I think it's a little counterintuitive that SWK receives the out of combat healing debuff in an ability designed to take you out of combat. I know that Meditation is immune to the debuff so maybe SWK ulti can get the same treatment?
Even when fighting right up until you get into the air, you only get two ticks of the heal before the debuff kicks in.
External link →Agreed this is a strange counterintuitive example, but I feel like the comments are using this as a platform to remove the entire system. We will be looking into some ways to prevent this type of specific scenario with SWK, but we are still very happy with the brawling system as a whole.
Brawling is a better solution for healing for 2 specific reasons - in combat vs out of combat rules and applying to all healing
We want to have rules attached to ALL healing for in combat and out of combat. So, even if we were to implement something more specific to each healing god/item and lifesteal - we would be redundantly stating that things have decreased out of combat healing everywhere. Which just feels messier and achieves the same effect.
We also do intend to nerf all healing, this includes lifesteal and smaller self heals, not just group healing. So again brawling is a nice solution for applying game wide, as we would want it to anyway.
But why does someone like Cupid, Tyr, etc need to be nerfed along with it when it was Hel/Aphro or an Asi-Hunter full healing off a buff camp. Cupid Hearts barely do anything now.
because healing is really strong, even in small amounts. We have a lot of data to back this up. Cupid was essentially sleeper OP most of his entire career, even when he wasn't considered meta he was top win%. This is true for many gods with even small amounts of small healing, Chiron is another example that comes to mind.
They still heal the full amount in combat, to discourage players from sitting under tower and waiting to pick up more hearts.
Why do you intend to nerf all healings? Wasn’t the whole goal of the Brawlers effect to affect only abilities that could heal more than one at a time while out of combat?
it absolutely was not the goal. We specifically did intend to nerf all healing in SMITE. Not just group healers.
Why not have antiheal effects apply to specific subtypes of healing? I understand the reason for it being healers running riot but I didn't see lifesteal being a problem before as it was kept under control by Brawlers + Divine (unless you ran a full power assassin/warrior and got deleted in a protracted fight)
Brawlers could be defined as ability healing, then Pestilence can be defined as lifesteal healing, nerfing Devos etc as seen fit (or adding more antiheal between these two heal types). Ankh could just be a debuff that affects both and HP5 is untouched. Things like Vamana ult would be affected by Ankh and Brawlers but to kill a hunter would require Pestilence and the solo laner to go in with their team, etc. I'd imagine something like this would make the tank feel like the tank, and as auras don't stack it could work. While ability hunters would require Brawlers to deal with
While the Aphrodite/Ra/Hel stuff might be a problem still I'd probably be OK with a DR system on ability healing- any healing overtime or within a certain time period (like if you get hit) brings back less the more you keep using it (incentivising the use of Asclepius rod and Cad) so you'd have to wait or end your fights fast- an Aphro that is far away from an enemy team will still full heal her comrade over time even with the debuff as her healing is based on power and her power levels get pretty huge by late game
Well its hard to answer this question because there are a lot of matters of opinion across the scenario.
You said you didn't see lifesteal as a problem. We did see lifesteal as a problem.
Your pitch suggests adding complexity and specific modifiers for situations that you think should be handled differently. We think they should be handled the same way, so that's why we implemented a solution that handles them the same way.
Your pitch is much harder to understand and apply strategically, in my opinion. But pretty much the whole reddit community who dislikes brawling is in favor of more complexity because they think its necessary to nerf only specific types of healing more than others. We think that we needed to nerf all types of healing in similar ways, specifically decreasing it substantially when not fighting enemy gods.
Introducing more unique counter items is generally not a good thing. People already have a low purchase rate on anti-heal, so we are going to make it even more narrow? Seems risky.
As for DR for healing - I generally think this is also a solution without a problem. Healing is already gated by cooldown, Healing is now gated by in-combat or out of combat. Adding DR to healing specifically would encourage people to not heal repeatedly and fight, but to instead disengage and heal up? This pitch seems to encourage exactly the opposite type of gameplay we are hoping to create.
Why not rework healing abilities, Or the problematic healing characters who define the meta when healing is strong?
eventually we might. but people tend to want healing, and in any possible way we rework them we still want to reduce out-of-combat healing more than in-combat healing.
The main point I'm trying to get across in this thread is:
I feel like the brawling debuff is a good choice as a balance however wouldn’t it seem better to exclude ultimate abilities from that debuff to allow it more usability in the earlier parts of the game and makes ultimates like sun wukong’s more consistent? At this moment there are very few ultimates that don’t require you to do damage to heal and most of the other ultimates that do heal are from a passive, lifesteal, or other ability. This change would apply on 6 gods I believe-
Sun wukong ult
Vamana ult
Isis ult
Shiva ult
Erlang ult
Terra ult
Removing ultimate ability healing from the brawling debuff makes these abilities more consistent to use. There can be an argument on how the ultimate healing can be too effective but in my opinion, you would be using an ultimate ability for that sustain and 4 of those ultimate abilities are huge team fight ultimates in combat. The only one that i can see this change effecting too much is Isis for healing too much after completing an objective but I feel like that can get changed in it’s own way.
all of those abilities we would still encourage you to stay in combat and we see it as a good thing that you cant just run away to heal out of combat with them. The only exception is SWK because he is literally removed from combat from his ability and only heals himself.
I don’t like that your reasoning here is ppl don’t buy antiheal items…. Ok well then they deserve to be healed against? I’m not seeing the problem. If you choose not to buy beads against ares, that’s the same thing, it’s your fault for not making the correct build choice
Edit: furthermore isn’t the whole reason that you removed boots was to increase build diversity? And now you’re almost acting like you’re against build diversity. Most gods have a small list of meta items that if you don’t build atleast 3 or 4 of them, you’re not performing
thats just a small part of my response. but how is forcing people to buy 2-3 different types of anti heal items encouraging build diversity? it does the exact opposite and makes more mandatory items.
remove global debuff and then make healers have 2 seperate numbers for heals. For example, make hels 3 heal herself for 180+ 30% scaling and make allies take a total of 125+15% scaling.
The numbers can obviously be adjusted, but the self surivability of healers should remain, while nerfing the healing they do to allies all together.
They can then rebuff the healing of gods like aphrodite for themselves, or even buff the offensive capabilities of them too.
Keep healing as a primarily selfish tool and make it much weaker for allies.
Just copied and pasted a response, what do you think of this idea? Is it something you have thought about before?
why is this better than nerfing out of combat healing? if your numbers were slightly lower you would have just pitched exactly brawling, with the only difference that the healer themself gets a slight bonus.
As I've mentioned in multiple other comments, this rule came from the fact that many gods could regenerate their own HP too much, from lifesteal, self heals, and group heals. This pitch does not solve the problems we are currently solving with brawling.
Because if there were more antiheal items then it would increase diversity cuz as of now, the only real viable antiheal item for mages is divine ruin, so if you need antiheal that’s the only item you’re buying if you’re not trolling and throwing and there’s no diversity to that
Edit: Also hunters are another great example, for many they don’t have abilities to apply brawlers to many targets so that’s not a viable option to build then and it lowers the diversity again
i dont think im going to be able to convince you here, but I disagree.
the commenter above was suggesting that we make more UNIQUE types of anti-heal items - to counter only specific types of healing - ex: an anti lifesteal and an item and a different anti healing item.
That in no way improves build diversity, it gives you theoretically more options, but if self sustain is even slightly strong both become mandatory then limiting your flex build slots
more items doesn't mean more diversity.
mayyyyyybe just making a bunch of different items that all have a passive like divine ruin could have an effect like your suggesting, but its still not really build diversity, its just a few options within the same mandatory slot
Honest question, is having a global status effect active at all times a bad game design? With this, every god in this game is debuffed until they fight. I think that's why people view it as lazy or a Band-Aid fix. I realize Smite is different but are there other games where you are debuffed off the jump like this? Is this a common thing? It just feels kind of weird, it feels hard to explain to new players I play with WHY it's necessary to globally debuff every character instead of just tweaking the numbers across the board on healing. I get that it's easier, but is it actually better?
its not. SMITE has tons of global effects, many of them even less visible. Base protections globally nerf everyone's damage from the numbers they see on their ability screen. Lowest level player on conquest gets bonus XP. Everyone gets their movement speed reduced when strafing or backpedaling or basic attacking (except medusa) - there are many examples.
If we aim to nerf every single out of combat heal, this is the correct way to do it.
Reddit seems to think it would be better to specifically put "this ability is 40% less effective if you have not dealt/received damage within 3s" on every single healing ability - then tweak some down to 30% and others up to 50% - which I understand, that's a fair assessment, its a more precise way of doing it. But we can control the heal already by the base amount and applying the same reduction for combat is arguably more fair and better balance than allowing some specific gods to heal more out of combat than others.
That's totally fair. Thanks for the answer. I certainly don't envy you. Designing a game seems very difficult and no one is ever gonna be happy. There's a reason all of us have been playing this game for 5+ years though!
haha much appreciated.
im working hard to help this community understand why this solution works better than they think. People seem to be mostly against it because it feels too good to be true. Something so simple shouldn't just work like that!? But it has worked quite well!
We prob should buff cupid hearts, and fix this Sun Wukong issue since he literally cannot be in combat and heal in his cloud at the same time (he is the only god with this situation) - but besides that I've seen no compelling points on why we should get rid of brawling.
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