PvE scaling with featured heroes

MarvelMan

@Phantron
Im thinking the people most likely to use prologue heal are thosee who dont really have a viable OBW/Spidey they would use in actual matches but are willing to spend the time in the (relative) safety of the prologue.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

Lyrian wrote:

In any event, Spidey's heal rebalance is going to be a very thorny point to balance. Too little adjustment and the status quo of healing in the prologue remains. Too much adjustment and the forum is going to erupt into Ragnapocolypse 2.0.

Im fearful of the over adjustment which eliminates prologue healing. If MPQ is similar to other games, and Ive seen stats that it is, where the whales are the source of income what happens if you kill the way a F2P player heals/extends play time? It would definitely scare away some players, possibly putting the community into decline.

As is there is a trade off of time for health, which seems fair to me. Im not sure how long a match in prologue to heal would take, maybe 5-6 min? Look at a LR, if you did that a couple times that is a HUGE disadvantage vs those players willing to drop cash on Health Packs. Again, seems fair to me. Could it be tweak? I spose, but only as long as it only adds a very minor amount of pain.

That's only LRs. When you talk about the longer events, there is definitely a significant advantage to be able to heal.

The whole concept of having a healer is stupid and seems to be there just because MPQ has numbers that looks like a RPG, even though it plays more like a fighting game. You don't ask how come there isn't a healer when you play Street Fighter because the whole system doesn't make much sense if you can heal. The competitive model of MPQ pretty much assumes you can't heal either, since health pack is both a limited source and, in theory, a major source of income for the developer (not sure how that's working out, but it's clearly intended to make them money). That's why there are some rather harsh penalties applied to healing in PvE scaling, and for a while we also see some rather ridiculous scaling in PvP that attempted to stomp out healing. When Ares or Thor is boosted 200%, it is equivalent of a massive healing nerf since everyone besides the featured character dies in one hit and gives you no chance to heal. Eventually they stopped doing that because that's a case where the cure turned out to be worse than the disease, but they're definitely trying to curtail healing and it'd be far easier if you simply cannot recover HPs. Heals can be changed to temporary HP or damage absorb and that wouldn't require changing how the character works on a fundamental level, but if you cannot recover HP permanently that'd eliminate a lot of the weird things they're putting in game to try to neutralize healing.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

@Phantron
Im thinking the people most likely to use prologue heal are thosee who dont really have a viable OBW/Spidey they would use in actual matches but are willing to spend the time in the (relative) safety of the prologue.

If you don't have a viable Spiderman then you might actually lose health fighting minions because if you can't reliably stun the other side you might actually take damage. OBW is even worse because you can't heal anything at all until you have blue at level 5 if you're using a 3Xgoons battle (chances of having no CD tiles is extremely low in such a battle). I guess you can technically fight something with a villian in it, but it's far trickier to get the tiles you need when the other side gets to move the board too. The solo Venom fight is probably the most ideal for healing, but that only works for characters to around level 40-50 or so because you simply kill Venom too fast otherwise when you're higher than that, and after that you start getting into risky situations (as in you might not actually gain any health) without a strong OBW/Spiderman.

MarvelMan

I wouldnt be opposed to that.

Right now the system penalizes those who arent willing to spend cash on health packs and those who dont have a 5B spidey yet are willing to (painfully) heal in the prologue. Elimination of healing addresses both of those inequalities

Unknown

For me P healing is usualy okay and I look at it as a different mini-game that is about keeping venom alive the longest. (like other PQ games are with different games and MPQ really lack that aspect).

It doesn't take really that much effort. And my spidey is only 3 in blue (so about equal to OBW output per blues), if he was 5 it would take time not even worth mention.

And I strictly refuse to buy health pack with wherever you play for it in game (guess HP), let alone real $.

Maybe it's contained pain for the reason I try not to get that much damaged in game -- and obviously heal up in the real arena whenever possible. In pvp it usually works fine by itself and the detour is small.

And when I get in serious trouble I most often just leave the game for an hour -- while I rest heroes get revived too, that happening is good indication I'm in no real shape to play in the first place.

Changing the prologue healer: IMO that is kinda pathetic and I doubt it will gain them any real $ while making many people to feel bad in the guts. The stock thing sucked bigtime so could be better left as is and bring the benefit for the "smart" ones to get better hooked and possibly spend on something else -- like roster. Guess they made the change the same time they disabled boost drops on the p. missions.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

As is there is a trade off of time for health, which seems fair to me. Im not sure how long a match in prologue to heal would take, maybe 5-6 min? Look at a LR, if you did that a couple times that is a HUGE disadvantage vs those players willing to drop cash on Health Packs. Again, seems fair to me. Could it be tweak? I spose, but only as long as it only adds a very minor amount of pain.

I could get fair positions in LR taking occasional detour to the healer alright. (It sux having over 5 health packs, makes you not use them, I could have saved a deal of effort if they were in regrowth range With some tanking as a fair team you must be able to make that run only consuming the base 5 packs that grow back. IMO those who spend a lot on health packs probably play recklessly or experimenting with way too much risk.

And a healing session is pretty fast -- after all you just need to pick up 9 yellow and whatever blue is there. To cure in the 1500 range the 22 and 25 venom missions are ideal, insignificant incoming damage (0 of tiles if you just make 1 spider shield), devour for 300 uninteresting. Fail rate below 1/3 and those are probably even faster. With characters like ares yo have shortcuts to exit killing any time.

Unknown

MarvelMan wrote:

I wouldnt be opposed to that.

Right now the system penalizes those who arent willing to spend cash on health packs and those who dont have a 5B spidey yet are willing to (painfully) heal in the prologue. Elimination of healing addresses both of those inequalities

I'm not too worried about P2W on health packs simply because if you're rich enough to heal at 50 HP a pop, you could just upgrade the covers outright and isn't the covers what we're fighting for in the first place? It you got to spend 1000 HP of health pack to win some cover, is that really saving anything? I'm going to assume a guy who can afford to do this isn't going to have problem winning his first cover and surely it's easier to just shell out 1250 HP than buying a bunch of health packs and still have no guaranteed you'll win?

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

OBW is even worse because you can't heal anything at all until you have blue at level 5 if you're using a 3Xgoons battle (chances of having no CD tiles is extremely low in such a battle). I guess you can technically fight something with a villian in it, but it's far trickier to get the tiles you need when the other side gets to move the board too.

The Venom moving the board is actually very helpful most of the time. I get blue supply twice as fast. Plus he packs out web tiles, you can count on like 2. If only one character is there to heal OBW and spiderman work fine together, if you can't et yellows you can still shoot just OBW. Blue-steal is a mixed bag for the extra damage.

Unknown

I do think any changes to healing should have changes to how characters recover after down. It should take no longer than 2 hours to go from 1 HP to max HP no matter how much you have (and possibly less if your character is very low). Something like 1H for down, 2H from 1HP to max (or even 1H) would be needed to keep the game's pace sensible. I assume they want you to have multiple high level characters, but when it takes 7 hours to heal up a guy, if your A-team gets knocked out it's generally better to use your last 3 health packs and then call it a day. If it took less time to recover naturally, it might actually make sense to put in the bench for a while.

Unknown

pasa_ wrote:

Phantron wrote:

OBW is even worse because you can't heal anything at all until you have blue at level 5 if you're using a 3Xgoons battle (chances of having no CD tiles is extremely low in such a battle). I guess you can technically fight something with a villian in it, but it's far trickier to get the tiles you need when the other side gets to move the board too.

The Venom moving the board is actually very helpful most of the time. I get blue supply twice as fast. Plus he packs out web tiles, you can count on like 2.

Venom's probably too weak for serious healing though? I know I used him a bunch early on, but I just don't see how his 1K health would be enough before I killed him with match 3s against level 85+ characters.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Venom's probably too weak for serious healing though? I know I used him a bunch early on, but I just don't see how his 1K health would be enough before I killed him with match 3s against level 85+ characters.

There is a full row of them, you select by the amount you're up. Sure 5k heal will take like 2 runs with the lvl40 one. I just currently discover that even the 2nd mission with the 15-ish is useful, LT and IM40 ws healed there for the next juggs go. (this spiderman-only)

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

I do think any changes to healing should have changes to how characters recover after down. It should take no longer than 2 hours to go from 1 HP to max HP no matter how much you have (and possibly less if your character is very low). Something like 1H for down, 2H from 1HP to max (or even 1H) would be needed to keep the game's pace sensible. I assume they want you to have multiple high level characters, but when it takes 7 hours to heal up a guy, if your A-team gets knocked out it's generally better to use your last 3 health packs and then call it a day. If it took less time to recover naturally, it might actually make sense to put in the bench for a while.

We noted too many times how ridiculous it is for Hulk to heal for 8-12 hours. It definitely should be a percentage rate. I'd also go with the 1-2 hours/full heal rate.

MarvelMan

Im not really worried about the P2W aspect of health packs myself (often I dont go all the way through mine before my time is up) but its just the cash grab at the expense of a player base that was unlikely to give any up that irked me, plus that they also seem to be penalizing people who go that route over those that just wait.

I really would like the percentage heal over the current hp/sec rate.

IceIX

Just want to say that while I don't have any particular comments to add to the discussion at the moment, the thread itself is putting up a lot of good opinions and conversation on the matter. Definitely useful stuff for us to pore over.

MarvelMan

Wow, way to ruin an off topic discussion thread Ice.

Oh, and thank you for the compliment as I assume you mean my comments....even though Im sure you dont.

Zifna

Cryptobrancus wrote:

It seems to me the devs look at whatever data they have available to determine how hard a given match was. Boosts are one thing they can look at but, win/loss and damage are the only things easily reduced to useful data

Obviously a loss = too hard.
A win but every character coming out badly injured = difficult but doable
A win with some damage = winnable, repeatable
A win with no damage = effortless, grindable, too easy

If every match you play looks like it was effortless then yes the scaling will ramp up the difficulty, that only makes sense. A fun game is not one that is win effortlessly repeat until your eyes bleed.

This certainly favors certain playstyles more than others though. Players who favor a stand-up duke-it-out fight will have easier scaling than players who prefer to play "control" to use a Magic the Gathering term. If these are what the developers are looking at, I suggest they consider some other metrics as well. For example:

- Lowest character health during the fight (rather than health at the end) - You might have a difficult fight where one of your characters almost dies, but then you get an ability off or a lucky cascade and manage to get enough mana to cast a heal or two before the end. Your characters are still at full health, but you came a hairsbreadth from total defeat

- Total enemy mana earned If you have a match where the enemy gained 40 mana of each color, it was probably a near thing and you got lucky with theft, heals, stuns, or enemy casting decisions

- Number of friendly/enemy matches made or abilities cast - If your battle lasted 100 turns and you cast 30 abilities, it probably wasn't easy or effortless, even if you managed to avoid coming out with much damage (example: flawlessly executed fight against L230 NPCs with a bunch of L30 characters)

Unknown

I'm trying to brainstorm about something.

If you take risks and try difficult battles you can be out of luck very quickly and have all your characters down and have to use healthpacks or take a break

Health packs can also be used when you are doing well but essentially want to 'keep going' to me these are very different uses of the same resource.

Would it make sense to have two separate resources one for recovering from disaster and one for keeping a team in fit shape?

Keep healthpacks as normal
Add in a new Crisis Kit which recovers slower than healthpacks but can only be used on the defeat screen and brings the whole team back up to full health.
Even if I only got one of those a day I would take on more challenges than I do normally and feel like there is a buffer from catastrophic cascades and other disasters.

Thoughts?

Unknown

I think a happy medium would be to tie someway pot regen rate to damage dealt to the opponent?
If you don't fight, they regen at the same rate, but if your doing a lotta damage, it restocks faster.
Perhaps tie it to damage taken as well to satisfy the control players.
That way its good enough that you won't need a healer in game for non competitive times but you still beget useful data as people attempt the fights even if they don't win as it counts to faster pot recharge up to 5.
Something along the lines of how path of exile potion usage is setup, your sustained literally by the blood of the enemy.
That way should all healers be removed/changed, the game speeds up but its still doable with the extra pots unless they play extra reckless. To prevent tank character abuses on high hp and boosted character tanking, use it as a % instead of flat numbers.
Would make the game faster paced without losing the advantage of saving health pack purchases when needed.