Delfofthebla BloodBond has a range of 12 blocks for party members to gain the effect of the healing if I'm correct.
Wasn't our goal to reduce the range of AoE radius' so you must have proper positioning and not a free roam deal?
I thought it was about time for you to show up. Let's get started then, shall we?
The goal was to reduce the effectiveness of instant cast AoE heals. It isn't that big of a deal when you have one of the relevant classes in the party, but when you start stacking multiples of them, I think the AoE heal spam is a bit absurd. It's instant, it's unstoppable, and it essentially makes a large amount of class skills completely worthless (Samurai DoTs, Pyromancer Fire/Withering, Necromancer DoTs, all class slows, and possibly stuns?)
I'll admit that I used the term "instant cast AoE heals" pretty hard back in that original post. However, my emphasis was on the fact that they were
instant and that they
purged debuffs, as shown above. The healing, if high enough, can be a bit of a concern too, but it wasn't (and isn't) my primary concern when dealing with HealingChorus / Chakra. My apologies for not wording this as well as I could have.
As I stated in the underlined text above, purging debuffs is an action that effectively kills several classes. While it may be fun players (such as yourself) to be able to freely spam Chakra or HealingChorus in the midst of a fight to support your allies, I feel as though those abilities are rather game-breaking and thus must have weaknesses to compensate. A low radius forces you to put more effort into using the ability, and if you don't, it isn't quite as effective.
However, healing alone does not do that at all, and
can be countered (ala MortalWound). If the heal has a warmup, it can be countered even further by using interrupt abilities. If we take the Cleric's GroupHeal as an example, it has a pretty decent radius too (more than Chakra). However, it has a warmup, and thus, can be interrupted. A Cleric's GroupHeal cannot remove debuffs either. Chakra / HealingChorus are the only two abilities on HC that allow you to do this in an AoE. Sure, you can silence them, and you can reduce the healing via MortalWound, but you
cannot interrupt them, and you
cannot prevent them from removing debuffs. These two aspects are very powerful strengths that must be accounted for when balancing the abilities.
From the other side of the fence, you have classes like the Necromancer. As I said, a Necromancer absolutely
cannot prevent players from having his debuffs purged. It's impossible. No matter what he does, Chakra / HealingChorus cannot be stopped other than perma silence. But perma silence is impossible. if these abilities had warmups, things would be much much more different. At the time, I did not wish to add warmups to these abilities, and so I opted to reduce the radius instead.
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With that said, let's talk about BloodBond. So what about it? Well, like GroupHeal, BloodBond is just an AoE heal. It does not purge debuffs. This already would warrant having an acceptable radius to it. Additionally, BloodBond itself is much more easily countered, and despite the fact that it "appears" to be instant, it isn't. I am not entirely convinced that it needs a range reduction. Despite the fact that it
seems rather strong, there are a lot of factors that play into the balance of the ability.
- I'd like to once again point out that all healing can be countered by MortalWound. BloodBond is no exception. Additionally, a Cleric, Beguiler, or Scribe can dispel BloodBond off of the Bloodmage to remove the healing all-together. Dispelling it off means he also has to pay a decent portion of his HP to put it back on, countering the ability further.
- BloodBond only heals players when the Bloodmage deals damage. The class has only 3 sources of dealing damage. 1 of those sources can only be used once or twice per fight, and requires the Bloodmage to build up his BloodUnion to be used first (BoilBlood). The other two require you to cast warmup abilities that can be interrupted. Due to there being a plethora of interrupt abilities on nearly every class these days, (many of which are AoE) I do not consider this ability to provide "instant healing". He cannot "control" the healing in any way. It is impossible for him to think "hey, I want to heal my party that's 6 blocks that way!" run in, and then instantly do so. BloodBond just isn't that reliable.
- Another interesting fact to consider is that these skills, being the warmups that they are, have decent ranges to them. This is to prevent the Bloodmage from being absolutely destroyed by melee classes in teamfights, but also to make the warmups more comfortable. The thing is, all of the BloodBond healing is centered around the Bloodmage, not the target that he is damaging. Because of this, a Bloodmage has to position himself closer to his allies if he wishes to heal his whole party. A Bloodmage that sits in the back of the fight and deals damage from afar will heal nobody. The Bloodmage already has to make positioning decisions if he wishes to be an effective group healer.
Unlike the Disciple and Bard, who have several abilities that can be used to escape or distance themselves from targets, the Bloodmage has none. ThickenBlood
appears to allow this, but it does not put you below sprinting levels, and thus, has no effect on anyone that isn't already low on stamina. And unlike the Disciple, the Bloodmage cannot heal himself endlessly while he runs away. He only has
one reliable self heal, and it is very ineffective. The costs, the cooldown, and the health gain just simply aren't enough to allow him to survive against a close-range enemy. Reducing the radius of BloodBond and forcing the Bloodmage to stick closer to his targets and his allies will make the ability
worthless. He just can't survive in the midst of a fight like Disciple and Bard can. I understand that even those classes have survivability issues to them, but they have tools at their disposal to protect themselves. The Bloodmage doesn't.
In short, I was directing my statement towards
instant cast,
AoE heals that
remove debuffs, as well as
the classes themselves. If HealingChorus / Chakra did not do these things, I would not have pushed so hard for a radius reduction on them. Conversely, if they were to
lose these effects, I would increase their ranges to compensate.
The Bloodmage cannot simply run around in circles and spam a single button to instantly heal his entire party while also removing some of the highest damaging abilities/status effects in the entire game from his allies like a disciple was previously able to do. Now, I'm not saying I'm 100% against reducing the radius. It
may actually be too large. But right now, before we've had a chance to see it played more, I do not plan to reduce the radius. If, after reading this post, you still disagree with this, feel free to post your reasoning.
