I want to revisit Healing skills!! I am a Cleric i want to play a cleric but i cant!

That's pretty much due to how skewed the difficulty scaling is; Healing Touch is practically mandatory for everyone at this point... which reduces the value for those who want to focus on it (although, theoretically, theirs would be more powerful).

I've been playing for 2 releases without the healing school of magic and I've been severely gimped.

 

Yea, I think it is a big mistake to not add non Magic healing like bandages before persistence.

I also think that the regen rate is very much too fast in combat. And that it would be better if it instead was out of combat only and scaling with the stillness bonus.
Why that is an issue is because all mob damage are balanced with that in mind which again is forcing most players to add Life magic.

I also think that depending on healing proffifiency/attunement that heals should have diminishing returns and shouldn't heal back to max.
Just like with item durability. There should be
Current Health/Current Max/Real Max
and when taking big hits 10% round down of the damage decrease your Current Max. (Hits making <10 doesn't decrease)
When you regenerate, or apply "low level" healing like a mediocre potion or simple spells like Healing Touch, they only increase your Current Health towards your Current Max.
Where the only way to increase your Current Max towards your Real Max is by 'high level' healing or by "Resting"=Camp+Food+big vulnerability debuff for an XX duration of time.

Addressing those three would really differentiate a high level healer to something useful. While creating player market opportunities. And fix some balancing issues and some AFK exploits at the same time.

 

Caveat - None of this is snark. These are all honest questions and my experiences.

I would love to know what exactly playing at a "high level" or "endgame" really means to people in this game right now. As far as I can tell, it's not a whole lot different from what I'm doing now. I'm honestly really confused by this conversation and it sounds more like perception from people who haven't played a dedicated healer at a high level vs. actual play time as or with a high level healer. Who here has chimed in that is, in fact, a high level healer? And I mean one that groups regularly and participates in PvP. I think Margaritte has, but I'd love to hear from some more experiences.

I'm level 56. My Healing Touch and my Healing Ray are locked at 70 in favor of leveling innates. I've been focusing on increasing my range with Life Reach (at 42 currently) in order to see how that affects my ability to heal during group fights. I find the range on Healing Touch to be an incredibly limiting factor. I can't heal out of range of many attacks (trolls, demons) with that spell. I often end up taking a good amount of damage myself...or I stand out of range and only really have Healing Ray at my disposal.

I play regularly with someone who is currently Adventurer Level 70. I heal, he hits stuff. We've played at control points, 5 skull zones, and we've taken on trolls and the ghost corpion as a pair. With a little learning curve, we're usually successful. As I stated before, I group with full parties once a week. We tackle high level mobs, 5 skull zones, controls points....and we've played tag with a demon and a dragon. I'm usually the only primary healer. Sometimes we have some cross healing. We have a group with a range of Adventurer Levels and Skills (some ranged, some magic, some melee). The healing is never not needed.

I'm a terrible PvP player. I paired up with an archer to play fight with the same lvl 70 who honestly hits pretty hard and is way better at PvP. Having a healer in the fight was helpful, at least in my opinion.

Solo play is a little different. I've chosen a full healer/escape build. That was a choice I made and what it does is sacrifice damage output for survivability. When I'm solo, my progress is slower. I could easily change that by adding a few other abilities in the mix (and I have started to by leveling my blades innates). I don't see a situation where I couldn't effectively output damage and be a good healer. Just the time and effort to level the skills and find the right mix. I mean - there should be trade offs for the choices we make in our playstyle, right? The only situation I see this being a huge pitfall is for those that are trying to race to some predefined max level. Which would really only be applicable in PvP at this point, right?

All of that being said, people who don't regularly heal as a playstyle typically don't think to heal party members. It's just not part of their playstyle. Sometimes they will toss a heal on themselves, but in my observation....they drop healing the second a healer enters the group. Why heal when you can hit things?

I am also dying to hear from someone who was told that they weren't wanted in a party because they were a dedicated healer.

 

Well, I did say I have no idea if it's happening in this game currently, but this is sort of what the deal is in MMOs:

The high end content is whatever content you are not guaranteed to succeed at by just plucking away at it. It's whatever content starts rewarding quality of play over quantity of play. PvP is pretty much always like that, but most games do want some challenging PvE content as well, because there is a market for it, and it gets people a lot more engaged in the game if there is actually a discussion of "How do you beat X?".

The problem with creating that kind of content is that you need to somehow restrict how many players can take it on in order to ensure that it's actually challenging, so that creates a scarcity of group spots. In order for content to actually pose a challenge you simply have to have a system where bringing people who aren't up to the challenge along means it gets way harder or even impossible to do.

So that's where the issue with healers comes in. You can have a game built like WoW where you simply need a healer to succeed. It's simply a requirement, so every group has a healer, no questions asked. You can also have a game like Guild Wars 2 where healers are optional, and all content can be beaten without one. The problem with the former is that it often annoys people not to be able to attempt the content with whatever characters they happen to have around, and the problem with the latter is that it creates situation where taking a healer along becomes seen as a measure of slowing down the group to make the fights easier, which tends to mean the most skilled players will want to eschew the healer entirely.

We'll see how it all plays out, I'm not sure this game currently has any content where you can't just take anyone you want along, and in many ways that's a positive thing, because it lets people build whatever character they want without worrying too much about getting excluded. Ultima Online did pull this off rather well, so maybe there is nothing to worry about. Tabula Rasa on the other hand got shitcanned by a lot of people for not having anything to do at the high end, and what they meant by that was "There is nothing that actually feels like my quest for power and efforts to get good at the game are required & rewarded".

 

I will try to explain more about what I mean when I say that I worry end-game healers will suffer. Right now, I'm level 92. Last release cycle, I ended at 92 as well and had GMs in Healing Touch, Healing Ray and Beneficent Blessing with the other Life innates and skills in the high 80's or 90's and several other GMs that were not directly related to healing. I did and do lot of healing for groups: big ones and little ones, for PvP and PvE with lots of different guilds and player groups. I have thousands of hours logged in the game, and healing is my favorite thing to do, so I've spent a lot of time working on it.

I have never, ever, had anyone say that I was not wanted in a party. There is a big difference between not being welcome and not being needed, if that makes sense. When I talk about healers becoming obsolete, it's more an issue of leveling and maintaining many skills at GM level or above. Big parties will always benefit from having a healer, as will control point runs, team PvP (if the healer is tough!) and some boss fights. From what I've seen, they usually happen for fun, and do not come close to netting the kind of adv and prd exp needed to maintain end game skills. When I do those sorts of things, my exp pool plummets unless I have everything turned off that I'm using at the time. The sort of exp that lets you progress at a reasonable rate at higher levels comes from rounding up and quickly killing large groups of high level mobs, like the spiders in Deep Ravenswood, for example. It's a question of efficiency.

I have spent a lot of time working with players, in groups of two, doing just this sort of thing. What I saw was invariably the player dealing the damage was eventually more than capable of doing this in the same amount of time with or without healing. That is not to say that they did not take damage, but could survive long enough to make the pull, kill all the mobs and then recover while preparing the next pull or harvesting the mobs for prd exp. At that point, with a healer, those players were basically giving up 40% of their experience when they didn't need to. To me, that is obsoletion. Will people do that for their healer? Of course they will, but to me, a healer is there to help players do something they couldn't do on their own or to help them do something faster and make them more efficient. At some point, a healer stops being able to do that and still progress their character at the same rate as their peers.

A pure healer cannot earn exp on their own. They will eventually have to either work with lower level players than themselves and earn exp at a slower rate than their peers, or they will have to work with their peers knowing that they are slowing them down. At end game, meaning to me when we have all reached whatever level/skillset pleases us, we are all going to have to grind to maintain our skills. Working in groups with people you like is great fun, but it's not the most efficient way at high levels. I am not, nor do I plan to be an exclusive healer, so when I noticed this happening again and again, I started to focus more and more on combat skills where before I had heals and support skills like slows and buffs, mainly. I am fine grinding solo to earn the bulk of my exp points and healing for fun, but players who want to be pacifist healers are going to have to deal with this issue.

 

As far as divine, doesn't SOTA have a priestess and an Oracle in the main story line? Traditionally divine character archetypes right? Yet only magery magic for players? We are avatars even.

/Shrug