EverQuest 2 Game Update Blog

Xelgad has posted a flurry of responses to specific class issues today.

This one, in regards to Critical Heals which have been removed from all fighters. For some fighter classes, critical heals might have been overpowered, but for Paladins (joshingly referred to as Healadins), losing all crititical heals has had class altering effects not only in solo situations (which this nerf was intended to fix) but in group and raid setups.

At Fan Faire, we were provided with a response on this issue which was more placating than prescient. Fortunately, it seems a few Paladins have planted a bug in the right ear and there may be some movement yet to sort this issue out.

From the EQ2 Forums (in response to a lengthy, detailed list of suggestions to fix the class by Boli32), Xelgad had this to say:

First, let me reiterate that it’s very important to us that abilities scale at a balanced rate. As I posted in the test feedback forum, that was really the primary reason for the heal crit change. It’s a waste of time for us to balance abilities for a certain gear level if better gear next expansion is going to benefit some abilities more than others. Overall, I think the change has helped the situation to a degree, but we are still working on fine tuning it.

It’s very likely that Lay on Hands will become percent based in the future, and we’d like to change some of your other heals as well. However, instead of shifting to more damage reduction/mitigation abilities, we would rather increase heal amount, increase cooldowns, and, perhaps, reduce the casting time of your heals/ward. If we made those changes, casting your heals and ward every time they’re up would result in lower total heals per second, but the abilities would be better for countering spike damage.

Feedback on this general idea would be appreciated.

Our interpretation of the changes he’s talking about would be big emergency heals on longer cooldown timers.

You can discuss this issue further, and provide feedback to Xelgad on the EQ2 Forums thread Critical Healing taken away… because?.