Healing debuff

[Brids17]

So I've had a few encounters now that took me over 40 minutes to complete due to bad luck with enemy types. Initially I thought you worst you could get was two reavers and 4 mender/druids but today I found the ultimate annoyance of 3 plague doctors and 3 zombies with the revive counter. It took me around 5 minutes *per* kill to get through it all. It was made worse by the fact they had all bunched up in the corner and so the AOE heals were insane.

I'm not sure if this is a balance issue but if it's not, can we have a debuff that either prevents healing on that target or signifigantly reduces the amount of healing they recieve? It would be annoying to have it used against you but I could live with that if it meant preventing overly long battes where you don't have enough DPS to burst them down.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Hey :)

I don't think it's possible for the game to have you face 4 menders/druids currently (as of a few bulids ago at least). There's a cap of 2 'healers' per battle maximum in place.
If you ever get 4 somewhere, a screenshot would be helpful to help us narrow down the issue.

Plague doctors do count as .75 of a healer though, so you could have 3.

As for the debuff you're mentioning, it's already in the game. It's the Weaken debuff.

[RavenOfRazgriz]

Originally posted by 6 Eyes Studio:

As for the debuff you're mentioning, it's already in the game. It's the Weaken debuff.

It might be worth renaming the Weaken debuff. That name isn't very descriptive for understanding either its old or new effects without reading Help or having the AI use it on you. Perhaps rename it Decay, after Decay Slice?

It is certainly worth using though, now that the AI actually brings healer options. Weaken, Mute, and Sleep are quite invaluable.

Also, I think this is the second time someone's mentioned two Reavers and four Menders specifically. Perhaps a story battle got messed up somewhere to have too many healers?

[Brids17]

What are the numbers on druids and menders? I've certainly gotten a combination of three of them before. But thank you for letting me know that weaken is a healing debuff, I was always under the impression it made you do less damage but the different effects aren't always clear. I'll keep an eye out for the 4 healers and two reavers though, no idea when it was I saw them.

[6 Eyes Studio]

Renaming the effect could help with that for sure. Weaken used to do something completely different, but we haven't renamed it after we changed its effect.

RavenOfRazgriz does make a good point that it's possible there's a premade encounter (no random classes) that has a lot of menders for example. If it's premade, it won't have the restriction I mentioned, as that is for randomized jobs/subjobs.

Here's the information for the different classes (it's in the GameOptions.txt that ships with the game).

; Used to create a count of healers and then restrict the max amount of healers on a map for randomly generated job/sub.
; This is the "amount of healers" added by having this job/sub
[npc-healer-count]
HEAL=1
ALCH=0.25
UTIL=0.5
DRUI=0.5
PRIN=1
LORD=0.25
ANAT=1
BLAD=0.25
SMED=0.5

And the current max of healers is:
NpcSpawnHealerMax=2.25

edit: those were added pretty recently and certainly might use some tuning. Also, seems like Plague Doctor is worth 0.5, not 0.75. That was my mistake >.<

[Meredith K Pseudonym]

Originally posted by RavenOfRazgriz:

Originally posted by 6 Eyes Studio:

As for the debuff you're mentioning, it's already in the game. It's the Weaken debuff.

It might be worth renaming the Weaken debuff. That name isn't very descriptive for understanding either its old or new effects without reading Help or having the AI use it on you. Perhaps rename it Decay, after Decay Slice?

I'd suggest some simple synonym for "compromise" but that might be how it became Weaken in the first place.

Still, there's Blight and Mar. Taint exists as a synonym for Blight.

[Brids17]

Druid should probably count for more than plague doctor, given they have a direct heal spell, rather than a weak AOE. Perhaps druid should be .75, limiting them to 3 per battle. Scary to think I could have 4 plague doctors but at least with careful positioning you can force them to heal you as well.