A split from
here since I don't want to bog that thread down in discussions of what Clerics should/shouldn't do or need to focus on.
I have a strong bias toward like the style of games where status effects are meaningful and healers are meant to remove them.
I believe that any Cleanse skill in AOC for Clerics will be almost completely mandatory, so know that I'm biased away from 'bothering to make this a tradeoff' other than from its base design.
Right now Clerics have 'Flash Heal' which can be cast while casting something else. Ashes is a relatively fast game with big stuff happening and big groups fighting. I need a single target Flash cleanse for CC. It can be limited by forcing it to target the person I'm already casting a heal on. I would also like it to maybe cost Conviction instead of Mana.
If Ashes slows down, as a game, I wouldn't mind if the Cleanse was not universal and was somehow tied to 'what spell you were casting when you did it'.
The balance that I see here is:
1. If you must be casting a different heal to use this, then you end up 'wasting' mana when someone CCs a full health target, so at least, even if you 'spam' this, you burn through your mana.
2. If it has a Conviction cost, maybe the same thing, you can't just 'free cleanse stuff if your opponent gets the jump on you'.
3. It limits how often you can do it without also preventing a Cleric from just countering repeated CC.
4. If it can only ever be single target and targeted to someone you are currently throwing a heal/HoT at (or at best, Consecrating Wave can be used for any AoE) then uncoordinated groups of Clerics won't be able to just do stuff, whereas coordinated healing works better.
5. Since it requires healing to be done, you can't do it on yourself without starting a cast on yourself, but depending on how Ashes counts 'completion of cast' (i.e. if you get CCed for any length of time during the cast does it fail?) you could start to heal yourself, watch for CC, and hit the Flash Cleanse to power through and break the CC to finish the cast.
Thanks for reading.