If the changes are made simply to appease the pvp players, then make those changes exist in Cyrodiil only. By nerfing heals to the ground all around like you have, you will end up losing a great deal of your PVE and endgame players, making all healers obsolete, keeping people from using all of the new gear sets that you made players just farm, and ensuring that off meta (NB, DK, Sorc, etc) healers are no longer able to heal. The healing changes are completely unnecessary.

As per the threads https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/comment/6194479#Comment_6194479 and https://forums.elderscrollsonline.com/en/discussion/483907/minor-lifesteal-mechanics#latest, nobody is quite sure how the increasingly important debuff Minor Lifesteal works. Please improve tooltips, a lot.

Please make Rushed Ceremony directionless again. My emergency "heal" is Ward Ally, and after this patch I may drop it from my skill bars. And it's good for emergency heals/"heals" to be directionless.

Perhaps make Healing Ritual be able to be cast wherever someone chooses to make up for the Grand healing nerf.

My biggest concern at the moment is what the state of healing will be for non-templars and wardens in this upcoming patch.
@ZOS_BrianWheeler already said that to "offset the loss of things such as Healing Springs stacking, with abilities like Ring of Preservation, or the large increase to Cleansing Ritual."

This does not help a sorcerer or nightblade or DK healer, who has no access to a templar class heal. It doesn't help any mag healer in general, because Ring of Preservation is a stam heal, and an expensive one at that; healers need to block and dodge in content too.

What's been done is that you guys are stripping away the tools that off-meta healers NEED to remain viable in high-end content, and saying that all healers will be fine because of a high-cost stam heal, and an overtuned heal that is literally accessible by a single class. The rest of us need tools to help us remain relevant in the roles that we love and enjoy. Please.

As a sorc, I have Twilight Matriarch. This is it. That is literally all my class gives me for healing tools on others (outside of Negate, an ultimate). Templars, wardens, and even necros to some extent have a number of other class healing abilities to fall back on to help make up for these new changes. I'm sorry, but I can't spam my Twilight Matriarch to victory on things like Lokke Hardmode, or vHoF hardmode.

If you want to change healing up this much, fine; but EVERYONE, not just templars, need the tools to deal with this new setup.

RogueShark wrote: »

My biggest concern at the moment is what the state of healing will be for non-templars and wardens in this upcoming patch.
@ZOS_BrianWheeler already said that to "offset the loss of things such as Healing Springs stacking, with abilities like Ring of Preservation, or the large increase to Cleansing Ritual."

This does not help a sorcerer or nightblade or DK healer, who has no access to a templar class heal. It doesn't help any mag healer in general, because Ring of Preservation is a stam heal, and an expensive one at that; healers need to block and dodge in content too.

What's been done is that you guys are stripping away the tools that off-meta healers NEED to remain viable in high-end content, and saying that all healers will be fine because of a high-cost stam heal, and an overtuned heal that is literally accessible by a single class. The rest of us need tools to help us remain relevant in the roles that we love and enjoy. Please.

As a sorc, I have Twilight Matriarch. This is it. That is literally all my class gives me for healing tools on others (outside of Negate, an ultimate). Templars, wardens, and even necros to some extent have a number of other class healing abilities to fall back on to help make up for these new changes. I'm sorry, but I can't spam my Twilight Matriarch to victory on things like Lokke Hardmode, or vHoF hardmode.

If you want to change healing up this much, fine; but EVERYONE, not just templars, need the tools to deal with this new setup.

I main a sorc healer and i agree with this 100%.

PaigeWimberley wrote: »

I main a sorc healer and i agree with this 100%.

ok, let´s talk about the healing changes (I will already take into account what was posted about 1 orb giving a synergy to all party members)

Healers now: The main healing kit comes from skills, that are available for every class: combat prayer, grand healing, orbs + support skills (will not be talking about those since not a lot changes)
- we buff our teammates with combat prayer to give them minor berserk
- we use orbs as our "spammable": whenever we do not have other things to do (buff, debuff, heal) we will throw orbs for our DDs. orbs will keep a nice layer of HoTs in the group, offer utility (sustain, snyergy) and smart healers will anticipate the direction a group will be moving and make sure to cover as much of that space as possible with orbs. we send them out in different directions sometimes to reach everyone.
- in situations, where there is high damage incoming over an amount of several secounds usually (burst damage situations - like vHoF Assembly General execute, vCR banefull in execute, vSS HMs all have those situations built in) a good healer will know in advance to reapply buffs, throw 2 orbs and then stack some grand healing to heal through that incoming damage. the illustrious healing morph allowes us to stack 4 abilities on top of each other, allowing to heal through high damage spikes in a way that is sustainable for a short amount of time.
- class abilities are used to burst heal individual players, offer utility/synergies, they do not define healers

Healers after the changes:
- we will still buff our teammates, but also, combat prayer suddenly became the ONE singular AoE burst heal available to all classes in this game, and it´s tooltip sits around 7k healing for 2,7k magicka cost. combat prayer currently has an aiming issue where it sometimes will turn your character to another direction, making it hard to aim and impractical to spam.
- orbs got redesigned to "1 orb for all": the current plan is, to allow healers to have 1 orb active at a time, this orb can be synergized by anyone not on cooldown. this only adresses half the issue, why the orb change was discussed so controversial. some trials need a healer to be at some distance from the group (vAS, vCR) so having only 1 orb means we cannot send them out in groups anymore, to always have some in group. it also means that we cannot send orbs in more than 1 location any more, thus making it harder to efficiently support our team.
- grand healing was completely redesigned and lost the purpose it had until now. it is now a ground based AoE HoT that heals for a lot less than it used to, cannot be stacked any more and costs a lot more. healers lost the ability, to put ground AoE HoTs in multiple locations, thus healing players that are out of group because of mechanics/the need to resurect fallen teammates. also the ability to heal through incoming burst damage with non-class-abilities has been drastically reduced, we have combat prayer now, but the tooltip is a lot lower than what you could stack with 4 illustrious healings in 1 spot (7k vs 10-12k)
- class abilities now will becomme neccessary to heal through incoming burst damage, but only 3 classes have on-demand AoE burst heals:
- templars have ritual of rebirth with the highest tooltip and cost: a 12,8k heal for 5,8k magicka cost - I will leave it to your imagination, how long a healer can spam this skill
- wardens have enchanted growth: a 8,7k heal for 3,8k magicka cost, this is a conal heal and harder to aim than the other burst heals but it has a long range
- necromancers have enduring undeath: a 8k heal for 2,9k magicka cost, the only class AoE heal that can actually be aimed at a location and can add a HoT if it consumes a corpse
the other 3 classes simply do not have an option outside of combat prayer to heal multiple targets for a big amount of health at the same time.

now for the other fun changes:
- ring of preservation now lasts 2o secounds, heals for 900 health every 0,5 secounds and costs 2,8k stamina - on a stamina character that is, on a healer the heal is below 300 health/0,5 secounds
- echoing vigor: it took me 10minutes to go on PTS, make a stamina warden and get a tooltip of 41k health over 10 secounds for a cost of 2k stamina, that is a heal that will be put on up to 6 players and stay on them; so you have given stamina DD players the most potent heal over time for the lowest cost and 2 of them stack, giving you roughly 50-80k heal over 10sec ticking away at you... meaning 5-8k HPS, wich is comparable to a healer spamming combat prayer on a group.

if your goal was to make healing more fun and engaging, you failed.
if your goal was to help casual/progression groups clear harder content you failed.
if your goal was to make healers ask themselves, why they even exist, CONGRATULATIONS

edit to add: all my tooltips are from PTS on a breton in Olorime/Jorvulds, Ritual mundus, powered resto, 100 blessed, 81 elfborn, blue max mag/health food

From what I understand, there are issues with spamming Healing Springs and Orbs in PvP. If there won’t be any separation in PvP and PvE balance, why not adjust the Alliance and Support tools to combat players specifically in PvP?

Instead of making the skill lines only viable in Cyrodiil, change skills to have more use in Battlegrounds and Imperial City. The other team spamming orbs? Get you a skill that corrupts a certain percent of their healing (like Warden’s Corrupting Seed.) Or an armor that does something similar if you’re in melee range.
Pet buffs are an issue? Get a Fighter’s Guild skill that vanquishes pets under a certain health threshold.
Werewolves too much in PvP? An armor set that gives a burst of Dawnbreaker-like damage.

Potentially these could belong to a new (Gladiator?) skill line if changing the current PvP skill line isn’t an option. Make it specifically focus on balancing out other player’s healing skills.

I feel like this makes sense, as there aren’t really any other tools specifically for Battlegrounds-type combat, and negating PC enemy skills. This would give a way to balance PvP without taking away from PvE (and having to rebalance all PvE content.) This would obviously take longer than this patch, but it makes sense to add more skills to spend the ever-increasing Skyshards on.

Hopefully I will have the PTS ready to play tonight to test (though DL ate up all my internet data for the month, so please know I’m serious about this game lol) and give more feedback on skill performance.

I am very nervous about Healing Springs, especially almost halving the heals. I have no idea how to keep Tharayya alive in vDoM without it. I feel like keeping the current live hybrid AoE and healing, but increasing the cost of every second cast might be better to keep up with a moving dungeon group and still force some thought into where you put it.

For Regeneration, instead of upping the cost and decreasing targets effected, maybe have one morph have higher cost, slightly lower healing, but cover up to 6 people? Right now, it’s not really valuable for trials/dungeons except for applying some buffs before a fight. I’d be fine with the current changes if it targets the member with the lowest health I guess.

Orbs. I can see why they need to be non-spammable, but please keep in mind they are the best resource return most classes have. Maybe increase the limit to 4-6 if they’re single-use, or at least 4 if multiple people can activate. Otherwise Trials will be miserable with people fighting over orbs. On one hand, I do think they need to be easier to hit, but slowing them down is not ideal. Can you make their activation radius a bit larger instead?

I'm pretty sure that springs were gutted due to pvp complaining. I take my healers into CRYodiil once a month to reach rank one, and it's always funny seeing how long I can stay alive spamming springs on myself with heavy fortified brass and mending while a couple of people spam everything they have at me. The orb change makes no sense because you aren't gonna be using orbs in pvp, you'd heal and have a few dps skill in there.

Hello. OK, I will re-post, but also @Nightingale707's comment summarizes a lot of my concerns very nicely, as well.

In my opinion...

• I believe that the changes on the table for healers will make us a lot less mobile and will remove a lot of options from our arsenal to be a flexible, resulting in less of us playing healers and most 4mans not running a healer at all, which unfortunately is already "a thing."
• They also will make it a lot less fun to be a healer, greatly reducing our options for a rotation or what we can "do" during fights, since we can't usefully double cast two of our main abilities but we still need them on our bars.
• They are a big step back from some of the earlier changes to make it easier for all classes to be a healer if they so desired.
• Finally, they will make it extremely hard for groups to handle difficult content in trials, because abilities are nerfed with nothing being buffed in its place that can make up for the changes. This will further widen the gap between the elites who attempt hard content and even the mid level players who are trying to see and complete the content, let alone the new players who enter with hope and quickly realize it isn't just time and practice that will get them that Sunspire skin, but possibly years of effort trying to find eleven people willing to attempt a Trial with someone who doesn't already have the clear.

The announcement about Orbs, from my perspective, does very little to alleviate my personal concerns about these changes, because my biggest issue with "one Orb at a time" idea, combined with the "one healing springs at a time" change, is that I can no longer cover multiple areas of a raid or dungeon. This not only limits my usefulness as a healer, but limits the types of strategies groups can use for harder content because stacking is going to be the only option. If my most powerful heal (combat prayer) requires me to stand and face where I am healing, and my single orb is slowed down even more to be sleepy molasses, I've basically got one much less powerful healing spring or one very RNG-heavy regeneration to maybe reach someone not standing right next to me. Who cares that my orb can travel in one direction and hit more people? I currently cast it in three or four directions! Forget about me being able to run around and participate in any mechanics, be it rezzing or adding DPS or an actual mechanic, because I will now be stuck standing by the area where my heals are most critical. When they are needed at all, which, given all of these nerfs and the buffs to vigor, they may not be since people will be relying even more on self-heals.

Oh, but yay, we've fixed it so that stacked DPS relying on orbs for resources will be OK. Yippee. (Yes, a little sarcasm there.)

There have been a lot of posts on the forums attacking the healers that are objecting to these concerns, assuming that all healers do is spam healing springs or orbs and accusing healers of not being willing to learn a new play style or not wanting to becoming more skilled. These posts are distracting from the real issue here which is that skilled healers do not spam two skills but use the flexibility of all three skills (orbs, springs, and regeneration) to be able to fully participate in fights, be mobile, save/cover pugs when a new player is struggling, heal extremely difficult content, and have somewhat of an interesting rotation.

Finally, these changes have opened up debates about "what a healer is for." Without some type of official statement, there is no real way to end this debate and also just distracts from the real issues at hand. That said, I'd like to express that ESO has been, for many years, by far the most fun game in which I've ever healed, because I've always been able to add to the fight in other ways, including a % of the DPS. For me gutting the healer role so that we are healbots and not relied upon for support or adding some DPS takes all of the fun out of it and removes one of the core things that made ESO great all of these years. I will quote and reference an old Deltias page: "Healing is still my favorite role in ESO and in large part because you don’t just ONLY heal. You do damage, execute the boss and defend your allies." I couldn't say it better myself. Also, check out his old "top five tips to healing in ESO." I understand that not everyone thinks this is how healers should heal, and the game has evolved significantly since that time, but every single change to healers since beta that has reduced our ability to be flexible, add to the DPS, and be more than "just a healer" has slowly removed the fun out of being a healer. With each patch power creep makes our DPS less important, which means providing support and participating in mechanics fills the gap. And now those options may also be dwindling. Again, this is my personal opinion.

And, here is my previous post with more specific feedback about the abilities, from the other thread:

What a hot mess just for the sake of changing things because they want to. We need a fair explanation to what's the point to all of this.

Nightingale707 wrote: »

ok, let´s talk about the healing changes (I will already take into account what was posted about 1 orb giving a synergy to all party members)

Healers now: The main healing kit comes from skills, that are available for every class: combat prayer, grand healing, orbs + support skills (will not be talking about those since not a lot changes)
- we buff our teammates with combat prayer to give them minor berserk
- we use orbs as our "spammable": whenever we do not have other things to do (buff, debuff, heal) we will throw orbs for our DDs. orbs will keep a nice layer of HoTs in the group, offer utility (sustain, snyergy) and smart healers will anticipate the direction a group will be moving and make sure to cover as much of that space as possible with orbs. we send them out in different directions sometimes to reach everyone.
- in situations, where there is high damage incoming over an amount of several secounds usually (burst damage situations - like vHoF Assembly General execute, vCR banefull in execute, vSS HMs all have those situations built in) a good healer will know in advance to reapply buffs, throw 2 orbs and then stack some grand healing to heal through that incoming damage. the illustrious healing morph allowes us to stack 4 abilities on top of each other, allowing to heal through high damage spikes in a way that is sustainable for a short amount of time.
- class abilities are used to burst heal individual players, offer utility/synergies, they do not define healers

Healers after the changes:
- we will still buff our teammates, but also, combat prayer suddenly became the ONE singular AoE burst heal available to all classes in this game, and it´s tooltip sits around 7k healing for 2,7k magicka cost. combat prayer currently has an aiming issue where it sometimes will turn your character to another direction, making it hard to aim and impractical to spam.
- orbs got redesigned to "1 orb for all": the current plan is, to allow healers to have 1 orb active at a time, this orb can be synergized by anyone not on cooldown. this only adresses half the issue, why the orb change was discussed so controversial. some trials need a healer to be at some distance from the group (vAS, vCR) so having only 1 orb means we cannot send them out in groups anymore, to always have some in group. it also means that we cannot send orbs in more than 1 location any more, thus making it harder to efficiently support our team.
- grand healing was completely redesigned and lost the purpose it had until now. it is now a ground based AoE HoT that heals for a lot less than it used to, cannot be stacked any more and costs a lot more. healers lost the ability, to put ground AoE HoTs in multiple locations, thus healing players that are out of group because of mechanics/the need to resurect fallen teammates. also the ability to heal through incoming burst damage with non-class-abilities has been drastically reduced, we have combat prayer now, but the tooltip is a lot lower than what you could stack with 4 illustrious healings in 1 spot (7k vs 10-12k)
- class abilities now will becomme neccessary to heal through incoming burst damage, but only 3 classes have on-demand AoE burst heals:
- templars have ritual of rebirth with the highest tooltip and cost: a 12,8k heal for 5,8k magicka cost - I will leave it to your imagination, how long a healer can spam this skill
- wardens have enchanted growth: a 8,7k heal for 3,8k magicka cost, this is a conal heal and harder to aim than the other burst heals but it has a long range
- necromancers have enduring undeath: a 8k heal for 2,9k magicka cost, the only class AoE heal that can actually be aimed at a location and can add a HoT if it consumes a corpse
the other 3 classes simply do not have an option outside of combat prayer to heal multiple targets for a big amount of health at the same time.

now for the other fun changes:
- ring of preservation now lasts 2o secounds, heals for 900 health every 0,5 secounds and costs 2,8k stamina - on a stamina character that is, on a healer the heal is below 300 health/0,5 secounds
- echoing vigor: it took me 10minutes to go on PTS, make a stamina warden and get a tooltip of 41k health over 10 secounds for a cost of 2k stamina, that is a heal that will be put on up to 6 players and stay on them; so you have given stamina DD players the most potent heal over time for the lowest cost and 2 of them stack, giving you roughly 50-80k heal over 10sec ticking away at you... meaning 5-8k HPS, wich is comparable to a healer spamming combat prayer on a group.

if your goal was to make healing more fun and engaging, you failed.
if your goal was to help casual/progression groups clear harder content you failed.
if your goal was to make healers ask themselves, why they even exist, CONGRATULATIONS

edit to add: all my tooltips are from PTS on a breton in Olorime/Jorvulds, Ritual mundus, powered resto, 100 blessed, 81 elfborn, blue max mag/health food

Good comment on the Ring of Preservation... But come on, how could they have known that? They are only the developers of this game. Cut them some slack please. It's not their job to know or even be able to roughly estimate such things...

I'll re-post here what I've written elsewhere.

So I've had the time now to think a bit more about the Grand Healing and Orb changes, and I want to add this line of thinking to the mix:

From what I understand, the goal of the Orb (week 2)/Grand Healing change is to promote that healers do other things in their spare time aside from "spam" these two skills (the goal of the inability to have more than one active at a time, specifically, not the nerf to their healing output).

This got me thinking a bit about what else I am actually able to do as a trials healer in the meantime rather than cast these two skills.

Let's consider a Templar healer in vSS for example, on Yolnahkriin HM. For this boss, my bars look like this on live:

Guard, CBP, CoP, Illustrious, Orbs
Rune, Ritual, Blockade, PotL, Guard

All of these skills are essential to have on my bars at the moment. Perhaps I could take off Guard, which would make it so that I have to focus the tank a bit more instead of having to throw Orbs at my group. But what I/others enjoy about guarding the tank is that it enables us to not have to focus him, so we can instead spend more time buffing our group/debuffing the boss.
So let's say that I remove Guard and add some damage or stat-boosting skills there instead, or let's say I keep guard and, because of the HoT nerfs, I now have to focus the tank more instead. I guess I don't see how this is more attractive than having to throw Orbs for the group to synergize-- Needing to spam heals on the tank to make sure he doesn't die vs. needing to keep orbs in the group to make sure they can sustain. It's the same thing in the end, really, isn't it? "Spamming" x skill to accomplish x goal.

Or let's say I remove Rune instead and opt to keep Guard, and I add a DoT on my bar to keep up. This will hurt my sustain a bit so I'll probably have to heavy attack a bit more. I don't see how this is any better or more attractive than casting multiple Orbs. Instead of filling the gaps between my HoTs, buffs and debuffs with Orbs, I'll now need to fill them with heavy attacks so that I have enough Magicka for said HoTs, Buffs and Debuffs.

This boss (along with many other fights) is I think a nice example about which we can ask the question: What is a healer actually supposed to do now that we don't need to throw Orbs? What does ZoS actually want us to do?

There is 0 incoming damage in this fight aside from the Flare, and the damage that the MT takes from the boss. So if I don't need to be healing or providing many Orbs for resources for a good portion of the fight, and if I don't have the bar space for dps skills, what exactly should I be doing instead? CBP lasts 8 seconds, more if you use Jorvuld; Illustrious now lasts 12 seconds; Ritual lasts 24 seconds; CoP stays for 20 seconds; PotL debuffs last 9 seconds.

Many healers at the moment consider Orbs as their "spammable" skill, just as a Magicka DD might consider Force Pulse their spammable. Orbs are the go-to spammable skill of an experienced healer because probably someone can always use an Orb if we throw it. And now, some healers have gone a step further and have introduced new "spammables" into their rotations, ie another unique synergy that we offer DDs to give them Major Slayer for the Lokkestiiz set (on my Warden, for example, I now throw even fewer Orbs than before because I aim to throw a lot of Harvests as well). Just as a DD aims to fill the gaps between their DoTs with their spammable, healers aim to fill the gaps between their HoTs/buffs/debuffs with something. I'm just not sure what that something should turn out to be should these changes go through, because there are so many other essential group support skills that are long buffs, debuffs, and HoTs that we need to have on our bars.

Another option might be, let's say that instead of adding damage or stat-boosting skills to our bars, we must now add skills that help boost our healing output/team's survivability during the moments where damage output is higher (for example, during the Flares on Yolna HM). What then should we do in the meantime when no healing is needed/no damage is incoming? To me it seems like we'd largely just be waiting around for those healing-intensive moments to happen, doing very little otherwise.

BennyButton wrote: »

I just made a bow/bow stamwarden healer on PTS. This makes me think ZOS and HBO's GOT creators joined forces to subvert expectations

That exactly what i've think to do too.
Look like the best healing option right now.

only 1 class can heal enough, warden..