Glorious Alpha Two Testers!
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Alpha Two Realms are now unlocked for Phase II testing!
For our initial launch, testing will begin on Friday, December 20, 2024, at 10 AM Pacific and continue uninterrupted until Monday, January 6, 2025, at 10 AM Pacific. After January 6th, we’ll transition to a schedule of five-day-per-week access for the remainder of Phase II.
You can download the game launcher here and we encourage you to join us on our for the most up to date testing news.
Comments
Healers would fall into the required category, so would tanks. You could use a summoner instead of a cleric to heal, but I think it’s unlikely to be able to do hard content. Same for tanking, and replacing a tank with a summoner with a tank pet.
Does that make tanks and priests overpowered? Yes a little bit, but tanks have been OP in MMOs forever to encourage players to play the role.
I’d expect tanks, bards and healers to be at around 70% of the dps of a dps class. You can argue that’s not balanced, but it’s necessary because those roles don’t stack and anything less makes them completely useless if you have more then 1.
I’m more than okay for the forced trinity. Every game I’ve see that tries something different has sucked.
Nothing, but I'm not the one heralding the gloomy fate of this "inevitably useless class" (not a direct quote!), without offering any productive directions.
Here's the stat window in L2. Healer classes only influenced the HP/MP part. The bards influenced literally every other stat except for the "Stats" and "Social" parts.
Mobs would hit for A TON if you didn't have buffs, so you'd need a bard to lessen that. Then mobs would hit for just a ton, so you still needed a healer to stay alive.
A lot of classes had some form of weak self-sustain. There were hp regen pots. There was a summoner that had a healing summon, a tank that had healing, bards that had aoe healing. None of that prevented the requirement for a healer, because none of it was enough to survive during farming. Healers pretty much didn't do any damage in pve, so they were just Healers.
I think this might be another point that the discussion crashes at.
I can't speak for others here, but I've been discussing high/top lvl full party content. The content that will give the most benefit to those who can farm it. And considering what Intrepid have said in the past, I imagine that this content will always require a healer.
Yes, there will be weak content and solo content, which will not REQUIRE a healer. And I'm sure a ton of people will participate in that content when they simply can't find a full party. But that content will provide a much lesser benefit to the farmers, which is why I've been pretty much disregarding it so far.
On the other hand, I feel like you've been talking about this exact content. The super easy stuff where people wouldn't need a proper healer and would be fine with a cleric augment or just a bard/summoner. If that is correct, then this is the exact point of contention that's led to so much argument here.
Yeah, while that request is a reasonable preference to have, clearly the direction Intrepid is going for is that they deem it more fun if support/heal is spread across two classes. Essentially because it means that the supporters have to be more creative to make themselves useful than just exist and be intrinsically necessary. In some games that philosophy fails terribly (There are supposedly a bunch of second-rate support classes in LOTR:O that only exist for flavour and wouldn't really ever get picked for their abilities), in others I've seen it create very intriguing dynamics and creative builds. I think ArcheAge is a pretty okay example of a game that does it this way and mostly succeeds. Well, as far as you can say that ArcheAge succeeds at anything it promises.
If you want to influence that class role to feel more rewarding, you'll have to point to what you want to see each class have more of in order to feel fun to play.
Tell you what, if you want to appeal to them to abandon the split support class, I'll even sign your petition. I just think there are easier paths towards improvement.
If that's the case, I wonder if one Bard augment school will be health related.
You can look at their hp go up and down, while the healer constantly casts. His casts are also mostly preventive rather than reactionary, because he knows that the damage intake is constant and high. And people still die, because the damage is just huge.
He's also healing mostly with a %-based ability and an HP balance one, but that's mostly due to them going at it in big waves with full MP rests in-between farms, and because they seemingly are not afraid of pvp attackers (could be due to this being a private server with lower population).
Oh and btw, their tank is the healing one, but his only main use here is the HUGE defense buff, rather than his heals.
Now, I'm definitely not expecting Ashes to have this kind of aoe farming. But what I am expecting is a relatively same amount of incoming damage during the same lvl of content optimality. And in that context I believe that cleric will be a requirement, along with a bard (cause people in that video have full defensive bard buffs).
Before it was introduced into the game, people just used party heal (that is even more expensive and has longer cast time). And instead of gathering two rooms of mobs, they'd gather 1.
And no, there was another healer who also has the same chain heal. So even with 2 healers using the strongest heal in the game, they still had people dying.
Also, what exactly do you mean by "strongest"? In pvp, the only way for a healer to kill any kind of dps class would be to completely remove all of their mana, proc as many debuffs as possible on them, transform into a dpsing avatar (with reduced dmg in pvp btw) and pretty much "kill them with a spoon". There was also another way to do it, but that too amounted to "killing with a spoon".
While, yes, in 1v1 pvp it was almost impossible to kill a healer who still had mana and had full buff (though you could burn mana and remove buffs and could then kill them), in party pvp you'd either hit the healer with all dpsers or just pray for an ability crit from a dagger class (which were somewhat frequent).
In other words, healers weren't "strongest", they were just healers.
See, this post implies that you just don't like 'oldschool' MMO Healing.
You say 'the only skill expression available is how fast you react to damage intake and how well you use your MP and cooldowns'.
The only skill expression generally added by MMO Backline Healer roles is cleanses and ground target placement. You do not have to engage the enemy. Optimally (in many people's eyes) you never do, and even if you do, it's not usually skillful (and it's really often not rewarding at all to do so).
Some people just consider your 'only' to be more than 'enough'.
Also, I forgot to mention, that huge tank buff reduces incoming healing by 80%, which is why they had to use %-based abilities rather than pure direct healing. The buff is just too strong to not use in this kind of farming and the %-based healing enabled this strat.
If you pay attention to who's getting hit, it's all 3 mages, so they would've been using aoe heals either way, but also it's about the thing I mentioned above.
Casts can be interacted by crits iirc. Also, there are CCs that can completely stun him for long enough to die to a few dagger abilities, or silence him which leads directly to death, or burn his mana so that he can't heal anymore (a healer's job btw), or agro him with a tank so he can only use the basic aoe heal that has a long cast time costs a ton and doesn't heal all that much. Also, healers were fairly squishy in L2, so a lucky crit on a dagger ability (if made to the back of the healer) could just oneshot the healer even through constant self-healing.
In other words, even 1v1s were doable with a bit of rng or just proper RPS matchups.
If we're talking about group pvp, the healer would be flagged because they'd be healing flagged characters, so they can't "not engage". And if you're running away from a dps chaser - you're not healing. And if you're running away from a dagger class dps - you're fucking dead in seconds. Also, if you decide to just heal yourself during a fight, due to you being attacked - you're not healing your party, which means that you'll die after all them die. And like I said, healers could still die even while spamming strong self-healing, so it's not like you're completely safe either. And all the other tools I mentioned apply.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "arbitrary damage reduction in PvP". Can you explain?
All of those things were strong in pvp, so healers would very often engage the enemy directly, on top of healing their party.
Just noting that the thing to bear in mind when you're continuing here is that Niem is definitely right, in that if one hears 'Healer' in a certain era (I personally think around 2012- early 2018), they really are just exactly what Niem describes.
This was probably a backlash to the low 'count' of 'Healers' in older games from the era before that, where the 'obvious' part of the skill disparity was way 'too high' (basically you could be a great DPS or an average DPS and it be okay and many people didn't know what a great DPS looked like anyway, but Healing was the opposite of that).
The things you mention are actually absent from 'Pure Healers' for about a 6 year timespan in which the older MMOs were declining just ENOUGH that newer players weren't particularly encouraged to get into them.
Though I am curious how it'll play out in Ashes, if they do manage to make their pve hard enough to require a healer and the healer in question won't just be a "you can heal, but you mostly just dps" kinda guy.
I found it, I think!
(I'll put it in the other thread too).
This is the disconnect (and to be clear, this is our 'fault').
FFXIV isn't 'far back enough'.
EQ2 is a 2004 game.
FFXI is a 2002 game.
Lineage 2 is a 2003 game.
The problem that happened in 2012 (FFXIV was originally more like FFXI but messed up some stuff, got remade and handed over to a WoW fan and converted around this time or slightly before/after) was that a lot of games were made with the intention of 'making MMOs that were similar to but better than/more accessible than the Early 2000s games.
Unfortunately not every developer of those games understood all the aspects of those games that needed to be fixed. They definitely have problems but basically the 2011+ games fixed them wrong and created an era of doubly unengaging healer gameplay that you are used to.
The healing ability came several years after the tank buff, so for quite a while there was not easy circumvent.
What I said still applies. Several people are always getting damaged in those kinds of situations. Aoe heal also had a higher healing power, while costing x4 more. So instead of healing several people with singular weaker heals, it was more efficient and quicker to just heal all of them at once with a stronger heal.
Also, if the group managed to minimize the amount of attacked members, they'd of course use STH instead. This usually came down to the group's composition and skill lvl.
ARR came out in 2013. I'm not familiar with the class changes throughout its lifetime, but even if we consider the 2013 date, to me that's already zoomerish times. BDO came out in 2014 and I'd call that one of the most zoomerish games out there, due to its super fast pace and pretty much full disregard for the trinity.
As Azherae said, you just seem to dislike oldschool design. The healer's role is to heal, not to do dps while sometimes pressing a healing button. Obviously a ton of mmos in the last decade went towards that latter description, but, as has been discussed before in these threads, Ashes is returning to the roots of mmos exactly because Steven dislikes where mmos are currently. I know you'll just call that regression, so don't get hung up on this part of the comment.
And just for potential other similar questions: bards barely did any dps as well so they only buffed and debuffed, summoners had pretty limited use too because the summon's abilities were waaay more restricted than the class they were copying. Mage, melee, archer dps are self-evident.