Thank you for making this topic!
I really enjoy this character’s aesthetic, and I find her barks and art very very charming- you did a fantastic job on her. (Hats off to whoever wrote the brothel line, that one made me laugh)

That said, I do feel like a few of her skills her a bit overtuned, leaving her with two large issues imo: The first is her healing, which is monstrously strong. Another is that, with four move slots, she is capable of compressing several class rolls into a couple of skills. She essentially compresses the role of a guard class, healer, (light) stunner and DoT stacker into one character which is nuts and leaves her as a relatively flexible jack of all trades master in the mid ranks. I’m going to give my thoughts on all of her skills specifically, starting with the skills I think are more or less her strongest and moving down the list. Bear in mind that I’m not a modder or a designer, and not even great at this game- this is just my opinion.

Cleansing Crystals: This move is very strong. This is a flat heal and a Heal over time on both the Herald and a party member, and it scales up over time. With this move, the Herald can take both herself and another party member off of deaths door and protect them from death from any potential DoTs they may receive, which is an incredible amount of sustain given how easy it is to spam this move. Compare this to the flagellant- he has a similar HoT effect, but instead of healing himself he applies up to 5pts of bleed/rd to himself as a tradeoff, and it’s just a heal over time. On the other end, compare it with the vestal- she also has a multi-character healing ability, but just flat healing and she needs to use it every turn- the Herald can get you off death’s door and then as long as you don’t get focused by like spiders or something, you’re probably fine. Its ability to be used anywhere but the front also makes it quite flexible, and the healing also stacks on herself too, so you can wind up with incredible self sustain if you spam this even after being shuffled.

Protective Shells: This isn’t necessarily a problem ability, but goes very well with Cleansing Crystals and contributes to the feeling that this character is immortal. Because the Herald has such high hp and potential for regen, stacking prot and guarding weakened party members is a cinch for her. This also ripostes, and potentially makes a block, and both can be used in the back three ranks, meaning that she’s extremely difficult to kill unless she gets pulled to the very front and focused down. Honestly, I don’t mind her turtling like this- I think it’s a fun niche. The problem is that she can guard better than the man at arms and heal better than the vestal, and do those simultaneously while having riposte up. And that’s in two skills. I don’t even use this as much as I should since spamming resonance and cleansing crystals often gets the job done.

Crystalline Resonance: I really like the idea of this ability, and use it frequently. It synergizes extremely well with both modded and vanilla classes that deal extra damage to bleeding/blighted enemies and allows her to dot any enemy in the game (She’s very strong with the grave robber and wraith). I don’t think this is inherently broken and is actually a really fun tool in her kit even if it lets her function normally basically anywhere, she’s just extremely strong in other areas too.

Temporal Crystals: Rounding out her Jack-of-all kit, Resonant crystals is a modest single target stun. It’s comparable to stunning blow or dazzling light with a little less damage, a little less chance to stun and able to hit all 4 ranks from anywhere but the back. Probably pretty reasonable given the versatility imo, lots of characters have a stun and it’s not terribly strong- I often wind up using it for damage on the front/3rd rank and then question why I didn’t just take reality bend instead.

Reality Bend: stronger than I first thought it would be, again because of versatility- you can use it from any rank, to any rank which isn’t common and gives her immense flexibility in who to damage, and there’s no damage reduction. I wouldn’t say it’s busted, but it does make her extremely reliable at finishing off wounded enemies since she’s usually moving towards the back half of the fight. If I had to tweak it I'd actually give its healing debuff to temporal crystals, since this is mostly a better skill imo.

Beyond Time and Space: I don’t usually run this one, although I think it’s cool. Hitting 4 ranks is fun, but she doesn’t really have much space for it and crystalline resonance does a better job focusing multiple enemies. The shuffle can be very very strong when it works, though, and is definitely worth the stress hit.

Calming Crystals: I like that she has this ability, although I don’t usually run it. A personal stress heal is always nice on a tanky character and sometimes I swap out Temporal Crystals for it.

Her resists are pretty normal otherwise (And seem to mirror the sleeper in resistances? Nice touch.), and I actually appreciate that her move resist is so low as a weakness, even if she can hit in so many ranks that it’s not a huge one. I think her sustain is more or less the reason she feels so strong, imo, since healing is generally quite tough to balance in this game.

If I had the chance to balance her, I would probably reduce or remove either the flat heal or the HoT effect from Cleansing Crystals- I think that the Librarian modded class actually had a similar skill (albeit single target) that was also very strong with both flat and HoT healing, and now that it is tuned down to just the HoT I find it quite a reasonable skill for a healer. Alternatively, name it like Entrancing Crystals or something and make it stress her or shuffle her or some other impactful drawback to prevent spamming it as an optimal strategy.

As a bit of theorycrafting, given the chance to rework her a bit, I might even cut her max hp just a touch and lean in on the self regen+ guard portion of her kit even harder- I like that she can just be a big regenerating bulwark for her team, but her healing lets her make them effectively immortal so I would remove that from cleansing crystals and add a personal HoT to protective shells, and lessen the prot buff somewhat to compensate. I really like the idea of her being this sealf-healing but small wall to shield her teammates. Maybe cleansing crystals can become something like Fortifying Crystals and give a block to herself+whoever she’s guarding, like the Thorn modded class does with healing with her riposte block. But that’s just an idea- I’m not a designer, and this is all just speculation.

I hope this feedback on my experience is helpful- I adore this character visually but I think it’s a shame that every fight I bring her to always seems so well in hand. I also like that all of her barks are unique, since that adds a level of personality that isn’t often present at the surface level of most other modded characters which I think is fantastic. Thank you for your hard work, and best of luck with your modding!

She is absolutely busted and i love it.

She is OP without feeling OP. Or the other way around, i'm not sure yet.

The biggest reason why is the cost of actions. She puts guard AND riposte AND buffs self prot at the same time. Sure, her damage is pathetic, but it adds up over time. Guard itself allows other heroes to attack without being too afraid for themselves. Added prot further negates enemies' attempts on murdering you.

She gets that for 2 entire turns, meaning on her 2nd turn she can use any other skill she has. And boy oh boy, she has some.

Self-recovery, plus one companion small heal AND recovery? Sign me in! Action economy is completely broken here.

Just to add some length to a giant middle finger Herald gives this game, she can also stress-heal herself. And it's a very good stress heal. What else? Oh, right, 80% virtue chance.

This part is actually interesting. Yes, her affliction only has 20% chance to proc, but it's devastating for the whole party, as it disables her main skill and gives her debuff on received stress-heals. This decision kind of balances out the 80%, makes you gamble big. I like that, considering that she's a damage/stress spongue.

I have no idea how to balance this, really, and i'm not even sure if it requires balancing. Yes, she's powerful, but not immortal, i've lost quite a few of them, and not even to affliction. However, 2 of them in my party trivialized Vvulf, Swine King, Prophet, very long champion dungeons of all zones and even Farmstead to some extent. Should test her more in Crimson Court, but i havev a good idea on how that'll go.

The thing is, when you're playing with modded classes, you're doing it for fun, not for challenging yourself, most of the time. I like Herald, i like her a lot thematically and mechanically. I'm not sure that removing/shifting any of her stats/abilities would make her fit into the game better. Like, yes, you can move riposte into her attack skill, but then it's a choice of keeping guard and riposte up or healing self/others. You can debuff her heals, but then you'll probably need an actual healer in the party.

I could suggest limiting her to one Herald per Hamlet, like The Fool class. It's cruel and would disable | x Herald Herald x | strat that works so well, but maybe that's why she feels too good? Because that party works too well? I don't know.

Anyways, that's my thoughts on the matter.

i would actually argue that at low levels without her healing trinkets she is too weak (at least in a heavily modded playthrough) as her heals are too small to pull a character off of deaths door without them being immediately brought back down. her healing at low levels basically relies on most enemies already being dead, as if you are facing a full enemy party then herald just can't keep up with the damage output. the hot is strong but doesn't help when a hero gets critted down to 0, and i have lost many heros at level 0 and 1 because i brought herald in as the group healer; yes she can be very strong at high levels but is too weak at low levels (milkmaid suffers from the same hot plus base heal issue)

i would suggest making her baseline heal be 2-3 base with a 3 hot for 1 round then adding extra round to the hot in addition to the increased heal power i.e

level 2: 2-4 with hot of 3 for 2 rounds
level 3: 3-5 with hot of 3 for 2 rounds
(i think the self heal is more or less fine)

something like that would maybe smooth things out at low levels, as right not i have to run a second healer for herald and milkmaid because there low level healing just isn't enough to reliably keep heros alive