Less healing makes for a more interesting game.

Not talking about a bunch of skills though just the one way overpowered tier 1 healing spell.
Making it only out of combat or nerf in it in any way would force people to go further down the tree to do some actual healing

 

I have no issues with healing........

I have issues with not having spells/skills such as poisoning that prevents a direct heal.

 

You almost have to have in-combat heals for a DPS-style game (like SotA). The only systems I've seen that can make combat without healing really work are turn based and highly tactical. NOT real-time hotbar button-mashers.

 

That would only apply in PvP though and at that point just make the build you need to kill people even more specific, not less.

 

Aye healing ray but healing touch doesn't have to be but meh I don't care what is changed as long as something is
as it is now healing touch is way too good for a tier 1 spell imo

 

How likely is it that people will abandon healing if it costs just a few points more though?

One possibility I see would be for healing spells to reduce the damage you inflict by 50% for something like 10 seconds when you cast one. (Channeling life magic just requires you to clear your mind of murderous impulses for a while) That way it's much more beneficial to a party to have one dedicated healer than for everyone to be healing themselves. Self healing still works, but you'd want to avoid just throwing out a tiny healing spell every time it's up because that would trash your damage.

 

Don't want people to abandon healing though just think that if you want to heal you should need to grab more than 1 active and 1 passive.. it's just a bit to easy to get

 

Yea, but since all the healing in the game is contained in a single skill line I don't think it's ever particularly hard to get whatever it takes to expand your characters abilities by a reliable self heal.

The way the game currently works it's practically impossible to get by without healing anyways, so as of right now easy access to healing is actually kind of a requirement to making a workable character.

 

A few more quick suggestions:

Focus
Again, it needs to be a stable value that the developers can reliably develop skills and their focus costs around. I mentioned this already, but it merits mentioning a second time.

Alternatives to Healing
Health Shields (on your health bar), Magical Shields (Placed in the world as cover, blocking projectiles, weakening/buffing those inside, etc). More effective damage mitigation moves. Self healing as a result of combos (not something you can always achieve) As these are introduced, healing can become weaker, the life tree itself could also gain some of these shield types as a supportive tree.

Healing Others
Make healing others better than healing yourself. The innate could be changed to benefit allies when healing or buffing them with Life spells.

Healing Buffer
Some games use a healing buffer. I think Bloodline Champions had a 25% healing buffer. This meant that only 25% of someone's maximum health could be healed, the healing showing up as a lighter colour on their health bar. This meant that breaking the 25% mark would make a permanent dent in their health for the fight. (e.g. if someone was taken to 40% health, they could be healed to 65% (40% "real" health and 25% "healed" health))
This buffer also benefits those who lose less health to begin with or can mitigate more damage as the health is more valuable per point. This means healing is better for people who are naturally tanky as they are less likely to lose the buffer.

Charged/Channelled Abilities
If a heal had to be charged up or channelled for better healing (and started pretty weak), it would open up opportunities for interrupts and increase the value of the healer as an archetype, as healing yourself would be even more difficult when being hit. At the same time, it would make healers more susceptible to focus in pvp.

 

While the core idea you present here has much value, it itself leads to a second problem, that of overly limited construction.

I hold up NeverWinter Online as an example. Classes determine what talents and gear you can choose, stats get set for life at character creation. Players re-roll over and over to get optimal numbers, because low stats will cripple your character forever, high stats will make you exceptional forever (though most likely everyone will have high stats, good luck pulling ahead of the pack). Meanwhile the talents available on the tree are so limited as to be "choose A, B, or C" at almost every level. This system gives excellent game balance, but almost no diversity.

SotA wants to be diverse. Advertises diversity. Drew people in as investors on a platform of diversity. Game balance is very important to me, and I believe, one of the most important aspects of game design. But I believe that risking game balance is worth the gain in diversity of builds.

Now, we don't have to have a COMPLETELY open system to have diversity. We don't need to make every single talent and ability available without preamble. But as we gate those abilities, it is reasonable for us to set up multiple "this or that" choices. Where I feel that I differ from your suggestion is in numbers. You offer one defensive cooldown, and one defensive move. I think there should be more. To allow everyone diversity in those choices as well. Will there be favorite abilities? Yes absolutely, if there were only two choices in the whole game one would be a favorite, it's human nature, and statistical law. There will be trends in the community, high flying players will popularize certain builds, EJ.com will declare a certain setup to be "optimal" and hordes of unthinking followers will spec that way without knowing what it means. That is not something for the game design to correct for. Human nature should be allowed to flow through this game in whatever ways it will (within the bounds of law, taste, and reason) because this is a game, made to entertain those humans.

Fairness on the other hand, giving each build option its own chance, that is the calling of game design. So I believe that there should be several options available to everyone regardless of what they are trying to build. Those options shouldn't include any ability that essentially says "act like you are this totally other spec for a few seconds". If someone who is playing a 'tank' character has a defensive option that heals them to full life once every two minutes, all they have to do is get so good defensively that they take two minutes and ten seconds to kill. Then they are immortal, which is part of OPs complaint. If a ranged spec character has a cooldown that lets them take on an unlimited number of opponents in melee range for 12 seconds every five minutes, that just means they spec a way into disappearing from melee range, and they get sniping rights on anything anywhere, and then tank the fallout and vanish. I could go on, I won't. Those "pick only a few options from this list" set of abilities in order to be diverse and open, "sandbox" as it were, need to be options that any character can take without being broken, broadly useful enough to appeal to most if not all builds. Things like focus regain on a cooldown, a sprint that would be useful in PvP or for travel (or for complex pulls in group content), a lifesteal on outgoing damage (because let's face it, healers probably won't buy an expensive self healing cooldown when they can just heal themselves cheaply whenever), temporary stat boosts (like effective +30 points for 10 seconds)... but nothing that undermines the need for other builds, or lets someone ignore an entire skill tree while reaping what should have been its benefits.

 

You mean as an alternative to sitting quietly for 20 seconds, or eating some food? I doubt many would waste the ability slot on that.

 

I don't think it limits character options to have people build within a template of abilities every character should have. It simply makes sense that every character has some kind of strategy for staying alive, some kind of strategy for winning a fight, some kind of strategy for helping others, some kind of powerful cooldown move and so forth. They should be as different as possible from one character to the next and come in all kinds of combinations that interact in interesting ways, but having people build within a framework like that simply avoids presenting hundreds of thousands of bad choices as being part of your game's character diversity.

 

Who says auto-healing will only take 20 seconds in the final game? I expect them to slow it down -- I hope they do. As for food, food is just supposed to affect your ability to auto-heal, in addition to other things.

I think heal spells should be fully usable in battle, though; to restrict them to out of battle use would be arbitrary. Besides, once auto-heal is throttled down, I expect healing potions will become popular for out of battle healing.

However, I still think that the most effective way to balance heal spells is to tie low-level spells to reagents. The devs could keep heal spells nerfed, but that's just makes those spells annoying to use. The devs could lower potion costs to make potions more available but that would also lead the game to be unbalanced.

 

I like the healing tree, not for what it does to myself but what I can do to others with it. I see it as keeping the other person alive, since some monsters and players can do fast enough damage that you can't keep up with on your own unless you had additional help. And that's where I like to be, the support player. I don't look at PvP for this, since I don't do it a lot I only look as a PvE perspective the most.

I'd rather see it something useful for those who want to dedicate time into it. Maybe something you need to make better use of it, like a focus item. If you want to use it, you might have to give up an item slot for it.

It's either do the hard part of nerfing the skill (which never actually works properly) or taking out healing altogether and make other skills that give a regen.. or combo move for healing.

 

I will be using healing probably quite a bit as I plan on adventuring solo a lot. So...in that case having the ability to heal is important to me.

 

To be fair it's only important because you need it.

If Fireball instantly killed enemies while all other damage abilities did only 1 damage we wouldn't say "We should keep fireball as it is, because I'll be needing to kill enemies", we'd say "Fireball is too dominant as a damage spell, we need to balance the effectiveness of all offensive spells and abilities to create variety"

By the same logic, we shouldn't be saying "We should keep healing as it is, because I'll be needing it to live", we need to say "Healing is too dominant as a defensive option, we need to balance the effectiveness of all defensive abilities to create variety."

The problem with healing is it is harder to balance in the first place with how it currently works, as, fundamentally, healing is flawed in most MMOs. As people have already mentioned, the traditional healing mechanic just creates a threshold for death, to combat this, developers will need to increase the damage of enemies to be able to break this threshold at which point anyone without healing is screwed. The natural result of this method of healing is the absolute requirement of healing.

Ideally, defensive abilities should be an engaging and reactive method of defense, not a spammable sustain. Anything with the power to reliably sustain someone creates the threshold.

Healing is pretty difficult to design as a reactive element though.

 

Couldnt agree more. 3 things i think are currently op. 1 - the amount of life healing grace can heal back is way op in efficiency compared to the little dmg your opponent can do to you with the same amount of focus, in pvp and lets you solo and tank groups of monsters in pve

2 - tap soul can make fights never stop, 2 tap souls (with only 2sec cd inbetween) being able to give you enough focus to use another aforementioned completely insanely efficient healing grace which then can also be used to tap soul more from and its a vicious broken cycle currently.

and 3 - you can wear full plate while still having 0% fizzle chance on the best healing spell magery has to offer, the healing grace, so you already have crazy tankiness from plate, and then the best healing spell on top plus healing grace every 4 seconds at the worst when you have run out of resources thanks to tap soul.

I just used healing grace and it healed me in total including 1 crit for one tick for 151 life, for 15 focus. in full plate youll hit someone for maybe 30-40 tops on the most efficient skills currently, for the same amount of focus?

Makes healing very op atm indeed.

 

No I would say we should balance it not take it out.

 

The problem with healing is that it's very hard to balance because it's impact on the fight depends on what's going on in the fight, and always expresses itself in three categories:

1. You outheal all incoming damage. The power of healing in this case is absolute, for whatever this encounter is it's as overpowered as can be.
2. You slow down incoming damage significantly. Healing is useful, but not any different than flat mitigation with the downside of having to actively use it, and the upside of being able to apply it to someone else.
3. You cannot cast reactively before the incoming damage kills the target (due to CC or too much damage). Healing is completely useless in this case.

So, in order to have healing be balanced in the game as a support mechanism its interaction with the fight really has to fall into category 2, but as fights scale and people bring different builds and the devs want to have some encounter be harder than others it just frequently ends up in categories 1 and 3. Every WoW boss that has a little mechanic that makes people switch up their tactics is devs trying to figure out how to throw a wrench into category 1 healing.

Basically if you can come up with a system that keeps healing in the category 2 interaction with the fight at all times, you've cracked one of the most fundamental balance issues with MMOs.




One possible idea to do it:

When you get hit your HP is not immediately removed, instead a portion of your life bar (according to how much damage was done) is declared to be "bleeding". That portion of your life slowly ticks away. If you take enough damage eventually your entire life bar is bleeding and you will die if nobody intervenes. (Maybe your character could fall to the ground and be reduced to crawling around while being fully bleeding.)

Healing spells do not give you HP back, instead they just remove the bleeding from your life bar, that means even if someone gets hit with damage that exceeds their health pool all that does is expose their entire life bar to bleeding. Healing spells stop the bleeding, but since they have to work from the bottom of the health bar up to stop the character from bleeding entirely, the character will lose a significant portion of their health to bleeding before the heals and the bleed meet in the middle so to speak. Since all healing is reactive there is always at least a little bleeding, keeping healing from ever being absolute. Since all damage takes time to kill you there is always a chance to heal, keeping healing from ever being completely useless.

Actual HP would be regained when your character is out of combat and able to initiate a short rest.

As an advanced version of this system the health bar would be subject to more than just bleeding damage. Bleeding would be the most common type, inflicted by physical attacks, but a portion of the health bar could also become affected by, let's say, burning, or poison damage. To get rid of the burning you'd have to throw a water spell at the target, and a cure spell to get rid of the poison, so healing starts coming in different varieties for different damage. If a character has a rainbow colored health bar that is red with bleeds and green with poisons and blue with frostbite and orange with burning and purple with necrotic energy you basically have to triage the situation to try to maintain as much of the persons health as possible.


I'm not saying this would be right for SotA, it's just me thinking about how to keep healing spells in that category 2 interaction.

 

you take out healing, you lose players.

they already removed the trinity, meaning everyone can now heal to a degree if they wish.

now all the need to do is balance the systems so they can work with and without... meaning if you focus more on dps and less on healing , you should still survive at times - albeit with fewer hitpoints at the end, even if you play perfectly, or if you focus more on healing you can last longer and have a larger margin of error (more hitpoints at the end of the fight).. the latter would work well for the casual player, but the more hardcore player would enjoy the "epicness" of a battle ending with fewer hitpoints. and both get the job done.