Post#38 » Sun Oct 21, 2018 1:50 am
The discussion has moved from DoK/WP DPS, to all dps healers and hybrids in general. Can't say if this is off-topic or not, because it is indirectly related to the topic at hand, but I thought I would comment on it as a rr79 dps AM main.
It's worth noting that at the moment, both DPS DoK and DPS AM have a rather unusual style of damage dealing. Their normal dps numbers are actually significantly below that of an actual pure dps class (less pronounced on DoK, but it's also melee), but both of these classes have abilities that act as a sort of damage steroid, which allows them to enter a stage where they do very high pressure for a few seconds around once every 20 seconds, ideally leading to scoring a kill.
I thought this worth pointing out, because this style of damage dealing has its upsides and downsides, such as, essentially, as you run out of your damage steroids, you go back to doing really low damage. What can be taken away from this, is that you have other tools available for balancing these two classes besides simply nerfing their healing output and increasing their damage by a %.
If you wanted to increase or decrease their damage dealing capability you can do, in my opinion, one of two elegant things:
Decrease the cooldowns of the damage steroids (For AM - Laser and Dissipating Energies, for DoK the dissipating energies mirror and likely something else)
Increase the duration of the damage steroids, extending the period during which they are capable of doing actual DPS.
The first option is a softer way to boost their damage in that it doesn't effect their kill potential, but makes their damage output a more reliable tool with more uptime. The second increases their lethality to the enemy, allowing them that 1 or 2 extra seconds of high dps is often the difference between a kill and having to wait the next 15 seconds until your ability comes up again.
Coincidentially, by utilizing these tools instead of just adding or decreasing direct damage % numbers on something like Divine Fury, you can do less radical nerfs to their healing potential and can potentially better preserve their hybrid nature, because while their dps uptime is increased, the actual dps and/or burst that they can put out is not effected. This means it is less likely to cause problematic balance states where they can delete people in like 2-3 seconds, instead simply allowing them to have a longer period of pretending to be an actual dps (if duration increased) or allow them to do so more often (if cooldown is reduced).
Coincidentially, because this is far less problematic than simply boosting damage numbers, this also means that there will be more room to preserve their class defining off-healing capabilities. So where a 10-15% damage boost would warrant something like a 30-40% healing reduction, a 1-2 second duration boost or a 2-3 second cooldown reduction to certain abilities would likely allow the balance team to decrease healing by 10-20%, which still keeps their healing relevant as something to be used in a tight spot, if much less powerful than it is now.
Worth pointing out, that I only spoke about the two hybrids I knew something about. Obviously because DPS WP functions differently than AM and DoK, this approach would likely not work for them simply on the back of not having abilities that can be influenced in such a manner.
That's my 2c. and advice for balance decisions going forward. In general, my opinion is that if you nerf healing hard enough that you might as well not have healing abilities when in a dps spec, it takes away from the class identity a lot and will end up boring, because you're playing a dps class with a lot less buttons. One thing I firmly believe is that dps healers shouldn't be able to rez people, as that really does screw with 6v6 fights, where you just can't wipe the enemy team despite winning, because they keep ressurecting each other with their 3 healers. Done it myself and experienced it from enemies
Giladar - rr 80 DPS AM
