It seems like healing is so easy to acquire in SOTA and so beneficial that everyone will be healers... If everyone is a healer it becomes hard to balance the game and it detracts from the build diversity. Personally I would like to see only basic low level healing available for everyone except those who devote considerable skill points to it. I would suggest requiring more skill points to advance healing and then have it cost much more focus unless top tier healing skills are acquired to bring it back down. Also I'm not sure I've understood it correctly but won't a very high level character simply master every skill tree? So even if my suggestion above is implemented we will still end up with everyone being healers at higher levels. In the absence of a class system UO was able to resolve this by limiting the number of skill trees you could master. If you wanted to be a jack of all trades you had to accept not being masters of them. Advancement in those chosen trees also became incrementally smaller as you approached the cap. This also helped prevent the situation you see in games like WoW where you are untouchable if you are 10 levels higher and so the PVP game only becomes balanced once you reach the level cap. I would suggest requiring continued skill point investment in a tree to keep it's power relevant for the overall level of the character.
Diminishing returns as you level up will make it very difficult to master everything without an enormous effort. By the time you're level 100 you'll only be getting 1 point per level. That is.. as the numbers are currently. It is effectively a soft cap.
If I had my first preference, there would be no healing during a fight at all (but there would be ways to heal up quickly after a fight so as to keep adventuring instead of dying or sitting in recovery somewhere). My second choice would be for healing to be *much weaker* than damaging attacks are, so that at least combat will not be drawn out with ongoing (and to me boring/immersion breaking) bouts of healing - "stab stab slash slash, whoops he heals it all up, bash stab slash, oops more healing, etc. etc. until maybe someone finally succumbs to wounds. But, if we *must* have healing, I want any character to be capable of it, I've certainly seen the situation where "healing classes" cannot be killed by other classes and yet can kill them in long drawn out papercut duels where the guy who cannot heal is finally knickle and dimed unto death, while magic font of healing guy is immortal. If healing is "balanced" such that we do not have fighters toe to toe bashing and healing with neither dying, or where some guy with healing has no chance of falling against another guy who lacks healing, at least that may be tolerable But some super duper healing powerhouse that outheals damage intake is just annoying to me, so I hope *no one* can be that.
Even at level 100 i was a long way from mastering every skill tree, can acquire a decent chunk of them though.
This is going to be one of the bigger balance issues in this game I think. The big issue with having a game where everyone can heal is that it creates a damage threshold to even be able to hurt anyone, which makes support focused characters even less useful, since they likely won't be able to hurt anyone on top of only really being needed when damage gets extreme.
If it makes anyone feel better.. Bowen won't be able to cast a spell to save his life. That said.. I do plan to master any non-magical healing that may be available. Which, according to Richard (2 years ago) will be available.. ie bandages. Though I don't expect to be able to apply those during battle. Cause that would be ridiculous.
I think it'd be cool to have a field medic skill set in the mundane skills. It always bothers me when games make every single effect other than "hit things" magic based.
I've never been a fan of too much magic. It just makes it sooo.. mundane. Unfortunately I don't think we'll be seeing any new skills other than what's currently listed until EP2 so my first aide skills will probably have to wait until then. Still, I might be able to specialize in healing aspects of alchemy? Though a potion for everything isn't much better than magic. I think it'll eventually work out though. It's just the focus right now is combat and crafting.
It's kinda important to remember this isn't just an MMO. It's selective mutiplayer (there is a single-player offline mode) so being able to solo the game is kind of crucial.
It was just one aspect of facilitating RP in UO; however, I was very much appreciative of non-magery healing in UO. All of my mains on every server I ever played (production, Siege, and free shard) eschewed magic skills. Sure, I had alternates on some UO servers that did use magery but the chararacter that I was known as never had magery skills of any kind. I prefer to role play mundane characters. My characters in D&D have eschewed magic. My single player RPG characters eschew magic. It is how I choose to play unless I absolutely have no choice (i.e. every class has healing spells in their class skill tree). SotA has thrown me in a bit of a quandary. Ultimas differentiated between fighter and paladin where fighters had no Magic Points and Paladins had few Magic Points (though not necessarily the fewest of classes with Magic Points) for spellcasting. In UO, paladins were part of the lore in Trinsic though the Chivalry skill didn't become available until Age of Shadows. In SotA, it has been stated that the Magic Sigil was designed with paladins and fighters in mind (Life, Earth, Sun) apart from clerics/preists (Life, Water). So what is the difference, if any, between a fighter and a paladin in SotA? Is a mundane fighter even going to be able to viable in any sense or MUST we invest points in the Magic Sigil for the sake of Life? What if I just want to be a mundane character? What if my character distrusts magery or *gasp* considers it unvirtuous or not aligned with Order? I am not saying my characters would be correct in their assertions but that won't change their minds.
As long as there are out of combat healing options like bandages and as long as the game is balanced I don't see why you shouldn't be able to solo the game without life magic
On the opposite, I think that the tackler support role will be huge. The people who PREVENT the opponent from overhealing, so that you heavy hitters will actually be able to damage him/her/it.
I really liked an old suggestion on these forums. That magic healing & first aid & regeneration would give diminishing returns as well, until you can get away and "rest". My version of that suggestion was that for every 10pts of damage you get you reduce your max health by 1, round down. So that you can only heal/1aid/reg up the remainder. So if you have 100 health, and take a couple of hits 12, 24, 33 and 19. Then your health would be down to 12/93. You heal/1aid/reg up to 93/93, and continue the fight. You take a crit hit of 44, you are down to 49/89. You heal up to 89/89 and face some big chihuahas and get small hits of 7, 8, 4, 6, 8, due to the round down none of those would hit the max so you'd be at 56/89. and so on. Until you can get away and do a "Rest and Recuperate" with food and a campfire, or scene change, or whatever, then you'd be back to 100/100. Also, that "Rest and Recuperate" could of course be interrupted and so on. This would add a whole element to standing guard while someone rests and such. It would also add a strategic value to reserves and alternating getting away for huge sieges and the like. Plus it would mitigate camping in both PvP and PvE and thus reduce the effectiveness of Gold Farming. Also another great suggestion from somewhere else: Where I would like that to be a resist to the type of healing, like magic healing, since that one is too easy at the moment.
That's not really how MMO combat works though, because the amount of damage you can throw on any given target scales infinitely, while the ammount of healing you can effectively deliver doesn't. The person dies when their HP ever dips below zero, but absolutely nothing happens when healing tops it out. As a result there is always a point where if enough people shoot at a single target that target dies, completely regardless of how much armor or healing it has. As a result healing becomes more effective the smaller the fights are usually, and since every healing ability in the game can be used for crosshealing there simply isn't a huge need to have a dedicated healer in the group if that significantly cuts into your damage and makes it easier for the enemy to target your healer.
...And with the right balance, also healing/regenerating consumables, like potions and foods - actually pretty useless.
There's no infinite in online player games. Let's leave asymptotes to calculus, shall we? I was talking about dedicated crowd controllers, not healers. Force multipliers that, while removing a char from the DPS output count, can effectively reduce the damage/healing output of more than one opposing character. Stuns, blinds, interruptions, etc. will all work great when your enemy can heal himself, but you're denying him that chance long enough for your damage dealers to finish him. I've seen Bux survive with full health and full focus while three of us were trying our best to kill him - and failing by exhausting our focus. A few, well timed stuns, would have done wonders to down him in our tests. We were raw DPSes, and lacked the tackler I'm talking about. Of course, if we were 30 instead of 3, we'd win that engagement. But I prefer to keep my debate realistic, thank you.
Yea, but even in a 30 vs 30 an organized team can turn the way the damage is applied into a 30 vs 1. CCs become more and more powerful as combat scales up, and healing becomes less and less powerful.
When gems effect more then Air and Fire then the specializations will be found through gear. A true healer will be equipped with life gems. Healing should be powerful, but a person should take a 10 to 20% resist to life magic for 20 seconds to a minute for every healing spell cast.. making healing great for those lucky criticals you get hit by, but not a one button answer to all lives problems.
