I have read your guide, and I appreciate the work that went into it. So, thanks for that.

However, it seems to be pretty much the consensus on these boards that a Sorceror with a resto staff is a better healer than a Templar. So it seems that healing is definitely not what the Templar does best.

I am personally struggling to find something that the Templar can latch onto as his niche. Possibly the off-healer, off-tank, jack of all trades... but that is kind of like saying that the Templar is not the best at anything except being second best. That doesn't really help me all that much when I'm trying to build a Templar that will be useful.

Well, I think you know what I'll say next?

Don't take their word for it. Try it first. It's really not as bad as people just reading patch notes and not playing are saying.

Dragon knights and Sorcerer have a lot more damage mitigation making better tanks then templar

Imo templar will make nice hybrids since they have nice passive ( can't hit decent on blocking units) and can go from hard hitting physical or magical spells with nice self sustain

I think the #1 Temps are good at is PvP, but that also brings in skill. During the stress tests templars were dominating the leader boards, but as for what they are good at in PvE i really have no clue.

Fair enough. I love the idea of a Templar, but am just worried that the new numbers don't support it so well. Hopefully I'm wrong.

• Do you happen to know what the new base cost is for Healing Ritual (without any cost reduction gear or passives)?

From looking at the numbers and the class abilities of the Templar compared to other classes I would say the Templar seems to be built for some hard hitting melee range AOE damage and still take a hit.

I dont think anyone has seriously gone that route with them in the PTS though (they all seem to be healers or of that mindset) so who knows. I'm seriously considering giving it a go from that angle, but I'm afraid that the direction of the class will start to turn away from that route and more towards healing if they listen to all the complaining.

Praying they don't become prey? I couldn't resist.

Bubble-hearthing.

Zenimax nerf.

That was because heals are great for adding APs to your total, and every Templar has the potential to heal with any build.

I still say a bow/ranged magicka build would be just fine. The biggest nerfs have been on the healing side, and seem worse only because they're taking out the effective parts of the class without adjusting the ineffective parts upwards. If they give several rounds of buffs to compensate there might not be an issue in the long term.

I can also see some possibility for a magicka tank build that would have decent success.

There were a lot of people wanting to be a healing Templar, which now seems less viable because you have at least two other classes that are better healers when set up to do that job. There were also people wanting to be a stamina build as a Templar, which also isn't a particularly good idea because they lack the class skills to benefit that build, and other classes do it better.

At this point the only thing that makes any sense at all is they wanted to eliminate overlap between Restoration Staff and Restoring Light, by cementing Restoration Staff as the ranged HoT line, and Restoring Light as the short range burst line. The only way to do that is to reduce the effectiveness of the "trick" of the one-trick pony and also increase heal values so that Templars can burst heal better, and fix the magicka regen problem at the same time. They've done the nerfing, so now they need to buff.

The problem right now is they're not communicating, and it looks a lot like they're just smacking Templars down while leaving classes that are seen as more powerful at all roles alone. My knee jerk reaction is that Matt Firor is exactly the dev to do that, but hopefully the others have more influence over class balance.

Mircutio did exactly this; the first round of nerfs destroyed the setup as it's so magicka reliant. It went from arguably too powerful to being unable to kill on-level creatures.

Not off the top off my head, but it is a pretty significant change. I think it was ~18% change? I could be wrong though.

Edit: Er, oops. Was factoring in something else. It's ~7%

I was worried that the PTS was coming down today. Would love to know the actual magicka cost if anyone can get into the PTS still.