Balancing pieces: healing and nano

News

All of the ideas below are pieces of the puzzle, in my opinion. I think that the sort of rebalancing that the dev team is considering is absolutely necessary, and will almost certainly need tweaks over the year after it's introduced. I know the dev team is already looking at ways to better balance aimed shot and perks landing all or nothing, which I think are important pieces. I'd just like to bring two additional pieces to the discussion that I think are important.

Healing:

As I think the dev team has already realized, healing is overpowered in AO at the moment. Because SL introduced the ability to cast a 10k+ single target heal, combined with more and more heal efficiency every patch, and the ability of even trox docs to get 2 second nano tick, and culminating with ICH, docs have had more healing. That's necessitated bosses with more and more damage, and led to giving more heals to other professions as well. As a result, in pvp if you don't kill someone with your alpha, the odds are they'll be able to heal fully.

I'd suggest an across the board reduction in heals. For docs, that's a 50% reduction in the amount of HP healed by the top SL heals. Additionally, reduce ICH to heal only 20k base, with the existing lockout to prevent spamming.

At the same time, give docs a new single target HoT: Life Force
Life Force stacks with team enhanced deathless blessing
4 second attack, 2 second recharge
Stacks like Malpractice. Life Force 1 is 30 ticks of +100hp every second. Life Force 2 is 30 ticks of +250hp every second. 3 is +450hp/sec.
Casting Life Force blocks the caster from casting it again for 30 seconds.

This nano would allow a doc to keep a HoT for +100hp/sec up on themselves at almost all times. However, the more docs who are with a team or raid group, the more effective the stacking effect can be up to almost an extra bio regrowth of healing.

Other professions would also need to get a reduction in their top heals, although none of the other profession heals are quite as overpowered as doc heals are at the moment.

Nano:

Before shadowlands, most level 200 characters did not have 2 second nano delta. Today, almost every character has 2 second nano delta, regardless of breed. Even if heals weren't changed at all, if it wasn't possible to spam them the way almost all professions can now, healing wouldn't be as large of a problem. I'd suggest raising the bar for 2 second nano delta.

Nano tick formula changed to:
901+ 2 second
801+ 4 second
701+ 6 second
621+ 8 second
(ie. top 4 tick reductions require 80 then 100 psy each instead of 60)

Nanomage will make that easily at level 220 for any profession. Solitus and Opifex will also make it fairly easily for any profession which can use support, control, or extermination symbiants. Atrox who can use symbiants that give psychic will have to make a few sacrifices in gear but should be able to do it. The real losers with these limits will be professions who are limited to infantry/artillery symbiants: Enforcers, Agents, and Soldiers. Soldiers don't really need 2 second nano delta, which leaves enforcer and agent.

Enforcers shouldn't need 2 second nano delta, because they shouldn't be a casting profession. However, the need to spam mongo when tanking and layers when solo'ing makes enforcers casters. I would suggest that the nano cost of the Mongo and Layers lines be reduced to 25% of their current value. Atrox enforcer would be able to get 6 second nano delta with few sacrifices, which would allow frequent but not constant mongo'ing. To chain mongo, the atrox enf would need a cost reducer or pnh.

My solution to agent would probably be more controversial, but I think they've gotten the short stick recently, so I'd just say change support symbiants to be locked to visual profession. Yes, that would be a huge bump to agent, and would have to be balanced by something, but the fact is that agent has never been a purely artillery profession, they are a support profession.

At the end of the day, professions who needed 2 second nano delta would still be able to get it, but sometimes sacrifices would need to be made, which I think would result in much more variety, which I think is a good thing.