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PVP healing fix


JackNader

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Any sane person who has actually played PvP in this game knows that the healing/taunt/guard mechanics are broken. In the previous version of this thread people were under the impression that I wanted to buff healers and nerf tanks. This is not the case.

 

I am calling for a rebalancing of "team" core mechanics, concerning multiple healers / guard and taunts.

 

Some background information.

 

- Healers in this game are designed around healing PVE boss fights, etc, not PVP.

-Taunt is a flat 30% damage debuff

-Guard adds 5% damage reduction and 50% shared damage

 

-In a 1v1 situation with "equal gear" a "Good" DPS will currently take down a Sorc/Sage healer in under a minute due to their squishy nature. Operative/Smugglers are a bit harder to take down. Troopers/Mercs are down right ridiculous to kill in a 1v1 simply because they have a tonne more damage reduction, a bubble talent that gives them an additional 25% damage reduction and can make themselves immune to interrupt.

 

-Guard + taunt reduces incoming damage to less than 35% of normal and that is BEFORE you add natural damage reduction. This means that it will take 3 - 4 people to kill a guarded sorc/sage if taunted and 5 - 6 people to kill a Trooper/Merc.

 

 

*Notes

 

A DPS should always beat a healer in a 1v1, however it should take the DPS a very long time to kill the healer. If the DPS can kill a healer too fast it renders the healing class pointless. If the healer cannot be killed by a single DPS, it massively shifts the balance of power in favor of healers. 1 - 2 Healers end up breaking pvp warzones as they tie up too many players.

 

Adding to the problem is when you get multiple healers in any one game. Healers tend to clump up so that they can all AOE heal themselves. If their are 2-3 healers clumped together, the most efficient way to kill them is to have a class with "pull" lift a healer away from their group so that they can be taken down by 2 DPS quickly. This tactic fails when the amount of clumped healers is 4 or more. There is absolutely no way to budge them.

 

On my server it seems more and more republic players are figuring out just how OP healers are. Initially when I first hit 50 there was one premade republic side that always had 2 healers. 1 month later, the amount of republic healers in any match has grown to 4 - 6. This many healers is game breaking. It's not fun at all.

 

-Fix suggestions

 

* IMO taunt should add a damage bonus versus healers. Great care would have to be taken to ensure 1v1's are not broken. That is, you can't just taunt a healer and receive the damage bonus yourself. I initially pondered the idea of adding a -30% healing debuff to Taunt but realized it would seriously break things. Adding the damage bonus is the most efficient fix and it would also be rather easy to implement.

 

*Taunt would need to be fixed in that only 1 taunt can be active on any player at any point in time. Taunt should be shown as greyed out if you can't currently cast it due to it already being listed on a players bar.

 

*Guard should add a 20% damage reduction bonus isntead of 5%. There should be no "shared" damage component. Instead apply a vulnerability to the guarding player so that that they take considerably more damage if attacked.

 

 

Foresight:-

 

 

*The real world effect from the Taunt casting change results in having the enemy team taunted for longer due to the staggering effect. Tank A taunts, Tank B taunts when the lockout is over, Then tank A again.

 

*Giving taunt bonus damage vs healers would place the tank as a core unit in any team which is where they should be.

 

*The guard mechanic changes would make healers more squishy under a guarded situation than they are now. The tank would also be less squishy or would take comparable damage to what they do now if they are silly enough to leave their guard on permanently. Note that this change would be for PVP ONLY!

 

Either way, these 3 changes would go a very long way in balancing the game.

Edited by JackNader
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  • 2 weeks later...

Good points BUT killing healer 1vs1 is possible right now only by Maruder. Any other class have problem with that (run out of resources, not enought sustained DPS or something). Operatives were nerfed to the ground and right now they are useless against healers. Especially Commandos.

 

My solution is to boost Operatives a little or give them gap closer to counter push back etc. And do something about cross healing. With 3-4 healers healing is not a problem. Problem is that they can cross-heal so unless you engage them with FULL TEAM ignoring 4 DPS on your back you won't take them down.

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First off, why in the world would a mod close a 4-page long thread and direct everyone in it to post here in a 1-post long (at the time) thread instead??? (especially when this post is ridiculously long and full of stuff unrelated to the previous thread)

 

Second, I think the problem with healing is the way that is scales with Expertise. Expertise increases damage and healing done while decreasing damage taken. The net result is that expertise improves healing while players with decent expertise simultaneously require equal or less healing (due to the damage mitigation portion of the Expertise).

 

Unfortunately, I don't think this problem can be fixed by tweaking Expertise as a standalone stat. Any change would probably result in Expertise becoming comparatively useless for some class of characters: healers, tanks, or DPS. Similarly, changing the healing/guarding/taunting mechanics would simply marginalize either the healing or tanking roles in the game as they stand today.

 

Personally, I would propose replacing Expertise and all other stats with something like "Aim:100(100)", where the number outside of parentheses is the standard value of the stat which applies to both PvE and PvP, while the number in parentheses only applies to PvP. This way, stats can be distributed appropriately by class (instead of having a mega-stat with unpredictable consequences), and PvE gear can have separate stats from PvP gear for balance between the play styles.

 

Edit:

As asides:

-Having taunt cause a damage buff against healers doesn't make sense. Additionally, the game isn't set up so that it can automatically distinguish between healer and DPS versions of the same AC (especially when getting into lower levels or hybrid specs).

-The suggestion to change Taunt sounds to me like a huge buff to tanks' DPS, which is already arguably too close to pure DPSers DPS.

-Healers need to be able to out-heal a single DPS, otherwise they're not worth having at all.

-Decent DPSers who use their interrupts can solo healers just fine. Even if they can't win (usually they can), they can generally do enough damage to prevent a healer from healing anyone other than himself until help arrives (on either side).

Edited by Dzhokhar
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I'm in a HC pvp guild, all members have full BM gear and we were all high ranked arena payers in wow. My mercenary is not better than any sorcerer in my guild, they dont die faster then me neither in 1v1 or WZ.

A good dps can kill us about 30-60s open area. In WZ i can stay alive easily against 1forever by pillar hugging and such but 2 dps can kill us.

If I have a friendly healer in the team i can stay alive against 3-4dps. If i have a tank to guard and defend me with a friendly healer i die about 1-2times per Warzone doing the objectives. A team with 2-3 healer and 1 tank is about unkillable no matter what has the enemy team got. We will see how do these teams perform in ranked but i doubt they can dominate it.

I can imagine warzones where the ball carrier can't die by players only by fire, where on civil war neither team can't get middle and no player die in the warzone, where on voidstar no team can go through the first door. I hope this wont happen.

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I'm in a HC pvp guild, all members have full BM gear and we were all high ranked arena payers in wow. My mercenary is not better than any sorcerer in my guild, they dont die faster then me neither in 1v1 or WZ.

A good dps can kill us about 30-60s open area. In WZ i can stay alive easily against 1forever by pillar hugging and such but 2 dps can kill us.

If I have a friendly healer in the team i can stay alive against 3-4dps. If i have a tank to guard and defend me with a friendly healer i die about 1-2times per Warzone doing the objectives. A team with 2-3 healer and 1 tank is about unkillable no matter what has the enemy team got. We will see how do these teams perform in ranked but i doubt they can dominate it.

I can imagine warzones where the ball carrier can't die by players only by fire, where on civil war neither team can't get middle and no player die in the warzone, where on voidstar no team can go through the first door. I hope this wont happen.

 

 

I dont think we will see many issues in Ald or Hutball, as backup in ald tends to take a little time and its easy to seperate players with knockbacks in hutball. Voidstar on the other hand is going to be a long and drwn out grind fest, this is undeniable.

 

As for the OP, i like your shield change but disagree with the taunt suggestion.

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  • 2 months later...
I really hope Bioware pays attention to your thred. I have noticed the same thing happening on my sever and it seems that people are pvping less because of it. It does not bother me too much I love pvp in this game but if no ones playing I cant either =(
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