Heal and its cooldown.

[Kiaro]

I propose heal be returned to as it was. From what I can see, priests here heal at roughly 1/2 the rate of normal. I've not heard the reasons for this, but I can pretty much guess them, so I'd like to explain why the heal cooldown is inappropriate both in a pvm and pvp setting.

First of all, I'd like to outline the main reasons I anticipate for people wishing for a heal nerf:

1) "Priests are very hard to kill. So and so couldn't kill them in X situation, it's too good. High priests feel unkillable"
2) "Priests feel pretty hard to kill, but the main thing is their SP seems to never die"
3) "In WoE, most priests are above average characters who require a dedicated amount of DPS to take out and are overall too much of a problem granted their various support skills"

Next, I would like to address these three points, and finish by demonstrating that a dedicated DPSer is stronger than a dedicated healer in WoE (just some maths) and outline the other ways in which, even if this weren't the case, priests could still be dealt with.

So, to the first point. Priests are hard to kill. This is true, but not impossible. As you approach end game with gear and intraguild co-ordination improves, preists become less unkillable. Further more, a priest focused on healing itself is not healing their allies, nor buffing them, nor even going so far to as lex aeterna some spike damage to secure a kill. They are merely keeping themselves alive, and as far as a threat to a castle goes, priest is the lowest (cannot emp break, nor kill, nor do any kind of dangerous debuffing that can't be immediately fixed by an acolyte). Those situations that you see a priest sat in flinch spamming heal on themselves is as bad as a melee class not attacking. If your anecdotal experience is within duels, then I can assure you that duels have no significance nor reflect at all on WoE, ignore them. In pvm, a dedicated tank is always better than a priest for tanking anything, be it a flee tank with priest support or a paladin with priest support. I can't imagine the issue is pvm, though. Even without the nerf a small mob can easily kill a priest, nevermind various end game bosses such as valkyrie, hydrolancer and so on.

To the second, priests have very strong regen. Specifically high priests with meditatio, magnificat up, blessed and in int/sp gear. First of all, it's important to understand that there are counters to this. Soul burn, dispell, pressure, and so on. These alone wont do the job, pressure must then be put on to out race the regen. This is easier if you are skilled at interrupting magnificat or keeping a priest dispelled. Conventionally, however, running SP dry is the worst means possible to try and beat a priest (though keeping magnificat down helps a lot if they are the only priest). Their SP bar and regen is more of a 'time limit' to how long they can spam heal on allies before things go down hill.

To the third, that is not the fault of priests and does not require a nerf on heal. If the current metagame can't handle priests, then people need to build for higher DPS, and utilise better strategies to kill priests. In a metagame without FCP, stalkers are dangerous. In a metagame without marc cards, wizards are dangerous. In a metagame with low DPS, priests are dangerous. In all these cases, the game isn't at fault, it's the current player abilities/gear that must be improved. I can't put it much more simply than that.

Finally, I'd like to give some examples of how to kill a priest and then to show dedicated DPS vs heal assuming cooldown is .5 seconds normally and here that it is 1 second.

First, to the abstract unscientific methods of priest slaying:

First of all, do not expect aspd or on focused skill spam to kill them. If this was the case, they would be worthless. With that out the way, here's a quick list of things that kill priests.

Asura, Acid demo, EDP, Sacrifice, Cart Termination, stone curse fiberlocked lex aeterna double cast FB10, full strip and moderate DPS, Lex Aeterna'd spike damage co-ordinated with a small group of spikers, Coma Tarot, Warmth, and I'm sure I've forgotten some. Meanwhile, here's a quick list of ways to make priests useless:

Close confine out of heal range of allies, keep them dispelled and SP denied, freeze/stone curse/sleep and then leave the priest, draw enemies out of their priests heal range, slow their movement greatly by forcing them to tip-toe in pneuma, do enough streaming DPS to lock them in a self heal spam.

I've not even being comprehensive here, or giving exact figures but in no way are priests over powered -- all these techniques work against a priest pre-heal nerf, the only difference is that while heal maxes early via int, meditatio and levels, you must work hard to gain great DPS. This just means, the players have to improve their gear! Trying to kill a priest with lower quality gear is like playing a battle professor without a soul linker.

So that said, here's the boring part, the maths:

Heal:

At level 99 with 135 int and meditatio, a high priest is healing for, rounding up to the nearest hundred, 3000 health. This is a nice round easy number I'd like to work with. I will be working with 6k heal per second, due to one heal per .5 seconds, so remember that in these hypotheticals, priests on HeRO do twice as badly.

Cart termination:

+4 ice pick, 120 str, full cart. 4947 damage base damage. WoE reduction of 40%, thara frog for 30%, and shall we say a beret for 10%. 3739 damage per term. Then multiply this by about 1.1-1.2 for ice pick (I'm assuming 80 vit and 30-40 def, otherwise the priest is going to die to stun or general DPS) and we have around 4000 damage per cart termination. This can be spammed at a speed relative to aspd, which tends to be rather decent on a smith. Long story short, whitesmith DPS vs heal - winner, whitesmith. Taking a sub-optimal whitesmith with only a two handed axe for attack, and we get 2.6~3kish depending on the priests defence. This one is closer, but if the priest can stun at all, the whitesmith wins and either way the priest must spam heal. Winner - whitesmith.

Acid Demonstration:

Again, I'm gonna take an 80 vit priest because any less and you're going to be stunned by bash, cart term, scream, stun weapons, hammerfall and generally die during the stun time as well as having low hp. The creator in my example is optimal and has 130 int. Acid demo does a cool 8.5k damage in this situation. With a lex aeterna, that's a guaranteed kill, and even at 125 int or vs slightly lower vit the priest will be under extremely heavy heal spam strain. Throw this at a priest taking damage from anywhere and that's nearly a guaranteed kill. Winner - Acid demonstration

Asura Strike - Oh I really really hope you guys don't want me to bore you with the maths on /asura strike/. Hide clip is ruwach'd and safety wall gets pneuma'd. Champion wins. (And without asura, OI will still do beefy damage, as will raging palm strike - don't mess with champs!)

EDP - I'm getting kinda lazy with the maths now, but ice pick + pvp dagger EDP'd will out DPS priests heal, this will take a long time to get the exact numbers for so trust me? high crit katar with some pvp cards will do it too, and soul linked sonic blow does the job even in WoE.

Full strip - Priest takes roughly 40-45% more damage from most sources. I hope I shant have to spell this one out, as it applies to nigh-everything.

Double cast firebolt - 125 int. 476~862 matk, with a +15% from the wand. Average matk is 669. On a thara-beret target with 50 mdef that's something like 13k damage. That's against 50 mdef! My goodness. My maths might be a tiny bit off, but I'm confident it's around 12-15k damage. Either way, this oneshots many 99 high priest. Sure, difficult to set up - but a powerful shot at a oneshot. This is without even exploiting the solidifying period between being SC'd and become solid in which skills cannot be used. Winner: Professor.

I could go on, but I shall stop there. In each of these cases, a highly dedicated DPSer out does the heals of a priest. The heals of a priest on a paladin from these DPSers, and the paladin probably survives. It's intricate, and it all works nicely, making priest not a dur-simple target, but certainly easier than taking out high hp/def/defensive buffed targets before the priest. Again, and I can't stress this enough, in my examples the priest was given .5 second cooldown as opposed to the roughly 1 second cooldown used here, and still they die to focused fire.

So the question is: Why is this changed, and can we please change it back? Also, I wanted to make this a poll but didn't work out how the poll thing at the bottom worked. If a mod added a simple 'yes no' poll to this I'd be happy. Thanks for reading this far those who did, and further thanks for consideration given to this. Nerfing heal has a large and unnecessary impact on RO, as demonstrated.