Healers need help! An idea to make them better without making them mandatory

Secret World Legends General Discussion
28

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.

How do you target them?

It’s a large and complex problem that would require a lot of work to fix, and has been argued over at length. Funcom has previously noted they are aware of the problem and would like to address it (however, that would depend on their development priorities and resources).

That doesn’t exactly evoke confidence unfortunately. I’ve played Age of Conan at launch, I’ve literally watched Funcom ignore serious balance issues to the point of basically killing off a potentially great game through inaction.

I’m starting to think I’ll just do the story content and move on. Maybe in a few years they will have sorted the game out enough to be worth spending time and money on.

29

Control+Tab will make whatever you are looking at your defensive target. Press several times to cycle through nearby options. F1 should put yourself as defensive target after you’re done.

30

Yup. You can also rebind the keys for it. I set mine to ` instead.

1 Like
31

I am a main healer and have four healing builds range from 100% healing down to 0% with 100% damage. They all get a fair bit of usage in MH Raid, megabosses, scenarios and daily dungeons, all depending on the pick up group dynamics.

I like scoring the occasional sustain tank as my 100% dmg heal build is pretty devastating and can cover group healing if required.

My two tips are;

  • Do what you want to do.
  • Be prepared to adapt.
1 Like
33

This would not be an issue as the healer would be effectively increasing the tanks dps output more then the dps with the change suggested by the OP

34

I actually think what the OP is suggesting here is genius. People are getting to hung up on the fact that cruel delight and sustain tanking was brought into the conversation and completely missing the benefit of what is being suggested.

To summarize currently healers are not considered very useful sure they can bring cleanses and some general group support on some fights but there’s no reason for a player to focus on becoming an amazing healer in terms of healing output in its current state.

The change suggested by the OP allows healers to again have a purpose. It counters the issue of having to little dps in fights that have a dps check ( yes I’m looking at you HR). It does NOT effect aggro as the tanks dps should be increased relatively as much and the healer can actually play an active role in controlling aggro by choosing who they focus to heal.

NO this isn’t a solution to sustain tanking.
And NO this doesn’t mean CD needs a nerf. In fact with these changes players will more often choose not to run cruel delight in dungeons.

Please try to see past the generalizations and notice how good this suggestion really is.

1 Like
35

Except that they still wouldn’t be healing, they’d be buffing. That’s why I don’t like this idea.

36

Valid point. But perhaps it would spur a change in group mentality. Right now groups are geared for no heals but if healers became the meta less people would choose to run CD Ain the dps builds and tanks may experiment with more dps focused builds. I know this is only possibly to an extent due to one shots but a good blood healer can actually increase the health pool significantly.

37

Lesson learned from City of Heroes : “healing” = “buffing hit points”, therefore “healer” = “(a form of) buffer” :man_shrugging:

Regarding the OP’s suggestion : I don’t get how “extra damage is capped by hit points” (7512) can work in combination with the demand of “three dps plus healer must be stronger than four dps”.
Wouldn’t a “two dps plus two healers” setup, with each dps having one healer pumping the damage, be potentially even stronger than 3+1 ?
All I see is a charlie foxtrot in the making, so I give the suggestion a hard pass.

38

Yeah mine’s on Tab alone and I moved potions to ctrl+4. (which conveniently is where it was in tsw)

39

Except that they still wouldn’t be healing, they’d be buffing. That’s why I don’t like this idea.

The problem with pure healing is that someone needs to be hurt before you can heal them, and they need to die unless they get healed for them to actually need you. So effectively a pure healer is only useful when they are mandatory.

Allowing heals to roll over into buffs when the target isn’t dying doesn’t take away the ability to be that life saving healer when needed, and I do agree that there should be more content where it is needed, but it doesn’t create a situation where the game needs to create a dependency on healers in every single bit of content where healers are supposed to have a use.

A big thing people tend to forget is that the core functionality of the healer archetype comes from early MMORPGs where you had to rest for minutes at a time after fights if you were wounded, so in those games healers were extremely useful even if you could easily defeat the monster before you ran out of health. That long downtime was done away with though as MMORPGs evolved, so now the “put health back” type of support character is only useful in fights where you would run out of health before you defeat the monster.

So, re-designing the way support characters work in MMORPGs is overdue anyways. Someone has to finally make a game where it all makes sense again. I think it would be great if “healer” went more toward “support” again, like in pen and paper games. In D&D the most effective way to go through encounters is to avoid damage through clever use of stealth, crowd control, defensive buffs and summoned creatures. Failing all that you need heals to restore your party to fighting form, but they should never be considered your first line of defense.

40

But SWL isn’t designed for a dedicated support class, either. In order for a support class to be viable, the healing weapons’ abilities would have to be retooled towards utility.

The OP’s suggestion does nothing to solve the actual problem. It doesn’t make healers useful again, it just turns them into dps in a roundabout way.

1 Like
41

The problem is that in a game without downtime healers that do nothing but put HP back cannot be useful unless you simply die without them. If you can finish the fight without having your health bar extended by external heals then you don’t need a healer.

So there is simply no scenario where healers that can do nothing but put health back are universally useful without making everyone else useless without them.

42

I don’t think so. It would have to be implemented in a very specific way I think. Consider some scenarios.

  1. Overhealing is individually tallied. A healer spamming group heals is required to buff the DPS. However the tank is not getting overhealing, because they are still getting hurt regularly. They get less overhealing, thus their buffed DPS is mostly nonexistant which means the DPS are doing buffed damage and the tank is rarely doing so.

  2. Overhealing is groupwide. This would be curious to implement, but probably superior to the first because the healer can simply put their most powerful heals on the tank continuously, and when they are topped off, the group gets overcharge.

However, what happens when say a DPS is partially wounded and it isn’t a critical importance to heal them, so the healer ignores it? Do they not get the buff? This is then easily asked of the tank. What happens when the tank is not full, but the DPS are, and there is overcharge to spread around?

Further, how does it properly spread around? Lets say there is a built up 30k overcharge, the tank hits a basic for ~1000 damage, does 2000. The 3 DPS each hit with a power ability for 10000 damage, and with overcharge do almost 20k each. Does the tank keep aggro or does the boss eat a DPS from the burst? Or lets say the overcharge is only 10k that the healer can reliably sustain on the tank, but each GCD, its one DPS that fires a split second before the tank, and uses the entire pool while the tank then never gets any of it? Similarly imagine any scenario where the tank can’t do DPS because they have to move, while DPS is burning through overcharge.

  1. Overcharge doesn’t affect aggro. That might be an odd way to do things, from a technical standpoint, to have it added separately somehow, and be potentially exploitable. However, it would of course avoid the issue entirely, independent of how it works.

I don’t know the best way to even implement this, but aggro is definitely an issue depending on how it is implemented and how the numbers work.

So now some more general questions. What about blood DPS, are they left out? What about AR who messes up a grenade and damages theirself? Or any other weapon that can self damage?

How does reap essence work (the AR heal that heals whoever shoots the target, if I got the name wrong?) How about blood shields, how does overcharge calculate there?

How about PVP, how would this work there? Should it? What is the state of healing in Shambala PVP?

And finally, realistically, what kind of HPS numbers can a healer pull? Would this even be viable? I have the high suspicion that the healer would still be better off as a 4th DPS, and may not even be able to sustain HPS necessary to fully buff a single DPS.

43

I don’t know the best way to even implement this, but aggro is definitely an issue depending on how it is implemented and how the numbers work.

The extra damage would not cause aggro, the healing generates aggro as if it went to someone’s health bar.

So now some more general questions. What about blood DPS, are they left out? What about AR who messes up a grenade and damages theirself? Or any other weapon that can self damage?

Blood would have a harder time retaining access to the overcharge bar with all its self damage, but healers just have to deal with that to generate an overcharge on blood characters, same as they have to deal with it to keep blood characters alive. Self damage would not go up with overcharge as it is based on percentiles and not CP anyways.

How does reap essence work (the AR heal that heals whoever shoots the target, if I got the name wrong?) How about blood shields, how does overcharge calculate there?

Leeching does fill up your overcharge bar. Blood shields don’t add to the bar, but since they make it easier to retain a full health bar they do help you retain the overcharge bonus.

How about PVP, how would this work there? Should it? What is the state of healing in Shambala PVP?

It would work in PvP. You shouldn’t let people unload on you while at full health in PvP though, so this will only be a problem if you’re already being overwhelmed.

Overcharge would quickly dissipate when out of combat, the same way that health very rapidly recharges your overcharge very quickly disappears. When you take damage while you have overcharge you’d start losing the bar as well if you’re not brought back to full health within a few seconds. You’d see the bar flash after maybe 2 seconds and start to drain if your character remains damaged. The healer needs to be on the ball.

As far as “Can this even be up full time?” goes: No, and it isn’t meant to be. This isn’t supposed to be a permanent 100% damage buff that healers enable, this is very specifically capped by the amount of healing they can do because it’s supposed to retain all the granularity of healing numbers so that the gear progression for healers matters.

44

This conclusion seems a bit too strong.

Let’s have a look at ESO. The dungeon system (not speaking of raids) in ESO is basically splitted between Normal and Vet dungeons (each dungeon have 2 versions) and broadly you have two types of dungeons non-DLC (two third) and DLC ones (one third) (DLC ones being more demanding both in term of mecanichs and outputs). With max level toons you can play most of the content with 1 tank 3 dpses and no heal (for non DLC dungeosn you dont even really need a tank if you know what what you do). With engame but not maxed out toons, you can probably run all non DLC dungeons without a heal or a tank. That means that most of the available content you dont really need a heal. Still people are using healers 90% of the time when running through lfg. The reason may be because it is actually quite easy to switch gear and build or maybe just because the population being much much bigger, you have a lot of different type of tanks, level of characters etc.

That said, from a resource point of view, i dont know which would be the easier of (1) reviewing hp and damage outputs of 30+ bosses to make space for healers and make boss non-hp’spongy or (2) create a brand new system on top of it all an make sure it is working as intended. Given devs should have access to plenty of data i imagine option (1) would be easier to implement.

Finally does it even make sense to implement any option if the population is not increased significantly?

45

This conclusion seems a bit too strong.

I think it’s the only logical conclusion.

Think about it this way: If you can kill an enemy before you run out of health getting heals doesn’t really help you. Your health simply resets after the fight, so there is no real benefit to having a healer. If you can’t kill an enemy before you run out of health then you need a healer, you simply can’t do it without those heals.

Now there are cases where whether or not you win before you run out of health isn’t certain, like what you’re seeing in ESO. You might be able to DPS the boss down before anyone needs dedicated healing, but maybe someone fails to dodge an AOE or an add beats on a DPS for a little too long and suddenly a heal is required to get through the fight. Not a big deal in ESO either since you can be good at healing and damage at the same time.

So, you can have a situation where it’s not 100% win or 100% lose without a healer, but a chance that either one will happen. Those are the only situations where a healer is useful but not mandatory. Those are also the most difficult of all situations to create on purpose though, since they depend on making something just hard enough that people won’t be so confident they can do it that they don’t take the safety measure of having a healer, but not so likely to fail that it becomes a liability not to have one. The only reason this works OK in ESO is because you can easily have enough healing to provide that safety while still being a damage dealer as well, so it’s not really a big loss to have someone who can jump to healing if needed.

46

Ok that may run counter my previous argumentation :slight_smile: but dont forget “shards”, healer are creatures sent by heavens cause they prevent dps to have to slot self healing and increase capacity to sustain dps too.

Yes indeed, but having a healer around may permit to shorten the fight a lot more by allowing dps to go full dps rather than slotting shields etc. But yes that is right.

Now it is not that i don’t agree with that, however it was working in TSW so they have a model design they could use as a fallback.

That said, “LF healer for vCoA1” just appeared on my screen :stuck_out_tongue:

47

I think it worked in TSW cause it wasn’t a matter of 3dps -> dungeon takes 45min, 4dps -> 30min. It was “6 minutes with a leecher, 7 minutes with a fist/blood healer”. So getting the ideal tank/healer setup mattered less.

1 Like
48

+1
HP’sponginess needs to be reviewed along with damage output and not only damage output :slight_smile: