lets talk about the state of the game and combat

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So what exactly do you want and consider entertaining? More dps? Cause unless I assumed wrong, you seem to disregard pure healers as OP or smth, so pure healers are probably not fun for you either. And if you just want more dps on a healer, then I agree with Noaani, healer just doesn't seem like the role for you.

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Well then it's good that the game is pvx and not just pve. Any valuable pve will be fought over and you will not survive against a party w/ a healer if your party doesn't have one. And if you were expecting Ashes to have pve-based balancing of class design - that won't be the case.

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What exactly does this entail, as you envision it?

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Ah, ok, now these past few days make waaaay more sense. You've just got complaints about the standards of the genre, but you have no solutions for them, let alone properly thoughtout ones. Got it.

And I'm gonna reread all your messages later just to make sure I'm not mistaken in this (and will edit this post later), but I think even your complaints have been super vague, which most likely stems from you not knowing what you even want.

edit: I went through the 2 threads that touched on the cleric discussion and the main theme has been "pure healers are OP", "I want smth new, but the new mechanic that Intrepid designed will feel bad, so not that kind of new", "proactive healers with dmg/heal abilities sound weird, but I dislike that healers are just reactive", and the two comments of "I'm not sure about any of this" in context of those pro-/re-active healers and this respawn gameplay, though the respawn discussion progressed somewhat which is a plus.

Overall the comments just come off as confused and contradictory, especially considering that Niem allegedly played a ton of healers in the past. Reactive is bad, proactive is bad, combo mechanics are bad, pure healer is bad, combat healer is boring. To me that kinda encapsulates pretty much any and all incarnations of healers in this genre, so I really don't see how Niem considers themselves a healer when they dislike literally the entire class' gameplay scheme.

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Are these fountains connected to the nearest dungeon? As in, does the energy go up if you kill only the dungeon's mobs? Cause otherwise people will just grind up some random mobs to get the energy to go destroy everyone's fountains before even entering the dungeon.

How does the buff interact with the party composition? Is it just "buff anyone who's currently in the party"? Cause I definitely foresee alt clerics with built up energy just standing on stand by, in case the party needs a second buff.

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L2 had a party recall ability that would just TP out the party if they thought they'd lose the pvp. It was one of the most hated and looked down upon mechanics in the game. Only the weakest players would use it and a ton of pvp videos would always mock people who did.

Also, how exactly does this TP out of the dungeon interact with all the stuff you looted in the dungeon? Cause to me this just sounds like the easiest way to escape from the depth of a dungeon w/o any risk of running into a trap set up by your enemies.

In other words, this sounds like a pretty bad mechanic that would make pvp dull and would, in most cases, just lead to full pvp avoidance instead of encouragement. Rez items, instead, encourage pvp because you know that you can keep going even if a few of your members die. And cleric doing a ton of healing also supports more pvp, because it prolongs the fight and great clerics can turn the tide of the fight with a few correct moves.

But this is progress. This is at least a direction and a suggestion, rather than just complains about Intrepid's utter talentless existence.

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So any member switches would mean that the party becomes weaker. This kinda fucks over most pugs, because afaik they quite often can change their roster throughout a farming session, because someone gotta afk or leave.

This would also apply to any guild parties that have several people that play at slightly different times, while some stay throughout the whole evening.

I guess that could be chucked up to "you can't win everything" design, but in context of potentially a lot of pvp, I dunno how many people would be willing to suffer the consequences of someone's irl situation influencing the gameplay (cause I'd imagine that fountain buffs will influence overall balancing of the game, so any party that can't get them will most likely lose out against people that were prepared to fight against a properly buffed group).

The alternative is to go remake the fountain every time your party composition changes, but that would mean giving up your loot/spot/progress, so it doesn't really change the issue.

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Yes, you mentioned a single death to get the ability to TP everyone out. Even if you limit this to purely pvp deaths, people will just bring an alt with them that can kill their sacrificial lamb. Or, hell, you wouldn't even need an alt. You'd just go kill yourself against any potential foe in the dungeon and TP the whole party out thanks to that death.

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You won't drop anything, because the sacrificial lamb won't have anything to drop. If your suggestion requires this to be a flagged death - the lamb will even suffer half the death penalties. This is literally nothing, when compared to the whole group dying and dropping their valuable loot (even if at a halved rate). TPing the whole group out means circumventing the pvp system, not improving it. Again, I know this because I literally played with this system for years. And that was in a game where you could already TP at will. Ashes won't have that (outside of Sci metro TP to vassal centers) and the game will be balanced around not having it. Giving players an easy out of pvp defeats the whole purpose of having that pvp in the first place.