How to nerf Talented Healer

That's the design. The player made a decision, whether he wants to heal this character to full, ensuring his safety, or bring smaller heal to keep him close to full, and generating card advantage for the healer.

The idea is to encourage the healer to use the heal and draw another card that is not a heal, and use that non-heal card instead. (If he draw another heal and heal to full, he wont have any card to use).

Or we could just straight up nerf talented healer to: " If ...., draw a card. Discard that card if it is a heal card". That way it encourage the talented priest to stack something other than mass heal

 

Sigh, just lost to someone who drew 4 heals in a row (I know because he only had 1 card in hand) and then a massive attack to kill my warrior off Talented Healer. Please nerf this card; a dice roll would be fair but the other ideas like requiring other card types or limiting it to once per turn would be good too.

 

Not max health AFTER the heal does sound like the easiest solution to make without a massive shift in game rules. Since Beta is close-ish to finishing, that is somewhat a desirable feature.

 

But wouldn't players just stack their deck with low heals, and then just repeatedly heal them with the small heals until they're just short of being full?

If the problem is players repeatedly healing and drawing tons of cards, I feel the solution is just to make it so you can only draw 1 card per turn from talented healer. That way, more powerful heals are still better than weaker heals, and repeated heals in the same turn are wasted, so if someone wants to draw a replacement card for all their heals they need to space them out over several turns.

 

Yep, that's why its a small nerf. I dont suggest to break the card, I just nerf it. Small heals have its fun too since you can no longer clutch heal, your healing target will be more vulnerable to repeated attack, make the talented healer deck weaker in general. Gaining card advantage will be less of a problem if these extra card are weak heals.

Before, you ran out of HP to heal before you can finish a chain (entire party full health every turn). Now you are more likely to run out of chain before you can fully heal your target.

 

I don't think the no-overhealing rule goes far enough, and while it's pretty straightforward it's also arbitrary and counter-intuitive. I'm of the opinion that the card needs more than just a tweak at this point, the change needs to be on the magnitude of adding a 3+ or 4+ roll to the card. We need to put a stake through the heart of the dedicated healer with Focused Healer meta - it's getting to the point where MP is between the haves and the have-nots in regards to focused healer.

 

I agree with the sentiment, I just really, really hate the idea of having a die roll on drawing a card (Playing Altruism is something I found extremely frustrating - it felt like playing MtG and not drawing any lands). That's why I suggested capping it at one card per turn - it would permanently fix the problem of talented healer priests healing their entire team to full in the span of a turn while still being a viable way to build a cleric.

 

How about:
Whenever you play a Heal card, your draw next round is increased by 1.

 

I think we should buff Healing Spirit to +2 or +3 and get rid of Talented Healer altogether/replace it with a new talent for Priests that broaden possible playstyles.

If you want more cards, use Altruism.

Better heals, Healing Spirit.

Attachment removal, Holy Presence.

Talented healer just blows everything out of the water and overlaps both Healing Spirit and Altruism.

 

That's probably better than adding a dice roll. I don't know if this idea has been mentioned yet but you could make it 'draw a card then pick a card to discard' which would allow you to cycle through to your heals while taking out the card advantage part of it.

 

While that sounds good on first glance, it then becomes more like a self leadership. With enough card draw, it can still lead to infinite churning.

 

The overall problem of completely eliminating the card is the fact that healing will always have lower values than an attacking deck. Since a Mage can attack from afar, their advantage is 'keep away' tactics, while Warriors move in for extreme damage. The reality is that Priests are a considerably weaker force compared to the two, because they must be close for attacking, which are in general weaker than Warriors through a conventional draw.

Priests viability so far is the quick draw tactic that we see dominating, so Talented Healer must remain in some form. I don't agree with the suggestion that you only draw one card per turn, due to the fact that you use two cards, and their are already lower quality cards that will give you 'two for one'.

Not so sure how to nerf the card in a nice way, but I feel that a counter per use is the best suggestion so far, or if you were to use a dice role, a 3+ seems adequate.

Another suggestion that doesn't fix the whole problem due to several ways of getting around it, but does make for a harder build, is to add the word Halt. I think that this makes the talented healer feel more like his sole purpose is healing and consequentially not moving. Still needs a limitation of how many cards can be drawn like this though.

 

I've only run into someone using this a few times. It did not generate them an auto win. I honestly don't think its a big deal but its kinda intimidating when some heals up and thus we overreact.

I always keep purge to keep away pesky ice cards from my slow dwarves. Wouldn't purging the card work and end the draw chain?

 

This is a very important point regarding healing spells - how powerful should they be? Certainly not as potent as warriors, since warrior attacks have the drawback that they must be within 1 or 2 squares of their target. In my opinion, healing spells should be about as powerful as purely offensive mage spells, since both of them have the "long range" advantage. Let's do a rarity comparison of the healing spells right now with the mage spells:
1. Green: healing rays (6 or 12 healed range 8) vs. obliterating spark (9 damage range 6). I'd give healing rays the edge here because it has higher total healing potential (two wounded guys isn't that uncommon) and because obliterating spark damage could be reduced by armor. Also, healing rays has longer range so it's easier to use as long as you keep your priest in LOS with the others.
2. Gold: Mighty/Potent spark (7/6 damage range 6) vs greater heal (8 healed range 8). Greater heal definitely has the edge in both amount healed and range, not even considering that the spark damage can be further reduced by armor. Even worse, greater heal is easier to get since mighty spark only appears on staffs while greater heal can appear on divine items, divine skills, divine weapons, divine armors (even on the common divine item silver healing ring with two other decent heals).
3. Silver: Devastating spark (4 damage range 6) vs Heal (4 healed range 8). Heal still has the edge over lightning at least with range and irreducible damage. At this rarity level sorcerous blast (6 damage range 6) does have the edge over heal, but to my knowledge this is the highest damage arcane spell in the game, so it might not even belong in silver. Sorcerous blast is as hard to get as a gold card certainly so I would probably compare it with greater heal. Comparatively there's boosted heal which heals for 6 and provides pseudo-armor 3, but that is definitely harder to use with its range of 1 (although not as hard of course as pulling off a range 1 warrior attack since your ally will not run away).
4. Bronze: Haven't done a careful analysis because there are a lot of bronze cards but it looks like limited heal (heal 4, range 3) and help the weak (heal 5, infinite range) certainly have the range edge at least over similar bronze mage spells such as zap (damage 4, range 2) and big zap (damage 5, range 2).

So actually in all rarity levels heals either heal potentially more or have longer range and easier use than the corresponding mage spells, plus the healing spells are much easier to get since those high damage mage spells only appear on staffs while priests can get heals with pretty much any items. This is why I'm extremely convinced that healing does not need card advantage on top of all this from either talented healer OR altriusm because healing is already quite potent in terms of amount healed/range (I'm assuming that the damage dealt/range for mages is balanced which may or may not be the case). Imagine if instead of spark generator made mage offensive spells guarantee a card draw if they did damage (or even gave a card draw on a 4+ dice roll)... people would be throwing a fit! And yet that is basically what is happening with talented healer except that heal spells are actually more potent than mage direct damage spells.

This is why I stand by my statement earlier that talented healer should be made to give +2 to heal cards played just like healing spirit gives +1 to heal cards, because having priest as sort of a "reverse offensive mage" sounds extremely reasonable. Just something that doesn't involve card draw! Card advantage is one of the most important things in a game like this and heals are already powerful enough not to need it! This means I think altriusm needs to be heavily considered as well.

P.S. I have a slight misgiving about the +2 to heal cards, in that it might be too good with multi-heals. Team heal (and healing burst, insp. presence to a lesser extent) allows an easy-to-use 9 healing to your team (doesn't even require LOS) and it could be up to 15 healed total with a +2 boost, which is too much heal potential for a silver card and doesn't require enough positioning work to pull it off. I can see a deck easily abusing firestorm and team heals, although I guess that already happens now just with team heal giving the card draw instead.

 

That's a well thought out and processed argument to my post and kudos for bringing it to the table, but it neglects the fact that buff cards tend to increase Mage's level of response against values of healing (or cards that remain through a trait format). If their existed such a card that also buffs how high healing was (not so low as Healing Spirit), then I think you're idea would be totally bullet-proof. Afterall, the thing about Cardhunter isn't about what item gives you what card, but, rather, what synergy each card gives the whole team.

 

Another idea. You can change it to something like All Out Attack. One shot power double. But it seems like a massive nerf

 

How about, we change the functionality of Talented Healer to:

Each time you heal an ally with less than full health, draw a card.

Each time you take damage, discard a card at random.

This way it retains its infinite card replacement capability (all of its power) but gains you a pretty significant drawback you have to tactically plan for and play around.

 

That is not really a drawback. Almost all of the infinite draw happens well after the other team has used up all of their cards. Keep the healer in the background, far from enemy attacks, once they cannot move or attack back, start your run.

It does effectively remove 1 draw from all of the "Take card and damage" actions, but I don't know if every infinite draw build uses those.

 

After reading this I am starting to wonder if I am the only one who does not see any issue with talented healer.

From my experience I have yet to run into this as a problem. There just seems to be so many counters to this and without it healing priests are very blah.

When I see someone chaining heals I gather up my good attacks and wait till I'm certain to kill a toon with focused burst damage including the damage I know I'll need to counter the healing in between my attacks. Doing this I would say that I have never lost to someone just because of chain heals.

On the flip side I run a chain healer and have lost many times due to burst damage. But my favorite counter I've had used against me is when people use Card discarders such as counter spell to stop the chain heals.

In my mind chain healing is a counter for people who swarm attack while being countered by multiple strategies such as focus fire, card discards, and burst damage.

Instead of making healers weaker I think the answer is to make the other priest builds more viable.

By the way I just want to thank the debs for making such a fun game and so far not making it pay to win. Keep up the good work.