Lyiat wrote: » I think the problem is that people are expecting skill rotations when I don't think there are going to be. With the limited number of skills users will have plus the confirmation that we're not going to be able to stack skill slots across the screen (it's been confirmed we'll have a set limit of 'active skills'), we're going to be relying more on basic attacks and launching our skills at the right moments for maximum effectiveness.
Dayuhan wrote: » I hope the support characters receive experience for their support. So many MMO's only reward actual combat - or give only "participation" rewards to the support characters. I would like to see support roles have their own unique support rewards apart from the combat experience.
danada wrote: » -I don't want to feel like I'm a bad DPS class that occasionally heals. Please make it so I can spend the majority of my time healing, buffing/debuffing, CCing enemies, etc. I have no issues with playstyles that do mix in dealing damage with healing, but I don't want it to be the norm. To me this feels like a design choice to entice DPS players into healing/supporting at the cost of pure healing/support gameplay.
danada wrote: » -Make healing "rotations" and spells interesting. I'd love to see spells that interact with each other in different ways. Casting heal A puts a buff on the target that increases healing from your other heals. Allies standing in your AOE healing have increased healing from your abilities, etc. There are probably a lot more interesting things that can be done, but these are just base ideas. Basically, I want to be thinking about the abilities I'm using and which ones I want to use next rather than mindlessly spamming 1 or 2 heals.
danada wrote: » -On the topic of controls: I hope that for targeted heals I'm able mouseover heal, either through an option/toggle or a macro. Bonus points if I can bind these to my mouse buttons. Also, with action combat being in the game I'm really hoping that there aren't a lot of "aimed heals" with a reticle. Trying to aim a heal in a raid/PvP environment sounds terrible to me. I'd rather see more template style "action healing". -For the UI: I'm hoping for customization for my party/raid frames. Coming from WoW there are a lot of raid/party frame addons that offer a high level of customization for stuff like postion, size, buffs/debuffs, incoming heals, etc. I want to be able to have as much information as possible so that I can make informed choices with my healing.
bot wrote: » The main concern I'd have is healing output. I don't want to see both high heals per second and sustained healing. Healers should have to choose between being burst healers or sustain healers so fights can actually end. When it comes to support, I think being specced to be more offensive-orientated and defensive-orientated should be the decision-making for them. So an offensive support class might have speed boosts, damage buffs, and cc while a defensive support might have shields, cc breaks, and abilities to help a team fall back.
neuroguy wrote: » I completely disagree. I really really really hope there is no/very few heals where you can just click on some party frame and cast. We should be required to have some vision of the actual world and our party beyond not standing in fire as healers. Even if it's tab, I should be required to face my target in some cone to be able to heal them imo. As a healer I should not be focused on 40 tiny little boxes playing reaction time whack-a-mole clicking and healing anyone who takes damage... I want to play an MMORPG please. In general I think healing should require more vision and communication with the raid/party. Positioning is an important part of many PvE and PvP encounters, lots of game mechanics are designed around it, I think adding healing to that list would be great.
danada wrote: » bot wrote: » The main concern I'd have is healing output. I don't want to see both high heals per second and sustained healing. Healers should have to choose between being burst healers or sustain healers so fights can actually end. When it comes to support, I think being specced to be more offensive-orientated and defensive-orientated should be the decision-making for them. So an offensive support class might have speed boosts, damage buffs, and cc while a defensive support might have shields, cc breaks, and abilities to help a team fall back. This is a really great point. Making sure that there's not only a difference in how classes heal, but also what they specialize in. Also helps to encourage bringing different healers in different situations. neuroguy wrote: » I completely disagree. I really really really hope there is no/very few heals where you can just click on some party frame and cast. We should be required to have some vision of the actual world and our party beyond not standing in fire as healers. Even if it's tab, I should be required to face my target in some cone to be able to heal them imo. As a healer I should not be focused on 40 tiny little boxes playing reaction time whack-a-mole clicking and healing anyone who takes damage... I want to play an MMORPG please. In general I think healing should require more vision and communication with the raid/party. Positioning is an important part of many PvE and PvP encounters, lots of game mechanics are designed around it, I think adding healing to that list would be great. I see where you're coming from with this, and I've heard a lot of people hate on the WoW "whack-a-mole" style of healing. Personally, I enjoyed it, but I'm open to different kinds of healing as well. I wouldn't be against your suggestion of healing in a cone in front of you. Like I said I'm down for template style "action" heals. However, I'm still worried they're going to try to implement aim based reticle heals, and that just sounds terrible to me. If I'm trying to heal someone and they're moving around dodging a boss mechanic or player abilities in pvp they could easily dodge my heals as well. Plus with a large raid and possibly huge PvP encounters it would be really hard to heal the specific person you wanted to.
Wandering Mist wrote: » Obviously this is just one iteration of that, but in GW2 there are no targeted healing spells. All of them are either aoe around your character, aoe on the ground or a cone aoe in front of you. The result is in raids the majority of the time the entire group is stacked in one place, and only separates for certain boss mechanics. There is simply no other way of doing it and I found it really really boring.
Wandering Mist wrote: » One thing to keep in mind in all of this is in how the healing will interact with the fight mechanics. If a fight requires every player to be spread apart from one another, it would be nearly impossible to heal with aoe heals for example. While I agree that the "whack-a-mole" style of healing can be annoying for some people, it does allow more flexibility when it comes to designing boss fights.
neuroguy wrote: » Perhaps that's a discussion on its own but I think the variety of healing spells will determine the style of healing gameplay itself. I think for example the far too common castbar followed by a zero-delay heal is very conducive to the "whack-a-mole" style of healing where the quality of your gear feels more important than your skills.
neuroguy wrote: » It's super interesting you think that because I have a different perspective on this actually. I think that it does not necessary allow for flexibility, it just makes the focus of the mechanics the individual and removes a mechanic that could be used to increase difficulty and communication demands. What I mean by this is that if players are forced to spread out or to dodge some ability on the ground, with "whack-a-mole" healing every player has a responsibility to dodge however they can and you only impact the healer if you fail to dodge the mechanic. But if you have GW2 style healing you have a responsibility to your healer to make life easier for them by rejoining the group asap and it forces communication between healers and the individual if positioning is compromised. Also, if depending on the class/subclass and augments of the healer you prefer your party to group up or spread out for optimal healing, the game can rely on class design itself (and not just boss design) to create different gameplay strategies. So yeah you could view it as increasing flexibility but I think it removes a potential group/party mechanic. Overall, "whack-a-mole" healing with short cast no-lag heals that do not care about positioning leads to boring healing gameplay, removes a mechanic that could increase the difficulty or communication demand on parties/raids and is simply so over-done people are tired of it. Having interesting healing spell mechanics, synergies between spells, and increasing the responsibility of the "healed" to help maximize the effectiveness of the "healer" promotes better gameplay and teamplay. It also removes the demand to focus on and have 40 squares take up most of your screen and encourages engagement with the actual content and mechanics occurring on screen.
neuroguy wrote: » Overall, "whack-a-mole" healing with short cast no-lag heals that do not care about positioning leads to boring healing gameplay, removes a mechanic that could increase the difficulty or communication demand on parties/raids and is simply so over-done people are tired of it. Having interesting healing spell mechanics, synergies between spells, and increasing the responsibility of the "healed" to help maximize the effectiveness of the "healer" promotes better gameplay and teamplay. It also removes the demand to focus on and have 40 squares take up most of your screen and encourages engagement with the actual content and mechanics occurring on screen.
danada wrote: » I very much so disagree with you about gear mattering more than skill with whack-a-mole style healing. In WoW, you can give a terrible healer amazing gear and they still will be a terrible healer. Gear can definitely help with healing throughput, don't get me wrong, but player skill still makes a huge difference. Deciding who to heal, which heal to use, and knowing the damage patters of the fight are all more important than gear.
danada wrote: » My biggest issue with what you're talking about here is putting responsibility of healing on non-healers. Beyond simple positional stuff like "please stack" or "please stand in my healing circle of goodness" I really don't want to have to rely on other people to do my job for me. Some of the spells that you listed sound really awesome, while some of them sound like a headache because it takes agency away from me as a healer. In your examples of things like a well of healing, or HoTs that tick slower/faster depending on movement I see it going horribly wrong because non-healers aren't focused on healing, and they shouldn't be expected to! They do their jobs while I do mine. You talk a lot about communication, but depending on raid size and how much other communication is happening this could lead to terrible comms. Imagine a situation where you have the RL calling out mechanics, the usual other chatter/call outs that happen in raids, and on top of that you have 5-8 healers (40man raid) all trying to call out different things to different players/groups so that their healing can be optimized. I see where you're coming from with trying to spice up healing, and I'm all for it. However, I don't think that anyone other than the healers should have a significant impact on the performance of the healers.
