How can you expect solutions to problems?

#0 - Jan. 17, 2009, 7:10 p.m.

Has any developer actually explained their problem that they have with CoH? It's unanimously agreed that it is too good of a spell, but for what reason?

Is it because it is instant cast?

Does it heal for too much?

Does it cost too little mana?

Does it heal too many people?

Is it the right heal for too many situations?

Is it because it's a smart heal?

Is it too accessable?

Is it a combination of multiple factors? If so, which ones?

Without knowing why you feel the heal is too powerful it's difficult to offer reasonable feedback to the situation. All kinds of options have been offered in terms of changes to CoH itself, changes to existing talents to make CoH not as beneficial, changes to existing talents to make other heals more appealing instead of CoH, and just plain adding new abilities altogether.

Doing all this feels like a big waste of time without knowing the reasoning behind the change. If you feel like the talent was too accessable then offering changes to the spell itself is irrelevant. If you feel the talent heals for too much then offering to take the smart heal off of it is irrelevant. If you feel it cost too little mana than increasing synergies within the tree is irrelevant. Please give us more information so we can offer more relevant solutions.

I'd compare it to writing a simple program. One decimal in the wrong place early in the writing stage and the whole program doesn't work. The problem is, you've written the whole program and even if you take that decimal out the program doesn't work because it was structured around that decimal. Right now, your change to CoH is only telling us that the program doesn't work, not why it doesn't. Tell us where that decimal is, let us help you rewrite the program whether it's through talent synergy changes, ability overhauls, or changes to whole healing models! There are hundreds of creative people on this forum that are grounded in reality that don't want to see their class overpowered, but also don't want to feel underpowered.

EDIT: REAL WORLD (OF WARCRAFT) EXAMPLE:

Lifebloom is a great example of this. It's mobile, it's powerful, it was trivializing not PvE but PvP healing. It was the perfect heal in nearly every situation. What did they do to it? They didn't give it a cooldown, they didn't adjust it's mechanics or how it was applied, they just made it heal for less. Instead of just slapping a cooldown, tune the ability. Help us understand!

Thank you for reading! For all you people that posted suggestions on how you would like to change CoH or priest healing in general please feel free to do so in this thread!

Ghostcrawler

#49 - Jan. 18, 2009, 7:13 a.m.

I hesitate to wade back into these waters, but Anathalt's reasoning here is pretty good:

Q u o t e:
I can give you some pieces here, but not the full picture:
-It starts with the trivial nerf: just reduce the healing output. They tried that, they found the button felt too weak.
-They looked at increasing the mana cost, but their experience with mana in the Sunwell made them concerned this nerf wouldn't last.
-They concluded that adding a cast time would both not sufficiently nerf the spell and would remove one of the core fun things about the spell.
-They looked at returning CoH to the party heal mechanic, but they didn't like the effect that had on raid positioning.
-They tried the arcane blast mechanic, but that was complicated and not very fun to play.
-I would presume they tried some variant on the diminishing returns mechanics people have proposed, and decided against those because they were too complicated.

The only correction I would make is to mana cost (which includes a Barrage style implementation). From a designer POV, messing around with mana cost seems like it would be an interesting decision. Oh, this spell heals a lot but is very expensive so the player will think twice before casting it. In reality though that doesn't often happen. Instead players tend to use the powerful spells anyway and then struggle to manage their mana and perhaps complain that we didn't design their class to have enough mana regen. I don't think players would have really hesitated to push the button a third or fourth time -- they would have done it anyway and drained their mana. (The alternative is the spell is sooo expensive that it just becomes a joke and good priests take it off their bar.)

When you want players to diversify their rotations, cooldowns are usually the simplest change that guarantees the behavior you want. Setting up buffs, like Arcane Blast, is another.

The design works okay for Arcane Blast because really that spell itself is just a buff working towards your next Arcane spell, kind of like building up combo points. We probably could have developed the priest in that direction, where you hit Circle of Healing a few times to build up a big buff stack and then finish off the heal with another group spell. That is just a pretty different design at that point.

There is also something of a myth that CoH was a perfectly balanced spell until the smart component. We were quite worried about what it was doing at the end of BC, which is why one of the very first changes we made to priests during LK development was to add the cooldown. We listened to players (and developers) who were concerned the cooldown would kill what was fun about the spell, so we did take it off (with some hesitation). But it turns out that was the wrong move and we probably should have stuck to our guns and shipped with the cooldown so priests didn't feel nerfed after LK went live.