Thoughts on the Upcoming End of Story Healing

HailMary

Narkon wrote:

If this change happens we will enter an era where Patch and heroes that create Protect tiles will be on every team. We will just move from OBW teams to Patch/C.Mags teams.

We're already in the Patch + CMags era. That pair already dominates the 3* landscape, and OBW use is negligible among solidly 3* players. Further, pretty much no one who uses CMags uses his blue for its Protect ability.

Narkon wrote:

Drop the price of Mother Load to $30 and increase the ISO it gives to be enough to fully level a 3*. I bet the next day the sales will spike. If they expect players to pay more than $30 for a fully maxed hero, they are out of their minds.

They don't expect you to simply drop cash to fully max a hero from scratch. If that were the case, they'd let you buy the first cover of a color outright. I, for one, am glad they're not gleefully diving headlong into the P2W abyss.

Spaminal wrote:

Or they could I don't know, make it a level field for everyone and have your team at full health after each battle anyway. There is no real point to the perma damage bull ****. It literally has no effect on people who have been playing for an extended time. It only hurts newer players or those missing a character or two. The health pack system is stupid because nothing is worse than running out of health packs and not being able to play for a few hours no matter the circumstances. Such a great feature to get people to "STOP" playing your game for an hour to let their roster regen.

As a person "who has been playing for an extended time," the perma-damage mechanic has quite an effect. I win probably 99% of my PVP fights. Once I got a couple of L141s, I'm pretty sure I've lost less than 4 fights, total, that I entered using full-health characters. Right now, perma-damage is the sole limitation on how long I can extend a single PVP push. If they remove perma-damage, I could melt faces in PVP literally endlessly.

Removing perma-damage would make PVPs literally nothing more than a competition about who can grind more.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Removing perma-damage would make PVPs literally nothing more than a competition about who can grind more.

I can't follow this, what is the break in the current system against that? You say losing a game is rare as hell. Winning without downed chr is not too much harder. You can heal in prologue so get back to full health. (the few downs you have by accident can be covered by the available regenerating packs).

So you *can* grind endlessly. By your logic we already in that situation.

(Also, by the conclusion time you conveniently forgot about a precondition you started with and made a general assertion.)

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

As a person "who has been playing for an extended time," the perma-damage mechanic has quite an effect. I win probably 99% of my PVP fights. Once I got a couple of L141s, I'm pretty sure I've lost less than 4 fights, total, that I entered using full-health characters. Right now, perma-damage is the sole limitation on how long I can extend a single PVP push. If they remove perma-damage, I could melt faces in PVP literally endlessly.

Removing perma-damage would make PVPs literally nothing more than a competition about who can grind more.

I always wonder how much time people spend healing in prologue that makes the claim of 'never lose'. If you take a 5800 HP character, start with 2000 health missing, there are guys who can take 3800 in one hit. A nasty cascade can do at least 1000 HP and then that puts you in range to be killed by almost any decent move, and once you're missing a guy that generally completely messes up your plan assuming your team is built in a way that actually have synergy. And no OBW doesn't help here because she's got low enough HP that she can be killed from full health by someone like Daken now. Sentry can easily kill her from full health using his low cost moves (Sacrifice/World Rupture), and Punisher/Psylocke is always quite good at dishing out quick damage. Sure, I probably never lose with full health, but if I only play battles with full health I'll be playing about 1/5 the game I'm currently playing. I go into fights with Thor only have 3000 health before, and it is indeed quite possible to lose those fights even when you've infinite combo by turn 3, because sometimes you can take 3000 damage by turn 3.

I guess people must be a lot more willing to grind than I do. I don't do story mode healing because it seems like a waste of time and if I run out of health packs I can just go do something else instead.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

Spaminal wrote:

Or they could I don't know, make it a level field for everyone and have your team at full health after each battle anyway. There is no real point to the perma damage bull ****. It literally has no effect on people who have been playing for an extended time. It only hurts newer players or those missing a character or two. The health pack system is stupid because nothing is worse than running out of health packs and not being able to play for a few hours no matter the circumstances. Such a great feature to get people to "STOP" playing your game for an hour to let their roster regen.

As a person "who has been playing for an extended time," the perma-damage mechanic has quite an effect. I win probably 99% of my PVP fights. Once I got a couple of L141s, I'm pretty sure I've lost less than 4 fights, total, that I entered using full-health characters. Right now, perma-damage is the sole limitation on how long I can extend a single PVP push. If they remove perma-damage, I could melt faces in PVP literally endlessly.

Removing perma-damage would make PVPs literally nothing more than a competition about who can grind more.

Unless they un-nerfed the AI to compensate, which I would be fine with. IceIX claimed that originally A.I. was a lot more intelligent, but they scaled it down to make things easier since players were claiming it was cheating.

Actually, they already seem to have some kind of algorithm in place that scales the A.I. based on how much you're winning. If you win too many matches in a row, it'll start tinying your kittens, and throwing volatile boards at you to boot. Since I don't have a high level mags or hood in PvP, this makes a big difference for me. But I for one wouldn't mind matches that were harder, with smarter A.I., no health loss at end, and substantially increased ISO rewards for winning them. And as much as I love to win, I think a coin toss to decide who goes first would substantially level the playing field between player and A.I.

Of course, this would be problematic in the current environment, since the primary driver in this game is to compete for covers. In this respect, I much preferred the original Puzzle Quests where you were only competing with the A.I. and yourself. OTOH, matches were way too long in those, waiting for the A.I. to calculate moves, since it actually played, and didn't hand out wins.

Unknown

Why are people always complaining the AI is too easy and yet never go anywhere without a full health team?

If you played the AI with guys starting at 3800 HP you'll realize they're most certainly not 'too easy' when one bad cascade can completely ruin your day. Isn't the fact that most people would never go anywhere without story healing a sign that the AI is actually pretty tough?

HailMary

pasa_ wrote:

I can't follow this, what is the break in the current system against that? You say losing a game is rare as hell. Winning without downed chr is not too much harder. You can heal in prologue so get back to full health. (the few downs you have by accident can be covered by the available regenerating packs).

So you *can* grind endlessly. By your logic we already in that situation.

(Also, by the conclusion time you conveniently forgot about a precondition you started with and made a general assertion.)

Fair enough. I suppose it's the annoyance factor and mid-push time investment of endless prologue healing that made me implicitly discount it among 3* players for this discussion. Prologue-healing 6000-7000 HP on a tanky 3* using OBW is a minikitty and a half.

I'm saying that instantly healing team health upon victory would benefit veterans far more than newbies/midtiers. From full health, there's virtually zero chance of multi-L141 players getting even a single character killed (Maybe you get stupid with Hood right after the AI gets a big cascade? Maybe Patch + pre-nerf Spidey gets a big blue cascade on turn 2?) and requiring even one health pack. Getting a full-health character killed is, I'm guessing, much more common among low/mid-tier players -- I know it was much more common for me when I was in 2* land. Thus, removing perma-damage isn't going to "make it a level field for everyone" -- it's going to widen the gap.

I'm not sure what your parenthetical statement was supposed to be referring to.

Phantron wrote:

I always wonder how much time people spend healing in prologue that makes the claim of 'never lose'. If you take a 5800 HP character, start with 2000 health missing, there are guys who can take 3800 in one hit. A nasty cascade can do at least 1000 HP and then that puts you in range to be killed by almost any decent move, and once you're missing a guy that generally completely messes up your plan assuming your team is built in a way that actually have synergy. And no OBW doesn't help here because she's got low enough HP that she can be killed from full health by someone like Daken now. Sentry can easily kill her from full health using his low cost moves (Sacrifice/World Rupture), and Punisher/Psylocke is always quite good at dishing out quick damage. Sure, I probably never lose with full health, but if I only play battles with full health I'll be playing about 1/5 the game I'm currently playing. I go into fights with Thor only have 3000 health before, and it is indeed quite possible to lose those fights even when you've infinite combo by turn 3, because sometimes you can take 3000 damage by turn 3.

I guess people must be a lot more willing to grind than I do. I don't do story mode healing because it seems like a waste of time and if I run out of health packs I can just go do something else instead.

I used to spend a decent amount of time prologue-healing with OBW during PVP pushes. Now that I run LT and Hulk pretty regularly, prologue healing is simply not worth the time. I can win a fight maybe 80% of the time if I enter with LT and/or Hulk and/or CMags at 2500 HP, but one of them will likely get killed by the end (or near enough as to not matter). So, I win 99% (maybe 97%? 98%?) of total fights simply by being risk-averse.

I limit losses simply by ending my push when I run dangerously low on health resources, i.e. zero health packs and defensive team below 2.5K HP each. With instant full-health heals, virtually all offensive risk disappears, permanently, regardless of timescale, for my LT + CMags + Hulk + BP + Hood + UDaken roster. Perma-damage and the associated annoyance of OBW prologue-healing are the only actual limitations on my PVP push duration, and I'm pretty sure I'm a fairly average intra-fight tactician.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Why are people always complaining the AI is too easy and yet never go anywhere without a full health team?

If you played the AI with guys starting at 3800 HP you'll realize they're most certainly not 'too easy' when one bad cascade can completely ruin your day. Isn't the fact that most people would never go anywhere without story healing a sign that the AI is actually pretty tough?

No, it's a sign that the game likes to start handing out volatile boards when you start winning, so you have to play the odds and get lucky or start wiping. I never story heal anymore, and haven't for a LONG time, but the health pack setup systematically discourages people from seeking tough matches since it means being unable to play potentially for hours if you lose, and sic unable to compete. I also think smarter A.I. and no health packs would help eliminate the need for shielding. If your A.I. counterpart plays as smart as you (or smarter) you should have a roughly equal chance of winning to losing on defense.

I for one would seek out tougher matches if there were less punishment from losing. Their policy of nerfing any character or mode that allows you to heal is more akin to outlawing band-aids to help prevent cuts.

Unknown

theHappyDance wrote:

No, it's a sign that the game likes to start handing out volatile boards when you start winning, so you have to play the odds and get lucky or start wiping. I never story heal anymore, and haven't for a LONG time, but the health pack setup systematically discourages people from seeking tough matches since it means being unable to play potentially for hours if you lose, and sic unable to compete. I also think smarter A.I. and no health packs would help eliminate the need for shielding. If your A.I. counterpart plays as smart as you (or smarter) you should have a roughly equal chance of winning to losing on defense.

I for one would seek out tougher matches if there were less punishment from losing. Their policy of nerfing any character or mode that allows you to heal is more akin to outlawing band-aids to help prevent cuts.

Doesn't it occur to you that the AI being good at volatile board is precisely its strength? You're basically saying if you played a Chess grandmaster who can figure out the likely next 10 moves that guy is cheating for figuring this out. The fact that AI knows how to take advantage of a volatile board is part of its inherent strength. Part of being good is recognizing how to reduce the complexity of a board so that the AI no longer wields a significant over you (the less complex the board, the easier it is for a human to see all the moves). If you take the time to analyze the board you'll find that the AI usually makes a move that benefits more from any lucky drops its way, and it general it prefers the move that will shake up the board the most because it always has an advantage in a chaotic situation.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Why are people always complaining the AI is too easy and yet never go anywhere without a full health team?

If you played the AI with guys starting at 3800 HP you'll realize they're most certainly not 'too easy' when one bad cascade can completely ruin your day. Isn't the fact that most people would never go anywhere without story healing a sign that the AI is actually pretty tough?

These are completely orthogonal issues. The AI is definitely not tough. It could be much better, and most actual PLAYers even expect it. For your side it's effective to see the AI pick suboptimal abilities, bad timing, bad order and especially use random tiles where choice is involved. But it is not really FUN. Those who would prefer an actual strategy game where you're supposed to think rather than just spam the A button, would prefer it that way, and would win the tournaments too despite suffering many losses. I guess most of the player base is not like that. And the part of it happy to burn $ notes, especially Franklins is even less likely fit the former...

But even this artificial stupidity controls powerful things and can whack you -- no toughness is needed for that really, the random flailing will do if the ends meet. And with more health as buffer you have better chance, many people just optimize for those better chances. Yet others go on RPG-like path and feel it is a bad thing to send seriously wounded soldiers to the next battle.

Point: AI complaints are not about ease/difficulty but the blatantly stupid moves.

Unknown

HailMary wrote:

I'm saying that instantly healing team health upon victory would benefit veterans far more than newbies/midtiers. From full health, there's virtually zero chance of multi-L141 players getting even a single character killed (Maybe you get stupid with Hood right after the AI gets a big cascade? Maybe Patch + pre-nerf Spidey gets a big blue cascade on turn 2?) and requiring even one health pack. Getting a full-health character killed is, I'm guessing, much more common among low/mid-tier players -- I know it was much more common for me when I was in 2* land. Thus, removing perma-damage isn't going to "make it a level field for everyone" -- it's going to widen the gap.

I'm going to categorically disagree with you here. Prologue for me was an absolute nightmare slog. Newbies typically don't have a lot of covers, and if (like me) they end up on the poor side of luck and had to run 15-20 matches to get anything other than ISO 20 frequently, wiping every time because they don't have the roster to not get tinykittied, they're a lot more affected by the health pack system than vets. It's still a broken/annoying mechanic, but it's a lot more manageable once you have a stronger roster and can go for a number of fights without wiping.

Logically, if getting full-health characters killed is more common among low/mid-tier players, it should LEVEL the playing field if they aren't heavily punished for losing. As it currently stands, you don't typically lose points in PvP from personal losses. You typically lose points from your defensive losses with the poor A.I. handing out victories like cake.

The difference is that new players are forced to fight tough matches and then not play for several hours. It's a little more forgiving for vets, but the amount of work required to achieve meaningful rewards is also considerably more. Eliminating the health pack system and switching off the dumb chip on A.I. would completely fix the problem. The only reason I can see to keep the current health pack system is to maintain the current "pay-to-keep-playing" setup. Of course, they would also need to rework the reward structure to give a lot better rewards for winning matches.

Unknown

@HailMary:

I certainly agree that switching to instaheal would shift the metagame completely. It's not really about vets/news but the characters -- many was designed and balanced with the health being scarce resource in mind. The change would annul those implied costs. The change would warrant kindof full rethinking every character to make sense.

Unknown

Phantron wrote:

Doesn't it occur to you that the AI being good at volatile board is precisely its strength? You're basically saying if you played a Chess grandmaster who can figure out the likely next 10 moves that guy is cheating for figuring this out. The fact that AI knows how to take advantage of a volatile board is part of its inherent strength. Part of being good is recognizing how to reduce the complexity of a board so that the AI no longer wields a significant over you (the less complex the board, the easier it is for a human to see all the moves). If you take the time to analyze the board you'll find that the AI usually makes a move that benefits more from any lucky drops its way, and it general it prefers the move that will shake up the board the most because it always has an advantage in a chaotic situation.

No, they're two separate things. I've played matches where the A.I. plays every ability at the right time, and boxes you out on a perfectly stable board. Sometimes you can recover, sometimes you can't. I've also played matches where it thinks a hot dog is more important than preventing you from getting off that game-ending ability. If you're familiar with the earlier PQ games, then you'd know that happens more frequently there - the A.I. playing smart on stable boards. The only problem with those is that matches tend to drag on for a LONG time. Having a volatile board doesn't intrinsically benefit the player or the A.I. If you know how to read them, you can compensate for it by "thinking like an A.I." with your moves. It does however increase the probability that the A.I. will get lucky and you'll wipe on that account, just by chance. But odds are roughly the same that you'll wipe the A.I. just by chance. The difference is you're more likely to need health packs with a dumb A.I. and dynamic board than a dumb A.I. and stable board. With a smart A.I. a dynamic board might actually benefit the player more, depending on the player and exactly how smart the A.I. is.

You'd probably need to maintain some level of board volatility to keep matches quicker and more dynamic, regardless of who wins. Either way, wiping is a lot less frustrating if you can get right back up on your feet and keep playing, instead of having to pay or be locked out for X hours, and need to schedule your play time around when there's health packs or events ending vs. when's most convenient/enjoyable for you.

HailMary

theHappyDance wrote:

I'm going to categorically disagree with you here. Prologue for me was an absolute nightmare slog. Newbies typically don't have a lot of covers, and if (like me) they end up on the poor side of luck and had to run 15-20 matches to get anything other than ISO 20 frequently, wiping every time because they don't have the roster to not get tinykittied, they're a lot more affected by the health pack system than vets. It's still a broken/annoying mechanic, but it's a lot more manageable once you have a stronger roster and can go for a number of fights without wiping.

That's a good point, but I don't know if Prologue play considerations are all that meaningful. Even as a person who didn't touch non-Prologue during my first week playing MPQ, I'm simply thinking about PVP, not Prologue. The low-/mid-tier players I'm referring to are ones who primarily focus on PVP/PVE, not Prologue.

theHappyDance wrote:

Logically, if getting full-health characters killed is more common among low/mid-tier players, it should LEVEL the playing field if they aren't heavily punished for losing. As it currently stands, you don't typically lose points in PvP from personal losses. You typically lose points from your defensive losses with the poor A.I. handing out victories like cake.

The proposal I was addressing was instant full heal at the end of matches. Reading the original comment again, I implicitly assumed it was "full instaheal if you're injured, but you stay down if you're downed", which admittedly may not have been the case. If it's "full instaheal for everyone even if they get downed", then yes, health packs would naturally be eliminated, and would require a fairly huge revamp of a lot of gameplay mechanics. D3 won't simply rebuild the game from the ground up all of a sudden, which means that any changes that happen will be gradual and piecemeal. In that context, instaheal of any sort, instituted all by its lonesome, would massively change PVP. For one, shielding at 500 points would likely no longer be a laughing matter, and the defensive meta would change so that true team-KO risk would be the only possible deterrent. Annoyance/cripple-risk deterrent would be rendered meaningless.

Spoit

Phantron wrote:

I guess people must be a lot more willing to grind than I do.

I'm skeptical of that point

Unknown

Much to catch up on here, I'll probably miss some of the good points presented in the thread.

-- I can't see full health restoration after each match occurring. This would eliminate health packs altogether, which would constitute endless grinding. Further, and more importantly, this would eliminate one of the core F2P aspects of the game, the lives system, which is a bigger atrocity. The core problem here, in my viewpoint, is that prologue healing circumvents the lives system (which it does). Because the lives system is somewhat trivial at the moment (outside of lost time spent healing in the prologue), health packs aren't really necessary or impactful in any meaningful way outside of a convenience boost on a PvP run. By eliminating any out-of-fight method to heal outside of natural regeneration or health packs, the lives system becomes a force that needs to be "respected" by the player base as it becomes meaningful again.

-- Lower level/stared characters have the advantage of requiring less time to naturally regen. Outside of Thor/Ares/Moonstone, all of the 2**s possess considerably less health than most 3***s, and can naturally regenerate faster. This also creates a considerable downside to one of the current meta of bringing the meatiest tank you can to every fight. Suddenly, that 10 hour regen time on Modern Thor's 8700 health is a potential liability.

-- I can't see CMag's blue hanging around in its current form much longer. I am highly suspicious that the current prize awards of CMags from Fresh Cut and Patch from Starfall is "random". In all likelihood, the devs are looking to see how hard players fall back on the CMags + Patch combo now that Spidey cannot perform his old role of a team stunlocker. The data will likely show mass scaling still occurring to those using this combo, and without the Spidey confounding factor will likely send the evidence required that CMags still needs to be nerfed.

-- On that note, I can see CMags's blue simply be retweaked like this as a result (arbitrary numbers used):

Magnetized Field: 6 Blue AP

Level 1: Places two random defense tiles of strength 50 on any basic tile.
Level 2: Defense tile strength increased by 25%.
Level 3: Places two chosen defense tiles on any basic tile. Costs 2 AP more. (Allow for crit creation, but at increased cost to discourage behavior and to prevent infinite casting).
Level 4: Defense tile strength increased by 25%.
Level 5: Places two chosen defense tiles on any tile. Costs 2 AP more. (Allows for current functionality, but at a very significant cost. 10 AP is 4-match territory).

-- If as a result of these changes, health points become a new scarce commodity, would defense suddenly become part of the meta? How valuable would not losing health in fights become?

-- Inspired thought of the night: Consider the Spider-Man "nerf". What if he really wasn't nerfed at all? What if he was really changed into his current form with the these upcoming changes in mind? In his new form, he can heal incoming damage and act as a 3*** Bullesye to prevent damage from being incurred. Wouldn't that make him quite valuable if these changes go into effect in a manner even somewhat close to what I conjectured?

Unknown

Assuming you can't heal and you can't take 20 turns in a row with Magneto (the person you pair him up with him is mostly irrelevent when you have that kind of AP generation) you'll have to have characters regenerating much faster, like no more than 2 hours from 1 to max HP because otherwise you would be spending way too much time unable to play. Also, this change would it hard to play PvP and PvE at the same time, but maybe this is a good thing where you've to sort of choose to see what events to concentrate on.

In such a world you'd have to have something like all your characters have elevated HPs for PvP events (PvE is probably fine because scaling sort of takes care of this issue for everyone).

kensterr

Would ending prologue healing not benefit mostly those with a almost complete leveled roster? They can easily just use health packs on featured character while switching in between other 141s or 85s.

Unknown

kensterr wrote:

Would ending prologue healing not benefit mostly those with a almost complete leveled roster? They can easily just use health packs on featured character while switching in between other 141s or 85s.

Sure, but isn't that something you want encourage people to do? Right now the PvP events you only need your 2 best guys plus featured (PvE events you already should be rotating everyone if only to suicide them for scaling). Shouldn't a guy with 20 level 141s have some kind of advantage in PvP? Right now, trying to use anyone but your best 2 and possibly some defensive team specialist is actually a massive disadvantage in PvP. That gives players no incentive to build a diverse roster for PvP, and it doesn't help D3 make any money, so it's a lose-lose situation. Of course, it'd take more than just that to make people want to use more than 2 characters in PvP (got to do something about vulnerabilities of being attacked when you switch your team), so I don't see this as some kind of big change in itself even if it happened. Something else bigger has to proceed it first or it'd still have changed nothing.

Unknown

kensterr wrote:

Would ending prologue healing not benefit mostly those with a almost complete leveled roster? They can easily just use health packs on featured character while switching in between other 141s or 85s.

in PVE maybe, but while I could win matches with a ton of my characters, the fact that my defensive team would then be **** is a reason not too.

kensterr

@phantron, don't get me wrong, I'm trying to get my roster up to max 141. Problem is for those who have no 141 or just 85s and are matched with 141s most of the time. Also at the moment ISO distribution isn't much unless one spend a lot of time playing every day. Until Demiurge can find a balance in the system, removing prologue healing isn't that great of a move.