Controversial: No character should be able to heal teammates

Unknown

This is beyond stupid. Healing have drawbacks. You lose damager spot if you field OBW (and hopefully this will apply to SM soon). You lose very precious minutes near end of tourney if you go for free heals in prologue. It is up to you to CHOOSE. You're just want to take choice away just... because?

Unknown

rowaasr13 wrote:

This is beyond stupid. Healing have drawbacks. You lose damager spot if you field OBW (and hopefully this will apply to SM soon). You lose very precious minutes near end of tourney if you go for free heals in prologue. It is up to you to CHOOSE. You're just want to take choice away just... because?

Don't just think about healing within a given fight. The OP is also talking about overall playstyle. B/c damage persists across fights, there's an artificial limit on how much you can play, unless you burn health packs and ultimately burn HP (and thus real money) to get more of them.

I got 3 attempts on the 3x230 nodes this morning and that's all I got to play before my A-team was dead and buried. Now I'm playing Ascension and FF:Tactics on my phone instead of playing MPQ - that's the problem that needs alleviated. I want to play MPQ and can't. I have no objections to spending real money but the return on investment is pretty terrible in this setup.

Gone are the days when you can attempt a boss fight until you win. Now it's attempt it and then wait 90 minutes to get 3 health packs and then try again.

NotYou13

There was a pretty good solution mentioned in here earlier in the thread. Make it so that downed heroes can only be revived with health packs, but make all non-lethal damage be healed automatically at the end of each match. That makes healing an in-match defensive ability only instead of it being a grind enhancer. It would increase diversity by not requiring the healers, but those who like the defensive play style (like myself) can still use them to full effect.

Edit: Reading more of the thread shows others agree with this as well.

Unknown

Right now you can go heal with above mentioned OBW in prologue and continue playing. Instead of increasing of means to trade your effort for playing time (i.e. adding more healers or way to heal through actual game activity) OP suggest to throw healing away and force everyone to stop playing. There's zero positive logic in that.

Unknown

I'm pretty sure that auto-healing will just promote usage of chars like Ares/Hulk who can decimate enemy team way faster that their own drawbacks kill them.

Unknown

Removing healing would have bad results for game, furtheron I do not think OBW healing is unbalanced. Spiderman Healing is unbalanced, but that is somewhat 2 ap cost of blue which wont survive balancing I bet. OBW heal is about 1200 at best and can be halved or prevented depending on how much you got in blue by single countdown tile.

Now negative effects of healing:
1. Slows game down, especially the way defense and retaliations are done.
2. Makes game a lot more pay to win.
3. Second point is further increased by +all colors cost gold. I would say healing is what keeps effect of this down currently.
4. Risk of many people quitting due to point 1 including medium money spenders due to unable to keep playing.
5. Points 2-4 lead can lead to even some whales and another subset of people to leave due to game crossing their threshold of acceptable pay to win presence.
6. Some money spenders wont leave, but they also wont spend anymore.
7. Rare gameplay wont help to keep players interested in game.

Unknown

rowaasr13 wrote:

This is beyond stupid. Healing have drawbacks. You lose damager spot if you field OBW (and hopefully this will apply to SM soon). You lose very precious minutes near end of tourney if you go for free heals in prologue. It is up to you to CHOOSE. You're just want to take choice away just... because?

So true.

I'd also like to comment that the Simulation PvE is doing an exceptional job of promoting diversification. I find myself using character combinations I normally would not use to combat particular situations. Feels more like.. a puzzle I've been taking Spidey on fewer and fewer missions, not only because I'm being forced, but because it didn't make sense against my current opponent. This has actually helped me realize the potential of certain lineups I normally would not have attempted because I had gotten so used to fielding "the A Team". Consequently, I've been using some of the new combos in other events to great success. I still use my healers, yes, but at least from me, you'll be seeing less of spidey. If thats the same for anyone else, seems like a move in the right direction.

Education and incentive is the best way to change behavior, not by hitting people over the head with a stick.

Unknown

This thread has been a rather fascinating study in people who read thread titles then click reply.

Nonce Equitaur 2

NotYou13 wrote:

There was a pretty good solution mentioned in here earlier in the thread. Make it so that downed heroes can only be revived with health packs, but make all non-lethal damage be healed automatically at the end of each match. That makes healing an in-match defensive ability only instead of it being a grind enhancer. It would increase diversity by not requiring the healers, but those who like the defensive play style (like myself) can still use them to full effect.

This won't work, due to the following strategy:
1. Enter and look at the board. Is there a favorable board of colors, and a good cascade? If so, take the cascade.
2. If the board of tiles is lousy, retreat. All characters fully healed!
3. If the battle ever turns, retreat.

It won't work. The correct solution is to keep the current system, but to speed up healing times.

Unknown

abuelo wrote:

This thread has been a rather fascinating study in people who read thread titles then click reply.

Did you ever play the game "Telephone" as a kid? The internet is like that, only worse.

Unknown

One of the main problems in the game right now is that a lot of the characters are repetitive. In order for the game to actually be interesting, there have to be a variety of available abilities. Removing healing from the option pool only makes the game less exciting. Spidey is already likely to lose the efficacy of his stun--which is a bummer; he's too powerful, but stun-lock is a strategy and any time you lose a strategy the game is less rich. Similarly, Magneto is going to lose his crafty AP generating blue power--it's also a bit too strong, but it allows for the kind of interesting play that makes a Puzzlequest game more compelling than Bejeweled.

Anyway, no removing any abilities. If healing narrows the option pool, that just means we need more healers and more options. (I think the OP or an early poster said more or less this same thing regarding more healers. It was correct.)

Unknown

abuelo wrote:

This thread has been a rather fascinating study in people who read thread titles then click reply.

I'm not sure what you are getting at with that comment. I think the points you made have been addressed and people have since moved on or advanced the discussion.

Unknown

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

NotYou13 wrote:

There was a pretty good solution mentioned in here earlier in the thread. Make it so that downed heroes can only be revived with health packs, but make all non-lethal damage be healed automatically at the end of each match. That makes healing an in-match defensive ability only instead of it being a grind enhancer. It would increase diversity by not requiring the healers, but those who like the defensive play style (like myself) can still use them to full effect.

This won't work, due to the following strategy:
1. Enter and look at the board. Is there a favorable board of colors, and a good cascade? If so, take the cascade.
2. If the board of tiles is lousy, retreat. All characters fully healed!
3. If the battle ever turns, retreat.

It won't work. The correct solution is to keep the current system, but to speed up healing times.

You forgot "4. Lose 25 tournament points." Admittedly, not true for PVE, but people can do that now and just heal in the prologue if they're willing to go that tedious.

Unknown

Ben Grimm wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

NotYou13 wrote:

There was a pretty good solution mentioned in here earlier in the thread. Make it so that downed heroes can only be revived with health packs, but make all non-lethal damage be healed automatically at the end of each match. That makes healing an in-match defensive ability only instead of it being a grind enhancer. It would increase diversity by not requiring the healers, but those who like the defensive play style (like myself) can still use them to full effect.

This won't work, due to the following strategy:
1. Enter and look at the board. Is there a favorable board of colors, and a good cascade? If so, take the cascade.
2. If the board of tiles is lousy, retreat. All characters fully healed!
3. If the battle ever turns, retreat.

It won't work. The correct solution is to keep the current system, but to speed up healing times.

You forgot "4. Lose 25 tournament points." Admittedly, not true for PVE, but people can do that now and just heal in the prologue if they're willing to go that tedious.

Honestly, in the scenario named above, I'd be ok with "Retreat" being renamed "Concede" and have it auto-down my characters. It's rare to retreat and still find those characters in a usable position - you're really just trying to shave down healing time.

Phaserhawk

I've talked about this before as well, the healing mechanic isn't the problem, its the lack of good characters, the difficulty of obtaining higher characters, as well as the ammount of time to level up characters.

You use heal to preserve your team and save health packs (health packs by the way should allow you to save packs that you find seperate from the 5 built in) because you only have 1 maybe 2 lineups and multiple events. Look at the 2* characters. Only 4 are solidly playable, Ares, Thor, Wolverine, OBW and possibly Storm for 5, the rest suck. So If you only have 4 1/2 decent characters with no 3*, yeah you are going to be abusing OBW heal because you have no other team. Even 3* teams need spidey because due to matchmaking, they are in a higher tier, and they too have a limited lineup due to the time, effort, and money or all three to level up a team, so they use Spidey. yes spidey is broken, but that is beside the point, the issue isn't the healing, if you had 3 good lines, you could afford to mix and match instead of always having Spidey or OBW, that's why Wolvie was so used as well, characters aren't OP just because the others are ****. If you are playing a game of War and take out A-8, you can't say 7 is OP just because it is better than 2-6, it's because you have nothing better than 7. 7 by itself is an average card, half are better half are worse, but when you limit the access to better cards, and you don't increase the number of 7's in the deck. the 7 card looks overpowered, when in fact it's balanced, it's everything else is out of whack. That's where OBW, Thor, Wolvie, Ares fall, they aren't OP, they are good average balanced cards it's the fact that the rest of the characters are either too hard to get, or the other cards are ****, fix the power problem before fixing the ability probelm

NotYou13

Riggy wrote:

Ben Grimm wrote:

Nonce Equitaur 2 wrote:

NotYou13 wrote:

There was a pretty good solution mentioned in here earlier in the thread. Make it so that downed heroes can only be revived with health packs, but make all non-lethal damage be healed automatically at the end of each match. That makes healing an in-match defensive ability only instead of it being a grind enhancer. It would increase diversity by not requiring the healers, but those who like the defensive play style (like myself) can still use them to full effect.

This won't work, due to the following strategy:
1. Enter and look at the board. Is there a favorable board of colors, and a good cascade? If so, take the cascade.
2. If the board of tiles is lousy, retreat. All characters fully healed!
3. If the battle ever turns, retreat.

It won't work. The correct solution is to keep the current system, but to speed up healing times.

You forgot "4. Lose 25 tournament points." Admittedly, not true for PVE, but people can do that now and just heal in the prologue if they're willing to go that tedious.

Honestly, in the scenario named above, I'd be ok with "Retreat" being renamed "Concede" and have it auto-down my characters. It's rare to retreat and still find those characters in a usable position - you're really just trying to shave down healing time.

There are ways to do it to severely penalize retreating, using either Ben or Riggy's suggestions or a combination thereof. Personally, I like the idea of retreating downing at least one character if not all three AND a big point loss. That immediately blocks the strategy of retreating for a more favorable match.

Unknown

I mean if Spidey and Obw did not having healing powers . . . what else do you guys think they should be replaced with? Obw already has stun and guns in other versions of her. And I don't really see spidey as a character that should damage others.

Unknown

I don't get how people say they want to play more when you see a ton of fatigue in PvE events from grinding the same missions over and over. It's precisely because you can heal that you have these ridiculous level 230X3 battles that you have to do 5 times each because otherwise there's no way to create any kind of separation.

If being able to grind less reduces the amount of iso8 you can get, that can be adjusted game-wide. If you can only play half as much then it would be reasonable to have iso8 be more available to reflect that. D3 monitors the iso8 gain and they're the ones who gets to decide what's an approprpiate rate of iso8 gain anyway, so it's not like whether you have healers or not matter there. They can obviously just reduce PvP match to 20 iso per win too if they don't want you to get so much iso, irrespective of whatever view they may have on healing itself.

Looking at my PvE scores I'm generally ahead of the pack even compared to the forum, and even I am getting a bit tired of events like Heroic Oscorp or Simulator Basics, and I certainly see many of you complaining about they're too grindy (which is totally valid). But they're necessarily that grindy because you can heal. PvP is even worse because players don't have access to level 230 guys that can randomly kill you or your team in one move so that you might actually have to give up. Devil Dino, Bagman, and Punisher is a far more powerful team than any PvP team you'll ever face (and remember Bagman means you don't have Spiderman), so I don't get if people are already tired of grinding in Simulator why they wouldn't get tired of doing the same thing in PvP, which is only worse.

Getting rid of healing will greatly cut down the amount of unnecessary grinding, and by the way, you really don't think D3 knows this? Why do you think Devil Dino shows up with Bagman as a team? It's so that you can't heal! Why does PvP tournament tend to feature a guy doing way too much damage after his character boost? Because you can't heal a guy who is down. They're already aware of this issue and that's why the featured character generally can kill anybody besides himself in one hit, so you have no chance of healing.

over_clocked

Phantron, many 1 star rosters that are doing well in Simulator atm have no access to healers as I understand it. Barring Venom missions.
I have two awesome healers and I am not doing spectacularly, healing only helps me to play the events that I want to play, and not even with 100% guarantee.
It seems to me you are implying that weaker rosters should not have a chance of fun and placing reasonably well because they don't have extreme damagers/health mountains that are Hulk, GSBW, classic Magneto or Patch, etc.
If you suggest removing healing, you might cripple way more of the fanbase than you think. Like some have already said, people would simply quit the game if denied the possibility of playing exactly when they want, for as much time as they want. Maybe the levels 230 are an unfortunate consequence of having healers, I wouldn't be so sure, but without them the game would be simply unplayable in its current condition.
Anyone can have an extremely bad board 3 times in a row, where's the player's fault in that? A player doesn't have 20+ awesome leveled heroes to play interchangeably? That sucks for them, how dare they use healers and try again?

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I don't get how people say they want to play more when you see a ton of fatigue in PvE events from grinding the same missions over and over. It's precisely because you can heal that you have these ridiculous level 230X3 battles that you have to do 5 times each because otherwise there's no way to create any kind of separation.

If being able to grind less reduces the amount of iso8 you can get, that can be adjusted game-wide. If you can only play half as much then it would be reasonable to have iso8 be more available to reflect that. D3 monitors the iso8 gain and they're the ones who gets to decide what's an approprpiate rate of iso8 gain anyway, so it's not like whether you have healers or not matter there. They can obviously just reduce PvP match to 20 iso per win too if they don't want you to get so much iso, irrespective of whatever view they may have on healing itself.

Looking at my PvE scores I'm generally ahead of the pack even compared to the forum, and even I am getting a bit tired of events like Heroic Oscorp or Simulator Basics, and I certainly see many of you complaining about they're too grindy (which is totally valid). But they're necessarily that grindy because you can heal. PvP is even worse because players don't have access to level 230 guys that can randomly kill you or your team in one move so that you might actually have to give up. Devil Dino, Bagman, and Punisher is a far more powerful team than any PvP team you'll ever face (and remember Bagman means you don't have Spiderman), so I don't get if people are already tired of grinding in Simulator why they wouldn't get tired of doing the same thing in PvP, which is only worse.

Getting rid of healing will greatly cut down the amount of unnecessary grinding, and by the way, you really don't think D3 knows this? Why do you think Devil Dino shows up with Bagman as a team? It's so that you can't heal! Why does PvP tournament tend to feature a guy doing way too much damage after his character boost? Because you can't heal a guy who is down. They're already aware of this issue and that's why the featured character generally can kill anybody besides himself in one hit, so you have no chance of healing.

Right character, wrong ability. 2 AP stun is what makes spidey shine against 230 enemies.