Healing and Spell Power

[eden2760]

I'm no Madfloyd, but I can field this one.
Part of the reason why it is nice for us to have this ability to set these coefficients for what percentage of Spell Power a spell benefits from is that it is very easy to modify.
This means that we can and are willing to make adjustments to spells which are underperforming.

The current 50% values for the spells listed in the original post are initial pegs to make sure they were remaining pretty close to their pre-expansion values, they were not intended as a rebalancing pass.

If we see certain spells under-preforming or that are in need of help, we now have the ability to tweak them upwards as needed, in whatever incremental amounts work best to nudge them into place.

Figured that was the case. Thanks for the quick reply on that.

[nivarch]

This change has at least 2 side effects that are not mentionned:

• When leveling it was easy to get a 75% devotion clicky that worked on heal. For the people that already boosted heal, it is less powerful than it was before (I didn't do calculations, but since you need ~a ML20 item to reach the old power, it is obvious with less powerful items it will be less powerful). This may not seem a big deal, but when running a/with WF in elite content it can make a difference.
• With the massive hp inflation from expansion, heal (not mass heal) is relatively less powerful (hp incrased by 20-50% while heal is the same as before). While you could before refill someone in one cast, it is no longer possible. To compensate people need to slot more healing amp... But we know that some people already don't carry some needed items (such as fortification), is it really wise to add a new must have?

Edit:
Also you really have to add some non weapon, non shield, devotion items. It really hurts a lot that there is none in the expansion (the old ones do not scale well). It hurts mostly paladin, rangers and melee FvS/clerics ; but it also adds a lot of micromanagement to healing even for caster divines that need to swap constantly between radiance, impulse and devotion.

Also I agree that healing is not very hard in this game, but just nerfing it is not going to help much. You should instead focus on adding new mechanism to healing.

[GermanicusMaximus]

However I spent the time and effort to grind out a Superior Devotion IX item. I did this with the intention of casting Mass heal without the use of empower heal in order to endurance heal longer fights.

That grind feels wasted now. Had it come from 2 year old content I would be less upset, but it came from the most recent raid prior to MOTU.
Simply buffing alchemical items to 100 or 108 spell power and adding implement bonus to them would balance this out quite a bit. This would put it on par with some of the lower end items from MOTU(random gen trash).

TLDR:
I am in the 1% that was nerfed.
Adding implement bonus and slightly increasing the Spell power of alchemical items would balance this.

Agreed.

It does appear that this was balanced around people using mediocre gear rather than top of the line gear. I keep seeing people say that 99% of divine casters didn't carry a Superior Devotion 9 item. Really? It is a tier 1 item from Lord of Blades. It sounds like pretty basic gear for any level 20 divine caster who took throwing heals as a serious responsibility.

[DarkForte]

I'm no Madfloyd, but I can field this one.
Part of the reason why it is nice for us to have this ability to set these coefficients for what percentage of Spell Power a spell benefits from is that it is very easy to modify.
This means that we can and are willing to make adjustments to spells which are underperforming.

The current 50% values for the spells listed in the original post are initial pegs to make sure they were remaining pretty close to their pre-expansion values, they were not intended as a rebalancing pass.

If we see certain spells under-preforming or that are in need of help, we now have the ability to tweak them upwards as needed, in whatever incremental amounts work best to nudge them into place.

Nice! I guess we can expect some rebalancing in the future then!

[eden2760]

This change has at least 2 side effects that are not mentionned:

• When leveling it was easy to get a 75% devotion clicky that worked on heal. For the people that already boosted heal, it is less powerful than it was before (I didn't do calculations, but since you need ~a ML20 item to reach the old power, it is obvious with less powerful items it will be less powerful). This may not seem a big deal, but when running a/with WF in elite content it can make a difference.
• With the massive hp inflation from expansion heal (not mass heal) is relatively to hp less powerful. While you could before refill someone in one cast, it is no longer possible. To compensate people need to slot more healing amp... But we already know that some people already don't carry some needed items (such as fortification), is it really wise to add a new must have?

Not sure I agree with your second bullet. I think people having more hp now isn't as much of an issue as people are making it out to be. This might require knowing the quest/raid well enough to know approximately how hard a mob hits/casts for and knowing that you need to keep tanks (now with more hp) at or above a certain threshold level.

To exaggerate, if someone has 3K hp, are you or they going to expect that you should keep them topped up to 3K at all times? Of course not. Instead you will be concentrating on keeping them high enough such that they survive.

If they have more hp now, great. This will give you more wiggle room and you should be able to use excess spell points to top them up above what level you're trying to keep them at, if you've got the surplus.

But if they're sacrificing fort/healing amp at all for having a huge hp pool, then that's an entirely separate issue.

[DarkForte]

Not sure I agree with your second bullet. I think people having more hp now isn't as much of an issue as people are making it out to be. This might require knowing the quest/raid well enough to know approximately how hard a mob hits/casts for and knowing that you need to keep tanks (now with more hp) at or above a certain threshold level.

To exaggerate, if someone has 3K hp, are you or they going to expect that you should keep them topped up to 3K at all times? Of course not. Instead you will be concentrating on keeping them high enough such that they survive.

If they have more hp now, great. This will give you more wiggle room and you should be able to use excess spell points to top them up above what level you're trying to keep them at, if you've got the surplus.

But if they're sacrificing fort/healing amp at all for having a huge hp pool, then that's an entirely separate issue.

That's the thing. You don't have to sacrifice anything to get a huge pool of HP. My favored soul was at 545 HP before u14 hit. He's close to 900 now. That's a 300+ HP boost. Fighters and Paladins can expect to break 1300 HP when in tanking stance.

[eden2760]

That's the thing. You don't have to sacrifice anything to get a huge pool of HP. My favored soul was at 545 HP before u14 hit. He's close to 900 now. That's a 300+ HP boost. Fighters and Paladins can expect to break 1300 HP when in tanking stance.

Okay, and I'm not trying to bicker with you, but I'm asking genuinely as I haven't touched a lot of end-level content since the new update, nor played a divine since then:

Outside of some of the noticable changes to spell power from mobs (read: in things like Running with the devils... ugh)... have the mobs in high-end quests/raids abilities/powers changed such that we no longer know what type of damage to expect?

It does seem that the way before was that you pretty much keep everyone at 100%, period.

So is it actually changing where, with more and more people getting higher end hp and still remaining viable builds that you no longer should be looking at keeping them at 100%, but instead making sure they have a full-enough hp bar to survive the encounter?

[nivarch]

Not sure I agree with your second bullet. I think people having more hp now isn't as much of an issue as people are making it out to be. This might require knowing the quest/raid well enough to know approximately how hard a mob hits/casts for and knowing that you need to keep tanks (now with more hp) at or above a certain threshold level.

To exaggerate, if someone has 3K hp, are you or they going to expect that you should keep them topped up to 3K at all times? Of course not. Instead you will be concentrating on keeping them high enough such that they survive.

If they have more hp now, great. This will give you more wiggle room and you should be able to use excess spell points to top them up above what level you're trying to keep them at, if you've got the surplus.

But if they're sacrificing fort/healing amp at all for having a huge hp pool, then that's an entirely separate issue.

You don't need to sacrifice much to have high HP.
Also heal is not really a spell you use (well I use...) to heal atank, I have scrolls, FvS capstone, renewal and Mass heal for that (cause tanks takes mostly predictible damage).

Heal is an emergency spell that I use on DPS when they take heavy fire. When you run EE, they very easily go from 700 to 50HP in one second, in these (frequent) situations the only solution to avoid their death on next attack is a quickened heal. However if the person does not stack healing amp it will no longer put him back to full life, and the next burst may kill him ; or I will have to spend more time capstone healing him, or using a scroll on him.
This is especially bad since it's an emergency heal and you usually don't have time to switch back to a devotion item (cause you had to cast a BB or use a scroll before) so you don't often benefit from maximum spell power (until you add us non weapons devotion items, please dev!).

[Note: talking about EE, but burst damage happen in EH quest]

EDIT:

Okay, and I'm not trying to bicker with you, but I'm asking genuinely as I haven't touched a lot of end-level content since the new update, nor played a divine since then:

Outside of some of the noticable changes to spell power from mobs (read: in things like Running with the devils... ugh)... have the mobs in high-end quests/raids abilities/powers changed such that we no longer know what type of damage to expect?

It does seem that the way before was that you pretty much keep everyone at 100%, period.

So is it actually changing where, with more and more people getting higher end hp and still remaining viable builds that you no longer should be looking at keeping them at 100%, but instead making sure they have a full-enough hp bar to survive the encounter?

In EE content (especially in harder content such as full group in the belly of the beast with broken dungeon alert for example) you have no other choice but to keep people at 100% or to see them dead.
Damage cannot be predicted since it's a lot of casters (so you can't easily tell who will be hit) and since the damage is very high when someone gets hit it can quickly empty his HP bar.
This is especially bad for WF (yes it is broken now which make it even worse).

Further Edit:
I'm not really complaining about the change. I can live with it since I play mostly with competent people (and I also know that I react fairly quickly and I manage to keep people alive fairly well in EE). However I fear it may have a big impact on the people that haven't been playing DDO for the last 3 years.

[DarkForte]

Okay, and I'm not trying to bicker with you, but I'm asking genuinely as I haven't touched a lot of end-level content since the new update, nor played a divine since then:

Outside of some of the noticable changes to spell power from mobs (read: in things like Running with the devils... ugh)... have the mobs in high-end quests/raids abilities/powers changed such that we no longer know what type of damage to expect?

It does seem that the way before was that you pretty much keep everyone at 100%, period.

So is it actually changing where, with more and more people getting higher end hp and still remaining viable builds that you no longer should be looking at keeping them at 100%, but instead making sure they have a full-enough hp bar to survive the encounter?

I kept people at 100% because mass heal topped pretty much everyone but WF barbarians off (420 base before heal amp).

Also, EE mobs and bosses are hitting well into the triple digits from what I hear, so I'd pretty much force myself to keep everyone very high at all times.

[justagame]

I suspect the latter. I've seen no evidence that any divine offensive spells other than the one named in the original post of this thread (Summon Archon) gains reduced benefit from Spell Power. All my testing has shown they're all spot on for the 100% that we have them set to.

I think this is just a case of the one person who tried to test it actually used Summon Archon to do so, then the "light spells are getting half also" word just spread around, despite being inaccurate.

I think that was me. Whlie I picked the lantern archon for testing because it has the lowest variance and thus easier to get a read on the damage range, unlucky me for picking the one that was targeted. (Why, I don't know, it was hardly gamebreaking -- but that's another matter).

What I didn't post was that, despite bettwe gear, that using the spellpower system should be netting be higher blade barrier damage, I am actually getting slightly less. Much harder to post numbers and reliable averages since the variance is so much, but if you guys could double check to make sure nothing intentionally got in there, that would be appreciated. (Since I don't seem to be the only one with this impression).

Max Empowered BB under old system with Tier-3 cove dagger, with AOV II:
(1+.3+.5)x(1+1+.5) = 450%

Under the new system with the SAME equipment:
(100+60+150+75+52(equip) +15 (implement) = 452%. The damage should be about the same, I was seeing 10% less.

With better equipment (96 impulse of sup. kinetic lore): I should be doing MORE damage than before, but am doing about the same, maybe 10 hp more at MOST (that's < 3% increase). I didn't post these examples because BB has such a huge variance, I'd want a really larger sample, or at least larger than I was willing to test.

On a related note, kinetic lore does not apply to untyped (unlike impulse, which does), meaning there is no superior lore for BB or cometfall. Furthermore, you've left superior radiance lore off the loot gen tables, so no sup. lore for light spells.

So NO offensive divine spells benefit from all that new great lore gear floating around. Making the equipment problem even worse than we already knew it would be.

[eden2760]

I kept people at 100% because mass heal topped pretty much everyone but WF barbarians off (420 base before heal amp).

In tanking situations at least, EE mobs and bosses are hitting well into the triple digits from what I hear, so I'd pretty much force myself to keep the 1300hp stalwart very high at all times.

That makes sense, then.

From the constant stream of feedback (some from very levelheaded/objective players) it seems that the reduction to these will probably be getting at least a little bit of an upward adjustment.

[Archangel666]

Couple of questions.

Does the Light Monk Healing Finisher get full Spell Power from Devotion items?


Before U14 I used to use Superior Ardor potions to boost my self healing. Especially when soloing. Now that just doesn't work and I've had to craft a Devotion of Greater Healing Lore(Can't craft Major yet) Trinket. This is a PITA anyway 'cause Monk gear slots are tricky at the best of times, but I've done it.


Also other than the obvious answer of "It was easier" is there a reason why monk abilities are classed as spells? It just seems to me that you could have given it its own type perhaps Mystical or something. This would allow you more control of items which boost Monk abilities without providing items which boost spells also which could mean larger boosts for specific items.

Good example for me is the Devotion wraps. These now give 30 Equipment Bonus. Not terribly useful to be honest.


Also might I suggest that future named Monk items might contain something to boost monk abilities? With the exception of the Devout wraps, I can't think a single one that boosts Healing Finishers, though there are Fernian Wraps that boost the triple Fire Finisher, but that's it.

[Razcar]

Is a 4% loss really something to get upset about.

With melee not getting -4% hit points in U14, along with mobs not hitting for 4% less damage - but both quite the opposite - it is wrong.

[GermanicusMaximus]

The problem in this case thou, healing, impacts everyone and everyone should speak against it.

Well, you would think so.

Divine caster: Hey barb, you want heals?

Barbarian: Why would you even ask that when you know the answer?

The real agenda here is pretty straight forward. A lot of melee want divine casters nerfed so they have no choice but to follow the melee around and be their "healer". A powerful Heal and Mass Heal? The divine caster will just run around killing undead, wasting spell points that could be used to heal melee.

The social dynamic in this game has regressed to that reality, and it doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. It is hard to imagine that is a viable social dynamic for the long term health of the game, but the melee players screaming that Heal and Mass Heal can't be made too powerful apparently don't seem to care.

[Gremmlynn]

You don't need to sacrifice much to have high HP.
Also heal is not really a spell you use (well I use...) to heal atank, I have scrolls, FvS capstone, renewal and Mass heal for that (cause tanks takes mostly predictible damage).

Heal is an emergency spell that I use on DPS when they take heavy fire. When you run EE, they very easily go from 700 to 50HP in one second, in these (frequent) situations the only solution to avoid their death on next attack is a quickened heal. However if the person does not stack healing amp it will no longer put him back to full life, and the next burst may kill him ; or I will have to spend more time capstone healing him, or using a scroll on him.
This is especially bad since it's an emergency heal and you usually don't have time to switch back to a devotion item (cause you had to cast a BB or use a scroll before) so you don't often benefit from maximum spell power (until you add us non weapons devotion items, please dev!).

[Note: talking about EE, but burst damage happen in EH quest]

EDIT:


In EE content (especially in harder content such as full group in the belly of the beast with broken dungeon alert for example) you have no other choice but to keep people at 100% or to see them dead.
Damage cannot be predicted since it's a lot of casters (so you can't easily tell who will be hit) and since the damage is very high when someone gets hit it can quickly empty his HP bar.
This is especially bad for WF (yes it is broken now which make it even worse).

Further Edit:
I'm not really complaining about the change. I can live with it since I play mostly with competent people (and I also know that I react fairly quickly and I manage to keep people alive fairly well in EE). However I fear it may have a big impact on the people that haven't been playing DDO for the last 3 years.

And if they didn't have the newly inflated hps they would have been dead from the first shot. I don't see the point.

How many hps a players has isn't important when talking about healing effectiveness, just how much damage they are taking.

[Udalric]

Just logged into DDO what i've noticed after u14.1 :

-Avenging Light Sla dmg is nerfed by 50% !&^%
from 350~ pre u14.1 to 170~ now
- Silver Fire spell is still broken
- wings working

[DeafeningWhisper]

Well, you would think so.

Divine caster: Hey barb, you want heals?

Barbarian: Why would you even ask that when you know the answer?

The real agenda here is pretty straight forward. A lot of melee want divine casters nerfed so they have no choice but to follow the melee around and be their "healer". A powerful Heal and Mass Heal? The divine caster will just run around killing undead, wasting spell points that could be used to heal melee.

The social dynamic in this game has regressed to that reality, and it doesn't appear to be changing anytime soon. It is hard to imagine that is a viable social dynamic for the long term health of the game, but the melee players screaming that Heal and Mass Heal can't be made too powerful apparently don't seem to care.

Which is all kinds of dumb when you think that: they need us but we don't need them.

You'd think they'd want their healers happy, alas they seem to think: "healer = caster, caster nerf good for melee!".

[Forzah]

With melee not getting -4% hit points in U14, along with mobs not hitting for 4% less damage - but both quite the opposite - it is wrong.

The way it was before U14 is not some sort of holy point of reference that we should stick to forever. The heal and mass heal spell usually healed for more than necessary before U14. Making it heal a few percent less will not change that much. It's just a little tweak, and you can never have it be exactly the same as before in the current system. It all depends on gear setup... for some it will even be a bit stronger. Calling such a change 'wrong' sounds a bit strange to me though, as heal remains a killer healing spell, capable of topping off most people with the appropriate gear.

[Thrudh]

That's the thing. You don't have to sacrifice anything to get a huge pool of HP. My favored soul was at 545 HP before u14 hit. He's close to 900 now. That's a 300+ HP boost. Fighters and Paladins can expect to break 1300 HP when in tanking stance.

And everyone has SOME AC and PRR and dodge now...

Tons of hit points with damage mitigation makes healing easier, not harder.

And there's an easy-to-get +7 STR, +2 insight CON, 30% heal amp item that every new player (and most vets) are going to want to wear.

A lot of variables have changed. It's just silly to say "My heal used to heal for 450, now it only heals for 400! I'm not playing my divines anymore until this is fixed!". There's more variables than that one number.

[Udalric]

I suspect the latter. I've seen no evidence that any divine offensive spells other than the one named in the original post of this thread (Summon Archon) gains reduced benefit from Spell Power. All my testing has shown they're all spot on for the 100% that we have them set to.

I think this is just a case of the one person who tried to test it actually used Summon Archon to do so, then the "light spells are getting half also" word just spread around, despite being inaccurate.

Please check Silver Fire spell 200% sure it's broken. Description says about 100-160 dmg base - we are getting 50% less. I would also like to ask why only Druids have new divine spells and why Avenging light was nerfed by 50% in u14.1?