AM/Shammy Healing

[Greatwarden]

What about something like that was given to BO/SM due to they having bad mechanic?
And abillity with no GCD that switch all points in Mork to Gork or Gork to Mork with maybe 10 sec CD?
And the same for AM ofc

This is a very novel idea. I like it!

[Jaycub]

On the mechanic, like it's been said before in the thread we will need to define what role the AM/Shaman have in general. It would seem the original dev team did intend the class to be a hybrid, even judging by the current mechanic alone.

The problem I see with the current mechanic is different for both playstyles (DPS and Healer). When you are heal spec you are going to be using the side of the mechanic that allows you to fire off DPS spells with no cast time or increased effectiveness. The problem is as a healer role AM your role is much more active than RP/WP in terms of getting the most effectiveness out of your class. What I mean by this is WP/RP have great permanent buffs or long duration buffs like the almighty RP AP rune. Whereas the AM needs to actively cast AP drains, puddles, and other debuffs which are cutting deep into GCD's meaning when you group is taking any kind of damage what little you would get out of casting a damaging spell at 5 mechanic is just not worth it.

And idea would be to allow heal AM's to freely cast a damaging/utility spell with no GCD penalty at 5 mechanic, so there would be literally no reason NOT to take advantage of the mechanic. Another thing AM/Shaman desperately needs is a buff rework or tweak, right now the resistance buff is inferior to knights because it cannot be purged and is of greater value on top of being a debuff as well with 100% uptime, and because RP also have the same buff. Changing it to a buff that decreased magic damage taken by like 10% on top of what it is now would be the easy way to make it useful, as even tho the flat resists wouldn't stack with other buffs the 10% would, and of course it has counter play in shatters.

DPS AM is a whole different problem. They have no reliable healing at all, the leech DoT is very weak and single target only. The only good leach is a 13pt ability that requires a group of enemies to get the most out of it. As far as using actual healing spells in a dps setup, the group heal right now is healing for about ~500, which is honestly just a little bit better than a bugmans tick and considering its only good when you have mechanic up for it its just fluff healing lost by a single dot tick from magus. The HoT again is single target only and is very gimped when DPS healing for just over 1k over 15 secs atm.

While I don't think DPS AM should be healing anywhere near on par with say a DPS/Grace WP, they do need the same type of mechanisms to heal. By that I mean they need some kind of sustainable group wide heal, maybe turn the leech dots into a group heal rather than single target and reduce the CD to 5 secs, or change the 25% leech tactic to a group wide leech and effect all damage as well as mirroring it to shaman, that would be a good start I think. The mechanic could then be tweaked to allow for a decent burst/panic heal whenever you have 5 up to play a similar role as say divine assault. Maybe have the mechanic so that it scales up by 20% each point where the heal used will also count intelligence as a power stat (100% of intelligence applied as "willpower" at 5 mechanic).

Just some ideas anyways, or at least what I would dream this class would be :^)

[Azarael]

Honestly, for these classes I was really thinking of using the mechanic to solve their MAD problem. What I'd have proposed would have been reducing the steps to 3 maximum on either side, changing the spells to perform a shift instead of a consume, removing or nerfing the existing benefits if required and changing the mechanic so that as long as you are casting a spell aligned with the side of the mechanic that you have points on, your magical or healing stats, whichever are higher, contribute to the scaling. So an Archmage stacking Int would cast his heals off his Int and Magic Power bonus instead of his Willpower and Healing Power bonus, using his Magic crit if it's higher than his Healing crit as long as he is in the Tranquility region.

The other thing that I'd propose, to ensure that heal AM and Shammy don't feel pressured to use their mechanic on damage they don't really want to apply, is to either increase the lifetap HP steal % whe allies are the target (while reducing it against self) or scale the power of lifetaps against targets other than the Archmage with mechanic stacks.

[Jaycub]

Making it 3 steps instead of 5 would def help out DPS AM/Shaman in terms of their ability to use somewhat worthwhile healing more frequently, especially if you change it to use int as power stat for healing abilities used with mechanic.

This would be a good step forward for the class and see where it stands after that.

Leech changes would be nice too

[Feidam]

I see Azareal's suggestion working out well too. As far as weakening the life tap for the archmage though I wonder if that is necessary? We do not want the AM being too powerful of course, but the best life taps already have cooldown associated with them. And it is not like the healing AM is going to be able to just pump out balance essence with the his change. They will still have everything they already have to balance in combat still be to casting.

[Jaycub]

Pretty sure he is talking about buffing the lifetap, but in a way that doesn't make shaman/AM more of a 1v1 god than they already are... but rather increase it's viability as a group play healing tool.

[Euan]

I wouldn't mind it seeing it being drop to 3 mork/gork buffs but that's not whats wrong with AM/Shaman. I'd like to see Gork fix it/am equivilant become instant heal on 5-10 sec cooldown. They're not unviable though, nothing in this game is.

[Nameless]

there is another problem with the mechanic, it is very ap-hungry. There is just not enough AP /esp on shaman side/ to do effectively both healing and trow some debuffs (i dont even speak about dmg spells). For heal pseced AM/Shamans by casting dmg/debuffs you use AP + GCD while got pretty high risk of being disrupted, blocked. That problem will become even worste at t4 when there wil be more defensive stats for all while healing AM/Shaman will keep their low intelligence lvls.

As i understand Aza what to change that so healing AM/Shaman use wp/heal crit instead of intel/magic crit when cast dmg/debuff spells which will resolve part of the problem but the ap issues will still be there.
Other than that it will be pretty hard to balance that. Cos class that do both good healing and dps with one spec at same time should not be possible and if you do both roles subpar you will be just substituted with class that do better at his main role

[Tesq]

The meccanic need to provide an ap reduction and a cast time redution so that it will make you able to "play" hybrid but reduction the ap and the cast mean you would also be ale to heal faster than what your heal x sec should be resulting in recover the time you spent build the meccanic with offensive skills.
Either lower the point to 3 or increase the ratio gain to 2-1 or etc is not important as give shammy/am a workign ap reduction imo, anyway considering am/shammy have a lots of ista dots, with a propper proportion to how much cast time and ap get reduced by meccanic it should not be so hard to make it work.
The meccanic aim should be with more mastery you swap between offensive and healing the more you are able to spam both which require both ap reduction and cast time reduction.

Am/shammy alredy have a cast time reduction, they also need an ap reduction x point and gain points in a different ratio.

The trade off for the initial need to build mecc when you have max points should be the total ap and cast time reduction.

And obviously this do not need to make useless the ap drain/ nor the ap regen via crits tactics

[roadkillrobin]

Just decreasing the steps and letting you cast dps spells for willpower or healing spells for int wouldn't solve anything.
Since A: We have no group hots or buffs etz that lets us cast dps spells between heals. So we never have time to cast the dps spells, If we wanna keep our group up while under pressure we're stuck to Gather Round Blessing of Isha spam. Even our basic tools like Stikky Feetz or AP drain means that someone in your group is likly to die coz they only get a mesly 400 hot tick over the time of 1,5gcd+2,5 Garther Round. If GR and BoI instead would heal people 3 times over the time of 2,5 Instead of 1 time after 2,5 this wouldn't be a problem. Hence why I sugested it way back.

B: AM/Shaman don't bring anything to a WB, Almoast Nothing to a 6man. Instant ress, whats the point when ress sickness is 50% stat reduction. A buff wich overlap with the strongest tanks that pretty much everyone is running. a Puddle that all melee classes just ignore eaither with charge or snare immunity.

An abillity that would alow us to swap Mechanic Points without GCD would solve alot of problems. And it's probobly the least amount of work the Devs need to do aswell.