It took all of my professionalism not to sneak out of work early yesterday to get home and log into EverQuest II. The New Halas patch is something I’ve been super excited about and it offers up the “second half” or “last quarter” of what should have been included in the Sentinel’s Fate expansion pack. New Halas city arrived! The new storyline system went into place. Two new raids, one easy to moderate and one hard, were added and the most important chance to date went in: hide your “fing” mount! That last one is something I specifically asked for! The New Halas patch also brought with it Shader 3.0. In short, this was a serious content patch from SOE!
Hi, I’m Squishy
We’re going to be attempting the new easy to moderate raid zone tonight so I’ll spare droping details on it until we’ve actually put some time into it. Some of the loot that is dropping there has already found its way into the auction channel and it, combined with an experience last night, brought me back to an issue I’ve had with EverQuest II for a while now. I’m tired of being a squishy templar! It feels like that as the product has aged the developers have gotten into the mindset that “healer” plate isn’t really plate. They also seem to toss a lot of alternate advancement abilities that bring other healers into the same realm of survivability as the templar. This happened in EverQuest for a bit and I didn’t care for it then either.
What really drove this home for me was the fact that I no longer survive as many melee AEs as I should. Ferrel is geared towards having extra hit points and mitigation. I actually sacrifice a little healing ability for survivability. Despite that fact I rarely survive AEs that kill the fury or warden I frequently group with. To make it more insulting our swashbuckler Dresden will occasionally survive things that kill me! He is a sissy chain wearing pirate wannabe! I’m a shield using, plate wearing, survival focused player and yet I die easily. It has become a bit frustrating. I play clerics because I am willing to give up the ability to deal damage or have great utility so that I can survive when things go poorly. Somewhere along the line the developers have lost that notion. Templars are the defensive, survival based, healing class.
New Halas has brought some exceptional items into play as I mentioned before but when looking at some of them the healing plate is outrageous! Last night I saw an “armor blank” with each of the three healer types on it. The chain healers received more critical mitigation than the plate healers and the bonuses that were associated with it just didn’t make sense. I’m thinking something is a little zany in itemization land. This is to be expected though with some of the poor choices that have been made with the new item system. Allowing every class to have 100% critical chance and 100% double attack really starts to invalidate those bonuses. They’re not even bonuses anymore. You either have them or you’re sub-standard. Critical chance is so easy for a templar to get I actively avoid items with it and yet somehow Ferrel has 135%. Each new item just piles more on though.
It is my hope that we can rein in some of the insanity that has been going on with itemization and start redefining the roles that each healer class is intended to play. I truly miss my classic EQ2 templar that could survive a lot of the big hits long enough for the tank to grab aggro back. I didn’t mind my low damage because I was hard to kill. Now I’m easy to kill and my damage is still woefully bad. I just don’t want to be squishy anymore!
New Halas is cool
Beyond the continued itemization issues I was extremely impressed with the New Halas patch. SOE made good on a lot of the promises that Brenlo made and I think it speaks well to him even if he isn’t around the office to appreciate it directly. As promised we received new raid zones. We have our new starting city. Finding out where to go at any given level is easy thanks to the storyline window. All of these things make life a lot easier for new players and old ones. I look at this patch as part of his legacy and hope others enjoy it as much as I do.
All characters are © 2007 - 2012
We’ve seen this sort of role homogenization in WoW as well. It’s great for each class to have a different feel and niche, but less great for a group of 23 people to be sitting on their rears because the available healer for the last niche is the wrong type of healer. Dunno what the solution to that is, though.
Hey even wannabe pirates have cool fashion sense!
I have to agree with Green Armadillo, increased class diversity causes specific class necessity. However, I do love the complexity that brings to raids and such. I also love the choices you get since I never really fell in love with any of the generic WoW classes (but I have fallen in love with the swashbuckler!).