Seems like damage is more important than ever
I don’t think their intentions are to make it so that damage-centric builds are less desirable because balancing content that way would be absolutely horrible.
What they want is to open up the possibility of somebody or multiple people taking on a different role with it actually contributing to the party in a meaningful way. By this I mean, perhaps sacrifice 1 or 2 people to focus entirely on defensive support.
That said, I really don’t know about the difficulty of the raid bosses soon to come but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s difficult enough for at least most groups to justify the idea of taking somebody to heal. To me that’s not a bad thing, what would be a bad thing would be making it so that it’s required to have somebody healing. You don’t necessarily have to make it a requirement to succeed in order for something to have value in groups.
All in all it’s important to understand that it would be unrealistic for content to be designed with the mindset of there being an equal amount of people bringing tanky/healing gear as people focusing on maximisation of their damage. I can’t even imagine how dreadful the content would be to play like that, lol.
(edited by Purple Miku.7032)
When the boss gets to that enrage part, he gains a break bar. I’m pretty sure breaking it does something.
When the boss gets to that enrage part, he gains a break bar. I’m pretty sure breaking it does something.
That enrage part is actually something he does before enraging, but after beating the first split, he continues doing it until the breakbar is broken.
Enrage just increases damage by 400% and prevents rezzing the downed.
High damage output was always going to still be important, the key is having enough healing and control for the mechanics of the boss. Different bosses will require more of those two than other but you will always need at least 6 people in high damage builds.
There’s enrage mechanics in lots of MMOs, but groups still run with tanks and healers. The mechanic itself doesn’t necessarily incentivize a continued zerk meta, even if it does make dps important.
The only reason that tanks are required in these other MMOs is because they are the only ones that don’t get one shot due to arbitrary stat gates making it mandatory.
The Perfect Ideal is that the idea of running a full on tank or a healer provides a multiplicative that is competitive, awesome, really great to see but completely optional so you dont have to sit there for 2 hours past raid time or call the entire raid off because your only healer needs to handle his kids for the night.
EDIT: Or your raid group gets shot because your tank decides he wants to go glass because an epic two handed sword dropped in blackwing lair so he decides to blow out his DKP on it causing you to lose your most geared tank setting you back 2 months of player building
It would be a waste to have someone in your group specialize in a pure healing build, healing power is a terrible stat and things like engi heal turret are so good with a bit of communication you can max blast the field.
I hear they have changed the agro so it’s a bit less random, if that is the case and it is easy to hold agro in downstate then downstate tanks might be a thing, having one player with quickness to res another in downstate till 99% hp is more effective than any healing in the game, of course it would render two people in your group to be completely useless, just like if they were running pure heal/tank builds.