Not sure I would get rid of temp health. I like the idea of health return as a reward for skilled play (i.e., killing/critting/etc.).
I could see just making temp health on kill a base passive for all classes. It would free up a talent tier for something more meaningful since it’s not really a choice for anything other than beam/pyro.
Although, as others have suggested, it would also be interesting if the temp health talents were customized for each class/sub-class. That could potentially offer some cool build opportunities.
Although, I’d personally just like to see an overhaul of most of the talent trees. Temp health is really just one problem with the trees. A lot (or most?) of the talents don’t feel like a decent option. Looking through my build trials at 650+ hours, I think part of the problem is that there is rarely a reason to pick a non-damage skill. For example, only 8/15 of the Pyro talents seem viable to me.
Less damage when I get disabled? Or I could just dodge. Increased charge speed on low health? No idea what FS was thinking there. The two atk speed talents feel like maybe they wanted me to go melee or shoot faster with bolt? Except nothing else really synergizes and the melee weapons are mediocre without UC melee power. No one takes -block cost on overcharge. Or temp health on boss. Or temp health on ult.
I think it might be better if FS started from the standpoint of what builds they want to offer for each subclass, and then build the tree to make them work – including how they want temp health to function for each build. Right now, they just seem sort of cobbled together.
In my opinion the skilled play in this game isn’t killing. Killing is easy. 90% of the enemys can’t even defend themself in any way. The skilled play in this game is not getting hit. That’s the difficult thing. By giving the player temp health you don’t allow them skilled play. You allow him to do a few more mistakes.
But yeah it should be a base passive.
Then let me rephrase. It encourages you to get better at the only real “role” in this game – which is killing as fast as possible. Everyone is a DPS class.
There’s no threat system. No real way to “tank” (barring Bardin’s ult, I guess) or heal/support (maybe Bardin bomb’s?). Even challenge on modded is just balancing killing power with mobility/survivability. I like the idea of getting temp health for different actions, but I struggle with the implementation. What action – besides killing stuff – should provide temp health that we want to encourage?
Temp health on kill is at least honest about every player’s goal and rewards people who kill better/faster.
I again have to disagree with you. Temp health doesn’t encourage you to get bether at killing in my opinion. Its not like you hit level 20 and suddenly think “Well i get temp health for kills now, maybe i should kill more”.
I actually think temp health allows you to play worse. Take this Video of J_sat as example.
go to 8:30. A very skilled play would have been if J_sat killed the entire horde without getting hit. For that to happen he would have had to choose the timing for his melee and especially ranged attacks way more carefull. The most difficult thing in fighting a horde is not to smash the attack button. It is to find the right opening for attacks. Because of temp health he doesn’t has to do this skilled play. He can just take out the crossbow and shot. He gets hit several times for not choosing the right time to attack but temp health takes away the punishment for his bad plays. Don’t get me wrong J_sat is incredible skilled. But would he have done the same thing without temp health, it would have been even more impressive.
He is another thing about it. Imagine there was another player together with J_sat. this other player doesn’t have temp health. He needs to be more carefull with choosing his attack window. therefor he attacks fewer than J_sat but doesn’t get hit on the other hand. Who would you say is the more skilled player? The one who doesn’t do any mistakes and always chooses the right time to attack but needs longer for the horde because of that, or the one who chooses bad attack windows, takes a few hits but doesn’t have to care because of temp health. I would say the guy who doesn’t get hit. Funny thing is, the worse player will have more kills at the end of the day.
How about look-out role? 3 people whacking at rats on a ledge often does not require a fourth. Or if there are too many enemies it’s useful of instead of optimizing killing you optimize the amount of disruption to the enemy (aka. crowd control). There are more roles than DPS and only rewarding killing with temp HP is kind of stupid, since it encourages bad play.
To be fair, I think he values hit trading in situations where you can clear faster. Rather than finding the absolute safest times to attack and treating temp health merely as a cushion for mistakes, you can use your health as a resource. Trade some health when it lets you get extra attacks and kills, which returns you with extra ult charge and temp health. If you can clear hordes quicker, you have more time to progress through the map before the next horde/special spawns.
I think true solo has different priorities since you know you’ll be getting such a large amount of temp health.
Like I said, I rephrased. Using the word “skilled” was probably wrong. Temp health on kill encourages the right behavior – skilled or not. Again, you want players leaning on the side of aggressive since tactically rhe game is all about kill speed. And, as Feudal said below, it encourages the player to kill quickly and to engage in more aggressive behavior – like hit trading (which arguably requires some skill and judgment). In other words, if I’m awesome at killing, I can take a few more hits and just shrug them off to keep killing more. That’s definitely the case in true solo. There are times where it’s ideal to just take the hit – knowing you are going to refill on temp health since you are guaranteed every kill.
I think the weakness with my logic is that Temp health on kill is a limited resource. You are technically competing with your teammates since there is a finite pool of stuff to kill. You can actually outkill the team by such a large margin that they can’t get temp health back. I’ve sometimes had to stop killing to let a flagging melee regain temp health on a horde for example – or they yelled at me until I slowed down lol. I’d definitely acknowledge that as a weakness since it doesn’t really promote group play.
I’ll probably agree that the best solution for temp HP would be randomizing getting it. What if the chance (as opposed to the amount) of it depended on a type of foe you fall?
And don’t forget, guys, that j_sat runs his solos with double damage which makes it a pretty much different game regarding both killing hordes (1 slash to kill most rats in place of our usual 2-3) and specials (no need to actually aim for the head). It is useful to show off some tactics, but don’t expect this smoothness from a real unmodded game.
I’m not sure how you would measure this. Amount of stagger you deal? Mob knockdown? It would certainly limit it to certain weapon loadouts exclusively.
Unfortunately, I’m not really sure I agree with you that there are other roles besides DPS in this game. Maybe mid-game, there are roles like “you’re prioritizing special kills.” Maybe. But not roles in the traditional RPG sense. There’s no tank, no healer, no support. There are classes with the occasional utility ability (Bardin bombs/WHC’s weak group buffs) or a stagger ult (on CD), but, otherwise, we should all be optimizing for one thing. Killing as many different unit types as fast as we can.
It’s why shield weapons still feel weak even after the last patch. They offer stagger, but the kill speed is still stupidly low. You’re better off running most of the other 1H or 2H weapons and just killing the targets rather than “CC’ing” them.
FS could change that and make real roles. But it would require making big changes. For example, take shield again, you could increase the aggro radius on shield weapons (which is basically just proximity based) and make it so the shield aggro takes priority in a queue with your teammates’ weapons (which would be a completely new feature – assigning threat values to different weapons). Then a shield bardin could actually peel mobs off of a teammate just by running close. Then you would actually have an incentive to stack stam/block and CC and you could create a real tank – since there is now a way to actually tank. Then you could award things like temp health chance on block – since it’s now happening enough to matter. Or chance on charged swing to reward the CC action – since the game is now encouraging tank behavior. But without those changes, no one would take those options over temp rewards for killing since the game currently only incentivizes killing.
And then there are ripple effects from that change right? Now we have a real tanking solution. So skills like Shade backstab become kind of awesome. You could have Bardin gather aggro and knockdown while a Shade backstabs. Then you could change one of the Shade’s temp health talents to temp health chance on backstabs – which would be optimal if you were running a group loadout with a tank. Then we’re rewarding use of skills, abilities, class synergies over just raw kills.
This ended up longer than I intended. To summarize, the game is only designed around one role right now, DPS. So I think it would be hard to create temp health rewards around anything other than some variation of killing stuff – or different ways of killing stuff.
@Feudal
Of course hit traiding was the right choice in that situation. But it is only possible because of temp health. Without it he would have had to do the more skilled/difficult play. I only wanted to show with this that temp health does take away some of the skill requirement for this game. But youre right, hit trading is often the right choice.
Ok so I’ve done myself a bit of observational research - going in to recruit and seeing how people fare without Temp Health.
Very badly. Very badly indeed. Oh my.
Now I’m sure there’s some scope for the fact new players think it’s ok to windmill into a patrol with a blacksmiths weapon and be ok. New players don’t know how to dodge, new players don’t know how to block effectively and push when necessary to give themselves an opening. NEw players YOLO into the distance a lot, and spilt up, and do silly things - but are we dismissing the impact of Temp Health based upon the fact we think new players are pants at the game?
After some contemplative beard-stroking, and some quite fine Irish Whiskey, I have come to the conclusion that Temp Health is a mechanic that should be available to all at level 1, and would very much improve survivability at recruit/veteran and is a mechanic of making the game more accessible for new players( as it helps them understand the benefits of blocking/dodging etc without making a mistake so lethal), and needs to be REMOVED as a bonus at Champ+.
Champion difficulty and above could remove the temp health benefit in the same way that it introduces the friendly fire. This would still make Temp Health an ambient ability for everyone at level 1 and be removed once the player decides to go to Champion. This could really improve player retention as the enemies that are so punishing (at all difficulties) are really savage at recruit. I mean a gunner wipes players so fast it’s not funny. Being a level 30 in a recruit party and seeing you whole team get completely rinsed in a matter of seconds can’t ALL be down to new players. Recruit is punishing without high power weapons or high level characters. I think we might have all forgotten just how many times we got downed during beta as a recruit/veteran. How many times we got pummeled in veteran by only having power 118 weapons. Bosses are really savage. Even Roger.
Add into the fact we long-term veterans understand the game and the skills required to be successful to see how we cruise through the Recruit/Veteran/Champion difficulties. This skews our perspective a bit.
By removing Temp Health from Champion and Legend it would suddenly make so much more things a real challenge. Of course there would need to be extensive re-balancing of hordes/specials/ spawn rates to account for the fact that Temp Health has buffered players through many runs, but with a current thread about how “Legend isn’t challenging” it might be something to consider.
Anyone feel like doing Legend/Champion runs without using Temp Health on Kill and Temp Health on Crit? I’m going to try, and see if it really ramps up the difficulty. I hope it will as this might be just the balance change needed to engage some cocksure players in Legend.
Temp health wouldn´t help to grow in this game in any way. If the ppl spam LMB on recruit / veteran, they´ll do that on champ/legend too. If you remove it then, they´ll die hard and ragequit + arque “HOW THE FASDSAFIOA FATSHARK, WHERE IS MY TEMP HEALTH YOU AOIUFHAUKSOHFUJHAFKUH!!!”
Temp health helps a big playerbase right now, but yeah recruit should become more friendly to newcomers (no patrols, boss without horde) and temp health should be removed overall.
It’d just soften the initial shock a bit. People who are bad players will still be bad players and never move to Champion+anyhow. Go and play a recuit game to see just how painful it is for new people. I forgot how harsh it was.
I do know how it is, that´s why they should nerf it a lil bit more, but temp health would help nobody to gain their own skill. If the ppl don´t understand how that game works properly, theý´ll never go out of recruit/veteran. Step by step… that´s what they need or they´ll leave.
People don’t even make it to Veteran. It’s too punishing for new players. I do agree with you, developing new skills is a matter of personal pride rather than any mechanic in game. Temp health at recruit might help new players become “Hooked”.
I’ll have to say no on this. The gaps between different difficulties are big enough already, and this would add hugely to them. Also, Recruit and Veteran are forgiving enough already for people to learn bad habits: not dodging Specials and Bosses, hiding behind Block instead of putting it up when necessary… And shooting through friends. Feel free to add more examples, if you want. If Temp health was also restricted to lower levels, that would teach people to not care about being hit as “I can recover it in few kills anyway” and then need to learn away from it when hits suddenly hurt much more and you can’t recover from them even temporarily. Which would certainly lead to even more deaths on the higher difficulties, and through that, frustration and quitting the game. I’d say it would have pretty much the exact opposite effect of what you said.
This is also the reason I’ve said it shouldn’t necessarily be available from the start, even if it was made into a baseline ability. First teach that getting hit hurts, then teach how to avoid getting hit, and only then allow mitigating the hits you will end up taking. If you want a more skilled playerbase, the best way is to find people on the lower difficulties who want to learn, then teaching them. People won’t learn to swim by giving them a snorkel, flippers and floaters and as soon as they can move around with those, taking them all away and putting them in deep water. That leads to drowning, or nearly so and being afraid of water for a long time.
That´s why i would prefer a “nerf to the ai-director”. The normal horde won´t be a problem to the players. Patrols/bosses are. Let them “solo” bosses and don´t give out patrols there.
Even CW´s could be pain, so maybe recruit should be skaven only???
I don´t know. You´re right that temp health would help them, but it would just transfer the “OH FÜÜÜÜ” - effect to veteran/champion.
New ppl need a good progress and that would be to “learn every type of enemy step by step”.
I suppose I’m just trying to smooth the way things are;
New players are downed a lot. I mean really punished.
veterans are moaning that everything is a monty haul and red dupes are bloody annoying.
Somewhere there is a way of using Temp Health to soften the blow to new players without the veteran players being completely casual about the highest difficulty.
@Darth_Angeal and @Yzneftamz you both make solid points, and there is more to it than just “Fix This” or “Fix That”.
The analogy of swimming is quite good actually, in that we DO give people floats and water wings to help confidence and remove the severe repercussions of a mistake (in a pool), but we don’t just drop people in the Atlantic and hope they’re ok. Cutting off Temp Health all of a sudden might be a bit severe…
Temp health could be the way to gently wean players onto Champion+ difficulty by gently removing the crutch of Temp Health at each increasing difficulty.
Dodging and Blocking and pushing are things people either learn or they don’t whether temp health is there or not. Certain Classes enforce the fact you need to dodge(or not) and block(or not) and so on with weapons/talents …ad infinitum.
[edit] Recruit and Veteran are only forgiving to those of us who are used to higher difficulties. For those new to the whole franchise Recruit and Veteran are savage and ruthless.
