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Alpha Two Phase II testing is currently taking place 5+ days each week. More information about testing schedule can be found here
If you have Alpha Two, you can download the game launcher here, and we encourage you to join us on our Official Discord Server for the most up to date testing news.
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Future Crafting Plans: Herbalism > Alchemy & Scribe or Mining > Metalworking > Jewel cutting (Pending)
Yes, in fact I played a healer in ESO. Mostly ran stuff with my guild, and we had plenty of healers, so I sometimes had to take a bench, and I also remember spending "long" minutes in the group finder queue. But I trust the judgement of those with more experience in MMOs than myself, and hope that it will work out just fine. The poll quoted above by CaptnChuck seems promising, as there's only a 3% difference between the most and the least popular classes. Other games, as far as I know, have much more skewed ratios.
If anything the huge worry would be there being far too few healers considering there is only one primary healing archetype. We can only hope that cleric secondary classes will be good enough offhealers to make up for not being able to find one of the few primary healing archetype players out there.
since the decrepit trinity is stated to be the game play group mechanic they should do the following:
cleric/* differing themes of support however all equivalent and viable
*/cleric differing themes of support however all equivalent and viable
tank/* differing themes of tank however all equivalent and viable
*/tank differing themes of tank however all equivalent and viable
also cleric and tank base classes can aug into dps archetypes to be viable dps in that theme too
if only cleric/* and tank/* are viable in those roles than there is going to be the usual extreme shortfall of players to play those roles. also if tank/tank and cleric/cleric are the most effective at those roles than that's all that will ever be run in challenging content.
if they spec to augment cleric then they can provide the healer role of the trinity. if they spec augment to tank then they can provide the tank role of the trinity. the horror. now tanks and cleric mains will be on equal footing to every other class. each of those could more easily try their hand at dps as well.
I would challenge the devs to have two weeks with only main tank and cleric classes able to provide each of that trinity role and then move that viability to the augments the following two weeks. You think that viability will ever be removed from the augments?
By the enormous wait times It is abundantly clear there is not enough support from the player base for a dedicated class for those roles. Allowing anyone to spec into that role for a time will greatly relieve the contention for them.
clerics and fighters are quite popular outside MMORPGs. It's a function of the video game grouping trinity mechanic that has bastardized the cleric archetype into a heal spamming wizard and fighters into toothless damage sponges. And then the game mechanics for each are normally quite dull too.
I would like to mention my experience with Lineage 2 that tells me something completely different, as we didn't had that many instanced dungeons to level up, so you relied a lot on open world farming. The max number of members for a group / party was 9. (Increased for bigger content like Epic Bosses / Sieges, same max number but grouped in an alliance system called “Channel Commander " )
I would like to elaborate with the following.
1.- The Open World Pve/Pvp: To have a little context first, If you take a look into the classes of Lineage 2, you can divide the Healer in 3 main different categories. Each one of these, affected differently by their race (Humans are beefy / slower cast speed, elves have lightning fast cast speed, but squishier,etc, you get the idea )
a) Full blown Healer = Bishop / Cardinal--> Heavy and fast healing skills, Combat sleep, okay buffs etc.
b) Support/Healer = Elven Elder / Shilen Elder --> Medium Tier Heals, Great Mana regen/replenish skills, good defense/ utility buffs.
c) Buffer / Healer = Prophet / Warcryer / Overlord --> Heal over Time, Ability to use better combat gear and Excellent party/guild buffs.
In the world, you made your party from what you had in hand, especially if you were a DPS in your way to gear yourself / learn new skills. Sometimes you had your shitty self-buffs.. sometimes you find an Elder... that can do a bit of everything but don't get too cocky because he doesn't have that many heals but good buffs, so you get to farm better that if you were alone. Then you have your high end party, where that same elder, is ESSENTIAL because if not for him (either elf or dark elf ), the heavy bishop/ cardinal, burned through his mana wayyy to quick.
Lineage 2 had this way of giving you the liberty to choose the healer or support you wanted, but it became a game heavily dependent on buffs. I’m not saying that this was a bad thing, but only barely. Because it allowed to have/need more than 1 type of healer/support on your party to get to that sweet buff spot where you have good defensive buffs and amazing attack buffs, and a buddy to heal you. You could do the thing alone and rely on Health pots, but it was way better and faster to do it in a small group of... say 4 or 5 buddies killing stuff. It encouraged a lot the random group play.
2.- Siege, Mass PvP ( Open world ), Epic Boss: Here you had to fine-tune your party ( As in most MMOrpg ) to get the most amount of buffs, without slacking on DPS. So you build your party of 9, most of the time around the type of DPS you had (this sort of dictated what kind of healer/ Support you needed ).
For example If you had frontline Tank/Dps, you needed 1 heavy healer, 1 party buffer and 1 mana charger for your healer ( 3 ) then you had your Tank and Off Tank ( Like a bard or bladedancer ) (5 ), then you had 3 or 4 melee DPS.. if you wanted more sustain, you kicked 1 dps and recruited 1 more heavy healer or buffer, etc. and BAM , party of 9, full buff, ready to kick some a**.
On the other hand, if you had a party of Ranged dps / Mages, you focused on 1 or 2 off tanks and 4 dps with a bunch of elders to sustain mana and heal.
So every class had their thing, every class had this one or a few skills that made them different, cool to play, needed and important for either a random group or an end game/ guild group. The amount of people in the group, allowed you to jump to another area or not, maybe a bit higher level, but with a bunch of off tanks and healers to fight along.
If Intrepid plays their hand right, every class will be playable and interesting, or at least we will have classes that represents different play-styles .
Sorry, got carried away, Interesting topic.
Judging by this, there will be a lot of different types of healers for different playstyles, so more people will find one that suits them ?
TL;DR: Big groups are fun, sometimes you don't have big groups, a variety of healers is fun, give them each a different key feature that feels balanced. Give the player liberty to choose and configure their group/ playstyle the way it suits better for them and don't push constantly for that 1 type of party. A good idea is to try to build the healers around the DPS ? Have healers with skills to support mages and mage parties, other for melee dps, other for ranged dps... Fighting healers ? etc.
These all do roughly the same thing and most players will be wanting to play them irrespective to the total number of choices available to them:
Fighter - DPS
Mage - DPS
Rogue - DPS/Special/Solo Play
Ranger - DPS
These all have very specific jobs that can't be found in abundance with any other class or augment:
Tank - Aggro/CC
Cleric - Healing
Bard - Support/Minor Healing
I'm interested to see how the summoner is tuned but I can't see it currently being a vital class for most situations:
Summoner - Solo Play/DPS/Support
You can likely form a party without a Rogue or a Summoner while also mixing your DPS up with duplicates, at the loss of perhaps time and versatility. Say for example 2 Fighters and 3 Mages instead of one of each DPS type. Hell, it may even be possible to bring a third Fighter in and ask that all three run Tank as an Augment. Your Cleric would then be forced to be hyper specialized in Single-target and AoE healing, rather than any form of CC or buffs. Your Bard will also be forced into playing into a very buff-heavy or healing-focused style of play, probably with a Cleric Augment. Is it possible to bypass party composition suggestions and be successful? Absolutely. Is it optimal? It might actually be more optimal than playing the standard 1x8 composition.
Scaling up my previous example, think of how much sustain and power four Fighters augmented with Tank would be supported by four Bards augmented with Cleric. Barring any instagib mechanics caused by not having a specific type of class in your party, it feels like that kind of competition could slowly but surely complete an entire dungeon at level requirement.
Conversely, if one of every class type is required to complete 8-person party content, you'll definitely see a shortage of Tanks, Healers and Bards. You may also see a shortage of Rogues and Summoners given that they may not even want to do 8-person content if the classes are designed more towards solo players.
However, I think a lot of people aren't looking at 40-person raids and 40v40/250v250 PvP content. Big boss monsters will have a DPS race before an enrage timer kicks in I'm sure, but a large number of Tanks, Clerics, and Bards are vital to completing the content without wiping repeatedly. There's not much you can do to fudge around with the complex mechanics you will encounter and the unforgiving nature of Legendary raid bosses. Respective to respawn timers, TTK, and geography, sustain is going to be a huge part of 40v40 and 250v250 PvP. Sustain only comes from fat heals, fat tanks, and big buffs.
They have already said cleric is the single target tank healer and bards are the group healers.
Unless they planning for enough off healers to be able to fully heal for a group or enough off tanks can tank for a group. The current system can mostly remain true, but I don't think summoners will be able to fill the excess roles themselves. Having a couple combinations outside the norm would be nice.
U.S. East
They have already said your primary is most of your character and that your 2ndary modifies it. Example fighter/mage makes you a fighter with maybe elemental sword damage and teleport charge...it does not make you suddenly half mage
Cleric / is the main tank healer and Bard / is the group healer we already know this.
Just like you shouldn't be able to fulfill every artisan role on a single character, the same holds true for trinity roles with adventure classes.
For choices to matter, they need to have consequences. If you as a Fighter are filling the role of a Cleric, your choice has just been rendered meaningless. If you want to fulfill a different role than you initially chose for your character, that's what alts are for.
Class homogenisation and lack of identity is a cancer. Once it begins to spread, it becomes forced into every aspect of a game out of necessity, because anyone with less tools that everyone else just becomes worse.
The insidious thing about homogenising roles is that it lowers the value of skill. If a Fighter just becomes a Tank whenever he/she struggles to find a place in group content because of an overabundance of Fighters (or dps classes in general), that's eliminating a source of pressure for them to excel at their class. Why get better when it's easier to swap to an off-role and find a group?
If you want to be a Fighter, except when it's hard, there's a meaningful choice to be made there. Asking to be protected from the results of your own choices is how you wind up with situations like the current retail environment in WoW.
Pretty sure you don't really understand the conversation being had. WoW can't be used as a comparison for this because WoW doesn't fuse classes like Everquest did.
We pretty much want the opposite of this in a way, but in my example I already said a rogue shouldn't be able to heal that would probably include fighter too.
What we want are like 3 to 4 additional viable healers or tanks depending on the Augment on certain main Archetypes. This would limit having to find something that may not even exist for some groups. Ignoring the op.
Summoners are already going to do this, but I don't think they are going to be enough. They can take the idea from summoners and make fighter and bard a little like that at least. Definitely make Augments more interesting for Tanks and Clerics.
They need to make those augments more interesting in some way otherwise the Tank one probably won't be used that much. Having no role changes outside of summoner would just be a wasted opportunity for the augment system to me as long as every non sensible role isn't enforced.
U.S. East
Your secondary archetype can blur the lines a little bit.
That is, IIRC, what has been said by Steven.
From this I am just going to assume that your Mage/Cleric class may have a bit of self healing or add some extra survivability to the group while sacrificing some damage potential, but will decidedly NOT be a substitute for an actual healer.
What I was trying to convey is that that same exact choice should remain equally meaningful for the other archetypes.
If someone chooses to be a mage or a ranger as their primary archetypes, they're choosing to be DPS. What I take issue with is the very loophole you're asking for them to get out of the role they selected while framing it as "we want augments to be more interesting" and "We want more healers".
I'm pretty much assuming that, outside of maybe Bard/Cleric, having Cleric as your subclass is just going to add some personal healing utility. Since Bard is already a heavy support class, it might give them more of a group utility.
Going X/Tank will probably add some survivability, and might let some primary archetypes off-tank a bit. I could see Fighter/Tank being a decent off-tank, and potentially able to main-tank some content, for example. Summoner/Tank could have pets that are significantly more on the tankier side than DPS.
But as you said, I doubt something like a Mage/Cleric will suddenly be a viable healer for group content.
D&D - You end up being the only healer or the entire party wants to be a healer.
EQ - Most guilds had a handful of dedicated healers.
DAoC - What's a healer?
Guild Wars - "Day 3,597. I'm still surrounded by elementalists. I may be the last healer alive."
EQ2 - Wow that was a fun month
GW2 - It's like a blue drop with bad stats. You see them around but they're usually stupid.
WoW - It's what you do after you level your main character. Everyone and no one was a healer and i was 1/2 in my guild that mained healing
As someone who plans on RPing and spending 95% of my game time playing a healer I personally hope they aren't common but these things are hit and miss. Surely this is going to be the closest feel to a D&D night right?
Got a link for this quote? I missed it.
Got a link for this quote? I missed it.[/quote]
it was in one of the interviews with a steamer
I'm planning on playing Tank/tank, tank/summoner, tank/cleric, and tank/bard to determine what would not only be best for pve but also for my playstyle. I think there will be a tank and cleric shortage ultimately. 1 tank out of 8 classes and again 1 healer out of 8 classes is how I am seeing this all come to fruition.
The math is simple 8 person group 8 classes 1 of each. Or if you want some flexibility 1 tank 1 cleric 1 bard and 5 dps.
59:55 Asmond asked about the Brads and Steven reiterated what the wiki says.
I think it would be neat to see an aoe HOT type heal centered on the bard or maybe a big one time hit with a good sized cool down.