Critique on the current state from a veteran player.

[Aluviya]

It's challenging to observe the turmoil unfolding due to your contribution to this forum post, Caduceus. Your understanding of balance appears to lack the depth of experience needed to fully grasp the intricacies of RoR, particularly in the context of small-scale PvP. Allow me to address this in the most diplomatic manner possible:

I've never heard of you,

This is solely because I've been playing this game since the server's inception and have participated in almost all seasons of solo ranked/granked. Yet, I've never encountered your name despite your claim of having extensive "small scale PvP" experience. Shouldn't your name be familiar to me? You give off vibes of someone "who knows it well" but actually lacks experience.

DoK/WP trade range for tankiness in their book/chalice spec (compared to the other ranged healers), but since book/chalice isn't particularly strong outside of warbands I left it out of the discussion.

I have no gripe with shield DoK/WP since there is a clear trade-off.

The tradeoff, if executed skillfully, results in significantly increased damage and circumstances that can only be described as unfair when compared to ranged healers. However, you'd be aware of this if you had experience in small-scale PvP. It's worth noting that we typically don't match up ranged healers against SnB healers in official small-scale PvP events..

M2 is a big one for starters - pretty much a free escape roughly once per minute. Ontop of that, there are puddles and knockback + snare. Shammies get extra tools. Zealots and Runepriests get extremely potent lifesavers, etc.

For classes that spend most of their time at 100-150ft range where they're already hard to reach I'd say that's pretty extensive. Playing my healer is leisure time and it's baffling to me how trivial it is to negate the efforts of DPS classes and how easy it is to keep myself safe. It has always seemed plainly unfair how little effort it takes.

Let me rephrase my basic argument then: healers should be vulnerable in some way. Currently they simply are not. There's various ways one could conceivably go about this, but since the fact that healers do not have to invest in their primary stat is clearly unintuitive from a game design perspective, this seems to me like a logical avenue.

This is simply not true. Additionally, it oversimplifies the capabilities of all healers. For instance, RPthen possesses a single-target Detaunt and M2, along with a 3-minute cooldown ability that can be shattered. It's challenging to see how these could be considered "big tools.". Have you ever checked how many defensive abilities a SH has? I hesitate to label you as a forum troll, but your argumentation does give off that impression (no offense intended). Let's avoid further derailing the discussion.

[Caduceus]

The tradeoff, if executed skillfully, results in significantly increased damage and circumstances that can only be described as unfair when compared to ranged healers. However, you'd be aware of this if you had experience in small-scale PvP. It's worth noting that we typically don't match up ranged healers against SnB healers in official small-scale PvP events..

This is plain old posturing, and not very impressive. If you want to believe I have no small-scale experience that's your perogative. I can only laugh at that.

Also, you're shifting the topic to something it wasn't about originally, and basically ignoring my deeper points about how TTK and the over-sized defensive safety net interact to create undesirable and hard-to-fix balance situations.

This is simply not true. Additionally, it oversimplifies the capabilities of all healers. For instance, RPthen possesses a single-target Detaunt and M2, along with a 3-minute cooldown ability that can be shattered. It's challenging to see how these could be considered "big tools.". Have you ever checked how many defensive abilities a SH has? I hesitate to label you as a forum troll, but your argumentation does give off that impression (no offense intended). Let's avoid further derailing the discussion.

More posturing. A bit rich you're the one calling me a forum troll. Play the ball, not the man.

Anyway, if you want to chase Runies in your Ranked matches, be my guest, I suppose.

And yes, there are other classes who have escape tools. We can have a discussion about that in another topic. This is typical "whataboutism" - one does not exclude the other.


Please stop derailing the discussion with your cheap rhetorical tricks and posturing. Tyvm.

[Hazmy]

Please keep the thread on point and stay respectful to your fellow players.

If you shared your view on this topic, it is best to let others also share their perspective and just observe.

[calipso]

As a healer player, my pov is completely different. I’ve seen how healers have been nerfed several times, either reducing their armor (dok aint what it used to be, unless you are snb and get a pretty semi defensive kit, AM feels like playing a feather which also got m1 nerfed) or removing abilities that were very useful and had big impact in order to keep your party alive.
Maybe im wrong but is the OP suggesting to remove the abilities that i, as a healer, got in order to survive?
Could the OP give examples on which situations are healers unkilleables? were they guarded? Did they have 2nd support healer? If healer was under attack: what lvl was the dps, gear and amount of dmg/debuffs used? (Provide screenshots)
EVERY healer is killeable, that so called “net” is our abilities like every tank or dps have in order to do dmg. Our “net”, as i mentioned before, is trying to survive, our party or us. Why we, as a healers, invest in defensive stats? Is pretty obvious, we need help to dont be killed in 1 GCD.
At this point with the amount of dmg output, debuffs and so on all the dps have, if you aren’t able to kill a solo healer, or even in party (depends on situations) is more a ltp issue

[salazarn]

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

Or that healers stack lots of defensive stats and can have a 50% detaunt up and still spam heal

[Hazmy]

I had to clean new posts again due to getting too aggressive and personal.

Please, stay on topic and avoid turning this into non-productive arguments and personal attacks.

[Kaliani]

I can't imagine being even more squishy while getting grabbed from across the field and focused down while have my healing debuffed.

[Caduceus]

I can't imagine being even more squishy while getting grabbed from across the field and focused down while have my healing debuffed.

This cannot be an argument, since healers are tankier than DPS, and DPS will consistently need to take more risk and be closer to the fight to fulfill their role.

If you believe healers are too squishy, where would that leave DPS?

[Kaliani]

I can't imagine being even more squishy while getting grabbed from across the field and focused down while have my healing debuffed.

This cannot be an argument, since healers are tankier than DPS, and DPS will consistently need to take more risk and be closer to the fight to fulfill their role.

If you believe healers are too squishy, where would that leave DPS?

Not being focused by 20 people while 6 of of them grab them into the air.

[Caduceus]

Not being focused by 20 people while 6 of of them grab them into the air.

But, again, if you make this argument from a healer perspective you would have to admit that DPS have it way worse, because A. DPS is not as tanky, and B. they are closer to the fight and have to take more risk to fulfill their role.

To be clear, I don't think this argument holds up at all.

Also, pulls are a seperate issue that in my view isn't directly related to tankiness. Even tanks have to deal with those kinds of pulls, and even tanks die to that type of focus-fire. For healers though, a lot needs to go wrong first before they are at risk of being pulled.