It’s better if you understand what you’re talking about before you post tbh.
The new targeted heal is not enough to keep a party alive atm. It’s a mere 2oh 10s cd.
Restoration(HoT Aura), Chorta(HoT circle), Indulgentia(HoT pbaoe buff), Mass Heal(pbaoe), Tree of Sephiroth(HoT circle) are all additional sources of healing that still require a group to stick together in some form if you want to heal several allies at once.
Only healing factor(target buff) and heal(target heal) act in the manner you speak off.
And even if that wasn’t the case, you should still be in range for all the dmg buffs your team gives.
And dmg prevention always helps ofc.
ask @Wolfy he has hands on experience.
Iirc the target heal was glitching under mouse controls and often targeted nearby objects instead of players. So his selfheals would keep healing owls instead.
And Diev/Priest/Kabba is still a fully capable hybrid build atm.
But it does look like most builds will do far worse than full healers in keeping a group alive, so for those of us who like the D&D style cleric it doesn’t look good.
But hey, we got re-rebuild to look forward to /sarcasm.
What about it?
I just like how heal tiles work x…x
If IMC wants to make boss fights more interesting they need to overhaul way more than just a few tiles.
We’d need wider buff ranges to enable different placements.
Targeted buff areas perhaps instead of just making it all point blank.
But you don’t want stuff like Sterea Trofh/Tree of sephiroth to be to large either, it would still be easy. Bosses/mobs would need ways to punish players for staying bundled together.
You’d need better ai.
Maybe let the boss outright dispell or detonate skills that would make it trivial.
I don’t expect them to pull it off tbh, I was hoping for transform to be worth using and they already let me down on that one…
We are talking here about a game, we don’t have any sort of laws that hold us back from doing things other than the limitations the developers give to us. And i’m talking in regard of skills here.
Thank you for the tip though.
You do have a point here. I’d also say that overhealing was the main factor that made Heal what it was, but again you have in account what i said before. This is meant to be the MAIN healing tool. Heal was too overpowered by what it was meant to be, a basic healing ability to provide aid to party members while your better healing abilities are up, in a way it’s just the same as how dps works. Back we didn’t have any other reliable tools other than Mass Heal (correct me if i’m wrong), and it is still to this day the best healing tool when clearing content because of how it works. Now we have many different healing skills that can provide the same utility that the curren Heal does, such as Chortasmata and Tree of Sephirot to give some examples. Even Featherfoot has some niche party wide healing ability that is pretty good in my opinion, not sure why it isn’t used often. Is it was for the fact solely for the fact of Heal’s capacity, you should ask the players if they’d enjoy it the same if it was locked the its level 1 properties, which if i’m correct was 5 tiles per cast, or if they’d be okay if the skill Heal recovered for the same amount as Chortasmate currently does. You need to also have in consideretion other factors such as bosses being able to destroy magic circles or using Reversi, you’d be putting way too much thought and risk on a skill that is meant to be a basic healing tool.
I am confident that thins won’t happen knowing the direction Re:Build is following.
For a game to tries its best to portrait classes as accurately possible, i don’t think archery is meant to be performed less than two meters away from the target.
This is a thing that falls under the issues with boss design. Bosses in the game are simple enough that if you have the need to use all of these skills in order to finish the fight there’s two things that could be happening. Either people are using their tools unnecessarily, which would be strange since many argue that you in fact need to put a lot of thought in your actions, or bosses are just way ridiculosly strong being able to melt you in one hit, which is just as unhealthy since it promotes only frustration rather than engagement. And i’d go for the last because i know for a fact that bosses in this game terribly suck. (Refer to @Velthari’s post.)
So you’re correct on this point, but i don’t think it is for the right reasons. You point out that Heal is not enough to keep a party alive in end game content, and while i used end game content as example for my previous posts, i did because that’s the point where i currently am in the game. You need to also have in considaration new players that have to go through all the previous content we did.
What makes you think the game tries to portray classes as accuracy as possible? ToS has never been about that. It’s always been a highly fantasy oriented game with a lot of skills that are specifically designed to be as weird and quirky as possible while giving references to a lot of different cultural disciplines and religions. But never was it promised anywhere in the game’s promotional material that these classes were depicted as accurately as possible. Are you telling me that Inquisitors used torture pears as flying projectiles and caltrops? No, they were gags designed to break a person’s throat, and the only reason they behave the way they do in-game is because of the fantasy trope of ‘silence’ that comes from casters shouting spells. And don’t even get me started on breaking wheel.
Also, you realize that currently the new ‘heal’ has two overheats and like a 10 second cooldown after the last changes to it?
See, i am not talking about Read Dead Redemption 2 levels of accuracy, i am talking about theme accuracy. And again, as much as one could argue that this is a fantasy game, even for a game i don’t think classes like Archer are meant to be played at melee range, they’re designed how they are for a reason.
As i said before, have in consideration that this is a basic healing tool, most of us are no longer at level 15 guys, we have no need for this skill as much as we do for the ones such as Tree of Sephirot or Mass Heal. As the joke says, you gotta think of the children. This skill is meant for them, not much for us.
To those that don’t know, there is a “prominent” point as to why “dedicated healers” don’t like healing. The argument is that targeted healing has become nothing more than watching the UI and healing the UI. A follow up to this is that UI watching promotes not actually playing the game (the encounter) as all you do is look at the UI for hp drops. We can’t even click UI elements to “target” party members. We have to pick a direction and hope that direction corresponds to the player we actually want to heal.
In pve it is clearly a nerf to cleric healing (testers echo this sentiment strongly and IMC actually acknowledges this). In pvp it is worse because not only is it less cleric healing, we lost a form of counter play to it via zoning or direct cc to prevent players from going to healing tiles.
This debate/topic should probably get its own thread.
Back to topic. Any quarrel shooter or rogue scraps?
Again, that makes no sense! Who’s to say that our lv 15 heal can’t be a 10 tile heal with numbers tuned to fit? the mechanic doesn’t need to change. The ‘children’ can still learn to use tile heal just as well as any other. If it has to be a basic healing ability, then it just has to have its numbers tuned.
edit: seems I misunderstood the meaning of your post, but I still think it makes no sense. A basic ability doesn’t mean that the ability ever has to be irrelevant. A well-designed basic ability should be something you continue to use through the entire game. Something that provides reliable utility and forms a playstyle that the rest of your choices center around. That’s why heal is such a well designed skill. You use it filler between those higher impact heals with larger cooldowns, like Mass Heal and Sephiroth. And it’s great because it fills a different kind of function while still being strong on its own.
Does a swordsman ever need to stop using Gung ho? No. Does an archer ever have to stop using Swift Step? No. So why should a cleric ever need to stop using heal?
Again, the fact that it is a basic healing skill. If i was to make a comparison within the game, Archer’s Twin Arrow won’t do as much damage as Mergen’s Triple Arrow, Archer is a base class. Aspirine alone won’t heal you through cancer, which is pretty much what Heal has been doing for the massive chunks of damage we take since forever.
I just read your edit, and i gotta clarify that i don’t say that we must stop to use Heal, we definitely should keep using and we will, such as we do with the skills you mentioned below, now more than ever with the buffs they were given. What i say is that Heal is not supposed to be a skills to replace what more especialized healing skills do, as we get stronger we start to tone down the need for it as we learn new and more powerful skills but this doesn’t mean we need to stop using it, we just change the way we use it. It becomes no longer a primary healing tool, but rather a backup that we use as our more powerful skills becoem available again.
Now this is an actual problem. If this is how the new skill is designed then i’m glad they’re delaying the release of Re:Build so hopefully they will focus their time on addressing this sort of issues.
I agree, perhaps i took too much space with my posts. Apologies.
Sadly Quarrel Shooter is no longer as popular since the removal of Running Shot, and the videos currently available don’t showcase anything, they’re more of a spamming fiesta of abilities.
But the thing is, heal in its current state doesn’t overshadow the healing skills on dedicated healer builds either. You still use it s filler heal when Mass Heal, Aukuras, or Tree of Sephi is on cooldown, or as a backup for when teammates are really struggling OR as a damaging spell when your team is good and doesn’t need heals.
It’s also good to use heal so that you can preserve the CD’s of higher impact skills such as Mass Heal anyway. So if anything it’s even more valuable.
I wish I could use an archer base skill other than swift step as an example, but they all scale so poorly that they are actually ignorable.
@kiheseki As much as that sounds like it’d be a nice compromise, I still really value the ability to drop my heal tiles wherever I want, in a spot that I can properly control.
clearly IMC should just add an attribute that drops heal tiles around your target in addition to the basic heal as a high level attribute for cleric. And then add some high level attributes for the other base classes too like start-up invulnerability on scout cloak and atk speed boost on swift step etc.
EDIT: Maybe even add attribute choices where picking one makes you unable to get another etc. esp for high level attributes
EDIT2: @frustratedsquirrel2 I personally hate how heal tiles directly drop in front of you. The only reason this works currently is because level 10+ is the norm. The same people who are grateful that ein sof and healing factor can be targeted now will probably prefer a 5 tile heal to be targetable as well. Anything beyond 5 tiles is OP for a base class.
You’re correct, but this is exactly how i see the newly reworked Heal. It is a very strong skill in fact, if we can ignore the many issues regarding the application method, it is still a very strong skill. If there’s any translators here please correct me, but from the database i gather that:
It has a Healing Power of 1000% on a 10 second cooldown, about half of what Mass Heal can do, which is a party wide heal on a 30 second cooldown. This sounds sounds pretty good to me.
It also has an enhancement attribute that if i’m correct, it grants the skill an additional 500% healing power.
Has a dot heal attribute that heals the target for 10 seconds. Knowing how overheat works in the game after Re:Build this should mean that whoever you heal should be more than fine while you wait for Heal to recharge.
I like this new mechanic because it is as simple as it can be, which turns Heal into a more spammable skill than it used to be in the current game while also removing the risks such as being removed by any boss with the ability to destroy magic circles, and this in theory turns your stronger skills into something more valuable and adds to the need for thinking before acting and at the same time you get to keep your back up healing tool always available.
If there’s anything i would modify about this skill is it’s overheat, i think the skill should have 5 uses, one for each party member including the healer.
If there’s anything i can say about this, i pointed out before that we should think differently when it comes to Re:Build combat, it is not the same as the current game. Healing will become way more valuable than it is right now, so it is something you would not want to waste. I play a full support character too, and while i won’t ever do as much damage as a dedicated dps, i’m more than certain that my party wouldn’t be able to accomplish things without my aid.
This is the reason why they’re base skills, and it’s not because they should be less important that the more powerful skills on your kit. If you’ve noticed there’s a pattern to base classes in Re:Build, each base class has 1 or two buff skills, a few utility ones and some reserved for damage. I think this is because the base clase is the very starting point on what your character will be focused on, whether it is a support, a tank or a DPS there’s a skill that fits your goal.
That won’t satisfy me. I really like some of the other changes coming with RE:build, haha. Overall I won’t complain too much if heal is changed as long as everything else is made better, but it’s just a big shame to see it go.
See, I don’t like the new mechanic for exactly that reason. It’s SIMPLE. I don’t want simple, I want complex. And heal tiles were a unique idea with a certain panache and complexity that made ToS clerics feel very different to any other cleric I can think of, a real breath of fresh air compared to what people usually think of healing skills in MMOS.
This game is too easy and we really shouldn’t be embracing simplicity. Everything in games these days is oversimplified.
The risks that came with heal in its current state were one of the things that made it interesting and created skill mastery expression for a cleric. Not saying that there is no skill expression with a more traditional heal, but I’ve mentioned many times already in this thread the various little tricks you can do with heal tiles. All of that will go away when these changes happen, making my class just that little bit less mechanically fun and complex, that’s my major issue here. I don’t mind if they nerf heal’s numbers or make it less or more spammable, it’s the identity and the mechanics I’ll have to miss out on for something that’s far more basic.
Simply by just making the AI of Bosses smarter it would make encounters much harder then making encounters based on your position relative to the boss.
Velcoffer was just a really good example of poor boss encounter/AI design.
Velcoffer Skills
Auto Attack:
Uses it always on highest treat target.
Cleave.
Uses it after a few auto attacks, or after every 2nd auto attack. Silences.
Cleave Combo:
Generally alternates between cleave and the cleave combo after 2 cleaves but sometimes just spams it. Cleave Combo consists of 2 cleaves with a final big cleave that re-positions Velcoffer
Charge:
Uses it every 10-15 seconds.
Magic Ball Cast:
No idea what causes it but its good when he bugs out and just spams cast this
Purple Puddle of Death:
Purple puddle comes out of his tail and is thrown at a random party member when someone is not face hugging Velcoffer. Only casts it in Phase 3
Ranged Power Wave:
Only used when no one is in melee range of Velcoffer. Has a small push back
Cursed Breath:
Slow debuff, continuously damages target if in breath, brakes magic circles
So how do you handle/counter all of these skills.
Cleave is easy just tank and spank bring despellers so you don’t get silenced.
Cleave Combo same as cleave
Charge: Face at Wall
Magic Ball Cast: Tank and spank does the least amount of damage
Purple Puddle of Death: Face hug Velcoffer then he never casts it. Also Merkabah is counted as a party member for some reason so dont cast it.
Ranged Power Wave: Make sure someone is in melee range of Velcoffer.
Cursed Breath don’t stand in front
Now if we make small AI changes and skill changes we can make Velcoffer go from tank and spank to quite a difficult encounter for the player base instead of just a numbers check.
Cursed Breath cone goes from 45 degree to 135 degree. Casts when close to wall and facing it. Casts it every 30 Seconds. Has a cast time so the party can re-position
Charges only to get to highest threat target. 15 second cooldown. Cast if no one is in range and after casting Ranged Power Wave or Purple Puddle of Death cant cast both skills back to back.
If everyone is not in melee range of Velcoffer in 5 seconds casts Purple Puddle of Death.
Purple Puddle of Death is cast when he loses 5% hp or if someone in the party is not face hugging Velcoffer.
Cleave does damage that cant be tanked by a single person and needs other people next to player to share damage. Still Silences
Ranged Power Wave when no one is in range or charge has been used recently. 15 second cooldown. (Forcing players not to get hit by charge)
Phase one ends at 50% hp
Magic Ball Cast turns into magic brake and happens after phase 1
Phase 2 ends at 0% hp
Still uses reversi after phase 2 casts after losing 10% hp
Phase 3 Starts as Velcoffer reaches 0 HP, recovers HP to max and takes 200% more dmg does 1% more dmg every 10 seconds till death.
These changes just made Velcoffer into end game content that can truly be challenging instead of the current snore fest of tank and spank.
I do welcome some difficulty improvements in TOS, but I found heal tile is adding unnecessary complexity more than difficulty.
Diifculty can be dodging boss AOE and healing party members, difficulty could be observing boss action and use defensive skill before a boss dmg burst. Furthermore, cleric heal should really be a supliment healing in rebuild, for any healer necessary content in that case with stronger healing skill like mass heal available for dedicated healer, heal tile would be fine. However, since IMC haven’t really classified tank/Dps/heal/support role, i bet there will be many player using cleric only as healing class. In that case I would prefer heal being the new single target heal if it is the only healing skill available
But i think this it exactly the reason why we need some bits of simplicty now, because as i’ve stated many times before, Re:Build will not be the same Tree of Savior we currently know, the game is no longer easy anymore. Bosses are more resilient now and hit harder thena before without over exaggerating, and our damage capabilities have been further limited. There’s now a need for well thought decisions and hopefully, if the way we fight bosses is also re-disigned, it will lead to more strategy development in real time as opposed to following a single cheap strategy that will always work regardless of your actions. By adding unnecessary complexity as @kurokawamayumi stated, to an already hard game we are not making it more engaging, but rather frustrating. This is something no well designed game should fall under. And while you might feel underwhelmed by the fact that your class no longer has complexity, i’d argue that it is more complex, more difficult and way more valuable than before after this changes. Feeling like a real icon of succor to your party rather than a dispenser sounds way more exciting in my opinion.
I really like the changes you’ve made here, the way the phases transition and they way you handle the boss. Not to mention that spicy addition of the third phase. I hope the developers also start looking at our feedback regarding boss design.