Devs: suggestions for fixing Templar "healing ritual" skill

profundidob16_ESO

Yesterday I ran Darkshade caverns vet mode with a pug and the last boss made me fully realize a problem with the Templar role:

Fitting the mechanic, the boss keeps moving around and forces the group to keep moving with him, so they cannot stick to any spot, nor can they move in a snared way BUT at the same time during a phase everyone's healthbars are dropping (= full group damage that should be countered by full group healing). We used to have BOL as a full group healing spell to counter this sort of phases and burst through at the cost of high magicka consumption. The spell was able to heal the entire group instantly and without snaring. Enough to pull them through this phase up when spamming it. I agree that it was too easy and took skill out of the group healing equation which is probably why you devs changed it.

But now our only spell to counter such a phase is Healing ritual. That it has a casting time (which is still too long if you compare with more experienced mmo's that use morphs to reduce 1sec casting times to 0.5 casting times instead of 1.7 to 1.3) is acceptable to counter it's main benefit being a full group heal spell but the biggest problem is mobility. When snared as a healer you cannot keep these people alive in this boss fight, especially with a small 10m radius which people run out of instantly if boss mechanics require it and if they stay back they die too because of another boss mechanic (red circles).


Suggestion to fix: Keep the huge penalty of having a casting time to counter the biggest advantage of this spell (that it's a full group heal) but take away it's snaring and increase it's radius so that it can be used as a mobile PVE group heal spell so that it boils down to the templar's skill to position himself correctly at all times. With let's say a 16m radius and no snaring the templar could at least always try run and position himself to be in range of 2 targets while dodging red circles and "catch" the out of reach target runaways with his "honor of the dead" or "breath of life" long range 1-2 targets spell. (thinking of Molag Kena shield phase...) Ofcourse if you are worried about abuse in PVP and especially zergs you can easily make it so that the snaring and/or reduced radius does apply in pvp zerg groups etc


Think about:

"honor of the dead" or "breath of life" as an instant long range but only 1-2 targets spell to respond to sudden drops and tank healing
"healing ritual" as a 16m or 18m radius group healing spell at the cost of a casting time to burst through a rough phase

TheM0rganism

What it needs is an added shield on cast to make up for the delay.

Animal_Mother

Considering Rushed Ceremony (and it's morphs) have a 28m radius, I don't think a 20m radius would be too much to ask for.

puffy99

They didn't change it due to dungeons - they changed it because a few *** streamers after about 20 drinks complained that they could not take over a keep in the usually 3-5 minutes.

I doubt without this crying they would of made any changes at all.

Considering the state of Templars live now, it should of never been done..

fuc4kem!, I hope their twitch streams get stuck in login land

lonewolf26

Honestly. I get more mileage out of Grand Healing / Healing Springs spam with a rapid regen ticking on my group. I tell them to stay close to me then i walk them with the boss while they stay in range of the next springs.The only time I blow breath of life is when a dps doesn't see the fire blasts, or someone takes a huge ricochet hit from an add.

puffy99

that strategy doesn't work in banished cells, for engine guardian and about 5 others I can think of unless you have a really well coordinated team you use all the time.

cschwingeb14_ESO

You really should try healing this boss on another class to see how totally easy-mode BoL is. No worries about positioning. No worries about the ramp up time that is required to get good healing out of healing springs, or the trouble uneven terrain causes with ground target heals.

Better yet, try healing with only resto-staff heals, channeled focus (for magicka regen) and purify (for healing buff). That's what it's like healing with any other class

No, really. Try it. Then, when you wipe, try it with just adding lingering ritual (out the other morph). You'll see that it's actually a very useful spell.

Then try it again with BoL and you'll see how completely easy mode it is.

puffy99

Why would I want to do that? Resto sucks balls and it always has. That is why Templars have BoL and a healing Tree...
BoL also is not easy mode if the groups DPS sucks which happens a lot now days with glass cannon builds and no self sustain/heals for some of these random Vet groups.

It will only make people play less Dungeons once this release hits, not more.
Which i guess if they are going to sell Helms/Shoulders everyone will be in PvP anyway so it won't matter.

Yep, really great decisions from Wrobel land.

Joy_Division

I'd still always use Healing Springs for this particular fight and every other fight.

lonewolf26

puffy99 wrote: »

Why would I want to do that? Resto sucks balls and it always has. That is why Templars have BoL and a healing Tree.

Templars have a lot going for them in the healing department , but a balanced healer will make use of class healing and resto abilities. BoL is a great heal but has two major drawbacks.

1) its cost makes it mana inefficient. Often times you don't need to heal a person for the amount that BoLs do, and a heal over time effect helps offset small, incidental heals. If a fight drags on you'll be out of mana and stuck regenning when you dps and tank need you the most. Healing springs returns mana to you which helps offset its cost. You can keep the party alive with it, and still have mana to blow Breath when its needed.

2) The larger the group, and the more people that are low on health, the less effective Breath is. With the game as it is live , you'll likely not notice this as much in four person dungeons. In trials or large group PvP though it will become very apparent that BoL won't cut the mustard as a go-to heal. It's situational. When Thieves guild goes live you'll start to notice this more as BoL will heal one less person.

puffy99

Alright, I will give it a shot, looks like I need to slot it soon anyway.
Cheers!

profundidob16_ESO

lonewolf26 wrote: »

Honestly. I get more mileage out of Grand Healing / Healing Springs spam with a rapid regen ticking on my group. I tell them to stay close to me then i walk them with the boss while they stay in range of the next springs.The only time I blow breath of life is when a dps doesn't see the fire blasts, or someone takes a huge ricochet hit from an add.

I agree and personally -even though I'm templar- use the same strategy throughout the whole dungeon and in general it works well for me but on bosses like engine guardian, Molag Kena, banished cells endboss this indeed doesn't work. massive rapid circles of red on the floor require group members to scather and keep mobile. There we obviously need something more like a pretty long range group heal to burst through.

However I do agree that BOL in it's current form is simply too easy. SPAM 1 group heal key = win win win. Where's the skill in that ? We templars need to have the tools to provide better...no wait...THE BEST healing but only if we have the skill to use them and honestly with BOL spam in it's current form it requires absolutely zero skill

profundidob16_ESO

cschwingeb14_ESO wrote: »

You really should try healing this boss on another class to see how totally easy-mode BoL is. No worries about positioning. No worries about the ramp up time that is required to get good healing out of healing springs, or the trouble uneven terrain causes with ground target heals.

Better yet, try healing with only resto-staff heals, channeled focus (for magicka regen) and purify (for healing buff). That's what it's like healing with any other class

No, really. Try it. Then, when you wipe, try it with just adding lingering ritual (out the other morph). You'll see that it's actually a very useful spell.

Then try it again with BoL and you'll see how completely easy mode it is.

That's exactly what I did by remorphing BOL to honor of the dead in the darkshade caverns run and try to heal with everything else I had. Then I realized just how easymode that the BOL morph makes our whole class in it's current form and why teh devs had to nerf it. However nerfing it creates a vacuum of a missing group heal tool in our healing set that needs to be filled by equal functionality such as healing ritual in more efficient form than it currently is

lonewolf26

profundidob16_ESO wrote: »

cschwingeb14_ESO wrote: »

You really should try healing this boss on another class to see how totally easy-mode BoL is. No worries about positioning. No worries about the ramp up time that is required to get good healing out of healing springs, or the trouble uneven terrain causes with ground target heals.

Better yet, try healing with only resto-staff heals, channeled focus (for magicka regen) and purify (for healing buff). That's what it's like healing with any other class

No, really. Try it. Then, when you wipe, try it with just adding lingering ritual (out the other morph). You'll see that it's actually a very useful spell.

Then try it again with BoL and you'll see how completely easy mode it is.

That's exactly what I did by remorphing BOL to honor of the dead in the darkshade caverns run and try to heal with everything else I had. Then I realized just how easymode that the BOL morph makes our whole class in it's current form and why teh devs had to nerf it. However nerfing it creates a vacuum of a missing group heal tool in our healing set that needs to be filled by equal functionality such as healing ritual in more efficient form than it currently is

This much I agree with. Helping ritual heals a larger group for a lot, but its significant cast time usually keeps it off of my bar. Outside of those mechanics with long tell times, I'd need precognition to know if one of my team is going to take a ton of damage to prep that skill in time to save them. There are more effective flash heals for how twitchy you need to be to respond to emergencies.

profundidob16_ESO

Indeed, the casting time is the big penalty that makes me prefer other spells to put on my bar but the self snare combined with a small radius is what really makes the spell absolute NO GO for me.

Alot of the current and future boss fight mechanics require continuous random movement to avoid multiple huge red circles that keep popping up and at the same time everyone's health is dropping. Spot heals from Resto tree such healing springs just don't cut it there.

When trying to use our main group heal spell "healing ritual" even in it's shortest casting time form ("ritual of rebirth") it's still 1.3 sec ! And it's not the waiting time by itself that you have to wait for before that group member dies but you have to be in range first so that means always be in the perfect range of at least 2 targets in a 4-man group and catch the fourth member with our BOL or HOD flash-heal ! Try that when all people have to scather over a wide plane such as Molag Kena, Engine Guardian, flesh abominator, Banished cells, etc...

It completely baffles me that the chose superior healing class has a usuless main group heal spell in their class tree and now has to fall back to the general resto tree which is available to any class for all group healing functionality. That cannot be right, how could a templar possible be a better healer than a sorc then ?? Surely devs must see this

puffy99

I doubt any of the developers actually Heal or at least on a Templar.
As mentioned above constant movement makes these non instant spells a no go in a lot of cases.
Plus in the above mentioned dungeons people are jumping all over the place with various immediate health bar needs.
Healing Springs will only carry you so far and for the most part is very situational.

If I could stack 30K shields and just spin around like a top it might work out but on a Temp your mobility is limited when you are confined to your house for the most part for the focus.

AlnilamE

For that fight, during the poison phase, I would cast Healing Springs and Purifying Ritual if I'm healing with my templar.

Though most of the time I would be healing with my NB or my sorc instead.

Anhedonie

There is another solution. Make it a chanelled spell.
Something like "spell lasts for 3 seconds and heals for x in 12 meter radius every 0.5 seconds". Needless to say, caster should be able to move while casting it.

profundidob16_ESO

Anhedonie wrote: »

There is another solution. Make it a chanelled spell.
Something like "spell lasts for 3 seconds and heals for x in 12 meter radius every 0.5 seconds". Needless to say, caster should be able to move while casting it.

hmm I thought about this and no, that wouldn't do it. Here's why:

I get that if you tune and tweak this channeled spell properly you would eventually get the equivalent of spamming my earlier proposed "healing ritual" spell while moving BUT you would have to break the channel to cast a flash heal (BOL/HOD) in between to save a distant group member's life. And since this channel spell would heal for few per tick obviously you would never reach enough healing per second out of big group heals with flash heals in between. Or the mana cost of the channel spell would have to be put so high in order to have a considerable heal per 0.5sec tick that the spell would be practically unusable unless you are sure you will finish the channel but...hey we have such a channel group heal spell already, and it's cost is so high we pay it in 192 ultimate instead of an insane amount of magicka...

profundidob16_ESO

@ZOS_GinaBruno @Wrobel

dylanjaygrobbelaarb16_ESO

good thing there are damage shields/ dps that heals/ vigor etc... god forbid anyone use anything to sustain themselves in a pinch

MikeB

There's no reason to use any of the Templar class heals once TG goes live. BoL is already inefficient and once it's nerfed Healing Springs will be better all around. By trying to make the game unhomogenized they've done the exact opposite. Prior Templar was the only class that didn't need to use the Resto Tree, now they will just be like everyone else but worse.

Darkonflare15

MikeB wrote: »

There's no reason to use any of the Templar class heals once TG goes live. BoL is already inefficient and once it's nerfed Healing Springs will be better all around. By trying to make the game unhomogenized they've done the exact opposite. Prior Templar was the only class that didn't need to use the Resto Tree, now they will just be like everyone else but worse.

Not really. Templar is still a class that has lot more healing passives than any other class. Sorcs and Dks do not even have a third of helpful passives or skills that can help with straight healing of others. You get a dedicated ultimate for healing, skills that you can use without having an resto staff, rezing people faster than any other class and can rez them to full health. On top of that you have access to all the resto skills ,improve your rezing time with a set to make it even faster, and can restore stamina to other players. The only other class that even has a healing ultimate are nightblades and their ultimate you have either hit the synergy in order to access it and its range is no where near the range of the Templar ultimate.

Kaliki

Darkonflare15 wrote: »

Not really. Templar is still a class that has lot more healing passives than any other class. Sorcs and Dks do not even have a third of helpful passives or skills that can help with straight healing of others. You get a dedicated ultimate for healing, skills that you can use without having an resto staff, rezing people faster than any other class and can rez them to full health. On top of that you have access to all the resto skills ,improve your rezing time with a set to make it even faster, and can restore stamina to other players. The only other class that even has a healing ultimate are nightblades and their ultimate you have either hit the synergy in order to access it and its range is no where near the range of the Templar ultimate.

All our healing passives are either useless, nice to have but not necessary or straight worse than using Restoration staff skills.
The only proper passive Templars will have is Major mending when standing in one of our circles.

Aside from that:
- an ultimate that heals 6 ppl every second which means death in every healing intense trial situation, might still be useful in small dungeons (which are easy anyway) or maybe PvP, although standing still channeling in PvP... I sometimes use it when I'm lazy in trials and want to rest for 4 seconds on a trash pull and save magicka.
- Light weaver: 3 different effects but none of them even worth the skill points
- Master Ritualist: nice to have but does not give us an edge at straight healing. in a proper trial group there are be no deaths.
- Mending: 10% more heal with restoring light heals in proportion to the severity of the wounds. almost useless, as we won't be using much templar healing anyway.

Templars have 2 healing spells: 1 is useless (Healing Ritual), and the other one now situational. Even on live I cannot keep up a group in IC with BOL.

Templar healing is going to look like this now: Put down extended ritual then use resto staff from there and in some situations one might use BoL as a panic button.

This is not much different than what it looks like now. Gaining the major mending buff is now easier than the 30% buff before. Otherwise we lost the ability to keep up a spread out trial group.

All this does not change the fact that Healing Ritual was always and is useless.

Calling -25 % cast time and healing part of a major class rebalance addresses nothing of what templars have been saying about this skill for 2 years.