Emeratis wrote: »

GloatingSwine wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

GloatingSwine wrote: »

Emeratis wrote: »

GloatingSwine wrote: »

Radiate77 wrote: »

guarstompemoji wrote: »

Moving any healing buffs away from gb will just either:
1. Make tanks tankier
2. Diminish the role of the healer further by making dps never need them

If anything, the animal like "feels" clunky to cast. I'd like to see the animations smoothed out, particularly cliff racer.

I have no doubt that Green Balance is going to be gutted in the healing department.

It’s reigned as #1 for Healing forever.

If DK is any reference, they are going to need to add damage and tank utility to the skill line so I wonder what will be traded to do so.

Green Balance will either keep toughness on heal and continue to reign forever for healers, or it won't and it won't.

Building a support class is about collecting tools because we need to solve problems other than nails. Making everyone have 10% more max HP is an extremely valuable tool for a healer.

One healer should not have an "always play" button. War horn used to source the toughness buff and they changed it to make warden healer more desirable, but it turned into making them required. Necro similarly used to have exclusivity to colossus's major vulnerability debuff, but that now has at least 5 other sources. Toughness is the only buff/debuff in game that has one monopoly of a source, with the only other source being a selfish set in Warrior Poet set.

If toughness is the only reason that warden healer is desirable and it isn't a good healer without it, the problem is not the buff it's the fact the skills aren't good enough and are being propped up by an exclusive buff. Necro still sees plenty of play with major vuln having sources other than colossus. Toughness exclusivity isn't healthy for the game or the class. I'd rather warden heals feel fun, cool, and rewarding and not be chained to dependency on proccing a buff.

Trouble is that game balance lives under the totalitarian principle. Anything not mandatory is forbidden, anything not forbidden is mandatory.

In the subclassing world a skill line either has to be the best out of 21 at solving its particular set of problems or it has to have something uniquely valuable you pick into after you have the best one, or it is dead because you use the one that is the best instead.

Removing exclusive utility can be the difference between a skill line being an always pick and a never pick. Just ask Earthen Heart, which has only a week left to live.

It doesn't have to be like that though, and the whole point of these reworks is to attempt to equalize power and increase player choice. I personally feel with that as the design principle, archaic and choice limiting options do not have a place. We've already walked away from dk being required as tank and templar being required as healer and other things, why insist warden healer remains special and exclusive, especially when many healers do not enjoy playing warden? I also feel putting too much of warden's power budget into healer at the expense of warden dps is why we don't see many of them despite many people wishing for it. A class can only have so much overall power from a balance standpoint.

Currently the dk skill lines have taken a hit by diversifying but we also have to look to where things will be when all classes are done, which I think will put some skill lines in better spots than during the interim. It doesn't help that the interim is 1-2 years of irl time, but there are also things like class mastery passives that are coming that the devs said are intended to buffer some of that awkward period. I still feel there are better solutions if that isn't enough than keeping toughness exclusive.

It does though, because there isn't a way to "equalise power" under subclassing because any skill line that doesn't have enough concentrated power or utility just gets swapped for one that does, and only the best version of each need apply. If a class has three skill lines where none of them have enough concentrated power or utility you disregard that class as a base and it becomes dead.

This sort of system is not amenable to choice, it's the realm of calculation. That's especially obvious in DPS where Herald and Assassination are head and shoulders above any other skill line in the game especially in combination because Herald has everything but crit and Assassination has all crit all the time. (And the fact that DK has its own beam after the rework isn't going to change anything for DPS, they're still going to be the same Herald/Assassination/Ardent combo where the DK only exists to backbar Molten Whip for 15% bonus to Fatecarver or Runeblades).

DK will not get better for tanks when the other classes are reworked, it's even getting worse if you pureclass it! (And the better you were at getting value out of it before the rework the more you'll lose out.) Its only hope is that they get done over even worse. Its utility is still going to be spread over two different skill lines with worse activation conditions available for its utility and weaker versions of things it already had. Hoping that everything will be fine in 18-24 months is not a strategy, unless your desired goal is "everyone plays Arcanist because it's the only class they haven't ruined yet".

That is what they are trying to help, though. Being in a transitory period is awkward but we also have to be aware what is our current day reality will not be what the game is like at the end of things. We also know they are actively monitoring things and seeking feedback and trying to make the transition period less painful. If I recall, they also said the dk rework is not the be all end all of that class's balance and they are willing to revisit things in classes reworked that are still not working.

I get the frustration, I really do. I want monoclass and more rp flavored subclassing builds to feel good and viable and right now there is a huge gap between both of those and what is optimal. It doesn't have to be like that forever. Other games I play do not have such a sharp gap in power between the meta/min maxed options and what people find fun and choose to invest practice in. ESO can be like that too, I truly believe that. That is why I don't want to see things that reinforce bad balancing habits reinforced in the class reworks. I have hope for a better future for the game's balance based on their statement of intent.

They can't help this though. It's a structural feature of the totalitarian principle that governs character building in highly mathematised systems like MMOs. The only way to fix it is to either make the new class mastery passives so potent they enforce pureclassing whilst making sure every class has at least one unique utility that a team demands be present or to delete subclassing. Neither of these seem likely.

They certainly can't help if they just randomly sprinkle effects around the skill lines on one class at a time without thinking about how those effects activate and affect each other, or if they just ignore the fact that they're making an MMO and tanks and healers are things which exist, both of which they did with the DK rework. If that is a statement of intent for how the Warden rework is going to work out I hope you're ready to roll a new base class.

I am not judging them based on their statement of intent, I'm judging them based on their implementation. Their implementation based on the DK rework is actively harmful for anyone who doesn't want to run a beam or runeblades DPS build but stick it onto a DK base now because of the new conditional 15% more damage.

Consider the following: The rework DK has a passive that gives passive health regeneration that scales up at low health. This is the level of understanding of value in the game that they are operating with for these reworks. If you are at low health you need health back now, not slightly more of it in two seconds time. Two seconds is forever if you are at low health. And yet this is the only effect of one of the reworked DK's passives. Skill points that are deader than disco.

Emeratis wrote: »

Snipping quote for brevity/readability for others

GloatingSwine wrote: »

They can't help this though. It's a structural feature of the totalitarian principle that governs character building in highly mathematised systems like MMOs. The only way to fix it is to either make the new class mastery passives so potent they enforce pureclassing whilst making sure every class has at least one unique utility that a team demands be present or to delete subclassing. Neither of these seem likely.

They certainly can't help if they just randomly sprinkle effects around the skill lines on one class at a time without thinking about how those effects activate and affect each other, or if they just ignore the fact that they're making an MMO and tanks and healers are things which exist, both of which they did with the DK rework. If that is a statement of intent for how the Warden rework is going to work out I hope you're ready to roll a new base class.

I am not judging them based on their statement of intent, I'm judging them based on their implementation. Their implementation based on the DK rework is actively harmful for anyone who doesn't want to run a beam or runeblades DPS build but stick it onto a DK base now because of the new conditional 15% more damage.

Consider the following: The rework DK has a passive that gives passive health regeneration that scales up at low health. This is the level of understanding of value in the game that they are operating with for these reworks. If you are at low health you need health back now, not slightly more of it in two seconds time. Two seconds is forever if you are at low health. And yet this is the only effect of one of the reworked DK's passives. Skill points that are deader than disco.

I disagree with you on this is the only way it has to be, and other mmos have different balancing styles and levels of freedom or lack therof. MMO's are not a monolith. I also disagree on your solution because it buffs monoclass while ignoring not all subclassing builds even now are equal and that doesn't help them. Also, some people like subclassing and don't want to see it be the next hot thing that then turns useless in a few patches (psijic, vampire, werewolf, etc). We have too many dead systems in this game right now, we don't need more.

DK tank drew the short straw in the rework but dk healer got a ton of nice quality of life things and the things that weren't working like heal targeting are in the process of being fixed. I playtested it on the pts a bit as a dk healer enjoyer and while I miss some things it felt better than prior patches and metas. I agree that the dk implementation of several things leave some things to be desired and I hope some of those things are fixed in the future, but it wasn't all negative and there are some good things in there too. It is their first rework and there will be some mistakes made. I am all for holding their feet to the fire on fixing those things and doing better, but I also think assuming the warden rework will be a disaster based on the rework is not a healthy or helpful mindset.

We have some disagreements on things but we also have some agreements, either way, I'm more hoping the discourse and discussion in this thread helps the warden rework land better initially and the future class reworks get better over time.

MMOs are not a monolith, but they do all have certain fixed points of comparison. Most of the time in most content in most MMOs that have ever existed we are cooperating to make the enemy's HP number hit zero. That is going to generate similar pressures every time, and it is going to make players respond in the same ways every time. We are going to chase as much DPS as we can get as a team with just enough survivability to not die. That's always going to be the goal state for player teams. That's why the totalitarian principle applies, because there is an identifiable best possible state for the players as a team, and anything that reaches that state better than another thing is better than that other thing. And because everyone wants everyone else to maximise their performance (See: Folding Ideas - Why it's Rude to Suck at World of Warcraft) anything not the best is useless.

Anything not mandatory is forbidden, anything not forbidden is mandatory.

The way that interacts with subclassing is that it simply means that there will always be an identifiable best possible combination of three skill lines for each role which allows the whole team to hit the "make enemy HP zero" goal the best. There is an identifiable best DPS, main and off tank, and combination of two healers. If you ain't in those, you ain't in the game.


That's why I don't think DK healers are going to start existing after the rework, because there isn't any healer utility in the passives, no DK skill line will be the best way to do what it does on a healer, and none have enough utility in one place to be a flex choice, even if they fix the heal targeting.

And it's not just that DK tank "drew the short straw", it's that the nature of the changes demonstrate such a bafflingly bad understanding of what a skill line needs to bring to the table under the subclassing system they've designed. Spreading out the value of the one viable skill line into two doesn't make two viable skill lines that you pick together, it makes zero viable skill lines.

guarstompemoji wrote: »

The long and short is we need more support voices during the class rework. DK saw a plethora of organized DPS-pov feedback. The result is, I would not be thrilled about maining a DK healer, and tanks may be dropping the class, after it being a staple for a decade.

This isn't to say the toolkit is bad. More, dps came out on top. That in itself is not bad. One mainline streamer suggested that dk might benefit from ignoring support roles entirely, or at least partly. That's...the support-play representation there was.

In part, that is one of the reasons I don't want to see GB gutted. It's unfun as a support taking lines that there's only one, or half of one, skill that's useful to you. I'd like to see options expanded and made more fun and interesting, instead.

I agree with this overall with this. I called out on the pts side of things several time how dps centric the changes to dk felt and how most of the changes were aimed towards dps. For dk healer, I did playtest it 2/4 weeks and while I have some gripes about some things, it's still at least a little better than playing dk healer has been for the past five years (seriously, my dk healer is one of my babies and I really want to feel good using her more so this was a big thing for me in the dk rework). It will also possibly be better on live because we got them to look into the issues with most of the dk heals having bugged targeting, and also an acknowledgement that other heals that have been similarly bugged for years will be fixed. They did say that after the major class reworks, classes will still see changes and adjustments and this isn't just a "big rework and then done/solved/never touched again" thing and I think a lot of people missed that comment.