Healing and difficulties

[SmuJayB]

I know the difficulties are very early on in development, but currently imo there is a big problem with what they do when it comes to healing. The healing that can be acquired from weapons and gifts, especially the Necromancy gift, often ends up being more valuable than the end-of-level and sometimes even flask heals.

Because of this, the difference in difficulty between builds that have access to on-demand healing like that and builds that don't is greater than the difference between difficulty levels. In Dead Cells, flasks are refilled between areas on lower difficulties and Necromancy (which functions essentially the same) is far weaker.

Of course 1-to-1 comparisons can't be drawn, but this means that healing mutations in Dead Cells feel like a way to make the later difficulties slightly more doable, rather than making them easier than an easy difficulty without one. I don't have a specific suggestion on how to fix this other than that Dead Cells' system works fine, but I guess it would be nice to tone down build-specific healing in favour of universal healing to avoid the game's difficulty depending too much on certain gifts and affixes as opposed to the actual difficulty system.

[Shiro]

Flasks feel like they can't be easily "spammed"; several times I died because I simply didn't want to waste the flask until it was too late, as they aren't auto refilled. At least afterboss shop reliably contains one, but this also reduces the already small number of other items shop offers.

Meanwhile Necromancy feels not just overpowered, but indispensable. Without it, healing during the level is limited to rng food dropped or sold, rng of specific item modifier that lets it lifesteal (but only up to 50%) and expensive flask, which you do not want to use even once, not to mention more. Shielding crystallize is useful alternative but doesn't scale with maxhp.

I'd let (on low difficulty) healing waters to refill flasks partially, say fill every empty flask with "subpar" healing that only recovers 25% hp (and prob can't be shared). Good enough to get you off death's door, weak enough so that you still would prefer a proper flask. More (weak) ways to properly heal off enemies or generate shield more reliably would also help, and let necromancy be nerfed without harm.