Cleric is boring. Please fix the divine power
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.
