Priest feedback

[Niph]

This is feedback about the Priest skill, heal-oriented only. I didn't try to practice it doing damage, but only worked on maximizing the healing power you can get from it in a group.

Also, since I'm not druid and I'm not fan of Pig, I didn't try to pair it with one of these two skills and chose Psychology instead. Druid and Pig are probably a better choice but that will be for someone else to confirm.

In general, I found healing quite interesting. Since all abilities have a refresh (fortunately pretty short for some), you often have to balance between the immediate need for heal and saving up some if things gets even more "interesting" than they already are. Typically, in a bad situation when your group is fighting too many mobs, only one or perhaps two healing abilities will be up. It seems to me it takes a lot of experience to be a good healer then, so for real feedback I would need to finish gearing up and to practice a lot more, with different groups.

Anyway, there is a true and very welcome feeling of EQ raid-style healing in this. With the difference than in EQ you could sort of spam the same powerful heals over and over, something impossible in PG. It's refreshing!

I noticed a few issues in the process of testing:



The group window has a bug with the way some gauges are displayed. Sometimes they just stay blank and only the current value / max value are displayed, but not the colored gauge. I wish I could find a way to reproduce it, because it does happen often, but without a reason I could figure out.
I suspect Triage does more than just heal one target, but I'm unable to test it with people that don't have some health regen on them, it seems everyone has food active.
When using Triage, if you have a player selected and even if this player will eventually not be the one benefiting from the heal, if they are far you will run to them first. Since this ability has a target that is calculated at the end of the channeling, would it be possible to make it so that you don't run to your target?
In EQ, I think all beneficial spells do not require line-of-sight. After practicing as a dedicated healer, I still really miss it. I would be really nice if at least Triage did not require it (see above).
A feature that I *really* miss is the possibility to see my own stats (Health, Power and Armor) in the group window. There is just so many things you can focus on, and if things are really hectic I will completely loose view of the rest of the screen. All that remains are these 5 gauges that must remain above zero, and again I really wish that could include my own health...
When Tether Soul triggers, you get a message that a character is going to be revived, but this message is really easy to miss. In practice, I think it would be nice to have a buff on the priest that doesn't do anything, but that also disappears if Tether Soul fades on other members of the group.
There doesn't seem to be any equipment with Priest bonus or bonus to Priest abilities whatsoever, beside the basic gear you can get from barter.
It used to be possible to heal someone through healing the monster that is focused on them, but this doesn't seem to work anymore. I thought it's just some abilities, but in fact it seems to be all forms of healing. I've already reported this concern with AH feedback.
There are Generic mods that add some bonus to your Major Healing abilities. For example, on the Main Hand and Head slots. This is a reminder they cannot (as far as I know) be extracted and reapplied, in the hope this bug goes up in the list!


My abilities:

Priest: Triage, Remedy, Mend Flesh, Exhilarate, Unfetter, Relentless Hope.
Psychology: Mock (1, the lowest level, for the combat refresh), Soothe, Pep Talk, Tell Me About Your Mother, But I Love You, Inspire Confidence.


All my gear is at level 70, half of it finished (The 5 mods I want, +aug).

[Katrinne]

Hello!

First post here. I want to share my experience and expectations. I was excited with Priest skill announcement, since I always played some sort of fire mage/healer combo in previous MMOs and thought that would do it (since fire/psy didn't feel right as in the particular way I like).

IMHO, I felt like Priest is a class made for groups and thats it.. a lot of skills are harmful to be cast alone (just as an example, Relentless Hope cost 27 power and restore 15 to all groups, so if you are alone you just end up wasting power.. I know, it restores some HP too, but all the other classes have health + power healing skills without that kind of backdrop), the other skill that recovers power + armor is a 2 second cast (that somehow it feels like 3 or 4 since it takes 1 second to start animating), and if Im hit it stops and I have to start over, so, for soloing, its useless).
And as I leveled a bit (til 30ish), I was seeing that most skills are sort like that, as in the one I recently acquired, Tether Soul - for those that doesn't know, it "buffs" some group member with a sort of resurrection buff, that will revive the first ally to die.. "but not yourself". So, unless you are in a group, this one you can't use either. And I try to wonder why, maybe there was some concerns of it becoming too powerful but there is a 8h cooldown and reviving once every 8h, any group member can but not the Priest, I don't see it as it would be too OP if they could.

So I felt like the skill line was really just for grouping, and REALLY just for grouping, cause I don't see how it could be a support skill for your main skill set, as psy would be. This is just MY experience, unfortunately I don't have a lot of time to play on the past months, so I don't group often and I usually log in and do some random stuff to chill out a bit, and maybe the skill set is just like it was intended to be, but I felt it was a bit of punishment to - apparently - having mostly downsides when soloing.

I know a lot of people group and is probably loving how it is (and it IS really nice for groups), I grouped some in the past and was really fun, I can imagine how this skill will be useful, just as I said, I just couldn't imagine it would be pointless to play alone, and I thought maybe my experience and point of view could be shared here. Its just my opinion and I don't know any better, I just instinctly thought skills would just work as in all the other skill lines, and I honestly doesn't see how it would be any overpowered if it would be just normal solo-friendly as any other skill.

But anyway, I wanted to share my experience with the better intentions as possible. This is just a detail and I also wanted to thanks PG for being what it is, special and unique, because it has been my only fun time for a long, long time. Thanks!

[Tagamogi]

The group window has a bug with the way some gauges are displayed. Sometimes they just stay blank and only the current value / max value are displayed, but not the colored gauge. I wish I could find a way to reproduce it, because it does happen often, but without a reason I could figure out.

The way to temporarily fix that is to go to UI Settings, change the "Compact Party Display" to the opposite of your current setting (so on or off), save, then change it back the way you want and save again.

The colors disappearing seem to be loosely caused by your group members entering a zone after you. It doesn't happen 100% of the time - I have a theory that it may be based on the particular zone, but that's probably incorrect. I was able to reproduce it very consistently when zoning into Kur Tower, but not in the Yeti Cave. That could have been coincidence, though.

I have not noticed any color problems that were not tied to the zone-in order.