What cards are breaking the bank?

Then it's worse than Altruism in the vast majority of cases. That said, I definitely think healing needs nerfing in one way or another (as someone who always includes a pure healer).

 

That's part of my point though. A casting of it often results in the ending of a game. Will it make high ranked play? I donno. I do know that my ranking has shot back up since I dedicated a wizard to it. In my experience it can beat top tier decks with sub par cards and play, even if it sometimes goes sideways.

Sadly, my last 3 games my opponent quits right after I cast it where my opponents ranks were between 1250 and 1421.

Edit: while continuing to test this build, I find it interesting that the only times I've lost are in games where the enemy cast WWE...

 

WWE rarely bothers me, i think i have won more games than i have lost because of my opponent has cast this spell. Just have a team move spare, or move + attack cards and it is no problem. Quite often I have landed next to the nice squishy mage and given him a good clip round the ear for being so cheeky!

 

I am getting really annoyed with Talented Healer. The main problem is the Focused Healer item which is a rare lvl 18 item, so rarity kind of obscures the problem. Without the item you cannot build a consistent deck around it. I also do not see it used particularly well yet. Most players just dump tons of healing on their cleric and that's the extent of the deckbuilding.

The main reason why it's annoying is because it makes games take ages, because healing becomes more plentiful than damage.

 

As someone who (IMHO) has used focused healer particularly well, I fully agree with turinturamba that healing needs some kind of fix. Nerfing Help The Weak by either reducing the amount healed or requiring line of sight would do a lot to alleviate the problem.

In short: devs, please nerf me!

 

I don't really see how Help The Weak is a problem. It is compareable to Team Heal. The problem really is the excessive card draw. If you think about it Inspiration (a basic cycle) is a silver level card, so Talented Healer basically reads: With each successful heal you get a silver card.

 

The problem is that help the weak is a bronze card, leading to OP items like Mail Of Succor. Getting a draw for your healer is not as good as choosing which character gets a draw (Inspiration), but I see your point.

I think requiring all heals to have line of sight would fix the problem nicely: I couldn't just send my warrior off on his own, knowing my healer will have plenty of team heals and help the weaks.

 

Just had another match perfectly illustrating the brokenness of Focused Healer. Match was vs bear onyx. I deal a ton of damage and successfully zone his warrior and wizard out for most of the game until he eventually wins because my time runs out in round 9. I think I am done with mp until this gets changed. Not only is three Talented Heal vastly overpowered, but more important is that the matches are very long and boring. I shudder to think what happens when two teams with two clerics running focused healer each get matched vs each other.

 

Its called meta bring bigger attacks honestly...

 

If you don't have a clue don't post, honestly. In the game against bear onyx I started out my attack with a Savage Curse Fireball hitting two chars, followed by a frenzied impaling dwarven warrior who landed a Vicious Strike and a Dancing Strike and a Devastating Blow. Next turn his team was at full health and full cards. Unless you want to argue that you should only bring 1 hit kill attacks, your post makes no sense.

 

No I'm saying you should bring some one hit killer attack which is exactly my point since you point to a bunch of 10- attacks. If you don't like that idea start rolling with encumber stacking to push it off or line of sight tools or disenchant. There are plenty of ways to handle it and a healing priest without that buff is super meh. My suggestion was just the least scalpel of the solutions as big attacks work on basically anything.

Its very possible the buff needs a nudge down but lets not start shouting broken because someone healed through your damage with a healer.

 

I think nerfing should be considered not just in terms of MP (which is the usual argument right now) but also in term of SP, which was the main development branch of the game initially. Nerfing a healer in MP so the you can two shot a character and get your MP match over in five minutes might sound great to you, but to others who find themselves fighting 10+ monsters on a map will say that being able to heal back up to full health is essential for completing some maps. As it is now, only Greater Heal is able to restore enough HP to make healers viable in most single player maps. Having the possibility to heal a few times (because you got to draw a heal after playing a heal) gives healers other options and makes cards like Minor Heal possibly worth playing.

 

The overall weakness of heals in general means that the only way to make a truly effective dedicated healer is with Focused Healer. And I've been looking for any Divine skill with more than one Talented Healer, so I could have a holy priest who was actually effective at healing. Howerver I don't consider this overpowered in MP mostly because if a person wants to bring a pure dedicated healer by min/max that healer around stacking heals and card draw with Talented Healer they have effectively reduced their offensive capability to two characters. Healing requires you to use a turn to react to the damage your opponent does which makes you predictable and easier to control in a strategic sense. Only one heal is really effective to wipe out large amounts of damage Greater Heal and that is limited in how many you can bring in your deck. It should be easy enough to draw and focus enough damage to take down one of your opponents dps or even the healer himself. You can be confident that your opponent wont be able to deal out as much damage as you and as soon as they are behind they will fall very quickly farther behind, and if their one remaining character is the healer they have effectively lost or at best drawn.

To me Talented Healer needs balancing because it effectively means there is little to no reason to bring the other healing focused trait Healing Spirit. one additional point of health is nothing compared to another card that could be that Greater Heal. Altruism fits in nice with buff priests, Holy Presence works pretty good for a battle healer fighting next to a warrior or another priest, but if you're going heals it's Focused Healer or just bring another warrior with as much team move, obliteration, and all out attacks as you can fit.

 

The healer is a loss of damage source. And if they cannot heal equal to what you can damage when they have heal cards, then they are useless.

I faced off against 2 dual-priest decks today. One of them had one guy on the victory square tossing himself Nimbus each turn, the other one put unholy well on his mage who launched Firestorms 2 turns in a row. I moved an elvish step warrior up and wiped out both his mage and unholy priest in one turn (thanks to him nearly killing his own units). The other guy I ignored while parking myself on 2 victory squares to win.

The second, I am pretty sure was healer built, because I managed to get the elven step warrior in and kill his lone mage on the first round, he instantly quit.

If they have a healer, focus your damage, HEAVILY. My preference is ignore the healer and kill the damage sources, but you can easily go the other way and focus down the healer, then chip away at the unguarded DPS from a distance.

I don't know the specifics of your own deck, but it is quite possible you are running into an issue not of healers being overpowered, but of having FOCUSED characters being powerful. Quite likely you built each one of your characters to stand alone (a mix of offense and defense). This is great if you get isolated, but it means each turn you are likely to draw at least a few, possibly all, of your cards as things currently useless to you. Warrior is in range to bash in heads, but draws only armor? Sucks to be you!

By having a character heavily devoted to ONLY support, he will always draw support cards. By having one devoted ONLY to attack, he will always draw attack cards. This removes some random elements from the game, and improves your overall chances.

 

turinturamba, you are absolutely right that a priest with Talented Healer is extremely difficult to beat simply due to the card advantage that it creates. On the other hand though, I was able to focus down a few characters in my last two matches against this strat and pick up the win. I would not say that it is OP, honestly I think that Focused Healer is the only thing that makes a healing priest viable in the the current meta.

 

There is counterplay to Talented Healer, even if it's limited for some builds. For one they don't have a card advantage until you start doing damage and they can start healing it up. If your deck has a lot of damage, misdirection and switching targets can work, especially when their healer can only be in line of sight of one of his teammates at a time. If your deck benefits greatly from drawing buffs before you commit to a fight, you may have to cede the victory squares a few rounds until you can set up some burst damage they can't heal through.

Lava does damage at the beginning of turns, so you try to lay it under a target when you're in position to follow it up next round.

Counterspell and Purge are the straightforward counters, although with purge you can either get lucky and they draw all three talented healers early and you can purge the third, or you can get unlucky and purge it to have it quickly replaced.

EDIT:after trying it myself I take back everything I said. You pretty much get to heal your whole team up to full every round. Focused healer as an item should not exist. It makes it way too easy to draw through half your deck and get to several team heals, heal the weaks and tank any amount of damage and heal it to full while your opponent is passing, completely out of cards.

 

Eh I guess I'll just wait a few weeks until all top decks run focused healer and people optimize their parties to take advantage of it (i.e not running warriors with it anymore). For what it's worth with the right items you should be able to reliably go infinite with it on turn 1 with a 2 priests/ 1 firestorm wizard combo.

 

Well, what are the cards/equipment? lets see someone make it and try it out. I'm missing Focused Healer so I would have trouble building it. And for what it's worth, hit-point bags that are dwarf warriors would benefit a lot from constant heals; so much so that I doubt one firestorm wizard would even be able to burn them down.

 

I have focused healer, but I don't have enough firestorm to really give it a go.

 

You'd need two, wouldn't you? I have one focused healer and a bunch of firestorm, guess i could try the second priest with Superb Healer. If i see another focused healer in the rare shop i'll buy it and try this build out for you guys.