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.

[Namine]

First of all, Namin? is a high priestess, although not a pvp one, and she did read through the entire post~

Namin? actually sort of questions if this change is yet another of a "negative" change by the heRO SvN update. It seems like heal has a 1 second cooldown right now according to skill description on RMS (which uses eAthena stats, and heRO uses eAthena to run). So the post is essentially saying... iRO has 0.5 cooldown for heal? Shuffling through most databases online, Namin? really does not say how any official versions of RO uses 0.5 sec as cooldown...

The way Namin? sees it is that this is a SvN change, which heRO has agreed with the GMs that the server will accept both the positive and the negative changes about it, and it seems like this is one of the many 'negative' ones~

It was also never mentioned in the change-log for heRO's custom changes for the SvN either (such as sight/ruwach, and various drop rates for some items), so that is another reason why Namin? doubts that it is a heRO change, but rather the svn change.

[GM-Pandora]

That's a long post, it's kinda late I'm sorry to admit I didnt read it all, but please know that heal was not tempered with by the admin of this server in any way, it is working as intended by the eAthena developer when they made our current subversion.

[Kiaro]

Well when you can read it, official update or not, it's quite clear that end game, priests are not worth playing as a healer class and are beaten by creator potion pitching and cond potion pitching by a lot. Ironically, priests will need to use condensed ranked potions to survive DPS and probably focus on buffs and heals instead of healing -- this is a priest!

I mean, before end game it wont look bad, but as gear progresses priests will be in the dust. I guess this suggestion applies whether or not the change was intended. I've never seen such slow heal, and heal loses to DPS end game anyway so~ I mean, I guess it becomes a thread of 'can we revert this?' to 'can we change this?' with the appropriate projected numbers to back it up.

[Namine]

Well when you can read it, official update or not, it's quite clear that end game, priests are not worth playing as a healer class and are beaten by creator potion pitching and cond potion pitching by a lot. Ironically, priests will need to use condensed ranked potions to survive DPS and probably focus on buffs and heals instead of healing -- this is a priest!

But main just whined a week ago that creators are completely useless[/irony]

Indeed potion pitcher heals more than a priest, and priests are the supposedly 'healing classes' but then again, Heal costs only SP while Creators have to go through quite the trouble to make the potions at times, and reaching ranking status can prove to be difficult.

Since the current trends according to everyone else (Namin? is obviously biased for better/faster heals, regardless of being backed by math or not ) is that "iRO is God and the word of God is the total absolute truth" then perhaps players ought to be consistent when requesting for balance changes with the GMs, and go for "let heal be how iRO has them to be."



Indeed Priests seem to lose in all those situations, and Namin? is purely being theoretical since she lacks true pvp experience, but if Priests can really out-heal all those suggestions, then perhaps they are actually overpowered instead... seems rather silly if Priests can really out-heal most attacks from different classes through spamming heals, instead of how they can delay/stall right now if they really are left alone against whoever they are against...

[Sekaru]

Cough this has to be said.. Cart term = lex divina acid demo = pneuma Asura= well get used to it everyone gets owned by it Edp = welcome to the wonderful world of your tottaly screwed full strip = simply I dunno run? and if confined silence as for double bolt I'm just gonna lol and tell you that we have flower wings wich give +20 mdef add that to all the other mdef gear and your own mdef and doubled or not the bolts will do like maybe 50 a shot wich makes a 3k heal more then enough....

the main flaw in your list is your pinning a hp against things EVERY CLASS has problems beating. oh and by the way lol 1v1 overall isn't a good situation for priests they are a SUPPORT class for a reason wich means in most of these situations they have an ally who can kill whomever they are attacking.... by the way a good priest can get through all these situations in more then one way just gotta think outside the box lol

[Rika]

I truly hope I did not misread and misinterpret this post in any way ._.;

Personally, the heal works fine for me. I remember in the past how I'd complain about such a cool down until I finally adjusted and worked a s tragedy in which I wouldn't die instantly when mobbed

I don't believe priests original intent was to survive on a 1v1 match with say classes whose skills are built towards more damage towards players. A fairly decent priest will survive a while into the match, but unless they have a way of bringing down the opponent it's simply a matter of sp/lag/unexpected other effects from the opponent/etc to finish the priest off.

Going into a more supportive priest build, chances are the team with the priest will have a higher chance of survivability as compared to the other team as their buffs can become essential. You mention how the priest can become occupied by healing them self and not able to attend to the rest of the team, perhaps this is more of a problem of the team unable to notice a huge force is on their support and should be redirected as a priority to the team. Once the force is redirected, not even necessarily dead just a change of targets, the priest should be able to bring itself back up in time to help the rest.

SP is a problem for majority of the classes who wish to go out on lengthy pvp without any options to sit, something that is covered with our fishing system on HeRO. Yes it is quite ironic that main was ranting on how potion pitching alchemists were quite useless thanks to the abundance of fish available to everyone in the game. They tend to be easier to spam than skills, and quite a few knights are known to have nemo (full hp/sp) up their sleeves. Of course, we can't deny the down effects the fish also bring. One can only shudder at the thought of randomly being frozen when attempting to heal a near dead ally.

I can't say too much towards the first point mentioned. Even with a cool down nerf the priest is still a very formidable tank/attempt kill if you can obtain equipment. Personally, I have always found killing a priest to be the most annoying thing in the world but I concern myself more with distracting the player from its allies and majority of the time will doubt the priest can kill me.

Hopefully I didn't bunch up this post seeing as it's midnight for me...and taking into account I haven't full out pvped in a while, specially concerning HeRO.

[Kiaro]

Cough this has to be said.. Cart term = lex divina acid demo = pneuma Asura= well get used to it everyone gets owned by it Edp = welcome to the wonderful world of your tottaly screwed Icon_razz full strip = simply I dunno run? and if confined silence Icon_razz as for double bolt I'm just gonna lol and tell you that we have flower wings wich give +20 mdef add that to all the other mdef gear and your own mdef and doubled or not the bolts will do like maybe 50 a shot Icon_razz wich makes a 3k heal more then enough....

Under no circumstances should a whitesmith not have panacea to instantly get rid of silence. By being locked in pneuma, a priest falls into the creators hand (and if the creator happens to have a frilldora card, then the priest has about a half second to see the creator casting, react, mouse themselves and pneuma before it hits), you can't run from full strip, that's what close confine is for, you can't silence because any end game WoE character will have panacea, period. (if you hide, then your allies have fun having no healer). I gave my hypothetical priest 50 mdef, so I did indeed give them mdef gear.

the main flaw in your list is your pinning a hp against things EVERY CLASS has problems beating. oh and by the way lol 1v1 overall isn't a good situation for priests Icon_razz they are a SUPPORT class for a reason wich means in most of these situations they have an ally who can kill whomever they are attacking.... by the way a good priest can get through all these situations in more then one way Icon_razz just gotta think outside the box lol

What I am showing isn't that priests should be able to beat those classes, or survive dedicated DPSers. Remember, my examples gave priests double the healing potential that they have here, and still they lose out. With half the effectiveness on heal, it's not even a contest. Your 'outside the box' thing isn't very helpful, since I think I'm largely aware of gear options and whatnot and there's no esoteric escape except perhaps being tied to a bard in WoE, if indeed poem of bragi affects the heal cooldown here.

I don't believe priests original intent was to survive on a 1v1 match with say classes whose skills are built towards more damage towards players. A fairly decent priest will survive a while into the match, but unless they have a way of bringing down the opponent it's simply a matter of sp/lag/unexpected other effects from the opponent/etc to finish the priest off.

I quite agree priests shouldn't try to survive 1 vs 1 to those classes, and that teamwork is important and strategy and whatnot, but it is simple maths, not strategic failure which says 'priests are healing for half as much', essentially. Furthermore, my examples show that a priest wont survive fairly well -- they will die, even if they have 2x the heal ability as they do here. This is not the case. They are like, literally, twice as screwed vs these classes as my examples show.

To your comment about how with the right equips a priest can tank alright -- well yes, perhaps in pvm, but in WoE this is demonstrably not the case. My main concern is twofold: Firstly, priests are very easy to kill as you approach endgame, like to the point that priests would need to pot spam (see - every example I gave, but the priest has 1/2 the healing power) and secondly that while things are this way, the general healing of a priest will be too poor to be worthwhile. That is to say, that a priest healing an ally from attack will not make a significant enough difference to matter (because again, HP healed per second vs DPS will be is currently a rather dramatic difference).

For the most part, this isn't so much my opinion I'm arguing here, as just demonstrating how very very screwed priests appear to be as we approach the end game. Just numbers. Except the stuff about the general end metagame in pvp which is a bit less written in stone but I feel the need to clarify things like 'lex divina wont stop any competent whitesmith, ever' and 'pneuma isn't a particuarly reliable counter to AD from smart creators'.

Again, I am not proposing priests be able to outheal these damage sources. I am presenting the fact (just based on pure clean numbers/maths) that with 2x the healing power priests would still die to DPSers in the end game, and then from that fact, expressing my opinion that with half that healing power, priests are healing too little, especially compared to things like, slim potion pitcher or soul linked potion pitcher.

Thanks for the replies.

[Sekaru]

lol you never adressed my ally concern in general lol theres not too many hps that walk around aimlessly in WoE pvm or pvp without there proper backup and well for the mdef thing all I can say is krimlin lol and you do realize how easy it is for a hp to run don't you? its as simple as increase agil and decrease agil no stalker will catch them. oh and while were on decrease agil theres your solution to cart term lol as for the half second reaction time you get.. well a good priest should always be on guard especially in woE/pvp scenario's so most of the time they can make that half second or simply stay away from walls if your that frightened by frilldora...

now I keep pushing against the heal thing for one reason... there are MULTIPLE hp on this server alone that I have seen both tank and counter everysingle one of the sources you listed... I would tell you how but I wish I knew myself now with double the healing power it would be litteraly impossible to kill certain hp's... btw Deviling thara beret is the counter to asura lol. and there are many cards people tend to look over thats what I mean by outside the box lol what wonders a priest could do with a freezing rod lol and thats only something simple xD

[Jack Skellington]

Is Safety Wall considered outside the box? Haven't read much mention into that yet.