Healing

I don't know why the expectation of most players seems to be that characters should automatically heal over time (quickly) but I think it's bad for MMO's on a number of important levels.

1) If healing occurs naturally without the use of reagents, skills, or other players - the value of these things decreases exponentially.
2) If healing occurs naturally without the use of other players, we lose a valuable reason to socialize with one another. "I'm hurt, I need healed!" Or, "You're hurt and I could heal you but I won't."

Potions are another problem as I see it. Because potions can usually be ingested during a battle or just after a battle has been fought, games provide an easy reset button to players that frankly they don't need or deserve. Healing should not be a luxury item that you have to stock up on, healing, healers and items that heal should be a resource that is used sparingly. Healing should be something that is a great gift and not a commodity.

Some games approach to healing balance is to make spells and potions heal over a duration of time instead of giving an instant "full health" to the player. I don't believe this good game design.

My solution would be as follows:

Create wound categories. Minor (<70% of health remaining), Major (<50% of health remaining), Critical (<20% of health remaining), and Death (0% of health remaining).

Allow minor wounds to heal over time. But require a reagent. Here are some of the reagents that would be required and some details about how they would work:

- Bandages: These could be used anywhere, but would require you to be out of combat. So if you're in the middle of a fight, you're not going to use these - so sorry.
- Food: Eating would trigger your character to heal over time, but not instantly. You would need to eat at an Inn, or at a camp, or by a cooking fire. There are social benefits to this which should be obvious.
- Sleep: Much like food this would trigger your character to heal over time, however it would require a bed roll or a bed. There are social benefits to this which should be obvious.

Major wounds would not be healed with Bandages or Food or even Sleep! Instead, you'd need to find a doctor or a healing mage or have a special potion that could trigger healing. This would not EVER heal you to full health, but instead would allow you to get back to 70% health, where you would then need to nurse your minor wounds (see above).

Critical wounds would require the help of someone with the skill and mastery of magic to help you. No magic potion would help in this situation. You'd have to find another player. Your wounds being Critical, you would not have the ability to cast such spells yourself because of your horrible condition.

Death wounds would also require another player that could restore you to the living world. But power of this spell would come at a huge price to the caster as it would put them in a state of Critical wounds. Meaning that both players would be at a level of critical and require help from someone else.

In this system, camping a spawn point would be very difficult and the emphasis of the game would by necessity shift from having enough items and spells to constantly heal yourself, to a more sociable reliance on other players.

I believe this would be great for the game, fantastic for roleplaying, and wonderful for the challenge of all dungeon levels.

 

I think it is a matter of balance. The MMO I play most of the time is SWTOR.

The average encounter is meant to be a small challenge for the average player for that level. You fight a mob, or a small group of mobs. At level, they might do a reasonable amount of damage to you, so that if you pulled multiple groups of mobs, you'd likely die. Self-healing is almost necessary because otherwise you wouldn't survive another encounter.

You can tone down the damage the average encounter does to you, but then the encounters feel weak and boring.

 

I have no problem with people self healing themselves with skills or spells that require reagents (so long as it's at the minor or major wound level). What I don't want is natural heal over time mechanics where you just sit around and automatically heal yourself. That ruins the game imo.

Also, before someone tells me my idea "won't work", this idea at its base has been working just fine for almost 30 years in the MUD Gemstone III. There's no natural heal over time ability in that game. You have to sit and rest to get healed and this puts you in a vulnerable position to both NPC's and other players. For serious wounds, a player needs to find another player that has "empath" skills and those people can be found (even today) sitting in the center of town squares just waiting to heal people for free (although they appreciate tips).

In my proposed system, I'd require people find a place to eat or sleep that was "safe" which should also create an opportunity for people to socialize and meet new people that they can group with.

 

Yes, I can see it working for the MMO side of the house but you also have to remember some will never play the game that way. So you would have to have NPC healers as well.

 

You put a lot of thought into that post. I like it and agree with most of it.

Allow me to inject my 2 cents:

Potions - Should never be drinkable while in combat. That requires the use of a hand to hold the container, hand/eye coordination to get it out of your pack and pressed against your lips. Add to that the time it takes to ingest the contents. I highly doubt an adversary is going to wait while these actions occur.

Food - food can provide small bonuses such as an increased rate of healing. If you haven't eaten for a long while and you're very hungry then that should increase the time it takes to recover from any type of wound. Additionally, certain types of foods can add a resistance bonus against negative effects such as disease or poison. Resurrection from death should leave you in a very hungry state.

I like the divisions of wounds but personally I don't like the critical requiring another player. If I'm all alone fighting something/someone and receive a critical wound but have a cure wound spell available why prevent me from using it? Perhaps the drawback to casting the spell is the amount of mana it requires to move you back to the major wound category. Would it provide me enough health where I can determine to continue fighting or at least enable me to flee as a last resort.

 

I would be ok with potions being able to cure critical wounds. I would assume that when a potion of critical wound healing was created by a player, that player would be inflicted with critical wounds (so someone always has to pay for the damage, in this case the person making the potion is paying it forward).

I also like the idea of having a draw back to doing it yourself (healing your own critical wounds). I have no problem with people healing themselves and then running! I have a lot of trouble with people healing themselves over and over so they can level grind. So suppose you could heal yourself to a level where you can get away, but not continue to fight without assistance from another player?

 

I like the concepts of:
Light wounds can be self healed, and that eating good food (which gives purpose to good chef's) aids in self healing, but also holding healing major wounds to the specialists so that healers are needed.

I am interested in suggestions to reduce the "grind" capability of self healing.

Richard

 

I can agree with most of what you say but disagree with the wounds not self-healing. As in real life, given enough time all wounds will heal naturally, if not perfectly or the wounds will worsen and kill you.

I would say that depending on the amount of damage you take, you should heal slower. Minor wounds would heal much quicker than major wounds, which in turn would still heal faster than critical wounds. I would also say that at the 'critical wound' level there is a chance the wound may get worse and not better. You have a chance that your condition will deteriorate and it may result in death if not treated.

As for the rest potions, spells, reagents, etc.. so long as it's balanced and not overly easy to receive healing then I am fine with that. Not being able to bandage during combat makes sense. "Excuse me kind Satyr, I must pause our combat a moment in order to apply these bandages." never made much sense to me. Let the player do it if they like but not be able to fight at the same time and have the bandages offer only minimal help as suggested.

I do not know how in depth the healing mechanics will be looked at but you have offered some interesting suggestions.

Edit: Also the "Critical wounds would require the help of someone with the skill and mastery of magic to help you." could be an issue with Single player modes (online and offline) unless NPC are introduced to fill in.

 

How about allowing automatic self healing as mentioned above (different rates depending on the severity, if at all) but only while not in combat. The player would need to retreat to a ' safe ' location to rest and heal. Can't expect wounds to stop bleeding if you are constantly aggravating them with combat maneuvers.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

MUDs are a different being as you usually get together with a grow and chances are you've got a healer. not so with MMOs. One of the biggest problems with MMOs is finding healers, along with tanks but that's not what this is about. People can wait for hours to do content while they wait for a healer to join a group. Peopdon't want to play healers because it takes a special mindset to heal and be good at it. People want to rag on healers so people don't want to play them. So you have three solutions, 1) out of combat healing at a rate fast enough to keep people engaged and not sitting around doing nothing while their heal regents (most people want to go from fight to fight not sit on the ground waiting), 2) companions healers that heal you quickly when out of combat (in this case you may as well just have quick out of combat healing because its much the same), or 3) have weak npcs since you want to minimize downtime.

If you do make allowances for food or potions to heal, you have the problem of possibly needing one per fight so you'd better carry alot around with you.

 

Yea, if the devs have decided they are going with a stick system for hunger (which I prefer, personally), I'd rather at that auto-healing didn't happen by itself, and food was necessary to enable it. Just think about how this worked in earlier Ultimas. In most Ultima games, you required food or you would start to starve --- when you ran out of your supplies --- but also you couldn't auto-heal at sleep unless you had food with you. Do we really need this game to be less challenging than the early Ultimas?

@enderandrew, there's also nothing wrong with forcing players to find a way to heal themselves between mobs or go back and give up, and not do more than one group mob unless they have the preparation or capability to do it. Part of the problem with a lot of MMOs is that combat is nothing more than grinding. Kill these monsters, loot, move on, kill some more monsters, loot, move on, kill some more monsters, loot, move on. The devs really shouldn't be entertaining this model! They should be making it more difficult to play that way, IMO!

Something else to consider.. in many DOS RPGS, there were several categories of injuries. For example, in Wizard's Crown, there was light wounds, heavy wounds, and light bleeding, and heavy bleeding. Bleeding would require immediate treatment or you would continue to have blood loss and could die. Things like bandages were available in the game to treat that, apart from using prayer. I could suppose you could also have things like broken bones, that would make it more difficult to use an arm or a leg, and requiring they need special treatment.

 

I love the idea of good food making healing faster.

Now, for self healing it could always be made that you only heal so far with self healing...major wounds would still be there. Bleeding for example, could be an area that needs to have attention given to.

 

I think that's part of the problem right there, no patience. I think we need to slow down the tanks that expect to walk in destroy everything without breaking a sweat, loot the place dry and then complain about how everything is too easy.

Getting hurt and having to deal with it might actually make the game more interesting and force people to think before just jumping into every battle scenario they see.

 

I enjoy finding solutions that encourage roleplaying and deepen the community. That is why I proposed allowing self healing to any player, but requiring reagents to trigger the effect (bandages, food, shelter and a good sleep).

Although I understand that we're in pre-alpha and the dungeons we've seen thus far may be place holders of sorts, the current goal of most players is to get to the Lich at the end so they can farm it numerous times. Knowing that they can self heal given enough time, means that they risk very little even once a true death mechanic is in place. They will simply allow their character to take 75% damage, heal, and continue fighting.

I believe that instead of trying to reconstruct your dungeons so that the Lich moves through walls and reappears unexpectedly (although that would be cool) the root cause of players grinding is because they can. Free self healing allows this.

But if you were to create a more robust healing trigger, that came with a cost, now you have a built in risk vs. reward mechanism.

 

In most game health is treated like "I'm close to defeat" rather than really meaning "every bone in my body is broken and I'm close to death." Thus quick healing up after the encounter is by design. I know early games had that "fight one mob, sit 5 minutes" feel. No one liked that. It make healers crazy OP for soloing, followed by anything ranged, followed by everything else who had to sit or blow all their cash on consumables.

Healing slowly out of combat adds a huge nuisance and a huge balancing problem. I'm not sure it adds anything good.

 

In the years of playing MMOs, what I always see is a lack of healers or 'healing classes'. So solutions require a non-healer solution, so self something is needed.

 

@PrimeRib,

Removing auto-heal entirely also solves that problem, but in a different way

The point is you don't need to sit 5 minutes, you could leave, or you can prepare and bring potions or party members. That's a player choice. But gameplay thats designed to bring you from grinding one encounter to the next, without anything interesting in between, isn't good gameplay imo.

 

That's just it, I don't think people should be carrying 100 apples with them wherever they go. I think people should be encouraged to take a break and heal up before they slog ahead into a new encounter.

I realize fully that no one wants to constantly be told "now you have to rest again" because that's not going to shoot off any dopamine in anyone's head. However, I actually think that by doing this a greater balance for each encounter could be found. Each individual dungeon is likely something that should be completed in one sitting, correct? So now you can gauge the strength of a dungeon based on how many times you're likely to needed healed before you finish it.

There would be other benefits as well. For example...if your goal is to get somewhere and explore a particular dungeon, should you be wasting your time fighting a random spider that might critically injure you or a group member on your way to that dungeon? Or should you run away and leave that spider alone because quite frankly that's what normal people would do if they saw a random giant spider?

I don't want to sit and rest all day either, but I think that if I knew that was a consequence of not planning well or getting some good people to help me on whatever adventure I was going on, then I'd probably learn to plan well and attempt to avoid a lot of the random and pointless killing that is so heavily favored in MMO's today.

 

I think you bring up a very good point...no one really wants to sit around all day waiting to do "cool stuff". I'm sure no one is advocating that. Instead, I'm focused on making self healing something that requires a cost rather than being free.