Protection + Healing immunity
April 18, 2016 5:29AM
edited April 2016
I was looking forward to this patch in the hopes that it would fix the glaring problem of tanks not being able to tank properly and healing being somewhat trivial. After a few days, I've come to the conclusion that the protection mechanic was just a really bad idea. You didn't need a new mechanic at all, you needed to fix the mechanics that were already in place. Why complicate things with a new mechanic when you're not getting the existing ones right? Increase the health pools and effectiveness of armor was the answer, combined with the right call of lowering the damage of speed chars. Potentially let tanks still be slow, but start with 1/2 turn meter or something so that they initiate the fights like tanks in every MOBA, MMO etc. RG is so popular because he might actually get a taunt off before someone dies (which is still happening, regardless of the protection mechanic) The problem of Protection is that the following scenario is still all too common: It gets to my healers turn, everyone is either full health but missing some protection which I can't heal, already dead even though they were full last turn, or the ones who are low have healing immunity debuff. (more on that later) Just had a fight representative of this issue where my Lumi went the entire fight without a heal ever being warranted until she was the last one alive. That's absurd for a healer to have nothing to do. Once protection wears off, they're still just getting 1-2 shot meaning my toons go from 100-0% life constantly in between one of my healer's turn and the next. They're still so squishy that healing to full doesn't mean much. These are max geared 7 star toons I'm talking about. Healing immunity is also actually a bad idea. WoW had it with Mortal Strike, but it's at -25% fluctuating between patches all the way down to -10% and originally was set to -50%. Other games have had it where a healing debuff only reduces healing by 10% as well. 100% is just way too much, you should never be able to debuff an entire subclass's role. 50% I think is a hard cap. I'm not saying Sidious specifically is OP, although he is so annoyingly ubiquitous that given the recent (huge) mistake of not letting protection regenerate in GW combined with his presence in every single node makes GW just a really tedious hassle, and makes Barriss mandatory. I would argue 3 healers is mandatory for GW now too unless you want to be losing people the entire campaign. Anyway, I am saying the debuff in particular is too much no matter who's applying it. Combined with the new issues that protection brings, it just makes bothering to bring a healer really just a bad decision in Arena, and what I'd hoped you'd be doing with this patch is fixing mechanics that make tanking+healing worthless. "A" for effort, "D-" for execution.
In short, you're still having the exact same problem of people dying before they can be healed which just shouldn't happen. Kill my heroes because my heals are on c/d, not because I never even got a chance to use them in the first place.
In short, you're still having the exact same problem of people dying before they can be healed which just shouldn't happen. Kill my heroes because my heals are on c/d, not because I never even got a chance to use them in the first place.
0
Replies
No because we didn't need a huge HP increase, and nobody was using healers in Arena anyway.
Also, current mechanic means healers can only heal a char when below 50%. To make use of the full heal potential now a char needs to be 25% of total original HP + Protection....meanwhile you hit like a wet noodle.
Bad mechanic
Walls of text but agree. You had a very fun good product. Incremental change. Fix the broken. Complete insanity with the nerfing. The new protection made precrafting an awful nightmare. Healing was lay before add some hp lightly nerf OHKO. Game still fun lots of toons. We had variation then. Attempt and more variation. Now we have 6 meta toons. Sorry FOTP and yoda see you later. One leader. 6 toons. Jedi dead. B Rebels or empire or resistance or droids (lol) yeah no.
We have toons like Chewy who are all about defense. Buffing defense here and there.
But defense is completely worthless! Who uses Chewy so they can buff defense? Or any toon just for the purpose of buffing defense? Defense would have solved the problem of the 1 or 2 shot kills.
Here the game had a perfect mechanic to fix total offense teams. And instead of fixing defense to work properly, they add another sort of defense mechanism, protection, that doesn't solve the offense problem.
The OP specifically stated ' Increase the health pools and effectiveness of armor was the answer'.
This is my response to a guild mate last night regarding what would have happened if instead of protection it was an increase to HP.
'At level 80 Lumi will have her heal reduced down to a three turn cool down.
She will have 14509 hp and 13841 protection. If they had of added it all together she would have had 28350 health. Healing for 12756k every three turns with an additional 5620 heal at the start of their next two turns.
Sorry, but that is completely OP.'
Fortitude should not be equal to 90-110% of a hero's health. It should be equal to 25-75% depending on the hero. E.G. 25% for Rey, 75% for Boba Fett.
What an obtuse argument, you don't have to raise HP by so much that it makes healing OP. Nobody is saying we should have matched the exact same numbers as they added with protection, that's absurd to insinuate they would be beholden to a certain value. You have every number from a 1% increase on up to play with, it's all math. With healing immunity, ability block, and stun readily available, people can't beat you with healing unless you let them. You can debuff her regen..you could always..focus the healer if it's giving you trouble, bring healers yourself..etc etc. There are plenty of counters to healing. Given the fact that you can burst people down between healer's turns without any of those options, this really turns into a complete nonsense argument. My IG86 crits for 12k with offense up at only 73 and not full gear, so even those estimated values aren't OP. "Nobody using healers in arena" is exactly the problem. You have 3 main mechanics, tanking, healing, dps. And if no one is even using healing because it's worthless in arena? You have a MAJOR problem with your base mechanics. And just for the sake of argument, say that increasing HP pools and armor value made healing overpowered...they could always just...lower the numerical values of healing O.o
First off, Luminara has been an Arena staple for quite some time.
Second, I hate to say it, but I agree with the Turtle.
There are 3 whole characters with a Heal Immunity debuff, two of which have 0% Potency.
There are 4 characters that can Dispel this Debuff, and 2 others that can prevent it.
Larger health pools would have made healers a nightmare.
I'm not being obtuse!
Exactly, this person gets it. There are SO many dials to turn and tweak to get things in line and still fix the 1-2 shot problems, adding another dial was seriously the last thing they should have done.
Even in GW the problem with Sid is not heal immunity, it's his dodge rate against Jedi which prevents him from being easily nuked. Obviously the solution is to not run Jedi-heavy squads, but this can be problematic for FTP'ers as it's more than likely that our two main healers will be Lumi and JC. The dearth of dark side healers is a pretty glaring issue in this game, especially since Daka is slow to obtain (and is competing with QGJ for token usage). Talia is decent but has a major disadvantage in a long-cooldown heal that actually harms her instead of healing her.
Still, I don't think at all that 3 healers are needed in GW. I've completed GW every day since the update, using either Lumi + JC or Lumi + Talia. I also swap in RG after the first few nodes (which I tend to run DPS-heavy to get them done faster), because even with the DPS loss his stuns are invaluable - and are also another way to deal with heal immunity debuffers. With the AI usually opening with Sid's AoE rather than his basic, it means you can potentially keep him perma-stunned the entire match without him getting a debuff off.
Being in the top 50 is not even remotely hard. Have chars that fit the meta, win. My arguments take that long to flesh out, sorry if less than a page is too much for your brain. I understand the concept of protection, it ain't a difficult one to comprehend, it's just an unnecessary mechanic as there were other ways to fix the problem without adding a new mechanic which was the entire point of my post. Yes I've been one shot before, who hasn't?!? In fact my max geared Han has been one shot by a GS combo and a QGJ combo which led me to complain about the same issue of dps/assist burst being so overpowered in the first place that it dominated the meta and made such basic concepts as tanking and healing obsolete, that's how bad it was, I know...a fully geared tank dying on the first dps turn..incredibly broken. With Phasma leads it's only a matter of time before everyone has been one shot with a QGJ/IG86/GS assist combo. The Poe vs Poe days were before my time at max level but mandatory characters should never happen and are obviously OP. How exactly is that an argument for protection specifically as a mechanic to address the problem we both agree upon? I'm saying there were other solutions and you're saying this had to happen by restating the original problem we all agreed upon...no wonder your brain hurts, it's not even working right. I remember before the last patch where if I'm hunting for the most overrated Arena team to fight, I see even one Barriss and it's a free win, 2 of any other healer and ditto, Chewbacca, ditto as defense up means nothing. Which is why tanking and healing mechanics were obviously the problem. Surely there is something between healers painting a "free win" target on your back and healers are OP that doesn't involve a new mechanic. Every MOBA and MMO go through the same balancing act without a protection mechanic, making the argument that it is necessary demonstrably false. Also, saying that an update that by your admission caters only to the top 50 and stinks for everyone else is "needed" is absurd on its face.
I agree with you here fully, but healing being trivial is exactly the main reason Sid is garbage in Arena. Not many job opportunities for scissors when no one uses paper. Immunity isn't the only counter by far though, ability blocking the healer, stunning the healer, focusing the healer, bursting in between heals and debuffing the regen with QGJ for instance...healing has more counters than anything in the game and full blown immunity is the hardest counter I've seen in any game with tank/heal/dps mechanics. This thread has people that I know would be fully in the "it's a new meta, learn to counter/adapt" camp but are arguing on the other side of the fence here that an entire base mechanic that has tons of counters would have been OP.
I agree his dodge rate is what makes him annoying, and if I wasn't so nitpicky about everyone benefiting from my leader ability, I would swap out someone to kill him but really I just save him for 2nd to last and deal with it in GW, it's a nuisance but not unworkable. I use Yoda to spread evade+tenacity and save barriss heal for a debuffed char if she doesn't cleanse it. I'm not saying it's outright necessary to have 3 healers but it keeps me from retreating very often. It's just slow, painful and boring.
I agree about dark side healers too, but honestly Talia's biggest problem always seemed to be that she was a complete AI magnet and until RG got his buff, there weren't any good taunt tanks for f2p. After finally 7* qgj, I'm working on Daka atm.