It’s quite a wash-list of reasons tbh:
Healing wise:
Our healing isn’t that good, to the contrary it actually has quite a few downsides.
- Heal is based on tiles and requires time and attention to work.
- Mass heal can miss.
- Aukuras is only good with squire buffs and a stationary party
- revive has a far too long cd.
- None are spammable.
- Healing factor requires timing.
To make it worse damage in this game is very often dealt in high amounts or quick succession. Considering how slow and methodical our healing is, it’s simply not enough to keep up in most cases.
So the better option to keep a party alive is to bring healing and damage prevention. To survive the impossible spikes and heal through the normal.
Which is why cleric2 is so common, it’s healing is more than capable.
The one exception is healing factor, as that + spiritual link can ensure a party-wide massive health regen that can work.
[Though a res for content where you can’t use soul crystals is highly recommended as well.]
Damage vs support wise:
But that brings up the second issue, class balance.
Most cleric classes are clearly intended to be hybrids, as in they tend to offer both support and damage at the same time.
Some of our best damage prevention even originates from said hybrids to boot:
- Dievdirby can silence mobs, invuln allies and has owls as one of the strongest pre r6 dmg skills.
- Krivis can deal good single target dmg later on due to taoist and gets melstis to extend ausrine invulns.
- Druid gets ok-ish damage and sterea trofh to prevent a ton of damage.
- Even cleric2’s cure and heal deal respectable dmg for int builds while safety zone’s rank 2 attribute adds 20 blocks.
- Plague doctor can’t prevent dmg but can prevent conditions and healing factor ofc.
Sadly the less damage oriented classes tend to be quite lacking.:
- Oracle3 can’t grab worthwhile dmg at all, and has moving chance based damage prevention. Counterspell is good but only vs magic dmg.
- Kabba2 likewise misses out on a ton of damage, and even likely sacrifices merkabah’s dmg to provide temporary moving invulns.
- Pardoner doesn’t offer anything to their own kit either. Discern evil is nice, but only for specific builds others use.
The support oriented classes also have more bugs/balance issues affecting them to boot. But that’s more of a secondary issue IMO. Still very annoying though.
And sadhu is in need of a overhaul badly.
But a major issue is how rank 8 is designed.
Mob health is scaling too high for the low dmg builds. They can barely dent the new and common 250k health mobs even if they try.
So they need parties 24/7 but itos doesn’t even have that many players.
To make it even worse full support builds can’t farm most solo grind dungeons, mobs & missions for silver, cards & gear either.
Too many downsides with to little pay off tbh.
