A Genuine Plea to Remove Health Packs From The Game

Unknown

How many people who have healers go into a battle with less than full health? Almost no one. Health Packs are then only used to revive the fallen. Some game developers have recognized this and hence removed the need for between combat healing all together since it's basically a chore required to play the game, and chores suck. Examples include Dragon Age: Origins, Final Fantasy XII, Assassin's Creed III, and others. So, why not have Heroes who survive a match be given full health, eliminating the need to go heal them before their next match?

As I understand it, the purpose of Health Packs, and their 36 minute regeneration cycle, is to limit the armchair warrior who plays all day all the time from achieving single handed dominance of an event. But isn't this also what MMR and Scaling are for? Limited Health Packs (as well as MMR and Scaling, but I digress) encourages players to actively NOT play the game. Your team out of commission? You are out of Health Packs? Oh well, game over. Features that limit gameplay are bad features.

Rarely do I encounter a situation where I don't have a Health Pack to revive a fallen hero anymore, you'd have to have 6 heroes downed inside of 4 hours to run out, but I have a max level healer and go into matches with full health strong heroes like Hulk, Thor, Captain America, and Punisher. The existence of Health Packs at all doesn't really benefit me, unless I royally screw up. Those without healers are punished for playing the game, as they must trade the health of their heroes for the rewards of a mission, and then rely solely on the regenerating health packs to keep their team thriving. They inevitably hit a wall and can not continue without purchasing Health Packs or waiting out the clock to get the Health Packs they need. This is an unfair advantage to players who have healers. Having all heroes heal to full between matches will correct this imbalance.

If the design intent is to slow the game down by limited access to Hit Point restoration, then the new slowing down will be downed heroes. With no Health Pack to revive them the new downtime is their time to get back up. This can vary between characters but I've never seen one be down for more than an hour to two hours. This would also encourage roster rotation, if a hero goes down one must rise to take his place if a player wants to continue in an event. It would also encourage more overall play and less last minute rubberbanding to the top play, because what if your required hero goes down in the last hours? Then you are stuck at a particularly bad score. All these things seem like things we should want to encourage.

If you want to leave Health Packs in, because they are a potential source of Hero Point expenditure, fine, I don't mind that, but consider fully healing any standing heroes at the end of each match. We do it anyway when we are capable, it would just eliminate the need to prologue heal, and get the 20 ISO for doing so, and remove the disadvantage to new players who don't have OBW maxed out. Health packs would then be for reviving downed characters only, which is all I currently use them for anyway.

tl:dr? - Heal all characters between fights because OBW does that anyway for those that have her.

Nonce Equitaur 2

I have Spiderman and OBW, but I don't heal everyone between matches.

When scaling is reasonable, I like taking one team and trying to clear all the nodes in an event without healing. I'll have tanks like BP, LT, and LazyCap, and they'll get hurt a lot, but often not enough to stop me. And when someone gets hurt too much, then I'll use a health pack.

The last hours of an event require time and health pack management. If half your battles are healing runs, then you aren't getting points fast enough. If you're using a healer on your team, then you're using a very, very common team that is easy to beat. I see dozens of Spidey+Punisher+ Required teams every day, and I've got my routines for defeating this common team perfected. It's the weird teams that sometimes give me trouble.

Unknown

Most PvP brackets that I have personally seen have the top 10 shielded with hours to go, and very little movement. This may not be universally true, but it's been generally true for me. Those competing down to the wire for the #1 spots make up a tiny tiny portion of the player base. Change is recommended for the larger player base.

Also PvE if you are not prologue healing between fights you are likely getting hammered due to scaling. It's a necessity for those parts of the game, at least I feel it is.

Unknown

Lerysh wrote:

Most PvP brackets that I have personally seen have the top 10 shielded with hours to go, and very little movement. This may not be universally true, but it's been generally true for me. Those competing down to the wire for the #1 spots make up a tiny tiny portion of the player base. Change is recommended for the larger player base.

Also PvE if you are not prologue healing between fights you are likely getting hammered due to scaling. It's a necessity for those parts of the game, at least I feel it is.

Actually, I think the exact opposite - I think prologue healing is one major factor in which players are getting hammered.

Unknown

If your characters always get healed to full, Hulk would be pretty overpowered for PvE. One of the dilemmas I run into is that sacrificing Hulk almost always gets you a win, but that costs you 1 health pack per fight just on Hulk, and you want to do better than that when pressed for time. Put it this way, if Hulk has 9000 HP and the average match 3 is 600 damage against level 395s, let's be conservative and say you get 10 Angers in the game. If you can't win with 10 Angers, you probably weren't winning the game anyway (note that the other two guys can still be whatever cheap guys you normally would use).

Unknown

It has been stated that prologue healing does not affect scaling elsewhere on the boards, which is why it's one of the only ways to compete once scaling kicks in.

Unknown

Completely agree about the health pack issue. Healing runs in prologue just feels like gaming the system to get around health pack usage. Having full HP teams for each new battle also means that spidey and obw are less used in pvp since healing back up is less of a priority. Would promote fight diversity. Spidey/obw still really good utility without needing them to heal up for PvP pushes.