Healing Rods / general concerns

[Yeshir]

As far as I experienced it by now, healing rods are far to strong in PVP. Especially when fighting against a mage build.

Being able to carry ~150 bonus HP with you as a PF is rediculous. Mages can run out of steam pretty fast due to their limitation by mana. That for itself is okay. But if you need more or less your whole mana pool to bring down a PF to ~0 while he can heal up again close to full hp in no time while you cant do anything beside running from his arrows - something is wrong.

This leads to my next concern. You make quite a lot of deep going decisions and alterations here without having them carefully tested. Some might sound good "on paper" but can (and do) seriously mess things up. You have to be more careful with your changes which deal with pvp balance. Please. Dont get to excited with the possibilities you have on 103 and take it more slow and calm.

[M59Gar]

What you're seeing now is "exposed pre-existing brokenness". Heal rods are actually fixed heal wands (severely nerfed). If you think 150 bonus hp is bad, remember that people in classic Meridian could carry 500+.

Other externalities are definitely going to change regarding rods. There will be more rods (so that everyone isn't just carrying 5 heal rods, you will have to pick and choose), and there will be more ways to fight that don't always offer an inn to recharge at.

If you're having mana issues, I suggest you try out Jala 6 and Crystalize Mana, which has had some of its usability issues fixed and is now fairly awesome. It was always intended to help with pure mage mana issues, and it should now actually do that effectively.

As for testing, we do thorough testing, analysis, and planning for all changes that go in. The current state of heal rods is exactly what we intend. That doesn't mean balance changes and fixes are done, though. Some things will be temporarily more powerful than others while their counters / new content / new ways to fight need created or fixed. Everything we do is slow and calm :) We inherited a game full of flaws and bugs and we're not nearly done getting basic structures working smoothly.

[Yeshir]

I trust in your word concerning future changes. But still you're giving a very potent heal to people who normally wouldnt have it. Saying you could just carry 50+ heal pots in vanilla doesnt make it any better. And even if your mana wouldnt limit you, spell regs do more than arrows. Variaty is good but people will always take what is best. You can buff yourself so no need for rods. Having a more than decent heal backup outscales most others. No honestly, 150 HP is rediculous at the actual state of the game. Who needs Sha'Lille heal while he can just hold 5 healing rods? Especially if you can just hop into an inn and refill them instantly.

Beside this youre not only limited by your mana but also by your spell ingredients which take much more space than some arrows. it isnt viable for a mage to build with low might because you just cant carry sufficient ingredients for more than a pretty short fight. So might is needed just for the carry capacitys sake (as already mentioned).

[skittles1]

To expand on what Gar said, heal wands are more prevalent now because they've been brought to everyone's attention in the patch notes. Quite a few people were already using heal wands before they were patched, however (and I was guilty of this) those who were using them were carrying 10-20 wands and were essentially unkillable. For those of us who already used them, the patch actually nerfed heal wands because it cut our healing by a large amount but at the same time everybody has been made aware of how useful they are to carry.

In saying that, I agree that healing, reagents etc. could all use some tuning/balancing; there was some discussion about carrying capacity a while back so that could be a good place to start.

[M59Gar]

Yeah we're definitely on your page, Yeshir. There are lots of things planned to make healing more reasonable.

A proposed idea I really like is that of a "Black Mantle" type spell. This would be a high level Qor spell, probably level 5, maybe level 6. It would be an offensive PE that prevents all healing below its own spellpower. Heal rods would be given a spellpower that makes them function only if AMA has reduced Black mantle (a nod to PFs), and Shals would have to have better Heal spellpower than the Black Mantle to self-heal. Only caveat: if anyone other than the Black Mantle caster hits the target, it is dispelled.

That would be a serious new edge for Qor, effectively cutting your target's health in half in low numbers combat.

Just an example of ways new content can reduce the overall power of heal rods.

[Daenks]

I was thinking about this last night, and I think a simple move in the right direction would be to put a cool-down on inns instantly recharging rods. 15-30 minutes would do the trick. This would effectively limit you to 150 extra hp in a city battle, instead of the near infinite amount you can get by door hopping.

I also feel that once the other rods are in-game very few will carry 5 healing rods everywhere; but only time will tell.

[Yeshir]

Okay, I see a lot is going on and most importantly i see that you take concerns serious. Thanks for that :-)

[M59Gar]

Unfortunately, Daenks, we have some major limitations put on us by unlimited free accounts. If there are any cooldowns on recharging whatsoever, veteran players will simulate instant recharge by simply stockpiling extra characters in the inn. So adding a cooldown would only add a cooldown for noobs and midlevel players, while veterans would simply resubscribe to the character train strategy.

What I would like to do (and plan to do) on top of adding new rods is to also add new ways to compete that aren't next to inns. Inn-centric combat represents a fundamental failure in developer design, just like in any other game where players can fight around safe zones and safe-hop. It's horribly imbalanced simply based on the presence of a safe area a step away.

What I do like about heal rods is the balancing factor they bring in non-safe-zone-adjacent areas. For example, a 60 hp noob in CV attacked by a 125 hp PK. In classic Meridian, the noob is dead to rights no matter what. With heal rods, they're really at 210 hp vs 275... the disparity is not nearly so drastic. That's a major reason why heal wands weren't simply removed completely, and it's something we'll try to build value upon here soon.

[Yeshir]

So why just dont remove the recharge ability of rods in inns? You have to fill em up by killing monsters and charges are lost when dropping/trading. Problem solved. Dont make meridian to easy. Let PKs be real threat. You lose some real potential when you remove to many dangers. There should be still a good chance to just die in combat. You should be still vulnerable to PKs (if there were any atm) while building. Oh I died so many times to PKs when I started to play back in 1997. But having a look back this was also what made playing this game desirable and thrilling. Finding other places to build which werent visited by PKs every 20mins, going in groups, being always careful and having your back to the wall and an eye at the entrance of the map. Damn you may even die to monsters from time to time. There are so many mmorpgs out there, where its so easy to avoid death (and/or where death means nothing at all). Being in danger to die and actually lose something due to it is no weakness of meridian but one of the essential parts of this game. So please, dont make it to easy :-)

[M59Gar]

Removing the inn recharge has the same problem - veterans will kill monsters to fill up charges on a series of characters and have a stockpile of toons in the inn. The only way to be neutral with respect to character trains is to have rods recharge instantly in the inn. Any other solution (right now) will just play back into the character train problem. Major structural issues like unlimited free accounts tie our hands design-wise in many ways. I will say though, Daenks is working on a master login system. If we do manage to establish regulatory systems for accounts, you'll see some awesome fundamental changes because we can just directly eliminate character trains (if that's what the team wants to do). One potential result of that could be giving every player only 1 account, but with unlimited character slots. Things like that.

I don't think we'll ever make the game too easy. Definitely don't want to remove the risk and reward aspects of the game. Only, some people have learned to game the system to put all the risk on the victim and have none for themselves. A fully built qor/faren attacking a 30 hp char with 20% slash is just shooting fish in a barrel. I think we've done away with that. There are no plans to further mess with PK / newbie though.

[skittles1]

We could put a cooldown on wands to reduce the ability to spam them, even 1 or 2 seconds would still leave them very useful but stop people outhealing fatal damage all the time.

[M59Gar]

We could also go the opposite of the current charge model and have safe zones and logging off deplete all charges. That way only people actively killing monsters would have heal rod charges. But is that something we want? Basically eliminates heal rods for pvpers, PKs would have to kill 5 mobs if they wanted heal charges...

[Yeshir]

Cant you change it, as i suggested, so that rods lose their charges when dropped and traded? So you can keep them for yourself but not trade them with your mules without losing charges.

Also like the short delay skittles suggested.

[skittles1]

Rods already lose all charges when dropped or traded (just tested).

[M59Gar]

Yeah when I first designed them I tried to think of every little abuse ahead of time. Thus they lose charges at any interaction really.

I can't really design out character trains from charge-nerfed heal rods, though. As a player, if heal rods only gained charges from mob kills and lost all charges in safe zones and if I logged off, I would just leave 5 clients up in my guild hall ready to rumble at the first sign of PvP. Therefore I would still have 5 double-HP characters' worth versus any noob or midlevel with just 1. That's why I chose to give more charges to all to keep singletons equal to trains until we have a better endgame system.

[Yeshir]

Its ok if they keep charges in inns I guess. Just the instant recharge is what causes problems imho. So removing the instant recharge and maybe adding a short delay in between uses as skittles suggested would possibly bring healing rods more in line with pvp realities.

[skittles1]

Heal rods have a 500ms delay now (1 sec default but we're trialling 500ms) so this problem is kinda fixed. Closing this issue, as the general sentiment is that heal rods aren't an issue with the delay.