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.
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.
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.
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
