I'm am posting here in hopes that some rebalancing occurs between Templars and Inquisitors. As of right now, there is little benefit in including a Templar over an Inquisitor in any aspect of the game, be it raiding or grouping. Inquisitors out DPS Templars, match our healing ability, grossly out cure Templars, and provide much greater benefits to the groups via their buffs. Templars sit in MT groups mainly out of tradition more than actual necessity. High end raiding guilds are actually starting to replace Templars even in their MT groups and running 3 or 4 inquisitors. The main reason for this is Inquisitors unmatched curing ability with their Mythical spell... fast cast time, long range, and uninterruptable. Several raid encounters involve knock backs or the group being tossed up in the air rending healers helpless to cure groups until they land. Inquistors are the only class with the ability cure on the fly with a short refresh. This ability paired with their normal group cure ensures that they are adequate to single heal most raid encounters and cover all cures. With current gear granting generous amounts of potency and crit bonus, Inquisitor reactives / heals / special abilities are more than adequate to keep a tank or group up. The flip side of this is, that is also has strengthen Shamans (and tanks) to the point that they need less "support" to keep a tank up, so the plate healer contribution to a tank group heal wise is less and a plate healer that can add to DPS and provide fast curing is more desireable than the Damage mitigation that is the Templar's strength. Inquisitors also possess potent group DPS abilities (which usually end up near the top of parses) such as Chilling Invigoration, Fanatical Devotion, and 10% passive reuse... not to mention the ability to DPS effectively while healing / curing, and usually topping parses among healers. This thread isn't about how great Inquisitors have it or to get them nerfed in any way... this thread is about the state of the game and the Templar class. In order for Templars to compete for raid slots (and instance group spots), Templars need a little love in the curing, group utility, and DPS departments. While I have been a raiding Templar for several years, I am not going to pretend to know every healer class inside and out... so don't be too harsh if certain ideas seem to step on "other toes" as it were. Curing The biggest gripe I have with curing is that right now Inquisitors have a monopoly on curing uninterrupted... this is huge considering all the running around involved on many raid encounters. Only Furies with their long recast raid cure and Enhance:Sacrifice AA that allows us to single cure someone up to 50m away every 4 min (yay?) if you invest 10AA in it, allow any sort of uninterruptable curing . I know there's some AA lines from utility classes that allow uninterrupted movement, but with superior DPS alternatives that will leave such choices unused. Some suggestions (not saying I'd like all implemented, just examples that would even the playing field)... Mana Cure - Revamp the spell so that when ever the target cast spells there is a chance the Templar will receive an item that allows the Templar to group cure 30m range, uninterruptable... (like the Vig x2 item with a similar proc) Enhance: Sacrifice under "Heroic" Achievements - Final rank instead of single curing make it a group cure, and please lower the base reuse. 10 AA for a 4 min ability to cure one person is a bit weak. Enhance: Cure II under "Templar" Achievements - change this into an uninterruptable single cure and each rank increases its range by 5m Divine Arbitration - 7min 30 sec ability WITH AA that is barely used... perhaps change it to something more useful like a Temp ability for the group to cast uninterrupted for 15 sec with a 3 min base reuse... or a Group HoT / Cure that can be casted on other groups with AA ... anything but its current ability. Right now its main use is to heal someone across the zone that gets aggro running to your group. Reverence - This spell stopped being useful a long time ago as well and could be turned into something better... singe target stoneskin? Power drain ward? Next cureable Detrimental that hits is cured automatically? Amplifies Hate Gain or MA, Spell DA, etc for a short duration at increased spell cost? Anything's better than its current ability. Group Utility Templars buff hp, group avoid status effects, mitigate some AoE damage (7.5% with AA)... lets not forget increase haste by 26... While we are the defensive plate priest, its like saying Inq shouldn't buff hp, phy mit, etc cause they are the offensive plate priest. Templars need something to sort of make Tank (or DPS) classes want them in a group. Some ideas... Virtue - add 15% Hate gain, 10% Strikethrough, 10% Accuracy Glory (50m) - add 5% Flurry, 20 MA, proc group heals and single cures the person with the buff (sometimes your melee is out of cure range on adds) Mana Cure - Add 8% Spell DA or Symbol of Marzin - add group 5% Spell DA / Extend Ticks by 1 / increase spell and heal range by 3 m Templar DPS No I don't want to top parses... but most Templars do not even attempt to DPS because its pointless with their current abilities. Templars should at least be able to contribute some to burn fights or when using Solo / DPS specs... I think this would be possible with a few slight changes. Templar Achievements: Smite Wrath - please please please remove the "disable Smite Wrath" 7 sec buff. If you cure? It gets removed... summon your hammer? removed... need to heal for any reason AS A HEALER. Its not like our spells are super powered with that buff up. My hammer proc'ing Peace of Mind / VC / PotM is my top parser on raids, even if I'm careful to have Smith Wrath up as much at possible. We only have a handful of nukes. Unswerving Hammer - Permanent pet and make its AA increase its health and Mitigation. All Templar nukes - decrease base cast time to that of "Wrath". Right now I can't fit in 2 of the slower nukes w/o delaying an auto attack. This is with capped cast speed. If the base cast at 100% was the same was Wrath, it'd be perfect.
Dear SOE -- Ignore the OP please. Templars are fine. Do NOT f**k with them please please. Templars are fast as heck on heals and cures and rock the heal parse out if properly played. Messing with them would be pointless imo.
Same, dear SOE pls do not listen OP. Templars are great. Inq is just lesser shadow of a templar. Smaller reacitves, no repent, no magic ward, no mark or involuntry cure, no stoneskin,no heals on cure, no glory(even if it's not realy good now). No sanctuary, no stun immune. Divine arbitration is a good spell. And templars always outdpsed equal geared inq on a single mob, and they even better now with 19.5 SDA and no single piece of cleric loot that increase mele output. Templar and inq have different role and background. We are protectors,healers, they are support. Even if i agree we don't buff anything exept hp and blessing, and it's better to have inq in non tank group, i DON'T WANT more offensive buffs. I want more protection. Pls give us tower shield and more deffensive buffs I want fear and charm immune, some aditional armor buff etc. I'm actualy agree with only that reverence need to be changed...somehow(idea of this ability was great and it's rocked during dof and kos, but now incoming damage is too high while reverence heal is too small). Make it permanent buff, like Divine armor and adjust effect slightly or change it to damage reduction, or make it single target hot.
I realy like your post and i cant more then agree to 100%. Ive been a raiding templar for many years and nothing have realy changed for us over these years, we dont heal,cure,dps or buff more or less but what have happend is that all other healer classes have been boosted in one way or another to be more able to their job right. As far in DoV exp atleast for em version it dosent take any special healer setup to take them down. But i most that a skilled templar is probably the only one that can turn something bad to good But yes many of our spells and abillitys needs to be looked in to. A lower recast timer on groupcure would be awsome. Do something about the hammer. Pets should have the same stats as the caster in DoV but the hammer dont. Make Glory a group wide buff and add something dpsy to it. The heal proc is way to small to make any big difference anyway. Mana cure should cure everything nox arc elemental including the person manacure is on. A spell da on it was a great idea.
I have to agree, Templars need a little tweeking. SOE did Templars a great injustice when Shield of Faith doesn't ward against power drains anymore. A change I would like to see is make Glory a group power proc instead of a heal and increase the proc rate to a 2. I can understand why SOE made the change so Shielding Faith doesn't completely block power drains but making it so it does nothing against a power drain was a bit extreme. How about a 20% reduction to power drains? IMO, Manacure isn't a reliable cure. For the HEALER classes that only have 1 group cure, the reuse timers need to be significantly lowered.
Oh yeah, and for the hammer pet, give it a AOE avoid. Long reuse timer+squishiness+almost every mob has some kind of AOE= hammer pet does almost nothing for our DPS.
I have to agree on shield of faith... last expansion it was one of our best abilities. This expansion there is one encounter I can think of that even uses up some of its ward. Right now I just use it to proc abilities since it is a group spell. The hammer is pretty beast if you have a Brawler in your group for max melee damage, group / raid temps are going, and you holy shield it... it is pretty disheartening when you throw up your temps (Divine Guidance, Benefaction, etc.) so you can DPS and between your crushing and spells you do like 20k dps on a 2.5 million raid burn, but Divine Light, your procs, and pets procs did like 50k combined for you. (this is in Off Stance, with my Offensive AA spec with Flurry, max auto attack mod, Smite Wrath up most of the fight etc, HM 2h'er, 180 pot / cb, 1 min ish burn)
I've been playing the templar in raids since hitting 50 many years ago and have to agree with Darc regarding (at minimum) the cures. The fact that high level raiding guilds are bemoaning their templar and wishing for well-played inquizies says it all. Also agree that Glory is useless and needs some work.
Wards in general used to prevent power drains , when they removed that element our shield of faith lost it too. As for your hammer not doing DPS that's very untrue. Timed right with VC and other buffs the hammer is leet ..If your having problems keeping your hammer up when the AoE cycles are due to hit , it's pretty simple thinking , just use your Holy Shield on the hammer and block the inc aoe , or ask a friendly swashy , or warden not sure how your run your MT group to AoE block the next set , theres many ways of doing good dps as a templar ...i can pull 60k dps on some ez mode names ..in heal spec and gear. Come GU60 and the bump to casting expertise i should hit 80k .. Templar for life!
There is just one thing that bothers me.The spell Resurrect. It's a great rez i just have one problem with it, its range. SoE gives up 1 meter to play with on our only good rez spell , beside our new endline Immaculate if you take it. What would the hurt be in inceasing that to maybe 10 meters , with the way AoE's are hitting in raids ,and positioning such a importance, i'd just like to see increased range on the spell. It's ok for healers to actually rez ( i know i know , dirges are supposed to rez) if you're fast and it doesnt take from your prep before the next AoE cycle it's a must especially if your dirges are slow! To help with the second group cure SoE could just removed the matching aspect on hostile spell with manacure. That would give any hostile spell a chance , thus you would always have a great manacure target for whatever AoE damage is to come. Templar for life! (Sphere ToD)
Heal perspective I think the only thing Temps needs is another group cure. I also agree with the shield of faith issue, I've been avidly parsing it and it almost never goes off, I've taken my 5 points out of it and use it just for a group proc. In SF it was so insanely useful it was usually a very large part of my parse, but for it to go down to the lowest spell on my parse, if it even shows up, is just a bit too much. As for DPS my vote would be to cast aside the melee stuff, seems like the inq are heavily favored in this fashion, and just let us concentrate on having casting DPS. Don't get me wrong, I heavily invested in my melee DPS since back in TSO and in SF I could easily outparse bards/chanters in my DPS spec. But the writings on the wall in DOV from the lack of melee priest itemization to the auto attack changes. Autoattack used to parse 40-50% of my damage, now I'm lucky if it parses 15% of my damage, lets just get rid of it already and transfer that DPS back into our DD spells. It's not that we should do less DPS than an inquisitor, it's that we shouldn't be able to DPS buff our group as much as an inq does. Otherwise I've been pretty happy overall with my Templar. One can only be grateful that we didn't get any real nerfs.
Tonight I was surprised to see a druid in my group had 3 group cures, he could basically group cure everything in every encounter we ran into. For one fight he got moved and I was trying to solo heal a fight. Solo cure, I should say, since the fight required minimal group healing. The aoe's would go out before my group cure could be recast and there wasn't enough time to single cure 6x. Another group cure would be nice, I'm not aware of another healer that only has 1 group cure. A DPS increase, in any form, would be much appreciated. In identical gear our guild's inq can double my dps.... double. Templars are great healers, but sometimes the amount of healing requried is less than our potential. So if you only have to heal at 80% of your capability what are you doing with the other 20%? More dps would be nice.
Gunthore@Butcherblock wrote: This. When not all-out healing and handling emergencies, my templar can find himself idle. There are several things which need fixing. Number one: decide if we are melee or caster DPS. Our AA tree is full of melee improvements, but all our abilities are casting that do poor damage and very little melee attacks. Either give us a melee tree like mystics and wardens and inquisitors have, or give us better spell attacks and make our AA tree support casting, not melee. As it is, the templar abilties and AA tree are way out of sync with. Please stop punishing us for healing. Every time we heal or cast any beneficial spell, our damage drops like a rock. Why? Its not like we are DPS monsters so why are we nerfed when we heal? That's just stupid. No other way to put it. Give us better group cures, otherwise I like what we can do with cures. Also make manacure a little more useful for the amount of AA it takes to get it. Give us some AE mob reactives. Either let AA change the spells to AE, or give us a prequel spell to fire that turns the next ST mob reactive into an AE one. That would be nice without being overpowering. Make Mark of Divinity do a bit more. It's barely worth casting at present. Fixes to our DPS AA and abilities would make it better. I like my templar but do find it frustrating at times. I don't want huge changes, but certainly its annoying to be outhealed by a warden who is also doing 20K DPS.
Perhaps replace Mana cure with a reactive group cure. Not to seem overpowered how about this. Pain's remedy Target Group(AE) Radius 30.0 meters Casting 2.0 seconds Recast 30 seconds Duration 5.0 seconds -When target recieves damage greater then 10% of max health this spell will cast Divine Gift on group members(AE) - Dispels 124 levels of any hostile effects on group members(AE) The duration chosen is sensitive. If it's over 8 seconds it could be possible to cure 2 aoes so you'd have to keep it short. And of course, the numbers presented here are default, unmodified numbers.
From fan faire mechanics panel: Q: Raid forces are dropping Templars in favor of Inquisitors because of the DPS they offer. Templars don’t get to raise the tank’s health much anymore. Inquisitors have better cures on the run. A: The funny thing about templars, they’re defensive healers. At the beginning of an expansion, Templars are relevant because they have blessings, stoneskins. Then as your tank gets geared, they become less important. We keep adding more difficult content so that does help keep Templars relevant. We could look into some solutions. The funny thing about templars is they are irrevelant now. There is no reason to pick a templar over an inquisitor in any situation.
If there is any classes that needs merging it's the healers. Create a dps spec for each that will lower their ability to heal as good, and a full scale heal spec. As it stands now the best healers in the game are slowly being replaced by what should be the back-up weaker healers. Not to knock on a friend, but my Templar has nearly 100aa more than his Inquisitor and his Inquisitor can almost handle some of crud my Templar takes on, and produce DPS. NO, I don't want Templar's to have more DPS. Infact I don't care if my Templar does a single bit of damge in a group/raid, but I sure as hell want the buffs and heals and cures to far far FAR surpass any given healer that can DPS. Current setup is totally screwed, and if it can't be balanced then merge them.
While I no longer play a templar, I used to back in KoS and EoF, and I currently play a defiler in a MT group. Right now my guild has not even one templar on the rooster because frankly they are never worth it over an Inq in any circumstance. Personally the only things I can see a templar has over an Inq is the stone skin buff, the proc chance increase buff, and divine arbitration for it being an emergency spell you can use near instantly with a very long range and no direct target. All of those things, frankly are not that important and can't hold a candle to what an Inq brings. Also playing a defiler, I am starting to feel quite a bit like a templar in that, I see myself losing my relevance over a mystic for there better group buffs and dps because the need for the full power of defiler wards over a mystics is also vanishing. If they want to balance healers at all, at the very least, they need to give all healers two group cures, because until they do, healers without them will ALWAYS be healer number 2 in a raid group.
It's kind of too bad really. We are NOT underpowered, the problem is: most raids don't need what we have. Yeah, when the mt shaman goes down, I can easily keep the group standing, but since that doesn't happen often, I don't have much to do other than my HUGE templar dps (yes yes yes, I know, we CAN do some fair dps, its just not exactly our strength) and playing wack-a-mole on cures. Making raids HARDER just for a class to "feel relevant" is sort of ridiculous. How 'bout just some slight changes to the class rather than simply adding damage to a mob. Lol, I'm fairly certain the cloth wearers will love aoes hitting harder for my ego's sake.
A skilled templar brings a lot to the table, and can still be very desirable on raids. Druids, especially wardens, need the tweaking for general raid usefulness, not Templars. Templars need to deal with actually having to compete for a raid spot, for the first time in EQ2 history. Get used to it.
A skilled player brings a lot to the table no matter what class they choose to play... it doesn't change the fact that there is an inbalance right now between "offensive" and "defensive" priest archtypes. The offensive archtypes (Inq, Mystic, Fury) brings impressive DPS buffs and utility to the group, while maintaining more than adequate healing abililty. Defensive archtypes (Templar, Defiler, Warden) bring some impressive situational tools that, while nice at times, are not essential to beating raid encounters... worded differently, a raid of only Inq, Shaman, and Fury healers will be not be any noticeably less durable than a raid of Templars, Defilers, Wardens. Given the superior Inq cure, such a raid would actually be worse off on many encounters. Tell me where the balance is in that?
