LukeBarrett
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Post by LukeBarrett on Feb 26, 2017 6:00:01 GMT
I find it tough to discuss Health & Healing without knowing if there's going to be a shift in core gameplay. For example, if they do incorporate skill-based elements like active blocks, evades, etc. for everyone that might change how you'd look at dealing with health/healing/defenses like guard & barrier. This. All core mechanics, such as healing, are integral parts of a whole system - it needs to be discussed in a more holistic sense to see what benefit it might add. Unfortunately for everyone here, you don't really know if there will be another game or what core combat changes might occur My thoughts on the matter are that the DAI Barrier and Guard solution to healing/recovering from hits wasn't ideal. Yes it worked, but it felt very disconnected from the combat goals at times and I would have preferred a different approach. There are lots of ways to achieve this but as was pointed out you need to plan for it from the start because it should be a core pillar of a combat system.
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Wynne
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Post by Wynne on Feb 27, 2017 1:00:14 GMT
While I fully agree the DA systems need work, there are a few problems. - Magic and healing magic canonically exist.
- Healing is fun for some players. FUN. I want DA as a series to not eliminate an entire playstyle just so that people feel like they "don't have" to (instead of can't) take a healing mage along. Make the alternatives clear, remove restrictions for mages, and make any related specializations about branching out and diversifying, not just healing harder. Let people play a fun buff-based mage, including heals, or a damage mage, or a jack-of-all-spells who can buff-heal and bomb as much as they like.
- Mages are supposed to be glass canons. If you want to be a tank, you play a tank. Mages are the ranged firebombers. If that changes, there's no reason to ever play a tank or bring a tank except for contrived extra loot. Magic is, according to lore, supposed to be unbalancing and that is why mages are feared. This leaves us even less reason to have Arcane Warriors floating around because it will mean that magic is just a sword with another name. Nobody I've ever met seemed to think that's fun. Magic, unlike arrows and swords, doesn't exist in our world, and that is why it should be awesome.
What I would really like? To see people stop worrying so much about perfect, unassailable game balance to the point where everything feels the same, and start worrying about FLAVOR, FUN, and LORE. Games seem like they are genericizing over time in the name of game balance, mostly for multiplayer's sake--it's absolutely bloody tedious and it doesn't work for Dragon Age. The ENTIRE draw of Dragon Age, in comparison with other IPs, is its lore and characters, not its game balance. What about IMMERSIVE GAMEPLAY where the feel is more important than points and bars and icons? Where roleplay has a hand in the choices?
I've never heard a single person talk glowingly about how balanced a single-player game was, only how fun, nuanced, or immersive it was.
What I would do is make it so that you either need a mage who has some kind of basic healing available and restrict their healing in some way, or you need a supply of potions and either will potentially work. Make it an either/or thing if you want. Healing, like attempting to take a potion (think about it, it takes TIME to drink a bottle dry, you don't just gulp it down easy while parrying blows, you have to uncork it and swallow over and over--maybe you shouldn't even be able to drink one in battle), should be interruptible like any other action, and healing spells should be as well. Starting to drink a potion yourself, or healing someone else as a mage, should gain you tremendous aggro. The challenge should be a warrior's interactions with the mage to protect them, and the rogue to harry and distract those attempting to harm or disable both. One should either have to be judicious with healing measures to avoid excessive aggro or blows of opportunity, or should have some kind of limit on their healing, like it gets weaker with each successive cast until they need rest to recuperate. But getting a rogue to distract someone so that the warrior can take a potion or the mage can heal him before he goes down makes a lot more sense to me than the instantaneous potion gulp and nothing else. Granted, synergistic distraction plays are more strategic, but it's more immersive/sensible and can be incorporated into tactics so that it's not necessarily a matter of micromanaging for those who don't want to do that. We can go at this from a sense of realism. Swords gradually dull, arrows occasionally snap, mages tire. Those are real life challenges. If we're going to gain debuffs, they should be slow to come on and slight and not oppressive, but they should happen--they don't need to be all about health, they can be about stamina or a need for food and water which you can find in the world rather than going through a load screen--like berries or a cool stream to drink from. That's how immersion-based thinking can make a system more fun--making your people feel like, well, PEOPLE. Additionally, injuries could come back. Maybe mages can't necessarily heal everything in an instant, only speed the process; that I could buy. But if that happens, it would need animations to feel dramatic; maybe even conversations. For a broken bone, perhaps you'd need a warrior to hack off a splint from a tree, then brace the bone so that the healing causes it to heal in the right direction. That's an RL concern, bones healing the wrong way so that the limb is permanently twisted. Since people can die and be un-save-able by mages, it's not at all out of the question that they might need supplies for specific kinds of healing. A cut should be simple enough to close, but a poison? An infection? The revival of necrotic or burned tissue? Harder, or it could/should be. If your healer gets poisoned, maybe you'd need a rogue to make an antidote (but easily, as easily as smashing a wall was in DAI) I find that a far better method of 'blackmail' to take along various classes than a few minor quests and silly walls only warriors can break. If we could find ways to make Dragon Age feel as dramatic as the novels did, where mages are powerful but life is fragile and a struggle, that would really set the series apart. You're a thinker, PapaC, and I like that, but--you have to think like someone who isn't you to create a truly excellent system. Think like someone who loves healing and wants to feel like magic is actually a powerful, scary, or awe-inspiring force--even in gameplay, because that causes immersion instead of feeling so excessively video gamey and micromanagey. Think like someone who hates having to sit through load screens and has a slow computer and gets annoyed and gets their immersion broken when they get damaged all the time and have to go back to base. Accommodate not only the thinkers, the strategists, but also the people who want the advantage of surprise to matter, or who want to feel the controversial yet undeniably useful nature of magic in the setting. That's when the downticks will become upticks--when you seek solutions within your systems for those unlike you, and don't needlessly overcomplicate where the complications add nothing tangible of value. That respect is a tremendous boon and it results in the best gameplay. I do love that you want to understand. The probably reasons for not liking load screens are obvious enough, but when it comes to things like healing, the question is more--why does someone like healing? Maybe they have a caregiver personality. Maybe they're a pacifist at heart. Maybe both. Maybe they're a roleplayer and their character is one or both of those things, so it doesn't make sense for them to light things on fire. If we understand that we have to accommodate the gleeful pyro firebomber, then we have to understand the same about healer types. A more tactical healing magic system would be amazing all around. Let people feel the roleplaying benefits in the gameplay systems, make people FEEL like they are what they're playing, and you'll have a game that's more fun for everyone.
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Post by KalleDemos on Feb 27, 2017 1:10:59 GMT
Spirit Healing should return to the series in DA4 as well as some form of Blood Magic healing. Blood Magic has been revealed as not completely destructive in the extended universe. In the comics there are Blood Mages that use their skills exclusively to heal. This should be explored in the games, more-so if the setting is Tevinter.
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Post by Nightscrawl on Feb 27, 2017 1:13:06 GMT
Regarding healing magic as canon, yes, that is true, and that wasn't retconned in DAI. There is dialogue pertaining to healing magic in the game. It just happened that none of the mages on our squad, or our own mage, specialized in healing magic. The lore excuse is that mastering healing magic is difficult, and mages who do so are exceptional. Spirit healer mages, like Wynne and her son Rhys, are also supposed to be rare.
And as far as balance is concerned, you can say that people shouldn't worry about it, but it is the devs who worry about it first and foremost. That is important to them. So important to them that they continue to patch a SP game to fix balance issues after release, like nerfing the KE spec and so on.
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Post by Wynne on Feb 27, 2017 1:32:44 GMT
I'm truly not against game balance in general--I'm simply opposed to it as being such a focus that we can't at all have mages be glass cannons any more, and we forget to worry about what is actually fun for people. Mages are supposed to be glass cannons; that's what the holy trinity is supposed to be all about. If I am a mage, but I go out into the world and I don't feel like I'm doing a fraction of the damage my double-dagger rogue is or that I'm really any more scary than my warrior with his AOE great-axe, well... I don't feel like I'm playing Dragon Age anymore. I feel like I'm playing Every Fantasy Game Ever.
If it's so huge a concern, though, I'm still in favor of a "Lore" difficulty setting. Not casual, but lore-friendly, where the details are build around immersion and the universe rather than perfect game balance. I realize that would be difficult, but I could also live with a better healing system which doesn't suddenly restrict all healing to potions or a KE focus resurrection ability for some reason.
I just hated the healing system in DAI so much. What was so evil about healing that it can't possibly be included anymore? As I mentioned above, there are plenty of ways to limit it as much as they limited potions, but without killing off roleplay choices and at the same time making the game more immersive and organic.
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LukeBarrett
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Post by LukeBarrett on Feb 27, 2017 1:53:18 GMT
Not having healing magic in DAI was, as I recall, due to the game initially being built in a certain way where traditional healing wouldn't have fit the model. Unfortunately, as development progressed the game's goals changed slightly and that was no longer the case; certain core things couldn't be changed at that point. On the dev side there was a lot of pain, time wise, having to stand the new engine up to have RPG systems (at that time I believe the engine had only shipped battlefield and a need for speed game). Since then things have come a long way and we, theoretically, have the ability to plan and execute better when it comes to combat and gameplay. I have high hopes that if another DA game were to exist it would solve a lot of issues I've seen in this thread
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Feb 27, 2017 2:51:55 GMT
I have high hopes that if another DA game were to exist it would solve a lot of issues I've seen in this thread (wink, wink) I SEE NOTHING! I KNOW NOTHING! IT WAS LIKE THAT WHEN I GOT HERE!
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Post by KalleDemos on Feb 27, 2017 8:49:55 GMT
I'm truly not against game balance in general--I'm simply opposed to it as being such a focus that we can't at all have mages be glass cannons any more, and we forget to worry about what is actually fun for people. Mages are supposed to be glass cannons; that's what the holy trinity is supposed to be all about. If I am a mage, but I go out into the world and I don't feel like I'm doing a fraction of the damage my double-dagger rogue is or that I'm really any more scary than my warrior with his AOE great-axe, well... I don't feel like I'm playing Dragon Age anymore. I feel like I'm playing Every Fantasy Game Ever. If it's so huge a concern, though, I'm still in favor of a "Lore" difficulty setting. Not casual, but lore-friendly, where the details are build around immersion and the universe rather than perfect game balance. I realize that would be difficult, but I could also live with a better healing system which doesn't suddenly restrict all healing to potions or a KE focus resurrection ability for some reason. I just hated the healing system in DAI so much. What was so evil about healing that it can't possibly be included anymore? As I mentioned above, there are plenty of ways to limit it as much as they limited potions, but without killing off roleplay choices and at the same time making the game more immersive and organic. I completely agree. DA:I Magic in general was *Disgusted Noise*. For serious where was the Blood Magic, Keeper Magic (We Finally Get To Play As An Actual Keeper!). Lore-wise, Mages in DA:I were a massive disappointment.
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Post by adrianbc on Feb 27, 2017 9:40:26 GMT
Health and healing systems are part of current games featuring combat for an important reason: as a way to handle hits our character(s) are taking during combat. In my opinion, the way a game handles health should be related to the type of game. If it`s a game only about combat (including not just shooters or 1`st view action games, but also war strategy games) then health and health recovery is a vital part of the package. For such games, background and story serve as secondary features. Combat is the star and the main reason for their existence. In case of RPG`s story and background (world-building) are the most important features. Combat is part of the package, but not the critical part. Realistic elements are useful, but not the very mundane like eating, sleeping or traveling in real time through the game`s realm. I don`t play a fantasy RPG only to watch my character eating like famished, snoring or walking / riding for minutes, just because it`s "real". What I want is an engrossing story which keeps me connected and immersed. It`s the same thing about combat. I don`t care to keep or break records like number of kills/sec, or the fastest ever dragon kill, or whatever monster I fancy. For me, combat is part of the game world. An important part, since combat is much featured nowadays, but not THE part. What I want from combat in a RPG is to be intelligently crafted, allowing players to use all the combat skills of the protagonist and her/his party to defeat opponents in a smart way. Old school "just hit `em in the head until they`re dead" has no appeal to me. Health and healing in RPG`s should reflect these games priorities. If it`s mostly a combat game, with little dialogue/exploring elements, then health is vital, and a smart health preserving and restoring system is a welcome addition. If the game is story oriented, then the health system should also reflect this. For me, the health system from DA:O worked just fine. As the magic system. The fact that the party was able to heal after each fight seemed perfectly normal. It`s what any war party will do in case of a campaign: fight a battle then rest until the wounds are healed, then advance. I considered that my Warden & Co always rested after fights, and this is why they healed. The fact that we don`t SEE the party camping after each battle is perfect for me. As I said, I don`t want to watch mundane repetitive actions during a game. The same about combat healing. Since DA lore mentioned healing and Spirit Healers, it was normal for mages to be able to heal during combat. I always hated the old AD&D ideas like resting effectively for health recovery because "you see, you need to rest in order to recover". Or the equally stupid idea of "memorizing" spells BEFORE resting for clerics and mages. DA:O used the more elegant idea of magical energy reserves which can be used for any spell a mage knows, regardless if s/he "memorized" such the night before. If Bioware wanted a more exciting combat system for DA:I they could have used mortal wounds instead, together with smarter enemies and party members. Not by restricting health recovery. For me, inefficient AI is the main problem in DA:I, not the health system.
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Post by Iakus on Feb 28, 2017 22:44:24 GMT
Magic in general was downright boring in DAI. There's supposed to be four schools of magic: Creation, Primal, Spirit, and Entropy. But what we got as three flavors of Primal and an extremely watered-down Spirit.
Where was the earth magic? Glyphs? Hexes? Summonings? Buffs? Debuffs? Energy and mana drains? I'd hoped we could have moved away from DA2's staff twirling and "pewpewpew"
Archery rogues felt more mage-y than mages.
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Post by Nightscrawl on Feb 28, 2017 23:03:57 GMT
^ Some of those things got spread around. For example, both spirit and entropy were incorporated into the Necromancer spec.
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Post by Gilli on Mar 1, 2017 0:44:34 GMT
And most of the Force Mage's spells from DA2 were put into the Rift Mage/Knight Enchanter trees
Fist of the Maker (DA2) --> Veil Strike (Rift Mage) Pull of the Abyss (DA2) --> Pull of the Abyss (Rift Mage) Gravitic Ring (DA2) --> Disruption Field (Knight Enchanter)
Also the Knight Enchanter is kinda a mix between Arcane Warrior & Battlemage from DAO. (not 100% but it's there)
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Post by Nightscrawl on Mar 1, 2017 1:03:45 GMT
Aside from staff stuff, I thought DA2 was a nice blend of trimming down trees, while still allowing for unique spell schools so you could have a specialist whose main function is to debuff the enemy, and so on.
One problem that I had with DAI skills, for all classes, was that there were passives in other trees that were useful for a different tree's playstyle, frost had mana regeneration, fire had crit, and so on, and these affected all mage skills, not only just fire. That is both useful, and not useful. If I'm going deep into the fire tree, I want those passives to be pertinent to the fire tree, or not to feel that I have to go into some other tree for my preferred spec to be playable.
However, this is getting away from health and healing.
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Sylvius the Mad
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Post by Sylvius the Mad on Mar 6, 2017 20:00:25 GMT
Get rid of archaic D&D restrictions, like mages can't wear plate armor and must have less health. Level the playing field. Choice of spec should not penalize players through the health system. Health was never a good counter-balance for mages being OP, so find some other way to balance mage power. I strongly object to the idea that the playing field must be level. That said, I would argue that the fragility of D&D mages worked really well. It didn't have any effect on how powerful or effective a given mage was, but it dramatically reduced the number of mages around. The thing that went wrong in CRPGs is they got rid of death as a mechanic. No one dies. Getting knocked down in a fight doesn’t carry a penalty. If these games had death in them, mages would need to be played in a far more risk-averse way in order to survive. That's what would balance their power. I don't like this either. Why are we just balancing combat? The thing I've always liked about Rogues in their non-combat utility. That's the area where they excel. Combat isn't typically their strength (which is why they have more tools to avoid combat, like stealth and traps). I've always liked the idea that Warriors are the best at every aspect of physical combat. Big weapons, small weapons, ranged weapons - everything. Rogues would have a narrower range in which they are effective, and they wouldn't ever be as effective as Warriors. I like the idea of classes not being tied to combat roles, however. Much like the segregation of abilities between Warriors and Rogues, enforcing combat roles by class is something that gained prominence in MMORPGs, and it was always a mistake. But what you seem to be doing here is encouraging every class to have the same combat role - a dangerous close-combat approach. That's not better. That's still encouraging a specific way to play. I can certainly agree with that. I have a few concerns here. First, that regenerating risk bar is basically just health by a different name, especially since you've given it to everyone. Second, because your risk bar regenerates, you provide no incentive at all to avoid taking damage entirely. All of your examples include the player's characters taking damage as a tactical choice. What benefit woulf not taking any damage provide? A decent use of range or crowd control can often prevent damage entirely (espcially in DAO), but you seem to be assuming that the characters will be taking damage on a regular basis. As someone who generally doesn’t consider an encouter wholly successful unless I didn't take damage at all, I find this model hard to swallow. I like that you don't heal fully in camps. Partial healing is the way to go, but not to a cap. Again, that just penalizes players who've managed not to take enough damage to get below that cap. Instead, if visiting a camp provided healing equal to 5% of total hit points (perhaps to minimum of 20%), that would be more equitable. Also, building off my Rogue idea (where the class offers non-combat benefits in return for being less effective in combat), I would also support a sort of medic option, either where a mage could specialize in healing magic but then be mostly ineffective in combat, or where all characters could act as medics for each other (thus providing limited in-combat healing at the cost of taking multiple combatants out of combat temporarily). I'm trying to maximize the number of ways one can play the game, but make those choices meaningful. If your party can afford to have 2 fewer combatants in it, then you can bring a Rogue (thus revealing extra loot and possibly opening whole new quest lines) and a healer. But of you play in a way that never takes damage, then you don’t need a healer (perhaps because you specced that mage for crowd control instead, or because you maxxed out your Rogue's stealth thus allowing ambushes and combat avoidance). That's the sort of system I'd like to see.
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Post by Sylvius the Mad on Mar 6, 2017 20:24:25 GMT
Aside from staff stuff, I thought DA2 was a nice blend of trimming down trees, while still allowing for unique spell schools so you could have a specialist whose main function is to debuff the enemy, and so on. One problem that I had with DAI skills, for all classes, was that there were passives in other trees that were useful for a different tree's playstyle, frost had mana regeneration, fire had crit, and so on, and these affected all mage skills, not only just fire. That is both useful, and not useful. If I'm going deep into the fire tree, I want those passives to be pertinent to the fire tree, or not to feel that I have to go into some other tree for my preferred spec to be playable. However, this is getting away from health and healing. I actually liked that. By putting useful passives in other trees, that effectively increased the cost of those passives (by making them cost more points). When speccing a 2H Warrior, I spend the first several levels doing nothing but giving him Shield talents, because those passives rock. And several of the twin dagger passives are even more valuable for an archer than for a melee Rogue. I like that feature.
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Post by LukeBarrett on Mar 6, 2017 20:43:29 GMT
Aside from staff stuff, I thought DA2 was a nice blend of trimming down trees, while still allowing for unique spell schools so you could have a specialist whose main function is to debuff the enemy, and so on. One problem that I had with DAI skills, for all classes, was that there were passives in other trees that were useful for a different tree's playstyle, frost had mana regeneration, fire had crit, and so on, and these affected all mage skills, not only just fire. That is both useful, and not useful. If I'm going deep into the fire tree, I want those passives to be pertinent to the fire tree, or not to feel that I have to go into some other tree for my preferred spec to be playable. However, this is getting away from health and healing. I actually liked that. By putting useful passives in other trees, that effectively increased the cost of those passives (by making them cost more points). When speccing a 2H Warrior, I spend the first several levels doing nothing but giving him Shield talents, because those passives rock. And several of the twin dagger passives are even more valuable for an archer than for a melee Rogue. I like that feature. We actually had them only granting passives to people using those weapon until close to the end of development (I was the one who fought to remove it). It allowed for anyone who wanted to engage more with the system to have options other than just picking stuff in a line without much thought. That said, I really disliked having to 'dump' points in to abilities you didn't plan on using just to get them. I have some solutions to that specific problem already in the works for the future though . The ideal is that every point spend is at least slightly useful to you and you have the ability to combine things from multiple avenues to make a build that works for how you want to play the game.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 6, 2017 20:50:09 GMT
I actually liked that. By putting useful passives in other trees, that effectively increased the cost of those passives (by making them cost more points). When speccing a 2H Warrior, I spend the first several levels doing nothing but giving him Shield talents, because those passives rock. And several of the twin dagger passives are even more valuable for an archer than for a melee Rogue. I like that feature. We actually had them only granting passives to people using those weapon until close to the end of development (I was the one who fought to remove it). It allowed for anyone who wanted to engage more with the system to have options other than just picking stuff in a line without much thought. That said, I really disliked having to 'dump' points in to abilities you didn't plan on using just to get them. I have some solutions to that specific problem already in the works for the future though :bandit: . The ideal is that every point spend is at least slightly useful to you and you have the ability to combine things from multiple avenues to make a build that works for how you want to play the game. That's nice... but... but... but... is the real healing back? As in playing heals, not hurts?
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Post by PapaCharlie9 on Mar 6, 2017 23:27:05 GMT
I appreciate the thoughtful responses, even in disagreement. Some replies: The thing that went wrong in CRPGs is they got rid of death as a mechanic. No one dies. Getting knocked down in a fight doesn’t carry a penalty. If these games had death in them, mages would need to be played in a far more risk-averse way in order to survive. That's what would balance their power. There's a growing contingent that agrees with you. I see more Souls-like and Rogue-like games every day. Personally, I think it changes gameplay too much from what's established in DA. Particularly if the penalty is Game Over, or lose all your collected gear/wealth, or restart at beginning of quest, 4 hours is the past. I don't mind playing games like that, particularly Rogue-likes, but I go in with the understanding that the entire focus of gameplay is don't take damage, ever!Well, the thesis of the OP is improving the health system, which usually comes into play only for combat, so I only touched on things relevant to that. But it's a fair point. I agree that there's a bit too much focus on combat in DAI. Where's Persuasion? Intimidation? Trickery? I can see why you'd come to that conclusion, but that's not what I meant. I meant, if a player decides (through skill selection) that their character is going to be a close-combat melee specialist, the health system should support that, regardless of class. But that's not the only choice a player could make. For example, ranged damage dealer should be another role and there would be a set of skills that would support that role, apart from close combat. Maybe there could be counter-acting passives for each role, a ranged damage dealer gets a penalty to health for getting too close, while a melee attacker gets a penalty for being too far or too long away from the fray. Well, not really. It's more like barrier or guard in DAI. If you want to say those are just alternate health bars, fine, but healing should not have a positive affect on the risk bar, just as it does not on barrier or guard. This is important, since the way in which a bar is restored has a strong influence on gameplay. That's kind of the whole point of my proposal. When there's only one "health bar" that automatically regens if you duck behind cover and rest a bit, you get run-and-gun gameplay like COD. When you have to exert effort or expend resources to restore one type of health bar, but you get another type of health bar that automatically regenerates, you get a different type of gameplay from COD. Closer to the "never take damage ever" end of the spectrum that you like, but not so far in that direction that game play is fundamentally changed from historical DA. I get it. I understand that style of gameplay, but again, that's such a radical departure from DA. I mean, why have a health bar at all? You can score it more like fencing and if you take more than N hits, where N can be as low as 0, you die. That's a workable alternative. Probably easier to code anyway.
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Post by Nightscrawl on Mar 7, 2017 1:33:05 GMT
That said, I really disliked having to 'dump' points in to abilities you didn't plan on using just to get them. I have some solutions to that specific problem already in the works for the future though . Not sure if I articulated it correctly, but this was my main issue with it.
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Post by Nightscrawl on Mar 7, 2017 1:33:56 GMT
We actually had them only granting passives to people using those weapon until close to the end of development (I was the one who fought to remove it). It allowed for anyone who wanted to engage more with the system to have options other than just picking stuff in a line without much thought. That said, I really disliked having to 'dump' points in to abilities you didn't plan on using just to get them. I have some solutions to that specific problem already in the works for the future though . The ideal is that every point spend is at least slightly useful to you and you have the ability to combine things from multiple avenues to make a build that works for how you want to play the game. That's nice... but... but... but... is the real healing back? As in playing heals, not hurts? They can't even confirm that DA4 exists, so you're not going to get an answer.
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Post by Sylvius the Mad on Mar 8, 2017 16:30:09 GMT
We actually had them only granting passives to people using those weapon until close to the end of development (I was the one who fought to remove it). It allowed for anyone who wanted to engage more with the system to have options other than just picking stuff in a line without much thought. Thank you very much for that. I can see why people don't like that, but to me that was part of what made the choices more interesting. It really helped to highlight the opportunity costs associated with leveling up. I also really like the idea that not all abilities have the same cost, thus making the system more interesting (through added complexity) yet again. Complex systems are more fun to learn.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 8, 2017 16:39:38 GMT
That's nice... but... but... but... is the real healing back? As in playing heals, not hurts? They can't even confirm that DA4 exists, so you're not going to get an answer. Of course I will. Eventually. But not immediately, no. But forgive me for my lack of patience seeing that the topic was healing, rather than the class tree structure.
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Post by Sylvius the Mad on Mar 8, 2017 21:16:35 GMT
I can see why you'd come to that conclusion, but that's not what I meant. I meant, if a player decides (through skill selection) that their character is going to be a close-combat melee specialist, the health system should support that, regardless of class. But that's not the only choice a player could make. For example, ranged damage dealer should be another role and there would be a set of skills that would support that role, apart from close combat. Maybe there could be counter-acting passives for each role, a ranged damage dealer gets a penalty to health for getting too close, while a melee attacker gets a penalty for being too far or too long away from the fray. I struggle to see how to explain that from an in-game perspective. I can see melee skills given a health bonus relative to non-melee skills, but why would those bonuses change dynamically based on which combat tactics are being used? And no, I won't accept gameplay/lore segregation. Barrier and Guard were just health by a different name. And because they cpuld be regenerated without limit, they badly undermined the no health regen mechanic DAI claimed to have. I would much rather conform to the established lore than the established gameplay. My preference would be to use the DAO healing systems but with no automatic health regen, because DAO was the only DA game that didn't actively encourage tanking (because it had useful crowd control options). Healing magic in the presence of mandatory tanking makes healing a crutch I'd rather we avoid. But regenerating health (which all the DA games have had) serves to eliminate strategic thinking from combat, making them purely tactical (this was an explicit goal of DAO's design, and DAO's biggest problem in my eyes). Because that would force everyone to play that way. Forcing everyone to use the same playstyle is specifically what I'm trying to avoid. I want to give people a credible world governed by credible rules and let them decide how they're going to get through it.
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Post by Absafraginlootly on Mar 8, 2017 23:11:19 GMT
While I fully agree the DA systems need work, there are a few problems. - Magic and healing magic canonically exist.
- Healing is fun for some players. FUN. I want DA as a series to not eliminate an entire playstyle just so that people feel like they "don't have" to (instead of can't) take a healing mage along. Make the alternatives clear, remove restrictions for mages, and make any related specializations about branching out and diversifying, not just healing harder. Let people play a fun buff-based mage, including heals, or a damage mage, or a jack-of-all-spells who can buff-heal and bomb as much as they like.
- Mages are supposed to be glass canons. If you want to be a tank, you play a tank. Mages are the ranged firebombers. If that changes, there's no reason to ever play a tank or bring a tank except for contrived extra loot. Magic is, according to lore, supposed to be unbalancing and that is why mages are feared. This leaves us even less reason to have Arcane Warriors floating around because it will mean that magic is just a sword with another name. Nobody I've ever met seemed to think that's fun. Magic, unlike arrows and swords, doesn't exist in our world, and that is why it should be awesome.
What I would really like? To see people stop worrying so much about perfect, unassailable game balance to the point where everything feels the same, and start worrying about FLAVOR, FUN, and LORE. Games seem like they are genericizing over time in the name of game balance, mostly for multiplayer's sake--it's absolutely bloody tedious and it doesn't work for Dragon Age. The ENTIRE draw of Dragon Age, in comparison with other IPs, is its lore and characters, not its game balance. What about IMMERSIVE GAMEPLAY where the feel is more important than points and bars and icons? Where roleplay has a hand in the choices?
I've never heard a single person talk glowingly about how balanced a single-player game was, only how fun, nuanced, or immersive it was.
What I would do is make it so that you either need a mage who has some kind of basic healing available and restrict their healing in some way, or you need a supply of potions and either will potentially work. Make it an either/or thing if you want. Healing, like attempting to take a potion (think about it, it takes TIME to drink a bottle dry, you don't just gulp it down easy while parrying blows, you have to uncork it and swallow over and over--maybe you shouldn't even be able to drink one in battle), should be interruptible like any other action, and healing spells should be as well. Starting to drink a potion yourself, or healing someone else as a mage, should gain you tremendous aggro. The challenge should be a warrior's interactions with the mage to protect them, and the rogue to harry and distract those attempting to harm or disable both. One should either have to be judicious with healing measures to avoid excessive aggro or blows of opportunity, or should have some kind of limit on their healing, like it gets weaker with each successive cast until they need rest to recuperate. But getting a rogue to distract someone so that the warrior can take a potion or the mage can heal him before he goes down makes a lot more sense to me than the instantaneous potion gulp and nothing else. Granted, synergistic distraction plays are more strategic, but it's more immersive/sensible and can be incorporated into tactics so that it's not necessarily a matter of micromanaging for those who don't want to do that. We can go at this from a sense of realism. Swords gradually dull, arrows occasionally snap, mages tire. Those are real life challenges. If we're going to gain debuffs, they should be slow to come on and slight and not oppressive, but they should happen--they don't need to be all about health, they can be about stamina or a need for food and water which you can find in the world rather than going through a load screen--like berries or a cool stream to drink from. That's how immersion-based thinking can make a system more fun--making your people feel like, well, PEOPLE. Additionally, injuries could come back. Maybe mages can't necessarily heal everything in an instant, only speed the process; that I could buy. But if that happens, it would need animations to feel dramatic; maybe even conversations. For a broken bone, perhaps you'd need a warrior to hack off a splint from a tree, then brace the bone so that the healing causes it to heal in the right direction. That's an RL concern, bones healing the wrong way so that the limb is permanently twisted. Since people can die and be un-save-able by mages, it's not at all out of the question that they might need supplies for specific kinds of healing. A cut should be simple enough to close, but a poison? An infection? The revival of necrotic or burned tissue? Harder, or it could/should be. If your healer gets poisoned, maybe you'd need a rogue to make an antidote (but easily, as easily as smashing a wall was in DAI) I find that a far better method of 'blackmail' to take along various classes than a few minor quests and silly walls only warriors can break. If we could find ways to make Dragon Age feel as dramatic as the novels did, where mages are powerful but life is fragile and a struggle, that would really set the series apart. You're a thinker, PapaC, and I like that, but--you have to think like someone who isn't you to create a truly excellent system. Think like someone who loves healing and wants to feel like magic is actually a powerful, scary, or awe-inspiring force--even in gameplay, because that causes immersion instead of feeling so excessively video gamey and micromanagey. Think like someone who hates having to sit through load screens and has a slow computer and gets annoyed and gets their immersion broken when they get damaged all the time and have to go back to base. Accommodate not only the thinkers, the strategists, but also the people who want the advantage of surprise to matter, or who want to feel the controversial yet undeniably useful nature of magic in the setting. That's when the downticks will become upticks--when you seek solutions within your systems for those unlike you, and don't needlessly overcomplicate where the complications add nothing tangible of value. That respect is a tremendous boon and it results in the best gameplay. I do love that you want to understand. The probably reasons for not liking load screens are obvious enough, but when it comes to things like healing, the question is more--why does someone like healing? Maybe they have a caregiver personality. Maybe they're a pacifist at heart. Maybe both. Maybe they're a roleplayer and their character is one or both of those things, so it doesn't make sense for them to light things on fire. If we understand that we have to accommodate the gleeful pyro firebomber, then we have to understand the same about healer types. A more tactical healing magic system would be amazing all around. Let people feel the roleplaying benefits in the gameplay systems, make people FEEL like they are what they're playing, and you'll have a game that's more fun for everyone. Big fan of the idea of bringing injuries back and having to camp or something to fix them. Like, the injury needs to be cleaned/set/splinted and then healed slowly overnight to make sure it heals correctly, I'd also love if you could camp anywhere there's room and isn't an enemy stronghold instead of having to travel/fast travel somewhere. It could also be an opportunity to chat to party members outside of homebase and have a percentage chance of a random encounter attacking the camp that goes up or down depending on how safe the area you camped in is. and I'm getting off topic... I didn't like getting rid of healing for DAI, it just made me hoard guard instead of potions and made mages more boring. I'd say bring back healing spells, and the potion equivalents for no mage groups, but then limit them with things like injury debuffs that need you to stop. You could also have camping to fix damaged armour and dulled weapons. And I'd like to see the schools of magic and large variety of spells for mages come back too. Mages didn't feel right in DAI. And surely it doesn't hurt to have mages have more abilities to choose from from when they still only choose the same amount. Mages aren't supposed to feel the same as the other classes.
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Post by Absafraginlootly on Mar 9, 2017 0:04:30 GMT
Spirit Healing should return to the series in DA4 as well as some form of Blood Magic healing. Blood Magic has been revealed as not completely destructive in the extended universe. In the comics there are Blood Mages that use their skills exclusively to heal. This should be explored in the games, more-so if the setting is Tevinter. If they do blood magic again then different branches of the tree for Healing, Damage and Control (eg. stop them from fighting till damaged, make them fight other ememies etc) would be great.
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