Let me preface this by saying that this is not a Cleric/Holy Arts revamp thread. This thread is strictly referring to the Healing and Party Healing skills. TL;DR is at the bottom of the post.
With the new Edern Renown buffing our HP to all new heights, and the G22 Techniques coming (I think there's one that increases HP, if I recall correctly), Healing has never before felt like such a useless skill.
With a renown bonus of 935 HP while I'm level 180 and in r1 Falcon Transformation, I have 3,379 maximum HP. If I attempt to heal myself with Dan 2 healing and 470 Magic Attack, the maximum I am able to heal is 100 HP while the average is 55~67 HP or thereabout. If I attempt to heal myself with Rank 1 Party Healing, the maximum I am able to heal is 271 HP while the average is 165~187 HP or thereabout.
Numbers as low as these are simply not viable anymore. I know there are ways to increase Healing's efficiency, but those means require players to make dedicated gear for healing, and not everyone wants to do that.
I can already imagine what kind of responses I may get, so I'm going to try and address all of them in advance:
* "Use a healing wand/get a trinity set/get healing reforges!" - See what I said above. Not everyone wants to sacrifice their armor or another set (such as Bohemian for me) just to make their healing skills more viable, and not everyone has the money to throw around on reforges.
* "Just use HP 500 Potions! They're craftable now!" - This is not a solution. This is a weak effort made by Devcat to avoid the problem of balancing skills that should be relevant, but are not. Even if we set that thought aside, there's still the issue of potion poisoning and HP 500 Potions being relatively inaccessible thanks to the tedious process of gathering Four-Leaf Clovers.
* "Buy more Nimbus pets!" - Nimbus pets aren't really that useful to players who have more than 1500 HP anymore. 150 HP per nimbus used to be incredibly useful, but as my character is now, I shouldn't have to sacrifice up to 10 hotkeys just to get approximately half of my health back. I have other pets I'd prefer to summon, and skills I'd prefer to have available for us.
* "Use Shield of Trust's Healing Hands subskill!" - Healing Hands at level 15 is only a slightly better Nimbus with a 20 second cooldown, as opposed to the Nimbus's 60 second cooldown. If you're taking hard-hitting attacks, using Shield of Trust is basically a death wish anyway thanks to the brief "buff" of advanced heavy stander. On top of that, how many players are actually going to bother doing Crusader content so that they can gain enough crusader levels to make Healing Hands useful?
* "Use Campfire and Fantastic Chorus!" - If I'm going to put forth all that effort to use campfire, burn the scented candles, and play fantastic chorus all so I can wait around while using rest, I might as well be using normal healing and nimbus pets instead.
I think that covers everything, but I may have missed something. Anyway, regarding the healing skills, I am not entirely sure how they could be improved in a way that would be considered balanced. All I know is that, as it currently stands, healing has become something of a chore for me. The down time I spend healing should be spent playing the game instead.
If anyone else has any ideas for how healing and party healing could be revamped, feel free to leave a suggestion.
TL;DR: Thanks to Edern Renown, I have so much HP that healing in all its available forms feels incredibly inefficient and outdated. As a result, I believe it is in need of a revamp. I don't have any suggestions as to how Devcat could update the skills a manner that retains their balance while being free, but if anyone else does, they're free to state it.
IGN: Chaosshadow
Server: Alexina
Comments
Although, potion poisoning works weirdly with Full Recovery Potions, in that if all you're drinking are Full Recovs, then even if you enter pot poison status, Full Recovs don't actually cause your stats to lower.
I wonder how Healing could be rebalanced to deal with the huge amount of HP you can get and the damage you can take.
Make it heal a % of Max HP on top of the current flat rate?
Even then, it wouldn't be so overpowered, even taking into account reforges, Trinity Set, and titles, but at least it would have more decent scaling.
I kind of saw the upper limit of what Healing can currently do now, and it was from a Party Healing Master with the Elite White Healer 2nd title, with 2 lv1 HP Recovery Reforged Accessories, a ~lv20 HP Recovery Trinity wear, with the rest of the set, and a Healing Wand, and they healed for over 300 on a single Healing orb. Regular Healing, too not Party Healing.
Even then, having an extra %-of-Max-HP per orb bonus would help healing catch up, even if the player WASN'T decked out in "pure healer gear".
Maybe it could be... like rF ~rA it's 5% max hp per orb, r9 ~ r2 it's 7% and r1 could be 10%?
Then it'd be like at least 50% of your max HP if all 5 orbs were used on you, though it'd be higher because it'd still have the flat amount in addition. That stamina cost would hurt though pfft.
Party Healing could be given the same treatment, but maybe a higher % of max HP, since it's only one orb.
like 15%/20%/30%?
Healing being strong would also help balance out the fact that if someone's healing, then they're not free to deal damage. At least if it was stronger, they could finish healing and get back in to the fight faster.
With all the newer raids having attacks that poison, instantly Deadly, or just plain hit hard, I am surprised Healing and Party Heal haven’t recieved some sort of numbers buff.
Or at the very least a new cleric spell that heals a large ammount with a cooldown or something. Like an Adv magic for clerics or something.
plus i don't understand the game's reasoning of not being able to kneel and heal yourself if you don't wear knuckles.
I really like Iyasenu’s idea to make healing and party healing be based on the % scale rather than fixed amount of HPs it heals.. of not then it at least be scaled off Magic Attack to make your heal better like the above poster mentioned.
I am also on the same boat about Respite, it’s literslly one of the most useless skills in game and you EVEN have to equip the knuckles to use it which make people want to use it less. Just make it so you can use Respite (and Tumble too) without needing knuckles and have Respite give you maybe something like 300% recovery speed for HP, MP, Stam or whatever works for a certain time period.
Sure it heals MP and Stam, but it heals HP at a percentage rate as well.
From: http://forums.mabinogi.nexon.net/discussion/18951/g22-abilities
I mean... it's a step in the right direction, but I kind of hope they don't just give us this and say "Well, we don't need to buff regular healing magics anymore!".
But pet spam is more efficient so healing is dead unless you are in a raid zone.
It casts like meteor/LR/hail storm that causes a fireball sized explosion around the caster, whoever is hit by it heals 50% wounds, 100% HP, applies regeneration (1% per sec) for 45 secs, and applies a defensive buff that's +100 def/mdef, +20 prot/mprot for 30 secs. And it takes 5min to cool down. It takes something a full 5 secs to charge up.
How about casting that in an area with a certain radius and everyone hurt there will get some healing?
Maybe combine it with some shield skills.
I like the idea of making a skill where if someone's in a Shield skill (Nature, Fire, Ice, Lightning), you get healed slowly over time within it. That'd be neat to have.
Have a quest where you need to get all shields to Rank A or something and then you talk to someone, do a quick dungeon run or mission or whatever for an item and come back and get the "Healing Wards" or whatever skill that makes the shields heal.