Clerics have the problem that their heals do way more than anyone is ever going to need. I was thinking that doing a % increase of health gamewide for everyone and all mobs. Do 100% for characters and something a tiny bit lower for mobs like 50%. This would make battles last longer overall so small things would need to be modified like increasing timers for raid mobs and such. BUT don't increase damage done. --- This would help with that healer problem. Later in the game heals might not heal for max every single shot. This would make people adjust how they play. If you don't like to adjust to changes in the world you should log out now and go find a cave to live in. --- Before you start complaining about it taking forever to kill mobs just think of how it was doing heroic zones two months ago. You would run through the zone and grab every mob you could before it leashed and THEN killed them with AOEs in like 10 seconds. --- There might be others who complain "Oh, think of the children!" "Er, think of the lower level people!" Yeah it would be harder in some ways for some people and easier in others. --- The reason I didn't think of doing this another way like decreasing heal amount overall just imagine how people would freak out. "Oh the GMs hate clerics, the end of the game is coming! We won't survive!" Live with it people.
What actual problem does this solve other than a complete lack of understanding on how heal mechanics work on your end? Also GM's hate clerics? Good thing the GM's dont design the game and the Dev's do. I would seek out cleric advice and a better understanding on how game mechanics work before coming to the forums with ideas like this.
They tried this with ToV and it didn't work out well because mobs had to hit harder than everyones total HP pool, it ruined all healer heals but channelers.
Actually, no, it didn't ruin anything. ToV was the most balanced healing has ever been since Shadow Odessy.. And channelers didn't exist in ToV. Yes, incoming damage will have to be higher.. that's not a problem. As long as incoming damage isn't frequently at or near hitpoint maxes AND no heal is a full heal, it works very, very well.
Sigh. http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/Channeler_(EQ2_Subclass) "Introduced with Tears of Veeshan, the 26th Everquest II class is a bow using, leather wearing, pet commanding, healing Priest class. You must have the Tears of Veeshan expansion to unlock Channelers." Healing was totally not balanced, if you werent a druid you were basically worthless due to the high amount of ticking damage and the fact that reactives couldn't keep up with the incoming damage. I know this for a fact because I cleared that entire expansion and we traded every shaman we had sans one because he was there for a million years for druids and channelers. In that expansion every. single. hit. from every named was higher than the tanks actual hit points, so the tank relied on permanent avoids, stoneskins and damage reduction temps. I'm also confused why you would ever call TSO balanced for healers, only inquis could solo heal a lot of encounters which made furies close to useless and templars were still leaps and bounds better than wardens. Plus at that point wards could just absorb every point of damage.
I guess I forgot channelers were introduced in ToV because I didn't really see any until the next expac, my apologies for my error. As far as the healing balance, we'll have to agree to disagree. I've spoken with and raided with others in ToV and beyond. I also find it odd that you orginally said only channelers weren't SoL.. then you later said druids were king. The only class I saw struggle at all were mystics.. but most of that had to do with wards still being capped on how much cb they used.
Sure i said any other healer but channeler but thats because they were the only class who could "heal", it was the only class the held the old mechanic of keeping a tank alive with their abilities. The other six healers could either cycle saves with tanks (but everyone raid a zerker/monk so they didn't have to) or heal up group damage, and who is the best at that? Druids/Channelers. Channelers have even more heal potential than the druids with group intercept/interpose redirect but it wasn't neccessary and you got way more dps out of druids so everyone ran those.
Player health increase? Could be useful. Mob health increase? Worthless, unless they decide to make mana an issue (I.e. Delete Chanter/Bards) since mana is the only way a longer battle would affect healing (Via having to conserve mana rather than spam whatever all day) As far as player health goes... It would have to be done right, with mob damage also balanced around it. Essentially you need for mobs to be damaging enough to be a threat (So that you don't just have one of the tanks that has a bunch of percentage based self heals invalidate healers...) but not so damaging as to one-shot or otherwise insta-gib targets (Because that just leads to heals being useless and Wards being god-tier) Then to truly be done right, you'd have to balance it throughout various stages in the game, so you don't get spots where it's broken (In either direction) but that might be doable with simple scaling modifiers...
I will say one thing, about this thread; I agree that they need to remove the 1 shot mechanic they've had in this game the last few expacs. How often does a tank go from 100% to 0% without any kind of warning? There is no ebb and flow to it, if a caster takes aggro he dies in 1 shot, if a tank doesn't have blockers up, they tend to die in 1 shot. It gets a little old. They're trying to make the game too fast paced and then they put us on servers that can't handle the load and lag kills more than the raid boss does.
If this was true, then this couldn't possibly be true: For the last couple of expansions, the vast majority of hits have been higher than the tanks total hit points, so the tanks do currently rely on permanent avoids, stoneskins, and death prevents to survive. That's now. That is why healers with wards are so powerful. If the hit is bigger than HP pool, then healers like druids with constantly rolling heals would not be as effective as those who can essentially supplement the hp pools. During ToV, druids were so powerful because the hp pools were large and incoming damage was fast, but hits were smaller than hp pools. No single hit was enough to one-shot anyone, but the incoming damage ticked so fast that druids were best at keeping up with incoming damage. Clerics only struggled because reactives did not always work. The reactive could be on individual or group but they did not always tick with every hit of a dot or recurring damage; quite often only the first tick of damage triggered the reactive, so that people could have the reactive on them, yet could die or the reactive would expire without healing more than one tick. It was a bug in the way reactives worked though, not an issue directly related to fast incoming damage. Channelers were powerful but had a steep learning curve so you did not see many successful channelers during ToV.
Okay. In ToV wards were horrible, one would maybe be a 1/3rd of a persons hp and it went away with the inital tick of the ticking aoe making it impossible to heal through. It was literally impossible to heal through the hits tanks were receiving with wards, a lot of those mobs were actually one shotting our zerker when he didn't have a temp up, it didn't matter if I had repent, defiler wards, skin like wood from warden, dirge ward from left side prestige. He. Still. Couldn't. Live. Sure, on live wards are kings since they allowed them to fully crit and they put like 40-60k potency on everyone. Obviously when a ward can be that high you would have to be crazy not to run a shaman. Yes, as I explained earlier druids heal up incoming damage. And there totally were hits strong enough to one shot people, I had to time protective instinct through quite a few mobs in wing three of ToV and also mobs in fabled deathtoll. Clerics as I said.... were bad. Channelers were very easy to play back then and still are, I remember our shadowknight boxing one through wing 3 of ToV on the hardest mobs in game lol. If you actually raided that expansion and cleared anything past the first raid zone you would know why it was so frustrating for a lot of the healing classes.
ToV was a clusterfark of heal issues with non druids....wards were near pointless, reactives issues stemmed from damage not triggering reactive triggers for the most part (which was brought up in ToV Beta) for the most part ToV raids had their ups and downs but the actual Temple of Veshann was where these issues were brought to the forefront. ToV wasnt called the druid xpac for nothing unless people forgot double stacking druids in groups was a way to bypass some mechanics (ever wonder why aoe blockers were nerfed to stop that...thats why). As for any potential % increase in hp pools for classes also doing the same for mobs in extremely poor foresight considering current HP pools of mobs.
I meant DEVs not GMs. Sorry for making that mistake. From what I see from additional posts my last option could always work too if the DEVs didn't mind people wining. Make up a story of one of the bad gods sucking healing energy from clerics to cause problems for the entire world. This could also have the effect that could mean they could add to the story and say the god has been stopped, if RL people freak out enough and it doesn't work out. I also agree with the Oneshot thing. I hate it when that happens. Maybe they could add a adorn that makes hits only do 50% of a person's health when they get hit so a mob would have to hit twice to kill. Just idea there. One last thing that I think has made things way too easy. The adorns for making certain classes immune to fear, stun, and such like Blinding Gleam for clerics. Modify them so its like 90% or 95% for higher power adorn. So its not always guaranteed. This is another one of the "Oh my, the game is harder lets wine and cry until they make it easy again!" types of things. I love it when people critique my ideas, it makes people think and have other ideas for things. All of these ideas people have might have a greater impact on the game!
Healer balance is in a not-terrible spot.. Channelers are by far the best healer, followed by inquisitors then the rest of the healers are pretty equal. The main issue is that your group has to be geared reasonably. With gear from KA, you can have 30 million Hp. Boss mobs hit me for 10m maximum. Druids are godly healers for groups full of non-braindead people. Healers abilities are based off of the tanks gear. Just like how the tanks ability is gauged by the dps toons gear and the dps toons ability is based off the tanks. This is a game of balance. When you get past the content level where even your tanks have 10m HP, then maybe that's a much better outlook on healing. I have healed T4 KA raids. I have healed PoP heroics. The balance is not in a bad spot, except for channelers who are OP.
ToV was horrible for healer balance unless you were a druid. I quit playing my healer main (inq) during ToV because it was so frustrating. And that's a beloved char who had been my main since the day EQ2 went live on Nov. 9th, 2004.
Druids ruled this xpac. hands down... clerics once they actually fixed reactives were solid.. If I remember correctly (been a while) think CB didn't affect wards then. I wouldn't say it was near balanced. They will never have healers balanced just by the mere fact of how each healer's particular spells work.
CB affected wards the bonus they received was just cut in half. Healers were balanced really well for a long time, think about it. Sure shamans have wards but then you think about templars stoneskin buff, their debuffs, sanctuary, holy shield, equilibrium etc. Wardens had sandstorm (uncontested block), group aoe avoids, cyclone, infuriating thorns, group death save, immune to root, shatter infections, two group cures etc. etc. If you look at an avoidance report its not like having a warden/templar isn't heavily reducing incoming damage. Furies/inquis have always been offensive healers and been able to solo heal anything in game, (pre-2015). Now its just wards being bonkers.
ToV was really bad for shaman. I was the sole surviving shaman in our raid force, and it was most likely just because I was married to the main tank. The defiler parsed ok on ACT, but it was very misleading because she didn't have the heal power to make up for the lack of saves. I had a templar that I would swap to for more difficult fights, because even though everything went right through her reactives, she had a good damage reduction/save rotation.
healer balance isn't in a good spot. In group .. yes .. any healer can solo heal (some struggle more than others, but it works). In raid --> wards. As a warden was in a group with an inquisitor in a fight where there was no elemental damage --> group dead. In an elemental fight, my heal parse was like : Elemental ward 89%, spirit of druidism proc ward 5%, solo ward on tank 3%, reprieve 3%. All my heals were 0% of my parse. that's crazy. Same for the templar ... full wards. Heals are secondary ... Am I just an elemental shaman ? In the end, it's true that what makes healers balanced is their utility outside of heals, and their synergy together. Still ... u can have all the best buffs ever, without wards, right now U cannot play the "real" healer.
