Critique on the current state from a veteran player.

[Panel]

I get the point about healers being though, but I think you are wrong. As a healer you can't kill anyone, if you nerf healers defenses and they can be killed by a single dps you get a situation where a healer can't kill anyone but can be killed by anyone. Why should I play healer if I'm just a walking sack of RP ready to be reaped? No one would play healer

Welcome to bw/sorcerer world sir.

Not comparable: BW/Sorc are situationally really good and can rack tons of kills in some settings. While sorc might not have much fun in Ironclad scenario facing double slayer premade, it can get insane kills in large scale back and forth fights in rvr lakes if choosing right targets, positioning correctly & pressing the right buttons.

Also healers are not too hard to kill in this game. I think most people who claim that are not as skilled as they think they are and are not paying attention to all buffs/debuffs that is going on and are not setting up kills correctly. Edit: this is not a flame towards OP btw, just general observation from what I've seen in forums/ingame general and advice chats and OP is right about shammies being definitely hard to kill because of their kit and auto-detaunt (also I think hes right about SH pet disarm but thats besides the point I'm trying to make here).

But speaking in general, I think healers are not too hard to kill:
1) Healer survivability has already been nerfed a lot when armor talis got nerfed few years ago.
2) I can kill probably around 80% of the healers (of whole population so lowbies included) without heal debuff with most of my BIS dps, then for some need heal debuff and few minutes of time to get through their defensives. ...Then for some healers (really good ones) I probably can't kill them alone even with double heal debuff but why should I? Who says 1 dps should automatically be able to kill 1 healer solo anyways? Who would want to play healer in that kind of setting? We are playing MMO and not some survival horror game and if someone is into survival horror games, there is better options.
3) Apparently viable 6vs6 strat is to tunnel healer all game and kill him through guard and all defensives.

TLDR: Healers are fine, if something needs to be done, it's fine-tuning goblin racials (fine-tuning, not reworking) but thats it.

Curious as to what "fine tuning" you envisage - their are 4 parameters - proc chance - speed - duration and proc frequency - any "fine tuning" would have to change at least one. I dont beleive for a moment you envisage increasing proc chance,speed and duration or reduce the cooldown. So "fine tuning" is just code for nerf. How about we cast our eyes over AMs for some fine tuning then - lets fine tune their ridiculous M1 heh

[Lime]

Healers are durable in plenty of games. The cleric is the defacto dnd healer and wears plate armor. Wow healers are also very durable wow PvP is literally chasing resto druids around pillars and battlegrounds for 30 minutes and paladins going invincible as everyone else dies.

Healers are only overtuned in t1 with no heal debuffs and against pugs that dont assist and have bad gear or bad play with low coordination.

This game has nearly perfect balance as the best groups take 2 tanks 2 dps and 2 healers which makes it hard for one role to be overpowered.

[Uchoo]

TL;DR: Add Personals, more player agency / autonomy !

If you make RoR more like "every other 3D MMO", you begin to compete with games that were actively developed for dozens of years with budgets of a small country If you make RoR to be more like WoW, why shouldn't you just play WoW instead? I think personal defensive CDs would reduce team dependence, again, losing on what I see as the attraction in RoR. I agree that it would make each class more interesting to play, but I also think it would make the game as a whole more boring to play. Also keep in mind that almost every other MMO is based around small scale PvP (for example, PvP in WoW with their personal CDs is designed around 3v3 deathmatches).

What I find strange about RoR is lack of CC. CCs are short, there are only 2 types of immunities and they are very harsh (instead of increasing DRs you immediately get full immunity for a long period of time). Unlike personal defensive CDs, CC can be used to save teammates, which I think is a better game design. So immunities can be replaced with increasing DRs leading to immunity, more CC can be added to some classes (like WE that struggles to be a useful frontliner).

If you think more CC would be a good solution, I recommend trying DAOC, that's what happens in that game, then you could see for yourself.

[Zxul]

If you think more CC would be a good solution, I recommend trying DAOC, that's what happens in that game, then you could see for yourself.

You had never tried Anarchy Online. 30 min duration snares, 4 min duration roots, no immunities. And then there are Shadowbreeds- for example, 30 sec very large size pbaoe unbreakable root+ very hard hitting uncleansable dot, in the same package. No max number of targets on both. Fun times.

[Caduceus]

When talking about the tankiness of healers, I suppose we should specify whether we're talking about scenarios/6v6 or RvR/24v24.

In large-scale fights, I would not argue healers are too tanky, since the damage potential there is way higher. But then again, positioning is the primary means of survival in RvR (as it should be).

A healer gets caught out of position in RvR, they'll get annihilated like anyone else.


That's where RvR fundamentally differs from smaller scale play. It's in small-scale where I would argue healers are much too tanky.

Someone seemed to suggest that tunneling healers in 6v6 is a viable strategy - it is not, with the exception being Shield DoK/WP.

The rest will be sitting comfortably at maximum range, and have plenty of tank, life-savers and CC to make chasing them a waste of time.

WP/DoK is a special case because they do sacrifice range for tank, making it more balanced in that regard. And in shield spec they have to sacrifice tank for more damage and healing.

For the ranged healers, there's no reason classes should be running around with a toolkit like that. For the record, I play all roles at rr80+.

As a healer you're essentially untouchable unless you're up against really capable opposition, and even then you're usually left alone because they know better.

This is even more pronounced outside of 6v6, since in regular scenarios teams tend to be less organized.


Of course, because there are healers on all teams it doesn't produce an imbalance. It just produces stale gameplay with very little tactical depth. This is further compounded by infinite resources and low cooldown life-savers.

Finally, the ranged healers are by far the easiest roles to play, while arguably having the greatest impact on the battlefield.

[Faction69]

Again, the reason people don't attack healers is not because they are invincible, it's because you gain next to no advantage from doing so vs attacking a dps. A healer caught unguarded is absolutely killable by any 2 competent dps, the only exception is archmage due to 15 second cd aoe detaunt. But why would you bother when you can hit a choppa and force them to play defensive instead, mitigating a ton of damage on your team, vs attacking a healer and allowing them to do full damage to you the whole time?

This game doesn't have skill based combat, the "best" players as considered by the community are often keyboard turners. There's practically zero cc (one cc every 30 seconds is not much), you have no real way to cc one target and attack another. Since you can't cc them for more than a few seconds per 30 sec, it's natural that in a game with so little room to outplay your opponents aside from simply actually using keybinds, attacking the DPS is the best strategy.

Weird to see people talking about 6v6 as if it's indicative of anything, no one aside from maybe 50-100 people total out of a population of thousands play it. Nothing should be balanced around a DOA game mode

[Uchoo]

Weird to see people talking about 6v6 as if it's indicative of anything, no one aside from maybe 50-100 people total out of a population of thousands play it. Nothing should be balanced around a DOA game mode

50-100 out of 1000 players? What's the percentage there? What percentage of WoW players PvP?

Do you have any competitive experience in WAR or any other game? Why should I trust you when you say things like "it's because you gain next to no advantage from doing so vs attacking a dps" or "This game doesn't have skill based combat"

[Faction69]

It's not about "trust" it's about literally looking at the tools given to you in this game. You have 1 cc of 2 types every 30 seconds per target and a few classes have interrupts that don't even lock out. Aside from that it's snares and raw healing/mitigation vs damage output, about as much of a button mash fest as a tab target pvp game could possibly be. Not sure how you can invoke WoW given that even the abberation that is WoW retail has about 50000x more depth and mechanical skill to it than WAR ever had.

And this server obviously has way more than 1000 players, and everyone on it pvps. Ranked was added by the RoR devs and if you're seriously saying that it needs to be balanced around or is at all indicative of anything of any value to the vast majority of the playerbase then you are clearly very disconnected from the reality of why people play this game in the first place, which is orvr. This is a game with relatively bad gameplay that's heavily limiting on player skill, but compelling supporting systems, and it's always been that way.

Perhaps this truth offends you as you have convinced yourself that playing an invented gamemode on a small private server of one of the most mechanically basic tab target MMORPGs ever made makes you some of authority. No one who is seriously looking for "competitive gameplay" is looking for it here, just a tiny minority of people who at most want to feel like a big fish in a small pond. Everyone else is here because they like the IP/orvr and are willing to put up with the flaws for it.

[Caduceus]

It's clear that scenarios/6v6 is a big part of the balance picture for the RoR devs, so obviously it should be part of the conversation. If your stance is that RvR should be the only consideration that's fine, but that's not the stance of the devs.

Everything I said about healers in the scenario/6v6 context stands. In fact, it's probably the most relevant for small-scale and scenarios (which I'm sure we can agree is part of the overall balance picture).

There's no reason a role should get the biggest impact at the longest range ánd this type of survivability in the form of CC and tankiness.

The two simply don't mix - it's a game design flaw.

And I don't think I'm saying anything controversial when I say that the ranged healers are the easiest classes to play at a competent level.

Again, the culprit behind this problem is simple to spot. For some strange reason healers don't have to invest in their primary stat. I've never heard a credible reason for why it should be that way.

[Bozzax]

Lul it is more like with the changes to gear, talismans and classes themselves ie less natural toughness and more easy to get armour penetration a healer that slot willpower won’t heal at all.

Exceptions are mdoks and mwps that currently is a win condition in 6v6 by current dev design

You guys should try more archetypes rly