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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.
I Have An Iron Hope That We're Gonna See A 'Templar'
Azherae
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
Good luck to both Intrepid and @Ironhope for the next stream.
Twitter's image was really well chosen, so props to whoever selected that.
I'm hype to see something 'additional' (a BossFight) but definitely will be rooting for all involved to have a great experience either way.
We're definitely past the point where we can expect anything we say in threads to influence the footage if it is the Cleric/Templar/Apostle style reveal I'm betting on, so let's have a different controversial conversation instead. How well should Clerics/Bards be able to DPS if they try?
My obviously biased vote is '70% of an average DPS character spec'.
The reason is because while I believe in 'Trinity' play, I see it moreso as pillars of play, not restrictions. You must have A healer for hard things or eventually you die due to effects uncleansed. You must have a Tank for hard things or eventually you die due to damage taken. You must have DPS for hard things or eventually you die by attrition.
Some games solve this by just giving everyone 'enough of each' and I disagree with this because it's stupid to balance (if you are in healer gear why should you still have enough damage to not die by attrition?) but I also don't think it's necessary to give each one 'very little' for this to work, in my experience.
I perceive good DPS as having enough additional Utility beyond just 'I do t3h damage' that I don't even think of 'Total Damage' as the real important thing in that 'slot', so I obviously favor 'being able to spec for damage and get up to near a Defensive Spec Fighter'.
I figure that any Cleric showcase will get us 'arguing' about this anyway, so head-start? Maybe it'll get us some extra tidbits of data on the live portion of stream.
Twitter's image was really well chosen, so props to whoever selected that.
I'm hype to see something 'additional' (a BossFight) but definitely will be rooting for all involved to have a great experience either way.
We're definitely past the point where we can expect anything we say in threads to influence the footage if it is the Cleric/Templar/Apostle style reveal I'm betting on, so let's have a different controversial conversation instead. How well should Clerics/Bards be able to DPS if they try?
My obviously biased vote is '70% of an average DPS character spec'.
The reason is because while I believe in 'Trinity' play, I see it moreso as pillars of play, not restrictions. You must have A healer for hard things or eventually you die due to effects uncleansed. You must have a Tank for hard things or eventually you die due to damage taken. You must have DPS for hard things or eventually you die by attrition.
Some games solve this by just giving everyone 'enough of each' and I disagree with this because it's stupid to balance (if you are in healer gear why should you still have enough damage to not die by attrition?) but I also don't think it's necessary to give each one 'very little' for this to work, in my experience.
I perceive good DPS as having enough additional Utility beyond just 'I do t3h damage' that I don't even think of 'Total Damage' as the real important thing in that 'slot', so I obviously favor 'being able to spec for damage and get up to near a Defensive Spec Fighter'.
I figure that any Cleric showcase will get us 'arguing' about this anyway, so head-start? Maybe it'll get us some extra tidbits of data on the live portion of stream.
Y'all know how Jamberry Roll.
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Comments
Now the flip side of this is healing in any non "good" pvp/top tier pve environmenst of years past is horrible as leveling/questing and even basic mobs tends to be a grind due to lackluster damage and while you will never die it ends up taking forever to make progress.
My hope for how these classes will work regarding dps is that you can basically use a "sliding scale" via abilities/weapon focus or abilities chosen (think NW... shudder) to make yourself anywhere from 100% healer/support to 30%healer/70% dps/tank via passives/actives etc.
Now there is a totally different question of what is viable/meta in this type of environment but I am hopeful that there will be room for creativity. BUTTTTTTTTT to get back to your question I am very much with you at the 70% of DPS area if they are "really trying"/spec'd that way. I also like the idea of raid parties/groups/what have you being like a stew with a lot of variability in terms of X is running some off tank 70/30 dps/tank build, Y is running 100% healer, Z is running 50/50 healer dps and A, B and C are also running variable "loadouts" as opposed to the more recent you need 4 dps, 2 healer, 2 tanks in GF to do this raid or whatever.
Edit: Got too excited. I am really hoping for some Templar coverage as I have a sneaking suspicion that is my "#1 heading into A2" as far as classes go, but overall any cleric coverage is extremely welcome. also wanted to echo that you and me are in agreement that I am excited for all that are involved tomorrow and hopefully we see some difficult-ish group content like a Boss.
Agreed, this specifically is less used for balance and more about gameplay and fun, basic combat revolves around attacking, defending and sustaining yourself, regardless of your class, so from an individual player experience perspective, everyone should have tools to do those things to a certain extent in order to engage with the full combat system. For example, (in extreme cases) if your character has no reason to be defensive, then you will never have to strategize around when to block, so you will miss out on a portion of the combat gameplay, which dumbs things down and is less engaging.
Due to the fact that its relative to the enemy's capabilities, (balancing wise, all else equal) - it doesn't really matter whether they can do "a little" or "a lot" of each role, its just about how much they can do in that role relative to the enemy.
So, based on the premise that each class should be able to engage with each role to a degree, this means it needs to be viable to actually perform in each role to a certain degree, so the classes would need to have at least a "fighting chance" in each of the "dps, tank, sustain" aspects.
My idea of a "fighting chance" is through having a reasonable amount of wiggle room to out-skill the opponent in each combat role. This is done best when skill is really the only factor which happens when classes are perfectly balanced, which is ideal for the most engaging combat (which would be more akin to fighting game balancing), but then every character feels very similar at the end of the day. Giving the classes identity an advantages in each area makes them feel unique and different, but does create imbalance to an extent. You can account for this by allowing counterpicking to be more prevelant in the process, or adjusting how drastic the advantages/disadvantages are. If the advantages/disadvantages are small enough that a reasonable amount of out-skilling the enemy can make up for it, it can still feel well balanced, if that gap is too large it becomes more of a hard-counter system where counterpicking is more meta than your actual combat skill.
So, from a balancing perspective I don't really think the percentage matters per say, in terms of "a cleric is 70% dps, therefore it is a dps based class who can kill other classes before it gets killed" its more of what that percentage is vs the other classes with that type of role. So (all else equal) a cleric with 70% dps focus vs a fighter with 85% dps focus would be the end same result as a cleric with 15% dps focus vs a fighter with 25% dps focus, in terms of performing that dps role.
Obviously the clerics dps output can influence the clerics ability to out-tank/sustain when combined with its dps, but then tanking/sustain would be its actual role at that point its just using dps to achieve it, so its not actually performing a dps role, it just can do damage and engage with the offensive aspect of combat.
So, when looking at what roles each class should perform, I think we would need to look more at how they are relative to each other in each role, to get an idea of how well they can perform each role in practice. Basically my opinion is that each class should all be cabable of performing every combat role through a reasonable amount of out-skilling the opponent, but with each class having an easier time doing this in its own specific role- and that this is determined relative to each of the other classes overall combat capabilities in that role.
I say "overall combat capabilities" because this also isn't just a numbers based thing, since the combat is action to an extent, its not just number crunching that determines your offensive output, defensive output, and sustain. Your combat spacing and timing through the combat mechanics (block/movement/hitboxes) is now a huge factor in your end result of efficiency in each role. So we would also have to look at each classes efficiency in each of those action combat aspects and combine that with the hard numbers, to get a better idea of how the classes stack up against each other relative to each role- and at that point I think its best to keep that gap very small for each role, in order to have the most engaging combat thats still balanced well.
Im sure you already are aware of this and chose the 70% because of it being a good "starting point" to begin to make those relative adjustments and tuning, in which case that would be reasonable, but kind of pointless to discuss because it just depends on how many class builds there are to tune and balance relative to each other, and will require a lot of iteration to balance well. Interesting topic nonetheless though!
You've pointed out to me a flaw in my post so I've edited it to say '70% of an average DPS character spec'.
I too, was thinking of it in terms of relative function, not 'how much of their build needs to be put into DPS abilities', but I failed to make that clear so it's clarified now hopefully.
As for another point, we don't actually know YET whether or not a Healer's capacity can be entirely separate from the Action Combat aspect of the game. If Intrepid goes by what I think was the 'majority' of feedback from Healers over the last few years, it seems more likely to me that you'd get the 'basic' Cleric as being a very 'low Action' style Archetype that would have to be augmented to gain mobility.
Of course, that does limit their DPS potential against mobile targets to an extent, but that could also be a 'lever' for balance.
I disagree with you as I think / believe and enjoyed this aspect.
A healer shoudnt be able to solo anything. Most classes shouldnt be able to solo.
Solo content should be severely limited and difficult.
Sow progress is GOOD. Leveling becomes meaningful. Lower level content becomes meaningful. I don't want to race to end level in 3 days, 5 days, 10 days, 30 days or even 45 days. Everything should take time and effort.
Thus the holy trinity - Healers only small narrow route of solo content should be via undead. ALA Everquest - I had few limited leveling zones to go to as a cleric if I wanted to solo, but I had to be a TWINK to do so. If not - it was all about LFG.
Players gotta embrace that an MMORPG isnt a solo game or a lobby game just sharing a world. It's about interacting, cooperating with other places to achieves goals TOGETHER and thus, I hope the cleric is limited in DPS scope and high demand in groups.
While I also enjoy the game type you're describing, I don't really feel it ends up being that way because it tends to affect only Healers and Bards in the end.
DPS just find 'the thing they can kill before their HP runs out in big bursts and ride their cooldowns. Moreso what I'm saying here is that if DPS can solo, Cleric should probably be tuned to keep up. Most people don't jump into playing Cleric 'so they can solo' anyway, right?
I feel that limiting Cleric in DPS scope, or indeed limiting other classes in sustainability (not necessarily healing, but for example learning to hunt very skillfully as mentioned above) leans more into MMORPG elements because it allows more flexibility in characterization for those who RP.
And by RP I mean even just 'RP through their build' which is... kind of the point of a Role Playing Game to me.
I dislike the 'you can't solo but you're in high demand for groups' for other technical reasons as well, but I complained about it in other threads and I feel it'd derail this one, so I'm just mentioning it so you know where I'm coming from and can therefore 'dismiss' my perspective in terms of strength of our disagreement.
I think @Azherae and @Neurath are grabbing onto what I was referencing. But I have no qualms with slow progress/leveling and I do admit that I am jumping into Cleric partially because I enjoy healing but also you literally never have to LFG and I find I am on speed dial for a lot of people often. I mean specifically a DPS can kill X things faster or complete task Y faster just due to bursting things down and "riding" cooldowns so more areas of the game will be affected than just me looking to solo lobby the game because that is just not the case.
Let's say I have some down time and want to harvest hides, it takes me 1 minute to kill the mob because I am a heal bot + small damage effects so it takes me an hour to get 60 units of hide. the DPS can just outright complete that faster (by magnitudes often is the case) so all aspects of play that are combat focused (gathering included) is just incongruently to my detriment. I would love if I never had to do any content solo, and there was always groups of stuff constantly needing me to heal or whatever but that will just never be the case.
At the end of the day I still stand by my statement and am hopeful that I can be self-sustaining as a Cleric, and that my DPS will only be hampered by "mana management" or how I choose to allocate my cooldowns/abilities and not just because I am heal-bot 3000 and I get an auto attack and that's it.
My apologies, I should have assumed thats what you meant. I would say 70% of end output relative to dps, would be reasonable, maybe even a bit higher to close that gap just a bit.
Yea, I was more so just saying it as a "reminder" that if it ends up being the case that action is prevelant, then we would have to account for that in addition to just the raw numbers to get an idea of that classes "end output" relative to other classes within a given role.
If you can't do any adventuring without a group, if you need to find partners before leaving the safety of a settlement: you're basically playing a lobby game with extra steps. The city, your friend list and guild mates are the lobby. No, it's not that much of a stretch.
As someone who's often played secondary healers, what I wonder most about healers in AoC is if it will be possible to create these type of characters without having cleric as the main archetype. Doesn't look like it, so the question of their DPS potential is interesting as it may be the only way to get that type of gameplay.
I have thought about this and have concluded that Bard will feature healing (unsubstantiated opinion) but unless the Cleric class features a monumental amount of build options/abilities one "type" of healer seems to shoehorn cleric as "heal-bot". On the other side of the coin, it's possible that there is just a very low amount of healing in AoC in general and that even clerics will be some form of heal/dps hybrid.
I'm hoping for the 'low amount of healing' but NOT the 'likely heal/dps hybrid' because my preference for the threat-type of MMOs is not 'damage taken' but 'crippling effects stacked up'.
There's lots of reasons I could rant about as to why I think this is better, but overall I'm definitely hoping for a bit lower on the Actual HP Healing scale if they can balance their other intentions well enough relative to it.
It will probably boil down to how "close" to the trinity system will they stay faithful to. I am good either way and would not mind low healing in the slightest if it provides other ways to remain engaging like lots of bleeds/effects to manage or buffs/utility to add and manage but if it again just boils down to "I cast AOE damage spell x50".. oh "I should put a shield on the tank". Then it will just be bad design.
Excited either way for tomorrow as I think that will color a lot of my opinion (was not in A1) and with the looming A2 happening SOON(tm). I guess it will paint a better picture on what will be expected.
But if we're comparing solo dps capabilities between a cleric/bard that has a dps build and another dps archetype with a dps build, then I'd prefer the C/B to be at around 60% in most cases and around 120% in some. Those "some" would be mob types that clerics are good against (smth along the lines of holy/unholy types).
I'm used to bards being buff machines which lets them do more solo dps than an unbuffed dps char, but I'd hope that Intrepid goes away from those kinds of extremes, so a bard would be around 80-90% of a dps char.
Imo the cleric should be ~40% against normal mobs (mainly due to high mana use), but should also have a few mob types that they can kill quite easily. That mob type would be limited, so solo clerics would have to contest them. But as we all know, solo clerics are a rare kind of player, so I don't think it'd be that much of a problem.
And so a cleric/bard would have the buff/debuff boosts against normal mobs, which would bring him up to ~60% of a dps char, while against those special mob types it would push him over 100%.
I am absolutely on board with the Cleric featuring the "bulk" of the party heals, and would love to see the bard with spot heals/bubbles/wards/etc and maybe effects like "All party members in 10m get 15% buff to heals received" or other healing adjacent effects. I just think it is mildly narrow game design if the cleric is the only class that can heal at all (or specifically is responsible for the bulk of the healing in all scenarios). Even if other classes can part time heal I think that would lead to more diversity.
That aside, I think we can all agree that Clerics should not be DPS/Heal war machines and that them taking a substantial hit to their DPS performance vs a DPS kitted class (lets just say DPS fighter) is welcome but I don't believe it can be to the severity that they are unplayable in solo/open world (again everyone seems to be in agreeance that somewhere between 80-60% sweet spot, even if that means a huge mana inefficiency) as that makes the class really distasteful to approach (obviously my biased opinion). I know I will probably have no trouble finding a group, and they will be in demand but if I am at a huge disadvantage in all content outside of group pvp and WBs/Raids/Dungeons it seems like it won't be very fun unless someone is waiting for me to log on to heal them or function in that group setting.
In Maplestory, bishops (advanced clerics) have an "Archangel" toggle that makes them "change form" which basically puts them in DPS mode at the expense of healing.
This is pretty effective at getting around this issue, however it also completely destroys role identity because then clerics were matching (and in many cases out-shining) other classes at the push of a button.
Could be a fun class fantasy if it was a more like an ult, rather than a toggle.
Previously I suggested giving supports wider AoE's but less single-target damage - so that they can compete when it comes to grinding mobs (coz they can hit more of them at once) without bossing/PvP advantage; but someone pointed out that this would limit the TYPE of mobs that are accessible to supports. Is this a bad tradeoff?
This isn't really about a 'need'.
Or rather, not a need for any specific 'thing that happens'.
It gets back to other aspects of design relative to 'having enough of them around', 'having them able to remain in sync with groups they like', and 'Roleplay class identity'.
Some people (you've seen them) just view themselves as 'Adventuring Healers that can Heal and DPS'. Sometimes, as you suggest 'Ah, but not at the same time' and sometimes 'under complex conditions' such as what NiKr suggests with 'special target mobs'.
The main 'problem' is that those things, by emergent design, often are available to other classes as well (might not be in Ashes) so it creates this weird situation where designers 'spend a lot of time making sure healers have less DPS or survivability' (the latter is more justified imo, but also probably should be tweakable) to prevent them from doing stuff that others can find other ways to do.
As for your question... I don't know because I don't really enjoy games where you can SURVIVE fighting too many mobs at once even on a healer, alone or even duo. I don't enjoy the gameplay type much other than as a 'hey watch this cool thing I can do when I time it perfectly with all cooldowns and all mana available' from a Mage.
tl;dr my experience is that if you make Healers/Bards too rigid in an MMORPG it becomes 'a lobby game' to them, they get sick of it, and either 'rush to endgame' (since that's what a large subset of the people who ask them to heal want to do as soon as they HAVE a healer/bard) or play something else.
In a game with Secondary Archetypes, I also feel a lack of DPS would create the 'why even bother trying?' meta quite quickly.
My game experience is that if you have varied and good PvE, every class has something like this,
I wouldn't think of this as 'the Cleric/Bard does extra damage to the mob' (this tends to lead to problems) but I would prefer "DPS do less if they don't have Cleric/Bard cleanses or buffs" across MANY mobs.
This therefore 'slows the DPS' but lets them still try, which makes many places more viable for adventuring in a way that might meet people or support smaller groups. If you had 'Bard/Cleric does extra damage to mobs', the DPS has no 'reason to go to that area looking for a Bard/Cleric to hang out with/bother/fight' because they are wasting their time if they happen to not find any and the gameplay isn't necessarily more interesting.
If you have 'This mob/opponent debuffs me enough that I want a healer/buffer' you can have more interesting gameplay involving shifts in your own build, consumables if you're determined and just killing some time, etc.
I'm mostly mentioning this because I'm aware of the difference in your PvE experiences.
This choice could be done through gear stats, or more simply skill points.
Say "X offensive skill now does more damage, but Y healing spell costs twice as much mana".
So your through put of healing may be lower. But you can put through some panic heals for the party, killing your resource pool, and taking that DPS lower at that time.
In the Bards case maybe they trade more and more of the
'buff group' power for greater 'buff self'.
It is just a question of balance, if you want to create those options, or blurring of dps vs utility, you just have to make sure that the total remains 100% and not 120%
I know what you're saying but it's a bit weird because it means we have to derive some sort of conversion for DPS to "healing equivalent": we can say 100% damage for 0% healing - that makes sense, but then what is 100% healing for 0% damage?
So to rephrase the original question into your language: what should be the default ratio of healing to damage for a cleric? 30% heal to 70% damage? Does that mean if a cleric goes 100% heal to 0% damage they become a heal bot and are 333.33% more effective at healing than default clerics?
This problem suggests it needs to be a binary choice - or a choice with threshold levels.
I should insert my opinion at this point - I like special numbers because they could create some sort of mathematical symmetry down the line so my preferred ratio is:
1 - (1 / e) = 63.21%*
*with the expectation that optimal grinding is a group activity where being a support is mildly superior to partying without supports. (mildly = ~5%) I wouldn't expect supports to solo grind, they'd spend solo time in the game's 83284 other systems instead.
So a breakdown of other reasons would be:
- not enough clerics - need to make no-cleric parties viable
- remain in sync with groups they like - need to make a party of all-clerics viable
- roleplay class identity - some cleric fantasies involve casting very powerful offensive holy magic
- lobby game - avoid having clerics getting stuck with group-content-only and locked out of everything else
- survival against too many mobs - mob AI should be challenging, not a risk-free agro everything you can see coz your heals are that good
ACKyeah I can see how my preferences don't work with points 2, 3 and 5
I don't understand your last point tho - "why bother even trying" meta?
If you are Cleric/Fighter and you go "I'm a Templar" and your group just goes 'yeah but you're a healer so focus on the healing thanks, please take augments that enhance your healing'...
What's the point of being anything other than a High Priest or Oracle?
I personally prefer soloable content to be on the side of specialized design, rather than a general one. So a cleric's solo content would be different from a tank's one and/or from a rogue's one. Well, specialized when it comes to the mob pve part of it, of course.
So like I said, cleric's mobs would have some weakness towards its kit, so cleric would be much stronger against those mobs than any other archetype. Rogue's mobs would have slower turn rates, so the rogue would be able to damage them in the back (if Intrepid go with the design choice). Tank's mobs would have weapons that go through armor much better, but are blocked by shields very well, and while everyone could wear a shield the overall speed of going through mobs would be slower w/o proper shield passives that most archetypes wouldn't bother with. Ranger's mobs would be susceptible to slowing debuffs. Etc etc. I want both of those things. The former for purely solo content and the latter for anything that requires more than one person to farm.
There could still be mechanically difficult mobs that push the solo players to their max, but my main point is that any truly solo content should be specialized enough to avoid pitting completely different archetypes against each other in pvp during their solo farming. Because with an RPS solo balancing, you'd always have locations where some archetype will be stronger than the other by default. Which would lead to the weaker side feeling bad about doing solo content.
I'm sure there's better ways of addressing this in the pve design itself, but I'm mainly looking at it from the pov of pvper who's constantly looking around for any attackers.
As you know, our divergence here comes from my strong disagreement with class based RPS balancing.
Therefore I have no opinion on the effectiveness of this design type, it's not for me, so I have no reason to have any.
Intrepid's PvE design is going to be divisive definitely because there are two (maybe three) pretty strongly opposed camps of PvE design and I don't believe mixing them in a game ever goes well. Their PvP design will therefore be emergent from that (or y'know, just 'terrible')
Whatever makes Steven happy in the end is what they should go with, but note that SO FAR what we've seen indicates we're getting 'what I want'. I'll let you know as soon as I see signs of that changing.
There's a lot more they have to account for when every class can wear every armor.
A little light on the 'ability to judge healing as a flow' due to the mob choice, but nothing that stood out to me as a concern.
Convictions and 'Can do damage by targeting enemy with specific healing skill' (I feel like it was explicitly NOT clarified whether this was for undead mobs only or not, but we do at least know that it will not HEAL any mobs) will definitely enable a LOT more on the augments front, I believe, but we're still in the space of mainly knowing static skills.
Just adding that though, changes the entire 'discussion' relative to 'DPS vs not' on the Cleric side while keeping the number of active skills considerably lower and doubling down on the Risk vs Reward, since you are specifically choosing 'to use your cooldown as well as mana on a Damage burst vs waiting for a heal'.
Could result in different playstyles based on how Conviction is used, or could be equally easily disregarded so that pure-heal Clerics never have a reason to use Convictions or might have very limited usage for them due to their style.
It was a little hard to tell why the Regeneration style skill was so strong (perhaps it too, was affected by Conviction, but I doubt it).
I didn't see anything that, based on my experience from other games and speculative expectations, would make me think anything has gone in any non-positive directions, and that's including all the subtle stuff I do with my overanalyzing.
Smite with Holy Fire!
Y'know, if you're into that.
I really like the idea of the conviction system, although I couldn't really tell when Steven was generating or using conviction (except when the spell chained). I'd really like it if some of the augments from our secondary archetypes change how our conviction bonuses work - so much potential there.
Finally - really nice cleanup of the AoE spell, as much as I liked the golden bubble I have to admit it was a lot of screen clutter. Its shorter duration also feels more meaningful.
Though this was a purely damaging skill there, but it only worked against undead mobs. And the Bishop class that Steven mentioned used this to farm solo.
Though like I said, I do think that the ability will be able to damage any mobs, pretty much for the exact reasons Azherae pointed out.
I'm trying to figure out what you mean by this one, so bear with me a bit, it might be faster to guess.
Are you talking about weaknesses to elements/energies or damage types? Because that's the only thing I can connect from the given image.
I know that some games don't have any elemental weaknesses at all, and L2M apparently has it by area rather than by mob? So is that what you mean? If so, yes, the concept of 'specialized target' in a game with a full element system would apply to nearly everyone in various ways. Doubly so if weapons do different types of damage (I'm used to Blunt, Slashing, and Piercing).
Or are you referring to something else specific to the 'Using Light or Holy Magic on Undead, separate to their additional weaknesses to this Element'?
e.g. in FFXI, "Ghosts" have highly reduced damage from all three sources of physical damage but hitting them with a Banish spell temporarily removes this damage reduction along with the extra damage you get from them being weak to Light/Holy magic so you use it before your WeaponSkill.
Is there a similar thing? Or are you referring moreso to the 'Ability to heal them' and just 'that being a way you can farm with a Healer'?
The effects on the overall DPS and strategies of a Cleric or specifically Templar seem like they'd be affected based on which of these things you were talking about (for example because Oracles could always augment an attack skill with Elemental damage).
Ah, and I should've added that the ability from the picture could only be used against the undead, so the healers couldn't farm any other mob with it. Which is why I said that Steven would probably avoid that kind of design and referenced your reasoning for that decision.
In all honesty, I was expecting to see a low level cleric with the core, basic stuff and.... I really wasn't disappointed.
I like the direction they're going, the synergy system they got in mind, the way they try to combine offensive with support actions and the way they've approached things so far gives me quite a bit of hope.
Its way too early to see any sort of DPS balance or anything of the sort and was not expecting to see anything like that, although I would have appreciated Steven giving us a hint in regards to how the various Cleric classes will work and their general desired performance.
But yeah, what they've said so far is encouraging.
I do see Templar as a more DPS focused Cleric thats supposed to stack a lot of conviction (or whatever it will be named) and just unload massive heals, if he managed to do enough dps.
You could also make a very good templar by having him do more DPS the more he heals and give him the ability to just spam instant heals if he keeps attacking.
Either way, I'm not sure Steven himself is sure how balance will work out exactly in this regard, right now.