Shaman/Archmage Experimental Mode Rebalance

[Thayli]

Disclaimer: I main Shaman and to shorten this post a little, I will only refer to abilities by their Shaman variant. However, since Shaman and Archmage are almost complete mirrors, I'll assume that these suggestions translate to Archmage too, although I'll leave it to people who actually play the class to be the judge of that.

The Problem: Shaman is overperforming if they can "juggle" their career mechanic. They are underperforming if they cannot.

This seems to be in line with the DoK/WP experimental mode, which had the same problem. If we can safely switch our career mechanic between a heal stack and a DPS stack ("juggling"), Shaman has access to what I believe is the strongest healing, both group and single target, bar none. However, this is dependent on two things:

• The ability to hit a target for single target lifetaps, or a group of targets for group lifetaps.
• Not receiving a large amount of focus damage.

If either of those 2 conditions are no longer fulfilled, Shaman is right back to being the worst healer in the game. Long cast times, expensive heals and a lack of a flash heal make it so when you cannot play the lifetap game, you are significantly worse than any other healer. While it is good that core healing is not even close to being as strong as lifetaps, due to the inherent risk versus reward trade-off of the latter, Shaman core healing is just not viable. The problem is actually twofold:

Problem 1: Lifetaps are simply too strong whereas the healing tree is just too weak.

We are in this weird situation right now where a lifetap spec is the strongest group play spec yet unusable in large scale because you cannot reliably hit targets. Naturally one would switch to the heal(bot) tree, yet the majority of this tree is geared towards single target healing, which has little to no use in medium and large scale group play.

Problem 2: Core heals are largely unviable when unable to lifetap or when under pressure.

There are many situations where you simply cannot hit targets to juggle your career mechanic. Large scale RVR with one or more warbands, keep sieges, objectives that have line-of-sight blockages, fights where framerate becomes an issue, etc.. In these cases, Shaman cast times and AP costs are straight back to bottom-tier and there's little to do about it. Instead of simply asking for a numbers buff here, I think this could simply be solved by solving a different problem:

When looking for a lifetap, Shaman needs to move. When under pressure, they certainly need to move. In fact, a lot of the class is geared towards being able to move and dance around threats. However, the 2 main heals, Gather Round and Bigger, Better An' Greener, require you to stand still. Which only leaves a single target HoT Ey, Quit Bleedin'! and a direct mirror of Zealot's Dark Medicine in the form of Gork'll Fix It as the remaining options, both of which are useless for anything but topping off and prehotting. So we have this strange choice at the moment between juggling the overpowerd lifetap and then standing still to cast our decent heals that are constantly set back and/or reduced, or keep moving but trying to stop ourselves from dying with a HoT. This is when the lack of a flash heal or decent heal-while-moving becomes very apparent and is the main thing holding Shaman back against skilled players.

Solution:

• - Slightly reduce the healing numbers on I'll Take That!
• - Significantly reduce the healing numbers on Fury of Da Green.
• - Change Fury of Da Green from raw healing to normal healing, so it can be heal debuffed and crit.
• + Change the Gork Fix'd It tactic to now slightly increase the flat healing portion of Gork'll Fix It, and have it apply to 3 people instead of 1, similar to the recently reworked Waaagh Frenzy!
• + Shrug It Off now can be applied to either your entire party except you, or just you but not your party. Moving it up one slot in the tree would be necessary to have it stay mutually exclusive with Fury of Da Green, for obvious balance reasons.

The idea here is to nerf the numbers on the lifetaps to make them less insane and give FoDG at least some form of counterplay in the form of healing debuffs. By buffing Gork'll Fix It though a tactic, it would make moving into favorable positions a lot more doable in larger scale and places where a constant line-of-sight dancing is the norm, while still being significantly worse than standing still and using your bigger heals, at the cost of being much more vulnerable to threats and setbacks. A buff to Shrug It Off would give some much needed group utility to the tree, yet have it be a strong "my party or me" choice similar to DoK/WP group cleanse.

It is not the goal to buff or nerf Shaman, but to take a little bit of power out of the lifetap spec, and put it in the healing tree, in addition to some much needed group utility. This makes it so there's no more insane amounts of healing when you can juggle, but gives Shaman some use besides morale pumping in cases where we cannot juggle, or some options with which we can position ourselves better to actually do so.

[Penril]

Moving to Discussions.

[Azarael]

Note that Fury of Da Green and Energy of Vaul will get a range increase to 100ft when the patcher is available, and a corresponding reduction in efficiency.

[bloodi]

So refering to "the problem".

What you are identifying here is nothing more than, what an upside and a downside is, you have a theorical "sweetspot" if you are not working towards it, you will suffer. I really dont know what the issue is, you have 150 feet skills than are less powerful than the 80 and 100 feet variants, well, as they should be.

You can still heal for decent values if you have a decent amount of wp, it was indeed the worst healer but it was mostly relatede to movement issues, ie their non existant healing on the move for am and the couple of tools a shammie had while moving, this is greatly solved by the experimental mode to the point that i dont feel the issue is there anymore at all.

But lets focus on the two problems you present.

Problem 1:

Not only its usable on large scale, it performs quite well in there, i run it myself and even if i run full int, the only problem i ever had was some misguided raid leader thinking i was a dps am because i was using +int pots and changing me to other group to put 2 healeres in my former one, nothing i coudlnt solve yelling them a bit about it. Furthermore, it helps my bombing group a bit and does wonders to keep up Bombing Bright Wizards with Energy of Vaul.

Hitting targets largely requires one thing, commitment from your group, as long as you can trust that your teammates will peel for you, being in such a range is not an issue, yeah you will get silenced and such but this is not something exclusive to Lifetap healers even if it will affect us a bit more.

Problem 2:

Again, this is the downside of having an upside but again, the experimental changes grealy changed how useful your group heal is under pressure, its the same cast time as a dok/wp so you are as good as they are in healing output, hell, you can argue that you are even better since you dont suffer donwntime at all due to depleting your RF/SE, with restorative burst and some ap drain you will be guaranteed to have ap, nevermind any ap your group may give or ap pots, once you are on the lifetap side of the mechanic, EovV/FoDTG and BE/ITT will do the job and once you run out of them you just start all over again.

You perfectly can run a bit and then group heal and move again, just like you would do in dok/wp, i really dont see the problem here.

So overall, i may agree that lifetaps are a bit too powerful right now but if as Aza says, the will be toned down with a slight increase in range, we will have to wait and see.

[Miszczu5647]

Maybe we should delay this discussion until changes Azarael talking about will be introduced? We will discuss then about what exist in game not a theory. Those changes are partially what you propose.

Definitely problems shaman experience in oRvR are worth discussing. Especially problems with siege fights.


I very like your proposition about changing tactic and Shrug it off. After ab. ex. shaman IMO is high risk-high reward aoe mobile healer. Your proposition put him more in this position. With those changes maybe we will break meta and shaman would by valid option as a second healer.

[Aurandilaz]

Lifetap healing is very potent atm, it feels a bit off, especially under right circumstances with lot of low defence enemies you can tap from (pets, glasscannon dps).
It also feels wrong when my lifetaps are blowing up bigger heal numbers than my actual heals and I'm quite much heal specced.

So, while it is awesome under right circumstances, it still doesn't really address the issue that under other circumstances shaman/Am fail to perform alongside other healers when it comes to raw group support utility in big scale fighting, where your sole task is to pump out max heals under enemy pressure and finding lifetap targets is not so easy.

One of the issues also that remain are the separation of crit values; magic and heal crit. They should become one, the way Sh/SW can balance between those two. Same with Int/WP.

The fact that AM/shamans greatest group healing potential comes from speccing high into Path of Vaul/Da Green?, and not from actual healing tree... is odd?

The lack of group support under pressure/during keep attacks/when retreating is the true "Achilles heel" of these two classes.

[Dabbart]

Never played a Shammie, and my AM is only 39/35 so take this with a grain of salt;

I love the system. Playing the Mechanic is the best way to heal, this is a good thing. life-taps are my main in combat heals, with HoTs, Cleanse, and the occasional spam of fast group heals being my alterations to build Force.

"intelligent" play is definitely required in ORvR to utilize Life-taps, but without them and their strength, the AM would be painful to play while kiting, I just don't have the quick heals that are necessary, I don't however believe that the Heal power should be increased, regardless of any "nerf" to Life Taps. Our casted heals are quite powerful already(just long CTs) so out of range we still have options. And hiding behind a tree spamming grp heal is still a viable option.

I also remember mention of a new ability to drop ALL stacks of career mechanic once a patcher is up and running, which would help quite a lot with maintaining the switch based casting imo, but it's not 100% mandatory. One can burn 5 stacks on fast grp heals or TE super quickly.

Also taking into account that Life-taps will be balanced via range and effectiveness with the patcher, I don't see any reason to change them or the classes at this time, but I do understand what you are saying about the Movement the classes require, but we'd have to see how the system works post-patcher before this would make sense imo.

Edit: I think the main issue is the Perception that Healing abilities should provide more than Life-taps. This arguement was well covered in the initial AM/Sham changes as well as the WP/DoK changes. Casting a heal from 100-150ft away carries far less Risk and Chance than any Lifetap. If I am in range to cast on them, they can do the same to me. They can disrupt/block/absorp the ability. Not to mention how innately squishy the AM is, having them agro casting SHOULD provide more heals than spamming Grp heal hiding behind a tree out of LoS of everyone.

And Vaul Can be the Best. If the opponents clump up for it.

TLDR: I think the option of Life-tap for Large quick heals with a risk, and the cast heals(for still largish numbers) works quite well currently.

[Miszczu5647]

As always from the single problem OP gave us we create "bigger picture"

What we have currently:
1. Mork shaman - strong ST heal.
2. Gork shaman - dps.
3. Da Green shaman - mobility aoe healer.
Above are the theme of each path (IMO). Don't change it. Make it work.

Point 2 is out of the discussion right now.

Point 1:
ST healer with great burst potential is option for second healer in party. If you have someone who cover aoe heals then you can focus on saving most focused one. Problems start when you are most focused in your party. Solution: Allow Gork Fix'd It transform your Gork'll Fix It into flash heal (maybe adding some numbers to heal component of the spell). Make this tactic third in Mork tree (replacing Pass It On). The first one should be Lookit What I Did and second Pass It On.
It is a little more tricky with AM as they have Wild Healing where shaman have Pass It On. I leave it to AM players as I don't have experience with ... noble Asur

Point 3:
We can talk about tweaking number form I'llTT and FoDG. Considering that range will be increase some tuning down is fair trade.

[shaggyboomboom]

I think the shammy/AM mechanic is fine as it is. Don't take this as boasting, but I see a lot of AMs not using BE/Vaul that so ever... Let's wait a bit longer for big changes.

I would like to see a power increase in Healing Energy though. Being a 1s cast for 400-500 healing is very bad and also costly.

[Aurandilaz]

what I really would love to see is heal crit + magic crit come together, stacking up... because currently you have to go either way, and forfeit the other, impossible to get both high.

Or better yet, have career mechanic increase the opposite crit rate;
say AM uses 5 heals to get up 5 Tranquility, this would allow 15 magic crit, 3% for each mechanic points, making it very likely for the next casted spell to crit. (or 5% bonus per point?)
other way round, having cast 5 dmg spells giving 5 force, the next heal has 15 (25)% chance to be crit?

anyway, the current mechanic is nice enough, but what I still want is that group support ability other than gheal