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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.
honestly the classes bluh
Miller5862
Member, Alpha Two
the cleric has god mode always full health and mana can solo everything in some heavy armor. the rest are all crap with long cooldowns. why is the cleric a god.. theres no trade off really. if a fighter has no healing it should tear through a cleric but nothing can. cleric with a book just spams hots and instant heals and stays up all while aoeing down groups of one star mobs.. why do most classes have such long skill cooldowns? all the while clerics over here healing through your burst then laughing at you while it heals and kills you while you wait on cds to burst againt. i just dont see any point in playing anything other than a cleric. is easy S tier in pve and pvp while everything else struggles
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Comments
the no CD flash spam heals could do with some tuning I agree.
But the fact of the matter is this isnt balanced around 1v1 it is balanced around group v group.
a group of clerics with 3 instant heals 2 spammable and a aoe heal and a hot up at all times will take a group of anything else lower dmg or not.. the class needs nerfs
Game is not balanced for 3v3 ... this ain't wow.
You cant ham-handed nerf the primary healer in a role based game.
A cleric can't over heal a good dps' damage AND get the kill.
Genius
However I don't agree cleric needs a nerf, they are tough for sure but definitely killable at level 25, also we have not seen anything past 25 or secondaries etc, so let's just wait and see
Skills like Flash are not meant for 1v1. Trying healing an 8 man group taking heavy damage and Flash is the "Oh Shit" heal when people are taking such heavy damage that the other heals aren't enough. There's a reason it's usable while casting other abilities. It's not supposed to be a primary spammed heal, but when you need it, oh boy do you need it.
Your post really just screams "I treated an enemy cleric like a training dummy and lost the dps check". Nothing to see here.
Bringing up the fighter is a joke as well - look at this insane damage output:
Take 2 people with equal skill and knowledge about the game, at the same level, the same gear and put them into an arena. Then we can start talking about balance.
The easy excuse of "Ashes is balanced around group not 1vs1" is nothing but an excuse and a fallacy and the reality of it will catch up with players about it soon enough. Classes might have certain soft or hard counters, but the general power / dps / survivability / self sustain differences have to be balanced, otherwise Ashes won't be particularly fun to play, whatever we talk pvp or pve grinding.
On topic itself, assuming similar gear, a fighter with trip and knockout applied on correct cleric skills, wounds stacking should be a decent counter to clerics survivability. Is it? Show me the data.
Blown past falling sands…
So lets give two options and see which one you think makes more sense:
option 1: Cleric's heals are balanced around healing 1 DPS worth of damage.
result? cleric spends the entire time during a 1v1 trying to heal itself to not die, does nothing of value except kite and heal.
now it's a 6v6 and one group has a cleric and the other doesnt - group with the cleric now has 1 player who cannot stop even 2 dps from just straight up killing a player, meanwhile those globals are invested into a dead player - nothing has been done to the enemy group by the cleric and it's totally a non-factor.
option 2: Cleric's heals are strong enough to burst heal quite well but limited by CD(as it currently stands, the heal with no CD would be a little weird to take in pvp) which means they can 1: provide some CC/damage/dispel value in between spending every global healing - and if the enemy team wants to score a kill they are either going to have to have all 6 players coordinated on 1 target, or they will have to CC/pressure the cleric to get a kill - just like every single other game out there. Infact one of the only reasons I ever play healer is to ensure that I'm doing damage in between heals - and this is consistent with high level play in almost any AAA mmo i've played. If you've ever played FFXIV trying to prog with healers who play like pacifists and don't do any damage in between heals it's like you're missing half a DPS and you wont meet the check. WoW's top M+ and Arena healers all know when to do damage, and have no problem putting respectable numbers up. This is both to ensure that a healing class still has the option to level solo as well as simply something useful to do when no heals are needed. This is a design that has worked across the genre - and as long as the TTK isn't too long, the game remains fun for everyone except for people who freak out every time pvp happens and then just die and cry on forums.
I play DPS like 80% of the time in games, tank maybe 23% - heals at like 2% of the time. Careful what you wish for, because if healers are bad - then no one plays them. Infact 2 of the most popular games in the genre have had issues with healers not even being needed due to some classes having way too much self sustain. This caused a nerf in WoW's expansion to tank/general self sustainability so that healers would have more value - and in FFXIV they had a literal healer strike because their DPS rotation was too simple and too many classes were able to sustain leading to them just pressing their 1 dps button 90% of the time. I probably won't play healer come launch of the game, but it's in everyone's best interest that playing the only healing class is actually attractive, and you can see from both the successes and failures of many games in the genre that the balance that works is not the balance you think you want.