DOK / WP experimental mode (just outdated but still relevant)

[Culdu]

Dear Devs,
dear community,

Thread is just outdated due to the end of the experimental mode but because i already finished it i hope i'm allowed to still post it due to it being still relevant.

It’s common knowledge that melee healing DoK* is not balanced atm, or being more precisely that transfer essence* is not balanced.

- *always including also WP/his equivalent ability

I know that there are future plans to increase the AP costs to change it from an “anytimer” to an emergency ability
and to reintroduce style with ae heal around def target.

I don’t think that these plans will have the intended effect and due to us having an experimental mode running on the class at the moment I would suggest to use that to test something now.

Why the plan is not good:
With adjusting group setup for it (AP aura + field) you will still be able to spam an overpowered ability.
When in need of an emergency ability you are normally (nearly) out of Ap.
After using the emergency ability you don’t have ap for khaines invigoration*
You already have divine assault* as emergency ability which is working perfectly for 1-2 targets, which is the normal amount of people who get focused in small scales.
DoKs* part in a group is to provide a basic amount of group heal, other healers have way to slow group heals and use single heals.
Current characteristics of the ability don’t reward playing “logical” due to being affected by challenge, detaunt and absorb, but not by armor and toughness, your best target is the back of a Tank, not a caster or healer.
The stuff influencing or not influencing the ability is very complicated and not following any logic.
It should still be playable to switch to vitality as a torture/sacri* DoK* on the beginning of a SC. Due to people doing this to support a random team (no other healer in sc/team). ,
!He/she should definitely perform a way better as healer when skilled on sacrifice/rites but it should work)

Suggestion for Transfer Essence* with tactic Empowered Transfer*:
Base amount of healing, triggered when a hit lands ~450(not triggered with parry& block, but when damage is absorbed)
25% strikethrough due to overall low Str values and you are hitting to heal not to kill
~300% of dmg dealt in addition to base amount
Amount of heal is ignoring guard
Soul essence is granted even with a miss(not checked yet)
Healing is directly proportional to “real” damage (aside from guard & base value)

The changes would lead to
Not any more benefited to hit tanks, but to hit weak targets. Necessary due to reward good target choice and “skill”; reward teamwork (debuffs). Enemy can influence your healing by man marking you with a tank & buffs.
Much more situations were interspersing a cast is beneficial
Teamplay with the second healer of the group is beneficial again due to more moving and more casts running(hots)
The casting part is needed again even when in melee range
It makes sense to adjust tactics for a more meele or more casting version to react on own and/or enemy setup (due to melee not op any more)
Making the Class much more challenging again
Giving more possibilities to adjust char via skilltree, tactics & playstyle to personal preferences and group setup instead of offering only one best (mandatory) way


This should be implemented and tested because I think it is the solution to make the melee healing interesting and challenging and stoppable again. Due to have a kind of broken modus at the moment it would also improve the average game experience for everyone.
I know you have a lot of work with the whole project but I hope you find the time to implement this for testing, due to the healing amounts (base and %) have to be tested and probably adjusted.


For future(full access to abilities)
Guess the first decision should be if it should be mirrored or if the sides should have specific benefits, for example one better buffer one better debuffer and/or one better healer other better dd .

The AE Healstyle would massively change the play style in more than 6ppl, because at the moment you only have rend soul* for people out of the group which makes it necessary to use casts and skill the ae heal for out of grp healing. The style could work well(if balanced value) but the question is, is that wanted.



Greetings Starilas

[Azarael]

I have a few questions.

1) Where do you get the idea that instituting the appropriate AP cost for a group heal is making it an "emergency ability"? It costs 35 AP at the moment and is worth far more. That and the lack of any other AP-costing builder which also heals are the problems.

2) If you nerf it against tanks, what are you going to do for WP and DoK in terms of mobility and anti snare to make it so they can hit anything other than tanks?

[Culdu]

1. read this concept in the forum(i thought written by you). If the ability would only heal a good amount when you have a good target it would not be too cheap. The amounts should be adjusted to have a bad heal perhaps 400 when hitting a hard target and to be better than your castable grp heal(in addition to not be debuffed) when hitting an enraged slayer

2. That's what would make it challenging and interesting. You are a melee at all.
I played that way(very effectiv, guess thats known) as second healer in 6 man grp a lot with unbuffed Casts with cap lvl 32 and 35, also a bit with 40(and on live 80).The casts are exactly what was missing(and a improved melee heal amount with 40) I loved the idea how you improved the willpower by hit, my idea had beed just to add one str based cast heal... .

The gameplay would be If you only have a tank to hit you need to cast to be effectiv, as like when you are out of range. You are a real hybrid then using cast or melee to heal whatever is more suitable in that situation. I would love to play that, due to being hard but having very good output when done well. A full range kiter grp would probably be your end, but why shouldn't there be counters?

Already wrote in other threads what could be other possible necessary adjustments ( viewtopic.php?f=96&t=18486&hilit=starilas&start=80 ) #83

Another thing would also be to make sigmars shield castable (no need to hit) like devour essence to have sth for the start of the fight when allies are fighting and your are not yet in range

Greetings Starilas

[dur3al]

Something to think about regarding the whole DoK/WP situation, and I'll base my comments on DoK that I've more experience with.

Melee healers are not really healers at all, they're just melee life-tappers... and the only skill to heal your group with life tap is TE. So you end up stacking tactics to support this skill such as Empowered Transfer and Divine Fury, since Divine Fury affects healing abilities only, not life taps (as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong). You end up investing to much for TE basically. So if you nerf this skill, it'll hit the melee healers to much, if you don't, it becomes far to effective... and even if you find the perfect balance for it, it'll still resolve around using 1 skill mostly, and therein lies the problem.

[Tesq]

Something to think about regarding the whole DoK/WP situation, and I'll base my comments on DoK that I've more experience with.

Melee healers are not really healers at all, they're just melee life-tappers... and the only skill to heal your group with life tap is TE. So you end up stacking tactics to support this skill such as Empowered Transfer and Divine Fury, since Divine Fury affects healing abilities only, not life taps (as far as I'm aware, correct me if I'm wrong). You end up investing to much for TE basically. So if you nerf this skill, it'll hit the melee healers to much, if you don't, it becomes far to effective... and even if you find the perfect balance for it, it'll still resolve around using 1 skill mostly, and therein lies the problem.

i talked about this too, wp/dok need 3-4 different skill and possibly a aoe path, so you have a balanced for g-group melee heal and a balancewd for st heal melee heal.
Tough you can take 2x mastery you eithe r will first + another one or the other 2. Make all influenced by heal debuff and there is not way it will be op.

[Culdu]

dural. tesq, sorry but have u at all read my post ? or is my english so way to bad that it is not possible to understand what i wrote ?

[Dabbart]

Main "problems" with melee healing imo(for ab ex):
1, Undefendable attacks.
2, Unmitigatable heals(ie tough/armor/guard means nothing in terms of health returned)
3, Perceived lack of counter to heals other than CC reliance.


Now, each one of those has very good reasoning behind them. If you HAVE to attack in melee to give ANY heals, w/o reliable snare/root breaks or any sort of closer, every single attack "needs" to give you something, otherwise you are entirely useless. Yea, sure. Particular WP/DoKs in specific groups against that particular opposition can do well. Every single time I played my WP melee it felt the exact same. Useless. My damage/heal numbers where irrelevant to me, because I could feel that I never got to the correct target, and had to spend so many GCDs just keeping myself alive. The fact that I could get high damage and high heals meant nothing. Because SC numbers mean just that. Nothing.(Edit: note, that mini rant is in regards to WP/DoK as they are WITHOUT the ab ex)

In my perfect world(ignoring coding constraints), I would remove the "Undefendable" nature from all DoK/WP attacks, and instead give significantly smaller heal on a defended attack. I would suggest 20% of the standard heal on block/parry. I would then reduce heals from Guard damage by 50%(so if the guard damage was block/parried you would only get 10% of the heals).

I love the idea of WP/DoKs working in melee. What we need, is a way to "tone down" the sheer amount of heals. A WP/DoK shouldn't be totally **** simply because a tank or 2 punts them on CD with a perma-snare, evading all of their attacks, and mitigating the rest down to 0 heals. However, that does not mean that they should be the only healer who's heals can't be effectively mitigated down to w/o it being target dependant(ie detaunt/challenge) Out-going healdebuffs are nasty for a reason. For a melee healer, I believe that intelligent Guard switching should provide SOME type of negation towards healing. The same goes for stacking defensive stats. I believe in balance and countering.

That's my thoughts on the ab ex however. In terms of the OPs thoughts, Aza's points stand imo. You can try to make it "more difficult", but you have to remember the base problems the class has in Melee. Your changes do nothing for these.

Lastly, sorry. But no one cares how you did when T3 was cap. T4 is an entirely different monster.

[Tesq]

Suggestion for Transfer Essence* with tactic Empowered Transfer*:
Base amount of healing, triggered when a hit lands ~450(not triggered with parry& block, but when damage is absorbed)
25% strikethrough due to overall low Str values and you are hitting to heal not to kill
~300% of dmg dealt in addition to base amount
Amount of heal is ignoring guard
Soul essence is granted even with a miss(not checked yet)
Healing is directly proportional to “real” damage (aside from guard & base value)



Greetings Starilas

if you mean this ye i red it, but the problem with Te is not hit tank, as a melee healer you can be block by tank in heal or the heals became incossitent, what makes heal out put so high is being linked to dmg done instead being a fix value like all othe r heals, being a multipler of dmg make it out of every scale.
If the dmg is too low it will be useless spec for dmg increase then why it's even a component not realiable? if it's too high it get OP.
Another issue it's the fact pure and simple that even if the heal component of sr/te would be in line with all other g-heals of backline healers it would still be overpowerd becuase it would heal as normal g-heals everyone while 1 ppl will be healed as with a st heal under heal debuff. Because these skill ingore heal debuff.

From this both the need to have these skill influenced by heal debuff first and foremost, then the need of multiple skill for different things; g-heal melee, st heal melee.

another way to make life simple would be change the way te/sr are handle; the target get healed by ST heal value while all the rest of the group by a g-heal heal value.(but heals are reduced by heal debuff).

Right know is like te/sr are getting 3x constribution than other heals; mastery + dmg + x% increase + tactic increase.
healing for BASE as 1 g-hels critted with otu set back and heal debuff. Idk what's the problem here.

if melee train you always have soemthing to hit; if instead you face a rdps set up 2 tank can provide a 30% dodge disrupt; and you can still heal casting anyway in the mean while. Regardless if the rdps is good they will not let you arrive on them, and so well all this heal being op jsut ruin melee time for the other ppl.

Also nerf te/rs mean nerf dok/wp survability because if you spam melee instead cast , you're absorb tactic it's useless.
A playstile which enforce a good mix need to be found; possible force you to front line BUT allow you to cast and/or melee-heal
or either a mix enforced by stuff as willpower stack buff as it was in ex mode. Front line healer mean also front line caster and so mean no set back and a passive detaunt or dmg reduction, It also mean be more exposed to cc so it also mean some cc need to have half value on you.

It's not that simply just move the class like this; another problem it's if this is not done right the class can take the spot of dd and a healer then alltogheter you take 1 rdps or 1 heal/dd rdps more and you have a surpluss of dmg or heals or both for free.
If it mean also that dok/wp need to carry not about enemys (becuase frontline mean either bad results or being unkillable) then they need to heal less because have sure that 1 healer will not die mean that the heals for the group should be lower because dok/wp should ignore everything and so they can focus more which mean they need to have a drawback in heal done. This also lead to be more static and maybe the 0,5 cast (not the ap heal) should be made castable on the move. (maybe this restriction ox X % heal less should not work for melee heals).

You need a lot of balances and check for this type of gameplay in my opinion, more than what we had even if something like willpower stack forced you in the right direction.

[Morf]

Im no expert on dps dok or dps wp but i do know enough about them..question, what was wrong with dps melee dok before the experimental change ? imo that is where dps dok and dps wp should be.
Reintroduce the skill that dok and wp had long ago and was removed (which i cannot remember the name of), change absence of faith to 50% heal debuff and 10 sec cooldown and see how that goes.
As for heal dok/wp and how easy they are to play compared to other healers, just reduce the range of group heal, group hot, group absorb and group cleanse so they have to be nearer the fight, putting them at risk and making the high armor,absorb for self on crit heal and 100% uptime aoe detaunt the defensive capabilities which they need to be within 65ft of the fight, this is far less drastic and will cause ppl to be less pissed compared to a complete overhaul of the class, something that was not needed anyway imo.

Sure heal dok and heal wp is above the other healers in terms of heal output and how easy it is to be a decent healer but they are by no means immortal.

[Culdu]

The thing is ... you don't need to hit all the time to heal really good any more, you need 3 hits, than you can cast some heals with 1,5 willpower which is way more than caster had befor ~softcap for me.

And that is just hybrid healing, you hit when heal more this way, and you cast when u heal more with that. If you keep on hitting a tank while hitting him for 30 dmg you just damn shouldn't heal any good. In this case you start your casts, u can even slot a tactic for more essence/wp can even slot a tactic for more castheal. If everyone here was in the Ap ex time just slotting full damage tactics like before and haven't skilled anything in the cast heal tree and just maxed the melee tree i finally understand why the cast healing mix i'm speaking about is hard to see viable.