Barriss Offee is NOT broken or OP and here's why...

"Slushie;1513" wrote:
Over the last 3 weeks there have been numerous threads and comments regarding Barriss Offee's Force Healer ability.

I'm posting this today to show that her heal ability is neither broken or OP as many people have claimed, and is in fact, working as intended.

From what I've read in these forums there's 3 main complaints involving Barriss Offee/Force Healer:

The heal ability is ignoring the Heal Immunity debuff and is therefore broken/bugged.

The heal ability is healing characters from low health back to 100% and is therefore "overpowered" and needs to be nerfed.

Barriss Offee has way too much HP which allows her heals to be extremely high and is therefore "overpowered" and needs to be nerfed.


But before we begin, here's a screenshot of my Barriss' Force Healer ability which I have used in the tests for this post.

http://i.imgur.com/fnTZHGQ.jpg

The reason for this picture is so that we're all very clear about what's being discussed here, that there are 2 components to Force Healer:

All allies have their health percentages equalised. (I'm Australian and I'll be damned if I spell it with a 'z' :p)

Then, each ally recovers 20% of their Max Health. (I've highlighted that last part because it's important to note later on.)


Now that I've got all the introduction out of the way, I can begin addressing the 3 complaints listed above.

1. The heal ability is ignoring the Heal Immunity debuff and is therefore broken/bugged.

To debunk this I went ahead and fought a GW battle until Barriss was the last remaining enemy, retreated, and then restarted with just Sidious to capture the following gif.

http://i.imgur.com/eJbF0Yz.gif

You can see that Barriss tries to heal herself but nothing happens. Why is this?
Well as the first part of her skill says, she equalises health between all her allies. Since there's no other allies for her to draw health from, she is unable to balance or alter her own health. (More on this mechanic later)
Then, as she has the heal immunity debuff on her, the second part of her heal (recover 20% of max health) is blocked as it should be.

Verdict: Working as intended.

2. The heal ability is healing characters from low health back to 100% and is therefore "overpowered".

This one is tricky, because I'd hazard a guess and say in 90% of the scenarios where people see this happening, it's because the team they're fighting has all 5 members alive with close to full health and only one character that's less than 50% and with heal immunity on them.
What you may not realise is that when the health equalisation occurs, those with higher amounts of health remaining actually lose some in order to balance out with the most injured character.

To demonstrate:

http://i.imgur.com/cf159LW.jpg

Everyone is 100% health except one person who is 25%. Health equalisation then takes the average of everyone's health and redistributes it evenly among all members. So characters are actually losing health to balance out the injured character, only we don't notice this because Barriss then heals 20% of each character's max health afterwards.

This may sound like a lot but the next gif shows that when everyone in the team is low on health, the overall health equalisation + 20% heal isn't very much at all.

http://i.imgur.com/PNPREY6.gif

Now I'm going to break this down into two images for discussion.

http://i.imgur.com/mXpwxzs.jpg

Before heal: You can see that Jedi Consular is the member in the team with the lowest amount of health, so he will gain health from the equalisation while the rest lose health as shown in the next image.

http://i.imgur.com/EwOSwv3.jpg

The top number reflects the health equalisation part of Force Healer. You can see that each member loses various amounts of health in order to roughly match what Consular will gain.

The bottom number shows you the heal of 20% of each character's max health. My Jedi Consular has 8621 HP + the 15% from Barriss' leadership skill = 9914 HP.
20% of 9914 is 1982.8, or rounded up to 1983 as shown in the above image. Once again this is important to note as I will explain when I address the 3rd complaint later.

So as you can see above, Force Healer only heals a large amount if a team has a high current combined health pool, and heals for much less when combined current health is low.

Verdict: Force Healer is not overpowered.

3. Barriss Offee has way too much HP which allows her heals to be extremely high and is therefore "overpowered".

Many people seem to be under the impression that Force Healer is based off of a percentage of Barriss Offee's health but if you look again closely at the skill description and remember the part that I highlighted, you can clearly see that this not the case.

Each ally recovers 20% of their Max Health.

As demonstrated above with my Jedi Consular, the heal is clearly based on the max health of each character, so Barriss Offee's amount of HP has no affect whatsoever on the heal amount being applied.

I can understand why the misunderstanding has come about as the heal skills for Jedi Consular, Luminara, and Old Daka all scale off of their own health, but in the case of Barriss and Talia this is simply not the case.

Verdict: Barriss Offee's high HP does not cause her heal to be overpowered.


Conclusion:

The purpose of this post is to help people get a clearer understanding of how the Force Healer skill mechanic works and hopefully clear up some of the confusion and misinformation that's being spread regarding this topic.

Yes I know we're basically arguing semantics here, and that health going up from being equalised is still a "form of healing", but there's a reason why every other heal in the game that is affected by Heal Immunity uses the words "recovers" or "heals", while Force Healer specifically says "equalises". It's obvious that it was a deliberate choice of words from the devs at CG to exclude it from the effects of Heal Immunity.

I know that some of you will remain unmoved by this evidence and continue to believe that Barriss is OP or bugged and needs to be nerfed. I accept that there's not much else I can do to convince you otherwise, short of agreeing with you, so feel free to continue arguing in the comments below.

Thank you for taking your time to read this.