It really depends on the class, the only healer we've seen often enough is the shaman whos a HoT type and those have been hard numbers within a range
The DL though self heals on a % of damage for some of its skills.
The next one we should expect to see is the Cleric, though I would guess them to be hard numbers as well.
Percentaged based heals are a true PITA to balance properly. Unless you tied the mana costs to the amount healed, percentage heals quickly become OP. So if the mana cost were tied to the amount healed, how would the Priest know before hand the mana cost? It would be a different cost for every person in the group, lower for some and higher for others. When you're in a situation where mana usage is getting tight, knowing exactly how much mana you're using on any given spell is of critical importance.
So for me that's a hard no on percentage based heals.
Iksar said:Too early to know for sure, I'd imagine they would mostly be flat amounts for most healing with maybe a very limited few that might heal a percentage.
Well, they do like to use percentage + abilities for all of the damage we have seen, so who knows.
I do think positive + percentage abilities will lead to the "mudflation" of abilities, making the game difficulty more trivial as time goes on. I would prefer they stick to static amounts for all spells and abilities.
Think of it like this. A year or two after release, players of the some level will be more likely to have higher gear/stats than as players of that level at launch when the abilities were design. Now those percentage + abilities are adding more damage than at launch, making the enemies easier. As time goes on this downward pressure of gear, the mudflation, will travel up the level stack making each level more trivial as abilities at that level essentially gain power as the players gain access to more gear that wasn't designed for those levels. With a static + amount, you never have to worry about that.
I'm a bit surprised that this is how they are going to build the game considering how against item mudflation Brad was. They are replacing item mudflation for ability mudflation.
A spell that heals for a static amount, but increases by X% of power the closer a player is to death (starting at like 75%) would be good for some dynamic play. It costs the same either way, so it's more efficient to heal when someone has taken a fair amount of damage, but you don't want to play things too close to the cuff (or do you?) Also gives you an extra bit of satisfaction when you heal someone at 5% HP and crit. So it's already doing X% more from the ability, then an additional X% from a crit.
Iksar said:bigdogchris said:Well, they do like to use percentage + abilities for all of the damage we have seen, so who knows.
The only percentages I can recall are DL life steal/% max hp stuff. What damage abilities are pure percentages?
There were a lot of the combat abilities that say "Do % more damage" Just watch the streams.
bigdogchris said:There were a lot of the combat abilities that say "Do % more damage" Just watch the streams.
From what I recall those are all +% damage based on weapon damage, so a flat number with a fixed +% balanced in on top. I don't see that being harmful in the same way as straight heal or damage for ~% of targets HP.
I'm going to find myself very bored if the heals are "Here's your single target heal, here is your group heal, here is your HoT. What? That's not enough variety for you?" I'm very much a fan of being able to excel as a healer by picking the right heal at the right time. I'm of the opinion that anything can be balanced with the right amount of planning. I don't like the idea "it's impossible to do X because I've decided it's impossible". If the game is set up so that a % based heal is weak in all situations except on a high HP tank, to me that is balanced. Worried it will be OP 2 years from release when an expansion has increased players HP totals? Add a new flat heal as part of that expansion that again outshines the % heal except for on tanks.
Heebs said: I'm going to find myself very bored if the heals are "Here's your single target heal, here is your group heal, here is your HoT. What? That's not enough variety for you?" I'm very much a fan of being able to excel as a healer by picking the right heal at the right time. I'm of the opinion that anything can be balanced with the right amount of planning. I don't like the idea "it's impossible to do X because I've decided it's impossible. If the game is set up so that a % based heal is weak in all situations except on a high HP tank, to me that is balanced. Worried it will be OP 2 years from release when an expansion has increased players HP totals? Add a new flat heal as part of that expansion that again outshines the % heal except for on tanks.
If its any consolation its nice to know that Joppa prefers to play a cleric main and kilsin does too, if I recall correctly. So Im thinking with one of the main devs behind the class, they may have some inherent motivation to not make it status quo or boring.
Iksar said:bigdogchris said:There were a lot of the combat abilities that say "Do % more damage" Just watch the streams.
From what I recall those are all +% damage based on weapon damage, so a flat number with a fixed +% balanced in on top. I don't see that being harmful in the same way as straight heal or damage for ~% of targets HP.
Yes, but as lower level players obtain higher level weapons from mudflation then the effect becomes larger, while staying at the same level range. That is harmful.
bigdogchris said:Yes, but as lower level players obtain higher level weapons from mudflation then the effect becomes larger, while staying at the same level range. That is harmful.
Unless they account for that with item/stat scaling to some degree, which even EQ did and VR has mentioned in the past.
%s in general are risky, unless they are %s of fixed numbers. % heals, % of enemy health life taps or damage, even % of equipment numbers have risks that inflation of later expansion makes them significantly more powerful than intended. The %s used in EQ AA abilities quickly led to skills like crafting reaching a point where trivials had to be double max skill to have a significant failure chance and was explained by devs as one of the worst design decisions they made. If ever %s can be added, the damage is compounded making balence near impossible without changing known favorite systems, or implementing hard caps, neither are player friendly.
I do expect the 3 healers to all have different methods. The fixed slow/fast heal, the very slow large heal and hots are all staples of MMOs and will probably be used in some way. I also expect that any "complete heal" type spell to be very rare, or very costly (time and/or mana). I believe they have said in the various videos they don't want a team of clerics running a timed heal chain, but more direct involvement an variety even in raid situations.
It's likely going to be both.
We know that some of the 'Self only' heals from the Dire Lord and Monk have been % of total HP. But for the most part I would assume that most heals cast by a Healer onto another Player will be a Hard number, even if that Hard number is calculated based on a % of their Spell power or equivilent.
Yet there may be special case heals that Healers use that do calculate based on a % of total HP, but likely these will be tied to longer cooldowns so they aren't your normal bread and butter Heals.
Just my guesses...
On the old class sites, the cleric had a heal that healed their target for 100% of their own HP value... And as mentioned above, there are offensive abilities that deal % damage so it is very safe to say that there will be a mixture of both.
Add- The wording has changed a bit, but its basically the same effect:
Coalescence
Match your health with the health of an ally in your group by either bringing their current Health up to your level, or bringing your current Health up to their level.
So healing yourself to full as a cleric and then hitting this ability may be easier than healing some uber geared tank. Or it may be a meta tactic that clerics just stack HP (depending on the efficacy/CD of this ability) and use it similar to a CH rotation.
I still think they should have considered the way FFXIV handles abilities. There you don't have fixed (heal or damage) numbers, or percentage values, instead all abilities have a "potency". The potency in combination with your stats determines the effective healing or damage value (and this should be shown in hte tooltip...unfortunately, FFXIV does not do this). The advantage of this approach is the simple scaling of abilities with gear, while avoiding the problems with percentage based abilities. It also makes comparing abilities a lot easier.
Heebs said:I'm going to find myself very bored if the heals are "Here's your single target heal, here is your group heal, here is your HoT. What? That's not enough variety for you?" I'm very much a fan of being able to excel as a healer by picking the right heal at the right time.
I completely agree. There shouldn't be any "best heal in all situations". There should also be way more to picking heals than a simple mana to healing cost ratio as well.
Ways to make healing more interesting & tactical :