, they would be more than enough to heal - certainly better than those of other priests - but we can't heal all 10 attacks when they all come at the same time.

    Again, I solo heal all the content as well. What I am doing works. It won't keep working if things keep going the way they are. It's already much more difficult to heal as a Fury. Before long, we won't have enough spike healing capability to solo heal the instances (I'm sure your mage group will be fine, though), and we won't have enough dps to be kept around for the utility.
    I'm going to assume from your comments that you dislike heroic content, and have likely only healed for raid geared groups. I group with random people who are not always in raid gear, and heal them fine, but I'm not so blind I can't see the problems I'm having to work around, or the eventual destination of Furies on the current path.

    I would like to reiterate again that I have no problem playing the class, and heal quite well, since you seem to be confused about this point.
  4. ARCHIVED-RogueSpideyChick Guest

    I have done heroic content. It bores me though. Same instances all the time over & over, & yes I've done it with lesser geared group members also, so I'm not always doing them people who are high-end geared to make it as easy as possible on me. Now I only really login to raid, then logout with not as much time anymore due to work. When I do get pulled back into an instance I realize I don't miss them.
    & I'm just confused as to how the class is broken because the only people who tend to say it is are the ones that aren't completely aware as to all the different ways you can gear & spec, then prep & deal with uh-oh situations. I suggest checking out guk.furies & talking to some there or checking out the fury boards on eq2flames. I think you'll be surprised as to all the different ideas people have posted as to how to how to how to play a fury in setups or situations that a lot of people post on these boards as being "broken."
  5. ARCHIVED-Ferunnia Guest

    I'd do the whole quote you and break down your views thing, but I don't have that kind of time, so I'll just give a few general tips and clarify some points.
    Unless you're in a different guild than your sidebar leaves me to believe, you haven't fought a single mob other than Mikkl that doesn't have a cast bar. (Checked eq2u, you are still in that guild...) Even he, however, casts his AoEs in an exact timing if you bother using ACT. Ability mod is a huge overall increase in numbers, I don't know where you're getting the idea that it isn't.
    Why do you need longer range heals if you are where you need to be in heroic content? There's not really anything you can do in heroic content that requires you to be out of healing range of anyone in the group. If you're that worried about heal range, just spec Howling with the Pack and nuke the mob...the heal hits zonewide... We have an enormous group ward if you spec for it, if you have 45k+hp, you're giving a ward of 15k to everyone in group singly...not many wards in the game bigger than that. If you're worried about getting heals off for 10 attacks at a time...temp buff better. T-shell increases the tank's blocking ability a ton. Porcupine makes them take less damage and heals over time. Regen ticks fast enough that between that and single target heals, a tank shouldn't die to over time damage. Maybe spike damage if it's big enough, but that's where the tank needs to be using his temps better.
    To level with you a bit here...with a good tank in the gear needed to do any given epic zone, you should be able to solo heal an offtank. I do all the time. Have for years.
    Our dps is comparable with a lot of chanters and bards, and a good Fury is doing T2 dps pretty much full time.
    The biggest part of playing a reactive healer as opposed to a proactive healer is learning to predict things, and knowing fights, and paying more attention to what's going on in your group than plate/chain healers.
    The things you see as problems to be worked around are issues that every class deals with in one way or another. We have great tools to do our job as a hybrid class extremely well. We lack in the area of debuffs and buffs for the group (to an extent...wish we had groupwide Primal Fury...then all my woes would be fixed), and have a horrid time dpsing while healing on power drain fights... that is about all I will give you as far as issues that I see after 7 and a half years of playing this character as my main.

    Edit: Typos
  6. ARCHIVED-Freedom Guest

    Besides giving us a buff or debuff that is more up to date there isn't a whole lot that can be changed without making us over powered compared to other healers. Sure we aren't a raid leaders first choice when recruiting but it just means we have to work a little harder to make a name for ourselves in the raid. Besides do you really want a easy button like inquisitors have? It's just not as satisfying for me personally.
    I am able to solo heal the mage group (and I've solo healed an SK on certain fights) in Drunder HM so it can be done just takes a little practice.
    The only thing about our class that is "broken" right now is our Death Swarm focus effect on our boots. Since the mobs no longer crit reducing it's crit chance is pretty pointless.
  7. ARCHIVED-Anastasie Guest

    Xelgad wrote:
    http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/...m?forum_id=2844
    Looks like they are going to give Wardens group-wide Instinct. I see no reason why we shouldn't get group-wide Primal Fury... They are also getting Shatter Infections turned into a groupwide Natural cleanse that ticks every second. They really do need some love, but there are some things that we need addressed as well.
    The Fury feedback thread could really use more input - it's only one page and wardens have over 5 pages and they are getting dev attention.
    The new Prestige Abilities on test need some tweaks and I hope if enough people speak up they will get fixed.
  8. ARCHIVED-Mzia Guest

    First let me say that I know some of this is my way of explaining the problems - e.g., I never meant to suggest we be able to heal while moving, I was just intending to point out that if we have to move (because the tank we are healing moved) for a long duration, we are screwed unless we have our emergencies up. This is a direct result of having /extremely/ short duration heals. It's not something that matters always, but when it matters, it matters.
    That said, every time I see anything suggesting Furies being improved in any manner, this is the type of response I see - People saying "Oh, you must suck, I heal the mage group fine" for the most part. To be fair, a lot of the suggestions are people who don't know what they're doing, but I'm a pretty good Fury, and have no problem solo healing current content (including solo healing the OT in raid content - I've actually been in that position more than I've been in a mage group position in my guild - we have two Furies.)
    This is completely different from the other priest forums (which also get a lot more posts, by the way) - you post suggestions in there, you at least have a chance of people reading what's being said, making constructive statements about problems with what was said (or sometimes just agreeing with what was said).
    In here, all you get is people saying "You must be doing it wrong.", and sometimes the ever so slightly more helpful "Here, try these things you already do because you must be doing them wrong."

    And that's probably why our myth does almost nothing for anyone but the other healer.
    And why we will never be able to stop those 6 mobs MAing all at once at a bad time (I.e., tank didn't have blocks up).
    And why our GU63 fury-specific prestige will likely be crap (yay! extra DoT tick for AE damage that will be <1% even in AE fights!).
  9. ARCHIVED-Orpheus666 Guest

    if you're tank is always dieing and you're the one healing sometimes... it's not your fault or the fault of your class. I'm going to recommend as well to start trying to ask questions of other fury's on how they handle things. I've not been playing for quite as long as Arica or some of the others posting here, but after 6 years and playing through the actual dark times of the class. We have far better tools to keep our groups alive. As far as the prestige talents go... there is potential for those that want to dps or heal, having the eyes to see and ears to hear help to figure it all out.

    (edited for words of wisdom)