Channeler QoL/Balance.

[Darkon]

Healing barrage only pulsing a heal 15m from your targets target is brutal. It needs to be 45-50m range. There's no reason that when you cast your primary group heal that it shouldn't hit the group. It particularly shouldn't be lost due to the art team rendering a large model.

Single target intercept requiring unobstructed LoS is a real pain on large mobs. Sometimes the mobs collision box will prevent your intercept from having any functionality.

Those are the only real issues the class has. Over all it's incredibly powerful and a lot of fun, but the healing barrage issue in particular means that it can be frustrating, particularly for players who don't know exactly why their heal isn't healing.

[Lemilla]

Healing Barrage, Healing Arrow and the new Soulshot are all just bad for healing in raids, except for fights like Grendish where the groups are spread out. You can increase the range, but it'll still hit just the 6 people who are closest to the mob and not those in your group who actually need healing.

Single target intercept does not need Line of Feet from your pet to the target. It's just a tiny 15m range that causes issues on those large mobs. Having a spell similar to Call Servant, but to teleport your pet to your target ally instead of to yourself, would have with this. But it's not an issue on most fights if you know where the tank is going to position the mob.


But yes, the class has some issues.

Half the conduits are not worth using. Same for the pet essences.

The AA endline abilities in the heroic tree are just bad.

Many abilities aren't properly affected by Ability Mod.

The intercepts scale great with incoming damage which is compensated by the other heals being not very good. But this just causes Channelers to be worth taking over other healers only for content tuned so hard that other healers can't handle it anymore. For content that actually exists it doesn't help and for easy content the intercepts are just bad.

Channelers were supposed to be the highest parsing priests to compensate for not having utlity, but at least in high-end guilds they are getting outparsed by almost all other priests while still not having any utility.



I'd suggest something along the following to lines to rebalance things:
1. Reduce intercept amounts by ~5-10% and and reduce the healing from Interpose Redirect to 50%
2. Make healing arrow/barrage and soulshot heal everyone in your own group in a large radius instead of any ally with a small target limit in a small radius.
3. Make slot 3 conduits worth using: remove the pet health cost, halve the dissonance cost and reduce the effect/trigger count by ~65%..
4. Rebalance the slot 1 and 2 conduits: the two reactives are not worth using at the moment
5: Buff or redesign the bad slot 4-8 conduits.See this thread for details. Make one or two of them useful dps utlity for the group.
6: Make dissonance management easier for players less confortable with the class by buffing the endline in the stamina tree.


But to be honest, priests are the archetype with the worst balance at the moment, and should all be properly rebalanced at the same time. Somewhere after Beta.

[jaqs]

I raid on my channeler and have enjoyed it overall, I do find the mechanics of healing barrage annoying at times and I only rely upon a few specific pet abilities, the pet bug has gotten me a few times, but overall I've enjoyed it. I buffed up to 100 and ran a heroic the other night and honestly the class seemed almost broken. The healing barrage proc basically never proc'd, the pet had 9 million health ( I still had 800k ) and was in the red constantly, the new AA heals well but has a long recast ( plus no healing barrage proc that never proc'd anyway ) basically another o**** button. I would of liked another way to handle dissonance, And yes please make healing barrage heal the necro in your group.

I like some of Lemilla's ideas, 5 in particular, but I do use pet slot 3 now for o**** moments. and I find myself often changing the constructs slots to adjust the amount of intercept. On a particularly hard fight this can make all the difference.

In my guild I played on my channeler up to the last few mobs in ToV but now it seems we need druids, so been popping over to my druid alt. Wondering if I should just change classes once again or is raiding on a channeler going to be viable this expansion?

[Laita]

I PL'd my channeler at the beginning of the xpac and have raided on it ever since, with the exception of that past couple months when I was asked to switch back to Illy (b/c hey, druids are the in thing now).. I agree with most that is being said here, the big exception is the suggestion to remove intercept amounts and interpose redirect.. I think that would be a huge mistake, and lets face it, interpose redirect is pretty much the only 4-8 dissonance ability being used. But plenty does need to happen in order to make a channeler a viable option going into the next xpac..

1. like mentioned above, make healing arrow/barrage/soulshot heal everyone in your group, regardless of distance from the mob, or so long as they're within a certain radius of the channeler, radius should be the same as every other healers group heals.

2. Get rid of soulshot and add in some type of utility or dissonance management ability in its place, it's not worth casting it over healing barrage period... there's no arguing this one, just the fact that healing barrage offers a chance at dissonance free 1-3 ability makes it far greater.

3. I'd like to see the cost of slot 3 dissonance abilities lowered, both in terms of pet health and actual dissonance.. This can be justified by slightly lowering the values or triggers of the abilities. Rarely do I ever see the 50 trigger count of truespirits defiance go below 47 within the 8s that it's up... change it to 20 triggers with a 20-30s duration.

4. change Vector of Life from a frontal cone to a full circle ability. While it works out decent when the raid is all stacked up nice and pretty, it's a pain in the *** and a detriment to group healing when people are spread out all over the place, because the encounter requires them to be 5-10m apart from each other. No other healer is crippled in the group healing by the limitations set on channelers.

5. /agree, completely redo 4-8 dissonance... weapon dissonance and interpose redirect are currently the only ones worth using. Make Thir'slaa's Shell a stoneskin for the target, and not for the pet. Add a group utility buff as an option, lower the dissonance cost of many of the abilities.

6. Lower the recast time of dissipate to 1 min (30s with 100% reuse), this, lowering dissonance costs, or adding some new type of dissonance management needs to happen.. if not then why bother putting in slots 3-8, b/c we will need all the slot 1-2 abilities to keep our pet green.

7. Remove the intercept distance requirement, or greatly increase it... or set an option for the pet to stand next to the target of attack.

8. The first prestige ability Thir'Slaa's Armor, should be able to be up at the same time as Marisha Kur's Blessing, it should NOT be one or the other!!!!! They should stack!

9. Lower the pet health cost of consume construct to 15% instead of 25%...

[Laita]

One more thing, while I'm thinking about it....

Make the channeler's pet share all the same stats as the channeler (cb, pot, crit chance, dps, ma, flurry, etc...)... so that the essence's we captured (feline, bovine), etc... actually do something... the big one is the crit chance though... as of right now, the ones that proc heals/dps are absolutely worthless... this wont be game breaking by any means, but as of right now, can turn them all off and wont notice the difference.

[Laita]

“Soulshot's heal value has been increased by 45%. The radius has been increased to 30 meters.
Construct's Interception no longer requires line of fight.
Marisha Kur's Blessing now properly can be maintained along with Thir'Slaa's Armor.”

Just logged in to check these out, glad to see MKB and the new prestige can finally stack! I did notice that the shadow AA giving MKB a 10% crit bonus no longer applies to MKB, but to Thir'Slaa's Armor now, so might want to update that. Additionally, I haven't tested this yet b/c I don't want to completely reset my AA's, but does the priest shared shadow AA Secular Protection apply the mitigation increase's appropriately to Thir'Slaa's Armor? If no one has tested this yet, I will later on today. Hoping someone can save me the trouble though.

Also, thank you, thank you for the changes to intercept. With that being said though, through inspection of the spell (both single target and group intercept) I'm not seeing a range applied to the intercept.. has the range requirement been removed completely? If so, thank you again!

Soulshot is still underwhelming.. more of an oh **** than anything, which works fine for groups since it's limited to 6 players, however still does not help the channeler in raid keep his group up as it will only heal the 6 nearest allies... unless I'm reading this wrong... but as is implies that it's the nearest 6 so long as they are within the group/raid... is there a way to code this so that it applies to the channelers group FIRST, and then if any of the group members are outside of the 30m radius, the left over "triggers" apply to other characters within the raid.

Thanks for the changes, and please consider some of the other changes that are mentioned in this thread, primarily adding utility and dissonance management changes.

[sompet_eq2]

Thank you for the intercept change!

Soulshot is just an another Healing Arrow, nothing new, nothing interesting. I like its casting speed, but at least make it's healing a bit different. For example, make it heal the 6 people with lowest HP in range or add a HOT to group or add dissonance dissipation or add some group buff like CB, WDB.

Also Soulshot has the same icon as Impulse Shot.

Truespirit Defiance: too short duration.

Truespirit Restoration: ticks should be the same as the initial heal.

Many of the slot 4-8 conduits are very situational dependent and rarely used. I'd like to see a very limited way to change a conduit mid-fight. Some conduits only would have a one-time use when something went wrong but they don't worth a slot otherwise (e.g deaggro, port to channeler, barrier of dissonance).

Conduit based buffs cannot be cast while moving like all other buffs (Interpose Redirect, Hidden Reserves, Controlled Backlash, Aura of Crippling).

[Laita]

Just playing around with AA's and noticed a few more issues...

1: Draconic Reinforcement (end healing ability in the dragon AA's) doesn't apply to channelers, since we have no direct single target heal. Can this ability be added to healing arrow/barrage? Not a huge deal since I rarely ever do I bother to spec heals, but should be adjusted so that channelers can take advantage of this ability.

2. Ancient Alacrity (2nd to bottom ability in dragon AA heal line). This ability is supposed to affect our large group direct heal, which is Salubrious Invocation, instead for some reason it affect Vector of Life. Not a huge deal, but with current class mechanics as they are, this would be much more beneficial on the spell it was designed for (Salubrious Invocation).. there's a big difference in keeping your group alive by casting it every 4s vs every 12s, and with having them spread out (up to 40m) as opposed to all stacked up and standing in front of you (up to 15m). Please change this to affect our large direct group heal, Salubrious Invocation, like it does every other healer.

Aside from the 10% crit bonus (from shadow AA's) not applying to MKB but to Thir'Slaa's Armor instead (address in yesterday's update notes, but still not fixed), everything else seems to be working as far as AA's are concerned.

Please, please consider replacing Soulshot with some form of utility and redesign/reconfigure the dissonance abilities!!! Especially the slot 3-8's!!!

[Tyman]

It already affects Healing arrow and barrage.

[Laita]

“It already affects Healing arrow and barrage”

My mistake on that one, wasn't seeing it happening.