Improving Health

Ffastyl · January 2016

Health is a stat we invest the minimum resources into so we are not instantly killed and leave it at that. There is no reason to invest in it further as healing undoes all non-fatal damage. Currently Health offers no innate advantages beyond having more Health, where Stamina and Magicka increase damage and healing for investing in them.

So let's make Health something worth investing in.

Increasing regeneration in proportion to Health is one route. Having more Health becomes akin to having more Vitality, allowing quicker recovery and resilience to injury and fatigue. Increasing all regeneration by 1% for every 1000 Health is a starting point. Tanks, who possess 20000 to 23000 Health on average would gain 20% to 23% additional regeneration. The multiplier can be higher for Health Recovery so investing in more Health equates to recovering Health faster, perhaps x1.5, the old Health to Stamina/Magicka multiplier. Then Tanks will have 30% to 34% additional Health Recovery.

However DPSs, who possess 15000 Health on average, would gain from this change as well, empowering the glass cannon spec. And while easy to think about, the percentage modifiers need to go as well. It was percentages that broke damage, so the bonuses need to be fixed values for balance's sake.

Providing regeneration bonuses for each Attribute Point spent in Health resolves the issue of making imbalanced glass cannons even stronger. Glass cannons invest normally 0 points into Health while Tanks can invest up to all 64 points. The question remains how much regeneration should be increased per Attribute Point invested in Health.
pubchart?oid=832694267&format=image

At 20 Recovery per point the maximum value begins to become unbalanced so the chart stops there.

I have invested either 20 or 40 points into Health at differing times of my tanking carrier, so I will be using those values to show additional Recovery below the maximum investment to get a gist of the "average" bonus.
pubchart?oid=2072613729&format=image

The issue with this improvement to Health is Health enchantments and Health bonuses on sets will be not provide Recovery bonuses. Unfortunately, applying a Recovery bonus to Health enchantments and bonuses would get out of hand quickly as each enchant/bonus can offer 10 times the value of an attribute point (Purple VR16 Health Enchantment on Purple Infused Cuirass is 1116 Health). To help prevent these enchantments and bonuses from becoming dead weight, more abilities can scale with Health or a secondary innate bonus to Health investment can be introduced.

Increasing Armor in proportion to Health is one suggestion seen in Heavy armor needs buffed already but this suggestion is better suited to a passive, otherwise, like the original draft of the Recovery suggestion above, it grants the bonus to everyone, increasing overall player power level when we need defense to catch up to offense (or offense brought down to defense).

One innate issue I have noticed with increasing Health across almost all games is while it takes more hits to be killed, it also takes more healing to be recovered. Changing healing abilities to restore percentages of missing Health, like Dragon Blood, or of Max Health will resolve the issue of requiring more healing to reach 100% and remove healing from scaling with the same stat as damage does (one cause of the glass cannon meta). Rapid Regeneration could restore 4% per tick (84% over 20 seconds), Breath of Life 30% to the main target and 20% to secondary targets, and Grand Healing 6% per tick (24% over 3 seconds), for example. This is an overhaul to healing abilities so it may not be feasible, or more likely, too big a change at present. So another way to tie healing to Health is provide a Healing Received bonus based on Max Health. 0.5% per 1000 Health, for 10% at 20000 Health and 7.5% at 15000 Health, or 1.0% per 1000 Health, though that is 15% increased healing received for the average DPS spec.

Having Health provide an innate bonus to damage, like Stamina and Magicka, while making them equal in that specific regard, perpetuates the offense centered imbalance we have currently.

Health is associated with defense and having it provide bonuses to it is how Health can be made equal to Stamina and Magicka investment.
Damage shields scaling with Health...
Healing scaling with Health...
Recovery scaling with Health...
Armor scaling with Health...
These are possible ways Health can be made a worthwhile investment.

What do you think will make Health something worth investing in?

davey1107 · January 2016

Nice presentation. I could get behind regen scaling to max health.

danno8 · January 2016

The problem I see is that stamina is just far better to invest in for survivability than health due to blocking being the best mitigation in the game.

Add to that the fact that high stamina also gives damage and health falls even further behind on the priority list.

In my eyes, true low damage, high health tanks can never be achieved in ESO until we decouple resource pools with damage. Spell damage and weapon damage modifiers can be increased to compensate.

While I feel your idea is interesting, I think it is overly complicated, the reason being because we are trying to avoid the whole "tanks with high damage" problem.

Sentinel · January 2016

There are a few small ways that come to mind when Healing and Health are taken in mind. Considering Healers have their own playstyle and ability to improve themselves, it is best that the healing is dependant upon the quality of the healer, meaning that it is best to leave the way outgoing healing is calculated and theorycrafted, the same (not converting to % health).

I do have 2 suggestions however.
1. More max health= Gives a modifier for healing received, such as having 20k health gives 10% healing received, but perhaps 30k gives 30% healing received. (would have to look at emperor bonuses for imbalance..)
2. In the calculations for healing, health is given an equal role as stamina/magicka and simply added to the equation. (the actual math itself would have to balance so that healing itself isn't massively buffed up front). What this would mean is, perhaps for using rally, someone with 40k health and 15k stamina would get the same values as someone with 20k health and 35k stamina. If this were used in conjunction with improving the modifier for health back to 1.5x, then health will be a stat that provides more statistical improvement to healing (since it could be raised higher than the other stats), but you do not lose out on all healing by investing in one stat. You would just have less than ideal.

edorfeus · January 2016

Great idea! In my opinion regeneration should be +0.5% for each point invested in health and the increase should be specifically and directly from the points invested, not from the total amount of health.

Lucky28 · January 2016

danno8 wrote: »

The problem I see is that stamina is just far better to invest in for survivability than health due to blocking being the best mitigation in the game.

Add to that the fact that high stamina also gives damage and health falls even further behind on the priority list.

In my eyes, true low damage, high health tanks can never be achieved in ESO until we decouple resource pools with damage. Spell damage and weapon damage modifiers can be increased to compensate.

While I feel your idea is interesting, I think it is overly complicated, the reason being because we are trying to avoid the whole "tanks with high damage" problem.

I don't really consider tanks with high damage to be a problem. i mean the thing is, i don't want to make tanks have to respec their entire characters everytime they wanted to switch between Cyrodiil and PvE. i mean hell, i wouldn't even think of playing a tank if i had to respec my attributes, morphs and CP at least once a day.

NecrosIX · January 2016

How about losing health translates to getting some ultimate in return? Or will this extra calculation add to the horrific lag in cyrodil?

Forestd16b14_ESO · January 2016

This.... plus buffing heavy armor seeing how health scales off it.

Ffastyl · January 2016

danno8 wrote: »

The problem I see is that stamina is just far better to invest in for survivability than health due to blocking being the best mitigation in the game.

Add to that the fact that high stamina also gives damage and health falls even further behind on the priority list.

In my eyes, true low damage, high health tanks can never be achieved in ESO until we decouple resource pools with damage. Spell damage and weapon damage modifiers can be increased to compensate.

While I feel your idea is interesting, I think it is overly complicated, the reason being because we are trying to avoid the whole "tanks with high damage" problem.

In Heavy armor needs buffed already, altering a Heavy Armor passive (Bracing, for the 5 piece requirement) to allow low Stamina Recovery while blocking has been suggested several times. Blocking is the best defense in ESO and Heavy Armor already has ties to reducing damage that way (where Light Armor has damage shields and Medium Armor has roll dodging).

Tying Max Resource to ability damage/healing is one of the features a handful of players see as imbalancing the game. If Max Stamina/Magicka can be effectively the same as Weapon/Spell Damage for ability efficacy, but Max Stamina/Magicka also lets you use more abilities, one is clearly better. Even with the increased influence Damage has relative to Max.

The problem Health has in this scene is very few abilities scale with it. Removing Max Stamina/Magicka from ability power formulae is one way of remedying the discrepancy, while making more abilities scale with Max Health is another route.
I personally want the power level brought down, Max decoupled from ability formulae, maximum possible Damage reduced, maximum possible Max reduced... it will create more viable builds and styles when we are not required to heavily invest in one to two stats to be competitive.
But, that would require a thorough analysis and overhaul of some of ESO's core systems. ZOS tried doing that with Update 6, the Update that created the current stacking meta, and, while clearly learning from mistakes, I doubt they are ready for another overhaul yet. So I am focusing on limited power increases, balancing isolated systems, and identifying causes for imbalance until we have a balanced game we can safely scale back the power level on.

And I see no issue with having versatile tanks, ones that can hit as hard as they can take, but I assume by "high damage" you are referring to the power available to present glass cannons. That, I can agree with. Some offense should be sacrificed to increase other areas, such as defense. But I do want it to be possible to spread stats around equally and still be viable.

Sentinel wrote: »

There are a few small ways that come to mind when Healing and Health are taken in mind. Considering Healers have their own playstyle and ability to improve themselves, it is best that the healing is dependant upon the quality of the healer, meaning that it is best to leave the way outgoing healing is calculated and theorycrafted, the same (not converting to % health).

I do have 2 suggestions however.
1. More max health= Gives a modifier for healing received, such as having 20k health gives 10% healing received, but perhaps 30k gives 30% healing received. (would have to look at emperor bonuses for imbalance..)
2. In the calculations for healing, health is given an equal role as stamina/magicka and simply added to the equation. (the actual math itself would have to balance so that healing itself isn't massively buffed up front). What this would mean is, perhaps for using rally, someone with 40k health and 15k stamina would get the same values as someone with 20k health and 35k stamina. If this were used in conjunction with improving the modifier for health back to 1.5x, then health will be a stat that provides more statistical improvement to healing (since it could be raised higher than the other stats), but you do not lose out on all healing by investing in one stat. You would just have less than ideal.

Yes, it is best for healers' sake to have healing be based on the caster rather than receiver. Otherwise party formations can become 1 Tank, 3 DPS or, if tanks are still a dying breed, 4 DPS, as it only matters how many times a heal can be cast with a fixed potency.

Your 2. point is actually a rather good one. It partially decouples damage from healing, though not completely. A dungeon crawler I enjoy has healing abilities scale with TEC (Technique) and VIT (Vitality) stats out of STR (Strength), TEC, VIT, AGI (Agility) and LUC (Luck). Because of this purely offensive magic classes, that have high TEC and little else, do not have terribly effective heals if they are taught any. Meanwhile tank classes, which have high VIT and middling TEC and inclass healing, have reasonable healing which is not as powerful as those of the dedicated healing class despite sharing some skills between them.

Implementing your idea is a rather logical one, since healing in general is associated with vitality and endurance as much as it is with magical aptitude. The question becomes one of how the power split will be between Health and Stamina/Magicka for each ability. Splitting the power 50-50 is a starting point, but the resource multipliers should be taken into account. Stamina and Magicka have a 1.1x and Health has 1.2x. Stamina/Magicka can count for 1 / 2.2 or 0.455 for each point (20000 will count as 9091) and Health 1 / 2.4 or 0.417 for each point (20000 will count as 8333). The two values can be summed for the new "resource" value to be used in the calculation. Or Stamina/Magicka can count for 1 / 1.1 and Health for 1 / 1.2 and then average the resulting values, which achieves exactly the same as above. Splitting the power like this means investing 30 attribute points in Stamina/Magicka and 30 in Health will grant the same power heals as 60 in Stamina/Magicka or 60 in Health.

Alternatively the Max Health and Max Stamina/Magicka stats can be averaged, ignoring the resource multipliers, each point counting 1:1. Since Health is easier to stack higher than Magicka or Stamina thanks to the higher resource multiplier, it grants more incentive to invest in Health, sacrificing damage and casts for more potent healing.

Xexpo · January 2016

Very interesting ideas @Ffastyl !
I think that's the first "Insightful" I have given a post in over a year that didn't actually mean LOL or Disagree

Sentinel · January 2016

So, a few things.

It must be noted that investing in health cannot become too powerful. It is easy to forget how the tip of balance can sway with this game, but in the past, smaller things than these suggestions have done more than whats been expected.

Keeping the above in mind, for the additional recovery given from health investment, I believe 15 to be a good amount. Providing 600 S/MR & 900HR at 40 points invested (to be affected by other multipliers which might substantially raise the amount), and 960S/MR & 1408HR at 64 points invested, the bonus to investing only into health comes into an area that is completely workable, but not perhaps the end goal. Which is how it should be, as minimal investments to maximum gains are not fantastic for balance.

Additionally another way that health and health recovery can be made more effective would be to double the potential values for health recovery and make that stat viable as well to any build. It does not provide anything substantial enough to a build range outside of tanks to be considered valuable. However with, say 300 health recovery, one might be able to have almost the exact offset of providing 174 damage from a jewelry enchant. At this point, stacking into health recovery could become quite nasty, and while values now can be obtained of nearly 6k, afterwards, it could be possible the maximum value rises to 10k, and average/desirable tank/hybrid value would meet at 3k or so.

This brings up the issue of it becoming too powerful as well. The values would need to be looked at quite a bit, or even multipliers adjusted, because having health recovery of between 6-10k with complete tanking abilities on the side creates a realm in which builds can easily out-tank, become immortal, in PvP. For PvP alone, having immortal builds is never great for balance, the same as insta-kill builds are. Combat becomes almost counterintuitive, so the values of health recovery would need to be closely examined.

That said, the classes that benefit most from the changes above would be DKs and Templars, and might even sway the meta somewhat. With a higher emphasis on non-shielded defense, those two classes would gain an advantage and might provide better class balance with the change.

At the moment, health and health recovery need a substantial buff, and doing so will affect class balance as much as build diversity.

Didgerion · January 2016

The health is good where it is.

The problem is with stam and magica pools. Those pools should not affect the output damage.

More magica means that you just have a bigger bag of magica.....but I did not observe any pillow fight animations when dealing magica damage....how come than there is more damage when fighting with bigger magica bags?

FlounderOG · January 2016

I would love a health tank with all armor enchants and traits going towards health and armor values.

sneakymitchell · January 2016

This is a nice chart to show I would love to see this in the game. Now a days is all DPS and vigor on stamina builds. ZOS should see this big time with the way health and health recovery is.

Baconlad · January 2016

As a blazing shield spamming, (1500magic recovery) 5500 healthregen, 45k health templar tank...i approve this message! =D I am already tanky enough can take two-three GOOD players of various build. In pve? Nothing can take me save for raid bosses. They tend to be rather hard hitting, taking over half my health AND almost 20k blazing shield. In pvp though my shield hits AOE (!) for 9k crits not including burning light procs/ proc crits.