Tree of Savior Forum

Food for Thought: What if... clerics can't heal?

General Discussion
#1

Just what if… the entire cleric tree lost the ability to mitigate damage via replenishing the HP using spells?

  • Clerics loses Heal
  • Priest loses mass Heal
  • Plague Doctor loses Healing Factor

What will happen to the general PVE content if the above is true?

Will dungeons be harder to traverse with a team that can only rely on HP potions and bonfire?

What about World Bosses, does it make it a more exciting fight knowing that you have to manually dodge moves and not rely on your cleric teammate to out heal the damage?

What about other means of damage mitigation? Will spells like Magic Shield become much more worthwhile when healing is limited?

What about other spells which are crowd-control based such as Confusion and Blind? Will they be much better as options to mitigate damage by disabling monsters?

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KToS General Thread v4.0
#2

Nothing, they aren’t really that necessary to begin with, except for WBs and maybe Raids(?).

Not really, I’ve been doing some dungeons without clerics, and even some with clerics that don’t even bother using heal.

That depend, I can’t confirm tho, but wouldn’t that SP dry the builds that aren’t SPR? Or does the skill goes for the SP of the caster, when a party member receive damage?

Not all work on them, for example, despite being some sort of gas cloud, Sleep doesn’t work on flying mob, same for Lethargy if I remember correctly.

I already mentioned this on another thread, but aside from field mob, open dungeon mob should be as strong as HG mob, or a bit more stronger to at least be worth of making a party (like when R8 patch was released).

Instanced dungeons would have stronger mob and would cast varied skills. For example:

  • On 300 dun, the archers could use all Archer skills but each class 1 mob, ex.: some Archer mob would use all Mergen skills while others would use all Sapper skills and so on.
  • Mages, Swordies and some Cleric type mob would do the same as above on their respective trees.

Then again, the dungeon maps would be even more empty since we barely have players to form parties.

Another thing I think it should be implemented is either:

  • Chars above 50 Lvs of a WB should not be able to damage it.

Or:

  • When 1 char hit the boss, it will take 1 damage and automatically create an Aura that will lower the Lv, gear and stats from that char to the range of the boss.

That way, even who is in that Lv range can get a shot at it.

Well, all of this is just my opinion and I really doubt IMC will or is even capable of pull these things off, maybe the mob toughness part, but not the boss one.

#3

a lot of campfire parties

#4

Prepare ur wallet
image

#5

is that 2nd bottle a suppository?

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#6

Heal isn’t necessary as long as you have enough CON and defence.
On my Clerics, I rarely use Heal as a mean to recover, mainly just for damage (unless I’ve lost some HP and some heal tiles are left over).
Seriously, even Ein Sof would be useful (maybe evn more useful than right now) without heal, improving the effect of HP recovery cards and potions.

With the upcoming patches (armor defence boost and halved transcendence costs), you only need 1-2 equipment sets for all your characters, so Heal will become obsolete for the majority of contents unless you’re a new player and/or haven’t had the ressources to get so far by the time we are up-to-date with the current kTest.

In the end, I guess the Clerics would be the ones suffering the most if Healing was disabled (most skills are point blank range) as they’re taking more hits on average [Swordsman has Peltasta&Highlander for active blocking, Guardian is now a huge defence boost] with less means to easily mitigate it [active evasion like Archer&Wizard through ranged attacking is hard, so they have to rely on support skills like Safety Zone, Mackangdal, Sterea Troph, Golden Bell Shield,Ausrine,etc.]

Afaik every hit only drains 1% of your SP,and the maximum level is 17, so at worst you’d lose 17% of your SP [which isn’t much if your SP pool is low due to small amounts of SPR/being a non-Wizard/non-Cleric] every 45 seconds…

#7

Almost all, if not all, DPS players don’t bother much with CON, unless it’s a PvE/PvP hybrid build.

With 30 CON you have a good HP pool, which you get from gears without even trying.

Then again, with the WBs rework, if you don’t have at least around 40k HP and a really good defense, you are just cannon fodder. <— I’m a living sample of that lol.

I said this before and I will say it again, IMC is turning ToS PC into a mobile game, where you can progress faster than normal if you use your CC, it’s not happening now, but it give the feeling that it will be in the future.

Not so sure if it’s working as it is described, I tried it in an INT build, and I remember my SP was being sucked dry, I wasn’t even casting, just moving around and taking a few hits due to massive lag.

More like, prepare your ass lol…

#8

Then they would lose their essence since clerics are healers. It’s the core of their role, the core of their existence. To heal, cure, take care of, protect the wounded.
If they can’t heal… why have a 4th tree called “Cleric” ? Fuse them with the Wizard tree or find a way to create another magical tree.

I’m now curious about what goal did you have in mind with your question ?

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#9

The problem is, most of content is so easy that we don’t need a cleric to do it, that is the main issue, IMC don’t know what the ■■■■ they are doing and designing the game while using a blindfold or simple watching South Park while coding.

The class became basically another DPS class or a buffer, which in the end, is less efficient than a buff shop, because you barely see anyone dying, unless they didn’t bought pots and are running around like that, which I saw some other day.

They are useful, barely, only on Demon Lords, Guild Bosses and Raid and maybe ET.

Then again, that is the only end-game content we got.

I do have some Clerics in my account, but all of them are DPS, why bother with FS right, if you have Cleric 2, you can heal efficiently.

#10

It to set up a discussion on the effects of limiting mitigation of damage via HP replenishment.

Traditionally in games, HP is a gauge on how many hits a player’s avatar can take before dying. The value of each point of HP gets higher as the player gets better defences, with the same amount of HP being able to soak up more hits before the player hits a critical point (1 more hit to death).

This in turn makes direct heals more valuable as players get better geared. A 10000 HP heal on a starting player may help mitigate 2-3 hits from monsters but the same 10000 HP heal on a geared player helps mitigate 10+ hits from the same monsters. It gets even better when heals are based off a percentage of total HP, with the same heal spell effectively mitigating more hits from monsters the more health pool the player has.

There are many ways to mitigate incoming damage for action games:

  • Direct HP replenishment (Heals, direct or overtime)
  • Lowering amount of damage taken (partial shielding, gear upgrades)
  • Lowering amount of damage the opposition dish out (debuffs)
  • Altering the state of the source of damage (Crowd control, skill interrupts)
  • Manually evading the damage source

Let us quickly jump to another action game to illustrate, Hollow Knight. For those who don’t know what Hollow Knight is, it is an action game where the player controls a character with a limited health pool, traverse the insect world and kill mutated insects. It is of the metroidvania genre and fights are hard where the player needs to learn how the monsters fight in order not to lose the precious health points.

In the game the player can convert soul points (SP equivalent for ToS) into HP at any time. It helps to make the fights easier by giving players room to make more mistakes (misteks that have to be paid with HP).

If, the player isn’t given the ability to convert SP to HP, Hollow Knight becomes instantly much harder. Players will have to be more careful not to tread into monster attack ranges, learn when to dodge and when to attack, learn how to pull in monsters as not to get into a disadvantageous position and learn when to use skills to disrupt monsters from attacking.

The game demands more “action” from players when life resource is limited.

Mapping it back to ToS, what is/are the reason(s) IMC increase World Boss’s attack/defenses and Health Pools? Is it…

  • So that World Bosses can last longer than 1-2 mins vs players onslaught as compared to before?
  • Players typically ignore what World Bosses do as their damage mitigation vastly outshine what the previous iteration of WBs can dish out?
  • WBs are initially planned as content for the elites of the elites only? Players who fall out short of “top end transcended gear” criteria can’t touch them?

World bosses aside, let me touch on general PvE and normal dungeon instances, which encompasses the bulk of what players do in game. I like to run experiment builds with entry level gear so as to try them out, especially on kTest server. Quite a handful of my youtube videos show me running 300dg with 270/315 blues and event gears. On the Telsiai server where I’m playing in, I often join 300dg runs with other players.

One really interesting thing which I see in such runs is that when players have lesser means of damage mitigation (without a healer), they are generally more meticulous in engaging the monsters. Cataphrats will instantly retreat out the moment they felt overwhelmed, Psychokinos will run in to Rise the monsters so that the party can have more breathing room and allow their skills more time to go off cooldown.

Back full circle, I believe that it is time where we can visit and discuss on the balance of damage and damage mitigation. On how to make ToS’s PvE engagements more engaging for the players, on how to upgrade it from being a Musou (無双) styled action mmo to one which requires more thought on PvE encounters (but not to Dark Souls level please lol).

Yeah, it to set up a discussion on the effects of limiting mitigation of damage via HP replenishment in order to balance difficulty.

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#11

Featherfoot will be the new cleric. Make this a thing.

1 Like
#12

The Clerics main role is not a “healer” but a “holy warrior” that uses divine power to fight against the evils in the world. It’s a common misconcept that Clerics are supposed to be “healers” and/or “buffers”, while healing and buffing is not solely limited to Clerics (in many games, types of mages, e.g. Sages, or the famous White Mage/Red Mage from the Square Enix Universes).

It’s more accurate to say that divine power/white magic/nature magic is usually a mean of recovery.
It is not the main mean of recovery,though, as usually potions/recovery herbs/other recovery items are introduced way before you have a healing skill to use(and in many games are usually more potent unless you have a long CD on them or a low recovery value).

What TOS did was just to expand on this idea, make the Cleric more attack-focused (as there’s still no content that can be cleared without attacking) and give most divine magic at least a double role (to heal/cure status effects and/or to deal damage).

Changes that could make the game more interesting is to have e.g. higher Cooldown in specific instances on healing skills (e.g. 50 seconds or 120 seconds, though it would hurt the Clerics damage) or watering down the initial healing capacity to 1% and 3% on Mass Heal.
Even common no-heal debuffs like the Pantorex debuff could be useful (it’s always funny to see people trying to get healed, wasting all heal tiles on the screen) to make the game more interactive.

An instance-long no recovery-debuff [excluding potions] would also suffice, so that Clerics could still use Heal for damage [it’s ridiculous to use Heal for recovery, given it deals so much damage, so I mainly use it for damage even against Demon Lords].

What I’d like to see is a no-heal debuff in Challenge Mode.
Currently it’s just so bad that people with crap armor can still clear up to stage 5 as long as they have a Cleric[not really a challenge, it’s more of an DPS check that excludes bad builds/bad party-compositions/bad equipment upgrade&transcendence (mainly weaponry, which is unfair since onehanded builds suffer way more until stage 6 where wearing a shield outweights the benefits of more attack)].

It’d be cool if the stages would not only increase the armor transcendence of the monsters and your looting chance, but also decrease the healing capacity by ~25% each stage, so that from stage 5 onwards you have no healing capabilities anymore via normal means (recovery skills like Aukuras, Restoration, Ein Sof[with stacked healing attribute], Prakriti [with recovery attribute] should still have their means of improved recovery, but Healing Factor, Heal and Mass Heal should do nothing from here onwards).

Or maybe a reverse system could be applied that allows recovery from stage 5 onwards only (e.g. stage 1-4 = no healing, stage 5 onwards = +10% recovery per stage, so stage 5 has 10%, stage 6 20% and stage 7 30% of normal recovery via Heal/Mass Heal/Healing Factor).

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#13

I concur. Like what you described in the past few posts, content is trivialised once players hit a certain threshold in equipment. So much that healing isn’t really needed.

I think the issue for this is monsters don’t get the same buffs like the players have, damage that ignores or bypasses part or most of the player’s defenses. Adding some form of elemental property damage for monsters will help in a big way like some mage monsters have the ability to enchant lightning to aid their peers for instance. Or the 300dg fire mages can cast enchant fire.

This problem is further aggravated when total HP% based healing is brought into the picture when a mid/ well-geared player already mitigates so much damage. When monsters already deal so little damage that it isn’t a threat, instant healing to max life with just 1 drop of heal tiles makes it worse. I can already imagine that ToS PvE scene will become more of a joke when the new gear stats and transcendence patch comes into fruition, where equipment gets a 1.5x boost in attack/defences in general.

I like what @Asriel proposed, to have some form of mitigation limitations for certain dungeons and challenge modes. It makes it more interesting for players, at least in my pov.

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#14

If the cleric tree lost its ability to heal, then they wouldn’t be called clerics.

Anyway, you’re confusing mitigation and restoration.

Replenishing HP using spells isn’t mitigation of damage.

Mitigation of damage is reducing incoming damage - like linker’s physical link, and pelt’s guardian (increasing armor, reduction of damage from attrib)

#15

Much thanks for the correction. I’ll try to use the proper terms to avoid confusion :3

What I’m talking about is the “mitigation of hits” that will kill the character, I don’t know the proper name for it (since I’m not a game dev). Besides damage reduction and shields which reduces/extends the number or hits, extending the number of hits a player character can take by meddling with the health points is also a form of mitigation.

Replenishing HP extends the number of hits a player can take over a period of time.

Hope that this isn’t confusing.

#16

Uhh, you’re combining the healing and mitigation portion (they shouldn’t be). I figured out your meaning, as i’ve done theorycrafting in a ton of other MMOs.

Mitigation - The word means ‘reducing the severity of’

So in most games there would be a trinity of HP, Mitigation, Restoration, not 2.

Extending the number of hits a player character can take by restoring the health points isn’t mitigation, since it dosen’t “reduce” the damage (meaning of the word).

Some games out there have literally ZERO mitigation, and everything is dealt with through restoration (HP meat tanks, pretty much), while others limit you to timed restoration (Heeeeey 30s potion cooldowns) with you stacking mitigation (damage reduction)

TOS isn’t unique in that sense, most of the more detailed MMOs (actually only 2 really big ones left, WoW and FFXIV) out there tries (or attempts to) to form a balance in the trinity.

Mitigation normally isn’t restricted to one class, all classes, regardless of tank, healer, or dps, would have some sort of mitigation. In TOS’s case, a simple example of Archer (evasion on swift step), Rog (Direct increase in evasion), Hoplite (Finestra block, although with a downside? of reducing evasion) would be considered mitigation, as they contribute to a direct reduction of incoming damage.

While Restoration (HJEALS PLOS!11!) is currently restricted to the cleric classes, with the one sole exemption of Featherfooties.

#17

Yeah I do realise that I’ve been tossing that word around without realising how others perceive the meaning.

What I’m talking about is “prevention of occurrence of death” (arrgh another one which I can’t find a suitable phrase). A suitable example will be like:

Player A has 5 HP, over the course of 10secs he will take 9 HP worth of damage, he can~

  1. Increase armor by 2x, reducing damage taken by half. He took 4.5HP over 10secs, mitigates 50% of incoming damage preventing death.

  2. Cast a shield which absorbs 5HP worth of damage. He took 4HP over 10secs, mitigates 55% of incoming damage preventing death.

  3. Extends his health bar by 2x, making it 10HP total right at the beginning. He took 9HP over 10secs, prevents death by “??? 5 points of damage” due to his increased HP pool which reverts back to normal after the encounter.

  4. Heals for 5HP total over the course of 10secs (can be in 2s and 3s). He took 9HP over 10secs, prevents death by “??? 5 points of damage” by balancing the incoming damage he can take as opposed to his remaining HP pools during the 10secs.

What will be a better word for “???”.

#18

basically my wiz, when wearing grita’s costume

#19

Replace ??? with “Heals”

So in example 3 > Extends health bar by 2x (AKA Giving himself an overheal or temporary HP of 5). Prevents death by 'temporary hp (OVERHEAL) of 5 points of damage

Example 4 > Heals for 5 hp, prevents death by HEALING 5 points of damage

A simple method of remembering would be to think of this. REDUCTION of incoming damage = Mitigation. Any sort of tinkering with your HP levels = Restoration/Healing (even overheals or temporary HP)

Regardless of incoming source of healing (restoration). In TOS’s case, all the non-cleric classes are potion reliant.

Your explanation pretty much lays out the trinity of HP - Mitigation - Restoration/Healing

He mitigates damage through armor and absorption, then heals HP before taking the next hit.

#20

For your example 2, shields providing temporary hp should be considered an ‘overheal’ of sorts

I don’t know if you’ve played Guild Wars (ONE, not TWO), but that game had temporary HP provision down to a really simplified manner.