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Cleric is boring. Please fix the divine power
Lennox
Member, Phoenix Initiative, Royalty, Kickstarter, Alpha One
Now that the verbal NDA has been lifted around the node wars test I wanted to bring up a discussion about the current state of cleric, and I encourage other PI members to chime in. Bergund, Yokai, Chibi and anyone else. Please share your experiences about playing cleric so far.
TLDR: Cleric as it stands is extremely boring, and I believe the largest part of this is how bland its current class resource is.
So I am a healer main in basically every MMO I have ever played and it was the only class I played during all of the node wars tests. The cleric is pretty strong and as long as you have mana then you are pretty hard to kill. I felt like I could easily keep people alive as long as they weren't getting hyper focused with decent ease. Mana was a bit on the tight end, but because every class had the same mana issues it didn't feel to bad when trying to keep people alive during long fights. All of this is to say that I don't believe that the current version of cleric has an issue with throughput. Like the title says, the problem is it is incredibly boring.
Now I know that in the tests we are only level 15, we don't have secondary augments, etc etc etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the class just doesn't feel unique in any way. It just has heals, and can cast those heals to keep others alive. Great, so it fills the role of healer. But what else? What does it have that gives it some identity? Nothing. I believe that this can be boiled down to a few different things, but my personal biggest grievance is its class resource. The other classes have much more interesting things goings on, fighter has momentum, ranger has hunts, etc. Those allow for a unique feel to their class that the current cleric resource does not.
Lets break down what the current resource does. (I couldn't take a screenshot so forgive that I don't remember the exact values) Right it is gain in X amount when you cast a heal on an ally. As the bar fills up it causes your heals to be more potent. If I remember correct at 100% you would do around 10% more healing, but that value may be off. Regardless as the bar goes up your heals are stronger. As for spending the resource, you have two ways to do this. And keep in mind that these two ways are chosen via a talent, so you must pick which one you actually want to have. The first is that you can activate it to finish a cast at its full charge strength, consuming X amount to do so. The second is that you can toggle on and off an aura so to speak, that when you have enough charge based on the spell you are casting, it will consume that resource instead of mana or health. When it comes to the "your heals are more potent while you have charge", I don't exactly have a problem with this. While I still say it is boring, its not inherently bad. It does give an interesting choice of do I take X immediate benefit or do I hold off to keep Y% more healing. The problem I have is the spenders.
So the spenders. Right now they are beyond boring. Not only that, but due to current mana you would be literally trolling to take the talent that would give you the ability to instantly finish a cast. I get where the idea was here in theory. You have several spells that have hefty cast times and work with the charge dynamic. So yes I could get off an instant cast, full charge deliverance and do a good single target heal. potentially saving someone's life. This has several issues though. First, is the spell flash cure. Currently this spell has 3 charges and can be cast during other casts. This spell healed for 200% of your healing power at the time of the node wars test. So anytime I could have possibly wanted to instant cast a spell to save a life of someone being bursted, I could start charging up a deliverance or judgment, and just smash all 3 of those charges into someone. That would do around 30-40% of someone's life which basically always was enough to finish my cast and save that person. Also because I didn't hypothetically spend my class resource, all of those heals did more healing per cast anyways. The second problem comes from the other version of the talent.
Being able to spend my class resource instead of mana (or health) to cast completely outclassed the instant cast version. It was not even close, and I would go so far as to say taking this version of the talent was completely mandatory. Mana was already tight, so without having this running I could not even imagine trying to heal in a longer fight. As for my grievances with this talent there are two. First is it makes the buff coming from the resource non-existent. This version is a toggleable buff to yourself where if you have it activated, it will automatically consume your resource to during cast. So you basically never get above about 40/100 resource since its being consumed pretty much as fast as it comes in. There were a few bugs with it where you would get the resource so fast you couldn't spend it fast enough, but we won't concern ourselves with unintended behavior. This means the the buff you get for having a lot of resource is basically gone. You will never build a meaningful amount of the resource so the buff is probably less than 5%ish to your healing. Having this on felt like I close to tripled my mana bar. I could stay in fights looong after all the dps had run out of mana. While the drawback of less potent heals is a bummer, this is clearly powerful so what's the issue? At least of the versions is good right? Well let's look back to the title. This is unbelievably boring. You could completely remove the resource, give 200% buff to cleric mana and ta-da, you have achieved the same affect. Talk about a snooze fest.
Right now, due to a boring and non-interactive class resource, and the small amount of spells that are actually relevant, I feel like I'm just there to keep a bar from hitting zero and nothing else is going on. Now we are talking about a healer, so I get where complaining that all I do is heal might sound counterintuitive, but my healer main brothers and sister out there know exactly what I mean when I say just being able to keep people alive is not enough to make a good healer. Imagine if you booted up WoW and all you decided to play a healer. You get on and there's only one healing class, lets go with priest. You get up to the games current max level and the only spells you have have is: heal, greater heal, divine star (sort of?), and a weaker version of guardian spirit. Now all of those heals are tuned in a way where you have no problem healing people through raids, pvp, whatever. This is plenty to get the job done, but does that mean its enough? I would say no, and that is basically what was worth taking as a cleric as it stands. You have deliverance for good reliable heals, judgment healed for insane amount on a long cast with a cooldown, healing wave (which requires 2 talent points to be able to actually do any healing instead of just damage), and defiant light which healed for 50% max hp over 10 seconds and would cheat death up to 25% of their max hp if they "died" while it was active. Most other spells I had, I only had because they were on the way to another spell I wanted. Okay I guess you do also have wings of salvation which is nice, but that spell has its own issues.
To briefly cover my problem with wings of salvation I'll boil it down. Right now it is a CC break, your only CC break in fact. Well as long as you spend 2 talents points on it to have it be a CC break. This means that your only movement skill is also your only CC break? Obvious problem but that's not why I am here.
So we have a pretty small list of very basic skills, and a class resource that is just toggle this ability and forget it exists. Great. I don't know about other people who played the cleric, but I would say this is beyond bland. To quote TV, if cleric was a spice it would be flour. Important sure, but bland. Now maybe I am wrong. Maybe this sounds great to some people. It is simple, and it is effective. If I am crazy, please tell me. Especially other PI folks. I adamantly want to hear what you thought after playing the class.
Now, complaining without proposing any semblance of a solution is tantamount to being a crybaby. So what can we do? I have several ideas that I personally think would be more interesting. Let me preface this quickly with I am not a developer, and I don't claim to be some revolutionary in world of gaming ideas. I have played a lot of MMOs over my time, but the longest and most consistent has (for bettor or worse) been World of Warcraft. So if these ideas feel adjacent to WoW stuff, its probably because they are. WoW has clearly done a lot right to stand as long as it has, but this isn't a forum post about a pissing match between AoC and other games so don't bother griping about how much you hate X game and whatever. I think a game that pulls from all the parts of other games that were good into one big pot is how we get the best games. Build upon what has been proven to be good and all that.
So, ideas to make it more interesting. I think we need things that give meaningful choice to cleric. In a lot of ways the healer is the lifeblood of any pvp fight, and raid encounter, dungeon etc etc. So if it is our quick choices that decide who lives and who dies then lets have those choices. Just, well my cast was too long but all I can do is try and spam a heal is not a fun class. The first idea I had was to change the consumption of the resource into a set of spells. Fellow WoW enjoyers will probably recognize this idea, but I think you should have 3 spells to choose from that consume only divine power. You should have something that provides a strong single target heal, something that is a decent aoe heal, and something that lets you spend it to do damage. Yeah yeah yeah, this is a holy priest I get it. Ignoring that, lets break it down.
The single target heal. This could come in many forms. I have two things that come to mind here, first some big burst heal. Whether this has a long cast, is instant cast I don't care. It would consume a very large amount of divine power (more than 50% minimum). This will be your "oh shit" button. Currently cleric doesn't feel like they have anything they can do for when it hits the fan. With a large enough cost this isn't something you can spend lightly or spam. I wouldn't even be against this requiring 75 divine power to cast. It is meant to be an emergency. The second would be some kind of channeled single target heal. You channel the heal into a person consuming X divine power per second to do so. Each tick does a good chunk of heal. This could even break the "Can always cast while moving" scheme and root you as a trade off to how much healing it could do into one person. Because it consumes it in smaller amounts, this spell would be cast more frequently and could be weaved in as a way to conserve mana, or saved up and burned into that person that is getting bursted.
AoE heal. My idea here is honestly pretty similar to the single target heal, but tone down the number and make it aoe. Have something that consumes are large amount but instantly heals around 20-25% hp of 5 people. Or maybe make it channel, maybe make you rooted again, I don't know. You could even create a channeled zone you put down, and inside that zone you get a lot of heals, or maybe an absorb shield or damage reduction, the skies the limit. Just give me a way to spread some aoe love.
Damage ability. Now this is where things get more interesting. Right now, in a pretend world where you had the talent points to actually take the clerics damage abilities, they revolve around building up stacks of burning to do damage. You can get that from bless weapon, smite, etc. So if we want to stick around that, fine. Give me an ability that can give a bunch of stacks of burning or something. Is this single target? Is this an aoe wave around me? I don't know. But, if we are being nitpicky (which we are) then I want to go back to the old statement of clerics are meant to be masters of life and death. So where's my death magic? Well how about we put it right here? How about a soul drain? I can channel a beam similar to the single target heal idea, but now it deals damage. Maybe it also puts a negative status effect like a slow or something. Or maybe we worry less about the amount of damage it deals, and just the utility it could provide. How about like an unholy nova that pushes enemies away and puts a DoT of some kind on them? Or if we stay single target, maybe some kind of deathly chains and these will work with your other damaging abilities, doing extra burst of damage when hit by your divine damage spells. Maybe you toggle it and it turns you into someone ready to dish out the damage by infusing my weapons with death. I really feel like the possibilities here are endless. And this would also lean a long way into being able to do some solo pve content (i.e. leveling up) with a little less pain. I know we should just group up, but I still want to be able to kill some mobs man. On a quick tangent. Where are my death type spells? Is this still the intended path for cleric? I for one hope so. As masters of life, doesn't that also give me purview over death?
This post is already getting beyond long, so I'll just rapid fire off some more quick ideas.
- Toggle buff that gives me large boost to healing and/or cast speed that consumes X divine power per second
- Spender that gives a large buff of some kind to a player. Talents could affect what this buff is (defense, attack, healing, ,etc)
- Place a large beacon on the battle field that smart heals to players
- Give a large shield to players. Absorbs are an interesting dynamic when healing
The very last idea I want to give out would be to play much more heavily into the life/death ideas. Maybe you should have two different resource bars, one of divine power one of unholy power. Or maybe you have one bar that at rest has you at 50 divine power and 50 unholy power and depending on spells cast it shifts that bar around to encourage you to cast both types of spells. These could still utilize some of the aforementioned spells and ideas but give it an even more interesting twist. I really really hope Intrepid isn't abandoning this idea as I think it is the linchpin to creating a fun cleric. Damage isn't my focus, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there.
I encourage others to come here and give their interesting ideas, or tell me I'm a dumbass who knows nothing about good games or development or whatever. But I desperately want the devs to see our thoughts and create the best cleric we can possibly have. We love you Intrepid staff, I hope you see this post and know that I'm complaining in good faith, not just trying to trash on the cleric. Please take another pass at divine power and keep on making a game we all look forward to.
TLDR: Cleric as it stands is extremely boring, and I believe the largest part of this is how bland its current class resource is.
So I am a healer main in basically every MMO I have ever played and it was the only class I played during all of the node wars tests. The cleric is pretty strong and as long as you have mana then you are pretty hard to kill. I felt like I could easily keep people alive as long as they weren't getting hyper focused with decent ease. Mana was a bit on the tight end, but because every class had the same mana issues it didn't feel to bad when trying to keep people alive during long fights. All of this is to say that I don't believe that the current version of cleric has an issue with throughput. Like the title says, the problem is it is incredibly boring.
Now I know that in the tests we are only level 15, we don't have secondary augments, etc etc etc. But that doesn't change the fact that the class just doesn't feel unique in any way. It just has heals, and can cast those heals to keep others alive. Great, so it fills the role of healer. But what else? What does it have that gives it some identity? Nothing. I believe that this can be boiled down to a few different things, but my personal biggest grievance is its class resource. The other classes have much more interesting things goings on, fighter has momentum, ranger has hunts, etc. Those allow for a unique feel to their class that the current cleric resource does not.
Lets break down what the current resource does. (I couldn't take a screenshot so forgive that I don't remember the exact values) Right it is gain in X amount when you cast a heal on an ally. As the bar fills up it causes your heals to be more potent. If I remember correct at 100% you would do around 10% more healing, but that value may be off. Regardless as the bar goes up your heals are stronger. As for spending the resource, you have two ways to do this. And keep in mind that these two ways are chosen via a talent, so you must pick which one you actually want to have. The first is that you can activate it to finish a cast at its full charge strength, consuming X amount to do so. The second is that you can toggle on and off an aura so to speak, that when you have enough charge based on the spell you are casting, it will consume that resource instead of mana or health. When it comes to the "your heals are more potent while you have charge", I don't exactly have a problem with this. While I still say it is boring, its not inherently bad. It does give an interesting choice of do I take X immediate benefit or do I hold off to keep Y% more healing. The problem I have is the spenders.
So the spenders. Right now they are beyond boring. Not only that, but due to current mana you would be literally trolling to take the talent that would give you the ability to instantly finish a cast. I get where the idea was here in theory. You have several spells that have hefty cast times and work with the charge dynamic. So yes I could get off an instant cast, full charge deliverance and do a good single target heal. potentially saving someone's life. This has several issues though. First, is the spell flash cure. Currently this spell has 3 charges and can be cast during other casts. This spell healed for 200% of your healing power at the time of the node wars test. So anytime I could have possibly wanted to instant cast a spell to save a life of someone being bursted, I could start charging up a deliverance or judgment, and just smash all 3 of those charges into someone. That would do around 30-40% of someone's life which basically always was enough to finish my cast and save that person. Also because I didn't hypothetically spend my class resource, all of those heals did more healing per cast anyways. The second problem comes from the other version of the talent.
Being able to spend my class resource instead of mana (or health) to cast completely outclassed the instant cast version. It was not even close, and I would go so far as to say taking this version of the talent was completely mandatory. Mana was already tight, so without having this running I could not even imagine trying to heal in a longer fight. As for my grievances with this talent there are two. First is it makes the buff coming from the resource non-existent. This version is a toggleable buff to yourself where if you have it activated, it will automatically consume your resource to during cast. So you basically never get above about 40/100 resource since its being consumed pretty much as fast as it comes in. There were a few bugs with it where you would get the resource so fast you couldn't spend it fast enough, but we won't concern ourselves with unintended behavior. This means the the buff you get for having a lot of resource is basically gone. You will never build a meaningful amount of the resource so the buff is probably less than 5%ish to your healing. Having this on felt like I close to tripled my mana bar. I could stay in fights looong after all the dps had run out of mana. While the drawback of less potent heals is a bummer, this is clearly powerful so what's the issue? At least of the versions is good right? Well let's look back to the title. This is unbelievably boring. You could completely remove the resource, give 200% buff to cleric mana and ta-da, you have achieved the same affect. Talk about a snooze fest.
Right now, due to a boring and non-interactive class resource, and the small amount of spells that are actually relevant, I feel like I'm just there to keep a bar from hitting zero and nothing else is going on. Now we are talking about a healer, so I get where complaining that all I do is heal might sound counterintuitive, but my healer main brothers and sister out there know exactly what I mean when I say just being able to keep people alive is not enough to make a good healer. Imagine if you booted up WoW and all you decided to play a healer. You get on and there's only one healing class, lets go with priest. You get up to the games current max level and the only spells you have have is: heal, greater heal, divine star (sort of?), and a weaker version of guardian spirit. Now all of those heals are tuned in a way where you have no problem healing people through raids, pvp, whatever. This is plenty to get the job done, but does that mean its enough? I would say no, and that is basically what was worth taking as a cleric as it stands. You have deliverance for good reliable heals, judgment healed for insane amount on a long cast with a cooldown, healing wave (which requires 2 talent points to be able to actually do any healing instead of just damage), and defiant light which healed for 50% max hp over 10 seconds and would cheat death up to 25% of their max hp if they "died" while it was active. Most other spells I had, I only had because they were on the way to another spell I wanted. Okay I guess you do also have wings of salvation which is nice, but that spell has its own issues.
To briefly cover my problem with wings of salvation I'll boil it down. Right now it is a CC break, your only CC break in fact. Well as long as you spend 2 talents points on it to have it be a CC break. This means that your only movement skill is also your only CC break? Obvious problem but that's not why I am here.
So we have a pretty small list of very basic skills, and a class resource that is just toggle this ability and forget it exists. Great. I don't know about other people who played the cleric, but I would say this is beyond bland. To quote TV, if cleric was a spice it would be flour. Important sure, but bland. Now maybe I am wrong. Maybe this sounds great to some people. It is simple, and it is effective. If I am crazy, please tell me. Especially other PI folks. I adamantly want to hear what you thought after playing the class.
Now, complaining without proposing any semblance of a solution is tantamount to being a crybaby. So what can we do? I have several ideas that I personally think would be more interesting. Let me preface this quickly with I am not a developer, and I don't claim to be some revolutionary in world of gaming ideas. I have played a lot of MMOs over my time, but the longest and most consistent has (for bettor or worse) been World of Warcraft. So if these ideas feel adjacent to WoW stuff, its probably because they are. WoW has clearly done a lot right to stand as long as it has, but this isn't a forum post about a pissing match between AoC and other games so don't bother griping about how much you hate X game and whatever. I think a game that pulls from all the parts of other games that were good into one big pot is how we get the best games. Build upon what has been proven to be good and all that.
So, ideas to make it more interesting. I think we need things that give meaningful choice to cleric. In a lot of ways the healer is the lifeblood of any pvp fight, and raid encounter, dungeon etc etc. So if it is our quick choices that decide who lives and who dies then lets have those choices. Just, well my cast was too long but all I can do is try and spam a heal is not a fun class. The first idea I had was to change the consumption of the resource into a set of spells. Fellow WoW enjoyers will probably recognize this idea, but I think you should have 3 spells to choose from that consume only divine power. You should have something that provides a strong single target heal, something that is a decent aoe heal, and something that lets you spend it to do damage. Yeah yeah yeah, this is a holy priest I get it. Ignoring that, lets break it down.
The single target heal. This could come in many forms. I have two things that come to mind here, first some big burst heal. Whether this has a long cast, is instant cast I don't care. It would consume a very large amount of divine power (more than 50% minimum). This will be your "oh shit" button. Currently cleric doesn't feel like they have anything they can do for when it hits the fan. With a large enough cost this isn't something you can spend lightly or spam. I wouldn't even be against this requiring 75 divine power to cast. It is meant to be an emergency. The second would be some kind of channeled single target heal. You channel the heal into a person consuming X divine power per second to do so. Each tick does a good chunk of heal. This could even break the "Can always cast while moving" scheme and root you as a trade off to how much healing it could do into one person. Because it consumes it in smaller amounts, this spell would be cast more frequently and could be weaved in as a way to conserve mana, or saved up and burned into that person that is getting bursted.
AoE heal. My idea here is honestly pretty similar to the single target heal, but tone down the number and make it aoe. Have something that consumes are large amount but instantly heals around 20-25% hp of 5 people. Or maybe make it channel, maybe make you rooted again, I don't know. You could even create a channeled zone you put down, and inside that zone you get a lot of heals, or maybe an absorb shield or damage reduction, the skies the limit. Just give me a way to spread some aoe love.
Damage ability. Now this is where things get more interesting. Right now, in a pretend world where you had the talent points to actually take the clerics damage abilities, they revolve around building up stacks of burning to do damage. You can get that from bless weapon, smite, etc. So if we want to stick around that, fine. Give me an ability that can give a bunch of stacks of burning or something. Is this single target? Is this an aoe wave around me? I don't know. But, if we are being nitpicky (which we are) then I want to go back to the old statement of clerics are meant to be masters of life and death. So where's my death magic? Well how about we put it right here? How about a soul drain? I can channel a beam similar to the single target heal idea, but now it deals damage. Maybe it also puts a negative status effect like a slow or something. Or maybe we worry less about the amount of damage it deals, and just the utility it could provide. How about like an unholy nova that pushes enemies away and puts a DoT of some kind on them? Or if we stay single target, maybe some kind of deathly chains and these will work with your other damaging abilities, doing extra burst of damage when hit by your divine damage spells. Maybe you toggle it and it turns you into someone ready to dish out the damage by infusing my weapons with death. I really feel like the possibilities here are endless. And this would also lean a long way into being able to do some solo pve content (i.e. leveling up) with a little less pain. I know we should just group up, but I still want to be able to kill some mobs man. On a quick tangent. Where are my death type spells? Is this still the intended path for cleric? I for one hope so. As masters of life, doesn't that also give me purview over death?
This post is already getting beyond long, so I'll just rapid fire off some more quick ideas.
- Toggle buff that gives me large boost to healing and/or cast speed that consumes X divine power per second
- Spender that gives a large buff of some kind to a player. Talents could affect what this buff is (defense, attack, healing, ,etc)
- Place a large beacon on the battle field that smart heals to players
- Give a large shield to players. Absorbs are an interesting dynamic when healing
The very last idea I want to give out would be to play much more heavily into the life/death ideas. Maybe you should have two different resource bars, one of divine power one of unholy power. Or maybe you have one bar that at rest has you at 50 divine power and 50 unholy power and depending on spells cast it shifts that bar around to encourage you to cast both types of spells. These could still utilize some of the aforementioned spells and ideas but give it an even more interesting twist. I really really hope Intrepid isn't abandoning this idea as I think it is the linchpin to creating a fun cleric. Damage isn't my focus, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be there.
I encourage others to come here and give their interesting ideas, or tell me I'm a dumbass who knows nothing about good games or development or whatever. But I desperately want the devs to see our thoughts and create the best cleric we can possibly have. We love you Intrepid staff, I hope you see this post and know that I'm complaining in good faith, not just trying to trash on the cleric. Please take another pass at divine power and keep on making a game we all look forward to.
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Comments
A more accurate statement would be the jury’s out until Alpha-2.
In Alpha-2 there will be: (a) testing of other gameplay types (not limited to node sieges), (b) larger testing scope on the primary archetype, and (c) a bigger population of testers.
With the verbal NDA lifted around the node wars test, I want to discuss the current state of the Cleric class. Other PI members like Bergund, Yokai, and Chibi, please share your experiences as well.
TLDR: Cleric is extremely boring mainly due to its bland class resource.
As a healer main, I found Cleric strong in keeping allies alive, but the class lacks uniqueness and feels very boring. At level 15, the class only has basic heals without any identity or interesting mechanics. Its class resource, which increases healing potency as it fills up and has two ways to spend it, is uninspiring. The spenders are either an instant cast that is hardly useful or a mana substitute that makes the resource buff negligible.
Cleric’s current abilities are limited and basic, making gameplay dull. There's a need for more interesting and interactive abilities, such as strong single-target and AoE heals, or even some damaging abilities reflecting a master of life and death. Additional suggestions include:
Toggle buffs consuming divine power per second.
Spenders that provide significant buffs or shields to players.
Abilities focusing on both life and death themes, possibly using two resource bars.
I hope Intrepid staff consider these points to make the Cleric more engaging and unique. Fellow players, please share your thoughts and suggestions.
but isn't this what makes the identity of a healer ?_? i mean...healers heal xD that's the identity, that's what makes the class different an unique from other classes...
anyways, regarding boredom, I think that's subjective. i read your post and judging from it, it seems that you gotta do a lot of mana management and make decisions pretty quickly in the heat of the fight, which skills to use and manage your resource. i find that quite interesting. add to that cc, buffs, debuffs, augments, etc. so the cleric is about having big brain and knowing what buttons to press and when (and you probably end up pressing the same buttons many times), rather than just going f1 f2 f3 f4 f8 f8 f7 f1 f2 f3 f4 f8 f8 f7 f1 f2 f3 f4, etc you get it.
regarding the aura and 40/100 you mentioned, cant you just turn the aura off, then turn it off when you hit 100/100 (or any amount) and then cast whatever heal you want instead of never going past 40?
I don't have any testing access, but as a very committed healer main, I will give my impressions on your observations:
I agree with many of your suggestions.
I don't think healers need to, or should, get any of their identy from mechanics/gimmicks/stacks/interactions.
I like being able to focus on the battlefield instead of having to get lost in optimising a bunch of egocentric rotation optimisations. Give me a few options for core rotations depending on my skills, and some balancing between self-defence and self-resource management, and helping the allies that need it.
But for identity? I'd much rather have impactful skill choices than internal minigames mechanics.
(My personal favourite is "Block non-damaging abilities" which makes it impossible for opponents to cast non-damaging abilities on the target with effects like heal reduction, resistance debuffs, or non-damaging CC. It feels super fun when each healer gets to decide that one target should have a highly specific powerful buff - especially when it comes to the choice of whether healers should get that buff.)
You can lock some of these mechanics behind mechanisms like toggling between modes or using a class resource. But the important thing for me is that I can feel like my skill choices and combat decisionmaking has impact, instead of being a hyperoptimisation minigame that revolves mostly around reaching the best numbers.
The worst thing that could happen for the skill design is making people tunnel-vision on their own rotations and hyper-optimising their stacks and procs. It's what ESO is all about, and it's what makes the game so insufferable to play.
Indeed. How is such a Character even up to - if People can measure the whole Class on it ? If the System functions similar like in Worst of Warcraft,
then a LvL 15 Cleric doesn't even have all of it's Classes Skills unlocked, now does it ? And the Second Archetype is not even present, löl.
It's ALMOST like trying to estimate the Game, when oneself has not even been a Alpha Two Tester yet. And even then things will still be Subject to Change in Development when Alpha Two is out.
-no augments
-some classes will have up to 40 skill that you havent even seen. Cleric included.
-???
-Class is boring.
I will agree that all of cleric skills currently shown are just variations of healing type skills, but you haven't even seen like half of the things cleric has to offer.
Also, are we giving each and every class specific resource now? Wtf.
Other than warrior, rogue is maybe the only one who needs that. Like combo points or something like that.
Everyone should use mana and stamina.
I am aware more abilities will come. Augments from secondaries will come. I know all of this. But since I have been actually playing the game and playing cleric I felt the need to let people know that right now the class feels boring. Early in it's life is the best time to criticize. Now is the time to experiment, to reiterate. Just saying "well it's only level 15" is a weak excuse.
I am wanting to pull on the creativity of others. To gives the devs random ideas to play with. To let them know they should explore other avenues while it's still easy to.
In which Regard ? o_Ô
I'll hope that the other PI members add their thoughts as well, as the thread goes on.
For now, it seems best just to mention my gratitude for all the effort you put into the post.
Agree to depends as there should be ways to lean into other classes and get some benefits (ie more movement at the cost of something else)
I liked the dash to a target with the heal at the end (or was it a shield? i forgot) but it felt very clericlike instead of just dashing all over like a rogue T_T
I do agree though I'd like to see one or two more offensive spells added to the cleric, or solo grinding mobs is going to get boring very quickly.
I don't think its a balancing issue. i think its more of a build choice (in the future of course, right now we arent at the balancing stages). you have limited skill points, so if you choose to focus on a couple of heals, you will mostly be casting those couple of skills, then you can use the rest of the points for other non healing skills.
maybe you can focus on high single target healing, or hot heals, or party heals, etc, etc. different builds for different situations.
Welcome to the forums Lennox
People here aren't going to read the breadth of what you said let alone are they going to care to try to understand it.
Anyway, I hope Cleric gets tweaks if only a few abilities operate on their main resource, that's kind of boring.
@Apok I have played quite a few MMOs over the past 20ish years. Granted at the start I was literally like 12 but still. For most of the games I have been a dedicated healer main but even during times where I dip my toes into dps I still always have a healer alt. As for games I've healed in I'll give a quick list. WoW I have played every single healer imaginable since the game came out in 2004. In GW2 I played mechanist. In ESO I played several different heals but I would say I mained warden. In Neverwinter I played cleric. FF14 I played scholar. Archage I played templar and hierophant. The list goes on but hopefully this gives at least a little bit of an idea. As for my favorite healers, I have always liked mistweaver monk from WoW and scholar from ff14. I always found the multiple playstyles of mistweaver to be fun. Do I want to go full caster healer, or do I want to punch things in the face and heal with that. Or do I go play a scholar and heal through a summon? Both are so interesting and unique I feel like. I truly hope the cleric x summoner combo is all I dream it will be. If it can live up to my dreams then it will be the best healer ever created.
To reiterate for those that seem to be lost on the point of the post. The vast vast vast majority of my problem comes from the current class specific mechanic. I know that every current ability is one tuning update from being the best heal in the game. Hell I saw that just over the course of these tests. You never knew what the best heal was until you started casting them. The thing with a faulty class mechanic though, is that no amount of extra levels or new spells to cast will fix what I believe to be the problem. Divine power needs to be completely re-evaluated. The buff it gives as it builds is completely fine with me, it is the current ways to spend it. Fast casts will be pointless for a large amount of gameplay, and if the other version is just better mana, then just give me more mana and be done with it.
I know some people mentioned mana control as a mechanic that can be considered skillful play and impactful choice, but I have to say that having played it myself I think I would disagree. The small amount you gain to healing currently would never outweigh the ability to preserve mana. And if people do think that sounds fun, then power to you, we just have to agree to disagree.
I started this thread because I don't want my favorite class in a game I am thousands of dollars deep into to be boring. My big ask at the end of my first post has seem to gone completely lost on everyone, so I will ask it more blatantly to try and get back on track.
If you could change the way divine power works/create spells that consume it, what would they be? I want to hear your wild ideas, get fun with it. This is a game in development, lets develop! If you hate divine power all together, what would you replace it with? Please fill this with fun and interesting ideas. Cleric is the only healer in the game. I know it has 8 secondary's to build off of, but if the foundation of cleric is faulty, then the rest will come tumbling down with it.
I really hope people will start to take advantage of this post. I don't want to see nothing change then watch thousands of players bitch and moan that the cleric is the most boring healer they have ever played. Healers are necessary to the game, give people a reason to want to play them.
Not reading, caring, or understanding all the replies in the thread can be equally or more hazardous than just reading the opening post.
I think most everyone replying here agree they want this primary healer class to be the best of any MMO.
But, does anyone really believe the intent of the node sieges was to provide a focused in-depth test of class combat mechanics?
No.
The intent of node siege testing was to test the mechanics of the node sieges … and that’s why characters were capped at level 15.
Don’t lose hope friends. Alpha-2 is in just a few months.
There we will be able to test Cleric in all types of scenarios with a lot more players … and really find out if it’s “fun” or “boring”.
I think its better to bring light to something immediately so they can take it understand consideration in their iterations now before we get more cemented class identity.
I haven't gotten to test any of the new classes myself and like you I will decide my opinion on them. But its best to bring something to light so we can at least see what @Lennox from his view point.
Also the forums are notorious for people talking down or talking at others rather than sharing our view points. Which is exactly what happened.
Which is why anyone with serious input to the game avoids these forums like the plague.
We're notorious? That's amazing!
I'd have just been happy with something simple like well known or village idiot.
I never thought to reach these hights!
At least that is what I get from your ramblings. You create a massive wall of text to offer feedback on class from an NDA test. I would guess this is not the right place to offer feedback, but after reading your text, I am too exhausted (read: lazy) to bother find out.
You begin by comparing the range of abilities available to you on a level 15 class-in-the-making for a game not yet feature complete, to a max level character in a game with 20 years of expansions and refinement.
Oh boy, is your feedback utterly useless. I really do hope Intrepid have selected at least a few invidivuals who manage to put their experience in perspective, and give valuable feedback that will actually benefit the rest of the playerbase. Because - sheesh! Your wall of text? Not worth reading.
Sorry if this comes off as blunt. But I expected more!
Sure, let us just carbon copy everything from World of Warcraft. Because that worked out great for every other wow-clone out there...