VGOEmulator.net

[quote="Kandra"]I have a hard time following the shifting arguments in this... we seems to all agree that the most fun with a cleric, and why we chose to play that class in the first place, is trying to keep people alive in difficult situations. Then you want to make the class less boring by giving it more DPS, which wasn't the reason you chose the class to start with.
One solution (note that it's just one solution and not the only one) to the boredom the you say some people felt, although I never felt it on any of my 3 clerics, would be to give everyone less DPS so the fights would last longer so you would actually need to heal, which was the reason why you chose the class.[/quote]

Best suggestion yet. I agree.

I wouldn't want to do sweeping changes to all classes.

As I mentioned, I was saying this from the perspective of a raid leader and a guild leader - meaning that I talked to a lot of players about why they chose what classes, and players that want to switch their mains. I talk about this from the perspective of someone that needed to recruit clerics and only find Disciples.

The people that want to play clerics are not the target of this, but they were few and far between. I was one of them. But even I admit that soloing a cleric was extremely boring. And I Suspect with the emulator, soloing is what a lot of us will be doing most of the time.

There is a reason that clerics were almost the least played class. Their main goal is to heal, and the people that loved playing them loved group healing. But when there is no group, there is no point in a cleric other than a buffbot. Which is exactly what we saw in live. It's great that a handful of people love the cleric as it is, but there were a great many people that ditched the class before they could even hit level 20. And even after getting one of the five cleric affinities (Yes, there were more than just three), it still doesn't reach it's best.

I am not asking for huge sweeping changes that turn the cleric into a dps powerhouse. Let's be *realistic* and *honest* and cut out the slippery slope and kneejerk disapproval. The first thing we should do is fix the endurance regeneration issue. See if that helps.

If that doesn't help, the second thing that should be looked into is:

Castigator's Fury: "You are filled with righteous anger, increasing your damage by 15% and lowering the refresh time of melee attacks by 4 seconds. While in this form your mitigation is lowered 5%."

This is the cleric's DPS stance. I'm not entirely sure that it worked. I did a lot of testing on my cleric and I never saw any kind of increase in my DPS, but I did notice my mitigation went down (I wonder if they switched the numbers?) If people are not playing clerics because they have nothing to heal, and can't kill anything then we should tweak this. Nothing else. Just this.

Maybe we should ensure their damage is actually increased by 15%. But, let's say we did that. The highest DPS my peace cleric every managed on raids was 1000DPS. A 15% increase would mean I'm doing about 1150DPS. OH MY GOD THE CLERIC IS SO POWERFUL THAT IS A HUGE MARGIN!#@@#!$#@. My Rogue on the other hand often hit 25k dps. My pally hit 17k DPS.

And the real shame: Disciples can hit 7-10k DPS and AT THE SAME TIME will OUT HEAL a cleric by a huge margin. Want proof? Here's a log from one of our raids: http://jakkal.com/MercaiusMelee.jpg I listed all the healers there, except for a bloodmage (Which had issues with parsers so they don't parse correctly, so I left him out.) That was my rogue at the top too *tee hee*. Anyway. You can see that the disciple with the highest DPS also had the highest HPS. Second only to a cleric, who had abysmal DPS. "But Jakkal, that's how it should be, because Clerics suck and blah blah blah blah that doesn't matter."

Now, I am not asking to nerf disciples, even if I think they should be. And I'm not asking for a huge increase to cleric dps for raids. And I'm sure as hell not going to ask for everyone to get nerfed or for mobs to get harder.

What I'm asking for is a little bit more dps so when people are soloing/levelling their cleric that they feel like they are making real *progress* and not wasting their time on a boring class. This is what I heard from a significant number of people when we asked them about playing clerics or if they were switching their main from a cleric to another class. This is not a me problem, this is a game problem. And this problem will be significantly worse with a low population.


MY SUGGESTION: Slowly tweak the Cleric and Castigator's fury to the following: Up the base DPS of level 1-20 abilities slightly. If something hits for 20, let it hit for 30. If something hits for 200, let it hit for 300. Castigator's Fury DPS is increased by 20%. Decrease Mitigation by the same margin. Decrease healing power by 5-10%. Put a cooldown on it so people can't switch it on the fly.

Making the cleric less likely to survive with higher damage will make it more fun. It will make people have to decide and think about what they're doing. Should they go DPS stance and risk dying or should they go healer stance and take forever? It might give the cleric new breath and new life.

I can get behind tweaking the five (sorry, only played with three of them and it's been 2 years) affinities. I also noticed the endurance regeneration issue. I'm not sure I ever saw a reason given for it. But it was definitely halved for cleric and shaman. That could help alleviate some of the issue in itself. I think that might be a good starting point. I'm not sure it needs to be fixed for shamans. I really felt shamans (at least bear and wolf) were appropriately powerful.
I can agree with making clerics more viable. I didn't feel they needed anything, but I do see your concern. If it makes them more valuable as a class, that's always good. But just bein really honest, they will never come close to the number of disciples or Bloodmages that are played. The real reason for that I think is just because of how diverse those two classes are as healers. I can't think of another game that has healing classes like them.
In the end, I think you may see a few more clerics, which is always a good thing, but it will still be top heavy with disciples and bloodmages.
I do like the suggestion of tweaking some of the affinities and stances along with looking at the endurance issue.

Personally, I would nerf discs and BMs if they are more effective healers than clerics. The cleric's purpose is to heal, not to have more DPS or faster regen. That doesn't make sense to me. I'd rather see that than giving better healing to clerics too because then you'd have a buncha effective healers, making the game less of a challenge as a whole. I'm totally against making VG easier.

I know "nerf" is an evil word, but that my 2cp.

Let's not go nerfing individual classes cause Clerics suck

There were supposed to be trade-offs for every classes strength and weaknesses. Many of them having to do with what they can do in a raid, what they can do in a group and what they can do solo. Lets not go nerfing BM's cause they can out "group" heal clerics while out DPSing them at the same time. The tradeoff in that instance is survivability. Lets be honest, I don't think Remedio ever died. Ever.

On a more serious note, over arcing player power needs to be addressed before we start looking at individual classes or individual specs of classes.

That is a long ways off, and I'm sure we'll all change our opinions before then anyhow!

Got more vital stuff to worry about right now - like how many hours of sleep content design is going to steal from me...

I would like to see how the classes play out with the level cap at 50 first. I personally wouldn't mind seeing at least Disciples get some sort of rework to either reduce their melee or their healing. They are such a cool class, but by virtue of design, just overpowered. I'm not so sure how much attention Bloodmage would need. They are much harder to learn to play efficiently than any of the other healing classes that I kind of think it's not as glaring an issue for them to be slightly overpowered.
But I really think a lot of the gear that was available after the reitemization was the core of the issue. There was so much easily accessible overpowered gear for the first 40+ levels that it really took away from a lot of the essence of the game. It was just too easy to level any class really, much less a healer.

While I do agree that playing as a Cleric was... Very, very dull, I wanted to pipe up about that parse posted.

Disciple will always parse as higher Heals per second than any other class because of Inner light hitting everyone in the party all the time. The thing the parsers didn't really account for though was overheal, which Disciples spent a lot of their time doing. Those big spike heals of a Cleric were far more impactful than the Disciples constant stream of, often wasted, healing.

Back to the topic though, I do think that Cleric was pretty slow. But I think that was the intent. They're neigh unkillable in solo content (and even some group content). I had heard of more than one solo Cleric managing to take down 6dot mobs.

When you have the combination of things that a Cleric has, you have to give up something in return. They're a plate wearing healer. They're extremely safe by design so they have to give up offensive power.

I found that Death Cleric was a great all-in-one. Decent DPS, not quite like a monk but better than a tank, still with the plate and healing. Although it lacked healing bonuses and wasn't as great as a healer could be, similarly to the parse interpretation mentioned above, it was usually the small fast heals that were more important and kept everything going.

By comparison, a Preservation Cleric seemed to kill by immortality, true it was kind of slow but the beauty of it was that you could *eventually* bring something down that a different character at that level could not. I do agree this can become a little tedious if it's mostly solo. The temptation of potentially better healing did not spur me to play this character as avidly as the other one. Many people said level as death or war then switch.