Life v. Death

From my perspective, being one of the 4 or so PvPers who went and stayed Life.

Death is the way to go.
Life while OK, has no offense. I can stand there and heal all day (until I drop a stack accidentally ), but so can the Death guy, and his heals hurt me. Every Crit of 400 on me heals him on a 1:1 ratio.
So I have to choose, do DMG or Heal.
I usually choose to try to out DPS them. Problem here is they're Death Attuned, I'm Life attuned and I have no offensive Life spells to Crit them like they Crit me (again while healing themselves). I can try to Air/Water them, but 80% of guys are Air. That leaves Water. One Range Spell, its a great spell, but one isnt enough. See below why I cant go Sun and use Searing Ray.

So what are my options. oooh, I'll use Celestial blessing out of the otherwise worthless Moon Tree.
There is a catch here too. It reduces my heals. Increases Resistance to Life/Death/Lunar magic. Might as well say Detrimental/Helpful/Worthless.
My heals go down by the same percentage as my resistance to Death, its moot. If not an out right negative, because it requires Moon Attunement, which either hurts my Suns offensive or defensive powers.

Once Chaotic Feedback is fixed, I'm done for. Cant use it either without negating my heals almost totally. My Life Attune ends up at like -300. Death guys can use it perfectly though.

I went mage, so I cant speak too much to Deaths power against melee. Other than to say I went Mage early on after GM'ing a heap of stuff in Swords and Bludgeon, and I knew then that I really didn't have a chance toe to toe'ing Death guys. Not that I stand a chance at range, but a bit more .


Right now, Life is pointless in PvP.
Its OK in PvE, but I keep one heal on my PvE bar, I don't get hit enough to justify more. I rarely use the one I have now.

 

Hey, that one heal is useful for those of us who try to tank in light armor!

...no one would be stupid enough to do that, right?

 

Healers usually don't solo.

With that said, none of the skills (in any tree) are remotely functional/balanced.

 

So everyone that doesn't play in groups should all be part of some necromantic cult?

 

No... I'm not sure how you came to that conclusion.

 

I understand your point. Traditionally Healers dont run solo.
This isnt the case for this game. Nearly all of the population will take either Life or Death.
There is no true 'Healer Class'. Mainly becaus e a true healer also needs offense.

Also, its a bit of a red herring, I'm solo 30% of the time.

 

Because you equated using the life tree to being a healer - which is not the way it works in this game.

 

@Oba Evesor , @Noric : So which spell from the Life tree does damage, exactly? [Banish Undead]? The one specifically designed to damage ONLY undead?

And that obviously means that solo-ers should all be necromancers, right?

 

You used a false equivalency to disagree with the OP, so i don't see why a false equivalency can't be used as a counter-argument.

 

If something like Lich Transformation gets added to the Death school then banish undead will work on players!

 

I never disagreed; you decided that on your own.

 

I don't know what you're asking here. The entire thread is based on Life not having any offensive PvP spells. Or any offensive spells at all except Banish Undead.
It needs balancing. It needs offense (Moon too, if we're being real here).

 

Great post oba

 

Great Post oba, I'm just confused why you can't use sun magic :-(

 

The other thing to consider is utility spells. Death has one of the best defensive spells against physical damage. If life had some defensive counters to death or other utility that would help as well. Life has 6 out of 7 actives being directly a heal or a cure ability. Water is not overly offensive but actually has functionality that makes it not totally inferior.

 

One could. It would add a spell. But Celestial Blessing scales its resist off of attunement. It scales its duration off of level. So for it to be effective at all you need Moon attune high. Which negates Sun stuff.

If I did go sun that would give me another offensive spell (which the person I'm fighting probably already has, since there is no negative attunement to Sun that has any offense).


Doesn't address that when fighting Death I'm still stuck casting 4 heals (since heals have been nerfed again and again) and 1 DPS spell to their 1:1 heal/attack Death Ray.

 

If you didn't disagree, i would say it was not communicated effectively. Both the person you replied to and myself seem to have concluded the same thing about what you meant but didn't say.

Anyway, if you do or don't agree - that's totally fine and dandy. I think Oba has it particularly bad right now because of the weakness to death magic that life attunement currently causes. In theory, that is going to be going away with R29, but even after that the homogeneous aspect of the life tree could use some work.