Suggestions to Fix HealAlac Specter

[Micah.3789]

First of all, I love HealAlac Specter... in theory: I find the class fantasy unique and the approach to support active and engaging, but the actual function of the spec is very awkward and underwhelming right now. I've been playing it mostly in instanced PvE, but also OW and WvW with all kinds of build variations. I've been homing in on the most egregious pain points and I've come up with some possible solutions. That said, I'm sympathetic regarding the amount of work it could take to implement changes, so these suggestions are my best attempt to get as much impact as possible without unnecessarily dramatic overhauls. 

One of the biggest pain points is access to protection. Shadow sap is clumsy and too costly, requiring massive initiative investment and cycling through allies to get reasonable duration. Cover of Shadow isn't terrible on paper, but stealthing allies can be very costly and a nuisance in PvE encounters; not to mention it's outright prevented by many fixates and tanking mechanics. My suggestion is a minor rework of Shadestep: have it provide both Alacrity and Protection to your tethered ally as well as 4 allies near you. Along with this, I'd relocate the effect that shares Shadow Shroud benefits around your tether target, and put it on Consume Shadows instead. This will keep Shadestep balanced, as well as define it as a boon trait choice, as it's currently adding too much group healing to AlacDps builds. 

This brings me to my next pain point: Consume Shadows. It's clearly meant to be a healing trait, and while the idea of turning shadow force into healing is fun and unique, it's completely counterproductive in its current form. It provides a very large burst heal, which is mostly only useful when the group is taking heavy damage; but it requires spending 5 seconds in shroud, while said heavy damage is gobbling your shadow force, resulting in little to no actual healing. On top of that, it scales exclusively with health instead of actual healing power. My suggestion is to change the heal to a flat base amount with additional healing power scaling. Instead of consuming all your shadow force, it would consume an amount based on your stacks of Consume Shadows. Something like 20% of your total shadow force per stack, that would then multiply the heal by how much it managed to consume. Something like ~1,500(1.0) healing increased by 0-100% depending on much shadow force was consumed. This maintains the integrity of the trait, while making it more manageable and consistent. With the addition of "beneficial effects of your shadow shroud skills affect allies around you" this becomes a reasonably potent healing trait.

Both Shadestep and Consume Shadows are painfully dependent on your ability to maintain shadow force while in shroud, which is currently a major struggle under even moderate damage pressure. A relatively easy fix would be to allow "tethered ally healing" to affect the specter, but grant barrier for the amount it would heal. This effect could be baseline, or added specifically to either trait. It would allow shroud abilities to grant small amounts of barrier to the specter to help mitigate loss of shadow force to heavy damage. If this effect is added, tether healing should be changed to only provide ~25% more healing per additional target hit rather than the current 100% as that could make the specter too tanky against multiple targets. If there's concern over Specters having too much sustain, they could get the harbinger treatment instead: making their shadow force unaffected by damage, but allowing healing while in shroud. Then the tether healing could just heal them normally.

The last pain point is tether/siphon ally. Siphon ally is a mostly useless skill to transfer your tether target at the cost of 50% Siphon CD. As siphoning an enemy provides significant boons, shadow force, and initiative; using siphon on an ally should really be avoided entirely. Here's where things get messy: a lot of Specter's boons and healing are tied to tether and occur around the ally target, meaning the target's movement controls the accuracy of the effects. I have two different suggestions to remedy this. The first is simple and already mentioned earlier: beneficial effects of shroud skills effect the tether target and allies around you. The second idea would require a more significant rework, but it could largely solve the problem with or without the other change. Remove ally targeting from Siphon, and add another F skill to replace it. The new skill would simply be "Tether Ally" and do nothing but transfer your tether with a 1sec CD to prevent spamming. After hitting with Siphon, however, Tether Ally would flip to an empowered skill for one use, akin to steal and stolen skill. Now Siphon Ally, this skill would still transfer your tether, but could provide additional effects: I'd suggest a barrier to 5 allies around the target, in keeping with the current skill.

P.S. Scepter skills should share 100% of their ally target effects, not 50%. Tune them down if necessary to compensate. 

[FelsPinguin.5902]

1 hour ago, Micah.3789 said:

My suggestion is to change the heal to a flat base amount with additional healing power scaling

I really Like that Suggestion. Because as I demonstrated Here:

The current Handling of the healing is lackluster. I would even suggest a fixed amount of base healing (ofc influenced by healing Power). this  would encourage staying in shroud even If damage deplenishes your shroud health. If that is to passive (I am well aware that Devs got rid of Most of the passive traits) you could build the mechanic in a way that only If you Exit shroud yourself you gain the healing and you will gain nothing If your shroud ends because your shroud health is Zero.

This would lead to a Playstyle in which you can stay in shroud as Long as you want before activating the healing by leaving shroud. On the other Hand If you mess Up and shroud ends due to Lack of shroud health you gain nothing. To make the shroud health maintaining easier I also Like the Idea of shroud skills giving barrier to the specter.

[Antrix.4512]

I'm fully supportive of improving this spec, particularly in its healing role, as I'm currently practicing and learning how to heal with my favorite class. It's a challenging undertaking, at least for me. I've been consulting with various experienced players, particularly Lucinellia, on different aspects of this role, and I must say that your suggestions resonate with me.

Now, I don't mean to stir the pot unnecessarily, but as a player who has been in the game for only a year, I'm curious about something. How often have player-suggested changes actually made their way into the game? To reiterate, I fully back the OP and their ideas, but I'm genuinely interested in knowing whether player feedback, especially of this nature, has historically been incorporated into the game.

[kash.9213]

Nice write up. I agree with most of it but I don't mind Siphon designating my current Tether. It's not a long cooldown. 

I would like those effects around me instead of my Tether though, good point. 

[Mudora.9201]

I heavily agree with this, as thief is my second main. I also am not sure when Alacrity was removed from wells, but it took away of lot of good traits for even maintaining the wells. Protection isn't... terrible, I suppose. But Alacrity is so much more useful in terms of heavy damage, heavy healing areas, and more. Though perhaps there's something that's been better since its removal? 

[Mudora.9201]

5 minutes ago, Mudora.9201 said:

I heavily agree with this, as thief is my second main. I also am not sure when Alacrity was removed from wells, but it took away of lot of good traits for even maintaining the wells. Protection isn't... terrible, I suppose. But Alacrity is so much more useful in terms of heavy damage, heavy healing areas, and more. Though perhaps there's something that's been better since its removal? 

Oh wait, I realize that was for WvW. Still in PvE. My mistake. Still... strange  that the time is... reduced from what it was? *shrug*

[Za Shaloc.3908]

I appreciate your post and think you do a great job at identifying some of the issues heal Specter has to deal with. 

I'm on the fence with you about point 1. I would rather see ANet make group stealth more compatible with endgame PvE so we can gain more value from traits like Cover in Shadow, whether it be through a mechanical adjustment or through a relic that modifies stealth. Admittedly this would require waaaaay more work, so I also think a skill like Seal Area could maybe use some pulsing AoE prot access as it feels more on the niche side in PvE. At least in my experience, but I am a WvW main and only do OW stuff and strikes for PvE. Additionally, your suggestion of making scepter skills grant 100% effectiveness to all allies would be a way of increasing the prot value on ally Scepter 2. 

I really like your suggestion for Consume Shadows (minus the shroud skill sharing moving here). I know it has a lot of potential value in PvE, but in WvW the trait feels really bad and I'd like to feel encouraged to actually take it (other options are pretty meh if you are playing as a pure support). Specter as a whole doesn't really have fantastic healing power scaling in my opinion, so having a skill that puts more value into the stat investment would be nice. 

Hard agree with your thoughts on Siphon/Tether Ally. I have felt the same way about its lack of trait interactions and think ANet needs to really sit down and make a decision to it either working with traits or separating it into a new F-skill. On one hand, I like the decision-making behind having to choose whether to use Siphon on an ally or enemy, especially because they could implement some really fun modifications to pre-existing Steal traits to make them more supportive when used on an ally. On the other hand, I think giving Tether a new F-skill would make Specter feel more "complete" and could help address some of the "clunk" that Specter uniquely suffers from. I'd be happy with either. This has been one of my biggest hangups with the spec since the EoD betas.

I have a whole handful of ideas myself as I am pretty passionate about support Specter, but I have been too lazy to articulate my thoughts. Maybe at some point I'll take the time to write them all out.

[Micah.3789]

2 hours ago, Mudora.9201 said:

Oh wait, I realize that was for WvW. Still in PvE. My mistake. Still... strange  that the time is... reduced from what it was? *shrug*

There was a complete overall of specter's alacrity support. It's now on shroud skill use instead of wells. It was part of the game-wide move to take quickness/alacrity off utility skills. In WvW the same trait (Shadestep)  gives protection instead of alacrity. That's partly why my suggestion was to have Shadestep grant Alacrity and Protection. 

[Micah.3789]

8 minutes ago, Za Shaloc.3908 said:

I'm on the fence with you about point 1. I would rather see ANet make group stealth more compatible with endgame PvE so we can gain more value from traits like Cover in Shadow, whether it be through a mechanical adjustment or through a relic that modifies stealth. Admittedly this would require waaaaay more work, so I also think a skill like Seal Area could maybe use some pulsing AoE prot access as it feels more on the niche side in PvE. At least in my experience, but I am a WvW main and only do OW stuff and strikes for PvE. Additionally, your suggestion of making scepter skills grant 100% effectiveness to all allies would be a way of increasing the prot value on ally Scepter 2. 

I actually completely agree with you about stealth compatible support. I'd love to see stealth share traits actually be functional in PvE, but in this particular post I'm focusing on what I think would be the most simple and realistic solutions to quickly get support specter out of this funk. Specifically with Shadestep, it already has protection in WvW and alacrity in PvE. Therefore it's safe to assume merging the two wouldn't be far fetched. As for taking the shroud skill share off of it: it's doing ridiculous healing even on a completely dedicated alacdps build. With no healing power at all, tether healing still does ~620 per target hit (3/5max). That's over 1k per second per enemy when you factor in cast times. That's really why I suggested moving it to Consume Shadows; it should be exclusive to a healing build. Plus, it just makes sense: Consume Shadows needs a buff and has a complimentary theme. They'd need to fix Consume Shadows and/or shadow force sustain issues first though. Otherwise, this vital healing would be locked behind a trait that actually reduces its viability.

 

[graishak.5406]

i have many similar pain points with specter.

in wvw the shroud hardnerf was not compensated for at all and it is hard to maintain shroud so i would like some over time barrier gen to counter some of the unavoidable damage there, preferably an effect like necro blood bank while in shroud

they should make ally target siphon give half of the SF, and give the steal traits some on-ally effect. it feels pointless since the res trait is gone.

also, would need some traits, preferably in core that work well with specter to remove (soft cc)conditions, e.g. give the prot GM also a cleanse when you apply prot

[kash.9213]

11 hours ago, Mudora.9201 said:

Oh wait, I realize that was for WvW. Still in PvE. My mistake. Still... strange  that the time is... reduced from what it was? *shrug*

I get why they gave us protection there instead for WvW. I would still like some way to give alacrity so I can help out people on siege, but that protection source is pretty clutch, especially in big hard driving fights, and a few Shroud skills can walk people through some stuff and feels in sync with the skill movement and utility you're using to provide it. Shroud health is a precious and fleeting thing though if the other side knows how to punish you on the lane you set up. 

[Micah.3789]

* UPDATE* I've been giving this a rethink, and I have a few revisions and additions to my original suggestions. 

First of all, I've reconsidered the idea to move the 'shroud effect share' from Shadestep. I was initially concerned about the healing alacdps builds gained and wanted to make room for added protection, but I think there's a better approach to this. Shroud tether heal scaling is the problem here: 514(0.1). Healing power investment barely affects the potency, while attacking multiple targets can increase it up to 5 fold! On one end this is highly exploitable and can do immense healing in the right scenarios with little to no healing power, but in most PvE content against a single boss with healing gear there's relatively little reward. My suggestion is to improve the coefficient to at least (0.2-0.3) and reduce the bonus per target to 25% or remove it entirely. If removed entirely, it would be nice to proc on skill use instead of hit so we could heal without a target.

Next is the Consume Shadows rework. I thought of a way to combine my aforementioned tether healing self barrier effect with a heal on exiting shroud.

Proposed new Consume shadows:

- Your Tethered Ally Healing now affects you as well, and all healing you grant yourself while in Shadow Shroud is converted to barrier.

- Gain stacks of Consume Shadows at regular intervals while in Shadow Shroud. Exiting Shadow Shroud breaks your barrier and heals allies based on the number of stacks you have gained, while consuming your remaining shadow force. Allies that are fully healed receive the rest of the value in barrier.

This rework would give heal specter some much needed longevity in shroud, while also providing a modest group heal at the cost of banked shadow force. The healing would scale exclusively off the consumed barrier, meaning it would effectively scale with healing power, but also be limited to a maximum of 25% of your health; as the healing would cap at 50% of the barrier which caps at 50% health. By relying on barrier, this heal would still require smart play to accumulate and utilize effectively, maintaining the feel and uniqueness of the current trait functionality. Breaking the barrier and losing shadow force when exiting shroud prevents this trait from being too abusable for general personal sustain. This also gracefully solves the larger design flaw of relying on shroud for boons and healing, while not being affected by healing yourself. It's pretty pitiful that heal specters are usually squishier than even the dps they are healing, especially when healers should be capable of tanking. Assuming the included change to tethered ally heal scaling, this trait alone could put heal specter in a pretty comfortable spot.