True Healing suggestions

Okay so the discussion thread for the true healing change has devolved into20 pages of frustrated ranting. There are some ideas in there that I’d hate to lose just because the tone of that thread is hostile. If the devs want to look for feedback, it would be kind of sucky for them to have to read through all the negativity, and worse, good ideas might get lost.

So I want to try to collect the suggestions about the true healing. I’m going to post those that I remember. If you’ve got an idea that I missed, add it, or if you have something constructive to say please post it.

I don’t want another list of complaints. Yeah some of us are mad, but let’s try to collect our ideas so that maybe we can help influence the change.

Let’s first identify the goals of the true healing change:
    Prologue healing - players are able to heal their characters in a safe place so that they can continue competing in PVP and PVE tournaments, rather than having to use the mechanics designed for healing—health packs.
      Team diversity - so many teams are comprised around the same characters. Healing characters can allow your team to play longer, and so logically building a team around a healing character has advantages. Because there are only two (soon to be three) healing characters, with certain colour sets, teams can be very very very similar. (If you don’t think the true healing solution changes that, this is fine, but this is a stated goal of the change)
        Money - this is not a stated goal, so we aren’t going to get a lot of feedback on this issue, but we shouldn’t ignore it. It’s not inherently bad that they want to monetize their game—that’s the F2P design.


        Here are some suggestions I remember from the discussion:

        Armor
        Someone/some people suggested armor instead of “true” and “temporary” healing.

        I think this is a good idea that functions similarly to true healing in its consequences to healers. It would also be more intuitive than two kinds of healing. It would be nice if this could be applied above max health—given that it isn’t health, it’s a barrier.

        It could also fit with the lore—web armor and gravity armor. Sure. We’re talking a world with basically no rules of reality.
        Only issue is the development requirements. They would need to implement some sort of UI change, which could be costly and take a while. This would also decrease the developers ability to make changes to other things.

        Eliminating prologue replayability or restricting certain characters from the prologue
        You could group a bunch of suggestions in here—anything that stops people from healing in the prologue but allows them to still use characters that heal in PVP and PVE matches.

        This would have a low development cost (maybe?) but wouldn’t solve the second issue of team diversity.

        Rebalancing healers
        If you changed healing characters powers so that they don’t heal as much, or change the power to do different things would make healers not as attractive of team members. They would still be viable (like Spider-man now) but not so powerful that you’d be crazy not to use them.

        An issue with this is development time again. We see how long power changes take, this might be a long time to fix OBW and the forthcoming She-Hulk. Especially if they mention it on the forums and people lose their collective minds.

        Characters heal after matches
        This changes health packs to an item used to revive a character when they die. Frankly, this is basically what I use them for now. I maintain with a healer every few matches, and use my health packs when I get unlucky or cocky.

        Full health characters would level the playing field between attacking and defending teams, but I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing, especially how bad the AI is.

        This change might also steeply reduce the use of health packs, and might be an unacceptable loss of revenue. It’s hard to tell from a spectator’s perspective.

        We’d also be dealing with a fairly fundamental change to how the game functions, especially when you’ve just started playing, when you don’t have healer characters. Maybe this is a benefit though, getting players out of the prologue and into the slog for 2* and 3* covers, the place that seems to be a main money maker.

        It’s possible this change could only affect PVP, but it’s hard to think about two sets of your heroes, one with a PVP health pool, one with a PVE health pool. Much mucho confusing methinks.

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        That's what I got. Post the ideas you saw and/or have. I think it helps to list some pros and cons of the ideas. It can't hurt to acknowledge the ways the different suggestions interact with the game positively and negatively. The devs aren't crazy people, they can look at suggestions and see things that we might not as players.