Post rebalancing (and sometimes even beforehand) there are many problems with Cleric skills, especially concerning those skills that have a debuffing nature/buffing nature/healing nature.
That’s why I think some adjustments should be made to make Cleric skills less exploitable by others, giving Cleric players an overall better standing ground.
First of all, I want to talk about tile support skills. They get abused/exploited by other players a lot, sometimes with and other times without evil intention.
I’m mainly talking about Heal,Cure,Safety Zone,Ein Sof,Healing Factor.
I believe everyone has a right to be the benefactor of his own skills, as it’s done for the other base Classes [i.e. Swordsmen,Archers,Wizards]. If skills are not partywide buffs but singular instances, I don’t understand why Cleric is the only base Class that has to have its skills exploited for egoistic reasons of other players.
I think Cleric needs a toggleable Class attribute that makes aforementioned skills beneficial effects to be only recievable by the caster.
This would remove a lot of stress from the Cleric player in his freedom of gaming, as he can focus normally on being efficient without having to worry every time he casts one of those specific skills if anyone else could just grab his buff effect and get away with it, ruining the Cleric players gaming experience.
This is especially grave in the case of Heal,Cure and Safety Zone. Heal and Cure are also damaging skills, and relinquishing them instead of using potions uses up quite a bit of the possible damage output, especially on builds which focus on non-damagedealing Classes. So basically it’s sabotaging the damage of a fellow player/party member.
But that’s not all. The main problem is that those skills scale with skilllevel, so builds with only Cleric C1 or lower levels of said skills with suffer even more if their skills are consumed by others. E.g. Cleric C1 Safety Zone has only up to 10 blocks, which are quite quickly used up if someone else stands in your Safety Zone to have his ass protected,too.
If you set up a Safety Zone and then try to cast several other skills, e.g. crafting a statue/statues,followed by debuffs to optimize your damageoutput, chances are high that the hits are used up by the party members who just run inside your Safety Zone so they can laze around, not having to actively dodge/block the attacks while spamming their skills. Meanwhile you, still casting your skills, are left without any protection and in enforced melee range to the enemy to hit with your skills. If you get knocked down/back while casting, your setup may be damaged/broken and a skill wasted -> on CD.
Same goes with e.g. Heal level 5/Cure level 5, if someone decides to snatch your Heals away/run over your Cure you can’t do anything, even if the Heal/Cure was meant for you/for damage.
Heal and Cure could also be protected by a no-healing attribute that removes the Healing/curing effect from the skill, but that could cause a problem for the Cleric player himself, that’s why a no-share attribute for non-partywide buff effects would be better.
In the case of Ein Sof and Healing Factor, which are skills with relatively long CD times, getting them snatched away by mistake or with evil/egoistic intentions is never an enjoyable thing to happen.
Since TOS uses the tiles system to avoid target based buffing/healing, there should be a system that prevents the possible exploitation/griefing caused by and through this system, which can only be granted with a Class attribute or game mode that allows or removes the availability of these effects to others.
Last but not least: Double Chance needs a similar attribute which allows only the caster to toggle the debuff effect(i.e. the multiplication of damage).
The skill needs so much setup time only to be immediately used up by a random autoattack/weak skill of other players that it’s not funny.
You can’t personally benefit from this effect at all in reality as it requires so much coordination and the cooperation of all players and A.I.-controlled entities (i.e. companions,zombies,Wizard summons e.g.), which is ± impossible in the case of the latter ones.
A skill only made for solo gaming [and without companion/zombies involved] is a pretty sad skill.