Let's talk about healing...

[Morglum]

I've seen quite a few balance-related notes being posted here recently but surprisingly no one is talking about healing, which is strange.

Healing is now pretty much the goto strategy in Genesis and in my opinion it's heavily imbalanced and the way it's implemented it also leads to the desertion of cool guilds.

After all the magic recodes and enhancers being added (plenty of enhancers) layman healing has become pretty strong. If you couple this with the fact that healing spells cost almost no mana and can be spammed you get the effect of infinite health for free.

It's one of the reasons why Minstrels are so popular now, since you get healing and you don't need components.

Personally I don't mind healing being useful (although as it is now it is broken), what irks me the most is that healing isn't made equal so some guilds get abandoned. Take for example Heralds of the Valar, who technically should have the strongest healing spell of all the laymans, with their option to consume extra components for better effect. Alas, who would go for that when you can go Minstrel or OotS and have healing for free? Even the extra component effect is pointless now within the guild itself. Why sacrifice 2 components for 1.5x the effect if I can sacrifice 2 components for 2x the effect? If the mana cost doesn't matter it'll always be more beneficial to just spam more cheaper stuff than do more powerful ones. The fact that you even need a component for a healing spell automatically removes this guild from the pool of viable layman choices for the purpose.

Would it be too much to ask for a bit of a review/unification on the healing front? It should definitely cost some more mana so it's not spammable but still useful. Also guilds that have healing that uses components could be brought back into the "good guild" category by making their base healing spells free (and maybe use one component for stronger effect to preserve this capability). Or the other way around, where component requirement would be added to the guilds that now have it for free (but I guess this might dissuade people from taking such options altogether).

What are other people's thoughts on the subject?

[Karpath]

In my optics every layman guild should be a trinket guild at most. Perhaps have a light spell, create food/drink a basic punch, stab or slash or some such. The layman CASTER guilds as they are now are layman guild by slot but occupational guilds by strength.

[Arman]

I personally think layman healing is generally fine, but it is pretty clear that free cast heals is probably too convenient. It might be time to consider layman guilds requiring more intensive component requirements

[Thalric]

When rangers use their layman heals instead of occ ones... something is totally off.
Layman spells ought to either have cooldown, less effect or higher cost.
If only one of them, relatively high difference from now.. if all, less so, of course.

[nils]

I've been of the view that heals in their current state are way to powerful, but I have this theory that it might not be the heals themselves, but the enhancers, that are the root cause. In a realm where everyone and their dog have access to them I'm leaning towards being in favour of removing all layman heals, or in the very least increase the mana cost to only yield 50% of hp-pool. It would still be a benefit, but very far from unlimited hit points, which they very much de facto are now.

Remember back when we waited for alcohol to do it's thing cause there was nothing else that sped up healing?

Edit: Making heals only castable when not afflicted by adrenaline could work as well.

[OgreToyBoy]

Edit: Making heals only castable when not afflicted by adrenaline could work as well.

This, for layman healers would get a direct and positive effect. Those who are trained occupational healers should be able to heal in-combat like before. Might need to add so healing make you adrenalined if healing someone in combat.

[Morglum]

In my opinion there are 2 separate issues here:

1. Unequal access to healing - for layman guilds either all should require component use or none of them. Doesn't matter if it's charges like with warlocks or on-use components, it should be unified across the board. As is we do have more diversity which might look like a good thing but it only creates a situation where people will select the most optimal choice (and this being of course no component requirement because it's the most bang for the buck). This in turn leads to guilds being abandoned in favor of the optimal ones (and potential toxic behavior with people laughing at those choosing sub-optimal stuff).

2. Free healing being broken - this is the other side of the coin (and a big reason why free heal guilds are chosen over component ones). If the decision is made to make all healing "free" there should be measures taken to address the infinite hp issue. Either give it a steep mana cost, increase cooldown significantly, disable casting in (or into) combat or some other thing like that.

[Cherek]

I think the majority of the players and wizards are pretty much in agreement that heal, or at least layman heal, is too good. I am sure there are a few that might disagree, but, those would be few I think.

The question is really HOW should we change it and WHO should do it.

I think, realistically, with the current wizard workforce, we need some sort of simple solution that works across the board. We don't really have the ability to make big individual changes to each guild at the moment, and we don't really have any active wizards who can do massive global changes with relative "ease". Basically, we have a bunch layman wizards but few occupational wizards

Adding a component cost will probably work, but it does require adjusting all guilds + help files. Which means involcvng several lieges, GM's, etc. My experience is that those kind of projects have a low chance of success. Components are also hard to balance right, I think, which may require additional tweaking.

I think the adrenaline idea does sound quite interesting. I don't know how hard it might be technically, but it doesn't sound too hard, and it would have an immediate effect on all layman guilds. The potential problem with this idea is that it's "all or nothing". We can't really tweak this. We nerf all layman heal with the time it takes to lose adrenaline, and we canät adjust it either way if it turns out to be too little of a nerf, or too big of a nerf.

The idea I've had for some time is to make enhancers provide a smaller bonus, or even have no effect, for layman guilds. Question is of course what the right number is. The positive thing with this idea is that we get one variable that we can use to tweak all layman healing with easily.

I do think a nerf to layman heal would be good for a lot of things in the game. The main downside in my opinion that it will likely decrease growth speed for everyone, but especially smaller players who can punch above their weight thanks to heal. I do think it's worth it, though, because if the game was too DPS-focused a few years ago, we went the other way now and made it too heal-focused.

[Cherek]

In my optics every layman guild should be a trinket guild at most. Perhaps have a light spell, create food/drink a basic punch, stab or slash or some such. The layman CASTER guilds as they are now are layman guild by slot but occupational guilds by strength.

That's how it once was. I don't think it was some deliberate design choice to change that, but over time there has definitely been an inflation of layman guild powers, especially magic laymans. I guess many wizards, naturally, wanted to add a lot of stuff to their guilds, and they had lots of fun ideas, and no real guidelines or rules regarding versatility. We have rules and guidelines for how much combat aid a guild can have at any given time, but no rules for how MANY abilities or spells a guild can have. And here we are now.

For magic it probably started with Worshippers, then Warlocks was made to provide en evil/neutral free to join version with similar powers, and then other magic laymans got an upgrade to stay competitive, and now we find ourselves in a position where it's hard to scale things down. We did discuss a scale-down project on the admin forum, but, it kind of stalled. I think we had a good idea that would limit caster laymans to ONE main power, followed by ONE lesser secondary power (similar to what melee laymans usually have), and a small number of utlity spells (also limited in number). I don't remember the exact details and I am too lazy to find the thread, but it was something like that. Due to the scope of the project it pretty quickly stalled, though. Nobody raised their hand and said "I'll do it! I'll recode them guilds!", and that was probably the end of that idea

So yeah, I think we're stuck with what we have now for the forseeable future. I do think nerfing layman heal might go a pretty long way to make melee laymans a bit more interesting, though. Heal does seem to be the main culprit at the moment. The main must-have ability. Another idea I've been contemplating is to add a "levels tax" thing, which shows (with text descriptors) the tax of a guild. (Thanks Wolverine for the idea). I think if players could see that your seemingly weak melee layman guild actually has MUCH less tax than the caster guild with 35 different spells, the melee option might feel a bit more appealing too.

[Hunter]

Hi,

I think make all layman spellcasters only able to use enhancers as if they were one-handed (meaning even two handed enhancers work as though they were one handed). Occupational spellcasters can use enhancers that work as they do now as either one or two handed.

Hunter