I've always wondered why Scouts are the only ones without an accessible AOE skill. don't you think it'd be a fairly simple concept if they pulled out more than one arrow to shoot at multiple targets? Just a thought. (IMPLEMENT!)
Sounds like a certain amazon skill from Diablo 2 (strafe), wouldn't be a bad idea, considering scouts almost just have to leach their way to 220, pvm is all about aoe in Rose.
As for the update, i find it hard to believe so much hate has arisen from such a small update... The champion update was a good idea (high def, high off, high acc, etc. all together...), for a long time champions were the end-all, be-all of classes, and they're experimenting to get them back into line. The Cleric update seems a good idea to me, but I do kind of feel like buff pots are going to be a little be crazy if they don't decide to nerf them down in a similar manner. I like the idea of having class-specific self-buffs being useful a lot more though, rather than each class having a single buff that's useful and everything else being dwarfed by the cleric's. I don't think I need to repeat that the raider buff was unnecessary, but it's not that huge of an update to get everyone upset. The biggest issue seems to be what they haven't done more than what they have.
Personally I think that it would be helpful if the community would release patch notes along with their updates as many other games do. For example, I haven't played guild wars in a long time, but when I did, they would have developer notes on skill balances to give the community an idea behind why they were nerfing certain skills or buffing others. It lets people see that there's some reason behind it and makes it more clear to everyone involved what's going on.
For future updates, I would honestly like to see a reworking of the cleric class. This may seem strange, but the cleric class is pretty stale. I understand that each of the heals is either stronger, or does something different, but there's really only 2 types of heals, yet there's 6 skills: 4 single target heals and 2 party heals. Of course, there's also the health and mana flames, but for the most part it's really just using 2 types of skills, and spamming them forever until either you outheal your opponents damage, or they outdamage your spammable heals. I think it would be interesting to see more active protection skills with cooldowns. This would add another layer to pvp as well as making the cleric class more interesting, as it would add a level of skill to clerics besides spamming 1, 2 and 3 to max heals on your target (Yes, I'm perhaps over-simplifying it a little bit, but it really is pretty simplistic in comparison to many healing classes), instead requiring healers to manage cooldowns to be able to effectively prevent damage, allowing for effective target switching to reduce the effectiveness of those same protections on the offensive side, and generally making pvp more active.
I also think it would be good to simultaneously nerf the insane mana capabilities of clerics. The issue I see is that, while clerics can potentially run out of mana in the level 150 range, assuming they don't have mana flames, by the time they're 220, they've only gotten more mana while the same skills are actually cheaper (due to the improved gear). I honestly think that mana flames/bonfires/health flames shouldn't stack anyway (in large numbers they are just absurd) and perhaps mana flames could be changed to something different, such as clearing debuffs every few seconds (which would aid in pvp keeping clerics from being perma-stunned/sleeped/silenced). The way that the loss of mana efficiency would be balanced would be via the protective skills allowing effective damage prevention, reducing the need for as many heals.
Anyway, I don't know what most people think about those sorts of ideas, but I feel like it would make being a primary healer a lot more interesting if there was actually stuff that you had to think about, and the idea of actually being able to pressuring a group out (by making their healer actually run out of mana) I think is a good idea (although the capability of just healing mana with food at any given time kind of ruins a lot of strategy like that when it comes to pvp).
On a side note if you required managing cooldowns on clerics in order to be effective, as well as making it possible for clerics to run out of mana, it could really effect all the botting, as it pretty much depends on the fact that they can just spam heal a target forever with no issue.
Edited by JavedIqbal, 23 May 2012 - 01:20 PM.
