Nerf water aura

15 votes

In its current state, water aura makes the game unbelievably easy. Where the game was challenging and engaging before, once you have the skill you can face tank anything and never die, making survival basically a joke.

I understand wanting to make players feel powerful but this ability needs to be limited in some way, either requiring mana or only healing up to a certain % of maximum health, encouraging you to engage with the rest of the mechanics by using items or being more careful from having less maximum hp.

Done Balance change Suggested by: Norah (25 Jan) • Upvoted: 13 Mar • Comments: 14

Comments: 14

26 Jan
Bill
Water aura is good, but I personally think if someone in the group is speccing to support the group, they SHOULD feel powerful. it shouldn't be a meager heal, support is often the least desired role, and should be incentivised.
12
27 Jan
Wesir
I'm playing the game solo right now and I don't think the difficulty scales with player count, as a squishy mage with nobody to distract the enemies water aura is pretty much the only reason I've been able to survive.

Since it's dependent on intelligence and only requires going through two int+1 nodes to get at max rank it would give +4 health regen a second (unless it's affected by the +30% bonus on the way to the node), strawberries give +3 health regen alone so by endgame it'll only be valuable to people that invest extra points in intelligence.

One potential change I think might be useful for it would be to reduce the AOE's healing potential and increase the range to cover whatever the size of a boss fight area is, the tank taking aggro from you isn't going to be super useful if you still have to stand close enough to get hit by an AOE targeted at them to keep them healed. In that playstyle you'd probably be carrying some healing spells on you anyway for burst.
2
27 Jan
Norah
The fact it's essentially a crutch is exactly the problem. When you have it you don't need to gear up or prepare for encounters.

Why pack some berries, or cook food or maintain a farm for potions if all you need to do is put a few skill points in the healer tree.

I play a squishy mage myself and having it makes me handle anything without any effort.

We just faced the wyrm in Pyke castle and my friend who plays a tank could literally take a breath in the face and not move and with the time it took for the boss to attack again he was full health. (With my intelligence boosted with a mushroom I Heal 21 HP per second, which also sometimes Crits at 34)

Also since he has aggro abilities I would never get targeted, which would have been the only way for us to actually lose that fight.

Basically what I'm saying is having one skill that makes survival a cake walk means you're not really playing a survival game anymore.
28 Jan
Fudji
Just like Norah said, I think the problem is that, you are not locked in a skill three, I really think should only be able to select 1 main tree and a secondary one and fusion some like / make some a single tree, like warrior with tank, barbarian with warrior etc.

Cause one of my friend plays mage, sink some point in healer and now he just doesn't care about upgrading gear, even ditched all of is potions and bandages in a chest. When we fight bosses I can legit stand still and not notice I am receiving damage.

The only way he can die, which doesn't happen a whole lot is, he goes alone somewhere and somehow, a monster one shot him.

Either Healing aura needs some tuning, or, they sadly should block some combos in the skill tree. I think the best should make the aura not scale 1:1 with int. Since you also have healing spells that are pretty strong.
28 Jan
Avatar
Playing solo, I have died with water aura and its upgrade, but I agree that it is far too strong and some kind of nerf is needed.

The problem is that tough enemies in this game will probably one-shot you, especially if you are a mage. But since I specced into healer, I too almost never need berries or bandages or healing potions while I was extremely dependent on them before. I'll stop short of stripping off my armor because I don't want to be one-shot.

Water aura would be powerful if it affected just the healer in the group, but affecting all of the healer's allies as well is crazy.

It would probably be a reasonable skill if it only gave +1 hp per second instead of +1 hp per intelligence point per second, in an AoE. With the second skill, bump that up to +2 hp per second, very big maybe. Even that still sounds powerful.
29 Jan
Samesama8
I'd suggest reducing the range from 15 to like 1, 2 or maybe at most 3 meters making the healing feel more active and also more dangerous as tank and healer would have to be close together.

Currently I heal for like 70+ in a 15 meter radius making any need to cast actual heal spells kinda disappear... Giving actual heal spells the bonus of safety might make them worth using again.

On the topic of nerfing water aura, nerfing blood magic/changing how it works should go hand in hand. Currently it is possible to cast spells infinitely with the combination of these two skills and according gear and stats. Water aura becomes the absolute best mana regen gain combined with blood magic. Also even crazier is that one can infinitely (as long as stamina holds out(unless using certain "tricks" to refill stamina in air)) fly combining blood magic, water aura and the updraft skill by gliding, updraft, cancel gliding, start gliding, updraft, repeat. Works better if block isn't binded to RMB.
30 Jan
joe
not going to lie water aura needs to be maybe 3-4 seconds for healing tick. im building tank water mage and i just stand there its silly... blasting away at anything with my wand and spells. you shouldnt be able just face tank the healing is nuts.
02 Feb
Multiversal Merged
I think a great way to balance this would be to have it scale off Spirit, then make it cost mana when it heals.

I love this ability, and I think this would still make it good, but also lower how amazing it is.
1
02 Feb
Aonyx Admin
"Water Aura" (suggested by <Hidden> on 2024-02-02), including upvotes (1) and comments (0), was merged into this suggestion.
04 Feb
Punchy
Playing solo I´m regenerating 40+ HP per second now with over 20 intelligence (foodbuffed) and when a friend copied all my skills (almost all the blue ones + most of the tank tree) it looks like the Water Auras stack aswell ;) ... so 2 battlemages fighting side by side equals 80+ HP per second. The game went from somewhat challenging to ridiculously easy at that point.

I also mix and match armor-pieces so that I maintain a reasonably high health-pool (850 to 1100 depending on buffs) and around 200 of each armor-type (magic/phys)
06 Feb
VoidFletcher
This was the worst possible change to the game - if I specialize into a support, let me feel useful. Otherwise I'll just play generic braindead dps.

Changed my review to negative and quit.
3
07 Feb
Storm Reaver
I don't play Multiplayer. Now Water Aura sucks.
2
08 Feb
Duke
The changes to Water Aura were three-fold, which seems a bit much all at once, without giving players a chance to experience smaller changes to the re-balance.

As a still-fairly low level player (not hit lvl 10 yet), I was so excited when I could finally afford to move up to the Water Aura skill. It helped my solo-adventuring, especially when venturing out into those tougher areas. I felt a tad braver, and less-squishy, as a mostly-magic-spec character. I also felt useful when adventuring with friends.

With the recent change:
The heal tick is smaller
The tick-timer is higher
The skpt are now every 2skpts into Intell instead of every 1skpt into Intell

Three (let's call it) "less useful" changes. Overall the skill feels as-if it does rougly 1/4 of the healing it used to do, which is a dramatic difference.

Here's hoping there's a chance it gets another slight rebalance in the "more useful" direction.
3
22 Feb
Zaphkiel
I don't think it needed to be nerfed, I think it needed to be the final healer node. The problem is that every build was incorporating it.
2