Hi everyone quick little PvE Developer Blog here to give a little info on what's going on behind the scenes. As many of you noticed, we're slow right now on content/event updates. We have a lot of things going on in the background and I wanted to share some of that real quick.

Healer Reworks

Just like tanks getting their 50th reworks, there will be game-wide changes coming to all 3 healer classes. I'll first give a TL;DR and then go into depth on the changes and why we decided to do them.

1. HoT effects are going to be removed (ex: heal relic, slime sacrifice, balm of azuna)
2. Cure cooldown/duration adjustments (shorter duration, more deliberate casts)
3. One high power defensive utility party skill for all healers (ex: Immortality)
4. One high power offensive utility party skill for all healers
5. Defensive ultimate ability

HoT (Heal over time) is getting removed from all healers as we found them to be very problematic to balance content around. Taking damage doesn’t feel as dangerous when you constantly gain HP. Even though most of them were 1% max HP per tick it’s always on you so it’s incredibly potent over long periods of time. A lot of players do not respect damage from bosses and do not get properly punished for getting hit. We don’t like how players often just “ape out” and carelessly DPS. These heal changes should make them more vulnerable.

This also means adjusting cures to make them more active and deliberate rather than cast and forget for the most part. Cures like Saint’s cure relic and Physician’s Antidote are incredibly strong and just continuously cure you. We don’t want to completely get rid of their ability to linger on the field and continuously cure. However, we do want to tune it down so you might have a lower cooldown but also it lingers for a shorter amount of time

Saints were the only healer with a powerful long cooldown defensive skill with Immortality. In response, we’re going to give all healers a new skill that mitigates or protects allies in one way or another.

Along with the theme of making offensive buffs more deliberate and active use, we’re going to be changing the offensive buffs that all the healers grant. Right now, we have a few offensive buffs but most of them are permanent or semi-permanent such as Blessing of Strikes, Slime Sacrifice, and (kinda) Unseen Art. We’re going to change these to be higher impact but long cooldown buffs. For example, Blessing of Strikes will no longer be 900s duration and grant 10% ATK/MATK. Instead, it’ll be a 15% damage increase (true damage) for 15s. This also means that Physician who had multiple party buffs will have to lose some to just have one.

Finally, Saint and Light Fury had access to defensive utility ultimate abilities while Physician had nothing. We’re going to give Physician an ultimate that also grants damage reduction and cures.

With these changes, the healers should have more similar baseline kits while having unique parts that set them apart.

Questions You’d Probably Ask

Q. What are you doing with Healing Relic then if you’re removing HoT?

A. I don’t have any plans to reduce the number of relic that Saint has. As of right now, I’m considering making Saint’s “small heal” Healing Relic instead of the base Heal skill in the Cleric tree and won’t drop a relic and then another skill like maybe Grand Cross will drop a damage dealing relic. I’m not sure what would be the best answer yet but it should be. I’ll ask for more specific feedback soon

Q. What are you doing with Awakened Slime Sacrifice?

A. Right now, it’s planned to be the big defensive ability. The tentative number right now is that it reduces damage taken by 80% for 4s. So a longer duration, less protection Immortality. We have similar plans to add something for Light Fury. Stay tuned for more info later if Kozima wants to talk about it.

Q. You’re getting rid of HoT, doesn’t this mean that content and everything is harder?

A. Essentially, yes. We want to discourage mindless DPS without punishment so this is the way to go. The long term goal is to look into adding healing from other sources in the future. One idea that we floated around is changing skill plates to add an option for something along the lines of “Heal for x% of your max HP on hit” to give more classes self-healing where it wasn’t before. You’ll have the chance to make an opportunity to choose between damage and a healing skill crest in the future perhaps.

Q. Will this effect the HoT effects from the heal themselves?

A. The short duration HoT that applies after casting a small/big heal base on your ATK/MATK is still a thing. Don’t worry about that going away.

Any other questions, leave them in the feedback discussion channel and I or another dev will try to answer.

What’s next?

After the healer reworks, we have FDNHC planned to release. I can’t share any details on that quite yet but we’re working on it still. The healer rework took priority since we need these out before FDNHC so we can balance it with the healer reworks in mind.

After FDNHC, we want to release a new season of Solace of Oblivion (S4), Ranked BTG, and various other not-directly-main-progression related content and system changes.