Suggestion Druid. Problems and Fixes.

[Tjundis]

I agree that one of the reasons druid feels a little weak is due to the heals. Cleric completely outdoes anything druid can do with a 4 second warmup fullheal. Granted this is hard to pull off in pvp, every heal druid has also has a 1.5-2.5 second warmup.

In terms of keeping allies away from damage, a druid can keep 1 person away for 4 seconds, but unless they're in a tunnel, earth wall is ineffective. A cleric can simply make his party invincible.

Cleric can mitigate burst, while druids cannot, nor can they pre-hot with anything but healingbloom, causing them to have to get all their over-time heals onto someone 4.5 seconds after they start taking damage (and alot of damage can be done to someone in that time).

Over 7 seconds and the 20 seconds following, a druid with maxxed wisdom can put out about 1150 healing. This is assuming the druid is freecasting, using every heal over time, soothe 3 times, and regrowth twice. A cleric can fullheal someone (who has an average hp of 800) over 4 seconds, and then sacredtouch someone over 3 seconds for 400hp, surpassing a druid's healing over 27 seconds in a mere 7 seconds.

I'm not sure if invincibility neutralizes disables, but either way, the potency of druid healing is quite underwhelming, specifically the potency of rejuvenation as it's not even as good as healingbloom.
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TLDR:

Too many warmups.
Heals over times not potent enough, cannot be precasted on someone with full hp.
Cannot keep more than 1 person away from their healing target.(In most situtations)

Perhaps druid could benefit from a mass entangle, rejuvenation being instant & more powerful, and the ability to cast the heal over time abilities on someone with full health?

 

[teddytazer]

When it comes to healing, Party members will call out "Need healing" and to deliver instant healing will determine if ally is saved or lost. For instance I was in a battle today, it was a team fight against umbra, my team was getting low and they asked for my healing bloom.. but as I was warming up.. the enemy team must have noticed that i was casting due to the global announcement in chat. and they proceeded to sandwich me between a multitude of weapons and magic explosions.. killing me before my warmup was finished.

 

[Dakinara]

Even on the last map, the thing that made druid a good healer (and really cleric too) was that soothe had a 1 second cooldown (and sacredword 3 seconds, sacred touch 8 seconds) and these single target heals could be spammed on people in order to keep up with damage. Balance team increased cooldown of single target heals greatly for druid and cleric (mostly too much self survivability reasons i think?), but now full heal massively outclasses all other single target heals on a healing / cooldown basis, and cleric has much better group healing / invuln as well. Cleric should be better healer, but i think full heal is hard to balance really. Ultimately, i think druid and cleric self healing is still ok, but healing others was hit too hard by the cooldown increases.

BEHOLD MY GLORIOUS PHILOSOPHY OF HEALER BALANCE:

A mostly / purely healing focused class (ie, currently just cleric and druid) should basically always have higher healing output than the damage output of a single damage dealing class. If this is not the case, you should never bring a healer - you would always be better off bringing another damage dealing class, as the only functional purpose of the healer would be to slightly delay the time it takes you to die vs a single damage dealer, and bringing another damage dealer would simply, mathematically, always improve your chances of winning versus bringing a healer. Only exceptions i can think of that would be balanced is a ninja backstabbing from sneak should outdamage healing if his target is just sitting there taking it, and a ranger should probably out damage healing if they are hitting every shot on a no / low armor target, due to the difficulty of hitting every shot.

However, while a healer should have higher output, they should also be more susceptible to interruptions / disruption, and have lower resource efficiency compared to other classes. Currently, i feel both these things are true. Healers have warm ups, some quite long, on all healing abilities that can be interrupted; short targeting ranges compared to most ranged attackers; and their heals are generally less mana efficient than comparable damage spells (other than soothe, soothe is crazy efficient). Healers also generally have limited movement / control abilities compared to other classes, although druid has increased a bit in that category with entangle / earthwall. All of these factors should coalesce to make 1v1 balance of healer vs a damage dealer somewhat reasonable. However, this has been problematic due to the ease of kiting.

Therefore the single target heal cooldown increases of this map reset. I am of the opinion that these cooldowns increases were good for balance in terms of reducing self survivability. However, they have pushed the balance too far in favor of damage dealers in terms of healing others. The only single target healing "saving grace" at the moment is full heal, which is just not a very easy to balance ability. I dont like full heal because the output doesnt scale with wisdom, and so the most effective way to build a "1v1" annoying cleric would be to massively increase con / endurance, equip a fiery sword, and just slowly erode any target to death only using full heal and kiting, which would still heal up to 600 health on self as a high con target. At the same time, full heal is hard to get high efficiency out of on targets other than self (you dont want to wait until they are too low on health), and isnt very good at all from a healing / mana cost perspective on squishy, low hp targets.

SOLUTION: Keep current heals as are, but add some new other ally only heals. My personal favorite way to do this would be to add some "skillshot" heals to the game as suggested by myself and others in this thread: http://herocraftonline.com/main/threads/can-cleric-druid-get-a-healball-spell.45313 but other options also exist. Simply put, self healing output should probably remain similar to where it is now, but output on others needs to increase, as most damage classes with any kind of magic / armor penetrating damage can currently put out more damage than we can heal back at this time.

 

[teddytazer]

I agree that healing spells could use a buff, there are so many classes that can just burst players down quickly with combos and not enough healers/good guys out there.

 

[Solidze]

Currently underplayed, lacks popularity because it is not necessarily the class that works well in the meta.
Although, I look at the positive parts of the class and overall it's high in utility and support.

Ire should be decent damage at the first levels but should have the per level damage and attribute increase slightly smaller to give the skill a good composition when bolt is gained. So at Level 65, Ire won't have much DPS and bolt becomes the larger damage source.

Mained this class last map, for our hots to have a 2+ sec warmup is ridiculous. They should have a higher mana cost and remain instant like last map or a 1.5sec or lower warmup. Was underplayed last map aswell due to Clerics have invuln's and mass instant heals for tournaments. Sad to see them underplayed again.

 

[Dwarfers]

I agree with all these ideas being thrown. I personally don't care what happens as long as Druid keeps earthwall/rampart vine because these two skills are amazing.