Healing and Combat

[kovak]

I was looking at some stuff about combat and how to add healing without making it overpowered and then i've crossed with this topic on reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/1dd3k3/pathfinder_without_magic/?st=ix4lgpe6&sh=c88c5170


After reading all the posts i've realized some points that idk if people will consider

• Totally removing healing options during combat or keeping "low tier" healing effects or limited healing may speed up combat or make it more strategic.
  
• Healing after combat may be consider a reward to the player so he won't need to spend their precious limited MP and potion supplies.
  
• Supportive classes still plays a major role here since they still have other means to help the team through buffs and/ or hex skills besides dealing damage.
  
• Consider consumable items and Equipments who gives limited usage skills to your party to play an important role in combat.
  
• Longer or shorter encounters won't make things look better.
  
• Allow actors to have limited healing powers that are reseted if you go to a resting point.
  

What's your take on this?

 

[Basileus]

I'm always conflicted on this topic.


On the one hand, I have always favored games like Dragon Quest with limited healing over Final Fantasy where I feel like I can always reliably heal up. I like the tension of exploring a dungeon and knowing that my MP is limited and hard to restore so I have to ration it carefully to make it all the way to the end and have enough left to fight the boss. Items to restore HP are weak in DQ, the equivalent of a Phoenix Down to revive allies in battle is extremely rare, revive spells are mid-game at the earliest and the first tier can fail, and while there are some items that restore MP they are not common. In FF, I always have more Phoenix Downs than I will ever realistically need, tons of weak potions that I will never use, way more than enough strong potions that will basically full-heal for the first half of the game, a never-ending supply of status effect cures (even though most status ailments go away after battle and generally aren't strong enough for me to care about), and I can always full heal HP and MP with a tent at any of the numerous save points. I'm never at risk in any non-old-school FF game because there is just healing up the wazoo. 


On the other hand, I know that turn-based combat can get really boring when there isn't more variety in the actions you can take and you feel the need to mash "Fight" to conserve MP. I get that many people find resource management to be tedious, but I don't think that means we should do away with it altogether. I'm not a fan of full heals after every fight - it takes away any sense of continuity. It's like the fights don't exist and there is no difference between a party that blows through every fight on the way to the boss and a party that was in the red at the end of each mob encounter and limped to the boss.


I think healing just needs to be a more interactive process. There needs to be more player input that "cast Cure spell of appropriate tier". That kind of thing leads to binary gameplay where there is either zero tension because you are always healed up or you struggle because resource costs prevent you from using your skills. I think there can still be Medics/White Mages that are dedicated support...I just think they should emphasize preventing damage with healing as secondary, possibly Heal Over Time effects by comboing buff skills or some other means of adding strategic decisions and/or skillful player input to the support class.


Basically, I want some form of resource management but with a large enough resource bar to actually play with, interesting supportive skills with strategic depth, and just enough difficulty replenishing resources to punish getting careless.

 

[Aoi Ninami]

One idea is to have "dual techs" where you can do much more powerful or situationally useful moves if two or more party members are free at the same time. Then the real cost of healing during battle is losing the opporunity to do your best moves in the same round.

 

[BloodletterQ]

Or you could have the healing class be a little to focused on healing while the backup healer just has Regen and maybe even Auto-Life as an example.