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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.
Action Camera & Healing
Leukael
Member, Alpha One, Alpha Two, Early Alpha Two
I wanted to make a post regarding the hybrid approach with action camera and how it relates to healing.
The appeal to healing for me is to make judgement calls on when and which heals/spells second to second (wow holy priest in past life.) When I see a push to an action camera approach I tend to see a move to aoe heals which is more about putting it in a place where it hits the most people. This removes those moment to moment decisions that make healing engaging in a different way than dps.
What do you enjoy about healing? Does it lend itself to action camera play? Is there any ideas you have on action camera and healing to keep it engaging?
The appeal to healing for me is to make judgement calls on when and which heals/spells second to second (wow holy priest in past life.) When I see a push to an action camera approach I tend to see a move to aoe heals which is more about putting it in a place where it hits the most people. This removes those moment to moment decisions that make healing engaging in a different way than dps.
What do you enjoy about healing? Does it lend itself to action camera play? Is there any ideas you have on action camera and healing to keep it engaging?
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Comments
My problem with action targeted heals, are alot of them are blanket heals, that auto target party within range, or nearest ally, or things like that, and those mindless press a single button heals, i dont see a huge place for. So most single target ranged heals being tab targeted and "melee" heals being an action target narrow cone, and group heals being action target "pool" reticles or tab target arch to nearest allies within range. Makes sence to me.
I don't have a strong expectation that 'AoE heals' are a requirement just because things have moved more toward Action. Firstly because MMO designers know that many healers don't even care about being frontline anyway so they just have to get to the correct position and keep their reticle on target. Secondly because I personally don't find it necessary. Healing is not explicitly easier or harder for me in Action, except for one thing.
If a game is explicitly designed with the expectation and intention that the healer is 'squishy backline' then they make it dangerous to be healing from up close, purposely. This makes sense because otherwise Healers often become able to tank somewhat in PvE (I enjoy this too). When 'pushing me to backline', it also makes 'close range big heal', a situation in which I move close to allies to heal strongly, a bad idea, which lowers my engagement relative to Action Combat.
Not necessarily relative to healing, but if the game is 'telling me' that 'You're a healer you shouldn't be frontline or even close', I normally expect to be 'not allowed to have fun in Action style' and have to rely on the game to consume all my focus from backline (most don't).
I would like to be able to heal from close. I do not mind if my 'big heal' cannot be self targeted to prevent me from also tanking. For a while I thought this was where Intrepid was going to go and they still might. I would be able to enjoy Action healing then, as I do in some other games.
I feel as if 'having access to too much AoE' would make it difficult to balance this, since it would also heal me, so I will hope that isn't the case, just from the perspective of 'I want to be more active while playing Shadow Disciple'.
Great insights. I personally was not saying it was more difficult but rather it felt less interesting and different from dps for clarity's sake.
Heals can also use projectiles with smaller AoEs (only hit 1 or 2 people), so it's easier to hit but you still aren't healing the whole party. I get a weird joy out of shooting skills like these at my feet or against a nearby
Larger AoE heals can also be balanced with cooldowns so it's more of an o shit button than a normal heal.
If you look outside the MMO genre, you can find plenty of examples of healing that requires aiming.
I agree with both of these comments!
My general thought is only one game has done action combat healing well and that was TERA. They managed to make a single target heal that was easy to use so you really felt like you had a WoW Holy Priest variety of spells to use and could choose which targets to heal, when, and with what abilities.
The main heal was an intuitive and smooth lock-on ability where you moved your (very large - this is important to have) reticule over the player(s) and it painted their character models with a translucent green showing who you were targeting, then you'd press the button again to heal. You could choose anywhere from 1-3 targets to heal with one of these skills, allowing for the difficulties of aiming at melee close together. There was another Targeted AoE where it would heal the target and anyone within a 5m radius. Then you had pool style location-locked AoEs as well.
They however also had a good camera angle which is also so, so important. You had a reticule that was higher up than most other action games, centrally located far above your character's head (and you could change the location of this on screen and personalize it if you wanted). This allowed for a more natural view similar to tab target games, allowing the healer to zoom out and see most of the battlefield looking down at them at an angle. It's important for a healer to be able to see all of this so we can make appropriate decisions. But for an action game with a reticule, this camera view makes it actually possible to target single players in a crowd. Of course other design decisions factor into this as well, but that was a big part of it.
Most games with action combat healing have not done it well - New World's targeted heal is difficult to use, clunky, prone to mis-targeting, awful camera view. ESO has the "auto target lowest HP party member" and lots of AoEs that we all hate, so there's no healer choice or skill/strategy there. They both also have that same low to the ground, over the shoulder camera view that is problematic for a class expected to be able to accurately target and heal a player through a zerg to save them in a pinch - if I can't clearly see the player model in full view with no players or other obstructions blocking my view, I can't heal them with a reticule skill.
My thought is, if they can make TERA-quality single-target or 2-3 person "single" target heals for the action side, that's ideal. If they can't, then just give me standard tab target single target heals and I'll use them in tab target mode. I do agree that I expect to see GtAoEs, PbAoEs, cones, lines, etc. for the "action" side of healing and that's fine.
I will also say that some of these line/cone, other smaller styled "AoE" heals can make for a more standard, Holy Priest style well-rounded healer if they go the Wildstar route with some of those. Yes even a line is technically multi-target, but some of Wildstar's healers had thicker lines intended as "single target" and you might get 1 or 2 extra players in that line as you attempt to heal that one person, but that's ok. It's another viable way of doing hybrid healing and adding "single target"-ish heals that are action designed and not tab target. I'm ok with that - especially mixed in with some standard tab-target abilities. I think the Esper had that mix and I enjoyed that class. It's not my first choice for action "single target" heal design, but its a method I'd be ok with.
I also wonder how "tab-targeted" heals will work in the action reticule mode UI setting. Will that even be viable or will it be really terrible and clunky?
I don't think it's necessary to limit healer's ability to self heal at all. That's just poor game design. Most games manage to work this issue out without limiting a class's primary ability - it's ludicrous to suggest when you really think about what you're asking. You can prevent healers from being OP in a ton of ways, but we do need to self heal. Sure I can have people peeling for me in PvP, but who heals my HP back up after I take those hits if not me? Otherwise you'll get a Crowfall-style meta where the standard group has 2 healers so they can cross-heal one another and nobody wants that. The same problem exists in PvE - if I take damage, who heals that up if it's not me?
We can have the healer balance discussion in another thread if you'd like, but I felt it necessary to disagree with that bit at least here. I do think it's necessary for Clerics in Ashes to be able to have a wide variety of build choices - melee healer in heavy armor, backline in cloth, standard Cleric style with heavy armor, variety of heals, a bit of damage. Maybe there's even a medium armor stealth healer in your Shadow Disciple - SWTOR style.
Well for clarity I didn't mean 'can never heal self'.
Just that some skills don't heal self. And in general, 'aimed' healing skills can't be aimed at oneself in my experience.
This is how I thought 'Devotion' was going to work in Alpha-1 and I found it interesting, I could use Devotion to heal others quickly and strategically, could use AoE and Hallowed Ground to heal myself, with Hallowed Ground being a real decision if I was backline at the time I wanted to use it, and still had the basic Heal that I could use on either others or myself. (Devotion was later changed to heal me too and then everything just became easy)
Healers with good other mitigation make good tanks unless balanced to explicitly not. If your disagreement is with this specific thing, sure, I'm glad to talk about it in another thread.
What should prevent healers from being tanks is their lack of skills to generate threat. They shouldnt be able to hold onto mobs. I dont care if they can be built to be hard to kill, they shouldnt get threat generating skills.
Or really maybe threat needs to be looked at more and be made more complex. Tanks should get more medigation and CC skills in general than healers. Maybe give some mobs that gain buffs the higher dps they have, so chewing on a hp tank buffs them vs chewing on a medigation tank.
Don't care much. In my experience it's harder to balance, that's all.
Particularly in a game where 'subclass', 'subjob', 'secondary kit', etc, are available.
If Intrepid WANTS Cleric/Tank to be able to do this, I'll be glad for it. I just don't want them balancing Cleric to be squishy backline so that they can't do it.
Making Clerics explicitly generate LESS Threat when healing has other problems, but honestly, at this point I'm arguing against my own interest here. The more 'broken' or 'potentially broken' Cleric is, the 'better' for me. I just don't like playing unbalanced games, and I don't like most of the approaches used for 'Cleric balance'.
Low threat generation? I'll abuse it.
Strong mitigation? Someone else will, I might too.
Massive powerful heals? EZ, absolutely using it.
The only good way I know to 'not result in abusable mechanics for Cleric in a system with secondary stuff' is to make healing HP as a whole weaker/less important in the game (hoping for this) or limiting the self-heals (will accept this).
I agree with threat limiting not being a great idea, i realized as it came out of my mouth, but i left it in. Thats why i made the suggestion of enemy variety.
Enemy variety probably truly is the best way overall to ensure the classes can feel powerful in some ways in some cases, and not be over powered in situations you dont want them to be over powered.
For this area to have enemies that life steal based on how much hp damage they do, or to buff themselves based on hitting dps thresholds makes medigation important in those areas in the game.
I'm sure Intrepid will come up with something, even if it isn't 'the one I believe I want'.
All I need to do is, if asked for feedback, tell them what I do not want. In this case, I think the only thing I don't want is the 'balanced for primarily backline even if geared'.
I ain't trying to reach Tank levels of 'waterfall stats' or whatever, but anything else that creates a big gap between 'The hits a Tank and I can take if wearing the same gear with no abilities active', I'm pretty opposed to.
Emulates rolling a 1 in D&D.
Sometimes people miss.
Also just generally, tanky healers aren't as tanky as real tanks, so they still take more damage than a tank would because they don't have the extra mitigation tanks have. Often also you'll run out of mana eventually to cast in some games.
In PvP you'd be able to keep yourself alive for a short bit with healing yourself like that, and likely you'd have some major CD you'd pop to aid yourself in that so outside of that CD it might not be viable long. But you couldn't do that forever and that's why you always need teammates to peel for you. Or alternatively, if capable of and forced to spam heal yourself, you are putting the rest of your team in danger because you're unable to heal them and they become easy prey - either you stop casting on yourself and risk dying yourself to heal a teammate, or you ignore the teammates and they die. More risk vs reward. You also have things like stuns/silences/fears to control the tanky healer.
There's numerous ways a tanky healer can be dealt with in PvP and many reasons why it'll be unviable in PvE for anything outside of regular mobs.
Why wouldn't you be able to target yourself with Devotion? I thought that was a regular tab-target skill? If it is then I assume you target yourself to heal yourself and that's it. If it heals you every time you target another player with it, then that I disagree with. It's skill-less and unfun. That goes back to what OP was saying - for me, having no need to choose takes the fun and strategy out of healing.
As for targeting yourself in action games, it depends on how the ability is designed. In TERA you couldn't, so you had a few options. You had an ability that only healed yourself on a 5 second CD that was your primary self heal, but that game also had 20-30 keybinds, so we don't really have room for that sort of thing in Ashes. The targeted AoE they had was aother single target lock on, but if you healed someone within the AoEs 5m range you'd also heal yourself with it. The other AoEs didn't heal you in TERA because they weren't GtAoE - they were fixed location skills and that location did not include the caster.
In New World the single target heals were designed differently (part of why it was so bad), but you had a self cast modifier there to target yourself with those, and then you could also just heal yourself with the AoEs.
I imagine here it would depend on how the ability is designed. In action mode I imagine they'd have a self-cast modifier for tab-targeted heals. For action heals hard to say without seeing how the skills are going to work.
This I hate honestly. If a skill is designed well and the reticule location and camera angle make it possible for me to accurately target, it should still aim at that target. That's within the player's control. If someone else walks in front of my heal and "steals" it, there's no skill-based way to prevent that because I can't predict another player moving in front of my heal target.
And in large scale PvP/PvE that would also relegate people to mostly AoE heals which we're all trying to avoid because it's skill-less and unfun. If a single target heal is unreliable like that, people just won't use it. That leads to awful gameplay. I'll throw New World under the bus again here because for many, full AoE became the meta for PvP because single target healing was unreliable in zergs. Or alternatively, people would lock their heals to only heal their group, making it impossible for them to heal anyone outside of that 5 man party, forced to avoid healing the rest of the raid. So they could more easily single-target heal their 5 people but at the cost of everyone else. I hope everyone understands how bad that is.
Tanky Healer + multiple high power DPS always worked for me. Enemies die faster, hate is 'absorbed' onto the Healer when they heal the DPS instead of 'focused on the tank', and the healer can just 'drop hate' by not healing themselves for a bit when they take damage (are we talking about games where taking damage doesn't reduce hate gained, though? Maybe that's it?)
Well, experiences differ. Ashes feels close to what I'm used to, based on what I played in Alpha-1. That's why I thought 'Oh, Devotion not healing me is intentional' (I'm pretty sure it really did change at some point in Alpha-1 from being not-self-targetable to being self-targetable).
I could, if I wanted to, 'tank' fairly easily this way, which doesn't say anything about long term design anyway, only 'basic hate mechanics'.
Ashes also had another proposed skill (I don't think it was present in Alpha-1 in the end) that would chain heal in front of you and didn't indicate that it would bounce back to you if you did this, so that's why I didn't find it weird.
In Raids its stack on commander/group at all times for maximum boon uptime and heals.
so its stack and fight stack and fight stack and fight. Its really ugly to watch and to even be apart of and Ive found myself not playing GW2 for many reasons, but this is definitely contributing reason.
I will say AoE healing in rift was a blast because the spells had a large area and you had no reason to stack, althought its been a long time since I played Rift i remember the raiding be really fun as a dps and healer (I never tanked in raids).
Just because you accurately aim at your target does not mean you will lock on your target such that you never miss. That's part of the fun of Action Combat.
New World combat was great for New World.
I dunno that I would like it for Ashes, but that has nothing to do with not being able to always hit my ranged targets.
And, of course, I don't give a crap about people trying to adopt "the META" - especially not for PvP.
I epect Ashes to have Tab Target heals as well as Action Combat heals and AoEs.
Choose whatever you personally like best
And that's not bad design, that's just bad player skills...or, really, bad luck. Sometimes, shit happens.
But if tyou want to "always" hit your target - focus on Tab Target heals.
A: I like the responsability, the strategic aspects atreled to healing like proper positining, mana/aggro management and the required extra levels of attention towads party members.
Q: Does it lend itself to action camera play?
A: Yes certainly, it is just more mechanically demanding and might just not be the cup of tea of some people more interested in the other aspects of healing.
Q: Is there any ideas you have on action camera and healing to keep it engaging?
A: I believe healing being engaging or not isn't necessarily tied to the type of camera one may use but more about the healing skills itself and thing like TTKs, and overall game pace(mainly cast speed) and healers responsabilities.
You can have varying levels of engagement required depending on the type of action heal you use, for example:
Around Self(360° a.k.a proximity heal) Heal: Only requires proper character positioning and timing.(safety risk depending on radius size)
Ground area and Cones Heals: Requires more aiming and timing but not necessary alot of precision (depending on size).
Skill Shot Heal: Requires way more aim and precision and can be intercepted
Many criticize the "Whack-a-mole" healing playstyle but i believe it to be a vaiid form of healing in mmorpgs it's just a different type of engagement that can give more freedom to other healer's aspects and possible forms of engagement.
Using Lineage 2 as an example, Lineage 2's TTK and pace in general started quite long and slow, and became shorter and faster as versions went by and meta was created increasing the healers engagement.
Other than the basic Heal and Ress, Lineage 2 Healer were tasked with Debuffs, Cleansing debuffs, Mana Recharging party members and Mana Burning enemies. Mana management was a big deal in Lineage 2 there wasn't mana potions and as mana cost were quite steep and mana base regen was minimum.
This complemented the healers engagement as the majority of its heals where either whack-a-mole style single target heals or big radius Around Self party heals.
Aren't we all sinners?
That has always been my concern with pvp as a healer. I play a healer because I enjoy healing and supporting my teammates. The issue I have with pvp as a healer is you're by default a tank first. Whoever figures out how to solve that will be my hero. In mobas healers have a generous amount of cc and disengages to deal with that but I think in mmos it is awkward in that space for some reason from a balancing point maybe?
I think the issue in a lot of MMOs is the role healers play in PvE means they need to be able to do a lot of healing. Since they are given a bunch of healing they need for PvE, you can't also then give them a bunch of CC on top of that. mobas don't have to worry about this.
One of the things i'm kind of hoping for is for tanks (and everyone else) to play a larger role in their health management with tools like active block so heals can be toned down and healer's kits expanded.
Great point! I enjoy the impact as a support in a moba (League Nami/Sera main here) and being able to punish aggression and being able to shine both in healing and cc. That is something I wish mmos would learn how to adapt/do.
I've played MMO healers who have their own CC's and disengages. There's no reason why we can't, here.
That's why I referenced League as an example. I see it as a compelling possibility to achieve that goal. Let's hope they do it or something to the same result.
Yeah very good overview on the general issue.
I would say healers could be potent at healing, and have some cc if they couldn't also spec into damage.... its weird to me for a cleric to be a jack of all trades.... a healer with front line abilities instantly becomes a tank... so they can do everything. Unlike every other class.
I think you should have to choose between reliable CC and tankability imo. But that is just me.
Healers in the PvP Context are usually the main enemy target to be taken down first for obvious reasons, forcing them to lean towards more defensive playstyles/builds to help them survive and to dissuade enemies from focusing them over squishier dps classes in their party, having a bodyguard in the form of an actual tank also helps this ideal of lessening this burden off of the healers shoulders.
CCs are also an excelent survival tool for healers but it requires proper balance and for the CC to be of the correct types and limited to not become overpowered for the class, i believe Lineage 2 gave healers the most reasonable CC abilities that fit healers in the game context, mostly simple single target Sleep and slows.
Having harder CCs on healers would cause balance issues without proper trade-off, same goes for healer's damage.
Aren't we all sinners?