I am a NB main player, and I use NB for all roles, so I am glad to discuss the problems with PTS Dark Cloak from both the healer and tank perspectives. The changes to Dark Cloak in PTS have had a significant impact on NB tanks, and I'm trying to use this thread to help dev better understand and adjust this skill if they still end up deciding to make changes to it.

As we all know, there are two main types of healing skills: HOT and burst healing. These two healing skills provide healing for yourself or your teammates in different situations. In the trial, even with the presence of a tank, DPS is difficult to completely avoid the damage of environmental damage, splash damage, etc. These damages is usually not high, but suffer multiple times is enough to cause a threat to the life of the DPS. The purpose of HOT is to provide continuous and reliable healing for team members (mainly DPS) so that they do not die from successive minor damage. The following chart is a more typical healer analysis that I found randomly in esologs. As you can see, in general HOT makes up the bulk of the healing. In short, the purpose of HOT is to keep your health in good condition while taking a small amount of damage consistently.



Burst healing makes up a smaller portion of the total healing, but it is just as important. When your teammate has suffered serious damage and his/her health is on the line, you need to quickly pull up the health, otherwise a random environmental damage may lead to death. In VSS's Ice Tomb, your teammate will lose 80% of health immediately. The healer will usually cast HOT in advance in the tomb, followed by spamming burst healing. In VDSR's Maelstrom, we also see healers spamming burst healing. In short, the purpose of burst healing is to quickly restore health to a safe condition when the target is already severely damaged.

Now let's talk about the problems with PTS Cloak of Darkness. Live Cloak of Darkness is a HOT and the only NB healing skill that scales off maximum health. It performs well and almost all NB tanks use it as one of their core skills. In PTS3, its effect was changed to restore 11%-14% of lost life per second. I believe that this change comes from dev's confidence in the Dragon's Blood mechanic. Although there is some controversy about the mechanics of Dragon's Blood, it is a good burst healing skill because it does give you a huge amount of healing in an instant, although it requires you to use it while at the loss of most of your health.


But that all changed when dev tried to transfer this mechanic to Dark Cloak. As mentioned earlier, the purpose of HOT is to keep your health at a good level while taking less damage consistently, but the mechanics of PTS Dark Cloak make it almost useless when you take minor damage. Let's say you're a NB tank and the first light attack from the boss does 10k damage to you, and your Dark Cloak only restores 1k health per second for you. This is still far from your full health, but the boss's next light strike will follow. And, when you've already taken serious damage, PTS Dark Cloak also can't play the role of a burst healer: the percentage it restores per second is too low compared to Dragon's Blood. It can't instantly bring your life back to a safe level when you're already on the brink of death. It takes 5 seconds to fully play its healing effect, and when your health is at stake, a single light strike from the boss within a second is enough to kill you.
PTS Cloak of Darkness becomes the game's worst self-healing skill, because it fails to meet the goals of a healing skill: it can neither keep your health in good condition while you're constantly taking small amounts of damage, nor can it instantly restore your health to a safe level when you're already taking serious damage. It cannot be a reliable healing skill under any circumstances. Dark Cloak on PTS cannot be used as a self-healing skill by NB tanks at all, and it is the only core healing skill that NB tanks can rely on. This change will undoubtedly kill the NB tanks.

I hope this post will provide some reference for dev and perhaps help you design a better healing skill for NB. Personally I think keeping Live Dark Cloak is the best approach, it's balanced enough. I've seen almost no posts complaining about this skill being overpowered before, but I've seen a dozen posts in the post-PTS3 forums complaining about the nerf to Dark Cloak being too severe. Maybe a rollback, like you guys have done with other changes, would be the smartest thing to do. If you still want to make changes to it, I hope you refer to other enthusiastic contributors in the community, such as code65536 and qcell, who already gave many constructive suggestions and have the most experience with the game, which is your most valuable treasure as game developers. You shouldn't let us down. I've always been glad that I'm a NB tank, it's not a mainstream option, but I'm doing well, and it makes me special. I've been all over the trials and gained many friends, and I don't want my journey to end at Update 35.