This is going to be another loooong post (2400 words) with me talking everything involving regnerating health, discussions, opinions, whatever, i hope you will read it if you have the time and come with thoughts on the questions i will place in the end.
So a bit of text to explain the point of it, most of us have played RPG’s. (those on that side atleast) and they usually have healing magic because that is what we are used to, but over the last few years healing appears to disappear from games for other systems such as potions, should we regen health, how would food affect it and so on. lets begin
(also i wont mention MC anywhere, the titan badum tss of voxel games since i have near 0 experience with it as pointed out)
The Holy Trinity
The holy trinity is a system used within older mmo’s to clearly define what roles each class and playstyle was, it looks like this
The games that uses The Holy Trinity system could have different classes but they would always boil down to 3 roles.
Tank:
Tanks are the front fighters in games, Tank classes are specifically made to protect the weaker members of the party, the DPS and Healers. They have massive healthbars and or damage reduction spells and their overall purpose is to Aggro from allies to himself (make the enemies that are attacking other people, attack him)
While have massive surviveability though it has minimal damage, if you were to fight as a tank you would be able to sustain a ton of hits but the fights would take much longer because the damage output is near 0, which also leads to tanks in most games being useless at playing solo.
A common trait for tanks is that they usually wear heavy armor and a shield to minimize damage taken.
DPS ( Damage Per Second) / Damage Dealers.
DPS classes as the name suggests excels at doing massive damage, the DPS role is the one with the most varied classes within it, everything from duelwielding warriors, archers, mages, warlocks, rogues, You name them, they all fall under the DPS category.
The reason that the DPS category is the biggest is because it is one of the easiest to solo normal enemies and content with,
The traits that all DPS classes share is that they can dish out alot of damage, usually split between sustainable middle strength damage and then have middle survivability, and then having glass cannon DPS classes like rogues that will have very little sustain ability but on the other hand have a ton of burst damage.
Healer:
Now this part is why i mentioned the holy trinity, the healers.
A Healers job is to keep other people + themselves alive using healing spells, shields and buffs.
Healers have really low damage but usually have the ability to cast some nasty debuffs that allows them to still affect the enemy in fights, the healers usually have really low armor rating and generally wears robes and cloth to enchance their ability to make spells more effective.
The point of the holy trinity is that even if you have 12 classes they will usually either be Tank, DPS or Healer. this is primarily used in dungeons, the usual amount of people required for a dungeon is 5, and it is neccesary to have a healer, a tank and 3 dps to clear dungeons because they were made so focused on the holy trinity, a tank will take the beating but he wont survive long because even though he has alot of survivability the enemies will take big chunks of health from him, that is where the healer comes in and stays in the background while keeping allies alive.
the common more simple RPG dungeon fights follows a pattern.
- Tank goes into the enemies. make them all hit him
- The dps starts to hit the same enemies that the tank is, so he can keep aggro
- The tank is the only one getting hit so he is the only one needing healing, so the healer will just spam the same ability time and time again on the tank to keep him from dying
As you can see with this Holy Trinity driven system healing is not something that will help, it is made purely for helping being neccesary and it leaves very little room for fun, there are no tactics, there are just spamming your abilties, if the tank keeps aggro the DPS can just keep attacking without ever fearing to get attacked, and the healer only had to worry about spamming the same heal ability, although the tank needs to keep aggro he has nothing he can do to prevent it from happening other than trusting his healer.
That is how it worked, but it was so set in stone that it wasnt fun anymore, that is where the interesting part comes in, people started breaking the pattern of holy trinity and make it more dynamic, i will mention a few examples.
GW2:
Guild wars 2 still had a sort of holy trinity but it wasnt nearly as set in stone as the previous example. the biggest difference being that although 1 class had the ability to heal others, the heals were so weak that they almost didnt count. that is why every class had a healing ability they could use by pressing Q
every class would have 2 or 3 possible healing skills (not sure which) + a racial specific healing ability.
i have a human thief and the the healing spells available i can remember on the top of my head is that i had a prayer to the godess (human racial) a spell that healed me and made me invisible (class) and one that passively gave me healing whenever i damaged an enemy which i could activate to get a small health burst and while it was on cd i didnt have the passive.
Using this system made dungeons hard, a tank could no longer pull aggro on every single target because it only had its own healing and damage mitigation which meant that the dps also needed to take damage and that there was no real healers, destroying the holy trinity completely.
People saw that it worked and smaller company games started to adapt to the idea of not neccesarily having a pre defined healer class or skill tree and some bigger games followed suit.
Eso used nearly the same system as gw2 except the fact that there was a healer skill tree, people still couldnt just let the tank take all the damage and then faceroll their skills they all needed to fight and dodge, making healing harder and more interesting because now they had to prioritize who to heal first and who could wait a bit.
Potions:
voxel games started to become popular and more were created because they saw how much money minecraft bought in, the 2 examples that are RPG focused are Cubeworld and Trove, both which uses potions in slightly diferent ways. the 2 ways are single use potions, and refillable potions.
Cubeworld used craftable potions which had different tiers, you would need to buy an empty flask, fill it with water and then combine that with a heartflower and boom you had a potion
the potions could stack up to a stack of 50 and they could be used in combat while moving, to drink the entire potion you would need to not attack for a few seconds while drinking.
The interesting thing is that there was no automatic health regeneration in the game and you had only 2 ways of getting health, eating food (which will come further down) and then drinking the potions. and only the potions could be drunk in combat, in Cubeworld for those who dont know, the enemies hit, and they hit hard so if you had no potions you would basically get instakilled in combat, unless you played ninja, cause they were in no way balanced and could become invincible, but that is another subject entirely xD
Trove did something a bit different, they allowed you to have 15 potions on you that was bound to Q but unlike CW there was no creating potions but rather recharging them, using a potion station or world spring or whatever they were called.
you would need to craft the recharge spring but it didnt take many materials. so whenever you wanted to recharge your potions you needed to find a recharge well (which wasnt too hard because of the moveable house system)
In this game there is however health regen involved and no food.
Now the curious thing is that bigger game such as dragon age inquisition also only allows the use of potions for healing (not counting the only healing spell in the game which requires special energy that takes ages to regen) simply because they saw it as a better system, and it is a really nice system, i cant just spam heals on my characters, you have a good amount of rechargeable potions but they are split between the entire party. so you always have to think ‘‘do i want to use the potion now, on this character? but then i have 1 less for later in case i need it’’ instead of only ‘‘oh look, you took dmg, here, full health’’ which adds an entire new dimension to the game, because its not just in battle your healing or potion amount that matters but also out of battle, the potions only recharge at your unlocked camps which are kinda far an few between, so you have to really think when to use potions.
DAI also uses 1 time potion systems, at standard you can equip 3 - 5 of a specific potion that you can carry, those are individual so though you only have 5 it is 5 per character.
Near 0 healing:
This is a short one since it is almost never done, but skyforge are currently making heal (like DAI) a skill that requires a high level and can only be used in extreme situations since there is a massive CD on it,
Skyforge still have support classes though and tank classes, but they rely on shields rather than on external healing.
when asked Is it true that there are no healers?
‘‘Yes, it’s true. There will be no healers in the game. We came to this decision because of the discomfort that healing seems to cause in such games - endless tug-of-war over the health bar; the whole raid focusing on the poor healer; drawn-out boss fights where winning is impossible; hopeless PvP – all of this can be easily fixed with one simple change, and the now-vacant role can be filled by several support classes.’’
which is also an interesting take on it
Health regeneration/Food:
now a days food in games either give longer lasting buffs or are useless and only there for the RP elements, the reason for that is that games usually have an out of combat regeneration system, after every fight you basically reset, so go in, fight, go out, get ful health and start over.
i mentioned in DAI how that wasnt quite the case, because your choices on when to heal would determine how many options you have for healing later when you might need it more. out of combat there wasnt any healing either, so if you had taken dmg that damage would not go up unless you uses another potion to get the health up.
Old school world of warcraft did something similar, you needed food and water because if you didnt have those then your mana or hp wouldnt really regenerate, the food and water was cheap and mages could even make it, but it was neccesary, that system sadly changed as wow got bigger and new stuff came into the game. now when you are low level you get the reset system as i mentioned, take a fight, win the fight, instantly get full hp and mana, repeat time and time again.
So we have 2 systems:
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there is no automatic health regen, the only way to get health is through potions, healing or food, increasing the value of chefs because food is no longer just a buff you could live without, but a system that you need so you have an easier time, not impossible to do without, but if you dont have food on you, you really need to think about what to do next. things like apples would be common in lower tier so it would be easy to keep food at lower tiers but the higher up you get the harder it is to find food so you would need to buy some from a chef.
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there is automatic health regen, there is no need for food to survive. you would simply get the reset system, this would allow them to make the invidividual battles harder because you do get a reset, while the other simple might make them slighly easier, but every fight would still feel like permanent damage and more punishing than option number 2.
So this is the explanations on the questions, now here are the questions:
- do you think there should be a specific healing class/fighting style or should healing be split up between all classes either as personal skills or potions
- do you think that oort should try to enforce the idea of holy trinity in case they do have healing classes?
- should there be an automated health regeneration system in the game that will give you full hp after every battle or should health only be regainable by potions (or the oort version of it) and food?
- in case they use a potion system should they be 1 time uses or a set amount that could be recharged at specific locations?
- should oort try to stay away from any form of heals which could be used in combat?
I honestly doubt anybody will read this because i like explaing my thoughts and ideas in details, but in case you managed to get through it. GJ.
-Zouls
If necessary only in beacons.
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