Analysis and two suggestions for Sage Healing

[Jedi_Kaysha]

Edit: just realised this post has become a fairly long wall of text, lol. For the TL;DR folks, here's the short version:

- Make sure Benevolence will always crit under the Conveyance buff;

- Remove the Force Regen penalty from Noble Sacrifice;

- Change Resplendence to give 50/100% chance to heal the Sage on Healing Trance crits;

 

After my experiences ingame in two Hard Mode flashpoints as well as my thoughts earlier when the patchnotes for 1.2 were announced, I can say that the 'fun' was taken out of Sage Healing for me by a fair chunk. From a fairly fluent mechanic, for me it has become something - as I called it in another post - not unlike ploughing through coagulated syrup.

 

This post also applies to the Sith Sorcerer Healer, of course, but since I play Republic on my Healer, I will use the terms and names from that side.

 

Now I can understand some of the changes they've made, but the implementation was perhaps something too much. I'd like to post my thoughts about two of them: Burst Healing and Noble Sacrifice. This all strictly from a PVE point of view, as I don't like PvP in the slightest. As far as is relevant, my stats are ingame as follows (full Columi):

Hitpoints: 18k

Willpower: 1550-ish

Crit chance: ~20%

Surge rating: ~70%

Force: 650

 

BURST HEALING

 

The double-dipping bug actually resulted from lag between the game client and the game server coupled with the fact that the original Conveyance buff was resolved at the start of casting Deliverance, rather than at the end. Due to network lag, the game client could already start casting the next healing spell, while the server had yet to remove the buff before the next cast, as it got 'used up'.

 

Since network lag is unavoidable, the only logical step to take was to make sure that buff resolution only occurred at the time the spell being cast was also resolved. This complicated matters, as it meant that a hastened Deliverance was no longer possible (hastening a spell is, after all, resolved during the start of the spell cast instead of the end). In order to give Deliverance a boon regardless, they reduced the Force cost instead.

 

This left Sages with only Benevolence as a Burst healing, which was boosted by granting it a massive extra chance to crit (crit chance increased by 60% ... but the wording is a bit ambiguous, though; if your crit chance is, say, 30%, does this mean it is boosted up to 90%? Or to 48% (which is 30% x 1.6)? Better said, is the 60% additive or multiplicative?) As an added benefit, this change would see a return of Benevolence to the cast bar of the Sage Healer. All in all, this is a welcome change, as it provides an extra tool to work with, making Sages more flexible in their healing role.

 

But it is only a poor-man’s substitution next to Deliverance. I’ve ran several checks and Benevolence heals for around 1600 non-crit, 2800 crit, for 46 Force, 1.36 seconds cast time. Deliverance, on the other hand, heals for around 3200 non-crit, 5500 crit, for 51 Force at 2.26 sec cast time. So, for Benevolence to even get close to a non-crit Deliverance, it has to crit itself, still falling short. Since the chance to crit is not 100%, there will be Benevolence casts that don’t crit – leaving the receiver of the heal out cold and making for a rather horrendous HPF (Hitpoints per Force used, in this case 34.8). Furthermore, pre-1.2 Deliverance could reach as high as 5500 (a HPF of 107.8!), a mark that Benevolence can never reach. A crit Benevolence is roughly 60.8 HPF, while a non-crit Deliverance is 62.7 HPF.

 

Personally, having this insecurity on whether a Benevolence cast is going to live up to its expectations (in other words: crit), while we’re likely only using it in a hairy situation where haste is of the essence, is making me very reluctant to use it. The potentials for disaster when it doesn’t crit are simply too great and that is something I don’t want to be burdened with at such a tight situation. It takes the skill out of keeping alive or letting them die and replaces it by a roll of the dice.

 

For that reason, I would make the suggestion to have Benevolence get a guaranteed crit when the Sage has an active Conveyance buff. It takes one worry off the Sages mind, granting a viable Burst Heal when Conveyance is up.

 

NOBLE SACRIFICE

 

I admit, I dislike the current implementation of this ability, have been ever since the beta of the game. Taken all by itself, it has the following effects:

 

- It is locked by the Global Cooldown;

- It consumes a Global Cooldown;

- It consumes 15% health;

- It reduces Force Regen by 25% for 10 seconds;

- It returns 8% of maximum Force.

 

When applied to myself (see values at the top), that translates to:

 

It consumes 2700 hitpoints and cuts my Force Regen by 2 Force per second, for 10 seconds (which works out to a net loss of 20 Force as opposed to full Force regen after 10 seconds). It returns 52 Force. Due to the net loss due to reduced regeneration, the net effect is that it only yields 32 Force. There is a short benefit of having 52 Force in the pool, but that benefit dries up within 10 seconds. Essentially, you take a loan on Force and pay it back with interest over 10 seconds time.

 

Any fight will also see the Healers taking damage. Dipping into your own health pool by such an amount to return some Force is putting the Sage in extra risk of dieing through effects from the encounter itself. And as is obvious, dead healers don’t heal at all.

 

The advantage of Noble Sacrifice over something similar to what the Trooper and Smuggler have, is that it doesn’t have a cooldown. The disadvantage is the health cost and regeneration cost that comes along with it.

 

Two often heard arguments are that a Sage Healer either has to use Rejuvenation on himself, or to stand in his own Salvation. Neither is cost-efficient, however.

 

The case of Rejuvenation:

Rejuvenation costs 28 Force and consumes a GCD on use. Since crits are not guaranteed, they cannot be dependent on to get the Sage back up to where he was with his hitpoints before. Looking purely at non-crit values, my Rejuvenation heals me for roughly 2400 health while it is running, over 15 seconds. As can be seen, this still leaves me 300 hitpoints short of when I used Noble Sacrifice, something that will have to get caught up by a crit somewhere in Rejuvenation’s active time.

 

At the same time, using Rejuvenation on the Sage himself has some negative aspects:

- It costs a GCD to use, during which the Sage cannot heal someone else;

- When talented for Force Shelter, that Force Shelter is used on the Sage (who has a wet paper bag for armor to begin with) instead of the Tank who benefits a lot more from it;

- It has a 6 second cooldown, so it cannot be used on anyone else while it is still cooling down;

- It has a running time of 15 seconds, which means that the Sage cannot use another Noble Sacrifice up until Rejuvenation has fully replenished the lost hitpoints, or risk dipping too low;

 

The case of Salvation

Salvation is by design intended to be used on 8 players. This is reflected in its hefty Force cost, which comes at 91 Force. For this, the people standing in it get healed 11 times over the course of 10 seconds.

 

With my current figures (see on top), that amounts to 388 healing per second, for a total of 4268 health. This is more than a single Noble Sacrifice, but less than two (which would cost 5400 health). As such, it doesn’t really ‘fit’. Besides that, two Noble Sacrifices will only yield 64 Force, not even enough to pay for the Salvation itself.

 

This would make Noble Sacrifice situational – and situational in that it requires Salvation to be already used for other purposes than to counter the effects of a Noble Sacrifice. Since Salvation can only be really used when people are clustered and able to remain clustered for 10 seconds, this compounds something that is situational by itself on something that is also situational.

 

The conclusion is that neither provides a viable alternative to Noble Sacrifice as it is, untalented. Noble Sacrifice, as an ability, provides no benefit in its own right! The benefit of using it, is just as high as the penalty, which may be not so bad to very bad depending on the situation at the moment it is needed.

 

The only reason to ever use Noble Sacrifice is if it is at least enhanced by two talents: Valiance (reducing health cost by 2% / 4%) and Resplendence (50% / 100% chance of not reducing Force Regen). Note, however, that Resplendence procs from Healing Trance, which has a cooldown of its own of 8 seconds. This means that you can only use a Noble Sacrifice without Force regeneration penalty once every 8 seconds at most.

 

To me this is actually very poor design. Every ability should have some form of viability in its own right, with Talents enhancing its functionality in one way or another. Right now, the Talents are required to even justify using it.

 

As such, before even beginning to reconsider the two Talents, I think the ability itself needs to be redesigned to provide some sort of benefit in its own right. The spirit of the Talent is of course that the Sage sacrifices part of his own essence to return it to the Force, allowing him to use it to help his allies. A Sorcerer consumes himself in burning anger, to squeeze out some more Force to vanquish his foes (even if indirectly by keeping his allies up long enough to kill the enemy). The health reduction would therefore have to remain, leaving a change to one of the other three: the Force regeneration penalty, the returned Force amount, or the GCD consumption.

 

Personally, I dislike the Force Regeneration penalty most, so I would slash that one off Noble Sacrifice. This increases the end result of using the bare Noble Sacrifice by 20 Force, while still having downsides that can’t be ignored – especially when used several times in a row.

 

However, as argued above, the Health penalty puts the Sage at a greater risk, because he will also suffer environmental damage. At the same time, slashing the Force Regeneration penalty makes Resplendence a useless talent. Both can be taken into a new talent, which could be decoupled from Noble Sacrifice to begin with, while remaining coupled to Healing Trance: simply change the Talent such, that Healing Trance critical hits have a 50% / 100% chance also heal the Sage for a small amount of his maximum hitpoints.

 

With these changes, I think the Sage is a viable, flexible, interesting and yet not overpowered healer. Specific values up for balance testing, of course.

Edited April 15, 2012 by Jedi_Kaysha

[Sylvan]

Very well thought out and reasoned post.

 

I could offer a slightly simpler suggestion. Give deliverance an 8 second cooldown, but replace it's 1.4 second cast time with the conveyance buff. Keep noble sacrifice as is.

 

This would give us back our emergency heal whilst also forcing us to make use of other abilities and it would prevent any kind of exploitation of rejuvenate.

[XtremJedi]

I have to admit to beginning to lose the energy to contribute to threads like this.

 

Before the 1.2 patch notes were released, quite a lot of us were providing suggestions in the Healing Forum and elsewhere, on how Sage/Sorc healing could be nerfed in a good way - making play more interesting and skillful. After the patch notes were announced, there was a positive raft of other options put forward... many of which were really good... including in PTS forums.

 

Through all of that though... there hasn't ever really been a recognition of the problem from BW - which is not that there was a nerf in healing output, nor even how big the nerf was really... but that the play-style of the class was hammered - both in PvE and PvP. BW's only response to complaints was that the nerf was necessary and Sage/Sorc now meet the target healing output metrics.

 

I dunno... perhaps I'm wrong, but I think that BW are pretty happy with the changes they've made. I honestly don't think that they are open to hearing that 1.2 was an awful patch. We meet the metrics and can heal the PvE content - so we're where we should be.

 

X

[YamianGodlike]

You forgot to mention one thing:

Since the net gain from Noble Sacrifice is 32 force and the cost of Rejuvenation is 28 the whole "combo" gives you a whopping 4 force. Yay for us...

[Sylvan]

Metrics don't pay subscriptions.

[XtremJedi]

You forgot to mention one thing:

Since the net gain from Noble Sacrifice is 32 force and the cost of Rejuvenation is 28 the whole "combo" gives you a whopping 4 force. Yay for us...

 

I'm not sure about this... it feels wrong.

 

You gain 52 from NS... and (even when not on resplendence proc) you still regain another 9 in the GCD, which makes 61. There's a loss of 2 force per second during the following 8.5 seconds - totalling 17 force... so you should still have a nett gain of 44.

 

The nett cost of Rejuvenation really shouldn't be 28 force either. Rejuvenate has a base cost of 30 - and taking 9% off for Inner Strength gets it to 28 - but you also regain 12 force during the GCD. So your nett Rejuvenation cost is actually 16.

 

That means that a Rejuv > NS combo should actually nett you 28 force.

 

If done on Resplendence proc, then you have an extra 17 force overall, so you should make a nett gain of 45. If you want to take into account the cost of the Healing Trance used to generate the Resplendence proc, then it's more like 29 nett gain - but that HT can be used to actually heal something, so I'm not sure that you can see it as an empty cost.

 

I saw an interesting approach to regain posted recently, which was to simply ignore Resplendence and just NS > NS > Rej > Deliverance. This actually works out pretty well. You gain a lot of force - even with the force regen debuff included and heal it all with the Rej and cheap Deliverance.

 

NS (+44) > NS (+44) > Rej (-16) > Deliverance (-16).... gives you a nett gain of 52. But of course, you spend 7 seconds executing it and two heals are going to yourself to make it possible. That's all empty time and empty heals.

 

There are clearly ways of creating force regain using these tools. You can make back enough, over time, to help support a rotation of sorts... as long as you're willing to also include quite a few pauses in casting in order to allow regen to work too. And the suggested solutions end up dedicating a lot of casting time and healing CDs to your pursuit of force... which messes up your role as a healer and makes game-play pretty awful.

 

X

[YamianGodlike]

XtremJedi: You say I gain 52 from NS and 9 during GCD for total of 61. But even without NS I would have gained the 9 anyway, so the gain from NS is still 52 minus lower force regen for the next 10s. Same for Rejuvenation - by casting I just lost 28 force, force regen over time will happen regardless of casting. Unless I'm missing something.

 

NS, NS, Rejuv, Deliver looks viable (at least for PvE, I can't imagine having spare 7s in PvP, not to mention the HP loss). I'm a bit afraid of that 50% lowered force regen though.

[XtremJedi]

Hehe... well the 50% lowered force regen was included in those calculations. You have a nett gain of 52 after NS > NS > Rej > Del and the regen debuff altogether (counting the total debuff value at once). That's the overall end result of that rotation... you will have 52 more force at the end of it all, than you started with.

 

That's what nett means: it's the final result after all gains and losses are accounted for. What you are talking about isn't the nett gain, because it doesn't include the regen. From your point of view, Rejuvenate costs 28 force. That's the 'gross' cost involved. But the nett cost is only 16, because you regen 12 during the casting.

 

Looking at gross costs and gains can be helpful too in some ways.... but the nett is the bottom line. If you want to express your argument in nett terms, then you need to compare the different strategies' nett results.

 

Conveyanced Rej > NS nett force gain is 45.

Rej > NS nett force gain is 28.

Doing nothing for 2 GCDs nett force gain is 24.

 

So then you can see that Rej > NS only gains an extra 4 points over doing nothing, but that conveyanced Rej > NS gains 21 points over doing nothing.

 

There can be benefits to using a gross approach. The gross contribution of Rej > NS may only be +4 points compared to doing nothing.... but knowing that when you have 50 force and use the combo you'll have 78 force afterwards is useful too... because it allows you to actually plan rotations. You'll never know the actual force drain/gain from a rotation, unless you look at the nett costs.

 

X

[Foenix]

i removed NS from my skill bar to the far end. May be it's usable on Soa or Karagga or T&Z, but in pvp...never.

[Jedi_Kaysha]

That's what nett means: it's the final result after all gains and losses are accounted for.

 

If you are considering nett results, Force wise, you are opening a different ballpark. In fact, you have to start considering cast times (affected by Alacrity) to get nett Force costs of spells, which are impacted by the state of your NS debuffs as well.

 

You can set up a table and determine Force costs to maintain certain rotations, based on the number of NS debuffs. It's just a matter of picking the right coefficients. I'll first state the template:

 

Spell name

Relative Force after casting, at 0 NS debuffs

Relative Force after casting, at 1 NS debuffs

Relative Force after casting, at 2 NS debuffs

Relative Force after casting, at 3 NS debuffs

Relative Force after casting, at 4 NS debuffs

 

I am just stating them for the most obvious Healing spells, based on my personal Alacrity (312, good for 9.58% activation speed):

 

Deliverance

-32.9

-37.4

-42.0

-46.5

-51.0

 

Deliverance, under Conveyance

-15.9

-20.4

-25.0

-29.5

-34.0

 

Healing Trance

-15.3

-20.7

-26.2

-31.6

-37.0

 

Rejuvenate*

-16.0

-19.0

-22.0

-25.0

-28.0

 

Force Armor*

-23.0

-26.0

-29.0

-32.0

-35.0

 

Salvation

-76.5

-80.1

-83.8

-87.4

-91.0

 

Salvation, under Conveyance

-46.5

-50.1

-53.8

-57.4

-61.0

 

Benevolence*

-34.0

-37.0

-40.0

-43.0

-46.0

 

* = This spell is instant cast or has a cast time faster than the GCD. The GCD timer is taken to determine Force cost and yield, to bridge the gap between the start of the cast and the start of the next cast.

 

Of course, values may differ slightly depending on total Alacrity of the Healer in question. But you can just set up a rotation, add the gain from NS and pick the correct value from the table for the spells being used and then it's just adding and substracting the values to determine where you end up.

 

One thing I realised that sets the Sages apart from the other Healer classes is that other Healer classes have a resource with a variable resource regeneration. The more they have of it, the higher the regen. For them, it is crucial to find the "sweet spot" on input and output of their resource. For Sages, no matter if they're at 0 Force or 650 Force, the regen is always the same.

 

Furthermore, for the other Healers the resource regeneration spell/ability is fairly heavy, but on a long cooldown. For the other healers, therefore, time is part of their resource management. For Sages, it's their health, since we could spam NS until the Nerfs come home. Well, ignoring the fact that we'd kill ourselves pretty fast, but we could keep casting it indefinately.

Edited April 16, 2012 by Jedi_Kaysha