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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.
Comments
Can never tell if your answers are genuine or pure sarcasm lol
Anyhow, I disagree,3 is way to many, could you explain your answer 😅
If a clear Advantage to nigh overpowering Power in PvP is needed to keep Healers "appealing", then i say they shouldn't be appealing.
Please no One call me Names for it, but i think Healers were NOT underpowered in for Example WoW Vanilla. Then, when the first Expansion dropped, named Burning Crusade,
and "Resilience" got patched into the Game, "BOOM!!!" Healers dominated PvP, because You were nearly unable to take these Guys down, while your whole Team on the other Hand was slaughtered by the Enemy Team when You had not the same Amount of Healers.
Or even better : let us All Please find the Middleground here - and say :
- Healers should be VERY powerful in PvE. For Example against World Bosses.
- But Healers should not be very powerful in PvP.
Because i can safely promise all of You, you will have +50 to +60 % of the whole Server Population play Clerics in PvP, if they alone will make all the Difference between Victory or Defeat.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)
This is where the secondary class system comes in to play.
If y ou are at risk of being jumped while out by yourself, take tank as your secondary. If you are heading out for large scale PvP with people you know will keep threats off you, take cleric as your secondary.
With the plan of it being hard to change secondary class, this obviously doesn't work - but I am of the opinion that it will be made easier to chage secondary than has been stated in the past, precisely for reasons like this (the class system as designed is wasted if players can't reasonably change secondary once a day).
The healer should always have protection buffs but as a temporary measure. If a group of players gank a healer it should be able to have the tools to escape for a few seconds but not more than a few moments.
sure, one should be enough, three times the amount of time it would take for killing one non-healer
Can't wait to test it out
Hopefully. It still drives players away to a degree. If Tanks and Healers (I'm mentioning both, because this entire conversation is identical if it's about Tanks) need to constantly switch to be effective, then that further reduces population. Healing and Tanking are work, DPS is just making big numbers and farming dopamine at the end of the day.
This is coming from a Ranger main. People will say "do I want work and responsibility or do I want to take a hormone shower?". If DPS can easily take out healers and tanks, a far larger percentage will just say to hell with it and take a nice shower.
Agree with alot but to be honest, once you master healing, it's not work at all, infact you can almost ignore most mechanics in dungeons because of your positioning, may change with ashes dungeons though
That's true, a good player can use the game itself to his advantage.
So that asks a new question: How high do we want the skill ceiling to be? In other words "He's fine as long as he does x", "He's fine as long as he does x and y", "He's fine as long as he does x, y and z" etc, all add further gating to the profession with more and more requirements to competent play. Add that to the additional responsibilities that both the healer and the tank have to the group. It all can compound the entry barriers to the class. So how rare do we want healers to be?
It really is a tough question, I think a big variable will be how secondaries work because people that play healers, tend to have a type of healer they want to play, offensive, mobile, slow tanky big heals, hots etc etc, with only having the clerics it could be very interesting, we may end up with a situation that secondaries are so good that healers are extremely common, or we may have the reverse issue due to not enough variety of healing play styles
Either way I don't want to see healers become op to solve this problem. Definitely some testing to be done
That's fair, I don't want to see a repeat of the WoW Shadow Priest either. I'm starting to think you and @Noaani are right, this question will be answered by secondaries.
Definitely, the shadow priest could almost fit somewhat into the bard, restoring mana and health, but I agree I don't want to see the spriest anywhere near ashes, not to mention any type of dot abilities are going to have to be tested extremely well due to the huge lack of healing every class has
In every MMO I have played, there have been different specs for every class based on what type of opponents they expect to find. DPS have different specs for solo, group, raid and PvP content (and often different specs within those groups), just as tanks and healers did. This was even the case in Archeage with it's incredibly tightly controlled meta (the meta only really applied to community and pickup content).
It doesn't turn people away - unless there is a heavy cost to changing. In my experience, people prefer the option to tailor their build to their intended gameplay session rather than not being able to.
I could see it being an issue if it were only tanks and healers that needed to do this - it would come across as somewhat unfair. However, I fully expect it to be everyone wanting to be good at the game that does it.
And maybe some other support class like Bard or Summoner should have spells to clear the anti heal from the heal, so he can survive.
- Will Cleric/Summoner be able to take on 2+ foes?
- Will Cleric/Rogue vanish from their sight?
- Will Cleric/Fighter be able to outfight them?
- Etc, etc.
And what about the healers foes - What do they bring? What CC do their secondaries bring?Too many variables to imagine right now.
But if it's Cleric/Cleric vs Class/Class, then would very much like to see the rock/paper/scissor dynamic in play - Cleric/Cleric can (not certain) take down one, may/probably die to two, and more than that will be CC'd to death vs three or more.
Groups might be designed around an off healer too btw so 1 main healer and a support class.
Healers imo should be able to heal other realy well however struggles to self heal, If a healer can just tank everything and keep themselves alive with multiple people constantly hitting them your gonna have an issue (Remember in WoW when healer were pretty much unkillable with 10 people hitting them, yeah thats whats happens when healer get designed to keep a tank alive agaist raid bosses hitting for 50% of the tanks hp a swing :P )
They should have some self healing but the majority of their heals especialy there crutch heals shouldnt be castable on themselfs. Healers should support their team and their team should support their heals by peeling players off or pressure the opponent heals to pull people off yours
I see two issues here though. When assuming group composition, you are designing a class around other classes (and also requiring certain group comps). Those classes will always change, so do clerics always need to be adjusted every time the other classes are rebalanced? Why not simply decide what the class should be and then let it stand on it's own?
Also, to compensate for perceived frustration when fighting a cleric, you are proposing that their abilities have different effects on themselves than they do on others. Why should priest have to calculate multiple stat effects in that way when no one else in the game has to?
These are examples of nerfing to extinction.
Im making the assumption here based on what devs have said but im assuming the devs will be balancing combat based on a group composition of 1 of each class as their base line. Them saying there balancing based on group combat and not solo and there being 8 classes aswell as group sizes being 8 (which is unusualy for MMO) it does lead into believing that is the case.
So that would also mean if a group of say 4 fighters 1 cleric + 3 other DPS is absolutely destroying a group of 1 of each class in every situation that would most likely indicate that fighters will be getting nerfed in the future, same if 3 cleric in a party constantly won agaist other group comprised of 1 of each class cleric will probaly be nerfed. if 4 summoner +4 other constantly loose to groups of 1 of each summoner will probably be inline for a buff.
if 8 clerics is completely unkillable then by any other group of 8 then you will definelty be seeing a nerf :P but yeah either way there most likly balancing classes around a group with 1 of each class in them
For the type of game I hope Ashes becomes, two, but not if one is a Bard (the Cleric should always be able to run in this case and basically kite forever).
For the type of game I personally like, one, dependent on skill like everything else, but the target should always be able to run away from the Cleric long before it gets that far without feeling like they risk dying from anything the Cleric can do, so Clerics would technically always 'lose' the 1v1 unless their goal was to push someone away from a spot.
I see what you are saying. However, even in the extreme example of 8 priests, I don't think you nerf the priests. That will just discourage people from playing priest.
You say, "the other classes don't have what they need to handle priests." Then you develop tools/abilities to deal with priests.
Give those tools to a couple classes (but definitely not all classes).
At that point handling various group compositions isn't about nerfing or buffing, it's about swapping in and out the correct "tools" for the situation.
This way you can balance out classes without discouraging any of them.
The answer should never be definitive in a classes showdown, like oh a fighter/rogue is always destroying a healer independently on player skill.
Ideally the game should be balanced around skill expression, and the outcome dictated by one PLAYER outplaying the other not a class outplaying the other.
I think we also missed an important aspect which is GEAR. A healer geared and specced into full heal power should not expect to be killing people, to 1v1 pvp they must sacrifice some healing stats and spells for offense, like have radiant damage stats on gear vs healing power, so the game should not allow cleric damage to scale off the same stat as healing or maybe just partly or have some gear pieces have 30% healing stats and 70% offence and others have the opposite for example.
This way clerics can also defend themselves in case of ganking / open world PVP / 1v1 arena but still be relevant in PvE content with different gear sets
If you think healers are overpowered in MMOs then play one.
An alternative to completely preventing some abilities from being self-cast is instead designing abilities that are difficult to effectively self-cast due to the potential of being interrupted. Deliverance is a well designed spell in this regard.
This design allows for healing output to remain high, keeping healers impactful and fun, while offering clear counter-play and stopping healers from being completely immortal in 1v1s or small group engagements.
which makes clerics good at not losing and not winning in 1v1s
considering that people often do not play healers, healers need to be effective to be some fun
If necessary, a standard cleric can survive 4 players till somewhat quickly out of mana, (the 4 players do not have anti healing and lack control abilities)
and you WILL have the whole Community make at least 60% of all it's Characters Healers for PvP. Because if you can overrun your Enemies with nigh immortal PvP'ers, you will rule unchallenged.
✓ Occasional Roleplayer
✓ Guild is " Balderag's Garde " for now. (German)