lets talk healing

I'm beginning to feel like a whiner with all the posts I have done recently, maybe its from being spoiled by other games, I get having a " challenge " but when you have nearly level 50 in every healing skill, its hard to ignore only getting maybe 20 hit points from it, especially when in combat it seems to be half that. Am I doing something wrong? I increase my INT and maybe that does nothing I am unsure. I am trying to make sense of progression but it hasn't proven itself to be very comforting. When you have 300+ hit points, healing is essentially worthless, and don't get me started on healing potions.

If I did nothing but healing while in combat I still die, I've tested this out, it does nothing worthwhile. And when you are ganked by a swordsman, and an archer (pve not pvp) skels or other its just a never ending loop of die-ing and coming back to exact revenge. Thank god the game doesn't penalize for death or I would be pretty screwed. I still struggle to enjoy grinding, but at least in other games you feel like you make some progress. I use shield spells both water and earth and use weapon block skills nothing seems to help. Any suggestions on strategy or is it just an imbalance that I am experiencing at this point in game?

 

The game DOES penalize you for dieing... but I agree the healing seems a bit weak. I think its on purpose though. Just like being in cloth as a mage, doesnt make you sturdy like a melee warrior in Plate.

More balancing is needed.

 

Well first of all: If you only heal and don't do damage, you certainly die eventually... but I think you already know that.
So back to your concerns about healing... Being a fullhearted healer myself I exerience similar problems (yes, I call it that, naming it a challenge doesn't make it go away either, so face it ) I'm not quite as high up in the skilltrees yet, but I not solely focus on healing and defensive spells, but go for a good mic of damage-spells as well. So far I can hold myself quite good against a 3-skull or two. Cycling in some crowd-control-spells that stun your opponents helps too.
The challenge for the devs right now is (yes, here it IS a challenge) that they need to balance out a skill- and combat system which allows for basically all kind of combinations... they need to design the skills so they add up to usefull builds. The task of combining them is up to us. Nothing of all that (the part of the devs and our part as players) is any way near completion yet. So if your current build isn't working, it's part because the skills aren't not quite what they need to be and part because they don't fit into each other to form a working build for your playstyle.
My advise: try add some more aggressive skills/spells into your decks, maybe add some crowd control and maybe try some other equipment as well. Try using a shield and wand and/or other types of armor.

And the most important part of it: keep reporting your findings here, so the devs can read about it. Else they will never know what is working and what is not!

 

Healing is working as intended

There are currently however no good alternatives to healing which makes this feel underpowered

PS I would love if the healing tree was removed all together

 

"working as intended" ... well, that might be so or maybe not. But whatever might be intended or not might still not what the game needs it to be. So it's for us, the players to post our expericence with the game.

Beside that I don't understand how the lack of alternatives can make something feel underpowered? How would the existence of an alternative to healing make healing feel more powerfull? And what would be an alternative to healing?

But if you don't feel the healing tree to be of importance to you, well, you don't have to use it. That would be as if it wouldn't exist for you.

 

Shields that you put up to prevent yourself from taking damage instead of taking damage and healing up full.
Healing was nerfed because EVERYONE needs to have it which does not make sense with the "classless" system that we have. I figured next step was to bring in more shield type spells after the nerf apparently I was wrong

 

in UO you had bandages to heal with too, only mages should use healing here its a magic tree so, it should scale with intelligence or something.

 

Nobody HAS to used healing, you can just avoid the spell and ... um... die in peace...thinking "Mommy, I didnt press the healing button, I didnt, I swear!!"

 

Alrighty now I get what you try to say, and I agree, atleast to some extend. Yes, there should be more effective ways to prevent damage. The skills and spells are there, but their effectiveness is still limited. Tweaking such mechanisms needs time and more than one try to get it right. Right now the devs have tuned down healing to see how that effects gameplay. Now they can start raising effectiveness of damage mitigating and healing effects to get a balanced and working state... well, that's how I would do it (and I have done it on a much smaler scale of game)
So yes, there should be more than one way to keep you alive, even wehn playing solo and I'm sure they are working to achieve that goal, too.

 

My healing tree has skills above 50 in all areas and attunement near 50. I have noticed some heals critting for 60+ health. So I am seeing a improvement. But the idea of bandages we had in UO is a GREAT idea. Dye your bandages too!
I would like to see that idea of bandages take flight!

 

What kind of healing are you trying to do? Are you a full healer? Or just healing yourself in combat?

If you're a full healer, you could make a major difference by slotting all of your gear with Diamonds. It will raise your attunement by 40 points. This makes a rather large difference in your numbers.

If you're just trying to heal yourself in combat, then I'd definitely recommend Death Field to you if you fight multiple enemies at a time. Death Field will cause damage to all enemies in an area around your target and also heal you for that same amount of damage done for each enemy. So if you were fighting 5 enemies and did 15 damage to each of them with death field, that's 75 healing that you would receive. If you don't use any other types of magic as a main damage source, then socketing diamonds could be useful to you as well to increase your healing effectiveness.

Intelligence will scale its healing up and will also increase your spell critical chance. Healing spells can crit, so it's definitely worth raising your INT.

 

I was in the same boat, 60+ in the life passives, 40 in every life active except rezz at 15. Pitiful heals then I had diamonds put in my chest and 2h weapon. Oh wow what a difference. Healing touch in combat while fighting heals for 36-110 Same for healing ray. 36 is the smallest heal and 110 is the biggest I have seen since gemming my gear Two days ago.

Also as for full dedicated heals you can heal much more often with a dedicated healing draw deck than you can off the non combat bar those lock slot cooldowns really limit your potential.

Also how is your bar setup? For me I have slots 6,7,8,9 set as dedicated draw slots for healing touch and healing ray, when I need heals I just spam all 4 heals, then go back to killing. The more often you heal the more healing you need because the fight lasts longer. You want burst heals then fight some more.

You could check what your fighting and in what order. Archers must die first, then mages, then melee. Basically you want to kill off the heavy damage dealers first, then work your way down the list.

Also when fighting packs of archers, kill one then run off while healing, rest up and then come back and drop another. When fighting make sure never expose your back to the enemy, they get bonuses to hit and critical from the back just like you do.

When fighting mobs that run, stand on the opposite side from where you want them to run to. That way they run away from their friends instead of towards them.


Another thing, don't take the actives you use above 40 until you have massive amounts of focus and can handle the focus drain. (i have almost 500 focus, and don't have a single active skill above 40 yet) In the Melee world, an active skill at 40 only does about 10-15% less damage than the same skill at 70, but the same skill at 70 costs between 45-65% more focus. If your using skills from a magic tree, you want to raise every active skill to 40, then raise all the actives you aren't using as high as possible for the attunement bonus, then after you have focus to spare, you can start dumping xp into the actives you actually fight with.

 

The state of healing in this game is much better than what people are writing in this thread. I would actually praise them for their great balance when it comes to healing.

I currently play a dedicated healer, and I've put many hours into him. With over 900 skill points in life magic and an attunement above 122 I can tell you, life magic becomes more than sufficient. When it comes to normal targeted heals with healing ray for instance, the heals usually hit for over 80 and sometimes crit for around 200. Healing grace alone provides excellent blanket healing for regular situations.

The system is set up so if you dabble in it, you'll see okay returns, but if you focus the stacking effects of the passives and your attunement it will really add up. You have your base healing values from your skills, but once you add in the heal other passive, life power passive and the attunement bonuses it really stacks well.

Getting the bonuses from placing diamonds into your equipment for the attunement bonuses makes a noticeable difference, but then at that point, you've focused your equipment into healing, and you deserve those bonuses. I like this system, because it makes it so people who are just casual healers, can never really attain the healing power of a dedicated healer.

So in short, healing works really well, and I think it's very well balanced at this point. With some focus and time, the power of those heals keep creeping up and eventually you and your party really notice.

PS The comment up above said you couldn't keep yourself alive self healing. Trust me that's not always true, once you are extremely high with life magic you'll have many things beating on you all the time because of all the taunt from healing you draw. You'll be self healing and staying alive while many things are beating on you at once.

 

While all that is most likely true (why should you lie?) it's getting there and having fun while doing it, that still seems to be a problem for some if not many dedicated healers.

 

I agree there's a problem for dedicated healers, but imo that's not related with its performance as a skill tree (which i also think it's way too convenient, having the best defensive skills in the game all together). The problem is that, the way things are atm, the concept of dedicated healer doesn't make sense. The reasons being

1. In a system with well defined roles like World of Warcraft, a healer was made to just heal, and it was reflected in the power of his healing. That can't be done here because healing it's not a role, but a feature everybody can (and will, see 2) pick.
2. The healing skill tree is the only way characters have to recover HP in combat without being a drain (that's death). Being in a classless system, everybody raises a couple skills there.
3. The way magic has been developed, magic have no special penalty on full plated melees. So tanks are, by default, healers able to heal themselves.

To sum it up, the main issue from my point of view is that the expectations of being a "dedicated healer" can't be met in the current classless system. Other than RP or personal reasons, there's no point in not having a hybrid character or a pure mage. And because how healing works, you can be a full cloth mage GM in the healing skill tree, but you won't heal any better than a melee who did exactly the same. Your healls will still be useful because there are monsters that hits like a truck on steroids, but there's no sense in planning to be only healing.

That may change if they make some radical things to the combat system... but for now that's what we have.

 

I wouldn't consider that necessarily true. For some of the true endgame content, you'll definitely want someone on healing duty. For example, dragon fights... I attacked the dragon in Southern Grunvald Barrens and he immediately hit me for 333 critical damage. There's no way I'm going to be able to heal myself back up after that quickly enough by myself. You'd need some assistance from someone else healing to survive that kind of damage. Granted, if I had my fire resistance buffs active at the time then it would have only hit me for about 200 damage, but that's still a very large amount of incoming damage that would be very difficult to heal yourself through without the assistance of a dedicated healer using a healing deck.

For the majority of other content however, I agree. There's not point in having a dedicated healer for general farming/questing. You can always keep a separate deck for damage though on your alternate and switch between the two depending on the situation. You can assign different gear to each deck as well (this is what I plan on doing, an Air/Fire/Death deck and a solely healing deck).

 

Actually there is a role for dedicated healer.
In group battles a dedicated healer is very useful and desirable. But that means you have to go into multiplayer and actually find people that are tackling hard enough content that you are an asset instead of a drain, and finding a group without nobles chat, means you stuck with guild chat, overland map zone chat, local zone chat , or the forums to find grouping buddies.

Previously, Healer spec + tamer spec was viable (not ideal but was viable way to play, I watched someone play that way solo for almost an hour).
It is just a few more tweaks away from being viable playstyle again.

There are also plenty of undead, and life does some nice damage to undead, so there is potential there to make a career in the life tree.
(yes it isn't ideal, but it's possible, and this early in development, that is promising)

It would be much better paired up with a second skill tree, but I think the potential is there to make a life focused character.
However it would be much better with a very social player, hermit type power gamers will find it totally useless as dedicated playstyle.

 

That´s why i said

If you're focused on the healing skill tree you'll be the one to put on healing duty when it's needed, but since lots of other players may be dedicated enough to healing to fulfill that role, you'll need some other skills. Efficient heal is not special (and even less considering that increased healing on others is a mandatory innate.

As i said before there is, but as you also said you'll need a second skill tree. Under the current model, no character focused in a single tree has meaning, because you can raise two at least, without too much trouble. If i have to choose between a guy with only healing and other that has healing and something else, i know who i'd pick.

I may pull the extra mile and say that if you're focused on a single skill tree to get all the skills over 100 it can be awesome. But even so, under the current model, there's no point on specializing on healing because everybody heals.

 

yes but not everyone heals well, and most chars don't have enough focus on the life tree, get it it to the point it's useful until slightly later levels.
(I know for a while, I just went without of combat healing, only retreat healing and just rested after battles instead because combat healing would actually hurt my xp per hour, so I would grind mobs, until I got low, then rest, then grind then rest)

I agree with you in principal, no one with any playstyle will limit themselves to exactly 1 tree (outside of Roleplaying a Gimped character)

However I'm saying there is potential for a character to spec life as their primary skill to make a viable playstyle. As long as they went out of their way to find people to group up with and make their superb healing shine.

 

I'll check that out