Originally posted by
LegendofSleek
It's only bad design if it doesn't work. It's only lazy if they didn't consider alternatives, and I assure you after watching years of healing metas coming and going: they've tried every "elegant" solution imaginable. If the scalpel fails there's no shame in trying the hammer. There's nothing inherently wrong with the direct approach.
You also have to consider "intended player experience," and "perceived intended experience." If the game wants a player to interact with the game in a certain way, but the player thinks they're supposed to be doing something else entirely: they're going to have a bad time*. A global debuff on healing just better communicates the intended experience. The goal of the change is "out of combat healing is worse," and it reads "out of combat healing is worse. The inverted change you proposed has the same goal of "out of combat healing is worse" but it reads "in combat healing is better," which could cause players to misunderstand the nature of their abilities. Which will lead them to frustrating experiences.
But to reiterate the most important point: It's only bad design if it doesn't work. Let's see if it works before we disqualify the merits of the change.
*To clarify it's only a problem if the player is trying to play the game "as intended," but misunderstands what is expected of them. The negative experiences emerge when the player feels like they're doing everything right but the game is not responding accordingly. It has nothing to do with individuals who are adding their own rules to customize their experience like speed/challenge runners.
I can also confirm we did talk about quite a few alternatives. I actually posted this before we revealed the global healing change but I thought it summed up healing in SMITE fairly well. You can also see where our head is at for how we view healing in SMITE. I mostly post it to this thread to show that we do really discuss all this stuff and try to justify why we do what we do and not just implement the path of least resistance. https://www.reddit.com/r/Smite/comments/kdvfnn/the_problem_with_healers_in_smite_is_the_lack_of/gfz82cq/?context=3
The design team has discussed healing for a long time, so any change we decided to make was going to have a lot of thought behind it. We talked about targeted healer nerfs, but had concerns about how those gods changes would be perceived, and would leave a lot of lesser frustrations unaddressed (Lifesteal and how some players perceive its power level for example). Just nerfing Aphrodite/Hel/Ra for example wouldn't really solve what we thought was a more global issue. Simply put, we want to ensure that more often than not, the combat players engage in has meaningful consequences. Out of combat healing had the ability to frequently negate this.
We did talk about doing something like rebalancing every single heal and sustain options in the game and providing a rule for boost combat healing. We even discussed more involved changes like a "recent damage" on the health bar that could receive full healing, but widdled over time so you had to quickly heal recent damage or face a penalty.
Thinking through the options we opted for the global anti-heal. This felt like an effective method to address a global concern that was also one of the more intuitive options. Out of combat healing, a perceived problem, has been made weaker while in combat healing, a perceived role that can be healthy in SMITE, is largely preserved. Explaining this to a player I feel is relatively straightforward once it is learned. When you fight gods, you are healing for full. Otherwise it is reduced. Its also a single change to parse (well, and the Anti-heal item changes) rather than a cascading wall of numerical changes to a slew of gods and items that largely results in functionally the same outcome.
devtrackers.gg