Druid Class [Feedback]

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    Quote from Brontes

    The aim of the druid (and priest) changes was to give you, as a player, options. We've tackled many issues plagueing the healer archetypem including, but not limited to, a hard time levelling, very little agency in instances, inability to do content other classes could, limited usability beyond one healer regarless of raid or party content. For that reason alone it was imperative we get rid of some limiting factors for the healer archetype (namely the removal of must-own gear to be considered useful).


    We're going to continue smoothing out gameplay as we go.

    As for changing the archetype of the healers, of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Just judging by the description of the changes, now only one druid/priest bundle is 100% heal (well, druid /scout), because they have more ways to generate nature's power. I thought that the shift towards a more damageable one should be something like: we improve the base damage and give bundles for dealing damage, but at the same time we remember that first of all these are healers.


    Yes, indeed. I didn't notice that nature's power now gives a boost to healing. It really makes you play more thoughtfully, maintaining the maximum amount of it. Unfortunately, I did not notice this during the initial reading of the changes.

    These are interesting changes that add complexity to achieve maximum healing.


    But how are they suitable for a healer if they actually give a damag? Now they give a buff for damage during treatment, but then it would be logical to add the opposite.: that when dealing damage, the healing increases? Then, yes, it would be a hybrid change, but now it looks lopsided, shifted to getting a damage buff by tapping the healing skill.

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    • Official Post
    Quote from Edelveyn
    Quote from Brontes

    The aim of the druid (and priest) changes was to give you, as a player, options. We've tackled many issues plagueing the healer archetypem including, but not limited to, a hard time levelling, very little agency in instances, inability to do content other classes could, limited usability beyond one healer regarless of raid or party content. For that reason alone it was imperative we get rid of some limiting factors for the healer archetype (namely the removal of must-own gear to be considered useful).


    We're going to continue smoothing out gameplay as we go.

    As for changing the archetype of the sick, of course, there is nothing wrong with that. Just judging by the description of the changes, now only one druid/priest bundle is 100% heal (well, druid /scout), because they have more ways to generate nature's power. I thought that the shift towards a more damageable one should be something like: we improve the base damage and give bundles for dealing damage, but at the same time we remember that first of all these are healers.

    Just to offer some transparency, the pure healers for this main class are the Druid/Priest, Druid/Scout and Druid/Warden.


    Druid/Warden has an unclear description in it's Recover, where you have a chance to restore a Nature's power; it requires one to cast, but will not consume one. We will adjust this description to be more clear in a future patch.


    That is a great suggestion! Should we find the heal power of hybrid heals to be lacking, we'll look into increasing it.


    Thank you for your feedback! :)

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    I also want to draw your attention to the Druid/Warlock. After the patch, its power in the healer's gear has fallen. Without the flow of endurance and wisdom into intelligence, the magic attack is greater than after. Although before it was a very good class, when the healer needed to go somewhere on his own to deal damage.


    Is this a deliberate weakening?

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    • Official Post
    Quote from Edelveyn

    I also want to draw your attention to the Druid/Warlock. After the patch, its power in the healer's gear has fallen. Without the flow of endurance and wisdom into intelligence, the magic attack is greater than after. Although before it was a very good class, when the healer needed to go somewhere on his own to deal damage.


    Is this a deliberate weakening?

    We're already discussing potential adjustments for the combination, Wesker, our mDPS-Lead is helping in that. Adjustments in the interim can be expected.

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    Quote from Zyrex

    Then... uhm... maybe... learn it? I started at 0 too once... but pls don't start speaking of skill, if u don't heal 100% manually yourself and instead press 2-3 buttons on an addon that does 100% of healing for you :D Compared to most ofher mmorpgs this game is easy af, now healers have to adapt to new gameplay, deal with it i guess, like all of us did too... I'd perfer full manual gameplay too, but it is what it is...

    the fact that you actually just said learn it makes your whole quote make me lose hope for humanity, you expect people over 40-50+ years old to learn Lua/Kitty when they play the game for fun and just wanna play for the nostalgic feeling not to mention have 0 knowledge about writing code, everyone with a decent IQ can tell this change was unnecessary and not wanted by the community.

    Another problem is which is already proven when most Endgamers are quitting the game not to mention take breaks, and its not because they don't like the game or server, its because of the unnecessary buffs that magical classes get, for example Warlock/Champion. I'm playing magical classes myself, but at this point chain looks depressing.

    not to mention the snarky comments and replies that comes out of DEVs is disgusting, ( and yes this has happened to me manyyy times) i mean literally disgusting how DEVs talk to people when they get paid by the players XD but enough about DEVs.... all this could be saved, but its not chosen to be saved simple as that. #DELETEWORLDBOSSES

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    Quote from Flacko

    the fact that you actually just said learn it makes your whole quote make me lose hope for humanity, you expect people over 40-50+ years old to learn Lua/Kitty when they play the game for fun and just wanna play for the nostalgic feeling not to mention have 0 knowledge about writing code, everyone with a decent IQ can tell this change was unnecessary and not wanted by the community.

    Yes, I'm so evil, I expect ppl to properly play/learn their new classes and to use an addon if they can't do it manually... I bet if you get along with healbot or raidheal, you can also understand kitty very easily, I mean the rotas of healers aren't complex or something, no need for big condition stacking and such, they remind me of warlock/druid rota of 2-3 skills... those rota-healers are actually easier to understand than most configurations I saw in raidheal or gridcliqueit, but what do I know...


    And however, there are still some full lazy-mode heals in existance, so yea, I'd actually expect ppl to learn kitty to play the rota-ones properly, IF they can't press 2-3 skills manually (which seems to be an issue for quite a lot ppl already) xD

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    Druid/Priest 1490658 [Işığ'ın Kurtarıcısı +105]

    503827 Nature's Power


    503827 Nature's Power is a very important buff because it increases the amount of healing done. I always try to have this buff higher than *5 on me as much as possible.


    Now if I use Druid/Priest 1490658 [Işığ'ın Kurtarıcısı +105], all 503827 Nature's Power I have is gone. When I look at the HP that comes to me or my teammates in return, I don't find it enough.


    If it takes *10 503827 Nature's Power to use Druid/Priest Druid/Priest 1490658 [Işığ'ın Kurtarıcısı +105], I think this talent should be better. Or it seemed like it would be great if the required amount was *5 instead of *10.

    What do you think?


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    I agree, yesterday when using it I was very disappointed. It is more profitable not to spend nature's power then than to spend them on such a weak regeneration, which does not give so much benefit.

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    Quote from Zyrex
    Quote from Flacko

    the fact that you actually just said learn it makes your whole quote make me lose hope for humanity, you expect people over 40-50+ years old to learn Lua/Kitty when they play the game for fun and just wanna play for the nostalgic feeling not to mention have 0 knowledge about writing code, everyone with a decent IQ can tell this change was unnecessary and not wanted by the community.

    Yes, I'm so evil, I expect ppl to properly play/learn their new classes and to use an addon if they can't do it manually... I bet if you get along with healbot or raidheal, you can also understand kitty very easily, I mean the rotas of healers aren't complex or something, no need for big condition stacking and such, they remind me of warlock/druid rota of 2-3 skills... those rota-healers are actually easier to understand than most configurations I saw in raidheal or gridcliqueit, but what do I know...


    And however, there are still some full lazy-mode heals in existance, so yea, I'd actually expect ppl to learn kitty to play the rota-ones properly, IF they can't press 2-3 skills manually (which seems to be an issue for quite a lot ppl already) xD

    Have you written a healing CE before? And I don’t mean one where you click targets manually and try to spam a button for choosing heal spell on top of that. It’s INCREDIBLY complex, for more than a few reasons:

    1. Figuring out if a player is in range to cast a skill is almost impossible unless you first target a player and check GetSkillUsable; but being that so many healing skills are AOE now you have to find a way to do a range check against the player to see if your desired skill will even hit/heal them. Luckily now we have TargetFriendByName, which helps a bit, though.

    2. Identifying the proper main tank to put buffs like Healing Salve or Curing Seed can be tricky — you might have a Wl/K offtanking, or two tanks in party where one player is geared and the other isn’t as much.

    3. No public CEs I’m aware of make the addition of any of those changes even close to easy. Kitty combo is an absolute mess of an engine to try and read (which is not to say it’s bad code, it’s just A LOT of code to read through to try and understand). I’ve got 15 or so years of work experience coding and there have been multiple times I’ve given up trying to fix or understand something in Kitty’s core code.

    4. Reading and debugging lua within RoM, including needing ReloadUI (or dofile if you have deeper knowledge), is tedious and frustrating. I don’t know why we’d want more players having to do that.


    I think one of my biggest fears about this change is you’re taking a class people have played a similar way for 15+ years and now expecting them to enjoy playing their whole class a different way. There’s already so much to focus on for a healer, tbh their jobs were already harder than a DPS which primarily stands still and spams a single button.


    I think if CoA really wants to have the official stance at reworking healers into hybrid DPS, CoA should take responsibility by creating a full healing combat + heal engine (if that’s the goal now).


    Also, I’m not sure the core issue for healer damage has been fully fixed — The main reasons healers don’t do damage is that they wear healer gear. They’re missing melee magic damage %, getting mdmg bonuses from various pieces of gear, pve dmg %, etc. I get that the goal was to make it so it was less necessary to stat / spec for heals in healer gear, but it’s not just an overall healing reduction per heal - it’s less time spent healing vs DPS which also lowers overall healing done.

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    Quote from Ravinous

    Have you written a healing CE before? And I don’t mean one where you click targets manually and try to spam a button for choosing heal spell on top of that. It’s INCREDIBLY complex [...]

    Wait... I think we have a misunderstanding here... the only "rotas" we talk about are like a few mob targeting spells (plus maybe seed + title skill debuff).. You don't need to add player-auto-targeting mechanics or such, bcz the healers just work as dps by dealing damage on mobs and heal players around passively. So you basically play like a damage dealer, but you heal by some mechanics... THAT'S what you write rotas for, that are veeeeery simple and straight-forward. Doesn't need any experience in lua or kitty or whatever, since most conditions are one-dimensional too...


    Current state of healers is either:

    - play full heal classes with raidheal addon as before (bcz they were almost unchanged in gameplay), OR,

    - play hybrid classes with full mob targeting rotas like a mdps player (either manually or with simple kitty)


    Example is p/m: You cast your ice wind blade and get a proc to cast group heal (raid wide) instantly with no cost and can do this every 2 seconds. On single target you cast your sublimation rota and maybe some fillers, such as dots or ISS and whatever you can find to fill in between and voila, you got your full targeting rotation healer that doesn't even have to use raidheal or similar heal addon anymore ^^


    I saw some guild mates play druid/mage or priest/mage by playing such dps-hybrid rotations with minimal effort or optimization and they dealt quite good dmg (like 10-20% of a proper dps, maybe needs some buffs here and there) and healed like 50-70% of a full heal at the same time... nobody wants you to use full heal spells on players, bcz it's not even necessary... and if u don't want to play the new archtype, just go for full heal classes that still exist and seem to be untouched at all...


    The thing what ppl seem to not understand in my previous posts is, that you don't need highend LUA scripts to play such hybrid heal classes at all, but if you WANT you can go for it. Just do a simple kitty and you're fine...

    Quote from Ravinous

    The main reasons healers don’t do damage is that they wear healer gear. They’re missing melee magic damage %, getting mdmg bonuses from various pieces of gear, pve dmg %, etc. I get that the goal was to make it so it was less necessary to stat / spec for heals in healer gear, but it’s not just an overall healing reduction per heal

    From what I saw what guild mates already achieved within 1 day after patch, they already used %mdmg or %magic melee weapon dmg rolls on their weapons bcz %wis isn't best in slot for (hybrid) healers anymore and some found use in channel or enchantment gloves bcz both seem to be viable for them now... and the damage they dealt was pretty good (could even be buffed further imo) :huh:

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    • Official Post

    Greetings, thank you for your feedback!


    Please keep in mind that more patches will follow to make things less bumpy, however, the current direction has been chosen very deliberately.

    Quote from Ravinous

    I think one of my biggest fears about this change is you’re taking a class people have played a similar way for 15+ years and now expecting them to enjoy playing their whole class a different way. There’s already so much to focus on for a healer, tbh their jobs were already harder than a DPS which primarily stands still and spams a single button.

    This problem is deceptively complex: buffs scaling with gear added a good amount of power into the game, and with orkhams release (and the subsequent change to %buffs), we've seen that many players had a very hard time progressing from around level 50+, which is the rough point where base skill power would no longer carry you.


    Low base atk- and damage-values weren't really helped by %buffs. We've added Healer's Resolution in the past to try and remedy this, however, it was already at it's maximum power, but not nearly powerful enough to be properly usable. Internal play tests concluded that you'd get to a point where you would stack a whole lot more intelligence than wisdom due to it's calculation, which would lead them to spiral out of control too quickly.


    Doing a 1:1 transformation would have been in a deceptively complex task to create and require deep engine changes, which ran the risks of breaking a whole host of other things in the process.
    In other words, it was neither worth the effort nor the risk.


    In total, healers had a terrible time leveling. Even fully levelled, a heal would rarely, if ever, even be able to quest talaghan solo in a fun way. This was a very bad thing for the game and caused many people to either swap to a different role or quit altogether.


    The few remaining healers would then find themselves at the next hurdle: Even though they were level 105, possibly equipped with a minigame set or bought gear, their buffs, which was expected of them, would still be incredibly weak due to the lack of cards and titles. Parties would simply not invite you to runs and players would have to actively rely on other players to divulge tactics for titles to pull them up.


    From that point on, healers were considered viable. The point where heals became viable was, when, essentially they had completed all content in the game, and what these players then found were two more, major issues:


    A lack of possible skill expression

    Once players had figured out the difficulties and/or set up their heal addons to specific situations, many (and I mean basically everyone except for the heal-only-hardliners) would start to build other gear, citing boredom in healing or a lack of power in farming as reasons for the swap.

    Players willing to adapt to changes (and therefore bring up the average skill level and create discovery around classes and their mechanics) would therefore leave classes. It led to a major misunderstanding to how heal mechanics work over time or how much heal is actually needed to survive instances.

    Changing a skill from 250 to 1.000 healing will result in a roughly 5% increased heal. This is something we aim to change, as explained in a previous post to give us a better angle at properly balancing heal numbers.


    Limited usability

    Without heals, instances are unplayable. With one heal, it's stressful until your raid figues out how to avoid most of the damage, with two heals it's comfortable. Anything beyond that meant that it wasn't beneficial to the raid to pick yet another healing class. Guilds with more than two full-heals would find themselves in the situation where they would delegate a fully equipped, end game healer to a supporting role with even less agency or a misfit gear.

    Standing on a monster and autoattacking to generate rage on a Warrior/Priest to keep providing a buff isn't the most fun gameplay one can have.

    As a result, Guilds would not take in newer heals if they already had about three, creating a negative feedback loop of the heals needing the help finding even less parties and guilds and being even more likely to leave the role. Simultaneously, the fewer heals in the guild, the more likely it is to have none online and therefore have an inability to run. This was especially an issue in midgame guilds.


    Changes simply had to be made in order to ensure that, in the future, people would actually want and get to play healers.


    For this reason, we created the new archetype out of vastly underutilized combinations. To provide an example of what we define as underutilized, Druid/Priest was played roughly 37* more than Druid/Champion in Orkham, remaining constant in Grafu Castle.

    We therefore decided to take this class and mold it into the new archetype while trying to preserve the Druid/Priest as a full heal.


    In cases, where the distinction was not nearly as clear (such as Priest/Mage or Druid/Warden), we simply added mechanics to make sure the base class would still be usable, even if no gameplay adaptions by the player would be made.

    Quote from Ravinous

    I think if CoA really wants to have the official stance at reworking healers into hybrid DPS, CoA should take responsibility by creating a full healing combat + heal engine (if that’s the goal now).

    The goal isn't (and never was) to hybridize all heals.


    Full heals still and will always remain. We will ensure they are de facto the strongest at pure healing. This is, due to the freshness of the patch and the safety nets we put up (to ensure raids are still possible), in parts, not the case and we're working on changes to create bigger differences in heal numbers.


    As laid out in the GD-Notes, the main purpose of the patch was to allow for more flexibility in choosing a healing class and similar to how DPS (should) do it, choose the combination most suited to your raid and the instance you're seeking to conquer. To be concrete: Adding another heal should mean they (or another) play a heal-dps hybrid, providing damage and supplementary heal, as well as powerful debuffs and the usual utility a main heal brings to the table (battle revives, buffs, defense reductions..) instead of a support class they are ill suited for in the gear department. It is still possible, however, no longer optimal to do so.


    The design choices of certain heal skills becoming AoE, losing a global cooldown and/or providing a long-running HoT have been made to create room for players to do other things without having to stress about their raid members dying.

    Hybrid combinations certainly have a much higher skill ceiling than full heals in terms of positioning, but are vastly more rewarding in terms of satisfaction than a regular healer. These mechanics are purposefully designed to work with very basic, almost rudimentary combat engines or even macros.


    While feedback is appreciated already, the point has to be made that it will take time for the archetype to take root and be understood by the player base, just as the learning curve for effectively using these classes by individual players have to be respected.


    Quote from Ravinous

    Also, I’m not sure the core issue for healer damage has been fully fixed — The main reasons healers don’t do damage is that they wear healer gear. They’re missing melee magic damage %, getting mdmg bonuses from various pieces of gear, pve dmg %, etc. I get that the goal was to make it so it was less necessary to stat / spec for heals in healer gear, but it’s not just an overall healing reduction per heal - it’s less time spent healing vs DPS which also lowers overall healing done.

    Healing done for Pure-Heal-Druids has increased by roughly 20% (about 35% for Druid/Scout). As Gloves of the Enchanter have been changed, they now may opt to the set gloves instead, which would provide them with even more healing than their hybrid counterparts.


    The biggest gameplay change to druids was to require them to use differing spells on each class combination. Before, we'd see that basically every druid was using Recover, Mother Earth's Fountain and Restore Life exclusively to heal. Quite frankly, this contributed greatly to the reports of boredom with the gameplay and was therefore bad for the healer community as a whole and simply had to be broken to ensure there would even be future healers left. This is the only place we're forcing heals to change their behavior in (relatively minor) ways and these changes are absolutely necessary to ensure more healer players would reach endgame in the first place.


    Incorporating new skills into healing will greatly reward you, not using them will reduce your healing done on average by 4%. Considering that about 65% of healing done was overhealing, we're confident (and have already seen) that healing is still fully possible and, in the case of some combinations, more relaxed than ever.


    I hope I could clear up both the intent and direction we're aiming for.


    Hooroo,

    Brontes

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    Be great if people besides the top geared were taken into account, kinda hafta make it to that point. Nice to see more we made you suck but there is gear to fix it or will be. As for upgrades my heals and dps is down, and if taking int conversion away why does sandstorm which is crippled now still take Int. Goblin mines since after season 4 my Druid has just gotten weaker and weaker and can't do other content, the worms I hit for 18k with widow now its 13k and sandstorm killed them first tick now its taking 3 and barely doing 10k. Not 100% confident on the wis to matk as well pretty sure I'm short 10k matk compared to having resolution.

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    • Official Post
    Quote from cainseriph

    Be great if people besides the top geared were taken into account, kinda hafta make it to that point. Nice to see more we made you suck but there is gear to fix it or will be. As for upgrades my heals and dps is down, and if taking int conversion away why does sandstorm which is crippled now still take Int. Goblin mines since after season 4 my Druid has just gotten weaker and weaker and can't do other content, the worms I hit for 18k with widow now its 13k and sandstorm killed them first tick now its taking 3 and barely doing 10k. Not 100% confident on the wis to matk as well pretty sure I'm short 10k matk compared to having resolution.

    Greetings,

    The healing you do on Druid/Rogue is diminished because the class is not meant to be a healer. It's squarely an mDPS. This falls in the domain of Wesker. Heals with wisdom gear (even starter) produce significantly more healing and damage, for which scalings will be changed from Int to Wis on important skills in the next patch, to help bridge the gap even further.

    Thank you for your feedback.


    Hooroo,

    Brontes

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    I've pointed out D/r is aimed for dps previously and watched it get stifled. And thanks for ignoring 90% off what I said. My Priest has way more wisdom and level 90 heal skills and fares barely better. Love the ignoring players effort to point out they prefer healing as their role on characters they have worked on for that purpose. And making it "easier" for healers starting out by making it a complete gear check. And lots off options as that is always thrown around.

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    @Brontes I would like to know what you think about this =)
    Thank you)

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    • Official Post
    Quote from Edelveyn
    Quote from Edelveyn

    I agree, yesterday when using it I was very disappointed. It is more profitable not to spend nature's power then than to spend them on such a weak regeneration, which does not give so much benefit.

    @Brontes I would like to know what you think about this =)
    Thank you)

    We have got a few changes lined up for this class combination that will help out a bit.

    Thank you for the feedback!