The leech effect from hitting the target now only applies to your team members.
I’d like to see this change reverted because of 2 points:
Unveil Essence in it’s Live form might be very strong, but TestLive already lowered its leech numbers to about 1/4th of previous in a general move to lower HPS across the board. Plus even in Live/Phase 1 form it can’t proc Empowerment on anyone outside single defensive target.
Unveil Essence in it’s Live form is one of the few ways to heal characters outside your group. In cases such as event megabosses person wanting to play the role of a healer can’t expect to be grouped with someone tanking, or anyone that loses HP because of fight mechanics. So if they want to heal they’ll need to use an ability that’s not reliant on defensive targeting (it’s not trivial to target a character that has aggro in this precise moment and retarget to the next aggro holder with the reticule system) or group membership.
Abilities allowing that were: Unveil Essence, Essence Grenade (+Lingering Essence), Wild Surge (+Wild Burst), Runic Hex (+Paroxysm) and Eldritch Scourge. All have lower healing numbers in Phase 2, and Unveil Essence no longer works.
I enjoy healing playstyle in general, and even though I heard many times that such healing “isn’t needed” I’d still like to continue performing this role in megaboss fights, event or otherwise.
In something like a mega boss fight, everyone being able to leech off one unveil is kinda far out of bounds with other healing weapons. Tanks dont benefit much from unveil leeching, as it grows with how hard they hit. If you wanna heal a tank not in your group, you target them with a single target heal.
There is no mechanism for targetting a player of your choice in SWL though… due to the reticle you can’t click them, all you have is Tab to select next player which cycles through everyone you’re vaguely pointing at. And “select target of my target” hotkey (used for finding the tank with aggro) has been broken the entire life of SWL.
Its not that big of a hassle to find the tank in an MB, i’ve done it often enough =P. But sure a better way to target people out of your group would be super nice.
I just dont think its at all wrong to bring unveil in line with other AoE heals, when it comes to how many it can heal. And certainly not if the aim is to heal the tank, cuz unveil is supposed to be an effective group heal, not a good tank heal
I disagree with this part. It could heal more people but that never mattered in group content or raid content. Neither was it strong enough leech to keep a tank up by itself in a megaboss fight (and it’s definitely not strong enough for that in Phase 2). So it’s less a matter of balance or fairness and more a matter of preservation of a “MB raidhealer” playstyle. Without it I’d have to either go back to DD, or become a pocket healer and try to fight through targeting woes and aggro slips.
It never really mattered in group or raid content because Cruel Delight was OP.
In a MB fight, the tank can just sustain through it, but one person using it was enough to keep all the other DPS alive. I often brought it along without even switching to healer AA, and it’d heal everyone through any AoE that didn’t one shot them. That’s massively more powerful than all of the other heal weapons, and removes the purpose of other healers in MBs.
I don’t know how this’ll really help healers though, as everyone is limited to healing inside their own group, and in public raids people often don’t bother with grouping. It’d be nice if we were automatically put into a raid group when we entered the MB instance, (like when we used to enter Fusang) but that seems unlikely.
With the changes to tanking and healing, I suspect that MBs will have a pocket healer for the tank. You won’t be able to rely on there being a competent healer in the public pack to keep you up, which means it’s likely to be worked out beforehand.