Healing makes combat bad

At the moment you can heal while relying on auto attack to kill your enemy. I found this worked best for me, for example, in Graff mine. I was most successful when I only clicked heal and let auto attack do its thing.

I agree that this situation could be improved, but rather than nerf healing (which already costs focus), I think it would be better to do away with auto attack - make people decide with each click between attack or defence. I think that would make for a more tactical and interesting game, with people deciding in real time how best to spend their limited focus, with that decision changing depending on what glyphs come up, and what combos they can make.

 

Potions should be great option to heal so you dont be forced to use a spell as a knight. Healing is part of combat. It opens options and revert mistakes.
The problem is not healing it self the problem is the endless regen on focus in fight.

 

In my experience, healing is not just OP, it is waaaay OP - relative to other abilities. As others have stated, if you go into a fight using various healing powers instead of various offensive powers, you can win much more easily. If you go into a fight that is "risky" without relying much on healing, the same fight is easy with use of healing. Yes, even considering focus cost of healing, you will do so far better burning up your focus on healing than on any other power (at least within my testing). If you go into a fight you can barely win with heavy use of healing, you will stand no chance against same encounter with any other strategy (other than possibly firing from range and keeping out of range of melee targets).

People who find fights in which a healing strategy is difficult, are facing a hard encounter for their level - if they switch to other strategies while having difficulty with a healing strategy, they will be slaughtered. This is my observation, despite the fact that this is assuming healing skills of relatively lower level than combat skills (a character with about 60+ blades and about 21+ healing used in recent testing). Presumably if healing was up to 60+ to match the other combat skills, the healing strategy would be what, three times more powerful that it is already? Nevermind that there are several more healing powers I've just started tapping in to use of in the life tree and another heal over time in the water tree.

I understand that fights are difficult starting out, I have been in difficult fights, and I have pushed things to get killed using a mix of healing & attack strategies, but when I've done so, it has been crystal clear that those fights I lost narrowly using healing, would have been utterly impossible without the healing (and relying instead on offensive and defensive powers of a non-healing nature).

Fair statement of bias, I am against healing during combat overall for many reasons. But the fact that healing in combat boosts one well above other methods/strategies is very clear at this point. In short I agree with the OP.

 

How to solve the healproblem?

To cast any type of healing you to have the fitting reagents in your inventory or cant be cast or heal only 10% of there normal value.

Healing potions. Change the way how healing potions works.

Cap how many healing potions a char can have at any given time.

For the purpos of the idea say player x can cant throu questing and merchants heal falsks. He can collect a maxium of 10.
He can refill this potions buy usin alchemist or finding an alchemist vendor.

He has no cool down on healing potions and can drink them by any time. Since he has only a maximum of 10 this is somthing he needs to be carfull with.

 

Dumb idea OP - I dont want to die, I heal. I dont want to wait ages to recover, I heal. Heal is part of the combat live wih it or die without it.

 

That´s not the point though... currently healing by far trumps defensive skills and is viewed as a must have ability. Noone is going to remove healing from the game, but it needs to be brought in line with defensive skills.

 

this is purely circumstantial of characters not being wiped, and will not work for new chracters or after the next wipe.

 

Here's what I wrote in full...

The combination of using Soul Tap and Healing over and over again is going to survive R21 as long as it produces an output that gives you more focus and more hit points - which it currently does.

 

Just letting readers knwo that it will not work this way. Its purely a product of the skill system switch without a character wipe

 

Heal is a defensive skill (in my opinion). It is the best defensive skill in our arsenal at the moment. This is why a lot of people use it. It helps you to survive so well. No one likes to die (well, mostly no one apart for the occasional individual). Thus heal is used extensively.

If there were other defensive skills that worked, in combination of each other or alone that would work as well as heal, then I'm sure there will be a wider variety of skills used defensively to stay alive.

What needs to be worked on is strengthening other defensive skills so we can stay alive without using as much heals. If there were other ways of staying alive, then you'd not need to use the heals as much. Because even if you made the heals cost more, it's still probably going to be used by most players excessively until there is a better alternative, defensively speaking.

 

While that may seem obvious, it did get into a release. If you expect the public to bug test your product, it is expected that the public complain about your bugs.

 

It is currently possible for a sub 30 level character to health faster then they can be damaged by 90% of enemy types, DOTs being the biggest exception. Unless you allow defensive skill to reduce incoming damage to 0 for extended periods of time, you are going to have to nerf healing to balance.

 

I agree that healing (and multiple means of it!) are the best defensive ability in game, but besides balancing heal with other survival/defensive measures, more important IMO is that heal is far stronger than offensive abilities. All things being equal, if heal is equal to offensive ability, heal makes one immortal (unless focus runs out, *and* the foe's offense is able to kill the healer before focus returns). This is not even considering the circumstance in which one character in a fight is being healed by another (or by more than one), which demonstrates absurdities never witnessed in reality, fiction, film or oral tradition, and which are very much not fun.

 

But if you are just standing there healing and auto attacking, you are not leveling up any other active skills. So which is the real problem, heal or auto attack? If you had to use focus to attack you couldn't stand there healing.

 

Why do you need them? Auto-attack works fine until your healing is high enough to make you invincible, then you can spend the extra focus on actives.

 

Which is what I'm asking, which is the problem... Heal or auto attack... If you can't auto attack you can't stand there and heal all day making it harder to level heal right? So which is the real culprit?

 

As long as free attack doesn't consume focus, you can attack and heal that way too.

 

... I tend to think of auto attack and free attack as the same mechanic... "No focus attacks". Either of these plus heal are bad mechanic. Maybe heal is too powerful at high levels but as long as "no focus" attacks can be used with heal there will be a problem.

More effort will need to be made on the other defense mechanics to get people to use them more too.

 

The defense skills just offer too little benefit at low skill levels or rather have too short durations. That´s my impression of them at least.

 

Agree 100%... and I think this is part of the problem.