I’ve only been playing this game for a relatively short time, but I’m running into a big problem with it: I like playing healers, and I constantly get told that I shouldn’t be playing one. This is pretty annoying, since the game very obviously has multiple classes that are meant to be healers, and tons of gear designed for healing, yet if that’s what you want to do in the game you’re useless most of the time. A big culprit in this seems to be a signet called the Signet of Cruel Delight that for some reason doesn’t have a cooldown and because of that just heals people endlessly while they attack. Even if that was fixed however, way too often you find yourself in situations where you simply don’t need any healing because the enemies just don’t do all that much damage, and everything that is actually dangerous is a one shot you just have to avoid, so once again healing isn’t needed.
I have an idea how healing could be made a lot more useful and welcome in any group without making the game too punishing without a healer however.
The game should add an overheal bar to all characters, called “Anima Overcharge” or something like that, that is the same size as your health pool, and is filled up when you receive healing while you’re already at maximum health. Anima Overcharge is then spent when you attack an opponent, by doubling the damage of your attack, but draining the anima overcharge bar by the extra damage inflicted.
So in effect, all healing that isn’t needed rolls over into damage output for the party, which means healing is always helpful. A healer can even be a significant damage multiplier in a party that is large enough to gain more overall HP from group heals than they would receive from standard damage.
To keep the whole thing balanced and not make self healing into the best way to increase DPS the Anima Overcharge would only apply to healing from external sources. A healer can always solo by just doing anima allocation in this game, so this should be a group feature. Also depending on balance there might be a modifier needed, for example only 75% or 50% of excess healing rolling over into the overcharge bar. It shouldn’t be totally overpowered, but in a group of 5 that doesn’t need healing you should be doing more damage with a healer who generates overcharge than with a 4th DPS.
I hope your idea will fall into oblivion, because it’s hilariously terrible. It just looks like a complicated version of AEGIS shields. Also, you have no idea how sustain tank works, hence your claims about Cruel Delight are void as tanks don’t need this signet to be able to keep themselves alive without healer. It’s not as if there wasn’t a guide about sustain tanking available that explains how that works. I’ll give it to the fact you’re new in the game and jump into complaining too fast.
Also, simple solution to your problem: find a cabal with people accepting to play with healers. Problem solved.
There was a thread about this (even 2 actually) that got locked because it was going nowhere anymore and discussions became stale. I don’t see the purpose of perpetuating yet another discussion about sustain tanking.
At least this is better than some people who just shouting around “healers are dying” very loudly without doing anything beyond that. Suggestions shall be encouraged even disagreement is inevitable.
I like the idea of overhealing becoming useful because without that there’s no way for a healer to speed up fights by being the best geared party member, don’t think your way in particular suits this game though, it’s not fun to micromanage healing targets.
Also just by nature in this game a better geared tank needs less healing but there’s currently no benefit to speccing that way, eg. an E8 geared tank doing E5s is just taking less damage than an E5 healer finds challenging to heal.
I only sustain tank if the healer asks me to (otherwise I bring normal tank utilities - lots of impairs/purges - and only high odds of sustaining instead of perfect success rate) but the whole way tanks take damage doesn’t seem conducive to a fun healing experience.
On topic (and off the top of my head), could we not fix the “sustain tanking > all” issue by like, doubling tank health but halving all the “percentage of max health” based self-healing tanks have? Sustain tanking would still mean higher group dps but tank + healer would be less prone to dying from a single mistake. Healers would need to find a group that matches their playstyle of course (unless “healtank” gets added as a role in groupfinder) but surely that would work as a band-aid? Or am I missing something super obvious?
I assume because the OP hasn’t been around long enough to pick up the phrase. Unless you’re suggesting that the reason nobody wants a healer in their group is somehow unrelated to sustain tanking?
Reducing direct heals and monster damage would probably have a smaller impact on balance overall.
TSW was already kinda on the upper edge of sustained healing being meaningful with it topping out at 2000 damage/sec on 8000ish base hp tanks (you could smooth that out a lot by running 10000+ base hp instead but back to aggro tradeoffs. Highest I managed to hold aggro with was ~15k). SWL’s on E9 is roughly 15000 damage/sec on 21000 hp tanks, which becomes 28300 with the near-mandatory pulverize and then debilitate pushes it to the point the tank can take even 1 hit without mitigation. (which is the point where healing becomes possible… if it’s all 1 shots the tank has to use the sustain build regardless whether group has a healer)
So I think maybe 1/3 as much incoming damage with 1/3 as much direct healing, and the heal builds could really start to distinguish themselves on things other than “enough panic buttons to compensate for when tank doesn’t mitigate”.
I have run E9 with a standard group layout and no tank self-heals but I’m using effective gear for that purpose (which is dps glyphs to hold aggro, tank AA to make healing possible)
I mean, it’d probably be about the same impact on balance overall? Obviously you could do it that way but it’s way more numbers that need changing if you’re tuning every mob at every difficulty level rather than scaling tank health.
Yeah but you need to double or triple the entire group’s hp to bring encounters into reason anyway (for example HR4 literally does like, 15000 damage to the entire group) so when you’re doing that retuning to make it reasoable you could just set the target at “healers can perform a useful job” instead of “dps aren’t one-shotted at dps allocation”
I don’t disagree that “take the entire game apart and rebuild it from scratch with better numbers for everything, fixing all problems along the way” is a better solution but if wishes were horses, etc.
to do a proper balancing you need time and money . i want devs concentrating in making content that brings ppl in to the game . Everything else will follow . without it what good are rebalancing anyway ? We still dont have all content from TSW transfered . We dont have PVP . Devs do nothing to bring new blood , and ppl asking for nerfs ? ???!!!??
What should happen is Funcom gets around to dealing with a very complex balancing issue that has resulted in many (though not all) tanks deciding to simply do everything themselves. It’s got a lot of moving parts, not the least of which is long-term current customer investment. So I wish them luck in dealing with it, but it’s been so long now that the customer investment part just gets worse every day. They’ve already lost players over it, but in exchange, they keep some. Bad situation for them.
The healing/tanking balance is an issue in need of a real comprehensive solution and extensive look at things, as has been said. This idea is does not address it.
Anima Overcharge as an idea is definitely not useful at high elites. I don’t see why a healer wants to be fumbling with target switching to overheal DPS over the tank, presuming they are still expected to heal the tank, and assuming that you still want to budget your heals for emergencies, because we are first presuming there is not a sustain tank.
Further, doubling a DPS’ damage output, or any significant increase, would immediately lead to massive aggro issues, as holding aggro can be a serious problem for tanks and high end DPS as things are currently.
Finally, because of the kind of damage output a DPS can do, versus the kind of healing a healer can do, I don’t think this overcharge is mathematically viable. You’re still better off as a 4th DPS, because your DPS are going to burn through that overcharge so fast it may as well not exist.
Overall I like the concept to a degree, but its not at all compatible with the current situation of the game. However, TSW and this game lack a serious reason for healers to push healing to beyond what is necessary, and this sort of idea does remedy that, and is something I’d like to see addressed if there is ever a serious rebalancing effort.
I don’t think it’s helpful to assume which fixes will be easy, so it’s better to stick to saying what’s actually wrong instead of asking them to do something that specifically won’t improve the tank/healer problem the game has on its own anyway (more tank hp = sustain stays most viable).
I don’t really see this argument of “You haven’t been around long enough to understand the issue”. The issue is I won’t be around long if every group I join people keep telling me to not play the character I want to play. How a newer player experiences the game matters, because if that experience isn’t good they have no reason to invest the time to become a veteran.
My experience with this game is simply this:
I want to play a healer. The game allows me to play a healer. When I enter dungeons the tanks either insist they don’t need heals or are newbies and die from attacks that must be dodged that I can’t heal through. When I do scenarios I can’t heal the survivors anymore like I could in TSW. When I do story content I switch over to damage as well. When I do raids, see Dungeons.
So sure, maybe I don’t understand exactly where the issues come from yet, but there seem to be two solutions: Rebuild the system from the ground up so that healers are actually needed to do all group content, or find a way to make overheal useful somehow. In my experience it’s a lot more likely to see new systems added to a game than old systems completely redesigned.
Bottom line is, if the first thing a new player who wants to play a specific kind of character runs into is: “Don’t play that character” then the game is losing players, content or no. I at least had a lot more fun with the old TSW where I was useful in raids, dungeons and scenarios than with this game where the tanks never die and the DPS heals itself just by attacking.
You can heal survivors at the same 1% effectiveness or whatever as TSW, it’s just a lot harder to select them because of what they did to tab targeting. And of course they ruined all aoe heals.
I don’t really have too many horses in this race anymore, but an observation…?
Even in the previous ages of healtanks, leechtanks, ect, people generally knew up front which roles they wanted for their groups. LF4 DPS? Okay, I won’t whisper that person. Or I’ll start my own group. Healers could start their own groups, I suppose.
But really, Group Finder isn’t really favorable to anything other than traditional. Holy Trinity. Nothing else accepted. Maybe a band-aid fix would be to tinker the Group Finder to parcel out only the roles a team leader may want?
Because even on a more practical level, Story Mode NYR “requires” two healers.
That is a very fair point. Although the issue of not ideal dungeon environement is possibly going beyond this: in comparison to TSW ones, new mecanichs are boring (eg. too manyhp sponges, no directly usable loot, etc).
Yes “overhealing bar” could actually solve partially the issue for you if you enjoy to play buff bot. That wouldnt solve the issue for people who really want to play as a healer (it would as well beg the question of why healer exist as a class for solo content as well). It wouldnt solve the issue that half of the glyphs are useless. The root of the issue is that the design of dungeons have been tweaked a lot, possibly to support the monetization scheme. But a number of tweaks actually made the content tedious (too many hp etc) the other ones made having a healer a luxury (no way of mitigating hits otherwise than cds - glyph are not efficient).
That said, i get the feeling that the only way they are going to bring people in/back is new content.
Maybe? I don’t really care which is most viable though, so long as both options are viable. Anyway, it was just a thought - I don’t particularly care to defend it against any kind of rigorous analysis, not that you’re doing any.
Suggestions shall be encouraged even disagreement is inevitable.
