Controversial: No character should be able to heal teammates

Unknown

Moral wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

I've said many times that the current healing times are too long.

Currently, it takes a high-level Hulk over 8 hours to heal. A low-level Hawkeye will heal in minutes. This defies even comic book reality.

Above a certain level, character healing is so bad that the healthpacks are the only option if you want to use a character multiple times. If the max healing time for any character was an hour, and the max healing time for regenerators (Daken, Wolverine) was 20 minutes, the the healers (Spiderman, OBW) would be less mandatory than they are now. Anyone still wanting to churn through a lot of battles quickly would need to rely on healthpacks/healers, but more casual players wouldn't need them.

With natural healing fixed, Spiderman/OBW would stop dominating the game.

Ever try to heal Hulk with Spider Man after Magnetic Translocation?

Because Spider Man is so OP, he can heal 2k damage with no hands

He can heal the Hulk to full with 18 blue and 18 yellow.

How broken is that?

I'd rather buy a heal pack

Unknown

OK lets think about this. IF no character can heal it's teammates then characters who can self heal become more common. We'd be seeing more of Patch, Astonishing Wolvie and Daken with other characters hiding behind them. Ares usage would fall as I'm sure I'm not the only one who loves Sunder. Characters that can reliably stun would also surge in usefulness (more so than already). We'd see more characters with AoE attacks used in PvP as a deterrent, if you are absolutely limited by health packs, making a push for points means every single health matters much more and taking one molotov here or raging tempest there may be the difference between winning and losing the next match.

I will say that aoe healing is critical for long game periods with the current set up. If it's something that stays (and I think it will) I would love at least one more character of each star level (let the 1*s have some love too) just to add some more diversity.

Unknown

Personally I think:

health packs should only bring back tko characters.

At the end of matches everyone is healed to 100%.

If you leave a match early then those 3 characters are tko.

This way, the healing is only useful in the matches for the matches...as it was suppose to be. Players can still play extended amounts of time as you heal after each match unless you get tko-ed. Leaving still tko's you so you cannot try to avoid losing for a free heal meaning healthpacks still have a purpose and will get used. Honestly..I was a little surprised the game didn't function like this in the first place.

Unknown

No more nerf threads, they always over do it when they nerf. Spidey's healing is in no way OP, to get it off and be worth while you need a lot of matches and named characters aren't going to just let you have your way with them. OBW is balanced by the fact that she is really squishy. For me, I think they need to boost the weaker characters that no one plays but that's the only change I want to see character wise.

I like the alternative that there is some sort of healing, maybe not every match but every few matches would be ok, maybe it could be tied to the new streak system they are going to implement. Granted right now, Spidey and OBW are on just about every team but because they want matches to be longer, they are pretty much necessary. I don't want to spend a longer time playing matches when after I'm done I can't play anymore.

Unknown

So far as PvP is concerned, no healing is definitely better because PvP is relative. If you can play more so can your opponents and it inherently cancels itself out. The only advantage is if you happen to have a healer and someone else does not. Yes you'd most likely be out after 5 matches, but so are your opponents. It'd look a lot like Nefarious Foes where people settle in their ranks relatively quickly and just stop grinding because it's too hard to get a significant advantage by grinding without healers.

Even when you're talking about self healing ability, see the nerf to Wolverine 2*'s regeneration. The only character whose healing sort of make sense is Patch because one of his skill pretty much negates his own healing (nobody lives long after Berserker Rage is on the board) and the jury is still out on how that will work out after Spiderman's nerfed (currently the #1 counter to any strong one character in the game).

Now for PvE, the currently model is not sustainable without healers. That said, if you can't heal anybody, they'd probably just make the progression rewards take less to reach, at least you'd hope that's what will be happening.

Also in a world without healers, extremely strong defensive ability like IW or even Captain America may become more valuable, but it'd never be overpowered because you still can't recover all the HPs you lost prior to a Force Bubble is on the board.

Right now the game would benefit by everyone playing less, not more. If you've a competitive bracket, especially in PvP, you know that unless you started playing at 3am, all the grinding you do is just canceled out by another guy (or 5) grinding just as hard as you, but you have to do that to keep up. It'd be good for everyone if everyone has to grind less. This would also further increase the value of defense, as now if your defense can cripple the attacker, this may seriously hamper their ability to attack you in the future even if you don't win. Suppose my team kills one of your guys and drops 2 of them to 30%, you might as well be down 3 guys if there are no healing abilities in the game, and that'd definitely slow you down while I try to make progress.

Unknown

I agree with OP.

It may not be a broken mechanic, but it's a boring one imo.

The problem is that healing doesn't really provide in-battle usage. It's an out-of-battle ability which is basically a free health pack. It sounds crazy, but think about it. You rarely use it to actually win a match, you use it to play more matches thereafter the match you actually heal in. Often in dummy matches which allows 24/7 grinding.

Unknown

Chimaera wrote:

Made this comment in a few threads recently but yes. The game promotes and rewards grinding. It is also limited by health packs and heal over time mechanics. There are only two healers, once you gain access to these healers you can play almost indefinitely, which makes them required. Healing is the single worst offender for diverse rosters.

What would change the game dynamics significantly would be to remove health packs and have your team healed automatically after each fight. Skipping would not be a problem nearly as much, most people skip to avoid fights you cannot win or hope to win without taking heavy losses. Don't mention skipping for retaliation / points win/loss that's a wash. But the game can become a different beast.

A different thing that could happen is keep health packs, but they only revive downed characters, name them revives or whatever. Damaged characters are healed after the fight. This would add some liability in losing characters during a match and allow some limitations on play if that is a desired game mechanic.

I know a couple people like the damage stays mechanic, I do not think I am one of them.

At the bare minimum they need to change (heal 1 health every second) to like (heal 1-3% health every second) or something along those lines. Ares is down + the time to regen, that's basically 8 hours. If you play on your phone you can health pack that when it regenerates. Steam players need to be at their computer to do that.

I like the health pack idea here.
No healers in the game.
Covers heal to 100% after a match.
Down characters need revived.

If you lose 1 cover during a match you can either
A- Keep playing at an attempt for victory while risking loss of your remaining covers.
B- Retreat and take a loss to ensure your future survival.

Thus kind of adds a new strategy aspect. It would also make their selection of "5" health packs be a more suitable / reasonable number to me. If they took away my heal completely and left me at just 5 health packs, I would quit.
I've been here since almost day 1 and stuck through a lot of stuff but if I couldn't have my 2-3 hour play sessions without paying i definitely would not play. I would lose interest by day 2.

Unknown

ihearthawthats wrote:

I agree with OP.

It may not be a broken mechanic, but it's a boring one imo.

The problem is that healing doesn't really provide in-battle usage. It's an out-of-battle ability which is basically a free health pack. It sounds crazy, but think about it. You rarely use it to actually win a match, you use it to play more matches thereafter the match you actually heal in. Often in dummy matches which allows 24/7 grinding.

I see a lot of good logic here. I use healers in my roster for longevity. I can typically win without them and just heal before final blow.

Eddiemon

I think healing is great. I love its current implementation. It's like strike tiles, or damage over time, or AoE damage, or AP generation or AP steal or board control or having massive single target DPS or having large HP pools or defense tiles.

I want all of them on every team and I can't have them all so I have to make compromises.

Is healing more powerful than the rest of my list? I would say not. Especially not on defense, where the computer player doesn't have a plan. In PvE against mooks healing is useless if you do it right.

In PvP healing slows you down. OBW is good because her espionage is doing unintended double strike tile damage. I don't know if/when they intend to fix that. But take that away from her and she slows her teams down. You're better stacking a team with AP generation and damage for quicker wins, then substituting in a healer when required.

Spidey is great in PvE for his stuns. A lot of the 230 mobs have close to 1 hit kill abilities for anyone not green and Hulklike in appearance. Healing ain't fixing that. It's nice that you can use his heal to top up damage at the end, and it speeds up your playing ability, but it isn't what dominates the match.

If you took half the characters and gave them heals you a) reduce the damage output capacity of those characters and b) increase the amount of damage you need to do per fight because everyone is healing. This just draws out fights and doesn;t improve the game. If you take healing away entirely so I am waiting on regen or buying health packs then I quit. I'm happy to give money to teh game because it is a good product, but as soon as extortion appears I am done.

DirigiblePilot

Maggotbreath wrote:

Moral wrote:

Health packs do what healing abilities don't:

Bring the dead back to life!

(Really need a zombie face)

We really need Marvel Zombies.

Frankencastle.

Unknown

Healing adds literally no strategy to the game right now.

Spiderman can only heal for meaningful amount with a large number of web tiles on the board, which implies the enemy is already stun locked and thus the game is over.

OBW's heals are nowhere strong enough to be used in mid battle. If your goal is to actively match blue to keep up with damage, you'll find yourself dying very horribly. Her heal is usually incidental, either from cascades or Aggressive Recon. To illustrate, imagine you're making 3 blue matches, and the enemy is making 3 black matches with The Hood for Intimidation (which does 1186 damage). Since OBW is making those 3 matches, she's also taking all the damage. You'd deal (135+112) * 3 = 741 damage, and heal yourself for about 1200 damage. The Hood will deal 156*3 = 468 + 1186, and assuming you heal exactly after Intimidation, you'd have taken 468+ 1186 - 1200 = 454 damage while dealing 741. This puts you in ahead by a very small margin and I had to look pretty hard to find an attack as bad as Intimidation to make the math work. In reality if they're getting any color that's actually useful you'd be way behind. Even if you could magically spread the damage to all 3 of your guys (even though OBW has to be one matching blue usually), this doesn't get around the fact that a 9 AP attack is starting to get into the range of doing irreversible harm to someone. Anyway, the point is you don't use OBW as a healer. Without Aggressive Recon to prevent enemies from using their moves at all, you'll get trashed rather easily in a straight up HP exchange. Since Aggressive Recon happens to get you the tiles you need for heal anyway, you can then heal after Aggressive Recon has neutralized the threat, but it's Aggressive Recon that's doing the heavy lifting here, not Anti-Grav device.

wirius

OP, you're completely correct. Notice that no one is actually countering your points. They're saying,

"Its fun for ME because I get to play more."

If the problem is that people aren't getting to play enough, then they can fix this by adding more base health packs in the game, or other methods that spread healing around evenly.

You're right, the ability to heal other champs is gameplay which discourages the model they obviously intended for other champs, crowding out the pool of usable characters too much.

Unknown

wirius wrote:

OP, you're completely correct. Notice that no one is actually countering your points. They're saying,

"Its fun for ME because I get to play more."

If the problem is that people aren't getting to play enough, then they can fix this by adding more base health packs in the game, or other methods that spread healing around evenly.

You're right, the ability to heal other champs is gameplay which discourages the model they obviously intended for other champs, crowding out the pool of usable characters too much.

Except you playing more means your opponent is also playing more and then you end up with these endless grinds that everyone complains about.

People need to realize that this game is inherently competitive. Just because they don't send you a video of how your guys were abused by Spiderman doesn't mean it didn't happen. At any rate looking at the general complaints about grinding, peopel clearly don't actually want to play more. They only want to play more if it'll give them an advantage, which is why they think having a healer is useful. Unfortunately, the zombie pack also have their healers too, and in fact that's part of the reason why you can never escape from the zombie pack. If the zombies can't heal, they might be forced to give up at some point if your team is actually significantly stronger. Right now, because everyone has healers, there's really not much for the zombie to fear you. Even if your team is twice as strong as someone else, who cares as long as you're worth twice the points? The fight might take longer, but having a low chance of being retaliated (high point guys rarely retaliate against low point guys) is still an overwhelming advantage.

nihilium

Problem that I see is:
We nerf high dmg chars because they have high dmg
We nerf awesome stun chars becaus ethey have awesome stun
We nerf healing chars because they have healing...
And lets also nerf AP stealing chars because they steal AP (its like AP boosts, right?)

Imagine this was a RPG (because some ppl just play more PvE than PvP), than we all would run around with a barbarian with a big stick.
Im all for game balance, but when u start to balance EVERYTHING u end up with all characters doing exactly the same and its just BORING.

Because how are ppl supposed to get some variation into their teams if there is no variation left?

... there will always be some kind of character with an especially usefull ability and imho as long as everyone can have them (like OBW.. her covers were pretty much given away for free for a while) I dont think its actually that wrong.
Whats wrong if the pool of usefull characters is narrowed down to 2-3 that just everyone uses all the time.

Imho we dont need to pick out the last some well-used character and point fingers, but throw out SOME MORE usefull 2stars.
What do u think happens if there are characters more usefull than OBW?
And how about some point bonuses for playing PvP matches back to back without waiting too long or doing other matches?
That would be more fun than too shoot down any more chars..

But yeah, lets nerf spidey first, but hes on the list anyway...

over_clocked

I was actually outraged/shocked, when after first play in MPQ I noticed that characters don't have full health and aren't revived immediately after a fight. Felt wrong after original PQ.
I want to play the game at any given time and I don't mind the idea of characters being healed right away unless they had been killed. I'm a ninja master of not letting my guys die (will attach a screenshot later). I used to heal with cHawkeye in City back when I had a 1 star roster only and was interested only in Prologue. I am healing now with both oBW and Spidey, I will be healing with them forever, even if you whiners nerf them to oblivion but let them keep any healing abilities but don't do something to the ridiculous 5 healthpacks limit/ridiculously slow natural healing. Not because I am the most competitive grinder out of them all, that's untrue, but because I. LIKE. TO. PLAY. A. LOT.
503 hours on record on Steam, not counting the casual hours on Android. Since mid December '13. Addict much? Yes.

But the problems with PvP mainly come from the broken matchmaking, not from healing characters, period.

edit:
not letting your squishiness reduce your playtime

Unknown

Healing is fine as a mechanic, Its normal to have it in every RPG and lo n behold almost in every RPG it's considered a powerful mechanic, which it is. That being said, Yes both the current healers need a bit of their healing powers reduced (number wise) but not to the point where its not useful anymore.

Once later on we get more diverse effects like maybe poison/daze/blind or burn which could reduce any kind of healing done to said characters by 50% then we can stop complaining about how broken heal is.

I'm still waiting on more interesting characters to show up rather than have our 6th wolverine or 5th Black widow (Seriously enough with the variations of same characters) Get us Phoenix/Cyclops/Human torch/Green goblin please.

Unknown

Bugpop wrote:

In all seriousness, I think it would be cool to have a Shield Agent fill a position in the lineup, give free AP, and throw down heal timers.

Shield Agents giving free AP like the villain goons would be ba-roken. Fun, though!

Unknown

Zhirrzh wrote:

Bugpop wrote:

In all seriousness, I think it would be cool to have a Shield Agent fill a position in the lineup, give free AP, and throw down heal timers.

Shield Agents giving free AP like the villain goons would be ba-roken. Fun, though!

I've often wanted followers in this game much like the first incarnation of PQ. They offered little boosts that gave some flavor and weren't tied to a specific character. I'd love to have a couple of Agents following me around that I could swap out to help shore up deficiencies in my heroes.

On topic, I burned my roster down last night before bed and was still waiting for IM40's 8+ hour healing to finish when I woke up. That's not exactly fun - to have to wake up and still burn a health pack in order to start the day with full health (not that it mattered, some unlucky cascades crushed him again in his first battle of the morning). So while it's dead boring to have to use healers all the time, I would hate to see team healing removed from the game b/c then I wouldn't be able to play as much as I want. Personally I liked the suggestion that teams heal up in b/w fights, or at least get some healing for a victory. If downed heroes didn't heal at the end of a fight, and health packs were only used to revive downed heroes, then that would be a sufficient penalty for losing.

As a slight tangent, the trick to free-to-play games is to create good will b/w the player and the developer, making them want to give you money. The problem with MPQ as a free-to-play is that it is very one-dimensional - it lacks the other things you could do in the original PQ. When I got tired of quest nodes, I'd go and create ever-more-elaborate items to craft. Or research spells from the plethora of monsters I ended up capturing. Or train a random mount. There were alternative gameplay styles with alternative objectives that - if they were present in MPQ - could provide alternative pay-points for the developer to earn money. As it is, I'm done spending money on this game not b/c I don't want to support the devs but b/c I've bought everything I need (i.e. roster slots).

If healing in the game exists to provide an opportunity for a pay point (e.g. health packs), then that's piss-poor game design. Try adding hideouts that can be customized and tweaked. With the addition of guilds, guild headquarters becomes a huge buy-in opportunity. The ability to purchase followers and level them up would be a huge windfall. There are many other places in the game where money can be made if they simply broaden the gameplay a bit.

user311

I like the ability to have someone as a healer - but I don't understand why that person has to be Spiderman and OBW. I would think that there could be other things they could do for their teammates like a motivation factor or something.

Unknown

I agree with the OP's assessment that only having 2 healers reduces diversification, however, I can't say I agree with the solution.

To be plain, I like having a healer. It let's me play longer and enjoy the game more. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that is case for most people too. Taking this away doesn't really solve anything. You'll have more diversified rosters, yes, but you'll have less people playing for shorter amounts of time. As it is, Demiurge likely makes a killing on health packs. However, I suspect their primary income comes from other expenditures. They WANT people to play more and longer. Who is going to grind out the ISO for a 141 character when they can only play in 30 minute spurts? I believe its those people that play for long periods and strive for the big rewards that the make their money off of. Demiurge has made their fair share of money off of me, don't doubt it.

I know if I was forced to play less due to health limitations, it wouldn't make me buy more health packs. The result would be me playing less, and consequently begin losing interest. This game banks on progression junkies -- if you stymie that mechanic, people start losing interest, play less, and spend less money. Bad for everyone.

People who have invested a great deal of time and effort are more likely to buy HP for things like Shields and Tokens -- if you try to shift the demand to health packs (time), you will lose momentum and that all-important gambler/OCD demographic.

Whatever the case, although this is a game to us, it's a business to Demiurge. They undoubtedly have a skilled team devoted to analyzing these metrics in order to maximize gains. If people who are over-using their healers (and there are a lot of us) were cutting into their bottom line, these changes would have long since happened.

I think the best solution for diversification would be to introduce additional characters with the ability. Not necessarily better or worse healers, but simply alternatives.

Chimaera wrote:

A different thing that could happen is keep health packs, but they only revive downed characters, name them revives or whatever. Damaged characters are healed after the fight. This would add some liability in losing characters during a match and allow some limitations on play if that is a desired game mechanic.

This. Very good idea!