I doubt you want two bards. If buffs can stack then the best team would be tank and 7 bards which I doubt. I think summoner took the off healing roll from bard and I also suspect you will need a bard to buff a cleric.
This means, one of each would be optimal for hard 8 man content. Summoner can also provide a tank to support the tank as a jack of all trades.
No, it will not concern me. Dispelling is a very common part of a healer's gameplay. @Azherae
I instantly suggested an AoE placement dispel for the Cleric role after seeing Mage showcase but I also felt like Steven will not want this in the game.
Bard and Cleric being in the same category might still concern me.
I have already written about this, you can make Cleric as simple as you want and still force it in-game by having it be op.
I agree with you, yes, and I understand the concern with things like 'what you think Steven won't want in the game'. But the post is (as I understand it) about two things.
1. Wanting to keep Resurrection mostly Cleric exclusive so that they're not just a healbot (for HP?)
2. Feeling that doing so and designing around it somewhat will lead to better gameplay (I'm not so sure about if you actually are saying this).
If I treat Death as 'an important to remove status effect' which is then 'compelling because of the interactions the Cleric could have with it', then in my mind, any other similar (but less ... crippling) status effect that has an impact on performance in combat would do the same thing, without needing to target the 'Fallen' status effect for 'uniqueness'.
If a Cleric is limited in how easily or quickly it can remove statuses, then it will be meaningful to choose which statuses to prioritize removing. However since 'Fallen/Dead' is a status that will be a priority for removal 99% of the time, it doesn't seem to me that it would be very meaningful/necessary to make that one limited to Clerics. That's the one I'd primarily 'let anyone deal with', opening up more tactical options.
If Steven doesn't want that gameplay type and prefers Clerics to be very 'HP recovery heavy' then I can see your concern, I just don't know what you're basing this opinion of Steven's preferences on.
In the current iteration i requested Dual Targetting for Cleric like the healers from Warhammer Online. Otherwise, I would hope the Cleric has both free aim (Action skills) and tab skills which do damage/heal, have a burst heal, burst damage, DoT, a normalisation heal, a HoT and a Lance.
Dual targeting was very overpowered in Warhammer Online. The healers were nigh on unkillable. I don't want such an outcome for Ashes which is why I prefer the lance. Though, dual targeting done well would be a boon too.
A hint that a Mage developer might not want an AoE placement Dispel in his game. A placement Dispel is different from a targeted Dispel. And even if there were the same they could still get implemented.
This is probably the thing I'm missing, because I might not have been listening to the stream clearly enough, and I won't ask you to find it for me if you don't remember exactly offhand, I'll go rewatch it.
But in case you do remember:
What was it that Tradd said, and approximately where in the Mage Showcase was it?
Specifically I don't mean that it has to be anything directly related to Dispels or Cleanses. What, if anything, did Tradd say at any point that made you concerned and feel as if Cleric's place in the game is fragile? Cause as a Cleric myself, I want to know if I should be worried too.
It is true that the devs ran 4 man groups to an 8 person location but I do not believe that is indicative of what players will be able to do if the belief in the harder elements are to be believed. Thus, I'm not sure what content you refer to except duos, trios and quads who level together without a Cleric.
Why are we talking about Tradd? In the sentence you quoted, the Mage developer I am referring to is Steven himself. Maybe I am wrong to call him a developer but the founder of Intrepid. To my knowledge, Cleric has not been discussed in the last stream.
Apologies again, I think of Steven as a Cleric, not a Mage, based on what I know of him.
Obviously someone like Steven who played so many MMOs has played multiple roles at different times. I'm more familiar with his Cleric play and tendencies than his Mage ones.
The classes who have resurrection are all Clerics so here is referring to them indirectly. And he is saying that classes without Clerics will be able to continue to go on which suggests that these parties will be able to do small-party content despite lacking a healer.
Is this in itself a concern somehow, for my clarity?
I'd expect that to be even more true in a game where debuffs are the primary threat situation.
Games like L2 (as I understand it from NiKr mostly so don't quote me) where 'strong content' is relatively HP-damage based would be the games where I'd expect the healer to be vital, whereas a 'heavy debuffs' game is exactly the game type where I would expect a small group with no healer to manage content slowly, with a large ramp-up in effectiveness when the Healer is added, which is about as much as I'd ask for?
As for the other point, I don't really have a response to it, and I shouldn't have focused on it, so please ignore the whole 'Steven as Mage/Steven as Cleric' thing.
I have already elaborated on the subject. If I have failed to show you why I doubt that I am capable of doing it.
Alright, then can you answer just two last things for me since they're not clear.
Do you personally desire that small groups doing small group content always need Clerics?
Do you perceive that it's possible to have a type of small group content where adding a Cleric would naturally have similar effects to adding a Bard and then your feeling is just that Steven might not want to make it?
What I desire is to play an archetype with unique and significant value to my team.
I don't understand the rest. I suggest that you go over what I've written about Ashes of Creation's Trinity if you are interested in my perspective on balance.
I remember you didn't like the cleric back then. Wondered if you have appreciated the change in direction or are still ambivalent about the cleric. Bard is still slated as a non healer so cleric is all we have.
I didnt really have an opinion on Intrepids version of a cleric back then. There may have been aspects of it I liked or didnt like, but no real opinion on it as a whole. I still dont really have an opinion on it, as there isnt enough information to have an opinion as yet.
I have not said it isn't a heal. I stated you do not need to react to any stressor, that the game is playing instead of you and you know it's true.
Ah, I see what you are saying.
Essentially you are saying the same thing about that specific healing mechanic as you are saying about Intrepids clerics - you dont have enough information to form a valid opinion, yet have formed a solid, immovable opinion regardless.
This is technically far more supportive of Niem's point than anything else.
I don't remember, have YOU played MOBAs much?
Guess I missed the point then, cause my 1.5k hours of dota2 (2.5k mmr though) were roughly the same in feel as my L2 gameplay. Well, at least when I played with friends instead of randos.
You have mobs you want to farm, the enemy wants to stop you. You fight both at the same time and try to minimize the incoming damage from either by moving around, CCing and healing. In late game it'd be towers and player enemies. That would be closer to an "attack during a boss farm" situation. You'd be under attack from the boss/tower (who deal a ton of dmg), while the enemy players try to stop you from killing it. You still gotta move around, heal a ton, and ideally end up killing both the players and the boss/tower. Oh, and considering that it's lategame, there'd be a fairly high chance that even the dead players might be on your ass as soon as they die, because they got resurrected. Except you could do smth about that in L2, while in dota you'd just hope that the enemy doesn't have the money or has their buyback on cd.
Games like L2 (as I understand it from NiKr mostly so don't quote me) where 'strong content' is relatively HP-damage based would be the games where I'd expect the healer to be vital, whereas a 'heavy debuffs' game is exactly the game type where I would expect a small group with no healer to manage content slowly, with a large ramp-up in effectiveness when the Healer is added, which is about as much as I'd ask for?
It was a combination of "mob hit hard" and "I don't want to die, cause even with a healer rez that's still several fucking hours of grinding that XP back". No one wanted to just keep dying during simple farm. This is why I completely don't understand OP's pov. I guess they just have a completely different gaming experience and find dying to be something super trivial and normal. I do not, so I will always bring a healer with me. Especially in a pvx game where the chances of pvp are quite high at all times.
As for the bard part of the discussion, we have too little info about Ashes bards, so it's very difficult to say whether Steven copied L2 there too. I think I remember hearing that they don't want as big of an impact from buffs in Ashes, but then it would mean that bard has some bigger role in some other place, because if buffs are inconsequential then what would be the point of having a bard in your group.
And if buffs are not inconsequential, then why the hell would you not maximize your output by leaving the bard out. And pvxness comes into play yet again. I'd expect a group of 2dps/bard/heal to be much much better in pvp than a 3dps/heal or a 3 dps/bard or, god forbid, 4dps. At least, once again, that's how it was in L2. Even with just a small buff advantage, your party (or quite often you yourself) would be stronger than the opponent.
I remember you didn't like the cleric back then. Wondered if you have appreciated the change in direction or are still ambivalent about the cleric. Bard is still slated as a non healer so cleric is all we have.
I didnt really have an opinion on Intrepids version of a cleric back then. There may have been aspects of it I liked or didnt like, but no real opinion on it as a whole. I still dont really have an opinion on it, as there isnt enough information to have an opinion as yet.
Fair enough. Opinions are like rivers and change all the time. I do think you can form opinions and give feedback though. I'd hate to wait too long and miss the chance.
Maybe the open-world PvP is going to necessitate the presence of clerics at all times. This would mean that in 2v2 skirmishes the party with a cleric must always win against a party without one. Because if you can't sustain the damage of 2 dps where you can use both aoe and st healing what is your impact going to be in larger fights where you can rely only on aoe healing? Practically nonexistent.
This stands out to me as an essential flaw in the logic in this thread. A deeper concept regarding the strength of the healer (where the underlying principle works in PvE as well as PvP) that most of your ideas generally seem to be hinging on, and one that I don't think adds up. If you could please go a bit more into detail on how this belief makes sense, I think it could really help make your ideas more realistic and constructive.
Healers' single-target heals, and their HPS output in general, are impactful because they allow their allies to go in, deal damage, retreat (In PvE "retreating" would usually just be achieved by "tanking less damage" than fully exiting), and quickly join the fight again at full capacity. Every time this happens in a large scale PvP fight, the healer's value is equivalent to one new reinforcement on that team. You're replacing a fighter that the enemy took out of combat.
One team's DPSminusHPS versus the other team's DPSminusHPS cannot be how you calcluate the class choice effectiveness of two parties, because it would assume that everyone involved would run in and maximise their DPS on one focused target after the other until they're dead. You're not considering that spacing, cover, zoning, and CC all beneficially factor into the effectiveness of healing, because the healer only has to keep those targets alive who have taken damage.
Purely mathematically, you don't have to be able to outheal the damage of even just a single enemy fighter to come out ahead as the healer: If 5 fighters are focusing down one of your team's 4 fighters, all their fighters are only relevant until they've been taken out of the fight. If a member of that team retreats when they're low, it will do nothing to help their team win, but rather remove their DPS from the fight even earlier.
On the other hand, one of your fighters that the enemies have been focusing can retreat, be healed back up, and join the fight again at serviceable health, while the healer-less enemies' lost HP remains essentially constant. While you can repeat this process as long as more than two of your active fighters have serviceable HP (to keep damaging the enemy team while your hurt ally is running), for the enemy's team, the effectiveness of their units ends when they are too low HP to rejoin the fight.
Your healing breaks the enemies' effectiveness of focusing your units while they are being wittled down themselves.
In principle it's the same logic as why a ranged unit can deal 300 DPS and still be more effective than a 500DPS melee. (I don't think you'd question that statement.) It's the same concept as kiting. It just works a bit differently, because in this heal-kiting system, the functions of tanking and (negative-)DPSing are spread out across multiple players.
And crucially, the healer's influence on this dynamic works even if the enemy matches your DPS distance range, so, unlike normal kiting, the healer's team of archers & mages can effectively "kite" the enemy archers & mages, by separately retreating into their heal-only range as needed.
And just to be clear, because there's a good chance you'll say that retreating and healing back up is not an exciting part of gameplay: it's not like the healer only starts being effective once someone has retreated. Your hypothetical 300 HPS already counteracts some of the enemy fighter's 500 DPS as soon as the enemies have started to deal damage. You're still part of the active combat. You can just *also* affect combat outside of the active combat range, when someone has retreated.
This is just a point about the principle behind the mathematical effectiveness of healing, and doesn't decide whether or not a particular healer's gameplay design is fun and challenging to play and make decisions with.
I have played AION, Albion, BDO, FFXIV, Lost Ark, and WoW(free trial).
You mostly play Asian dungeon grind & gank MMOs. You don't know Western dungeon design and good RvR. You don't know how the healer's role plays out when it centers around your allies taking unpredictable damage and relying on you to restore control.
I've played Asian MMOs and enjoyed healing in some. Those games aren't bad and theír class design isnt bad. But you shouldn't be so certain in your sweeping claims of doom about class design in a different type of game, when the issues you are concerned about are clearly already prevented by the different gameplay design that you don't seem to have enough experience in.
I have played AION, Albion, BDO, FFXIV, Lost Ark, and WoW(free trial). I don't think single-player MMOs exist.
A good example for single-player MMOs are games that encourage questing for the story as a primary drive to play the game. GW2 is among the most obvious examples, and that's even supposed to be an RvR game on some level. Same for ESO, whose daily-quest design sadly ends up encouraging players to treat it as a singleplayer game with a dungeon group finder and a PvP arena lobby. SW:TOR was one of the first games called out for appealing to this type of playstyle.
What unites these and many other games is that the overland map essentially just ends up functioning as an oversized lobby, with a singleplayer storyline to quest through. There are plenty of single-player MMOs on the Western market that show their intent in all kinds of themepark elements, and design choices (group finders, XP-gain optimisation and loot design, difficulty of overland PvE combat & XP grind, PvP design, etc).
Denying that single-player MMOs exist exposes your lack of experience with this side of the market.
Gating heals behind combos, mechanics or conditions is always going to feel terrible and out of place because of the very nature of healing. You are always in a state of responding to what others near you do. You do not control the fight.
I agree with your view on the healer's agency over control of the fight, and your resulting preference regarding spell design. I also prefer healer designs that don't require distractions in your own kit that restrict you from correctly responding to the actual priorities on the battlefield.
But that doesn't mean a game's design should never have those distractions, just that they have to leave enough room for you to focus on the real priorities of your class. Your heals can have fancy procs, and still end up "simply" providing potent heals that exist alongside your buffs and utility, as long as managing the procs leaves enough room to approach the rest of the fight normally. Then the distraction doesn't need to be a limitation to your general skill expression and strategy; it's just an extra obstacle to work on to fulfill your role even more optimally and raise the skill-ceiling.
That's a matter of game balance and the exact numbers involved in your class's skill interactions, not a binary question about whether a design feature should exist.
And so again this leaves me with the same issue as your comments in the other thread.
Your arguments are that the Cleric's design is lackluster because
we haven't been shown a lot of interesting abilities - and if they would exist, Intrepid would have shown them off
the healer doesn't seem useful enough because its own DPS lowers the effectiveness of its HPS (as if that was somehow a conclusive argument)
the healer doesn't seem useful enough in principle because its presence doesn't outcompete any other class (this is where I'd need your response to the top half of this comment)
But you don't mention
what interesting abilities you want to see
or
what level of usefulness you think needs to be demonstrated at this stage in the alpha.
Instead you're insisting on giving the healer a single unique ability to make the class impactful? Whose problem does that even begin to solve? It's not like you'd be playing the class if it was doomed to be a glorified revive bot.
I see BDO and the other games he played, and im getting a sus feeling on his thoughts with healing..... BDO is a glorified single player mmorpg as well. Playing wow on a free trail doesn't say anything either as far as knowing end game healing. Things are starting to make sense....
Comments
This means, one of each would be optimal for hard 8 man content. Summoner can also provide a tank to support the tank as a jack of all trades.
I agree with you, yes, and I understand the concern with things like 'what you think Steven won't want in the game'. But the post is (as I understand it) about two things.
1. Wanting to keep Resurrection mostly Cleric exclusive so that they're not just a healbot (for HP?)
2. Feeling that doing so and designing around it somewhat will lead to better gameplay (I'm not so sure about if you actually are saying this).
If I treat Death as 'an important to remove status effect' which is then 'compelling because of the interactions the Cleric could have with it', then in my mind, any other similar (but less ... crippling) status effect that has an impact on performance in combat would do the same thing, without needing to target the 'Fallen' status effect for 'uniqueness'.
If a Cleric is limited in how easily or quickly it can remove statuses, then it will be meaningful to choose which statuses to prioritize removing. However since 'Fallen/Dead' is a status that will be a priority for removal 99% of the time, it doesn't seem to me that it would be very meaningful/necessary to make that one limited to Clerics. That's the one I'd primarily 'let anyone deal with', opening up more tactical options.
If Steven doesn't want that gameplay type and prefers Clerics to be very 'HP recovery heavy' then I can see your concern, I just don't know what you're basing this opinion of Steven's preferences on.
This is probably the thing I'm missing, because I might not have been listening to the stream clearly enough, and I won't ask you to find it for me if you don't remember exactly offhand, I'll go rewatch it.
But in case you do remember:
What was it that Tradd said, and approximately where in the Mage Showcase was it?
Specifically I don't mean that it has to be anything directly related to Dispels or Cleanses. What, if anything, did Tradd say at any point that made you concerned and feel as if Cleric's place in the game is fragile? Cause as a Cleric myself, I want to know if I should be worried too.
Apologies again, I think of Steven as a Cleric, not a Mage, based on what I know of him.
Obviously someone like Steven who played so many MMOs has played multiple roles at different times. I'm more familiar with his Cleric play and tendencies than his Mage ones.
Is this in itself a concern somehow, for my clarity?
I'd expect that to be even more true in a game where debuffs are the primary threat situation.
Games like L2 (as I understand it from NiKr mostly so don't quote me) where 'strong content' is relatively HP-damage based would be the games where I'd expect the healer to be vital, whereas a 'heavy debuffs' game is exactly the game type where I would expect a small group with no healer to manage content slowly, with a large ramp-up in effectiveness when the Healer is added, which is about as much as I'd ask for?
As for the other point, I don't really have a response to it, and I shouldn't have focused on it, so please ignore the whole 'Steven as Mage/Steven as Cleric' thing.
Alright, then can you answer just two last things for me since they're not clear.
Do you personally desire that small groups doing small group content always need Clerics?
Do you perceive that it's possible to have a type of small group content where adding a Cleric would naturally have similar effects to adding a Bard and then your feeling is just that Steven might not want to make it?
Alright, thanks anyway.
I still need practice, I guess.
I didnt really have an opinion on Intrepids version of a cleric back then. There may have been aspects of it I liked or didnt like, but no real opinion on it as a whole. I still dont really have an opinion on it, as there isnt enough information to have an opinion as yet.
Ah, I see what you are saying.
Essentially you are saying the same thing about that specific healing mechanic as you are saying about Intrepids clerics - you dont have enough information to form a valid opinion, yet have formed a solid, immovable opinion regardless.
You have mobs you want to farm, the enemy wants to stop you. You fight both at the same time and try to minimize the incoming damage from either by moving around, CCing and healing. In late game it'd be towers and player enemies. That would be closer to an "attack during a boss farm" situation. You'd be under attack from the boss/tower (who deal a ton of dmg), while the enemy players try to stop you from killing it. You still gotta move around, heal a ton, and ideally end up killing both the players and the boss/tower. Oh, and considering that it's lategame, there'd be a fairly high chance that even the dead players might be on your ass as soon as they die, because they got resurrected. Except you could do smth about that in L2, while in dota you'd just hope that the enemy doesn't have the money or has their buyback on cd.
As for the bard part of the discussion, we have too little info about Ashes bards, so it's very difficult to say whether Steven copied L2 there too. I think I remember hearing that they don't want as big of an impact from buffs in Ashes, but then it would mean that bard has some bigger role in some other place, because if buffs are inconsequential then what would be the point of having a bard in your group.
And if buffs are not inconsequential, then why the hell would you not maximize your output by leaving the bard out. And pvxness comes into play yet again. I'd expect a group of 2dps/bard/heal to be much much better in pvp than a 3dps/heal or a 3 dps/bard or, god forbid, 4dps. At least, once again, that's how it was in L2. Even with just a small buff advantage, your party (or quite often you yourself) would be stronger than the opponent.
Fair enough. Opinions are like rivers and change all the time. I do think you can form opinions and give feedback though. I'd hate to wait too long and miss the chance.
Healers' single-target heals, and their HPS output in general, are impactful because they allow their allies to go in, deal damage, retreat (In PvE "retreating" would usually just be achieved by "tanking less damage" than fully exiting), and quickly join the fight again at full capacity. Every time this happens in a large scale PvP fight, the healer's value is equivalent to one new reinforcement on that team. You're replacing a fighter that the enemy took out of combat.
One team's DPSminusHPS versus the other team's DPSminusHPS cannot be how you calcluate the class choice effectiveness of two parties, because it would assume that everyone involved would run in and maximise their DPS on one focused target after the other until they're dead. You're not considering that spacing, cover, zoning, and CC all beneficially factor into the effectiveness of healing, because the healer only has to keep those targets alive who have taken damage.
Purely mathematically, you don't have to be able to outheal the damage of even just a single enemy fighter to come out ahead as the healer: If 5 fighters are focusing down one of your team's 4 fighters, all their fighters are only relevant until they've been taken out of the fight. If a member of that team retreats when they're low, it will do nothing to help their team win, but rather remove their DPS from the fight even earlier.
On the other hand, one of your fighters that the enemies have been focusing can retreat, be healed back up, and join the fight again at serviceable health, while the healer-less enemies' lost HP remains essentially constant. While you can repeat this process as long as more than two of your active fighters have serviceable HP (to keep damaging the enemy team while your hurt ally is running), for the enemy's team, the effectiveness of their units ends when they are too low HP to rejoin the fight.
Your healing breaks the enemies' effectiveness of focusing your units while they are being wittled down themselves.
In principle it's the same logic as why a ranged unit can deal 300 DPS and still be more effective than a 500DPS melee. (I don't think you'd question that statement.) It's the same concept as kiting. It just works a bit differently, because in this heal-kiting system, the functions of tanking and (negative-)DPSing are spread out across multiple players.
And crucially, the healer's influence on this dynamic works even if the enemy matches your DPS distance range, so, unlike normal kiting, the healer's team of archers & mages can effectively "kite" the enemy archers & mages, by separately retreating into their heal-only range as needed.
And just to be clear, because there's a good chance you'll say that retreating and healing back up is not an exciting part of gameplay: it's not like the healer only starts being effective once someone has retreated. Your hypothetical 300 HPS already counteracts some of the enemy fighter's 500 DPS as soon as the enemies have started to deal damage. You're still part of the active combat. You can just *also* affect combat outside of the active combat range, when someone has retreated.
This is just a point about the principle behind the mathematical effectiveness of healing, and doesn't decide whether or not a particular healer's gameplay design is fun and challenging to play and make decisions with.
You mostly play Asian dungeon grind & gank MMOs. You don't know Western dungeon design and good RvR. You don't know how the healer's role plays out when it centers around your allies taking unpredictable damage and relying on you to restore control.
I've played Asian MMOs and enjoyed healing in some. Those games aren't bad and theír class design isnt bad. But you shouldn't be so certain in your sweeping claims of doom about class design in a different type of game, when the issues you are concerned about are clearly already prevented by the different gameplay design that you don't seem to have enough experience in.
A good example for single-player MMOs are games that encourage questing for the story as a primary drive to play the game. GW2 is among the most obvious examples, and that's even supposed to be an RvR game on some level. Same for ESO, whose daily-quest design sadly ends up encouraging players to treat it as a singleplayer game with a dungeon group finder and a PvP arena lobby. SW:TOR was one of the first games called out for appealing to this type of playstyle.
What unites these and many other games is that the overland map essentially just ends up functioning as an oversized lobby, with a singleplayer storyline to quest through. There are plenty of single-player MMOs on the Western market that show their intent in all kinds of themepark elements, and design choices (group finders, XP-gain optimisation and loot design, difficulty of overland PvE combat & XP grind, PvP design, etc).
Denying that single-player MMOs exist exposes your lack of experience with this side of the market.
I agree with your view on the healer's agency over control of the fight, and your resulting preference regarding spell design. I also prefer healer designs that don't require distractions in your own kit that restrict you from correctly responding to the actual priorities on the battlefield.
But that doesn't mean a game's design should never have those distractions, just that they have to leave enough room for you to focus on the real priorities of your class. Your heals can have fancy procs, and still end up "simply" providing potent heals that exist alongside your buffs and utility, as long as managing the procs leaves enough room to approach the rest of the fight normally. Then the distraction doesn't need to be a limitation to your general skill expression and strategy; it's just an extra obstacle to work on to fulfill your role even more optimally and raise the skill-ceiling.
That's a matter of game balance and the exact numbers involved in your class's skill interactions, not a binary question about whether a design feature should exist.
And so again this leaves me with the same issue as your comments in the other thread.
Your arguments are that the Cleric's design is lackluster because
But you don't mention
or
Instead you're insisting on giving the healer a single unique ability to make the class impactful? Whose problem does that even begin to solve? It's not like you'd be playing the class if it was doomed to be a glorified revive bot.