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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.
Have Healers and Mages Become too powerful?
TheHiddenDaggerInn
Member, Leader of Men, Kickstarter, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Over the years of MMO's I have seen the classes evolve into what they're today. Back in the Day in a MMO casters would suffer large interuptions when casting, so any melee on them would greatly disrupt them, hence needing a party for them to have a "clean pocket" to do what they do best which is heal and do damage.
Now over time people wanted to be able to do more content on their own and at least be ablew to have some soloable content, and rightly so, it is boring always trying to find a group.
That being said, have games gone too far in what we have given mages and healers?
So now they can solo any mob, in most cases many mobs at once
Suffer no penalty for being hit
Have shields,escapes,roots
So is their a downside to playing a healer or a mage?
Mage is maybe a bit squishier but that was always the case as it should be with massive damage output.
Healer, seems of any game of late can take on multiple enemies to kill just 1 healer. where are the silences, the kicks, the stuns...
What are your thoughts on todays healing and mages? in games like Archeage mages rule all and it's not even close, in New World Healing Is Top Dog, In WoW Shadow Priest For years and Probably still is Was the best.
I get it, healing is boring, but that doesn't mean when need to make it so OP that they need to be gods to get people to play it.
Now over time people wanted to be able to do more content on their own and at least be ablew to have some soloable content, and rightly so, it is boring always trying to find a group.
That being said, have games gone too far in what we have given mages and healers?
So now they can solo any mob, in most cases many mobs at once
Suffer no penalty for being hit
Have shields,escapes,roots
So is their a downside to playing a healer or a mage?
Mage is maybe a bit squishier but that was always the case as it should be with massive damage output.
Healer, seems of any game of late can take on multiple enemies to kill just 1 healer. where are the silences, the kicks, the stuns...
What are your thoughts on todays healing and mages? in games like Archeage mages rule all and it's not even close, in New World Healing Is Top Dog, In WoW Shadow Priest For years and Probably still is Was the best.
I get it, healing is boring, but that doesn't mean when need to make it so OP that they need to be gods to get people to play it.
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What older mmorps are you referring to with healing (where it wasn't op) in your mind set.
I would say that even melee classes or the genre as a whole has changed giving classes more mobility in attacks and movement. The buffs aren't just to cleric or mage like classes. To get a older feeling like that you essentially would have to slow down combat on all classes and remove mobility.
Current classes that are melee wouldn't have clerics or mages have any chance what so ever. Also the other thing is i dont think people enjoyed being sitting ducks to cast spells all day. Its just not as fun gameplay as being able to actually move around and do stuff.
Though it doesn't mean there can't be some skills where you need to channel, I'm sure you will see that in aoc.
Going back to DND, the power of each classes is situational, which is the advantage to a diverse adventuring party. Some games gave a little too much ‘you’re good at all things all the time’ to caster classes to compensate for lack of armor, melee power, etc.
I can speak to WoW best. Examples include Frost mage, Mistweaver monk, and Resto druids. In vanilla, WoW was much more rock-paper-scissors (so is DND). Mages had clear advantage with burst and range, but if a warrior closed distance they were toast unless they escaped. This encouraged diverse groups to form so the advantage of one class covered the weaknesses of another.
However, as WoW leaned heavily toward casual solo-play (a general shift for most mmos too), classes had to become more self-sufficient. Everyone gets a heal! And classes became more oatmeal and players becoming less about working as a team and more self-centered.
I’m hoping Ashes changes this, refocusing us back to playing as teams. This will have the effect of classes becoming more rock-paper-scissors again, and to your point not making some classes be godlike in all scenarios.
TLDR : class imbalance is a function of majority solo play, so the more Ashes focuses on teams, the more a given class will have clear strengths and clear weaknesses.
Many people in the older MMOs used to think 'Healers are good for quick leveling' because they basically get a lot of invites and people often put up with less skilled ones.
But from MUCH anecdotal experience, people also treat healers like disposable bots around 50% of the time. Like, 'will get their group of DPS friends together, maybe befriend the tank if they aren't part of the group, but the healer is just an interchangeable thing that you don't befriend much'.
Not sure of the arrow of causation there if there even is one, after all, a healer in super high demand who doesn't turn down parties won't necessarily get too close to any given one.
Anyways, problem is that DPS 'can always solo mobs' even if it is expensive (obviously hyperbole) and the 'tradeoff' was often that Healers 'couldn't'.
But then it was changed to not be that way, basically.
It's also a flaw in the way most games design healing requirements, yes, but I think they should all be able to solo mobs, just differently. Tanks be slow, DPS be risky/expensive, Healers be between the two (mana runs out, damage is low).
If Mana doesn't run out, well, there's your problem. Similar for when the only real threat a character faces is 'Is my HP 0 yet? If not, do normal thing'.
Healers having decent damage and being powerful made them popular so there wasn't a healer shortage. The same happened with tanks, who are very powerful, but most people don't like to tank so they are never as popular.
People react to incentives, have no incentive to heal and people won't play them. It would be a game of solo players. For healers to not be powerful you'd need forced grouping.
yeah it would be nice to be able to interrupt casters with attacks other than cc. it would also make the casting speed stat more valuable. it would also be nice ot be able to interrupt fighters abilities too, perhaps at a lower chance.
what do you mean? the life staff was one of the first weapons in the game and it was always able to heal o-o it had different skills though
While I don't think healers should do no damage because that would kill non-group healer, I don't think a healer doing DPS a thing in bigger content, else what is the downside of being a healer, doing slightly less damage than the DPS and having immortal healing?
If we are talking the PVP scene I have an example MMO to bring the question of if Healers are too OP is a proper idea. In SWTOR, healers where infamous for being hard to kill, especially if a tank could guard them (redirect 50% of the dmg taken by guarded target to the tank). Before a certain expansion, a healer would never die unless 2 very good DPS, or 3 average DPS would attack the healer out of the 8 man group. Seems very OP right? But after a certain expansion, all DPS and tanks received double the damage from the expansion but healers remained the same, effectively nerfing them.
After the expansion, all healers now can be killed by a single DPS so long as the healer doesn't have a tank, and a particularly dedicated DPS can effectively make a healer useless because all the healing that healer does is on themselves and that might not even save them. Healers were no longer OP, but it felt terrible to play a healer, because anytime an enemy player saw you and you didn't bring a tank friend or get one via matchmaking, you would die and not be able to outheal the damage.
So with the above example given, I want to ask if you think healers not being "too powerful" is a proper downside to being a healer in PVP? Getting focused is a given, but there has to be a counter for healers to receive from being focused by the enemy. The downside shouldn't be play with friends who can group with you, nor should there be zero downsides to play a healer. But a balance must be maintained or else having too many downsides can kill the role in certain content.
Magicka Sorcerers in ESO (weakest class in the game) is looking at this thread like:
That's a simple statement that everyone should agree with if they think about the subject for a while objectively, but most people don't get past, 'I want to PK people, and I can't PK a healer by myself, so I don't like it, especially since I don't play one'.
I think before jumping into counters for things, first discuss about how things should be, then discuss about how it can be implemented.
Even if that single player(Not a tank nor a healer) is more skilled/geared than that competent healer?
Aren't we all sinners?
So all things being equal, a healer can’t be killed by another player in 1:1? I disagree. Classes need to have advantages over some, and weaknesses to others.
I think it is perfectly balanced if a healer can't be killed by an equal DPS or tank.
The equalizing factor there is that the healer can't kill the DPS/tank either.
Well the disadvantage of being a competent healer and not being killed by one player is that this healer probably can't kill a fly with it's low dmg output. That's the disadvantage.
I agree with @Iskiab that a dps should not be able to solo kill a healer who is on their game, but the healer shouldn't be able to down the dps either. That should be a stalemate, a battle that lasts a very long time and comes down to who is the most skilled with their class. The dps is doing big damage with the healer healing through it, while the healer is doing much less damage that the dps is countering with procs and consumables.
It's true that in the past magicians/healers were classes for fast xp, farming ressources and group PvP support but not 1V1 PvP. I liked it.
If a warrior cannot kill a healer in 1V1 (heal better than damages), I think it is still fine. But I hate when healers have some heavy damage spells... I prefer to have 2 chars, 1 char for physical damage and one healer.
I dont think healing is boring, I love to play a priest but a real priest healer support.
And I hope devs schedulled some resist elements spells easy to reach to any classes.
Fixed that for you:
Competent dps healer should be able to kill a healer avoid being killed by dps there should be ways to spec against healing damage as well.
Fixed for you:
Competent healer should not forever be able to avoid being killed by dps there should be ways to spec against damage as well but not be unkillable as it creates balance issues and content issues.
So basically, in PvP the healer is a lawn chair. Just there, not really doing anything, and ignored by everyone.
I'll say that if you had a "you can't kill me and I can't kill you" class in a game like Ashes of Creation, that's extremely overpowered.
"Hey, there is this guy in our guild's territory taking all the best resources!"
"It's a cleric, we just have to let him do it, there's no way we can stop him."
A good way to do a healer, and have it be functional, fun, and balanced, is this...
The healer can heal by doing damage. That way the class isn't just a healbot. You're not a walking hit point vending machine. You can actually fight.
Make it extremely squishy. You do ranged damage and your damage output is adequate but not the best.
In PvE group content, you are blasting at enemies and topping off the tank and others.
In PvP content, especially one-on-one, if someone attacks you, your health drops fast because your defenses are garbage. You can counteract that with self-healing as you damage the enemy. That in itself becomes a form of mitigation and makes up for the lack of defense you have. But doesn't make you invincible.
As a total hypothetical, let's have Cleric vs Bow Guy.
Bow Guy has leather armor and it reduces the damage he receives by 50%, and he shoots an arrow that does 100 damage. Cleric has a Holy Bolt spell that does 100 damage and heals 50 hit points.
Bow guy shoots Cleric with an arrow and does 100 damage. Cleric casts Holy Bolt against Bow Guy and does 100 damage, but the leather armor absorbs half so Bow Guy only loses 50 hit points. Meanwhile, Cleric heals 50 hit points from his spell. Net result: both characters are down 50 hit points, even though they have very different ways to deal with damage.
Of course that doesn't mean they're the same. If Cleric and Bow Guy had only 100 hit points worth of health, then Bow Guy stays alive because of his armor and Cleric is dead, since a dead person can't heal themselves. Spike damage is always the danger with self-healing.
But this is just a very simple hypothetical to show how these sorts of things can be balanced if the developers are thoughtful. Suggesting that the only way to make a healer balanced is to take away their ability to heal is short-sighted. Let them do damage, let them heal, they just can't heal enough to make themselves invincible.
So basically, a healer is the Perfect gatherer, can run around without worry, only needing to fret about 2 or more people going corrupt to kill him. What a great world to live in.
Exactly, that's why I said in a PvX game like AoC, such a thing isn't balanced, it's massively overpowered.
In GW1 (prophecies, assassins ruined all of this), warriors had the highest armor and were constant targets of slows without the ability to teleport around, and without a dedicated slot or support teammate to removing that slow or blind, a warrior can go an entire match without hitting an enemy. Conversely, a warrior with 2 interrupt skills could lock out 2/3 of an elementalist's casts.
From what I have heard about the class systems, party/class balancing etc, I believe GW1 is a huge influence for Intrepid. You could build a monk to do amazing holy DPS or you could build a monk to make another player nearly invulnerable with powerful enchantments, or you could make a monk able to do the biggest heals in the game. It will depend on which skills you choose to leave town with.
In this vein, it isn't about the class philosophy, but about the skill balancing... will warriors have answers to casters, and will healers have answers to melee, and what kinds of conditions or skill effects can each archetype use to disrupt the others?
I cannot wait to confirm all of this when we get a glimpse of augments.
A healer is a healer. It shouldnt be killable 1v1. Or except by very high dps class (with low defense). Would be fine for me, as far as the healer cannot kill no one of his level.
I'm failing to see the Rock, paper and Scissors in a class that can't be countered...
And I can give a few example where games that maybe intended healers to do no damage, but certainly can kill people is New World and Archeage. ever been hit by a 100k Skewer?
Very true people are effectively saying healer should have no counter lol.