Less healing makes for a more interesting game.

My impression from your recollection is the class based combat systems seemed to be more about role and less about dps-or-fail.

And I agree with that. I want some role in my role playing game.

However, SOTA is months (years, really?) away from alpha, never mind beta, launch, polish and balance, and have been extremely slow to react to core design document concept changes. In particular, things like the deck system, which wouldn't even have locked slots if players hadn't argued for months for such an option. Now is the time to argue for less healing, but.. I don't see it changing, given the development process shown to date.

I would love to see it done right, but I also don't believe class or classless alone determines an interesting combat system. Responding to tells on mobs, dynamically assessing resistances/strengths/immunities, and responding to racial/species attacks, custom combo's based on target, as well as build, those can all be done whether or not you have GW2 or EQ2 type character development. And they can all be done with or without healing, as a specific mechanic.

For now, even WITH healing, some (especially new) players find combat extremely frustrating. Why? Hard coded/locked aggro, insane aggro ranges, hitbox/hit-range, weapon disparity, and many other bugs associated with combat that have evidently been around for well over a year. That's... well.. ominous isn't the right word, but it's close. So, given all the choices, leaving healing as is, for the moment, at least makes the game playable.

 

I think when it comes to free build vs. class systems the best answer is somewhere in the middle. I've been playing Numenera recently, which is a pen and paper system that technically has classes, but lets you create characters from combinations of power sets that can be freely combined. You pick a base class, of which there is three, and then you add a descriptor and a focus. The descriptor is stuff like "Clever" or "Stealthy" or "Rugged" and adds some bonuses to your character, but it's the Focus where things get interesting, because the Focus is essentially a superpower that is just as character defining as your class, giving you options like controlling magnetism or wielding two weapons at once or turning invisible. The system itself is extremely simple, but it gives you so many combinations of different powers that you can make hundreds of interesting characters.

I think that's the sort of thing that a really good freebuild system needs to be. If you can give people, let's say, 3 choices out of 10 options each, and all those options are balanced against each other, you get 1000 possible characters while only having to balance 3 sets of 10, which a designer can reasonably do. So, there might be 10 defensive strategies your character can employ, 10 offensive strategies, and 10 utilities for example. The resulting number of possible characters is huge, while the system remains manageable and retains roles and balance.

 

well healing is nerphed... i effectively cant heal my self anymore. so time to take the pvp tag off and wait a few cycles to roll around till damage is nerphed to equal what we can heal.... not so fun anymore dying to simple mobs cause healing is basically gone

 

can't agree more on this - if you have a shield it shouldn't just make your AC higher.. you need to USE it for both defenseive and offensive moves. i know a LOT of folks in the SCA that have wanted "two damned shields instead of a bloody be-damned sword!" (direct quote from my father in law, at the Gulf Wars)

i think we're about 5-6 months from alpha, and 7-9 months from beta, give or take some latency.

 

With 20 available trees, if SotA limited us to 4 skill trees, that would still be just under 5,000 combinations. If you couldn't max out every skill in those four trees that would create even less similarity.
This would of course be similar to UO though in the sense that it had ~50 skills and you could max 7, which is almost millions of combinations, but really, you only had about 6-7 that were viable with mild deviations.
It would probably still create more variety than a totally free system though.

Anyhoo, I still think a Defense resource would be a good solution overall. Although I like the idea @Aetrion had for defense and offense, though even that could use a Defense resource to add a limit to their protections.

A few build descriptions using Archetypes. Unless I say otherwise assume they have 100 Defense Power (or whatever the resource might be called) just for an idea of how much certain abilities might cost you.
Also assume that defensive skills cost focus as well as defense power, Defense Power regenerates much slower than focus.

Warrior Tank
Wears Heavy Armour and likely uses a Shield or Weapons capable of Defense. Defense Power regenerates at a normal (slow) rate.
Heavy Armour skills have defenses that cost very little Defense Power, a warrior purely focused on defense would not run out of resource any time soon.
A tank will have very few (higher power) abilities that take a large chunk of Defense Power (20+) with most costing 1 or 2.
The idea would be that far more damage can be mitigated over time when coupled with their natural defenses than could be maintained by healing themselves (a more expensive prospect)

Paladin
A combination of Heavy Armour and Healing with a Weapon. The heavy armour limits the amount of life spells that can be taken. Likely just Healing Touch, Purify and Banish Undead and Life Power.
The paladin can use the innate defense of heavy armour along with the cheap Defense Power costs of the abilities associated with heavy armour. Depending on the build he may or may not save some defense power by opting for a two-handed weapon instead of a shield. He will take large hits (10-15?) to his Defense Power when healing. The result would be that a Paladin can mitigate more damage than the Warrior Tank over a shorter fight but their active defensive capacity drops off significantly as the fight progresses. If without a shield, they should have the advantage of dealing more damage however.
Defense Power costs would be halved when using abilities on targets other than yourself. This would also make the paladin a tanky support/dps as he could heal and purify allies with far less impact on his Heavy Armour defenses.

Archer
A combination of Light Armour, Archery and Utility for positioning. An archer should ideally not be getting hit very often, so Defense Power for this build would be focused on mobility and repositioning.
As with heavy armour, light armour defensive abilities would have low costs. Abilities that provide mobility would also have a low cost. However, the expensive Defense Power cost would come from Disengaging. With a high cost to Defense Power, abilities like Escape and Disabling Shot could be far more effective tools as their use would be more limited over the course of a fight with a lot of Defense Power being saved by only needing to use mitigation abilities during ranged assaults.

Might add a mage and a priest in a bit (getting tired of typing ><), but suffice to say there are a lot of utility spells out there that would compete with healing for Defense Power with the resource being used to economically balance their power.

 

A special pool for defense powers would be interesting. Restricting builds to a few trees might be a possibility, but I'm afraid it would still result in everyone taking life magic, the same way that all characters in UO had magic as a skill.

I think the most important thing the game is missing is simply the ability for the devs to somewhere say: "These two abilities cannot ever be on the same character", because that's kind of needed if you want to make abilities that are awesomely powerful and role defining without having people simply take all of them.

 

Well, the idea was that Life Magic would be hard for someone to use and taking it would be a waste in some cases.

Imagine you have 100 Defense Power
Every 5 seconds you gain 1 Defense Power in combat (it regenerates very fast outside of combat)
Every 5 Seconds you gain 3 Defense Power if you have not used offensive abilities or basic attacks

Now imagine that:

Deflect in Shields costs 2 Defense Power (50 Uses or 1 Use/10 Seconds, 1 Use/3.34 Seconds when passive)
Glancing Blow in Heavy Armour costs 1 Defense Power (100 Uses or 1 Use/5 Seconds, 1 Use/1.67 Seconds when passive)
Healing Touch in Life Magic On Self costs 10 Defense Power (10 Uses or 1 Use/50 Seconds, 1 Use/16.67 Seconds when passive)
Healing Touch in Life Magic On Ally costs 5 Defense Power (20 Uses or 1 Use/25 Seconds, 1 Use/8.34 Seconds when passive)

The regeneration rates and the individual costs can change, but the idea I'm putting across here is that:

1. Healing can be made to pay off a lot more for those who invest more (later spells are already more efficient, but could keep a similar Defense Power cost and fizzle chance)
2. Healing can be made to be a short term defense, with mitigations being the long term defense
3. Healing yourself can seriously impact your long-term defenses, making it a harder choice to blow your pool
4. Efficiently healing others requires a sacrifice of damage (passive regen) or the acceptance that you can only throw out a short burst of healing between DPS


As for exclusive abilities, I would not mind the tree limit or possibly split lines down different trees. Not sure how to prevent levelling two skills though. The example was Light and Heavy Armour, but the limiter there is what you actually wear, someone with a mind to can still train both for different occasions.

 

Having a second pool isn't a positive change IMO because it becomes a use it or lose it kind of situation. You wouldn't ever want your defense pool sitting at 100 because then you wouldn't be getting points, any 5 seconds that cast while you're at 100 aren't rewarded, so the second it hits 100 you'd simply cast the heal even if you don't need it necessarily simply because any pool that's capped isn't generating new points. It would have builds optimized around using as many points as possible from all available pools rather than making them focus on one activity. I prefer if more things come out of the same pool so that if you want to attack a lot there is no benefit to casting heals, and vice versa, if you want to heal you would save your points for casting heals.

 

Well, to be fair, the only reason I am suggesting a second pool is because they seem to want Focus to increase its maximum, be skilled to have abilities cost less, etc. The issue there is that you go from starving for Focus at the start to hardly caring later on, similar to WoW mana. If focus was a fixed resource and abilities were balanced around their use of it then I'd agree that another resource wouldn't be necessary. This whole concept has the added flaw of requiring you to skill focus, another non-choice.

On the other hand, a Defense Resource would be used to limit defense. If you heal when you don't need to just because it's at full then you're mostly just wasting Focus and Time instead of fighting and wasting your defense you might need later. Remember, abilities still take time to cast and have a focus cost, the Defense Resource isn't a pool to be spent, it's a reserve to be used when necessary and using it without needing to would be handicapping yourself.

And if it was in place then most utility/buff abilities would use it to a small (minor buffs, mitigation) or large (healing, major buffs) degree, i.e. most Blue, Yellow or Green spells would use it with offense (Red) being exempt.

 

Yea, maybe the way Focus works needs to be looked at a bit. I think the main reason why they have it set up to basically never run out right now is because the main limiting factor to ability use was supposed to be the draw system. Overall the possibility of simply running out of the "do stuff bar" isn't overly appealing in a game.

 

And thus, Defense Power!

But seriously, in my head Focus would actually recharge at a pretty fast rate so while some skills deplete the bar with their cost, others just slow it's regeneration down.

i.e.
Focus Regen fixed at 2 per second with a 100 maximum (50 Seconds from 0 to 100)
Tumble - 5 Focus (2.5 Seconds of Regen)
Rend - 10 Focus (5 Seconds of Regen)
Healing Touch - 30 Focus (15 Seconds of Regen)

Then number tweaks until it all seems about right. The advantage being that the balance of ability costs is fixed from level 1 to level 100 too.

I still like the idea of Defense Power, even with a possibly adjusted focus though. I suppose the overarching concept of that would be one fast bar (focus) that keeps you in action to different degrees of efficiency depending on your immediate spending and one very slow bar (defense power) that makes you deal with long-term efficiency.

Short fights would mainly just depend on how you manage your focus, and with balanced focus regen and costing, these fights could probably afford to be a bit more visceral. You won't run out of Defense Power here unless you are literally spamming heals (which again, with the focus costs as seen above, wouldn't really be feasible in a short fight)

Long fights against hardier opponents would depend more on the management of both Focus in the short term and Defense Power in the long term. Did you take a load of damage early and a mage throws three heals at you? Well, that's all well and good but you put him out of action on Focus for a while and drained 15% of his Defense Power in seconds (which would take 75 seconds to regenerate). You're fine in the short term (except for losing the dps of your mage) but you wiped out a lot of defense power for the longer fight from him and he may end up unable to heal or otherwise defend you much sooner than you'd like.

 

I feel like it'd make a lot more sense if health simply ended up being the "slow bar" that depletes gradually during a fight, instead of adding an extra bar that drains slowly while stopping the health bar from getting drained.

 

But the problem there is your health can't always be a slow bar.

In a short fight it needs to deplete fast, In a long fight there needs to be dangerous times where it really can fall, and for those without natural armour, it will drop off a lot faster regardless.

The Focus would be fast, Defense Power slow and the Health would be what determines your management of the other two.

I do also believe that it can work with two bars, certainly. But I can't picture a definite system where it works out, whereas the other one I have thought on and considered numbers (plus I'm biased as hell, lol). Like, I would like to see an example of how something would work.

 

Maybe there could be a dual health system like in Pillars of Eternity, where you can take endurance damage, which regenerates pretty rapidly and can be healed during combat, but if you hit 0 you still pass out and are out of the fight, but you can always take health damage, which is always a small portion of any damage you take, cannot be regenerated in combat, restricts how much endurance you can regain, and thereby makes it impossible to fight forever even if you manage to keep your endurance topped off. So basically, like 1% of the damage you take is taken to your health max, rather than your current hitpoints, meaning in pronlonged combat your lifebar gets shorter and shorter even if you keep it topped off. The max can only be healed back outside of combat.

 

Even a system that was as simple as Vanguard was pretty nice. You had a defensive target that heals and defensive skills went toward and offensive target that offensive skills were directed toward. There were also counters that would pop up when an enemy used a skill if you possessed the proper skills. Overall it was one of the better combat systems I've seen in a traditional style MMO.

 

Well, that and a lack of giving a damn. When human hunters gear up to go out and get, say, a couple of rabbits, they are AWARE that those rabbits are natural prey to many other creatures. They don't care. They aren't going to watch hawks and foxes hunt the rabbits. They are there to hunt them themselves, and then go eat them.

Moreover, when a unit of marines marches through hostile territory, they have probably been briefed on some of the wildlife "This little bastich is poisonous, you will die horribly. Don't get stung. If your idiot buddy gets stung, pull this syringe out of the first aid pack and stick it in his butt cheek."... but aside from things that affect them or their mission, they mostly don't care about the wildlife. They are eating one another, they aren't eating one another, who cares?

Now, if someone in this game, and someone WILL, decides to make a nature lover, who camps out in hard to reach places and watches the ecosystem algorithm at work, great for that guy, and I'm sure he'll notice. I think the system should be in place regardless. And there should be population spawns BASED on it. So if someone spends hours killing every wolf in sight, there should be LOTS of rabbits when he leaves. That would be hilarious. And the rabbits would then reduce or eliminate the spawns of various plants in the area, and draw a big resurgence of some manner of predator, etc.

But most players won't sit around and watch it no matter what. They have a goal, a reason for passing through that space, and it usually won't be bird watching.

 

Agreed, that would be ideal.

Obstacles to overcome to reach that goal? Much larger scenes (like, at least 10 times larger), dynamic spawn locations, dynamic spawn indicators, much higher rendering performance, and most importantly a desire to do it on the part of the team.
It's trivial to program, heck, a first year CS student could write the algorithm, but Portalarium has to want to do it, and be willing to climb those obstacles.

In the most basic version, "scene-clearers"/species bosses could be spawned if all the creatures of a particular species/type were removed from a hex in a short time.

It also leads to things like animal husbandry, crop management, ecosystem management by scene, and a whole bunch of other innovative fun mechanics that would distinguish the game as unique in the genre. Great idea.

 

i think the real problem is that you don't ever really have to hunt something, you just have to go there, and there it is.

 

I read through this thread and I can see some things I have been thinking about. What do you folks think about a Specialized system? For example,

Specialized Skill Cap 3
We can specialize into three trees (increasing the rate at which we gain use-based experience in this trees)

Trained
We can train into any other trees (gain use-based experience at a lower rate)

Perhaps we need something like this instead of being able to get into everything or such? A system like this would reinforce, without restricting, players focusing on their desired skillsets while allowing people to not focus as well.

 

So...I've read most of the posts in this thread and I get what the OP is saying yet I can't escape the fact that I love playing support classes/healers. I essentially agree that making op heals for everyone greatly unbalances the game so as a support-role player I would suggest going with what a few others have mentioned and make healing a plus when used on others so that class is viable and desirable. I would be willing to have a character completely devoted to healing at the expense of offensive skills. But to nerf the category entirely makes me sad.