Curse

dorn · May 08, 2005, 04:30 AM // 04:30

I'm sure someone will come in here in a sec and denounce me as a noob but this has been bugging me. Truly monks have a lot better skills and in reality most of my annoyance with monks often is due to their sub class or some other enchant.

This one though seems a bit over the top to me. As a healing spell it's not too horrid. I think +8 is too good personally considering that makes it a cheap fast recast counter to at least two degen spells. What really gets on my nerves about it though is it's ability to absorb enchant breaks then be nearly instantly recast.

Perhaps this is inexpierence on my part though. I know I've seen people complaining about enchant breaking being too weak but everytime I look at it it's more an issue of these low cost fast recast enchants always "taking the hit" instead of something like healing seed or mark of protection.

Anyways feel free to rip at my post I won't pretend to know enough to act like it's gospel and I deffinetly need to get a better grasp of this kind of thing.

Typhoon · May 08, 2005, 05:10 AM // 05:10

Yes, healing is too good. And yes, the monk players will come in here and say that everyone else has it all wrong. I might as well point this out before they do. There is always a problem with balancing healing classes, but the fact is it's better to make a healer overpowered than underpowered.

The solution is not to nerf healing, but to make the other aspects of the game more important. There are many spells in this game that are either ineffective or too situational to deserve a spot in the spellbar, and they need to be buffed up.

As a ranger I like to use many stances, preparations and debuffs. Does anyone ever try to break these buffs with spells? No. How often do I see negative effects like blind, cripple, poison and bleeding removed with a spell? Close to never. There are many spells avaiable to multiple classes that remove both positive and negative effects, but when you compare these spells to others that have vastly more flexibility, and then factor in a limited number of spell slots, it's not a suprise why most people don't ever bother with these spells.

The above is just an example part of the game design which is not as important and powerful as it should be. Other things like interrupts and slow effects (elementalists get an entire spell tree of it) have limited use and should have a bigger role in player combat, so that more people have reason to place these kinds of spells in their spellbar.

dorn · May 08, 2005, 05:44 AM // 05:44

While the "monks heal too well" debate might have some backing I wasn't really getting at that particular point right here.

I was more interested in pointing out that this one spell seems too over the top in terms of flexbility, energy conseration, and healing in general.

I've no problem with monks being able to slap +8 regen on a player but in mind since it realistically takes two hexs/conditions to get -8 regen then it really should require two spots on the monks bar to get the same effect.

Also because this is an "enchantment" with a 2s recast and fast casting time it acts as too much of a sponge against enchantment breaking spells that are all on long recast timers. I see a lot of expierenced players say Rend Enchantments is the only ball game in town because of this. Rend is very dangerous but the fact remains it seems to be the only spell with a high chance of nailing a serious enchantment and thus letting you actually kill the player in question.

Of course healing breeze isn't the only one guilty of this but in my eyes it seems to be the worst offender.

Rhazwyth · May 08, 2005, 05:55 AM // 05:55

Just use mark of subversion or any other similar spell, and they can't cast it.

PieXags · May 08, 2005, 06:05 AM // 06:05

Dorn, there are some skills of other classes that can slap a degeneration of 8, or more, on a player. There are loads of mesmers skills that do something very similar, chaos storm for example makes the enemy (and nearby enemies) lose 5-12 health each second, not as fast as degeneration, but when you're losing 12 health per second that can add up, or you could go with conjure phantasm and make them have a health degeneration of 5 for 12 seconds or something of the sort.

Why a mesmer can counter just about any sort of cast if you get right down to it, the problem is you just don't see enough mesmers in the game, I'd bet that they're the most unpopular class we've got right now (which is why I switched from my ranger to a mesmer).

Lets say the monk goes and gives one of his allies health regeneration of 8, and then slaps another basic healing skill right afterwords, well a mesmer could simply cast chaos storm and have them lose all but about 5 points of that health they just gained from the regeneration, and then he could cast backfire on the monk himself so that his next cast to give him a second healing backfires on himself causing him to lose quite a fair bit of damage (35-119).

It evens out if you've got the right people involved, and even if it didn't, the skill in itself isn't a big deal.

Rotgut The Unholy · May 08, 2005, 06:08 AM // 06:08

I say slightly buff all healing but give it a "Recently healed" negative status effect making you unable to be healed for say, 20 seconds or something.

Lazarous · May 08, 2005, 06:15 AM // 06:15

Actually that might be a good idea, though not quite in the form you proposed it. What if healing became progressively less effective on a single target? Like add something like the DP but call it healing penalty or something, where it increases by a certain amount each spell cast on the target, decreases with time not being cast on.

Laz

Typhoon · May 08, 2005, 06:51 AM // 06:51

Quote:

Originally Posted by PieXags

Dorn, there are some skills of other classes that can slap a degeneration of 8, or more, on a player. There are loads of mesmers skills that do something very similar, chaos storm for example makes the enemy (and nearby enemies) lose 5-12 health each second, not as fast as degeneration, but when you're losing 12 health per second that can add up, or you could go with conjure phantasm and make them have a health degeneration of 5 for 12 seconds or something of the sort.

Why a mesmer can counter just about any sort of cast if you get right down to it, the problem is you just don't see enough mesmers in the game, I'd bet that they're the most unpopular class we've got right now (which is why I switched from my ranger to a mesmer).

Lets say the monk goes and gives one of his allies health regeneration of 8, and then slaps another basic healing skill right afterwords, well a mesmer could simply cast chaos storm and have them lose all but about 5 points of that health they just gained from the regeneration, and then he could cast backfire on the monk himself so that his next cast to give him a second healing backfires on himself causing him to lose quite a fair bit of damage (35-119).

It evens out if you've got the right people involved, and even if it didn't, the skill in itself isn't a big deal.

My secondary is a mesmer. You can't spam chaos storm out of the box, and if you went as far to make a special setup to make it spammable, it's in no way near worth it. Conjure Phantasm is easily counterable by a monk, and even paired with other damaging spells like backfire will not win you any contest in damage output or mana dumping, a good monk build with elite heals will always stay on top of it.

Mesmers get many good hexes and spells against casting that are good against monks, but the problem is it takes many stacking of hexes and the combined casting times makes you too vunerable a target. Monks get heals that almost fill their entire lifebar, they also get Orison of Healing which is incredibly difficult to interrupt, partly why it's one of their top spammables.

The biggest mistake a group makes when fighting a good monk, is that they focus everything on that Monk. And while that monk sits there and spams super heals on himself, the rest of the monk's party has free reign to systematicaly elimiate the enemy team one by one. Personally, I love it when I'm grouped with a good monk against a team that thinks focus fire will take him down, because it allows be to sit there and shoot fish in a barrel.

Monks can counter an enemy's focus fire for a large amount of time and use it to their teams advantage. Rangers also have limited ability to absorb focus fire and use it to their advantage, but nowhere near to the extent of the monk. To take down a good monk, you have to coordinate your damage between a monk and another target. You have to force the monk to choose between healing himself or his dying teamate, until eventualy one of them dies.

My gripe is that monks and rangers are the only two classes that can put up this kind of survivability. And at least the ranger can only use his survival skills for himself, and not to heal others. Monks not only get best of both worlds, but other classes which deserve better survival options don't get anything.

JAGeAkurei · May 08, 2005, 11:42 AM // 11:42

healing breeze in itself isn't too bad, a necro or mesmer can shut it down real quick

Hado · May 08, 2005, 12:20 PM // 12:20

Healing Breeze is fine. Slightly expensive, not something most of the good monks often run on their skill bars.

It's just that enchant removal's so broken right now, that pretty much anything that involves enchant/defensive skill stacking seems stupidly overpowered.

Xellos · May 08, 2005, 12:48 PM // 12:48

I thought stuff like Shield of Imbalance and Protective Spirit/Bond were issues, why the heck is such a weak skill comparably considered overpowered?

SoTzuMe · May 08, 2005, 01:25 PM // 13:25

Healing Breeze is expensive for a monk primary, though an el/mo can drop it like a robot. In any case, compared with something like Draw or Remove Conditions (5 energy) or Remove Hex it's a pretty expensive counter to mesmers and necs.

Here's why healing isn't overpowered: a typical competitive HoH team has at least two, often 3 healers. Now, with just 2 healers, that's 25% of your team dedicated to healing. Intuitively, that sounds about right to me.

But with the more common 3 healer setup (arguable if it's more common, but I tend to think it is with winning teams at least) 37.5% of your team is used to heal the the rest. That seems high to me; it's over a third of your team.

dorn · May 08, 2005, 10:08 PM // 22:08

Quote:

Originally Posted by Xellos

I thought stuff like Shield of Imbalance and Protective Spirit/Bond were issues, why the heck is such a weak skill comparably considered overpowered?

That was my point really. Healing Breeze is part of the problem because it makes getting rid of Shield of Imbalance etc harder.

Someone said that enchant breaking is just too messed up but I honestly think the real problem is there are too many token enchants that you can stack on a target compounded with the fact that you don't know which enchants are there.

On the other side of things you have hexes where your teammate can click control + mouse click and tell you in an instant that he has this horrible hex on him and you can purge it off or spam cast remove hex untill it's gone.

I think allowing you to spam break enchants would be quetionable though because a lot of them are on long recast timers and they'd just suddenly suck.

Then theres the versatility of healing breeze. Someone implied a mesmer can somehow get -8 degen with one spell? The highest I've seen is -5 though. I think mereley that 8 regen in one spell slot is a bit much. Split that up into two slots somehow without having even more enchants be on the same target.

Vittorio · May 08, 2005, 11:09 PM // 23:09

At 12 Healing, Healing Breeze heals 160 hp total OVER TEN SECONDS and doesn't have the advantages of instant heals in that it can't be cast multiple times to heal more. I'm not at all saying that this spell isn't good, but it's not nearly as good as you make it out to be.

shalafifred · May 09, 2005, 04:21 AM // 04:21

healing breeze at 12 heals only 16 a second, which is truly not very much if u wanna talk about pure damage, you can easily do 50+ damage a second if u know what you are doing, or u can interupt monks so they cant heal near as good

either way i do not think their heals are to powerful in anyway

d4nowar · May 09, 2005, 05:03 AM // 05:03

i think shield of regeneration is similar. except it is much better. why use healing breeze when you can use SoR?

goku19123 · May 09, 2005, 05:22 AM // 05:22

To me, Healing Breeze's function in PvP is to help negate the negative pips from degen spells...

Typhoon · May 09, 2005, 07:26 AM // 07:26

Healing Breeze is fine, it's Osiron of healing that is the problem. For a nearly instacast, spammable 5 energy heal spell that is near impossible to interrupt, every monk that comes under attack will ***** that skill to no end.

The counter to spammable spells is both interrupt AND daze effect. Unfortunately the ONLY good daze affect belongs to the mesmer. Concussive shot blows.

Keure · May 09, 2005, 08:40 AM // 08:40

Quote:

Originally Posted by Typhoon

Healing Breeze is fine, it's Osiron of healing that is the problem. For a nearly instacast, spammable 5 energy heal spell that is near impossible to interrupt, every monk that comes under attack will ***** that skill to no end.

The counter to spammable spells is both interrupt AND daze effect. Unfortunately the ONLY good daze affect belongs to the mesmer. Concussive shot blows.

Backfire, diversion and energy draining is fun, but I can't wait until I get Blackout.

One of these days I'll use Arcane Conundrum.

dorn · May 09, 2005, 11:22 AM // 11:22

Quote:

Originally Posted by Typhoon

The counter to spammable spells is both interrupt AND daze effect. Unfortunately the ONLY good daze affect belongs to the mesmer. Concussive shot blows.

Last I checked mesmers don't get daze right? Daze is 3x casting time and you get interupted if you take damage from what I understood. Quite powerful yet quite situational to me because it's damn hard to catch a monk casting a long enough spell to land a concussive shot or skull crack.