Healing outside of party?

Playing for the first time this release and it seems you are unable to heal someone outside of your party. Does anyone know if it is going to remain this way? In my adventures when I come across someone who needs a hand I will assist them in their fight but frequently they die anyway without a heal. It would be nice to be able to cast beneficial spells on any player just to be helpful, regardless of party.

 

Yes, it would also play into the Plague mechanics. Although, adding permissions for only some spells is probably going to be problematic.

 

ha i thought i had been casting heal on people in need, after reading this I understand Iwas just healing my self like
*you wish you had this spell up hu *

and it should absolutely be added, good suggestion.

 

The problem with healing outside of your group is that it makes it easier to grief. Someone like you might be nice and try to heal a wounded person, but that person might be doing something "bad" and affect your karma. Or they might engage in PVP, which if you do not have PVP enabled will flag you for it.

Story wise, its hard to disallow healing others, but mechanics make it easier to understand why you can't.

 

If your target is PVP-enabled and you aren't, your heals won't work on him/her unless you both are in the same party.

Just like now, without the PVP-flag distinction.

I say restore the ability to heal other, non-PVP-flagged avatars.

 

Yes, this is most unfortunate. I understand why the developers did it, but I have also come across quite a few new (i.e., low level) players in dire straits (usually overwhelmed by a large number of elves, wolves, skeletons, or large spiders) and felt bad I couldn't heal them

 

I do not understand why they took out healing others -pve- when not in party. It is very much a part of social interacting in game, getting to know folks or wanting to get to know them after they saved your hide when you thought you were about to die.
Did the Devs bring it up yet, maybe it was not intended and will be corrected in one of the next patches.

 

I agree that this should be returned to the game. The only thing I can figure is that it was removed because people were healing low level players to allow them to gain levels faster without splitting experience in a party. But, I don't think that is a good enough reason to keep me from healing someone I see in trouble.

 

Another idea could be they want to limit the maximum healing possible. In a party, at best eight chars can heal the tank at once. Maybe this change intends to set an upper limit of concurrent healing?

I still feel really bad when I stumble upon some noob with low health, facing a clearly superior opponent and I can't do nothing to save him, even if I could.

 

The simplest solution is usually the best one. Some good ideas above (along with loopholes), but it makes the system that much more complex to code and test, with so many conditions to cover. There are likely 100's of other cases / loopholes they haven't thought of that can be exploited, and there are a dozen or two others that I've seen in other threads whenever this comes up.

If you execute an action against another player, be it for his benefit or detriment, that's a category of actions called player-to-player activities.

In any case, they already have a solution: just form an ad-hoc party on the spot and heal away. It takes two seconds to right-click and choose Invite to Party.

 

Yeah, sure, as if another window popping up in the face of an evident newbie (newbie clothes, newbie eq, newbie zone, overwhelmed by lowly mobs) would help someone having 15/80 health already...

 

We could just eliminate all in-combat healing altogether, but be provided with more non-healing support (a cloud of smoke to distract foes, stuns and knockdowns we have already, blinding thrusts, blocking with body and/or shield, etc.). If we reading description of such a situation (weakened fighter surrounded by foes) in a good novel, how would we expect a passerby to help? Not with healing, but perhaps charging in, knocking wolves off the beleaguered soul, riding in (if we had horses ) and pulling him up and away from the fray... Basically almost anything *but* "healing" him while wolves keep snapping off pieces all the while.

I'm in favour of being able to assist an overmatched stranger mind you, just not of in-combat healing mechanics

 

I agree wholeheartedly that this ability should be returned. It is important to foster a sense of community even amongst strangers. "Helping out with the fight" isn't the solution, since in most cases you would be stealing the kill (even inadvertantly).

The new player may even think you are stealing their kill on purpose, like the guy who ran up when my low level avatar was slowly but succesfully combatting 3 wolves. He one-shotted the Obsidian wolf and ran off with the exp after I had spent 10 minutes fighting them. At least I had the satisfaction of putting the guy on my blocked players list.

But enough rambling. My point is that it is better to heal the person in need rather than help kill the enemies.

 

I'd say the killstealing aspect is where roleplay comes in, and decision making... Should I help him out, when he might consider me getting in the way? A realistic issue... Again getting back to something you might read in a novel, some "hero" swarms in killing all the wolves and the guy "saved" might say "Hey! Who are you stealing all my glory, I had it all handled myself!" Or he might say, "Whew I was almost done there, thanks so much for the hand!" I think we get too much into letting artificial game mechanics kill realism and think in an rpg we should resist the impulse to bow to artificial/unrealistic mechanisms that kill immersion. In the story example, if the guy gets ticked off because you saved him, your hero might decide "that guy's an arrogant jerk" and never help him again, which seems fair enough - in game or out of game.

Just healing the guy back up as he's ripped to shreds, again and again, yes - it's something we're used to in *cough* bad mechanism MMO's. It's not something we're used to from heroic fiction, film, etc. I'd rather we distance ourselves from it in roleplaying games, even at risk of upsetting a newbie who marks us as killstealer for helping out.

 

I disagree totally with every word written in this post.

If I want to help someone, between the one-action, no-nonsense, impossible to misunderstand healing, and all the charade of the double guessing motives and intentions by someone in evident need, I'm 101% sure of what I prefer.

Immersion is "I help you NOW, because that's what you need straight now, straight here".

All the rest is theatrical nonsense that may inflate the "hero" ego, but sure as the sun won't solve the problem.

 

The question is: Do I want to help out a new player and give him the feeling that the community is supportive of new players, or do I want to completely roleplay and do what I would do to be helpful in a real-life situation, namely kill all the enemies, thus protecting the weak.

The problem is that the game is not like real life. In real life, if you save someone's life by killing their enemy, you really help them. But in the game, new players risk their in-game lives to gain experience, and by "helping" them, you are hurting them.

Taking this to an extreme, if you decided to roleplay a hero type who helps everybody who is engaged in a fight, you would soon find yourself quite unpopular, just the opposite than in real life. The artificial game mechanics are to blame, of course, but even an RPG needs artificial game mechanics to motivate people to keep playing.

 

Well said, although I would just add that healing the new player is indeed roleplaying A true Avatar would help the weak help themselves (i.e., heal them now and then give them helpful advice on combat afterwards) rather than make them reliant on the hero for protection (i.e., by killing the foes) What is that old proverb? "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day teach a man to fish and he can feed himself for life. " Once the new player learns from the more experienced player how to better prepare himself or herself for combat, perhaps one day the player will pay it forward and help another new player in need. Just a thought...

 

I don't get it. Why can't we heal people who are not engaged in PvP? It makes no sense. So what if someone helps them gain levels faster? Let them. It's not really a big exploit and even if we block it there are still other ways (almost-kill high level mob and let it hit you while lower level player gets the finishing blow and exp)

 

I see the point here, but even in real life (or in fiction) there are situations in which someone engaged in a fight will be ticked off if you help them, if they thought they had things under control (although admittedly there motive then would probably not be related to "experience points" but rather pride or such lol). From a game design perspective though, helping someone by "healing" them actually *should* take away xp from them just as much as stabbing their foe in the back should; either both should, or neither should, since both allow them to survive the encounter with help rather than on their own?

But as you say, at least in the current version of the game healing doesn't take away from xp whereas killing something might (if you get credit/xp instead of them). As much as I dislike in-combat healing it is the easiest way to help someone out without risk of taking from them and angering them. In a game absent in-combat healing though, players can still help each other out - they just have to realize that they (and others who help them) cannot always tell when the help is needed, and react accordingly. After any given encounter they can tell one another "Yes, thanks for the help!" or "Ooops I had that, please don't interfere in my combat again, though I appreciate that you were trying to help." If players hate you forever for trying to help them in a given encounter, I think the issue is theirs rather than yours.

But yes healing is the easiest safest way to show friendly support - darn it! (I still hate the mechanism, but cannot say it is not "helpful!")

 

I think you're right, I think it was put in specifically for Pvp reasons. I agree that if there is in-combat healing, you should (in PvE) be able to use it on anyone, not just your own party. I'd guess it would be coded separately for pvp vs. pve but just hasn't been done yet? At least I'm not seeing the argument against being able to heal only party members within pure PVE settings, other than figuring out the best way to code it.