*specifically for Healing Hands
Sorry for clickbait. This thread is intended to be a discussion on whether we should ask the developers to remove Cleric’s Hammer’ healing penalty.
My arguments are the following:
Spells are superior mechanically for both bossing and farming. When bossing, you can almost always deal damage to the boss, while on melee characters you have downtime due to being out of range, due to having to dodge some abilities. When farming, you can hit anything on the screen with spells, but have to run to every pack of monsters as a melee.
You save one skill tree point by not going melee, which can be used to spec Homeward, so that you don’t have to worry about not healing yourself when hitting distant targets. Yes, it does take away your ability to deal damage at range, but this is what melee version lacks by default. Even more, melee character can’t heal himself via Healing Hands when there are no targets in melee range, but spell character can, which is a huge bonus for survivability.
Counter argument in advance to “But you can just not spec Cleric’s Hammer and not have to deal with heal debuff”:
If you do so, you lose all the utility of a triggering skill, for example with Vengeance you get increased attack speed, damage reduction and double proc of on-hit effects such as armor shred. Also you lose access to making it a movement skill, and Healing Hands is currently the best Sentinel moveskill without alternatives, as it both can have 0 mana cost, be targeted anywhere and make you invulnerable while moving.
Overall I think that this skill’s spell version is far superior to melee version, and having melee get -65% instant healing (which, depending on your attack speed, can be more than half the total healing if you account for heal over time) on top of that, is totally unnecessary, and this debuff should be removed.
Edit: Considering point №2 (you can always get healing provided there is 1 target on the screen as a spellcaster vs only if you hit a target in melee range as a melee), the melee version should probably get a buff to healing instead of a debuff.
You can still cast healing hands when you have the trigger node specced.
As matter of fact, healing hands triggers itself. And there is no hard or fast rule like PoE on triggers.
So while I do agree the clerics hammer debuff is a bit strong, I think the intended gameplay loop was not to only use it as a triggered ability.
Also even with 65% less triggered healing, at 1k healing effect, the baseline 100 becomes 1100, which then becomes 385 which is not really all that bad of healing. if you need to heal yourself outside of combat, you simply press the button while on the bar.
Melee healing hands always heals the user when self casted, and its always centered on the player anyways.
Id argue that the node before the melee node should be moved elsewhere so melee builds dont have to be forced to take that mega trash node. The reason melee self cast HH feels so bad is at default you need to eat 16% action speed. The node is so bad, that you actually lose significant dps by putting in a second point.
With one point you deal 24% more damage, but cast 16% slower. This works out to 0.84 * 1.24 = 1.04~ total dps multiplier. if you take the second point, it is 0.68 * 1.48 = 1.006~ or less then 1% more damage. this second point lowers dps by about 3% and literally is only useful if you trigger it and ignore its downside also makes it worse as a movement skill.
This skill is terrible designed right now because its only merit is either being extremely broken through the ward stuff, or being an extra trigger on smite/melee because the self cast version eats poo.
Yes, you can cast it manually, but as I said, this makes you lose benefit of the triggering ability, while on a spell version you don’t even have to bother, just spam your triggering ability.
Also if you spec moveskill node, you can’t even spam Healing Hands manually, cause it gets a cooldown, and taking moveskill node is pretty much mandatory, cause other moveskills suck by comparison.
Also even with 65% less triggered healing, at 1k healing effect, the baseline 100 becomes 1100, which then becomes 385 which is not really all that bad of healing.
The point is, why would I bother with having to choose between manually attacking with healing hands while losing the best moveskill, or deal with having half healing, if I can just play the same build as a spellcaster and not have any of these issues?
They can, if you manually cast HH you get the ward/heal.
But you aren’t going to be hitting distant targets, you’re melee.
There’s several ways you can spec/play HH, while I do like it being proc’d by Vengeance, I’m inclined to give the channelled version a try, Dr3ad did a video on it and it did look good.
IMO, I think it needs to be. The amount of healing/ward you can get is utterly bonkers.
And that’s assuming you don’t take any points in Urgent Healing which provides an additional 35 flat healing, effectively being a 35% more modifier per point. So with 4 points there & 1k healing effectiveness you’d get a heal of 2.4k. Per cast. That’s almost 1k healing per proc from Cleric’s Hammer.
Only if you self cast. If you proc it via Cleric’s Hammer the reduction is irrelevant & you get 48% more damage & healing…
And if you take the channelled node, that ignores the cast speed reduction as well after you’ve started casting. So that node isn’t as bad as you make it out to be.
Okay, this needs clarification.
If you take the moveskill node, you can’t effectively heal yourself, cause it gets a long cooldown. If you don’t take the moveskill node, you lose the best sentinel’s moveskill. Spellcaster doesn’t have to bother with the choice, it can have both moveskill and heal himself via triggering through smite w/o penalty.
I was talking about spellcaster taking Homeward and not having to worry about missing the healing due to hitting distant targets.
I think I should’ve made my point clearer in the first post by adding some context:
1 The amount of ward is broken and the removal of a melee debuff should be done together with making the amount of healing/ward balanced overall.
2 The main issue is that melee version of the triggered Healing Hands is strictly worse than spellcaster version of the same triggered skill, while melee is already inherently worse, due to having to be in the enemy’s face to deal damage.
Again, spellcaster doesn’t have to choose, it can just spam the triggering spell, and get a full benefit of the healing. And again, spellcasting is mechanically superior to fighting in melee range.
the title is OK is not a clickbait.
e.g. have you guys tried high difficulties, Arena waves 150+/corruption 400+, if yes probably you died in one shot from some “breath” attacks from some mobs like Tundra Stalker who blow cold/fire damge from their mouths, those attacks are Damage over time so mitigation against them is very limited. are DoTs, but not over several secods, e.g. Tundra Stalker attack 4 times per second… so yes, most probably devs of this games hates melee.
itdoes notmatter how healing you have or how HH works, with 6K ward/2.5K life and all possible defense stats I got dead in less than 1 second, probably 250ms (first tick of Tundra Stalker attack) because they come in groups of 6, so no chance to react.
The reason its bad is because you are forced to take it for self cast melee HH. I bring up you can ignore its downsides, but I think nodes you are forced to path through probably shouldnt be “nodes that are only good if you ignore the massive downsides”
The debuff could probably be lowered to say 50% less healing and it would be okay. But I agree, like healing even 400 on use is basically a mod on an item saying “heal 400 health on hit” thats a crazy amount of health to instantly gain.
I mostly think that melee HH will feel really good if they just get rid of that damn node that makes it slow as balls which spell HH can feel free to ignore.
I’ve never used HH as a movement skill, but it looks as though it functions like Shield Rush? So why is Shield Rush bad but HH as a movement skill good? Unless you can pick the end point (like when you use Javelin as a movement skill)?
Yeah, doing both at the same time would probably be reasonable, IMO.
Which I agree is a bit weird.
Unless they teleported on top of you & instantly cast their frost breath, you had time to react. Unless you were busy with other mobs & didn’t notice them.
And the melee proc’d version & the channelled melee version. There’s several ways to ignore it.
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
Healing Hands VS Shield Rush:
1 Mana cost.
Can be brought to 0 (4-points or less if you use wand and doing a spell version)
VS
Can be brought to 23, or something like that (6-points), or refund mana (4 points), but makes you return to starting position, basically killing it as a travel skill
2 Safety.
Can make you invulnerable while traveling (1 point)
VS
Reduces damage taken by 20% while traveling (2 points)
3 Other.
Can double as a main damage skill if triggered through another ability (4 points)
VS
Can be made an attack that can be spammed only if you take a node that makes you return to starting position, basically killing it as a travel skill (5 points)
/////////////////////////////////////////////////
To be fair, I didnt even try shield rush, ditching it after looking at the skill tree, so maybe there are things I don’t know about.
Edit: the insert table function doesnt seem to work.
Shield rush is by far the best movement option on sentinel and its not even close. You can even do it without a shield. Which is 100 times less restrictive than the other movement skills. Can’t wait for them to nerf it into the ground for no reason.
sometimes they come from South/North of player and fast reach you.
Not only Tundra Stalker, e.g. Urshaku Scavengers or something like this, same type of mob woth fire damage, tested it with:
arnor 8900, ~53% reduction to non-phys, 57% armor appied to DoT so ~30% reduction to their attack + Oracle amulet with 18% reduction from DoT, so almost max you can do against DoT, with this I let a single Urshaki Scavengers to blow on me at corruption 430, got dead from 2.4k life and 1k ward in less than 2 seconds. ok, you can say is corruption 430, yes but when all other mobs theredo not do such high damage in few time and do not represent such a big threat and only 1 of that mobs are more dangerous then groups of other mobs then for sure xan be said that this types of mobs with this stupid DoT damage(cause is not over time, is instantly) are overtunned and their damage need to go down.
ecactly. cause they nerf OP builds(I am OK with that) but when we find out OP mobs the feedback is : “no, the monsters are perfectly tunned, they have no bugs and are 100% OK not having any issues”
Well something like a movement skill directly falls into the “skill check” aspect of the game. Can you time your evade correctly ,does your evade need to be correctly timed? Does it provide other benefits? Is it easily abused without thinking ? All this go out the window if it simply just “feels good” .
Take a genre like classic survival horror, the bad controls can sometimes be part of the tension of the game, the horror aspect of not being fully in control. Its like this a bit in the first dark souls game where the hit-stun from enemies is tremendously long where fighting more than one enemy increases the risk to a large degree.
I’m not sure what this genre is supposed to “feel” like or how much control we are supposed to have. Generally I find that in these games there are certain enemies who fall into the “you’re f-d now” catagory if they happen to get close to your character. At which point my brain goes well clearly we need fast and tight controls to avoid lesser enemies being a large threat.
I’ve found already that there were moments where my character was a bit weak and I found myself frantically trying to get away from the teleporting bears.
And then on the flip side we have larger enemies and bosses who telegraph their attacks and are also a threat. to which you might err on the side of less control and lean towards precision and timing via the “dodge” skill check.
Another part of this conversation is map/zone traversal. Where I can certainly use Shield rush to reach further and farther distances than most other movement abilities.
I’m not sure what their thinking is on this, of course different classes should move around differently. But I guess a question would be…
What is the base line of a movement skill?And if you make one worse than that, why do so?
in patch 1.0.1:
“Reduced size of Ulatri Scavenger’s Firebreath ability” - but I think was not really reduced, cause that mobs blow almost half of screen and are as deadly as Tundra Stalker.
why? there were a lot of feedback about monsters damage like Tundra Stalker, Ulatri Scavenger… and they did nothing!!! I tought devs of this game listen to community, or this was just publicity before release…
Then, one problem in this game is about “MORE” damage. The game really dont tell you but MORE damage its not the same as INCREASED damage. So, 24% more damage its A LOT of increased damage because of the damage formula of this game.
In this game, Base/Add dmg and Increased dmg will stack (with the same group) before it multiplie with other values, but MORE dmg will always multiplie.
It does. Most more modifiers should say something along the lines of “x% more damage (multiplicative with other modifiers)”. They didn’t used to, but a year or two ago all the instances of it were changed.
Plus the in-game game guide should describe the damage calculation in general as well.
This isn’t D4 where the only difference is a small (x) after the damage modifier.
if you dont trigger HH, its actually does literally nothing especially if you take 2 points.
Before taking the node, your dps is considered X. Dps can be improved by damage or attack speed multiplication.
The node gives 24% more damage, but 16% less attack speed per point. Speed and damage are multiplicative towards dps.
So taking one point gets you 1.24x * 0.84 = 1.04~ or about 4% dps. and 16% less health per second if self casting.
Take the second point, brings to total dps modifier to 1.48x * 0.68 = 1.006 or about 0.6% increased dps. And 32% less healing per second.
This node is a straight trap unless you are channeling, or triggering HH. if you go channeled melee healing hands, you also get to by pass the downside, but get a whole host of new ones.
