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Phase I of Alpha Two testing will occur on weekends. Each weekend is scheduled to start on Fridays at 10 AM PT and end on Sundays at 10 PM PT. Find out more here.
Check out Alpha Two Announcements here to see the latest Alpha Two news and update notes.
Our quickest Alpha Two updates are in Discord. Testers with Alpha Two access can chat in Alpha Two channels by connecting your Discord and Intrepid accounts here.
Healers and Supports: What are you hoping to see in AoC?
danada
Member
Title pretty much says it all. I'm wondering what other healer/support players are looking for in Ashes in all aspects of the game.
Quick note: The vast majority of my experience healing comes from WoW. I've read stuff about other game's systems, but haven't played them personally.
What I'd like to see:
-Each class/augmentation to have its own unique niche/playstyle. From what I understand, the cleric is going to be the base healing class, and the bard the base support class. I'm hoping that when you augment your base class it changes the playstyle of it significantly. Just some basic examples: healing mainly through HoTs, specializing in AOE healing with weaker single target, healing through dealing damage, specializing in preventing damage with shields vs direct heals, etc.
-I don't want to feel like I'm a bad DPS class that occasionally heals. Please make it so I can spend the majority of my time healing, buffing/debuffing, CCing enemies, etc. I have no issues with playstyles that do mix in dealing damage with healing, but I don't want it to be the norm. To me this feels like a design choice to entice DPS players into healing/supporting at the cost of pure healing/support gameplay.
-Make healing "rotations" and spells interesting. I'd love to see spells that interact with each other in different ways. Casting heal A puts a buff on the target that increases healing from your other heals. Allies standing in your AOE healing have increased healing from your abilities, etc. There are probably a lot more interesting things that can be done, but these are just base ideas. Basically, I want to be thinking about the abilities I'm using and which ones I want to use next rather than mindlessly spamming 1 or 2 heals.
-On the topic of controls: I hope that for targeted heals I'm able mouseover heal, either through an option/toggle or a macro. Bonus points if I can bind these to my mouse buttons. Also, with action combat being in the game I'm really hoping that there aren't a lot of "aimed heals" with a reticle. Trying to aim a heal in a raid/PvP environment sounds terrible to me. I'd rather see more template style "action healing".
-For the UI: I'm hoping for customization for my party/raid frames. Coming from WoW there are a lot of raid/party frame addons that offer a high level of customization for stuff like postion, size, buffs/debuffs, incoming heals, etc. I want to be able to have as much information as possible so that I can make informed choices with my healing.
What do you folks think about all this? Agree/disagree? Any other points? I'd love to have discussions about this stuff!
Quick note: The vast majority of my experience healing comes from WoW. I've read stuff about other game's systems, but haven't played them personally.
What I'd like to see:
-Each class/augmentation to have its own unique niche/playstyle. From what I understand, the cleric is going to be the base healing class, and the bard the base support class. I'm hoping that when you augment your base class it changes the playstyle of it significantly. Just some basic examples: healing mainly through HoTs, specializing in AOE healing with weaker single target, healing through dealing damage, specializing in preventing damage with shields vs direct heals, etc.
-I don't want to feel like I'm a bad DPS class that occasionally heals. Please make it so I can spend the majority of my time healing, buffing/debuffing, CCing enemies, etc. I have no issues with playstyles that do mix in dealing damage with healing, but I don't want it to be the norm. To me this feels like a design choice to entice DPS players into healing/supporting at the cost of pure healing/support gameplay.
-Make healing "rotations" and spells interesting. I'd love to see spells that interact with each other in different ways. Casting heal A puts a buff on the target that increases healing from your other heals. Allies standing in your AOE healing have increased healing from your abilities, etc. There are probably a lot more interesting things that can be done, but these are just base ideas. Basically, I want to be thinking about the abilities I'm using and which ones I want to use next rather than mindlessly spamming 1 or 2 heals.
-On the topic of controls: I hope that for targeted heals I'm able mouseover heal, either through an option/toggle or a macro. Bonus points if I can bind these to my mouse buttons. Also, with action combat being in the game I'm really hoping that there aren't a lot of "aimed heals" with a reticle. Trying to aim a heal in a raid/PvP environment sounds terrible to me. I'd rather see more template style "action healing".
-For the UI: I'm hoping for customization for my party/raid frames. Coming from WoW there are a lot of raid/party frame addons that offer a high level of customization for stuff like postion, size, buffs/debuffs, incoming heals, etc. I want to be able to have as much information as possible so that I can make informed choices with my healing.
What do you folks think about all this? Agree/disagree? Any other points? I'd love to have discussions about this stuff!
0
Comments
- be the best jeweler on my server
- recreate my wow rogue called damokles
- recreate my AION OG asmodian chanter
"What is the Chanter?" You ask?
Let me tell you:
The chanter was the best dps/healer/support/offtank you will ever see!
He could heal, dealt good amounts of damage in melee, was tanky with chain armour, AND BUFFED THE WHOLE GROUP WITH AOE BUFFS.
For the Bard I'm hoping for short duration buffing effects that have to be constantly changed and monitored during the fight. Again I will be very disappointed if the buffs are just passive effects that you put on at the start of the fight and then forget about them.
This will sound a bit silly but anyone who has watched the anime "log horizon", the Enchanter and Bard skills in that are the sorts of things I'd love to see in this game.
Completely agree on both points. For the bard I look at it like totem/seal twisting from Vanilla and TBC in wow. You can have a lot of player skill expression with systems like that. Your ability to keep up multiple buffs while fulfilling other rolls (heals, dps, cc, etc) can help support players differentiate themselves.
And I'm perfectly fine with that. One of the first online games I played was the original Guildwars, and that's exactly how it worked. You could only take a maximum of 8 skills with you on missions and limited mana to work with, meaning you had to think carefully about which skills to bring and when to use them.
This is something I feel a lot of players don't understand. You don't need a lot of skills to make the combat interesting. League of Legends characters have just 4 skills to work with and that game has some of the best combat depth of any game I've played.
So no, I'm not expecting skill rotations at all.
Just comes down to the diversity in how you support. The main concern I'd have is healing output. I don't want to see both high heals per second and sustained healing. Healers should have to choose between being burst healers or sustain healers so fights can actually end. When it comes to support, I think being specced to be more offensive-orientated and defensive-orientated should be the decision-making for them. So an offensive support class might have speed boosts, damage buffs, and cc while a defensive support might have shields, cc breaks, and abilities to help a team fall back.
I think OW does a good job of categorizing stats. Having offensive and defensive assists along with healing/shields applies etc.
Completely agree. I like healing in other mmos, I don't want to just be another dps class who's dps happens to heal...
Yeah in general synergies and choices are good, especially conditional ones which allow players to distinguish themselves from others skill-wise.
I completely disagree. I really really really hope there is no/very few heals where you can just click on some party frame and cast. We should be required to have some vision of the actual world and our party beyond not standing in fire as healers. Even if it's tab, I should be required to face my target in some cone to be able to heal them imo. As a healer I should not be focused on 40 tiny little boxes playing reaction time whack-a-mole clicking and healing anyone who takes damage... I want to play an MMORPG please.
In general I think healing should require more vision and communication with the raid/party. Positioning is an important part of many PvE and PvP encounters, lots of game mechanics are designed around it, I think adding healing to that list would be great.
This is a really great point. Making sure that there's not only a difference in how classes heal, but also what they specialize in. Also helps to encourage bringing different healers in different situations.
I see where you're coming from with this, and I've heard a lot of people hate on the WoW "whack-a-mole" style of healing. Personally, I enjoyed it, but I'm open to different kinds of healing as well. I wouldn't be against your suggestion of healing in a cone in front of you. Like I said I'm down for template style "action" heals. However, I'm still worried they're going to try to implement aim based reticle heals, and that just sounds terrible to me. If I'm trying to heal someone and they're moving around dodging a boss mechanic or player abilities in pvp they could easily dodge my heals as well. Plus with a large raid and possibly huge PvP encounters it would be really hard to heal the specific person you wanted to.
I don't quite understand what you mean by this. As far as I know if you're partied up with people and perform a support role in the group (healing, actively buffing/debuffing, etc) you get experience just like everyone else. I guess I'm not really clear on what you mean by support rewards apart from combat experience. Supports will still value combat exp because that's going to be how we level up just like everyone else...
Obviously this is just one iteration of that, but in GW2 there are no targeted healing spells. All of them are either aoe around your character, aoe on the ground or a cone aoe in front of you. The result is in raids the majority of the time the entire group is stacked in one place, and only separates for certain boss mechanics. There is simply no other way of doing it and I found it really really boring.
One thing to keep in mind in all of this is in how the healing will interact with the fight mechanics. If a fight requires every player to be spread apart from one another, it would be nearly impossible to heal with aoe heals for example. While I agree that the "whack-a-mole" style of healing can be annoying for some people, it does allow more flexibility when it comes to designing boss fights.
Yeah that does sound boring but I think it has potential. The fact that party/raid strategies adjusted to stack kind of proves the effectiveness of changing party/raid dynamics and communication by simply changing healing mechanics. The issue I see with what you describe in GW2 is the lack of diversity in healing mechanics, they all seem aoe just with different types of areas where they apply.
Perhaps that's a discussion on its own but I think the variety of healing spells will determine the style of healing gameplay itself. I think for example the far too common castbar followed by a zero-delay heal is very conducive to the "whack-a-mole" style of healing where the quality of your gear feels more important than your skills. I always prefer healing over time spells or delay-to-trigger heals that activate after some time because they encourage some understanding of the fight/game mechanics and require attention to the actual fight and its mechanics to be effective. Shields are similar in that sense. Example types of healing skills I'd like to see:
-healing beams that require you to stand still and heals everyone in its path
-targeted heal that splits some healing value with all nearby party members to the target player (so it can be placed on an isolated target to heal tons or heal many players just a little bit)
-healing "well" like spell that has limited healing so players have to manage how long they stay nearby it to not deplete it or overheal themselves
-targeted healing projectile that heals more the longer it travels
-charged up heal that heals more the longer it charges up (like bow powershot mechanic).
-circular aoe heal originating from healer where only one player receives a heal in each quarter of the circle (encourages spreading out)
-targeted heal that also "steals" life or mana from all nearby players/NPCs so it's best applied on isolated players (isolated from party/raid members)
-targeted chain heal that will heal all players between you and the target but that will slow down dramatically for every player it heals
-healing gate where players get healed if they walk through it with some reset boundary (encouraging movement)
-heal over time that ticks faster the more you move
-heal over time that only ticks if you stand still
... as you can see the actual types of healing spells/augments can change the playstyle and decision making of the healer dramatically. Importantly though, they increase the communication demand between the healer and the party. Maximal healing success will require a good healer but also a good party to optimize the use of the healing spells.
It's super interesting you think that because I have a different perspective on this actually. I think that it does not necessary allow for flexibility, it just makes the focus of the mechanics the individual and removes a mechanic that could be used to increase difficulty and communication demands. What I mean by this is that if players are forced to spread out or to dodge some ability on the ground, with "whack-a-mole" healing every player has a responsibility to dodge however they can and you only impact the healer if you fail to dodge the mechanic. But if you have GW2 style healing you have a responsibility to your healer to make life easier for them by rejoining the group asap and it forces communication between healers and the individual if positioning is compromised. Also, if depending on the class/subclass and augments of the healer you prefer your party to group up or spread out for optimal healing, the game can rely on class design itself (and not just boss design) to create different gameplay strategies. So yeah you could view it as increasing flexibility but I think it removes a potential group/party mechanic.
If a WoW boss had a mechanic where you could only heal players in a cone in front of you it would require the adjustment of the party/raid strategy to beat. Essentially, I think if that is a permanent mechanic in game, it would make other position dependent boss mechanics even more interesting
Overall, "whack-a-mole" healing with short cast no-lag heals that do not care about positioning leads to boring healing gameplay, removes a mechanic that could increase the difficulty or communication demand on parties/raids and is simply so over-done people are tired of it. Having interesting healing spell mechanics, synergies between spells, and increasing the responsibility of the "healed" to help maximize the effectiveness of the "healer" promotes better gameplay and teamplay. It also removes the demand to focus on and have 40 squares take up most of your screen and encourages engagement with the actual content and mechanics occurring on screen.
My biggest issue with what you're talking about here is putting responsibility of healing on non-healers. Beyond simple positional stuff like "please stack" or "please stand in my healing circle of goodness" I really don't want to have to rely on other people to do my job for me. Some of the spells that you listed sound really awesome, while some of them sound like a headache because it takes agency away from me as a healer. In your examples of things like a well of healing, or HoTs that tick slower/faster depending on movement I see it going horribly wrong because non-healers aren't focused on healing, and they shouldn't be expected to! They do their jobs while I do mine. You talk a lot about communication, but depending on raid size and how much other communication is happening this could lead to terrible comms. Imagine a situation where you have the RL calling out mechanics, the usual other chatter/call outs that happen in raids, and on top of that you have 5-8 healers (40man raid) all trying to call out different things to different players/groups so that their healing can be optimized. I see where you're coming from with trying to spice up healing, and I'm all for it. However, I don't think that anyone other than the healers should have a significant impact on the performance of the healers.
I'd like my support class to feel like the major power is from the support abilities. They should spend 90% of their time taking supportive actions.
I was thinking of a multi-level casting solution. Something like the below:
Multiple layers will provide a dynamic feeling to performances, optional components would add resource demands and flexibility to the end-product.
Maybe some abilities that spread and/or refresh other hot/dot effects applied by party members?
I agree 100%, but at the same time it is difficult to not have healing like that. I think short range aoe, targeted but potent heals, and having any auto-targeted heals that just involve pressing a frame and a key be relatively weak healing so you can't rely on it. I also like the idea of needing line of sight to heal.
That just may be some difference in the era of WoW we are talking about. I only played vanilla and TBC and thus that's what I'm referring to. I didn't feel like there was much healing spell selection for the most part. The skill-cap of knowing what spell to use was very low & easy to achieve and knowing damage patterns was rarely ever actually relevant if memory serves.
Fair points, but I think I have equally fair rebuttals ;D. I think perhaps the sharing of responsibilities may have been overstated. In general it is very much the responsibility of the healer to select the right heals. If the fight requires high mobility from your ranged dps, then maybe it's not a great idea to cast the heal that only ticks when the target is stationary on your ranged dps. But why shouldn't the party be expected to be mindful of a healer's healing mechanics? I think a lot is just based on convention and what people are used to. Tanks for example are used to having no autonomy on the threat generation of DPS classes (and DPS classes are expected to be mindful of the tank's role), and players have to be cognizant of their positioning to take advantage of totem buffs. I don't see any problem with asking players to be mindful of how to optimally take advantage of the healer's spells. It may feel confusing when people start the game and are familiarizing themselves with the classes but I'm sure totems and auras etc also had to be explained to players when WoW was first released and people just now take for granted that they understand how to optimally take advantage of the mechanics of other classes for their own benefit. And perhaps I overstated the importance of party/raid use of such spells... I don't think balancing should be done around optimal use of spells like the healing well I described but if you are pushing hard content and your healer might go oom, using the well optimally vs not may save the healer mana and give the party that much more chance of success.
Now in terms of the communication, I recognize that it can get very chaotic very fast if too much communication is demanded in combat but I mostly meant communication around the toolkit that the healer in particular is bringing. If I explain to my party before a fight "hey, this is how to maximize my healing effectiveness..." based on my augments and personal preference of spells to use for this fight, that would go a long way I think. Like I said, it allows class design to dictate strategy as much as boss mechanics. But I do get the fear of requiring too much communication on coms, I just think that's more of a content difficulty balance concern. If a healer can't heal a player because they don't know where they are there are still ways to figure it out without coms haha, so unless that player is in imminent danger of death it may not warrant verbal com in the moment but may earn that player a scolding between wipes :P.
I like it
@neuroguy Things have changed considerably for healers in WoW. You are right that back in vanilla and TBC healing pretty much consisted of "do I use my aoe heal or single target heal?" and that was it. Things have changed a lot since then and there is a lot more synergy in healing kits than there was before. Monk healers are particularly interesting for me, since they have spells that alter the functions of your other healing spells, meaning you have to think about the situation a bit more and decide which healing spell to alter.
https://www.wowdb.com/spells/116680-thunder-focus-tea
Fair rebuttals ;D Like you, I think i might have overstated my opinions. As far as other roles historically having to deal with mechanics outside their own role I think for the most part they were fairly passive if that makes sense. DPS having to keep track of threat was just a matter of keeping an eye on your threat meter and adjusting your DPS if you're getting too high. As far as auras and totems go it's mainly a positional issue. Making sure that you're standing near the healer/totem is the same idea as standing in the good healing stuff and not standing in fire. Very simple concepts. My worry is that if you're asking DPS to have to think more about other role's mechanics they either just straight up won't, or their personal performance may suffer. As a support/healer I'm there to enable the other roles to do their job. If my actions take away from that I see that as a problem. Now, of course when you get to top tier min/max situations I think it's fair to expect people to play better and react to healers in a more active way. Though your points about playing around healer comp do sound really awesome, don't get me wrong. I just want to make sure that it isn't too detrimental to people doing their job.
Just a quick point I thought of that I wanted to bring up RE: raid frames. I understand that people don't like staring at raid frames instead of the fight, but at the same time trying to heal by name plates hovering above people's heads in a 40 man situation sounds worse imo. Raid frames help to organize information and make it available at a quick glance. Now, maybe Ashes has a neat take on this and name plates will be more readable than in other situations, but I'm not going to hold my breath personally.
I've been wondering if you played a mistweaver ;D
Yes! I'm actually super excited to see what happens with summoner and its augments. I've always enjoyed playing jack of all trades style characters, and it sounds like summoner might be this for Ashes. If so I'm highly considering playing one, if not as a main definitely as an alt.
They are by far the most interesting healing spec to me
I hear ya. Resto Shaman are interesting in their own right but purely because of the sheer amount of utility spells they bring. In terms of actual healing it is pretty boring compared to Mistweavers. I actually prefer taking my Shaman into M+ dungeons because of their utility, but in raids you hardly ever get a chance to use those utility spells so I prefer taking my Mistweaver for that.
Good thing is that Steven already told us that this will be most likely possible ;D
(some examples for bard skills sound a ton like chanter from AION or fistweaver from WoW)
Root or slow could be used to slow one of the mobs being pulled so they are late to the fight so the first mob could be dead by the time slowed monster gets the the tank.
Works in pvp also just a little different.
But if there is already another class with that role then there is the possiblity of having an interupt ability.
Plus if they could have a speed buff that could give or use on themselves that would help people run out of danger pretty useful in my opinion.
This way healers will not be all heals.
Some tanks are really good know how to pull and time their abilities just right. Plus some really good groups help the tank out a little with pets and stuns and disarms and buffs. This may make a healer feel less involved cause does not have to push their skills to the limit to keep tank alive. Basical tank always has a nice pool of health-
So intead of nerfing the tank (design mistake in my opinion cause not all groups play at that level) Healers or support class should be able to set up their toon to do little more dps and maybe have some utility abilities
and then during the boss fight change to a setup that puts out more heals.
Personally when I started tanking I was over cautious and would pull one or two mobs and some times I would get really good healers and was near full health most of the time so the healer would just start pulling everything to feel more involved and do actual healing.
It's a very common problem and something a lot of new tanks struggle with, and it really impacts the healer. As a healer I find it annoying that often the better the group is, the less I have to do. If I'm in a group with a tank that never loses aggro and teammates that avoid any unnecessary damage, I barely do anything.
This is where the utility and cc come into play, as they allow me to still positively impact the group even when I'm not required to heal much.