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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.
Cleric Critique and Feedback
Healboat
Member, Founder, Kickstarter, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I did not see anyone make a post yet for cleric critique and feedback, so I made one. I have three main critiques of cleric gameplay so far.
1. I feel like I am playing a classless mmorpg and the cleric is just a jumble of random healing spells put together to make a healer. Most trinity tab targeting mmorpgs will have several healing classes or specs each with their own unique healing style. Some focus on hots, aoe heals, strong single target, fast single target, bubbles, chain heals and so on. The cleric, being the only true healing archetype, has to have all these abilities in it so people can occupy every niche that healers are needed for. This causes the cleric to feel like it has no identity. I was only able to get to level 9, but I already have a wide range of different spells and there are more available. By level 10 you can have strong single target heals, aoe heals, chain heals, hots, multiple heals that have charges. I think this is fine if at later levels you are forced to focus on improving only certain types of spells so that certain clerics are more proficient tank healers, raid healers, hots, etc. I don’t think it matters how the specialization works, whether it is through talents or secondary archetypes. There also seems to be some redundancy in the healing spells early on. I have two spells that each have 3 charges, are instant casts, have a cooldown, and function very similar. I don’t see why at a very low level I have multiple similar spells. I know that one of them can be cast while doing other things, but it just seems redundant and like someone just threw a bunch of random spells with no rhyme or reason into the talent tree.
2. Lack of mouse over macro heals and autoattacking while healing. I’m sure mouse over macros are coming at some point. I think Steven even specifically said they are coming, and Steven plays healer so I’m sure he uses them. Having to select a friendly player and stop autoattacking feels clunky. I hope when they add mouse over macros they don’t cause you to unselect the enemy you are autoattacking when you cast a heal on a friendly player. The healing right now just feels a little disjointed having to select a friendly party member, press a heal, select an enemy, and then press Q to start autoattacking again. It would feel significantly smoother with mouse over macros if you are autoattacking, mouseover a friendly player/nameplate/partyframe, cast your heal, and continue autoattacking without having to do anything else.
3. Lack of a normal single target spammable heal. This is a personal complaint of mine. I’m going to assume that this is an intentional part of the game design to not include a basic single rarget heal that you can just spam. It seems like intrepid have decided against this and are instead including charge based heals with a cd when the charges have been used up. I personally think this just feels bad. There are times when playing in a party that I’m just stood there autoattacking unable to heal because everything is on cd. I’m playing healer in a trinity mmo, because I want to play wack-a-mole with my partyframes. I understand if that is where intrepid wants the skill in healing to come from, managing charges and cooldowns. I personally think managing mana and cooldowns is more enjoyable. If someone wants to spam abilities and go oom, let them.
I think everything else I played was pretty good. I liked the animations. They were interesting without being too flashy which was a fear of mine. Inputs felt as responsive as they could have with the server lag at times. I would be interested to hear from other clerics, especially those that made it to higher levels and played in larger groups.
1. I feel like I am playing a classless mmorpg and the cleric is just a jumble of random healing spells put together to make a healer. Most trinity tab targeting mmorpgs will have several healing classes or specs each with their own unique healing style. Some focus on hots, aoe heals, strong single target, fast single target, bubbles, chain heals and so on. The cleric, being the only true healing archetype, has to have all these abilities in it so people can occupy every niche that healers are needed for. This causes the cleric to feel like it has no identity. I was only able to get to level 9, but I already have a wide range of different spells and there are more available. By level 10 you can have strong single target heals, aoe heals, chain heals, hots, multiple heals that have charges. I think this is fine if at later levels you are forced to focus on improving only certain types of spells so that certain clerics are more proficient tank healers, raid healers, hots, etc. I don’t think it matters how the specialization works, whether it is through talents or secondary archetypes. There also seems to be some redundancy in the healing spells early on. I have two spells that each have 3 charges, are instant casts, have a cooldown, and function very similar. I don’t see why at a very low level I have multiple similar spells. I know that one of them can be cast while doing other things, but it just seems redundant and like someone just threw a bunch of random spells with no rhyme or reason into the talent tree.
2. Lack of mouse over macro heals and autoattacking while healing. I’m sure mouse over macros are coming at some point. I think Steven even specifically said they are coming, and Steven plays healer so I’m sure he uses them. Having to select a friendly player and stop autoattacking feels clunky. I hope when they add mouse over macros they don’t cause you to unselect the enemy you are autoattacking when you cast a heal on a friendly player. The healing right now just feels a little disjointed having to select a friendly party member, press a heal, select an enemy, and then press Q to start autoattacking again. It would feel significantly smoother with mouse over macros if you are autoattacking, mouseover a friendly player/nameplate/partyframe, cast your heal, and continue autoattacking without having to do anything else.
3. Lack of a normal single target spammable heal. This is a personal complaint of mine. I’m going to assume that this is an intentional part of the game design to not include a basic single rarget heal that you can just spam. It seems like intrepid have decided against this and are instead including charge based heals with a cd when the charges have been used up. I personally think this just feels bad. There are times when playing in a party that I’m just stood there autoattacking unable to heal because everything is on cd. I’m playing healer in a trinity mmo, because I want to play wack-a-mole with my partyframes. I understand if that is where intrepid wants the skill in healing to come from, managing charges and cooldowns. I personally think managing mana and cooldowns is more enjoyable. If someone wants to spam abilities and go oom, let them.
I think everything else I played was pretty good. I liked the animations. They were interesting without being too flashy which was a fear of mine. Inputs felt as responsive as they could have with the server lag at times. I would be interested to hear from other clerics, especially those that made it to higher levels and played in larger groups.
6
Comments
I think most healing abilities felt pretty responsive and fun to use.
My biggest problem with healing this weekend was actually the UI and the fact that the healthbars on allies do not update more than 4 bars, that took out alot of the satisfaction of healing.
The party frames are very bad for healing atm.
I opened a post about that but in short its too much info, distractive and lacking visual indicators.
thats my most wanted QoL change rn
Deliverance is the spammable heal but it feels awkward to use because it's a charge-up.
Charge-up skills can be awkward in general but this one doesn't even have any indicators of how much you're healing. In other games you'd either see lines on the charge bar to indicate that (like 25%, 50%, 75%), or you had a fast charge bar that would charge several times over, each time you charged a full bar would be one charge level, going up to 2 or 3 levels total. Both of these give you a sense of how much you'd heal for and how long the cast would be. As is we're just flying blind, playing a guessing game. We need more info to make skill-based decisions as a healer.
If they're going to keep the charge up heal thing, they need to do one of the two things above. That being said, I really just want a very basic, single target spammable heal. Preferably several heals with no CD. Having a bar full of CDs (or stacks of charges) sucks (and it sucks in Throne and Liberty) and takes some of the skill and fun out of the equation as a healer. A few skills like that sure, but we need a base toolkit to work with. And make some other skill a charge up heal.
I also got to Cleric Lvl 9; I was in a raid group with one other cleric and a main and off tank. If the main tank went down, knowing if they were being rezed or not was not clear. Finding the other cleric in the bars to see if they even had enough mana to rez, was not clear. This confusion left both me and the other cleric frantically spamming the rez option or running around and trying to get the rez to un-grey itself thinking we were too far away from the tank to rez--even though the other cleric was already rezzing--all while the off-tank was slowly dying because neither of us were off-healing. Also it left dps, yelling "res the tank!!" even while they were actively being rezzed.
An indication on the dead raidframe-healthbar of an icon like phoenix wings or even just a yellow loading bar over the dead player to indicate their progress towards being rezzed would be helpful!
Edit: Oh also! Resplendent Beam wasn't working. It shot in a straight line for a short distance, never bounced, and had to be manually aimed.
True. Thats a good idea! I do hope the raid/party frames gets better quickly and not something that gets pushed to be worked on in beta.
Healing is so dependant on the frames and the information you get from there to get a good feel of healing.
Funny how everyone seems to have gotten to lvl 9, i did also
I have never been a healer main in other games, but rolled a Cleric and plan to do so in Ashes. In the past when off healing I would click on raid frames to select my target, but definitely see that mouse-over healing would be far superior. So I have a question...
If I have a raid member targeted, and mouse-over a different player in the raid frame, will my heal hit my targeted player, or the mouse-over player? And I assume if I am not mousing-over anyone in the raid frame, my heal will hit my target as per normal?
Sorry for the nub question, but you know...
That is exactly how it usually works. It prioritizes any available mouse-over target; if there is none then it resorts to your "regular" target (if applicable).
I've played cleric for a good bit of time and I'd love to reply to these and then provide my feedback. Here's my line by line of your suggestions:
1. I feel like what you're saying here is "My choices don't matter if I can pick up all the spells eventually as I level. I'm the same as every other max level cleric." (If I'm wrong let me know). I would agree if this ends up being the case. However, what we're testing is not anywhere near the end result. We're testing half of the levels currently.
2. Not sure about the macro part but you can mouse over and cast currently I believe.
3. Deliverance is one of the most mana efficient and powerful heals in the game by an incredibly wide margin (if fully talented). It is spammable and similar cast time to most single target spells in most mmos. It has a bonus to scale with how long you hold the cast (and if talented amount of health missing).
My feedback on clerics personally are these:
1. CC and mobility need some work/additions to create compelling choices. CC especially needs less conditionals, cooldown, and cast time in tandem. Tamp some of them down.
2. A HUD for Divine Power would be great.
3. Some sort of mechanic for Clerics to be res'ed by another class would be amazing (thinking Summoner or Bard).
As for Deliverance I agree. As for the OP's wish to see different levels on it, I think it already has that function. If you tap the skill, it will cast to 30 or 50% (dont remember exactly) on its own. So you basically already have a stage-like function in it.
Regarding your feedback, Leukael, I agree with 1. For your point 2: there already is a HUD for it. It's the yellow ring around your class icon in your frame. I agree that it's very inconspicuos, but it does the job.
As for rezzing: I would like to see Bard be able to rez out of combat as well. I feel like combat rez should be limited to the main heal. Out of combat it would just be really nice to have one other class be able to do it, obviously without the xp debt reduction though.
1. Better flight path on mend charges.
2. Divine power needs to be somewhere.
3. Soothing glow needs help in the upgrades. The additional charges aren't worth the points.
4. Wings of salvation looks weak for an expensive ability taking 2 top talents and having a 30s cooldown.
Divine Power is the circle around your nameplate on the UI in the top left corner. It's the same for all class resources and it's a terrible spot. I never look there so I end up never using that skill.
It should have a default of 2 players on non-held casting, give it a casting time if you want, but if it doesn't heal at least two people its a really expensive single target instant heal.
Having it heal outside of party/raid is pretty annoying, I'm not even sure how this will work in PvP as it could potentially heal opponents? and dont get me started on the flagging system and it bouncing to them.
a target of target would be helpful....I like to auto attack the mob, and as i see the tank or whoever taking damage I want to be able to press the heal button and it will heal whoever that mob is attacking, some spells like judgment cant do this, but i feel other healing spells could
Give an option to have raid frames as the default UI even if in a party, the party frames are just too big and I want to always have the raid frames up.
I didn't have a whole lot of play time over the weekend, so I didn't get to do a lot of grouping, mostly solo leveling out in the wild.. as such, the cleric played about how I expected and was pretty fun at the low level I experienced. I would like to see more customization than just a plethora of different heals though. The weapon trees were neat but rather meh... Would be nice to see some weapon specific combat arts or something from the weapon trees, instead of just adding proc effects and thats it. There should also be a shield tree, otherwise it just feels useless and more like an accessory
1) cleric is not a mash up of skills as you say and the games you are referring to are wow like- this is not WoW. A lot of the games have those types of heals - hots, instants, castables, and given how monsters in the areas are half of the heals might get unused. However, in the moment you start doing high performance farm OR you do not have the actual tank archetype you need to actually use all spells in your kit with maybe exception of mend.
2) there is auto-attacking option in the settings that you can leave turned on( it is buggy and sometimes u need to re-enable it after restart of client) and just select friendly target > select your attacking target to resume attacking
(now here is the part that is not well made yet as in having assist/etc, but we're still in alpha and that will for sure be done properly later given we have marks and all)
As a healer and especially given i did(and still am) play Thrones and Liberty - this with having duality target for friendly target and enemy target at the same time is absolutely bad - 1st it is highly uncomfortable especially for switching between using spells on yourself and the desired target and 2nd, which is more important makes the cleric feel bland as if you do not need any skill to play the class. Having some APM requirement there for scaling up the cleric gameplay needs to exist.
3) Deliverance is that spell that you are referring to as spamable - it is separated into 4 stages -25%, 50%, 75%, 100% and does seem to heal more the lower % your target is regardles of which stage it is on.
This suggestion with the multiple charge ups is super annoying I've had that as well in other game, it is definetely not helpful unless you're playing off sound from the cast spell and there is some bigger sound indicator for crossing that charge, but to be fair i'd rather have it as it is now without even such sound added.
Regarding the divine power location , i can always see mine, but yes I agree on the point it could be made more visible or somewhere else
Although moving the entire HP bar somewhere with the divine power bar having some different color or just heavy outline would be sufficient.
In-depth game analysis person / love to guide & help