Well, you all knew it - a nerf is coming to Talented Healer. We've been taking a while to think through exactly what we wanted to do with this card and, in particular, whether we should retain its card drawing power in some form. We considered very closely adding a die roll to the card draw and, while that probably would have worked, we ultimately decided against it on the basis that there's no real reason to attach card drawing to it. It seems unfair that Priests have access to both this form of card drawing and Altruism when card drawing isn't an inherent part of their mandate. So, we looked around for new abilities that would supplement or reward healing. One we considered was just extending the existing Healing Spirit but boost the healing value by more. That would have worked, but seemed a little dull. However, we decided that we did want to change Talented Healer to do more healing instead of drawing more cards. One keyword that we've been interested in getting more use in the set is Cantrip (Take another turn after playing this card). It was introduced relatively late in our rule set development and so isn't used extensively yet. We think in can be quite powerful in some situations. So - we decided to combine these two notions. Without further ado, here is the new Talented Healer rule: "Whenever you play a Heal card add Cantrip to that card and Heal 2 yourself." Some observations and examples: This triggers from the play of any card that has the Heal keyword in its play rules. This includes "life-draining" type cards as well as regular Heal cards! So Draining Touch will now trigger this card. As an example, you can now use your Talented Healer Priest to drain life and then move away from his enemy - all without giving your opponent a turn. This goes some way towards fixing a problem we had where the life-draining Priest build had no supporting Traits. If you have a bunch of Heal cards in hand, you can fire them all off without a break! Healing yourself is obviously quite powerful. We hope that the self-healing aspect of it encourages you to use your Healing spells on your party, secure in the knowledge that you are refreshing your own health. There's a possibly interesting combination of Altruism and Talented Healer now where you get the benefits from both without a second Trait forcing the first to drop off. Is this card as powerful as it used to be? No - but then, it was pretty obviously broken before. How powerful is it? We're not sure yet - you tell us! As an aside, this sort of major change to card rules is going to be very rare from now on. We're getting very close to the end of our Beta and once we go live we'll be much more reluctant to make these sort of moves.
Interesting change, I think this keeps Talented Healer very strong and gives priest a little more versatility in build options.
Talentet healer sure needed a rework, but i hope this doesnt encourage more into 3 x priest teams who have the ability to nuke down an enemy in one turn with lifedrain stacked decks. Add mass frenzy + some other boosts and you get quite easily huge amounts of dmg while the opponent can do nothing but watch their heroes go down hit after hit.
i like the new help for lifedrain as i do have nice unholy priest deck, but i don't think you'll see more then 2 or 3 card combos to often from this with lifedrain, but i do see that Talented Healer and Altruism together for healer decks could get massive heals with getting a card from Altruism and this could be to powerful together.
I more thought about the dmg aspect with added cantrip to each lifedrain. you can spam all your lifedrain attacks and then if reqruired finish off with one big hit in the end, bringing the dmg potential each round to new perspective. Cantrip is something you need to be careful with. Personally i dont want to get into a situation where the enemy plays solitaire and kills me before i can react. Think about a situation where you use a cantrip/move with your priest next to the enemy, then unload all of your lifedrain hits and finally your mage/warrior ends it with a finishing blow. Cantrip and heal or cantrip and move are okay, but cantrip and damage is something to give another tought in my opinion. ill give a counter suggestion for talented healer. how about it making heal cards a step+heal. same way the step+attack cards work. It would also fit the theme of "talented healer"
i think cantrip and lifedrain will be a hard combo to live though but also think your going to see more massive heals with Talented Healer and Altruism together, just think of getting your enemy down to 2 or 3 hp then have healer with Talented Healer and Altruism together heal them back to max hp. all your attk cards were wasted. its all going to come down to who can kill who in one turn. what we would need is counter card, like an armor or block card that would be able to stop the cantrip on lifedrain and some how find a way to counter the cantrip heals as well, mabe a card that plays it self if cantrip is triggered on heals or just on any cantrip perhaps?
They did not add any more healing to talented healer, expect the +2 to the casting priest aswell. So if a player has massive heals in hand, then they have but talented healer doesnt boost that amount anyhow. I dont mind if the healer gets a chance to use all hes heal cards aslong as hes not drawing infinite amount of cards what was the change in the first place. But doing so i fear the devs introduced a new equally devastating problem with easily accesible huge dmg potential per one action phase with the cantrip+lifesteal attacks. If you could rule out the lifesteal attacks from talented healer, no problem anymore in my opinion.
You can stack as much damage as you like into one attack, but a single Parry / Block / Dodge / Toughness card will ruin your day, not to mention someone with Impenetrable Nimbus attached crunching through your 'healers'. The idea of the nerf was to kill the infinite draw decks and leave Talented Healer in the game.
I understand the idea of hte nerf and i hope it didnt go from bad to worse. 3 turns of very powerfull damage potential sounds quite a nobrainer to any deck now. You can get rid of block cards with discard cards or weaker attacks .Choose a target who you know that doesnt have a block card. Dont attack the guy with impenetrable nimbus. well anyways, i feel i've voiced my concern and given my suggestions for altering the ability. i'll leave the matter for the devs and rest of the betatesters to judge.
Offensive-wise, priest is really weak compared to warrior. Any weapon with the same token costs are significantly weaker than the warrior counterpart and most of the time have 1-3 non-attack card in it. Currently, talented healer is the only offensive trait on priest. I got to agree Cantrip + attack is treading on dangerous waters. It give potential for 1 shotting without a respond (which is somewhat anti-fun). But at least this give a reason to fear priest (give him a higher threat in combat). Priest can now be more active instead of passively sitting in the back healing to full every turn. Combined this with Cantrip move should result in some interesting combo.
Guess I will be the first to say that the new talented healer is pretty terrible. For decks featuring healing, altruism will be much better and requires less powertokens. Speed is almost never the limiting factor when playing healing cards. The only deck that could benefit from the cantrip power is a deck running lots of lifesteal attacks. However almost all lifesteal attacks are range 1 and usually if you can land one range 1 attack then you can land all of them (else your opponent would have moved away already). Additionally lifesteal attacks are low damage, so the chance of drawing a onehit-kill combo is pretty low. Speed should again not be a big factor, because with the lifesteal you should have enough staying power to play all your cards when you are in a melee duel. However if we get a card with step move and lifesteal then talented healer will instantly become good again, because cantrip on moves is fantastic.
You can cantrip move into range, cantrip lifesteel, and then finish off with a normal attack. Your opponent wont even have time to move away. It just require another move card. You can even have all-out attack and mass frenzy on these lifesteal attack, which is quite powerful.
Yeah but the power in your example comes from the cantrip move. The cantrip lifesteal effectively just brings your normal attack to slightly above warrior damage levels at the cost of using more cards. I don't think you can get all-out attack on a cleric. Come to think of it with all-out attack we effectively have a much better version of cantrip attacks already in the game and even those aren't too powerful.
It's this one Superb Command. The problem isn't with a single cantrip. Plenty of cards have it and it's fine. The problem that is the potential for chaining multiple cantrip in a row, especially attacks, without a respond, which trait like Talented Healer can provide. I agree that it is a potential problem. It kinda isn't right now regarding the priest's card pool, but it will be something we have to be cautious about.
It would require a pretty nuts hand to get that. There is not a good way to get All-Out Attack, high quality drains, and Quick Run, and another attack into a hand. You can pack at most 6 Invigorating Touches (at pretty large opportunity cost and burning at least 2 rares), and 1 All-Out Attack in a priest. That priest would also have all of one copy of Quick Run. A warrior could do the same thing, with less reliance on luck. 3 available copies of All-Out Attack + access to a lot of Vicious Thrusts and Nimble Strikes. Everyone's favorite rare, Rageblood Dagger, alone gives 3 Vicious Thrusts and a Blind Rage.
I think that the change to talented healer is great, and that chained lifesteal attacks are not a huge concern OP-wise because they cap at 6 damage. Thus you need multiple cards to get anywhere close to the scary 11,14,17 damage warrior attacks and any armor like reliable mail or even normal mail will make the vampiric chain strategy much less effective. Perhaps somebody will prove me wrong on this with mass frenzy or wellspring or whatever. I agree with what turinturamba said though. The people who are running dedicated talented healer decks can just swap to the 3x altruism divine skill now and do pretty much the same thing. It may turn out that altruism will be the next auto-include priest skill, but at least it isn't as consistent as talented (though I don't think the 4+ dice roll is the proper way to balance draw chains). Keep in mind that altriusm in its current state IS basically talented healer with a dice roll "nerf" but that works with more useful cards than just healing. For non-vampiric decks, it's a no brainer to choose 3x altriusm over 3x talented healer (50% chance to get an extra card is better than 2 health to the priest who might not even need it and cantrip on the heal which usually doesn't make much difference), which is a shame.
