Changelog 18/11/16

[Azarael]

As previously stated, undefendable healing in Devotion and Vitality isn't the flaw.

Except it is the flaw,

I like that it doesn't heal off absorbs now, but not every class can have an absorb up at any time. The undefendable healing rewards bad players for choosing lousy targets like tanks, not only that but the only direct counter now is ranged, they can't get bullied around by tanks anymore. Yesterday as order, we had multiple scenarios where 3 doks were guarded in a melee train and were practically immortal. I don't mind the righteousness buffs, but going to prayer of devotion instantly makes you win. It would be better in my opinion to have the AoE detaunt in prayer of righteousness since the buffs give you more burst and a charge, and chances are you're going to be focused. Yesterday a WP could switch from Righteousness to Devotion and spam Sigmar's Radiance and never die.

I don't see what the point to a 5 minute CD on switching prayers is going to fix, if you're trying to stop people switching from Righteousness to Devotion so they're killable, then they're just going to stay in devotion. Devotion offers so much more survivability and healing. The point of having such drastic changes in each prayer was to be able to switch your role on the fly, if you enforce such a long CD, people will just stay in one prayer, it defeats the purpose of being a hybrid. People can port to Altdorf and respec before the timer is up.

And in regard to what sweet said about tanking the whole scenario, I've also guarded another WP in a SC while he was in devotion and all he did was spam Sigmar's Radiance and Divine Assault to keep us both up. We went to their WC in serpent's passage and slowly backed up to our own completely fine.

I feel like I'm a broken record here so I'll say it again:

The only reason that they're undefendable is because of Guard. Because the prevalence of undefendable attacks is low, Guard on this server is configured to bypass its defense check if the original damage is undefendable. What will happen if the undefendable component is removed:

1) You attack a tank. Enjoy your block and parry - reliability status: destroyed
2) You attack a target with Guard. The guarding tank will dissipate his portion of the damage from Guard 60% of the time, halving your heal, and there's not a damn thing you can do about that - reliability status: destroyed
3) You somehow hit a target that doesn't have Guard. Party!

Devotion has two issues, the first being that people are getting damage out of it. The aim was always to isolate Righteousness from Devotion and Absolution, which were meant to be healing and nothing else. That people are using them for damage (and the system is letting them do so) is flaw number one.

Flaw number two is the skill design, and it's what's being discussed at the moment. We have S'R and DA. What we need is S'R, DA and Divine Strike, with S'R's AP cost being increased. That way there is a 3 way choice: blow lots of AP to group heal with S'R, heal one person or self with DS, or use DA for a more vulnerable but powerful effect. The important thing to remember is that for this to work, a melee healer must be able to survive, but that survivability must come at a cost, and that cost is that if you screw it up, your team dies through lack of heals. Because one of the skills is missing and we don't have client control yet to change the AP cost of S'R and TE, I'm left with the problem of S'R spam.

Hold firmly in mind that my main agenda here is making the class a HEALER that obeys its concept. I would happily blast all of the damage out of Devotion and Vitality, and mandate that people run Righteousness and Celerity in order to be a hybrid, removing the stat transferring from those two stances, if the resulting Devotion/Vitality/Absolution/Tenacity set resulted in a more engaging healer that played according to concept.

[sweetest]

i dont understand how our views on this can be so far apart.

i don't think people are getting too much damage out of devotion at all. if you remain in devo stance for the duration of an SC your dmg will be around the same as a snb tank who is playing peel the whole time. the only time i could do effective dmg was when i switched to righteousness prayer and if i did that in the wrong situation, i would be focused and die instantly. and i find this to be a good and effective way to put a weakness in the WP, Catch them in righteousness with devotion on 30 sec cd? that is your chance to kill them.

in prayer of devotion i couldn't kill anything unless it was like a marauder 1v1 or choppa 1v1 or something like that.

im beginning to think there is no hope for me ending up satisfied with this class now because it seems like your ideas and my idea of what the class is are totally different.


edit: honestly i think a better solution to bring the WP and DoK back in line rather than the 5 minute cooldown would just be make their healing susceptible to heal debuffs. then with coordination melee can kill the unstoppable devo/tank combo and hybrid players like myself can still change stances on the fly every 30 seconds to perform more on dmg or healing as nescessary for the group.

[Azarael]

Then I guess we will have to see what the opinions are. Could you be right and Devotion is too survivable without drawbacks? Maybe. But know that the complaints I've been getting have been about high damage and high healing from the same spec, and there can only be two causes: Devotion or stance switching.

[sweetest]

you have to also take into consideration that a majority of these players are players who have never even played a 2h wp or they are the players who used to say things like "useless **** DD healer GG" and things like that, these types of players will always complain no matter what because they don't want to see the WP doing damage.

i think it would've been better to let this roll for a week then make changes but, again i don't think the people complaining even understand how the class is working, they just see a WP hit really hard in righteoussness and then they see him switch to devo when he gets focused and become an unstoppable healer, so they assume that he is doing both at the same time.

in reality it is one or the other with the 30 second cooldown and i don't think people realized that yet and saw it as a weakness, they just assumed that the WP could do both insane dmg and insane healing at all times, which totally is not the case.

edit: and the 2 causes you are right but it is not one or the other it is a combination of both, i dont think the WP's dmg levels are overpowered theyre on par with a regular mdps now but what people didn't like was they could change into devotion and instantly become an unstoppable god healer.

so we both agree on what the problem is just not the solution, i think nerfing the devotion stance is a much better approach than nerfing the ability to play the class as a hybrid, afterall it is a hyrbid, just like a swordmaster being incredibly tanky and doing incredible dmg.

[Eathisword]

Gonna chime in just for fun.

I was playing melee WP (all the way to RR100 melee) for all my time on live (3 years). And the class sucked really bad. The new changes are great, probably the best design you put forward so far in my mind. I tested it for about 5-6 hours Tuesday night, it was really exciting and fun. The ''stance dance'' was adding a really cool complexity and excitement in a somewhat stale class. Removing that with a 5 min CD, although I understand your argument, makes it boring again. And fun should be part of design plan. It probably makes your job harder, but its important.

I think we all agree that this week early iteration was pretty much OP, like very OP. I have videos of 1v3 or 2v6 in RvR which should not have been possible (my WP is still in T3 gear), but were thanks to wetnoodle stance (devotion) + AoE detaunt.

I fear that Sweet is somewhat right though : if we chose to go devotion (triggering a 5 min CD), WP/dok will still be unkillable and do the same damage spamming S'R and DA healing like Mofo (a devotion/salvation spec could reach mongoloid heal numbers tuesday with the aid of AoE hot + willpower buff from devo stance). And ya, even in devo, damage could be too high for the healing values it provided.

#1 In my mind, big problem for damage is AA haste
Most 2h get around 30-40% of their damage from AA. Being able to haste AA in devo is a big part of the damage. AA with current gear crit for well over 1k premitigation. Having 50%+15% more 1k hit (every 2,5s instead of 4,2s) is big damage.

#2 Overlaps on another problem : proc damage
With better AA, comes better proc damage. You attack more, you proc more BW/sorc buff. Huge damage gain even in devo. Even truer for Dok.

A workaround
If possible, make deva/salvation cancel autoattacks completely. This way wetnoodle healing stance would really provide wetnoodle damage, but the gameplay experience would somewhat be the same as we don't trigger actively AA or procs from AA.

With the complete depletion of RF/SE on stance switch, Normal CD (15s-20s sounds nice), it would probably be better balanced as switching to wetnoodle to avoid dying would be harder to pull off, stance dancing would still be fun, and devo bots would be just melee healer that do no damage. Furthermore, I would tie even more of S'R heal to the tactic. Make it heal for really **** without. So any person that really wants to ''heal'' needs to slot the tactic, somewhat limiting their dps output even switching to Righteousness as they'd ''lose'' one tactic that could be use for dps. Atm, well Tuesday, S'R' was healing for a good 500-600 without the tactic. This should not be. Making it 700-800 with it and 300-400 without would be better.

My 2 cents,
The baddielander formerly known as Eathisbook.

[Rhombutts]

3) You somehow hit a target that doesn't have Guard. Party!

Except thats what you're suppose to be aiming for as a 2-handed warrior priest.

Hold firmly in mind that my main agenda here is making the class a HEALER that obeys its concept.

I don't understand what you're trying to achieve. Do you want to make it so everyone gets to wield offensive weapons and hit for low damage while healing everyone to full? Being a melee healer just means you get exposed and focused more, and to counter that you want to make them near immortal by having attacks that are guarenteed to hit and burst heal? As I said, yesterday in most scenarios we got blown out by 3 tanks guarding 3 doks and AoE healing everyone to full.

I'd also like to say, not every warrior priest wants to run around using a 2hander, you're forcing them into playing a certain way. If all knights were forced to use shields and never use 2handers again I'd quit.

That being said, Devotion needs a nerf, theres absolutely 0 risk running devotion. You have a guarenteed heal when you hit something that you know will heal for over 1k because its unmitigated. To fix this, make heal debuff work on melee heals. On the other hand theres also a bunch of drawbacks from switching to Prayer of Righteousness, there is a constant RF drain and no AoE detaunt. Given that now theres a 5 min CD to switch prayers, a WP in righteousness is constantly losing RF, where the only drawbacks in devotion is -50% damage done by 2 abilities and now you have outstanding survivability.

[TenTonHammer]

This is a humble request to the dev team

In the Ebon flame T4 epic quest where you have to go into the vault to get the for the tome

You get overwhelmed because of how mobs will detect you through walls and run through them and the mess of high level mobs and champs overpower you

Torq says he does not have los to stop mobs running at you through walls and its hard to get team mates to d the quest b/c most are no longer intrested i tired doing it with an ally healer but it was too much for the both of us still

Would you consider temporarily turning the mobs the in the vault non aggressive till los fix?

[Arconnn]

I'll chime in as well i guess.

On my WP I plan to stop using Devotion wp and run Absolution due to significant ways to counter a devotion wp, if you're able to stay on a target your healing will be amazing enough I'd be surprised if someone died, but through ap drain, shields, cc, walking backwards away from the wp / dok, slowing the wp / dok etc, there are far too many ways to deny Devotion / Vitality Healing. I will say Devotion / Vitality is a great pug stomper though.
That being said, I think it would be help slightly to make Sigmar's shield a range cast so you're not denied completely, and differences between dok and wp with the wounds buff vs Pillage Essence, and Devour Essence (Procing Vitality / Celerity) vs Sigmar's shield (Doesn't actually heal that much even with the change, no procs), everyone is currently running a Vitality Dok the wounds buff will get shattered all the time making it quite useless, where as Pillage Essence directly counters a WP using Devotion greatly. And the age old problem of the fact that DoK attacks faster, thus procing his covenants more (ignore sorc / bw procs, because these will be shattered by the devotion wp and vitality dok now) and dealing more damage since they still have a damage covenant. The benefit of a WP is it gets a free Aoe detuant which is nice but doesn't make up for the significant dps loss.
As a comparison, My guild have been running a Celerity DoK and a Vitality DoK, Vitality DoK was equaling the numbers of Celerity DoK but healing same as a book DoK at the same time, where as my WP was dealing roughly 40-60k dmg but healing 350k +, the only reason you'd run a Celerity DoK, Is for Celerity.
The armor debuff from Tenacity / Absoultion forces the wp / dok to play defensively and have to play more carefully with smite / Essence Lash spamming becomes less viable, effectively reducing your healing output since it's harder to manage righteous fury / soul essence unless you play aggressively and put yourself at risk of getting switched on, Perhaps this is the change that was needed to balance DoK / Wp in a fair constructive way though.

Some thing I'd like to see is the Willpower buff when you strike a target in Devotion / Vitality to remain when you switch to Absolution / Tenacity and also increasing It's up time slightly.

[forsa]

1) You attack a tank. Enjoy your block and parry - reliability status: destroyed
2) You attack a target with Guard. The guarding tank will dissipate his portion of the damage from Guard 50% of the time, halving your heal, and there's not a damn thing you can do about that - reliability status: destroyed
3) You somehow hit a target that doesn't have Guard. Party!

1) a) Afaik you str dont go 0 for the purpose of Parry/Block overcoming check, and tanks tend to have low str.
b) Thx to the bonus Will provided by MHeal stance , even your basic heal/hot go up to pretty serious numbers.
c) You can run around that tank so that you can reliably hit him in the back, if he turns after you - he turns his back on your friends, while you'll still land some hits , thx to laggy positioning and reactions.

2) a) You lure your enemy away / ask your allied tank to throw enemy tank away further - 30 ft isn't that long.
b) same as in p.1)
c) change target

Spammable no cd undefendable damage + huge heal sounds like "I win" button.

DA unblokable would look much more logical combined with Prayer of Righteousness.

Sigmars shield/dok analog will definetly benefit from undefendable status, with its long cd and short duration.

[Yeslair]

well i guess its time i do my comment too now.
first of all i played meele dok for over 300 days pure online time on live and now playing it here on ror and what i can say about this.
the generell change that covenants are like stances now is absoulutly correct and the right way to go.
further more the nerf for backline heal whas needed and is exactly perfect in line with other healers now.

now the problematic celerety and vitality stance:
oppose to alot of peoples meaning the celerety(dps) got a big nerf. because dps dok heavyly rely on devour essence and bloodthirst to apply his burst/dps but the drain of 5 essence per second make it almost impossible to use devour essence, also you often drained out of essence often because one of your grp is fighting and keep you in combat. next thing is you dont have mdps archetype stuff like slow immunity or charge because you can cleanse, but actually you dont have the ressource for it anymore. all in all playing celerety is increddebly clunky and unrelient now and has no reason to use it

what leads us into the problematik of vitality(Mheal). you dont drain your essence and have a damage covenant too so basically you spec into tortue tree and use your dps rotation and stuff like before ab ex just with vitality instead of celerety because celerety gives you to much drawbacks and make you easy target while you are not reaching the damage of other mdps.

second problem is that the heals in vitality are to strong atm, not because they are to strong, more because they have no counterplay to it. means you spam off 1k+ grp heals every gcd without being affected by healdebuffs. what leads into unkillable goodmode grps.

my recomendation to fix this issues are:
1: remove or change the ressource drain of celerety like you only lose ressource per second while you are in meele range to any enemy or make some abilitys of tortue tree cost/scale with ressource
2: change the way how transfer essence and rend soul work, means let them count as (healing) and be affected from healdebuffs and willpower/healcrit. reduced by devine fury and increased by transferred focus and so on. and let them heal of absorbed damage aswell again (the undefendable stuff and the value itself has to be like it is to make it viable)
3: change the -50%damage on transfer essence while in vitality stance to -50%damage for all abilitys

this would fix almost all issues, the dps mode would have reduced heals because devine fury but still be able to use all the stuff, the Mheal is not godmode anymore and dont do lot of damage anymore while have counterplay to it.