Healing

Healing issues could be outdesigned w/o even touching the combat. Have a counter on all healing abilities (augmented ones included). If you cast the same healing ability twice in a row, the mana consumption doubles. Three times? Triples. And so on.

And give cleric a ton of situational or just varied heals, so that they can still heal a party w/o any real problems, but if they had to heal a single target or themselves, they'd have to use the stronger heals because weak/party heals are not enough.

Mb make the party heals have a "gives mana regen if the spell hits >1+X targets" effect and give it a big mana cost. Now the cleric can heal the party and sustain mana, while not being able to heal themselves with that spell because it's too costly. You can then play off of that design by giving bards a melee "prevent mana regen on target" debuff, so that in pvp bards need to get to the enemy cleric to prevent them from healing the party w/o losing mana. And now you have the enemy party trying to see who's the bard to prevent that debuff. And you got yourself an interesting pvp interaction, while also "nerfing" clerics.

The same effect is applicable to any class that gets cleric augments. They can still heal with their skills, but they'll have to dance around mana usage to prevent themselves from becoming useless.

Those are obviously just rough examples, but I just wanted to show that OPness of classes is not necessarily linked to combat changes or anything of the sort. Maybe by combat changes you meant something else though, in which case, I misunderstood it.

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So just as I said at the end, I guess I misunderstood what others mean by "combat revamp". To me, ability design is not the same as "do I swing a weapon w/o a target or do I need to click on someone" or "do I move with my ability when I use it?".

You can still use my example in both tab and action combat. And from what I understood, the problem was with exactly that, the way the combat works, and not the abilities that make use of that combat base. Maybe I was wrong in that assumption.

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Yeah, that is very true. We know next to nothing and I doubt we will anytime this year.

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You have 15 classes that can provide healing and maybe another 7 that can heal too. I'd say that's quite enough.

Healing is the place I have the most concern relative to freedom of choice in Ashes for the standard player.

Because Healers are probably the least 'forgiven' class for 'I can't, I didn't take that skill'.

Of course, 'peer pressure' has nothing to do with actual design options, so it's hard to say what will happen. I do hope that Clerics aren't going to just 'be expected to have every available skill' or 'have every available heal/cleanse skill and therefore forego any damage skills' in order to be considered 'viable'.

I would say 'as a Cleric' but mostly it isn't likely to affect me since my group is used to my style already. Hopefully we'll at least see some different styles of healer having better synergies with different styles of Tank.

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I don't think that I'd personally appreciate the levels of homogenization required for this to work, considering my collected data on your previous designs, so I guess I'm saying to Intrepid that if they aren't taking explicit feedback (i.e. 'do this, don't do that') I'll still hope for slower damage and more statuses, so that the 'window of forgiveness' is more open at least outside of 'top end content'.

And that does include 'accepting that certain styles/builds of Cleric only work well with certain Tank types.

Azherae wrote: »

Of course, 'peer pressure' has nothing to do with actual design options, so it's hard to say what will happen. I do hope that Clerics aren't going to just 'be expected to have every available skill' or 'have every available heal/cleanse skill and therefore forego any damage skills' in order to be considered 'viable'.

I'd hope there's no "pick this skill or this skill". Yes, we'll be able to choose augments, but I'd assume we'll have all the skills the archetype should have and only then add stuff onto them. Let those augments add/change whatever effects they want, but make the core function the same.

At least that way any cleric can do their job, so there won't be some complete discrimination of "if you don't have this - you're not welcomed in any party", while the uniqueness and personality of each person remains shown through their choice of additional effects on the skillset.