fewRy (Theodore Johnson)
Green Slime
Overall, healing in this game is going to be rather limited and highly situational in quite a wide variety of ways. I was reading through a few forum posts and saw one of the problems discussed being adding a healing / support role. One of the main problems is finding a suitable "spell" that won't make healing completely broken. I have a few solutions that I believe may work out rather smoothly given the current game mechanics, starting with the one I personally find to be the most balanced.
1. Temporarily Buffing What Is Already There
The main way to heal in this game is by means of health orbs that drop from enemies at a random drop rate, with the drop rate increasing the lower your health is (a hypothesis from my experience). One thing I found rather interesting was the card drop that increases health obtained from health orbs by 15%. To keep within the guidelines of having no healing during a boss-battle, making a skill that buffs the healing gained from health orbs may be a very good solution. Something that shouldn't be done is having the skill increase the drop rate of the orbs as a variation. With me getting around 400 hp per health orb already, it would seem rather overpowered in grinding if I had a large quantity of those helpful buggers popping out every time I smacked an enemy to death. The effect should be rather short and simple. Maybe increase the amount of health gained from a health orb by a small amount for 5-10 seconds with the final gold version giving an even smaller health over time effect. This still promotes the original concept of "fight to survive" while giving players the extra edge if they decide to invest points into that skill. An example will be my 400 hp recovery from the health orb. Without the 15% healing increase card, I'd estimate I would regain around 330 hp (for the sake of not knowing if the percentage values would stack to increase each-other to absurd amounts, I'm sticking with base-level modifiers for now). At just face value, increasing the amount of healing by 25% would bump up that healing orb to around 412.5 for 5-10 seconds, around an 80 hp increase from what it was before. In a nutshell, I'd just like to note that an Echo of Madness on Hard Mode with me having 135 defense (but the gold stage damage taken increase) does around 100 damage. That would just barely allow me to take one extra hit from that enemy. Not really a substantial increase, but useful nonetheless if you wish to go for extensive grinding.
2. Kill-Tracking Heal Limits
This is one of the more interesting methods that I find to sound very overpowered at the start, but rather balanced toward the end. Before I get into anything, this would also require you to remove any built-up heals a player has amassed when going into a new area via. the loading screen. This is to prevent players farming large amounts of low-level mobs to use heals in high-level areas and or boss arenas. The main usage of this is just as it sounds: kill a certain number of enemies to receive a healing charge. For higher-leveled characters, you can be left with two situations: you commit mass genocide on innocent creatures, or you fight tough enemies that aren't really eradicated as quickly. This makes healing more or less limited based on where you should be rather than where you shouldn't be. Let's be honest, I'm level 41 with 2013 hp, going into the starting area and killing a bunch of mobs, receiving unlimited healing charges for that area, it wouldn't really make that much of a difference. Even in Tai Ming, the enemies do have the potential to kill me, rather quickly at that, but because of my high damage output and tendency to not make stupid decisions, it would make things a breeze. But what about characters that are at the level they should be in that area? Let's say the standard level for Tai Ming is around 20-25. At those levels, if you are going for a hybrid damage / tanky build, you would have around 700-900 hp. On top of that, your damage output won't be nearly as high as others where you could slaughter dozens upon dozens of monsters, essentially giving you immortal life. This makes it so the more you kill, the more SMARTLY you play, you are rewarded for it by means of a longer life-span. One of the worst feelings is when you are at 10% hp, and you survive for the next minute killing a mob of monsters, but luck has decided you should not live today and never drops you a health orb.
3. Pulling a Dark Souls
Stick it in a bottle, give it a limit and chug it till you realize theres no more and you die. (Please don't do this).
1. Temporarily Buffing What Is Already There
The main way to heal in this game is by means of health orbs that drop from enemies at a random drop rate, with the drop rate increasing the lower your health is (a hypothesis from my experience). One thing I found rather interesting was the card drop that increases health obtained from health orbs by 15%. To keep within the guidelines of having no healing during a boss-battle, making a skill that buffs the healing gained from health orbs may be a very good solution. Something that shouldn't be done is having the skill increase the drop rate of the orbs as a variation. With me getting around 400 hp per health orb already, it would seem rather overpowered in grinding if I had a large quantity of those helpful buggers popping out every time I smacked an enemy to death. The effect should be rather short and simple. Maybe increase the amount of health gained from a health orb by a small amount for 5-10 seconds with the final gold version giving an even smaller health over time effect. This still promotes the original concept of "fight to survive" while giving players the extra edge if they decide to invest points into that skill. An example will be my 400 hp recovery from the health orb. Without the 15% healing increase card, I'd estimate I would regain around 330 hp (for the sake of not knowing if the percentage values would stack to increase each-other to absurd amounts, I'm sticking with base-level modifiers for now). At just face value, increasing the amount of healing by 25% would bump up that healing orb to around 412.5 for 5-10 seconds, around an 80 hp increase from what it was before. In a nutshell, I'd just like to note that an Echo of Madness on Hard Mode with me having 135 defense (but the gold stage damage taken increase) does around 100 damage. That would just barely allow me to take one extra hit from that enemy. Not really a substantial increase, but useful nonetheless if you wish to go for extensive grinding.
2. Kill-Tracking Heal Limits
This is one of the more interesting methods that I find to sound very overpowered at the start, but rather balanced toward the end. Before I get into anything, this would also require you to remove any built-up heals a player has amassed when going into a new area via. the loading screen. This is to prevent players farming large amounts of low-level mobs to use heals in high-level areas and or boss arenas. The main usage of this is just as it sounds: kill a certain number of enemies to receive a healing charge. For higher-leveled characters, you can be left with two situations: you commit mass genocide on innocent creatures, or you fight tough enemies that aren't really eradicated as quickly. This makes healing more or less limited based on where you should be rather than where you shouldn't be. Let's be honest, I'm level 41 with 2013 hp, going into the starting area and killing a bunch of mobs, receiving unlimited healing charges for that area, it wouldn't really make that much of a difference. Even in Tai Ming, the enemies do have the potential to kill me, rather quickly at that, but because of my high damage output and tendency to not make stupid decisions, it would make things a breeze. But what about characters that are at the level they should be in that area? Let's say the standard level for Tai Ming is around 20-25. At those levels, if you are going for a hybrid damage / tanky build, you would have around 700-900 hp. On top of that, your damage output won't be nearly as high as others where you could slaughter dozens upon dozens of monsters, essentially giving you immortal life. This makes it so the more you kill, the more SMARTLY you play, you are rewarded for it by means of a longer life-span. One of the worst feelings is when you are at 10% hp, and you survive for the next minute killing a mob of monsters, but luck has decided you should not live today and never drops you a health orb.
3. Pulling a Dark Souls
Stick it in a bottle, give it a limit and chug it till you realize theres no more and you die. (Please don't do this).