TLDR: Skaven hordes and elites heal too little, Beastmen hordes heal too much, Chaos and Beastmen elites heal too much.
Here are the current values of health gained for each enemy killed:
| Enemy |
Health from talent |
| Skavenslave |
0.5 |
| Clan Rat, Fanatic, Ungor |
1 |
| Marauder, Gor |
3 |
| Stormvermin, Plague Monk |
8 |
| Skaven Specials |
8 |
| Chaos Specials |
10 |
| Savage, Mauler, Bestigor, Wargor |
15 |
| Chaos Warrior |
30 |
| Bosses, Lords |
50 |
My problem with Heal on Kill talent is that its effectiveness is too inconsistent – it feels almost useless when fighting Skaven, and feels too good when killing Chaos and Beasmen elites. The biggest culprits are the 0.5 HP per slave kill (this is extremely low) and 8 HP per Skaven Elite kill (which is a bit too low). Savages and Monks have the same health and present about the same threat to players, yet Savages yield almost twice as much HP on kill. Bestigors have maybe 20% more health than Stormvermin but heal almost twice as much.
When fighting Beastmen hordes with no elites, it feels about as good as Heal on Cleave which is a bad thing – Heal on Kill is supposed to be less effective versus hordes because of how good it is when killing elites. I think this is due to getting 3 HP per Gor kill which is a bit too much, considering there are more Gors than Ungors in hordes, and Gors have less HP than Marauders (3 HP per Marauder feels fine).
So here are my suggested values for this talent:
| Enemy |
Health from talent |
| Skavenslave, Ungor |
1 |
| Clan Rat, Fanatic |
1.5 |
| Gor |
2 |
| Marauder |
3 |
| All Specials |
8 |
| Stormvermin, Plague Monk, Savage |
10 |
| Mauler, Bestigor, Wargor |
12 |
| Chaos Warrior |
24 |
| Bosses, Lords |
50 |
Thanks for considering.
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First thing i’ll point out is that ungors give 1.5 health, beastmen_horde = 1.5, under breedtweaks.bloodlust_health so you’re nerfing that without realizing it.
As for your suggestion, I do think skaven hordes need a buff to THP on kill (0.5 for slaves does feel low and I worry that 1 THP would be too close to THP on cleave), but i’m not sure how much. It’s unclear to me where the justification to buff fanatic THP on kill is, you did not list any, but I assume it would be based on relative health.
One objection I have to the rationale of relative HP values you presented is that the prevalence of each enemy is quite different, a single wave of a horde on cataclysm consists of 10/12 ungors and 15/16 gors on cataclysm, 24/26 fanatics and 10/12 marauders, and skaven have 42/48 slaves and 14/16 clan rats, and for elites, between bestigors and stormvermin in waves for instance, waves 1/3 would each contain 2/3 bestigors and 4/5 stormvermin. (Skaven are quite a bit more numerous)
As it is, one beastmen horde wave on cataclysm grants an average of 63 THP, chaos grants 58 THP, and skaven grant 37.5 THP, your suggestion would bring the values to 42 THP for beastmen, 70.5 THP for chaos and 67.5 THP for skaven waves.
Balance for health on kill also needs to take into account the prevalence of each enemy, because by health pool alone, beastmen hordes have the smallest health pool and when you balance health generated solely based on the health values of each unit, what would arguably be the hardest faction horde to fight would also generate the least temp HP.
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Thanks for the reply, you brought up many good points!
I took the current values from this post on reddit, so I didn’t know Ungors healed 1.5 rather than 1. Still, I think 1 HP per Ungor would be fair, since I feel they are as easy to kill as Skaven Slaves (a bit more HP, about the same mass, less damage).
As for trying to balance the average THP per wave or THP per enemy max health, the problem with these approaches is that they don’t account for factors such as enemy mass (you kill Gors much slower than their HP suggests due to their high mass) or the threat that an enemy presents (killing waves of Gors is more dangerous than killing waves of Clan Rats, while shielded Clan Rats are harder to kill than Gors, etc.) Also as far as I understand, Skaven hordes typically spawn more waves than other hordes so they might be more balanced in terms of healing per horde than we think (yet it doesn’t change the fact that they such hordes provide too little healing in practice).
I have to admit that my suggestions are based solely on my “feelings” when playing Cata with Boon of Shallya. A scientific approach would be much better, but it would have to account for too many factors, and you’ll still have to assign arbitrary “weights” to different stats (such as HP and Mass).
EDIT: Regarding your concern that 1 HP per Slave would be comparable to what you get from Heal on Hit, I think it should probably be fine – with Heal on Hit you get 1 HP per each Slave you damage, and I don’t know of any melee weapon that kills more than half the slaves that it damages (on average) with each hit (unless you have exceptionally high headshot rate).
EDIT2: The more I think of it, the more I come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t consider THP per horde or THP per wave at all – what matters is the THP per swing, because all other THP talents are based on THP per swing.
In any case, I would love to see some iterations on this talent – try new values, tweak them if they don’t feel right. Perhaps run a beta for it?
I think 1 hp from slaverats is a bit much and 2 hp from gors is a bit low. I dunno how much FS wants to deal with decimals when it comes to thp generation but I’d suggest .75 for slaves and 2.5 for gors. I also never realized savages gave 15 hp, I thought they gave 8 like plague monks, but I think your elite numbers are rather agreeable. I would just up specials to 10 because they are bigger threats normally than most elites.
All health and healing values are always rounded to the nearest 0.25, so suggestions like 0.75 per slave should be fine.