DneTrain Posted March 1, 2014 Share Posted March 1, 2014 (edited) I've played pretty much every angle of the Sorc from Healing to Madness in Both PvP and PvE. I have talked to the PvE sorc healers and PvP Dps in my guild for input. I think there are a few things that need to be done to put us on equal footing in terms of survivability and dps compared to other classes. Im going to make some comparisons to Mercs because for the most part they are the mirror of our class, ranged heals and dps. Priority Changes - Unnatural Preservation should be off of the GCD, it has a long enough cooldown after its used and should be available at any time like force barrier when off of cooldown. Static Barrier and Consumption are powerful moves in their own rights and should respect the global cooldown, even if many people would disagree. - This one is probably the biggest and will effect both Madness and Corruption. It is about Consumption. Many sorcs are pissed that we are the only class that has to sacrifice our own health in order to gain back our force. It would be most beneficial to bring back the way consumption used to work. No health loss, just stacking force regen degeneration. For corruption sorcs the force surge stacks would cancel out the force regen degen stacks; Force Barrier would remove the stacks in the corruption tree. Madness sorcs would still have the consumption stacks but without the loss of health it would help manage their force issues and survivability much better. - Sorc DPS and Healing have to deal with many issues in PvP arenas. Getting their casts off without being interrupted is a very big issue for Corruption and Lightning Sorcs. I will mention a solution for lightning sorcs below but I believe that Corruption sorcs should benefit from a talent ability in their tree that actively reduces the CD of polarity shift whenever they are attacked or a move is interrupted; Operative and Assassins have a similar talent tree ability. This will allow them to use polarity shift more often and be able to utilize their longer casted heals. - Many tanks in my guild are not too excited when Sorc healers are in their PvP arenas. The big issue is that sorcs take much higher damage than other healers and aren’t able to heal themselves or their when they are focused. A MAJOR issue that our tanks are encountering is the fact that there is guard damage that is transferred to the tank even when a sorc has Force Barrier active. There should be no damage taken by either the sorc or the tank when they are protected by the invincible shield. DPS / Utility - Mercs getting the AOE knockback while ours was taken and replace with a cone. I know we share a knockback with our Sin tanking class but it would be much more useful for our motto of running away and making them pay. They should bring it back, and vary it between the 3 trees. Corruption, gets its heal still. Lightning gets its root still. Madness can get a slow that effects the target for 4 seconds. This wouldn't unbalance the game at all, and would benefit their pvp belief of run away and make them pay. There wouldnt be any slowdown in you running away, needing you to turn around to knockback and turn back to run away from them. Just mechanic they should bring back. If these changes cannot be done, then simply make the Knockback a longer distance and return it to its 360 effect. - For pvp arenas the lightning spec is all but useless unless you go hybrid. This is mainly because our main top tier ability Thundering Blast can be so easily shut down. My suggestion would be giving Thundering Blast an Entrench like ability for the duration of its 2 second cast. Immunity to Knockback, CC, and Interrupts to allow the cast to get off. The counter to this ability which seems OP would be a healer or cleansing ability. If there is no affliction dot on the enemy then Thundering Blast can lose half of its power. Lightning Sorcs do not have the uncleansable dots, and for a dot to be necessary to do max damage, this would be the counter for it. Entrench gives snipers 20 seconds of immunity for their moves, Series or Shots can do just as much as a thundering blast not to mention be followed up with multiple other moves. This is just a suggestion to help out Lightning sorcs in PvP arenas. - Our so called DCD Force Barrier, is more of a nuisance than a benefit. 10 seconds of immunity for really no benefit except as a stalling tactic. The current changes to Force Barrier are welcome but I think they can add a couple more tweaks that are specific to whatever talent tree you use. Corruption Force Barrier stops all Healing the sorc can do for the group so how do we change that? Allow Force Barrier to have a pulsing effect that heals friendly players for the duration of the Barrier. You can make it the amount that the Force Suffusion heal does. Lightning and Madness Force barriers can do instant damage every 2-3 seconds for the duration of the bubble. These would be talent abilities high in their respective talent trees. - Another option for the Force Barrier would be to keep the scheduled changes coming up in 2.7 but reduce its duration to 5 seconds (which will grant the 4 stacks) and reduce its cool down to 1:30 (Because Lightning gets 30second reduction from talent tree which would make it 1 minute). Along with this it should heal up for up to 50% of our max health and regenerate force quicker. Being bubbled without a healer around to heal you is basically just killing time for the enemies abilities to come off of cooldown. This will get us back into the fight faster and allow us to make more use of the DCD you have given us. - There has been many debates about giving fadeout baseline to force speed. While that would be nice I think it would be a little too over the top. Putting Fadeout in Tier 1 of the corruption tree though would be more beneficial (also making it only 1 talent point to acquire). One more change I would make to force speed is to make it a longer duration. 4 seconds to run away and set up (5 seconds for corruption sorcs) would be better, especially paired with the increased knockback effect I mentioned earlier. HEALING This is an area of great concern for many sorcs. There have been many issues from PvP arenas, to PvE operations. I hope I can address them here. I had feedback from our main Progression Sorc Healer. - Dark Infusion is our most powerful single target heal, but it is also the longest casted heal in the game. To offset the cast time this heal needs to hit harder. Period. Either this or reduce it to a baseline 2.5 second cast time. - With the buff to Mercs Kolto Shells, it has effectively boosted their EHPS in raid scenarios. Revivification in 8 man operations is very functional and works quite well. When brought into a 16 man raid however the limitations of Revivification can be seen. Particular examples can be seen in Dread Palace and Scum and Villany. Revivification HEALS the DATACRON in the middle of the map on Dread Palace, and Revivification HEALS the ROCKS during the Titan 6 fights. Bioware NEEDS TO FIX the fact that these invincible objects take up a group member’s spot in the revivification puddle immediately!!!!! - Resurgence is the only HoT that sorcs have and it is a really weak one. It is basically used to set up for the stronger innervate or Revivification and apply the armor buff. To make this HoT more viable it should not have a cooldown or at least have a reduced cooldown to 3 seconds. - Static Barrier is not a healing move, it is a preventative move to protect people from damage. If your tank is at 30% health and you place a barrier on them, after it pops they are still at 30% health. The Static Barrier ability should be able to Crit when you put it on a friendly target, allowing for a larger amount of damage to be absorbed. Also High in the corruption tree there should be a talent that heals the friendly target protected by Static Barrier after it pops for "X' amount of health. - Force Surge stacks are a big part of many aspect for Sorc healing. Reduces the Activation time or Revivification, and negates the degenerative force regen effects of consumption. However as many sorc healers know there is one ability we have that does not get used often and that is Dark Heal. Another way to utilize Force Surge would be to have one stack of force surge allow an instant cast of Dark Heal. Along with this Dark Heal would need to have a lower force cost and slightly lower amount healed. However this would bring Dark Heal back into the rotation in emergency situations. - A possible idea that one of my guildmates came up with is specifically designed for PvP with very low possibility of it being a factor in PvE. If dark heal is interrupted, your next dark infusion becomes immune to interrupts. This allows you to bait out interrupts with your dark heal, keeping the skill cap high as it was intended for sorcs, but then solve some of the lockdown issues. Since you aren’t normally interrupted in PvE it would have little impact on that side of the game. Alternatively, if your dark infusion is interrupted it could make your next dark heal free. These are some of my suggestions to what we should do. Thanks to my fellow sorcs in REIGN for their input on how to bring our class back into the game. Edited March 2, 2014 by DneTrain Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ryuku-sama Posted March 1, 2014 Share Posted March 1, 2014 From a seer/corruption sage/sorc.....Those are very good idea...I just have some issue with taking away health cost for Consumption/Noble Sacrifice. It'ld make our Force management too easy mode..... with a steady 8 force/sec back while other healers and rDPS are stuck with diminishing regen, if we could use Consumption to get our Force back we would never run out of Force. And, currently, running out of Force isn't that easy.The health cost in PvE can easily be mitigated by Force Mend/Unnatural Preservation and, for healers, by Force Armor/Static Armor. If ever you use more Consumption then you can heal as DPS then you shouldn't take too much damage anyway.In PvP, it's almost impossible to run out of Force and when you do you are probably losing cuz you are burning your heal as fast as you can or you slow down slightly to regen cuz the other team is too stupid to attack your squishy ***...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthEndonae Posted March 1, 2014 Share Posted March 1, 2014 The no health cost for consumption for the healing tree was there initially, before Unnatural Preservation was added, however it had to be removed because Unnatural Preservation was necessary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MidichIorian Posted March 1, 2014 Share Posted March 1, 2014 (edited) I like them all but especially your thoughts on force barrier. Force barrier has really become a pet peeve of mine becuase it's such a useless and sporadically used ability. A DCD with a 3 minute CD will IMO never be useful. Do I use it this time, do i save it? You never know what's going to happen 5 or ten seconds from when you use it. If something on the other hand has a 1 minute CD, which IMO is fairly long too, you're atleast not feeling like you just screwed yourself. (i think i average something like 0,5 deaths/game, with the majority of games having 0 deaths, so it's not like I have issues with staying alive) I'm not even sure what situations they had in mind when they created Force Barrier? Is it supposed to be a strictly defensive ability, a last resort and "oh crap" DCD? That's the last thing I use it for. I currently use it to block one big hit to reduce the risk of me ending up in a "oh crap"-situation or to play it safe when I'm outnumbered and trying to prevent a node cap, not because I'm about to die but because I don't want to risk it. I don't need a 3 minute DCD with a 10 sec duration for those things, one of the many other DCD'es in the game, DCD'es with fairly short CD'es, would have done the trick. Dodge/Evasion would have suited sages/sorcs much better. The only reason to why i even have force barrier bound to one of my "good keys" on the keyboard is because they added a cast time to WW. WW used to be on barrier's key but is now bumped down to the "meh, someone will just interrupt it and in the event that I do get it off it's going to be broken by a team mate anyway"-keys. With WW still being a healthy ability I wouldnt have bothered with force barrier, that's how crappy it is. Edited March 1, 2014 by MidichIorian Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdrianDmitruk Posted March 2, 2014 Share Posted March 2, 2014 (edited) Small correction: The bug you describe is tanks taking guard damage from us even when we have Force Barrier up, not Static Barrier, and yes it needs to be fixed pronto. One of our greatest issues in PVP that no one ever thinks about but that kills our viability nonetheless is that we must (and are expected to by devs) constantly LOS to evade enemies but constant LOS means we cannot affect others. When we pop out of LOS we must cast (and do it before a leap or pull interrupts us), thus adding further delay to our ability to help the team and amplifying the problem. Corruption lacks any ability that can heal others through LOS; lightning can't Make Them Pay through LOS. This is a major contributing factor to both specs' utter lack of viability in arenas as we have to sacrifice any ability to help our team just so we can hope to survive. Madness is our most viable spec probably because its dots keep ticking while out of LOS, and its dots pack a punch, so it's substantially less affected by the problem. I made a quite detailed post about the problem and possible solutions (moreso for corruption as it remains to be seen if Fadeout will be enough for lightning, personally I think it has potential) here. Also on another note, there is way too much filler in the top third of corruption tree for it to be considered relevant to PVP. If you look at the talent trees of the other healers, the top talents tend to provide significant boosts to some very important heals. We only have 1 talent that does that (Twisted Force), 2 if you count Force Surge's ability to speed up reviv, and the rest of the tree is pretty much 1% here and there. It's just not enough to make the full tree desirable in arena compared to the defense available from bubblestun IMO. Edited March 2, 2014 by AdrianDmitruk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AdrianDmitruk Posted March 2, 2014 Share Posted March 2, 2014 I like them all but especially your thoughts on force barrier. Force barrier has really become a pet peeve of mine becuase it's such a useless and sporadically used ability. A DCD with a 3 minute CD will IMO never be useful. Do I use it this time, do i save it? You never know what's going to happen 5 or ten seconds from when you use it. If something on the other hand has a 1 minute CD, which IMO is fairly long too, you're atleast not feeling like you just screwed yourself. (i think i average something like 0,5 deaths/game, with the majority of games having 0 deaths, so it's not like I have issues with staying alive) I'm not even sure what situations they had in mind when they created Force Barrier? Is it supposed to be a strictly defensive ability, a last resort and "oh crap" DCD? That's the last thing I use it for. I currently use it to block one big hit to reduce the risk of me ending up in a "oh crap"-situation or to play it safe when I'm outnumbered and trying to prevent a node cap, not because I'm about to die but because I don't want to risk it. I don't need a 3 minute DCD with a 10 sec duration for those things, one of the many other DCD'es in the game, DCD'es with fairly short CD'es, would have done the trick. Dodge/Evasion would have suited sages/sorcs much better. The only reason to why i even have force barrier bound to one of my "good keys" on the keyboard is because they added a cast time to WW. WW used to be on barrier's key but is now bumped down to the "meh, someone will just interrupt it and in the event that I do get it off it's going to be broken by a team mate anyway"-keys. With WW still being a healthy ability I wouldnt have bothered with force barrier, that's how crappy it is. I use Force Barrier as a way of throwing a grenade semi-off-the-GCD. Yes the grenade is on the GCD but if I see three leaps to me the barrier stops around 20k damage just in the timespan I'm waiting for my next global to become available at all. The sentinels all leap into a faceplant and I run away. Vengeance will become even more prevalent in 2.7 so this won't work as often as it did pre 2.6 but strangely the buffs to Force Barrier kind-of-sort-of offset that by making it worth waiting a bit longer to throw the grenade in some circumstances. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DneTrain Posted March 2, 2014 Author Share Posted March 2, 2014 Small correction: The bug you describe is tanks taking guard damage from us even when we have Force Barrier up, not Static Barrier, and yes it needs to be fixed pronto. I will make the change in my post, thanks for the correction. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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