EQ2 Solves the Healer Problem?

[kemmyn]

just wanted to point out (and i am not in beta, i read this on the EQ2 forum) that on Newbie Isle, where you learn the mechanics of the game, there is a "raid" mob at level 4-5.  This mob will not be able to be killed by 1 person.  A group will be required.  

Thus by level 5, before you get out of the "nursery", Bruce's definition of "soloable" fails.  He wants a game that anything a group can do, a solo player can do.  Keep looking.  

I don't know what marketing material he's reading, but it's sure not the stuff being published by SOE.

[Merusk]

I think I figured out Bruce's argument.  He's arguing % of consumable content, not total ability to level.

Fine, EQ2 will win if you're looking at straight %.  NDA breakers I've seen said they'd done "Around 90" quests by the time they hit level 10.  WoW took *maybe* 20-25 quests to get my NE to 10.  Pure % of quest content, sure I'll agree EQ2 will beat WOW. Though I'll bet it will be because it'll take so damn many quests to level up in EQ2, though.  You can't do 90 quests in a short leveling curve like WOW had.

[HaemishM]

So someone register a gimmick account and spill the beans on EQ2 already.  I've never seen this community so uptight over an NDA before.  Generally, people around here are all to eager to dish or cheer the next big thing.

We aren't going to be breaking NDA's all wily-nily on this site. Both schild and I agree that the site would go downhill in a hurry if we started doing that.

Devs would stop coming, posting or even talking to us, which for whatever that's worth, is a bad thing. I personally enjoy the fact that guys like Lum, Raph and MahrinSkel will come and talk to us, even when I feel they are wrong. I'm not going to baby them, but I appreciate their input.

Also, when you start breaking NDA's, you attract hordes of fanbois and anti-fanbois, both of whom flock to your sight to find out more. And they start posting with agendas. The anti-fanbois want to point to the NDA breakage and say "SEE THIS GAME WILL SUCK!@!1!!" and the fanbois want to point to it and say "SEEE! THIS GAME WILL R0Xx0Rr!!@_@!1" This ain't the motherfucking Vault.

Finally, I'm hearing a lot of motherfuckers on this thread talking about games for which they have NO knowledge whatsoever, i.e. EQ2.

You cannot know how solo-friendly EQ2 is or isn't if you haven't played it. And you haven't played it, because if you have, you're breaking NDA and need to shut the fuck up. Page 2 of this thread was particularly painful. Stop being retarded.

[blindy]

This statement is still correct ... for Horde characters.

I realize I'm seriously late to this conversation, but there are elite quests for Horde pre-20.  Whether they can be done pre-20, I have no clue, since I haven't tried them, but my little undead priest got them assigned, and some of them are yellow at 16. I have one in Pyrewood in Silverpines (link to thottbot , though it's not marked as elite), and there's a couple more in Wailing Caverns (which is apparently an instance, I haven't been in it) that I got assigned in The Barrens or Thunder Bluff.

[El Gallo]

FYI, here is your non-NDA-breaking information on EQ2 soloing, which comes from the Moorgard Index, a compilation of Moorgard (EQ2 PR guy, formerly of Mobhunter before that site became a complete joke) posts on public forums:
http://www.eqii.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=186586#186586

Highlights:

Soloing won't provide all the rewards that grouping will, because our goal is to encourage grouping. If it makes you sleep better at night, think of soloing as the base exp and that grouping gives you a big bonus.

Grouping is the focus of our game. We agree that everyone should have the opportunity to solo on occasion, but EQ2 is a social game, and we want the mechanics to reinforce that idea.

What we are intending to limit is what soloing entails. When you have certain classes that can solo content that is designed for a group of players, it creates a problem. This has surfaced time and again in EQ, where someone uses a loophole to skirt around intended limitations. That destroys balance, especially when you have lots of other classes that can't solo at all.
We aren't going to design some classes for soloing and others for grouping. All our classes are designed for grouping. Again, that helps maintain game balance

Keep in mind that because there is less inherent risk in soloing (since the player has control over virtually all variables), the rewards will also be lower, both in terms of experience and loot. We can tune those rewards accordingly at any point.

Our goal is a relatively simple one: we don't want soloers being able to consume content that was intended for a full group with greater efficiency than the group can. This problem surfaced in EQ quite often, and necessitated class and zone changes to limit the effectiveness of such techniques.
We just want to prevent the problem from the ground up.

we want to making grouping more attractive than soloing. Why? Because they're competing playstyles, and the whole design of our game is built around grouping as a means to experience the depth of our world. We don't want soloing to provide the same or better rewards in the long run than grouping.

with EverQuest II, we're designing a game that emphasizes grouping. People will be able to advance their characters and obtain loot by soloing, but the potential rewards for a group of players will be greater.

Soloing will generally be more available [than in EQ1], because it will be something that anyone can do at any time. However, those who played one of the few classes in EQ that were able to achieve solo experience on par with the amount a group could obtain will not find that same ability in our game.

[SirBruce]

Yeah, you can find similar comments from the EQ2 team about how there is raid and group-specific content.

Having played WoW, my impression is still that EQ2 will be more solo-friendly than WoW.  It may turn out to not be.  In which case, I'll go back to playing City of Heroes or AC2, or I'll go play Tabula Rasa or Vanguard or Imperator or Face of Mankind or who knows what else.

Bruce

[MrHat]

FYI, here is your non-NDA-breaking information on EQ2 soloing, which comes from the Moorgard Index, a compilation of Moorgard (EQ2 PR guy, formerly of Mobhunter before that site became a complete joke) posts on public forums:
http://www.eqii.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=186586#186586

Highlights:

Soloing won't provide all the rewards that grouping will, because our goal is to encourage grouping. If it makes you sleep better at night, think of soloing as the base exp and that grouping gives you a big bonus.

Grouping is the focus of our game. We agree that everyone should have the opportunity to solo on occasion, but EQ2 is a social game, and we want the mechanics to reinforce that idea.

What we are intending to limit is what soloing entails. When you have certain classes that can solo content that is designed for a group of players, it creates a problem. This has surfaced time and again in EQ, where someone uses a loophole to skirt around intended limitations. That destroys balance, especially when you have lots of other classes that can't solo at all.
We aren't going to design some classes for soloing and others for grouping. All our classes are designed for grouping. Again, that helps maintain game balance

Keep in mind that because there is less inherent risk in soloing (since the player has control over virtually all variables), the rewards will also be lower, both in terms of experience and loot. We can tune those rewards accordingly at any point.

Our goal is a relatively simple one: we don't want soloers being able to consume content that was intended for a full group with greater efficiency than the group can. This problem surfaced in EQ quite often, and necessitated class and zone changes to limit the effectiveness of such techniques.
We just want to prevent the problem from the ground up.

we want to making grouping more attractive than soloing. Why? Because they're competing playstyles, and the whole design of our game is built around grouping as a means to experience the depth of our world. We don't want soloing to provide the same or better rewards in the long run than grouping.

with EverQuest II, we're designing a game that emphasizes grouping. People will be able to advance their characters and obtain loot by soloing, but the potential rewards for a group of players will be greater.

Soloing will generally be more available [than in EQ1], because it will be something that anyone can do at any time. However, those who played one of the few classes in EQ that were able to achieve solo experience on par with the amount a group could obtain will not find that same ability in our game.

Point Gallo.

[El Gallo]

Hardly NDA breaking

That's probably why I said it was "non-NDA-breaking" and noted that it had all been posted on public forums.

[SirBruce]

Hardly NDA breaking

That's probably why I said it was "non-NDA-breaking" and noted that it had all been posted on public forums.

Fair enough; I edited my post.

Bruce

[Ardent]

Getting back to the original question posed by jpark, I really don't know if there is a solution to the "problem" of healer classes with the current methodology of RPG combat.

The hero has a pool of hit points. Creature hits hero, points go down. Hero needs points to go back up, and the quickest way is to heal. The paradigm has existed as long as D&D and wargaming has existed.

Maybe the way to solve the problem is to create a new combat paradigm, that breaks away from the hit point loss/gain model that all the major MMORPGs use. ((shrugs))

[jpark]

Getting back to the original question posed by jpark, I really don't know if there is a solution to the "problem" of healer classes with the current methodology of RPG combat.

The hero has a pool of hit points. Creature hits hero, points go down. Hero needs points to go back up, and the quickest way is to heal. The paradigm has existed as long as D&D and wargaming has existed.

Maybe the way to solve the problem is to create a new combat paradigm, that breaks away from the hit point loss/gain model that all the major MMORPGs use. ((shrugs))

Or every class has the ability to group heal.  There is no healer.  Since group heals provide relatively little benefit for damage focused on a single character or during AoE attacks - everyone would help with the healing.

The middle ground of this idea could be EQ2 - make the healing that was the provedence of the cleric in EQ  fully available to other classes  (shaman, druid etc.).

[eldaec]

CoH already solved the healing problem imo.

Healing classes spend most of their time using buffing/debuffing skills that require activity and judgement rather than healing.

When they do heal most of them do so in odd ways, and you can't expect to just heal-tank your way through an encounter. Espeicially since every ability that every character has is on a recast timer. (The recast-timer-on-everything is a damn fine way to stop any class feeling like a one trick pony)

The EQ2 solution (every priest will heal equally but in different ways) is exacrtly what EQ, DAOC, and everything else promised. Maybe they'll get it right, maybe they won't. But the approach is not at all new.

[Trippy]

The middle ground of this idea could be EQ2 - make the healing that was the provedence of the cleric in EQ  fully available to other classes  (shaman, druid etc.).

Healing was hardly the sole providence of Clerics in EQ when I was playing (pre-PoP) except for one critical spell -- Complete Heal -- which I'll talk about more later. In the day-to-day single group exp grind, Clerics were hardly necessary except, as Romp noted in the second post in this thread, when things go bad and resses are needed. If you just look at the different heal spells a class has and compare healers that way, you aren't looking at the full picture. Yes Clerics can heal the most HPs by far in a single spell with CH (which the EQ devs admitted long ago is broken), however Shamans have slow which means people are taking much less damage and therefore need fewer heals, and Druids have regen which means if you are smart and spread aggro and damage around you won't miss CH either. Shamans and Druids could also dish out a lot more damage in a group (excepting undead mobs) which meant mobs died faster which meant they did less damage which meant less healing was needed.

In fact the original "vision" for healers in EQ was a pretty balanced one as long as you weren't just being a n00b and comparing HPs healed. Unfortunately as character HP and mob damage inflation took off, the value of CH increased far beyond its original intention leading to CH rotations and the like making Clerics essential for uber encounters. Shamans and Druids were still useful during raids as healers, however, if you were tackling AE mobs (e.g. dragons) since you needed people to heal the non-MTs, assuming they weren't hiding behind world geometry when the AE went off.

[Merusk]

Healing was hardly the sole providence of Clerics in EQ when I was playing (pre-PoP) except for one critical spell -- Complete Heal -- which I'll talk about more later. In the day-to-day single group exp grind, Clerics were hardly necessary except, as Romp noted in the second post in this thread, when things go bad and resses are needed. If you just look at the different heal spells a class has and compare healers that way, you aren't looking at the full picture. Yes Clerics can heal the most HPs by far in a single spell with CH (which the EQ devs admitted long ago is broken), however Shamans have slow which means people are taking much less damage and therefore need fewer heals, and Druids have regen which means if you are smart and spread aggro and damage around you won't miss CH either. Shamans and Druids could also dish out a lot more damage in a group (excepting undead mobs) which meant mobs died faster which meant they did less damage which meant less healing was needed.

PoP changed all this, though.  PoP mobs did ASSLOADS of damage per combat round, so sustained healing was far inferior to 'burst' healing like a CH spell.  Druids and Shamen had wimpy little 1000 point heals they'd have to spam, while clerics had that old bugger, CH.

  Slow meant little if you were still taking 1000 point hits (dual 500s) every combat round, and regen was a joke vs this damage. (Still is, even after they DOUBLED the # of HPs/ tick of all regen spells. It's a downtime reducer, not a way to make up for gimped heals)

 In response,  Druids & Shamen got their own versions of the CH spell. Druids got 2 versions, one which is capped at 3k hps and the other at 4.6k hps. Shamen's CH was capped at 2k hps.  But they got a nice heal-over-time which was good for casters, but not MT unless they were able to mitigate a good deal of damage. All the heals were capped at 75% of the target's total hps so even if they had 2k hps that needed healing, you could only heal 1.5k.

Now, yeah, people evolved and adapted to this, but clerics were still preferred for a good while. (Until PoP spells had 'trickled down' enough to matter to more than the upper 1%) But the 'different but equal' balancing act that EQ keeps trying to play with it's healing hasn't really worked out well over the long term.

[Sky]

I always like these gentle reminders of how I made the right choice getting the hell out of EQ years ago. Thanks.

[Nebu]

I always like these gentle reminders of how I made the right choice getting the hell out of EQ years ago. Thanks.

Couldn't agree more.  I left EQ shortly after the release of Velious and never looked back.  I still remember standing in Firiona Vie and giving away everything that I could from my level 60 cleric (the level cap at that time).  When all the newbies had my gear, I deleted each character and closed the account.  I also find it funny that I've gone back and given most other games a second chance... not EQ.  It became to clear what the cycle of this game was and I just didn't want to get caught up in it.

As for the topic-at-hand, I think that the issue is that clerics were given so few unique abilities that really distinguished them.  Druids and shaman could heal almost as well and they had more utility.  Faster travel, more damage in combat, and just more group friendly.  If game designers really want to follow the class model, they need to make the tradeoffs a bit more balanced.  Having complete heal and a good rez was nice, but both skills were lacking in the "fun" department.

[jpark]

Okay - now that the NDA is lifted - start talk'n people! )

1.  Are the healers actually equal - or does the Templar / Inquisitor reign?
2.  How useful is group heal vs. single target heal?
3.  Is there a demand for more than one healer in the group?  Are healers still rate limiting in group formation?

EDIT:  could we move this thread to the EQ2 beta section?  This would avoid starting a new thread there on healing.

[Koyasha]

while clerics had that old bugger, CH.

I didn't play a cleric full-time, but one of my characters was a cleric around mid to high 50's during PoP's day, and more often, I'd two-box a friend's level 65 cleric.  CH was about as useful as a warhammer against a mosquito; by the time you swing it, the mosquito's gone.  CH was all but useless when the tank would die 6 seconds into the fight with 4 seconds still left on your CH casting time.  Against an average XP mob.  If you had a druid or a shaman to toss little heals in the meantime, it was ok, but far and away, PoP revolved around the fast heal.

Not that clerics didn't have those...they pretty much had the monopoly on them.  But the point is that CH wasn't the spell that was keeping clerics on top during WoW, it was the faster spells...I can't even remember their names anymore, jeez.  But the 900 HP, 1.5 second heal, and the 2000 exp 4.5 second heal (I think I remember the HP/time correctly, or pretty close).  Also depended heavily on cleric AA's that increased the healing power of these spells, and focus items that did the same, so clerics were doing ~1500 with the quick spell and over 3000 with the slower one.  Druids' biggest heal was only a bit over the 4.5 second cleric heal on HP, and took a full 10 seconds to cast.

As for the healing 'problem' in general...  In a way, I'm fond of the idea that in-battle healing is emergency in nature, and you're expected to get through the fight without casting heals.  After the fight is over, you heal up and get the next mob.  I'm curious as to how a game would work designed around that idea.  Buffs and damage mitigation type spells (AD&D type Stoneskin, for example) would be an interesting replacement for actual heals in combat.  If the Cleric class in this hypothetical game only owned two (or some very limited quantity) spells - one early on, one later - that would function while in-combat, and the rest were extremely efficient, but completely non-functional whenever the target is on something's agro list, but instead had useful other spells, it might turn out rather interesting new strategies.

[El Gallo]

There is next to no difference between any of the healing classes, or any of the other classes within archetypes, in EQ2.  The game basically has 4 classes.  Maybe 5.

[jpark]

There is next to no difference between any of the healing classes, or any of the other classes within archetypes, in EQ2.  The game basically has 4 classes.  Maybe 5.

Looking at this link there do appear to be significant differences among the healing subclasses:

http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=priest&message.id=9255

My conclusion is that with an eye to eventual raiding, the the overloaded healing demands Priests currently experience in game - that Clerics - specifically Templars - will be in demand.  I am not in Beta - so my comment is based on the below.

This comment was helpful:

To sum up, clerics have additional health buffs, while druids buff power and shamans both (I assume for less, though). Clerics mostly heal using spells that heal the target when they get hit, while druids use regens and shamans prevent damage with wards. A lot of spells are activated when people get hit, or enemies hit a target. For clerics, they heal the group with instant heals, for druids, they add regen, for shamans they provoke wards. Finally, clerics get trauma debuffs, while druids get damage shields and shamans slows.
 
On particular subclasses within Cleric, Druid and Shamans:

"Now, the difference between a templar and an inquisitor : mostly, the spells that are activated when an enemy dies will heal the group for templars, while damaging the remaining enemies for inquisitors. The inquisitor will be more specialized in debuffs and damage, while the templar gets more kinds of buffs.
 
For wardens and furies - wardens use cold nukes, furies use heat or magic. Wardens can buff the group's attack, while furies buff single targets and add damage components to the group attacks. Finally, wardens can evac a group, while furies can gice group invisibility.
 
For mystics and defilers - mystics use cold DoTs, defilers disease. Mystics can buff power and noxious mitigation, while defilers are more focussed on debuffing, and indirectly using the enemie's powers to heal themselves or the group. Defilers get more DoTs with secondary effects, while mystics mostly get nukes and effect spells."

Still going over this information:

"Shaman wards prevent damage, and are applied before armor is checked. That means that while a tank is warded, they effectively have no AC at all - they can still parry, dodge, and such, but the incoming damage is applied directly to the ward without any armor reduction
 
Cleric triggered healing heals after damage is applied, therefore if the player is hit with a massive nuke that would just barely kill him, the heal would kick in after the player is already dead... which won't I believe bring them back to life. OTOH, the healing effect being applied after the fact allows armor mitigation to have its full effect. I've also seen the cleric triggered heal go off when someone is DoTed, and I believe DoTs just ignore wards.
 
Net effect: Shaman are probably slightly better healers for brawlers and other lightly armored types. Clerics are slightly better healers for plate tanks."

Things that strike me so far:

- Adding an extra attack to the party (Inquisitor)
- SoW, a run speed buff, (Druid and Shaman)
- AoE stun (Templar)
- Aggro reduction (Templar)
- Group Evacuation (Warden)
- Group Invisibility (Fury)
- Slow (Shaman)