Having experience playing all classes now, I must say I find templars rather lacking. Yes, they can be built to be viable for most things, but it just feels more limited and never really the best choice for the job. That is except for when you need a good burst heal, and perhaps a few other minor exceptions.
Part of what makes it feel limited is that the templar inherently has less varied abilities by having an entire tree dedicated to healing. On top of that, they have a lot of support or mechanic-based abilities that take even more away from purely offensive choices. Look at any templar attempting DPS and they will either have Sun Fire, Solar Flare, Puncturing Strikes, or some combination of the three. Even then, these abilities tend to not synergize as well with each other as other classes' abilities might.
On other classes, I feel encouraged to use a mixture of abilities to layer DoTs, weaken enemies, and provide damaging utility combinations. On a templar, I feel more obligated to pick which ability has the highest base damage and make liberal use of it.
Sure, you can get a decent rotation. Say, Explosive Charge, Solar Barrage, Vampire's Bane, Puncturing Strikes. But then what? You've got those initial bursts but no lasting utility and only one DoT. It just kind of tapers off while your enemy remains at full strength (full damage, full movement speed, etc.) and you exhaust your resources. Yes, exhaust your resources, because your primary damaging abilities all cost at least average or above, and the lack of lasting effects leaves you with little to do but light / heavy attacks. Every other class has either resource recovery abilities, low-cost filler abilities, or both.
The problem is, once you start breaking from that templar DPS mold, you're forced to either move to the destro staff crowd, which seems to consist of the vast majority of the player base, or you use a stamina based ability that likely sucks just as much.
I will say that the more utility based abilities are nice in 1v1 PVP situations. But what does that matter? Most meaningful PVP in this game is just so large scale that it makes no difference at all if you happen to interrupt a cast by throwing a spear at a player. You're still better off spamming AoE or healing.
So I guess that's what I'm getting at. I feel so constrained to a few generally situational and arguably mediocre abilities, whereas other classes allow me to experiment and break the mold with more ease. The lack of internal class ability synergy plays a huge role in that situation. On top of that, you have other abilities that are just too situational to justify keeping them on the bar, or some of them just have useless morphs. For instance, Backlash's Purifying Light morph. The puddle of healing it provides is so small, it can be missed entirely on bosses, also known as the only enemy it is ever really worth casting on.
That all said, I'm not saying templars are necessarily bad. It just seems harder to make them work, and when you do, you don't have a whole lot of options to experiment with. The abilities don't lend themselves to versatility. I'll stick with my templar because I enjoy it and I've put the most work into it. I just hope to see some changes sooner or later.
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