Possible Changes Coming To Health Sustain
by JR Cook - 8 years ago show comments
Matt Cooper from the Balance Team made an interesting post on the official forums recently on the subject of Health Sustain.
Not only does the post contain insight into design philosophy, but it also details potential changes to things such as Regen Globes, Healing Fountains, and passive health regeneration that we might see in the future.
As great as it is to peek behind the curtain and learn more about how the Devs see the game, the best part of this post is the opportunity to share your feedback on the subject. Read the post for yourself and then join the discussion if you would like to share your opinion.
I, for one, find the thought of even more enticing Health Globes terrifying. I already can’t resist trying to gather them all and I have paid for it with my life more than once. I can’t even image what will happen if they are even more desirable. RIP Alebeard!
My name is Matt and I am a member of the balance team for HOTS.
I’ll be coming to the forums occasionally to highlight different areas of the game that we are currently examining. With this, I’ll be looking to get your feedback, but also provide the community with additional insight into why we are investigating something and what the goals we are trying to accomplish are.
While I won’t be able to respond to every question or comment, please know that our team is listening to your feedback!
So, without further ado, the first topic: Health sustain.
This includes all sources of healing available including passive Health Regeneration, collection of Regeneration Globes, using a Healing Fountain, and a wide range of sustain talents such as Regeneration Master or Laws of Hope. Of course let’s not forget those pesky Support characters who can quickly top you off, or even returning to your Hall of Storms for a full heal.
Why are we looking at sustain, and what are we trying to accomplish?
Well, here are a few things:
• Poke heroes such as Chromie or Lunara can have much of their damage output invalidated by the constant uptick of health. This is partially why Chromie’s damage is tuned so insanely high, she essentially sits in burst territory.
• High sustain limits the reward of outplaying an opponent in a small skirmish fight. Your skillshots and those ‘small wins’ you get don’t ultimately matter that much unless you can get a kill.
• With the exception of a major lane bully like Zagara, it can be very difficult to decisively win a lane and force an opponent out. The reward for denying Regeneration Globes in lane also doesn’t end up meaning much.
• In team fights, high sustain can create somewhat passive skirmishes. Unless you have the burst damage to immediately destroy an enemy, most of your damage isn’t meaningful. This is partially why Burst Damage & CC are so prominent.
While the above is an oversimplification of a large system in the game, hopefully this provides some food for thought for your discussion.
Ultimately, we’ve experimented and discussed this internally a lot. There often isn’t a ‘Silver Bullet’ in design, and this area is no exception. There isn’t even necessarily a consensus amongst the design group of if this is even a problem or what the right solve may be.
With that all in mind, here is where we are currently leaning:
• Regeneration Globes: We’re actually looking to tune these up, while also cleaning up the math on these a bit. The hope is that denying opponents access to Regeneration Globes while securing your own ends up being a more meaningful event. The math on these in the live game is awkward right now, but it works out to be roughly 6.2% of your max health and 32 mana. We’ve been playtesting with a change that increases this to 12% of your max health and 8% of your max mana.
• Healing Fountains: We wanted to make using your Healing Fountain a bigger moment. A crazy first idea we had was to increase the CD on these from 100s -> 300s (and buffed accordingly). With such a long CD, it would become a huge moment and extremely deliberate of when to use a Healing Fountain. After much testing we are leaning towards a smaller change though. We’ve been playing with increasing CD from 100 -> 120s which feels meaningful but familiar. There are additional moments where that added 20s is enough to force you back to the Hall of Storms. We’ve also increased the mana provided from 20% -> 30% but kept the health the same. This ends up being an overall reduction in the HPS that these can provide.
• Passive Health Regeneration: While we’ve tested quite a few variations here, one interesting test we did was simply turning off Passive Health Regeneration and not allowing players to pick any sustain talents like Regeneration Master or First Aid. This change meant that taking damage from an Abathur Mine or a Tyrande Owl was now ‘permanent’. You had to take some sort of action to remove this lost health instead of getting it back for ‘free’ over time. This change was pretty heavily contested internally so it’s not something we’re currently planning on shipping but it’s potentially something we will explore more in the future. I’m really curious what you guys think about this idea.
• Support Characters: While I think we can all agree that Support heroes are a huge part of sustain, I wanted to exclude them from this initial conversation as I feel that this will overpower the discussion. Know that we are looking at Supports though, and hopefully that can be a future thread.
Please share any thoughts you have on the content above! I look forward to reading your discussions! 🙂
