Looting rights/XP gain for Healers
ThatBardGuy
Member, Alpha One, Adventurer
Steven has talked about the way looting rights and XP distribution will work many times. My question revolves around this system and healers. Will healing done be weighted differently than DPS when it comes to looting rights and XP distribution.
Example: If I help a fighter that is killing a mob by healing him and I heal more per second than he does DPS, will that give me looting rights to said mob? Ultimately, if the fighter had not done any DPS then the mob would not have died and neither of us would get to loot it anyways. Does that give loot priority to the fighter in this instance?
Example: If I help a fighter that is killing a mob by healing him and I heal more per second than he does DPS, will that give me looting rights to said mob? Ultimately, if the fighter had not done any DPS then the mob would not have died and neither of us would get to loot it anyways. Does that give loot priority to the fighter in this instance?
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Dungeons are going to be scaled for 8 man parties anyway so unless your doing content you vastly out level you wont be able to farm them solo anyway.
If you tag the mob first you only need to do 40% of the dps for looting rights. 55% would be more then enough.
If you want a more dpsy cleric you might go Rogue/Fighter as secondary.
If you go Cleric/Cleric, well, deal with it lol.
The idea behind is that choices matter, so your secondary class will impact many skills.
Your example could cause issues withing open world formats of healers spamming heals on people to claim loot rights. The healing vs dps is not relative and would need to be calculated in some format, generally speaking if you're in a group just either have it for Leader, FFA, Round robin or Roll.
In terms of PVP however I believe there should be a work around as normally healers do not get 'rewarded' post game with rewards due to coding not seeing their healing as contribution to efforts (some games this is not the case).
Hopefully they will take into account each roll for damage done, healing done and damage absorbed.
This got me thinking back (fondly-ish) to EverQuest. By level 4 fighting two mobs at once was probably suicidal (and the risk kept increasing), there were wandering hostile mobs everywhere, mobs ran faster than you did, and mobs wouldn't leash if you tried to run away. The idea that you could grind XP without a group was as strange as the idea of needing to group for XP is to someone that cut their MMO teeth on WoW. If nothing else, grouping meant you had someone to talk to while killing, unless they were a bard (bards, as I recall, needed to cast a spell every 1.5 seconds, and this interfered with their ability to converse in combat). Because downtime was part of the design, we filled it with conversation.
There is no way to know how the community is going to form once AoC goes live, nor do we know how the content will be balanced, but I expect that soloable content is going to be filler content, and you will have to be grouped for anything worthwhile. While the difficulty of fights and the requisite downtime in EQ forced the community together, and that sort of sense of community is what (I feel) AoC is trying to bring back, it is undeniable how harsh that was on new players and those with limited time--you could spend a 4 hour play session just looking for a group with nothing to show for your time and, if you died to a wandering mob, at an xp/level loss for the evening as well. I expect that solo farming will be the thing people do while looking for a group to do something with much better rewards. Further, solo-grinding is an invitation to be attacked. So I expect a healer looking for a group won't have to look hard.
During group content it wont matters as XP and loot will be shared amongst the party regardless of your performance.
You are a healer start a group and go on an adventure. You will never have a problem finding a group because you are the key class that it all hinges upon. Toss that fighter an invite and tell them to start killing harder stuff. If you get along throw him a friends invite. This may be inefficient at start or it may not it all depends on how the game is balanced. If you get a few Tanks on your friends list you will have zero issues in the future what ever level the first dungeons are at.
Next day you log in look at your friends list and ask the higher lvls or the people you liked the most to group up .
I really really hope this game has VoIP
Hell yeah, so I just have to level to 25 to finally do some damage! Great!
Seriously, I have exactly the same concerns and absolutely no idea how to adress the issue...
Healing is stressful enough as is, as is the meta right now in MMORPGs healers both DPS and heal at the same time and so we're literally DPS with more responsibilities. (FFXIV, WoW, Tera, Aion and the list goes on and on...)
Healers in solo content have always had a stark disadvantage outside of just being able to live, severely lowered time to kill means less XP when solo which means way more time to get equal level. That's fine, that makes sense. But if we're in a group with lowered XP that would be totally mean :c
Remeber one thing. Steven said that solo questing will be discouraged and group play promoted, starting from lvl 1 you should be leveling and questing in a party. They want this game to have a huge emphasis on socializing above anything else. You can do it solo, but it will go much slower for you, and when you come to the point where you have to do a story dungeon you have no party, and AoC will not feature a system like Dungeon/Raid finder in WoW.
But if you're social or even if you have a hard time working up the courage to ask strangers to group with you, being healer is great! Because you never have to worry that people think you're weird for asking to group with them, they see you're a healer so they immediately go "oooh he's a healer, poor bastard, yeah he needs a group asap." and usually everyone finds a healer useful so they let you in.
Or my favorite is walking out to an elite hunting spot, and you walk by a mage that's 1 shotting and mass AoE farming mobs and so he ignores your invite. So you keep walking and start pulling mobs 1 at a time slowly and then just over the hillside, like the glorious beauty of seeing an icecream truck rolling down your road, you see a lonely tank, and he too with his sword and board is slowly grinding the mobs one at a time, plus after each fight he's sitting down and eating for 3 minutes before he can do another pull. So you walk up to him and throw him a Stamania buff and heal him to max and he's like hell yes! and you're like "group?" and the tank will be like "Tru". And thus as nature intended, the Tank / Healer group is made. Of course the mage is still one shotting and AOE farming the mobs on the other side of the field 10X faster but oh well, that's the life Tank and Healers live.
You won't always have other people around and honestly relying on playing with other people just to level feels like shit a lot of times. Get a group together and they all want to be losers who go to sleep at 10pm and have 9-5 jobs every day? If you level without them, you lose your friends, but if you level with them you will hit level cap months after good players already have. So why opt in to relying on other people to begin with? That's why leveling is mostly a solo experience in every MMO, because reliance on others feels awful. Most MMOs you level by yourself until you hit a wall of sorts (hard quest, hard boss, dungeon, etc) and THEN you advertise for a group, do the hard content, and you all go on your way and back to solo grinding. If you're a healer and getting fucked out of loot and xp due to someone just running up and easily out dpsing your mobs, and doesn't want to join your group because he doesn't want his XP split, then what are you supposed to do?
In L2, you could NOT solo level as a healer or a buffer. It wasn't an option.
Also, as DPS, you would be insane to solo level up, you were forced by game mechanics to have a buffer and healers in a group.
So in L2, the game forced buffers healers and dps to level up together, otherwise nobody could do it in any sane way.