Barriss Offee is NOT broken or OP and here's why...

Prev1
Over the last 3 weeks there have been numerous threads and comments regarding Barriss Offee's Force Healer ability.

I'm posting this today to show that her heal ability is neither broken or OP as many people have claimed, and is in fact, working as intended.

From what I've read in these forums there's 3 main complaints involving Barriss Offee/Force Healer:
  1. The heal ability is ignoring the Heal Immunity debuff and is therefore broken/bugged.
  2. The heal ability is healing characters from low health back to 100% and is therefore "overpowered" and needs to be nerfed.
  3. Barriss Offee has way too much HP which allows her heals to be extremely high and is therefore "overpowered" and needs to be nerfed.

But before we begin, here's a screenshot of my Barriss' Force Healer ability which I have used in the tests for this post.

fnTZHGQ.jpg

The reason for this picture is so that we're all very clear about what's being discussed here, that there are 2 components to Force Healer:
  1. All allies have their health percentages equalised. (I'm Australian and I'll be damned if I spell it with a 'z' :p)
  2. Then, each ally recovers 20% of their Max Health. (I've highlighted that last part because it's important to note later on.)

Now that I've got all the introduction out of the way, I can begin addressing the 3 complaints listed above.

1. The heal ability is ignoring the Heal Immunity debuff and is therefore broken/bugged.

To debunk this I went ahead and fought a GW battle until Barriss was the last remaining enemy, retreated, and then restarted with just Sidious to capture the following gif.

eJbF0Yz.gif

You can see that Barriss tries to heal herself but nothing happens. Why is this?
Well as the first part of her skill says, she equalises health between all her allies. Since there's no other allies for her to draw health from, she is unable to balance or alter her own health. (More on this mechanic later)
Then, as she has the heal immunity debuff on her, the second part of her heal (recover 20% of max health) is blocked as it should be.

Verdict: Working as intended.

2. The heal ability is healing characters from low health back to 100% and is therefore "overpowered".

This one is tricky, because I'd hazard a guess and say in 90% of the scenarios where people see this happening, it's because the team they're fighting has all 5 members alive with close to full health and only one character that's less than 50% and with heal immunity on them.
What you may not realise is that when the health equalisation occurs, those with higher amounts of health remaining actually lose some in order to balance out with the most injured character.

To demonstrate:

cf159LW.jpg

Everyone is 100% health except one person who is 25%. Health equalisation then takes the average of everyone's health and redistributes it evenly among all members. So characters are actually losing health to balance out the injured character, only we don't notice this because Barriss then heals 20% of each character's max health afterwards.

This may sound like a lot but the next gif shows that when everyone in the team is low on health, the overall health equalisation + 20% heal isn't very much at all.

PNPREY6.gif

Now I'm going to break this down into two images for discussion.

mXpwxzs.jpg

Before heal: You can see that Jedi Consular is the member in the team with the lowest amount of health, so he will gain health from the equalisation while the rest lose health as shown in the next image.

EwOSwv3.jpg

The top number reflects the health equalisation part of Force Healer. You can see that each member loses various amounts of health in order to roughly match what Consular will gain.

The bottom number shows you the heal of 20% of each character's max health. My Jedi Consular has 8621 HP + the 15% from Barriss' leadership skill = 9914 HP.
20% of 9914 is 1982.8, or rounded up to 1983 as shown in the above image. Once again this is important to note as I will explain when I address the 3rd complaint later.

So as you can see above, Force Healer only heals a large amount if a team has a high current combined health pool, and heals for much less when combined current health is low.

Verdict: Force Healer is not overpowered.

3. Barriss Offee has way too much HP which allows her heals to be extremely high and is therefore "overpowered".

Many people seem to be under the impression that Force Healer is based off of a percentage of Barriss Offee's health but if you look again closely at the skill description and remember the part that I highlighted, you can clearly see that this not the case.

Each ally recovers 20% of their Max Health.

As demonstrated above with my Jedi Consular, the heal is clearly based on the max health of each character, so Barriss Offee's amount of HP has no affect whatsoever on the heal amount being applied.

I can understand why the misunderstanding has come about as the heal skills for Jedi Consular, Luminara, and Old Daka all scale off of their own health, but in the case of Barriss and Talia this is simply not the case.

Verdict: Barriss Offee's high HP does not cause her heal to be overpowered.


Conclusion:

The purpose of this post is to help people get a clearer understanding of how the Force Healer skill mechanic works and hopefully clear up some of the confusion and misinformation that's being spread regarding this topic.

Yes I know we're basically arguing semantics here, and that health going up from being equalised is still a "form of healing", but there's a reason why every other heal in the game that is affected by Heal Immunity uses the words "recovers" or "heals", while Force Healer specifically says "equalises". It's obvious that it was a deliberate choice of words from the devs at CG to exclude it from the effects of Heal Immunity.

I know that some of you will remain unmoved by this evidence and continue to believe that Barriss is OP or bugged and needs to be nerfed. I accept that there's not much else I can do to convince you otherwise, short of agreeing with you, so feel free to continue arguing in the comments below.

Thank you for taking your time to read this.

Replies

  • reizse
    1447 posts Member
    i don't think that people are complaining (or are they) about the secondary part of the heal based off her max hp. it's clear that it isn't. the complaining comes from how tanky she is (which again, is a problem that varies from player to player).

    she's not a problem for me over all, except when paired with other tanky characters such as old ben and fett. kudos to those players who chose to opt for that kind of turtle synergy.
    mighty chlorians
  • Destark
    81 posts Member
    edited December 2015
    Finally a great analysis instead of pointless arguments, awesome job Slushie
    Post edited by Destark on
  • Thank you for this post. Couldn't be clearer. :)
  • +1 for the effort given to explain Bariss's mechanic. A definitely triple A ratings for the explanation.
  • reizse wrote: »
    i don't think that people are complaining (or are they) about the secondary part of the heal based off her max hp. it's clear that it isn't. the complaining comes from how tanky she is (which again, is a problem that varies from player to player).

    she's not a problem for me over all, except when paired with other tanky characters such as old ben and fett. kudos to those players who chose to opt for that kind of turtle synergy.

    I'm a Turtle. It's in the name. I usually opt for healer's and a tank when I'm struggling with a difficult mission.

    As they say, the best offense is a good offense. But the best defense will match the best offense and then a decent offense will beat a bad defense.
    My name is cosmicturtle333, aka CT-333, aka Threes.
  • @reizse wrote: »
    i don't think that people are complaining (or are they) about the secondary part of the heal based off her max hp. it's clear that it isn't. the complaining comes from how tanky she is (which again, is a problem that varies from player to player).

    she's not a problem for me over all, except when paired with other tanky characters such as old ben and fett. kudos to those players who chose to opt for that kind of turtle synergy.

    You're right, the majority of complaints regarding her HP is more to do with her tankiness but I had to include what I said in my post because there had been some comments complaining about her high HP leading to big heals so I needed clear that up.

    Also, I don't necessarily mind that she's tanky because other than her heal and her tankiness, she doesn't bring much more to the team as her damage output is almost non existent.

    Barriss alone with high HP isn't an issue because she can be relatively easy to burst down if done correctly, but I'm with you on it being annoying when she's paired with Old Ben, Fett, and Chewie.
  • Great post and spot on.

    Regarding her tankiness.... Well I think that's offset by her super low attack.
  • People actually believed all of this stuff? I thought it was pretty obviosu with the wording to begin with that the first half of her ability was not a heal, it just spreads the damage out to the team.

    I still find her to be the best healer in the game though, Lumi just does not heal as well as her, other healers outside of barriss only heal a significant amount if you are getting AoE'ed down, and hardly anyone has AoE teams.
  • In my experience she's only truly effective paired with another healer, which to me defeats the purpose of using her. I don't find her as reliable as the Consular as a dedicated healer and I'd rather use Luminara as a backup healer because she does much more damage than Bariss. Granted, I'm not in the top 10 or whatever but I'm in no hurry to drop $40 on her
  • I love how you went into the extent of making a gif for this post. And great job with the critical analysis too! :)
  • @ZarAzi wrote: »
    I love how you went into the extent of making a gif for this post. And great job with the critical analysis too! :)

    Thanks, I'd been meaning to post this for a while now but I had been too lazy to record game play footage to demonstrate until this morning :p
  • The thing is with Barriss, is she is the del facto healer... you won't find decent teams without her... Now I'm not saying she's OP, as she is cotton candy to me in Arena, and probably a lot of others who figured out how to take her out..

    If anything most people who complain about Barriss is the result of running into an Arena or Galactic war match... Get close to taking someone out or Barriss out and somehow she gets her heal off restoring all of her health... One thing people tend to forget is Barriss's fourth ability makes her natural debuffer. So sometimes that healing immunity will get debuffed before she actually casts her heal. Thus the only true way to stop her healing is actually to stun or ability lock her if she is close to death and you know her heal is up. However there is only Old Ben who has a reliable 100% ability lock and only Cad Bane has a 100% chance on a stun if in either case the ability is not resisted.

    The issue is the other healers don't compare, namely Jedi Consulor, Talia and Old Daka. Luminara is counted as an attacker and healing is more a secondary thing for her. The Ewok elder heals for so little he's not even a healer in my eyes, he's cannon fodder! So the real issue is the other healers need to be bought onto par with Barriss.. or closer to Barriss's healing ability...

    Although this may create a big issue with Arena being full of 3 healer teams...

    All in all the game is actually fairly balanced, but people won't see this til they start encountering more of the rarer characters like Obi Wan, Lando, Vadar, Anakin etc... but with the way the game is set up... this may be a long way off

    The only power I feel is really OP is Obi-wan's mind trick.. This one ability can essentially turn the tide of any battle. Ability lock on all enemy characters, offense down for 2 turns, and 50% chance removes 50% of your turn meter.. And that is the base ability is not it ranked up



    Former crazy person of the guild "Shard Awakens"... *quit game 13th July 2016*

    Game used to be fun when it wasn't a grind... if I wanted a grind I would have went and played old school Everquest or some Korean MMO!
  • Naecabon
    1243 posts Member
    edited December 2015
    I don't really agree with the overall determination that Barriss's heal is "not overpowered" just due to the nature of how it works. It's an extremely misleading argument.

    Using the above example of a team of 100%/100%/100%/100%/25% all becoming 85% is exactly why this ability is overpowered. Her heal for most adds 27.5% of her max HP on top of this equalization, which more often than not, is a full team heal, regardless of if you have a low health dude, thanks to her insanely tanky hp.

    When playing, especially PvP, the majority of the time you are focusing one enemy at a time for the most efficient kill strategy. Spreading damage means healers get more bang for their buck on a heal, and it's not practical to attack different dudes. We're focus firing single targets a majority of the time.

    The one thing Barriss can do that no other healer in the game can do is bring an almost-dead enemy back to full health.

    Full.

    Health.

    The nature of the word "overpowered" in gaming is based around a character having something that no other character in the game has, that provides a utility that exceeds other similar types by such a large margin that it creates a glaring disparity between the two. Barriss has this, in spades. No other healer can put any character on your team back to full health so easily. Doing this for Barriss is a joke - even when she's not using her cooldown heal ability, she's proc'ing her main attack heal 30% of the time, which adds up quick. For me, this main attack heal is something absurd like +1800 on the team every time it hits. This easily heals back up situational damage the rest of your team takes and really means only the enemy being focus fired is at risk of death. Combine this with the cooldown heal and wha-bam, that low target is back to full. It's infuriating.

    The skill IS overpowered. Now, if you want to make a point and case for if it's easily manageable and counterable, sure... go nuts. That's an entirely different subject.

    Additionally, the fact that the equalization of the heal is giving you a green +number over your head, to me, says that it is also pretty much a heal and should be treated as so. I, along with many others, believe an enemy with a heal debuff should not be affected by the equalize, and I hope they treat it as such. It's too strong otherwise, as it's allowing this particular healer to "get passed" a loophole in the way this particular heal works. It's a heal, say what you will, and the fact it's equalizing doesn't change the fact it's making your health bar go up. It should be prevented by a heal debuff.

    Regardless, the argument that suddenly the only full-heal in the game isn't overpowered simply due to a situational scenario of your entire team being around the same low-HP is flawed. Even at it's worst, it's a 27.5% team heal which is fine. It's still strong on a bad day. And this scenario is so rare that saying this suddenly makes the fact that it's very commonly a full heal inefficient at classifying it as OP is not an effective argument. This has not changed my opinion of her at all, and I still see her as the above average "OP" healer people consider her as. She has a heal miles ahead in strength than all other characters and for that reason alone she will be targeted and complained about.
  • Naecabon wrote: »
    I don't really agree with the overall determination that Barriss's heal is "not overpowered" just due to the nature of how it works. This is extremely misleading. Your post did not change my mind at all on how powerful she is, and instead used a straw man argument to try and say that because one thing is one way, the other thing isn't as powerful.

    This is wrong.

    Using the above example of a team of 100%/100%/100%/100%/25% all becoming 85% is exactly why this ability is overpowered. Her heal for most adds 27.5% of her max HP on top of this equalization, which more often than not, is a full team heal, regardless of if you have a low health dude, thanks to her insanely tanky hp.

    When playing, especially PvP, the majority of the time you are focusing one enemy at a time for the most efficient kill strategy. Spreading damage means healers get more bang for their buck on a heal, and it's not practical to attack different dudes. We're focus firing single targets a majority of the time.

    The one thing Barriss can do that no other healer in the game can do is bring an almost-dead enemy back to full health.

    Full.

    Health.

    The nature of the word "overpowered" in gaming is based around a character having something that no other character in the game has, that provides a utility that exceeds other similar types by such a large margin that it creates a glaring disparity between the two. Barriss has this, in spades. No other healer can put any character on your team back to full health so easily. Doing this for Barriss is a joke - even when she's not using her cooldown heal ability, she's proc'ing her main attack heal 30% of the time, which adds up quick. For me, this main attack heal is something absurd like +1800 on the team every time it hits. This easily heals back up situational damage the rest of your team takes and really means only the enemy being focus fired is at risk of death. Combine this with the cooldown heal and wha-bam, that low target is back to full. It's infuriating.

    The skill IS overpowered.

    Additionally, the fact that the equalization of the heal is giving you a green +number over your head, to me, says that it is also pretty much a heal and should be treated as so. I, along with many others, believe an enemy with a heal debuff should not be affected by the equalize, and I hope they treat it as such. It's too strong otherwise, as it's allowing this particular healer to "get passed" a loophole in the way this particular heal works. It's a heal, say what you will, and the fact it's equalizing doesn't change the fact it's making your health bar go up. It should be prevented by a heal debuff.

    Regardless, the argument that suddenly the only full-heal in the game isn't overpowered simply due to a situational scenario of your entire team being around the same low-HP is absurd. Even at it's worst, it's a 27.5% team heal which is fine. It's still strong on a bad day. And this scenario is so rare that saying this suddenly makes the fact that it's very commonly a full heal is not an effective argument. This has not changed my opinion of her at all.

    Judging her skill based in a vacuum is not a fair assessment of her balance. You need to look at the character as a whole, her stats and her other skills. Let's take a look at what she does have:

    High HP
    Low attack
    Low speed

    Skill 1
    Her main attack is most likely the worst in the game in terms of damage and has a chance at healing the team for a small %.

    Skill 2
    This is the best heal bar none, I don't think anyone would disagree. But it comes with a high cool down, which means you have 4 turns to snipe someone off.

    Skill 3
    Her leader ability provides good survivability boost for her team, this may or may not take effect depending on the team comp.

    Skill 4
    A small chance at removing a debuff from her team.

    So when you put all of that together you have a character that is specialized in supporting the team with one big clutch heal and then small advantages in smal hp heals and cleanses. Whereas on offense she is negligible.

    So you can boil her down to her to one reliable big clutch heal because she really isn't contributing reliably to the fight after that for at least 4 turns, which comes by real slow because she's not fast. If you can't kill off another character in 4 turns then either you got unlucky with evasion or maybe your team just isn't that good?

    You compare that to someone else like Luminara, she will still be dishing out the damage through her normal attacks and her blast even when her heal is on cool down. There's a trade off in power in every character, Barriss is an example of putting all her eggs into one basket (her heal) so why is it wrong that it's powerful?.
  • @Naecabon wrote: »
    Her heal for most adds 27.5% of her max HP

    It's not 27.5% of her max HP. I already addressed that in point 3.

    Otherwise, you made a good argument and I respect that, but as @Pitchblack47 mentions, you're only focusing on how powerful her heal is and why it should be nerfed.

    But looking at her as a whole, if you take away her clutch heal then what else is she good for?

  • She is fine as is in my opinion. Don't take me wrong she's good and she should be (for a $50 character) But going up in arena and GW the are several other characters I fear more than her.

  • This post should get an award for detail, great information...
  • Qeltar
    4326 posts Member
    Excellent post. Of course what gets people ticked off is the balancing ability which is annoying when you are trying to burst a character down early on. Well, too bad! That's what she is SUPPOSED to do! LOL. It annoys me also but basically once she does that she is a non-entity until the fight is basically over. It's not a big deal.
    Also, I love Barriss teams in GW for obvious reasons. :)
    Quit 7/14/16. Best of luck to all of you.
  • Awesome awesome post...many +1s to you sir.

    Great breakdown of the mechanics with visuals.

  • Thanks for the post and detailing the character so thoroughly. Great job on presenting the facts about the character and I agree with you on all points made.
  • Skye
    795 posts Member
    She is fine as is in my opinion. Don't take me wrong she's good and she should be (for a $50 character) But going up in arena and GW the are several other characters I fear more than her.

    QFE... I've said many times people who complain about Barriss and Dooku... haven't encountered worse... Barriss is more a "oh joy, this is gonna take a while", but when you see a Lando (or a whole bunch of droids/Sith especially if you have a jedi team) you know that is gonna hurt or you could even lose.

    Everytime I see a Barriss, (random other healer), Dooku, Chewbacca, (random other).... I know I ain't going to lose it even in the arena... If I draw its usually cause I mis-clicked something
    Former crazy person of the guild "Shard Awakens"... *quit game 13th July 2016*

    Game used to be fun when it wasn't a grind... if I wanted a grind I would have went and played old school Everquest or some Korean MMO!
  • I really never got the complaints about Barriss. I'm level 53 now and right from the beginning of the game until now, I've never had much of a problem facing her, and my team is nothing out of the ordinary. Yea, her heal is very strong, but what else does she do? Pretty much nothing. A good amount of the time you can even burst down a character before she gets her heal off since she will usually attack after your whole team does.
  • More repetition on the way.
    467-325-146
    Pretty good collection of characters so far and GROWING
  • Great post! :) Something i have to add though. I do not own barris but when i face her, she is either last or second to last to be focused. I feel she has a very low speed to use her abilites. With my Han in team she can just pull off one heal in a fight. I do not see her as an OP healer, she is specialized on healing aoe dmg, thats all.
    Main reason people think she is op is that she is one of the best healers ingame, could be bought instant per package and was in nearly every deck of the top 100.
    Now i see many people having unlocked luminara on my rank (top 200), and i think her ability to stack evade on herself & block ability spell are way better if used correctly.

    The difference between jedi conuslar (free) and barris (paid) were too high. But when people start to get other healers, i think the opinion on Barris will change.
  • Slushie wrote: »
    @Naecabon wrote: »
    Her heal for most adds 27.5% of her max HP

    It's not 27.5% of her max HP. I already addressed that in point 3.

    Otherwise, you made a good argument and I respect that, but as @Pitchblack47 mentions, you're only focusing on how powerful her heal is and why it should be nerfed.

    But looking at her as a whole, if you take away her clutch heal then what else is she good for?

    Healing my team for +1800 on swing 1/3rd of the time?

    Taking off debuffs 40% of the time and helping me against enemies like Obi Wan?
  • To use her is to love her!

    Thanks for the great post!
  • @Naecabon wrote: »
    Slushie wrote: »
    @Naecabon wrote: »
    Her heal for most adds 27.5% of her max HP

    It's not 27.5% of her max HP. I already addressed that in point 3.

    Otherwise, you made a good argument and I respect that, but as @Pitchblack47 mentions, you're only focusing on how powerful her heal is and why it should be nerfed.

    But looking at her as a whole, if you take away her clutch heal then what else is she good for?

    Healing my team for +1800 on swing 1/3rd of the time?

    Taking off debuffs 40% of the time and helping me against enemies like Obi Wan?

    At level 60 and 7* with current cap of gear level Barriss is meant to have 16,245 HP. Let's say she's also the leader so she gets a 17.5% boost which takes her up to 19,087 HP.

    So yes, she has a 30% chance on hit to heal 10% of her max health which would be 1909 based on the above capped stats, and is more than likely to be less than the +1800 you claim.

    But a 7* Barriss is currently very rare to come across unless you're in the top 20 in Arena and that person has dropped a LOT of money to open Chromium packs. In which case you're now arguing the merits of a F2P player wanting to compete with a paying player in the top ranks which I'm sorry to say will usually end with the F2P player losing out.

    Not to mention the 30% chance doesn't mean she's actually guaranteed to heal on hit 1 in every 3 hits so it's a fairly unreliable heal to rely on.

    The debuff removal only applies to Jedi allies and at any rate currently appears to be bugged as people have reported they never see it proc.
  • Abyss
    1651 posts Member
    Slushi excellent job and spot on. I still see ppl missing (ir ignoring the facts rite off the bat too).

    Ppl are still arguing points that say her heals have to do w/ her own health and you showed just how weak her heal is if the team is low and how strong they are if only 1-2 ppl are low.

    Bottom line is she is a situational healer. If you play rite and the AI atks rite then yes, she can heal a ton (thats if ppl keep counting the equilization as a heal which it is NOT). But if the AI dont cooperate and you dont play to her strength then her heals are arguably the weakest available (again, check slushis pics/videos).

    again, great job slushie, very very helpful and inciteful
  • Naecabon
    1243 posts Member
    edited December 2015
    My 7* Barriss was the result of much farming on her two shard levels in Dark Side Tier 5.

    A F2P Player should be competing at a level equivalent to other F2P players, and the argument of her strength extends beyond just a specific tier of player. Her heal healing for less is offset by the fact your overall team is lower in strength and the power of that heal should still be significant.

    30% has proven more than sufficient for reliability. I see it proc multiple times per level and I'm sure it will increase as we level up beyond 60 in the future, meaning it will only become more reliable.

    I view her ability to heal a character at any % to full as overpowered. You do not. That's the real moral of this discussion, and always will be re: Barriss. It's simply opinionated and is in no way factual one way or another. I do not think she needs to be nerfed, I do not think she is unbeatable, I do not think people should complain about her and I do not think she's even essential on every team, but she's definitely overpowered. I just hope they add more units / skills to other units to level the healing playing field in the future.
  • thisgameisdope
    297 posts Member
    edited December 2015
    Finally a GREAT POST about Barris "OP" so many NOOBS outside can UNDERSTAND if she is not OP....Please make another one with DOOKU...for some people out there....kids I mean....

    I am F2P so do not say anything about buying crystals....I could not defeat Barris for few days before I get "THAT CHARACTER" in arena....since then Rank 2 is easy...Any team that I fight with barris in their lineup is 90% a WIN for me...
Sign In or Register to comment.