disposalist said:What about a heal that you can 'spray' amongst multiple targets as you channel it? :) It heals X amount per tenth of a second, can be channeled for 10 seconds and can be targetted as you like during those 10 seconds?
I don't remember ever seeing that mechanic either...
Priest of Mitra in Age of Conan has a "cone" healing spell: 120 degree cone (front facing) extending 6 m. IIRC it was a channeled heal too (it's been almost 10 years since I played that char).
If not an AE cone, it would be rad if Clerics had a channeled healing (single target) spell line. Heal becomes stronger the longer you channel.. with some cool animation akin to Mind Flay - Shadow Priest (WoW).
cheers <3
Saicred said:I believe this makes Large Direct Heals way too Powerful. Period.
And I believe aliens should dominate more worlds. Period... No reason? Are you one of those people? I'm gonna share my opinion but not give you a single reason why because it's my opinion.
C'mon guys, let's be constructive a little please, this board is for helping these guys get a direction into development of a game, if you got an opinion great, i respect that, but why? IDK about ya'll but I like having nice respectable arguments that are constructive, but this isn't constructive at all.
Dubah said:Saicred said:I believe this makes Large Direct Heals way too Powerful. Period.
And I believe aliens should dominate more worlds. Period... No reason? Are you one of those people? I'm gonna share my opinion but not give you a single reason why because it's my opinion.
C'mon guys, let's be constructive a little please, this board is for helping these guys get a direction into development of a game, if you got an opinion great, i respect that, but why? IDK about ya'll but I like having nice respectable arguments that are constructive, but this isn't constructive at all.
Saicred isn't one of those guys. I believe his succinct, direct and unexplained response is 'ok' in this case, as he is right hehe.
The ability to change target (and cancel) a large direct heal would mean you could just keep casting and cancelling and when you eventually *did* need the heal to land just redirect it to the right group member, effectively casting a large heal in a fraction of it's intended casting time. It would be an exploitable bug, basically.
But, I still stay it could be used, if balanced, as an interesting alternative mechanic.
disposalist said:Dubah said:Saicred said:I believe this makes Large Direct Heals way too Powerful. Period.
And I believe aliens should dominate more worlds. Period... No reason? Are you one of those people? I'm gonna share my opinion but not give you a single reason why because it's my opinion.
C'mon guys, let's be constructive a little please, this board is for helping these guys get a direction into development of a game, if you got an opinion great, i respect that, but why? IDK about ya'll but I like having nice respectable arguments that are constructive, but this isn't constructive at all.
Saicred isn't one of those guys. I believe his succinct, direct and unexplained response is 'ok' in this case, as he is right hehe.
The ability to change target (and cancel) a large direct heal would mean you could just keep casting and cancelling and when you eventually *did* need the heal to land just redirect it to the right group member, effectively casting a large heal in a fraction of it's intended casting time. It would be an exploitable bug, basically.
But, I still stay it could be used, if balanced, as an interesting alternative mechanic.
Oh I completely agree, I don't want the ability to change targets while healing either, i could easily abuse the heck out of that... or that time when you accientaly click a target mid heal and it heals the wrong person.
I just like constructivity more. Maybe he has a point to make that i haven't thought of yet either is all I'm getting at, I like to view what's on the table from all sides before making a final decision on something.
disposalist said:The ability to change target (and cancel) a large direct heal would mean you could just keep casting and cancelling and when you eventually *did* need the heal to land just redirect it to the right group member, effectively casting a large heal in a fraction of it's intended casting time. It would be an exploitable bug, basically.
This is exactly what I was saying at the beginning of the thread. Am I really that bad a composing my thoughts?!?
Kittik said:disposalist said:The ability to change target (and cancel) a large direct heal would mean you could just keep casting and cancelling and when you eventually *did* need the heal to land just redirect it to the right group member, effectively casting a large heal in a fraction of it's intended casting time. It would be an exploitable bug, basically.This is exactly what I was saying at the beginning of the thread. Am I really that bad a composing my thoughts?!?
Lol no I just like to reword and repeat partly to make sure I've got it right and partly to reinforce to make sure others have got it.
Oh, although "never stop" healing sounded like you meant you'd never run out of mana, but that's obviously (to me) not what you meant, more that you could 'continually' be healing. Obviously, when you cancel, you use no mana.
Aaaaand I'm repeating and restating again ;)
bigdogchris said:Without knowing the exact mechanics of the game I'm going to have to make up numbers.
Say you are in the middle of casting a higher powered, higher cast time heal spell on the tank, and there is 1 second left till it lands. You notice the Enchanter just got pwned by a DPS burst and needs a heal NOW.
In this situation, if say a quick heal spell is 2 second cast, which is the heal that you should use in that situation, but instead you click over to the new target and get the heal in 1 second instead. You now landed a much higher level heal in essentially 1 second. Not only is that faster than the balanced quick heal spell, but the amount of healing for that time is also significantly higher. You've broken 2 sets of balance issues here; cast duration and amount healed for that cast duration.
I don't really agree with your take on this because in the scenario you describe the healer had intended to heal the tank, but shifted their target to the enchanter. So yes, from the point the decision was made to heal the enchanter, the cast time and amount healed was higher than if casting had started from scratch. But remember that the initial heal going to the tank didn't happen, which means the tank could now be in dire straits or dead, and any new heal will have to be cast from scratch.
I do think there could be possible balance issues, as with any mechanic, but only testing can uncover those. As a matter of principle, I would like the flexibility to switch targets mid-cast, possibly as a toggle so that people who like to pre-select their next targets won't heal the wrong persons constantly.
disposalist said:The ability to change target (and cancel) a large direct heal would mean you could just keep casting and cancelling and when you eventually *did* need the heal to land just redirect it to the right group member, effectively casting a large heal in a fraction of it's intended casting time. It would be an exploitable bug, basically.
But, I still stay it could be used, if balanced, as an interesting alternative mechanic.
This can be countered by having a certain amount of mana "committed" during cast time, up to the full cost of the spell. For instance, a 3-second cast spell that costs 30 mana would commit 10 mana per second (or a proportional amount in smaller fractions of time) to the casting, so that if you cancel halfway through you'll be wasting mana. In fact, as I think about it, this should be the standard behaviour, as otherwise the ability to cancel casting can be exploited, even if not through the target-swapping "bug".
Much better being unable to change target then being unable to cancel. AAArgggggg losing all my mana if the target dies before the spell gets off or is healed by someone else.
What makes you think the aliens don't dominate all the worlds? Do you think humans are allergic to many foods, can't look at the sun without eye damage, get cancer from too much exposure to the sun and the like are proof that we evolved *here*? We are the aliens. Maybe landed from a prison boat with no technology to live or die as the Gods willed. Maybe technology was lost when the dinosaur killer hit.
dorotea said:Much better being unable to change target then being unable to cancel. AAArgggggg losing all my mana if the target dies before the spell gets off or is healed by someone else.
What makes you think the aliens don't dominate all the worlds? Do you think humans are allergic to many foods, can't look at the sun without eye damage, get cancer from too much exposure to the sun and the like are proof that we evolved *here*? We are the aliens. Maybe landed from a prison boat with no technology to live or die as the Gods willed. Maybe technology was lost when the dinosaur killer hit.
lol, sound reasoning about the aliens. Yeah, the more I read, the more I can see how this current "bug" could allow large heals to sometimes hit in a fraction of their normal cast time if the timing was right, which would really change combat mechanics, making them more like what you would see in an action mmo. Plus, the requisite strategy (because all the "good" healers would be expected to do it) of constantly starting and canceling big heals even if no one needs one at the beginning of the cast would become very tedious in my opinion. I would vote for the original intended mechanic.
Dubah said:Saicred said:I believe this makes Large Direct Heals way too Powerful. Period.
And I believe aliens should dominate more worlds. Period... No reason? Are you one of those people? I'm gonna share my opinion but not give you a single reason why because it's my opinion.
C'mon guys, let's be constructive a little please, this board is for helping these guys get a direction into development of a game, if you got an opinion great, i respect that, but why? IDK about ya'll but I like having nice respectable arguments that are constructive, but this isn't constructive at all.
Because it's so obviosly a bad design choice and broken. Part of the skill in being a healer is being aware of what's going on and predicting where the damage is going. For example, if you see an NPC charging towards a squishy party member, you should be rewarded for noticing that and quickly targeting that player (possibly canceling the other heal you had going), and healing that player. If you notice it fast enough and predict the damage, you can use a bigger/slower/more efficient heal. If you don't, you have to use a faster/less efficient heal.
It also affects the balance of hot verus direct and smart heals. Being able to change to a new target at the last second is a much bigger benefit when all the healing happens upfront versus healing that's spread out over time. Also, it invalidates the advantage of any type of smart healing, i.e. heals that automatically target the lowest HP target.
Why would you jump through hoops to try to balance something that at its core is bad design? It circumvents the need for situational awareness and rewards just staring at health bars. It removes the need to decide whether to risk finishing your current heal and hope you can get another off in time or to cancel your current heal in order to heal the other player faster. Pantheon combat is being designed with a focus on strategic decision making rather than twitch reflexes. So not only is it bad design in general, it's especially counter to the specific thing that Pantheon is built around.
I'll just say it: there is absolutely no way in hell that VR is going to leave this bug in the game and make it a feature.
zoltar said:Why would you jump through hoops to try to balance something that at its core is bad design? It circumvents the need for situational awareness and rewards just staring at health bars. It removes the need to decide whether to risk finishing your current heal and hope you can get another off in time or to cancel your current heal in order to heal the other player faster. Pantheon combat is being designed with a focus on strategic decision making rather than twitch reflexes. So not only is it bad design in general, it's especially counter to the specific thing that Pantheon is built around.
I'll just say it: there is absolutely no way in hell that VR is going to leave this bug in the game and make it a feature.
I don't believe they will leave this mechanic in place on the current single-target heals, no, it is a bug and changes the usage of the spell quite radically.
That doesn't mean it's not an interesting mechanic that couldn't be balanced, though.
As for being situational awareness and health bars, what healer isn't watching health bars? There's no other way to keep track of the group health.
And as for strategic decisions, yeah, some may prefer that and yes, flexi-targeting would be less strategic. Still tactical, though. The decision to use a flexi-heal (which would probably be less effective as a balance) is an additional strategy that could be chosen.
And as for being 'twitch', timing is absolutely essential in EQ and games like it and always has been. The Complete Heal from EQ was the longest cast time and the most strategic choice a cleric could make but to time it so that it was most effective was very tricky and often required great reflexes to see when the tank started taking burst damage and fire it off or whatever the trigger was. Get it wrong and the group wipes. Not 'twitch' play, but, yes timing is important (and always has been even in EQ-like RPGs).
I'm not saying VR should definitely do this, I'm just saying it's interesting enough to talk about and has anyone seen it used in another RPG or even used it, etc.
Let's not dismiss the concept just because it came from a bug.
I don't particularly like the notion of the flexi-heal because going down this road would lean towards reaction speed. If the flexi-heal is even well balanced, then people will be attempting to re-route heals frequently, which will require a lot of focus, attention, and reflexes to excel at. None of this is terrible, but generally "strategic" combat in my opinion involves pre-meditated decisions and seeing the consequences of those decisions play out over the course of a fight, while a flexi-heal does not fit that scheme as nicely as the traditional set heal target approach.
I also want to address the notion of starting and cancelling your heals. This already exists and is not a consequence of this new heal style. I have done it in the past when a tank is taking bursty damage and you need to land big heals occasionally. However, there is a clear downside - any time you cancel a heal you have spent that entire cast time not doing other productive things. I don't think the devs need to worry a great deal about disincentivizing this behavior given that natural and important downside. It will at most be a very niche technique.
I don't think this has a place in the game. It makes combat easier. Thats all it does. Now I understand the people that want to make some of the tedious parts of the game easier, the quality of life issues. I get that. But to make the core of the game easier, to make something that should be a real tactical decision into an easymode version of that. That I can't get behind. This will add nothing to the game other than allowing people to defeat encounterts that should be challening with less effort. I think making a challenging fight now a days is hard enough without giving us the players even more of an advantage than we already have.
daemonios said:I don't really agree with your take on this because in the scenario you describe the healer had intended to heal the tank, but shifted their target to the enchanter. So yes, from the point the decision was made to heal the enchanter, the cast time and amount healed was higher than if casting had started from scratch. But remember that the initial heal going to the tank didn't happen, which means the tank could now be in dire straits or dead, and any new heal will have to be cast from scratch.
I do think there could be possible balance issues, as with any mechanic, but only testing can uncover those. As a matter of principle, I would like the flexibility to switch targets mid-cast, possibly as a toggle so that people who like to pre-select their next targets won't heal the wrong persons constantly.
I'll be honest, I'm having a hard time defending my position with your counter point. All I can think of to say is allowing this fast switching to happen just doesn't feel right to me and I think that over time it would be shown to be exploitive. But I support gathering evidence to know for certain and would support the outcome based on that.
disposalist said:zoltar said:Why would you jump through hoops to try to balance something that at its core is bad design? It circumvents the need for situational awareness and rewards just staring at health bars. It removes the need to decide whether to risk finishing your current heal and hope you can get another off in time or to cancel your current heal in order to heal the other player faster. Pantheon combat is being designed with a focus on strategic decision making rather than twitch reflexes. So not only is it bad design in general, it's especially counter to the specific thing that Pantheon is built around.
I'll just say it: there is absolutely no way in hell that VR is going to leave this bug in the game and make it a feature.
As for being situational awareness and health bars, what healer isn't watching health bars? There's no other way to keep track of the group health.
You completely missed the point. Of course all healers watch the health bars. But you also have to watch the actual game. Part of the skill is being able to manage the health bars/cast your spells while ALSO having situational awareness and seeing what is going on around you. You shouldn't be designing the game in a way that encourages players having tunnel-vision on the health bars to the exclusion of the environment.
I'm not saying VR should definitely do this, I'm just saying it's interesting enough to talk about and has anyone seen it used in another RPG or even used it, etc.
Let's not dismiss the concept just because it came from a bug.
Nobody is dismissing it because it's a bug. It's being dismissed because it's a terrible idea. It's a novel idea, so I get why people are intrigued by it. But when you analyze it from a design perspective, it's completely at odds with what VR is trying to do with their combat and (IMO) just bad all around.
daemonios said:bigdogchris said:Without knowing the exact mechanics of the game I'm going to have to make up numbers.
Say you are in the middle of casting a higher powered, higher cast time heal spell on the tank, and there is 1 second left till it lands. You notice the Enchanter just got pwned by a DPS burst and needs a heal NOW.
In this situation, if say a quick heal spell is 2 second cast, which is the heal that you should use in that situation, but instead you click over to the new target and get the heal in 1 second instead. You now landed a much higher level heal in essentially 1 second. Not only is that faster than the balanced quick heal spell, but the amount of healing for that time is also significantly higher. You've broken 2 sets of balance issues here; cast duration and amount healed for that cast duration.
I don't really agree with your take on this because in the scenario you describe the healer had intended to heal the tank, but shifted their target to the enchanter. So yes, from the point the decision was made to heal the enchanter, the cast time and amount healed was higher than if casting had started from scratch. But remember that the initial heal going to the tank didn't happen, which means the tank could now be in dire straits or dead, and any new heal will have to be cast from scratch.
I do think there could be possible balance issues, as with any mechanic, but only testing can uncover those. As a matter of principle, I would like the flexibility to switch targets mid-cast, possibly as a toggle so that people who like to pre-select their next targets won't heal the wrong persons constantly.
I don't understand why you think the bolded part has of any relevance. Are you expecting to be able to heal both the tank and the enchanter with one cast? In the case of standard healing mechanics, the choice you're presented with is
The hypothetical situations involves an enchanter being put in grave danger due to incoming damage while you're in the process of casting a heal on the tank. I think we can assume that the risk to the enchanter is far greater than the risk to the tank, otherwise why would you switch the flex-heal from the tank to the enchanter in the first place. So comparing situation #1 to a flex-heal scenairo, both would have the same healing/time done but the flex-healing option has signfiicantly less risk due to healing the player in more danger first. Scenario 2 allows traditional healing to mitigate that some of that risk to the enchanter (probably not to the extent that flex-healing does) but also comes with the disadvantage of wasting all the time spent casting the original heal. And you still end up in the same situation with regards to the need to heal the tank, possibly worse if your new heal on the enchanter took much longer to cast than it took the flex-heal to just switch targets with their heal in progress.
zoltar said:I don't understand why you think the bolded part has of any relevance. Are you expecting to be able to heal both the tank and the enchanter with one cast? In the case of standard healing mechanics, the choice you're presented with is
- finish the heal going to the tank and risk the enchanter dying before you can heal them
- cancel your cast, healing the enchanter quickly, then going back to the tank.
The hypothetical situations involves an enchanter being put in grave danger due to incoming damage while you're in the process of casting a heal on the tank. I think we can assume that the risk to the enchanter is far greater than the risk to the tank, otherwise why would you switch the flex-heal from the tank to the enchanter in the first place. So comparing situation #1 to a flex-heal scenairo, both would have the same healing/time done but the flex-healing option has signfiicantly less risk due to healing the player in more danger first. Scenario 2 allows traditional healing to mitigate that some of that risk to the enchanter (probably not to the extent that flex-healing does) but also comes with the disadvantage of wasting all the time spent casting the original heal. And you still end up in the same situation with regards to the need to heal the tank, possibly worse if your new heal on the enchanter took much longer to cast than it took the flex-heal to just switch targets with their heal in progress.
It's relevant because the person I was replying to was only considering the advantages of target switching, i.e. bigger heal in less time, and not considering that the healer had actually intended to heal someone else first, and will have to see how they're going to do it after switching targets. If you don't consider the originally intended heal, then you're comparing apples to oranges.
Sabot said:I don't think this has a place in the game. It makes combat easier. Thats all it does. Now I understand the people that want to make some of the tedious parts of the game easier, the quality of life issues. I get that. But to make the core of the game easier, to make something that should be a real tactical decision into an easymode version of that. That I can't get behind. This will add nothing to the game other than allowing people to defeat encounterts that should be challening with less effort. I think making a challenging fight now a days is hard enough without giving us the players even more of an advantage than we already have.
I'm sorry, but I disagree. You seem to imply that the mechanic makes the game easier by definition, but in fact it only makes it easier if combat isn't balanced for it.
If it had been an intended mechanic from the start, you could have something like boss attacks that wipe x% of HP from a target, requiring immediate emergency healing - including switching targets on the current heal. In that case you'd have a *different* issue, namely the need for split-second decisions which I believe is not what the typical Pantheon fan is after, but it would have made the game actually *harder* rather than easier, as without the ability to switch targets you could have unavoidable deaths.