>>DR-Armifer: The revised versions of Heal and Devour got released into a Plat preview this evening. They're Melete's project, so I'll let her or the Plat players go into more detail.

Any details on the revised version of Heal?

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"Empathy doesn't make people nice." --GM Armifer

Empath new player guide: https://elanthipedia.play.net/mediawiki/index.php/Empath_new_player_guide

Empath hunting ladder: https://elanthipedia.play.net/mediawiki/index.php/Empath_hunting_ladde

> Empaths don't have to use materials/corpses to use the spell, of course, but it is becoming a ritual spell. I'd like you guys to try it out before passing judgement on that aspect of the changes, though, because the spell has been completely rewritten.

I'm trying to withhold judgement until i play with the spell, but can I ask a higher level question? How does heal fit in with the general ecosystem for empaths? Right now we have a heal over time, Regen, another heal over time option, herbs, and now a new heal over time option, heal. It wasn't particularly useful as it was, but it was a big heal you could cast on demand without targeting a thing to heal.

> It's certainly a fairly niche situation (i.e., Empath being injured but still able to hunt, or Empath healing allies but still wanting to hunt),

Isn't that regen now?

@Melete, can this not heal bleeding wounds that are tended or recently tended? That would give it an everyday use distinct from regen today.

>Isn't that regen now?

No - Regen is a cyclic, this is not. The point is you can use this AND use GS, IZ, or AD (not sure why you'd be using AD, but still)

<< I'll post more details when the spell is released to Prime and Test.>>

Any chance we're getting close to this happening? I seem to recall that these previews usually tend to be on the order of "about a week unless something blows up", and it's been several now. I suppose it could just be that something did, in fact, blow up, but I was just wondering.

Thanks,
-Life Weaver Karthor

Oof, that stinks. Thanks for the update, and hope you feel better.

Thanks,
-Life Weaver Karthor

By way of compromise, I've made sure this is live in test. Feel free to try to break the crud out of it. Kindly post/bug any bugs you find.

Melete

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Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.

Not sure if it's a bug or not, but the spell seems to be ending before it's short duration (about 30 minutes at max mana, which is weird no matter what "type" of spell it is) without healing very much. Basically I went into combat, and it triggered each time I got an insignificant wound. It seems to trigger 5 times and then terminate, no matter how little of its healing potential that actually consumes. That seems like an undesirable arrangement, but I feel like it was mentioned as intentional before. I would suggest one of the following changes:

1. Keep the "only 5 pulses" limitation, but don't have them trigger automatically. Make the caster use some verb when they want the spell to activate, so that they can wait until they're "actually injured" if they want.

2. Remove the "only 5 pulses" limitation, and let the spell use up either its whole duration or entire healing potential, whichever comes first.

3. Make it a normal spell instead of a ritual, so having to recast after having the healing potential wasted is less of a big deal.

Thanks,
-Life Weaver Karthor

Question for you Melete, is this spell going to stay in its current slot in the spell tree? I've been playing with it a bit on test and it does seem a bit under powered for the time and mana it requires. It seems to pulse at the same rate as Regenerate and for my mana I'd rather have Regen going. I can think of times this might be a useful spell to have, but I won't be using it hardly ever as it currently stands.

Anyone wanting to see a brief view of it in use:

https://pastebin.com/raw/7Ub0WmB8

Using a ritual isn't that hard, PoP is afterall. This new incarnation is useful when your still have gs up.

>>The change wouldn't be nearly so bad if this weren't a ritual spell, but I suspect that's in there because of necros, and using the same template is just easier.

Mechanically, devour isn’t a ritual spell.

Thematically, there is a good argument that preparing a corpse can count as a ritual.

I’d also factor in that not all ritual devices are 20 seconds.

I can see heal working in a similar setting to how devour can work: when you want a quick and dirty way to clean up your wounds, or if you feel you’ll be in a setting where you’re going to quickly take on some wounds and want them automatically addressed ASAP.

My understanding is that the duration of both heal and devour is kinda/sorta a stopgap measure to make sure it runs as long as it would typically need to. There’s no expectation it would last more than a few minutes because (assuming it works like devour) it fades if there is nothing left to heal.

I would imagine heal could be useful if you want to start drawing wounds from a few sources but want something that (I assume) triggers faster/harder than regen.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

So you aren't over-reading what I'm typing here, I think this is a bad change for empaths, but I don't think it's going to cause anyone a lot of problems. You're really just making a niche ability even more niche, to the point of obsolescence. But it's not like heal is a bread and butter spell. It's just a nice convenience spell now, and after the change it's just padding. Like YS for warrior mages.

> I’d also factor in that not all ritual devices are 20 seconds.

Yeah, okay. If I manage to find and buy a 50% ritual voucher then you have a 10s RT.

> I can see heal working in a similar setting to how devour can work: when you want a quick and dirty way to clean up your wounds,

You just described heal as it is today. It heals four wounds, worst to best. It's a great way to keep yourself alive if you don't want to drop GS or just want to casually clean stuff up while training utility. If the new heal wasn't a ritual then it wouldn't be that bad since you could effectively do the same, just slower.

> or if you feel you’ll be in a setting where you’re going to quickly take on some wounds and want them automatically addressed ASAP.

That's what I mentioned earlier as the one niche I see this fulfilling, but I can't think of anything in this entire game that gives you a mass of scratches, is something that needs to be handled ASAP (rather than letting regen do it's job), and is life threatening. BS solves the emergency bleeder problems faster and better. Regen solves the slow healing problem. The spot wound and scar heals solve the emergency locations. Heal is (was?) the no-thought, just grab stuff or get the big wounds now spell. Now it's regen lite, which is fine, really. I just don't see a point in using it when I have dedicated spells that already fulfil that need better.

>>You just described heal as it is today. It heals four wounds, worst to best.

Unless new heal works differently than new devour (I’m skeptical), doesn’t new heal fix way more than four wounds?

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

> So, again, that 'niche' situation is when you want to put out heavy heals AND have a GS out.

But GS isn't a prereq for it. What use do you see it serving for people who don't have GS? Maybe people who want Regen, and so grab Heal because it's a prereq?

> Unless new heal works differently than new devour (I’m skeptical), doesn’t new heal fix way more than four wounds?

The difference is in severity and time.

> So, again, that 'niche' situation is when you want to put out heavy heals AND have a GS out. That's a perfectly valid situation.

You mean when you expect a lot of wounds very quickly in a lot of different areas of minor severity each? That's not "niche". That's Niche. I can't think of a case where that happens now. Moreso if it stays as a ritual spell because now you have additional application time and cost to consider.

Again, I don't think this is the end of the world, but it's unfortunate to see something unique lost for something that's arguably less powerful and redundant. Especially considering that we have more slots than we can spend today. Why not just make this spell go by a different name, and we keep both?

>>You mean when you expect a lot of wounds very quickly in a lot of different areas of minor severity each? That's not "niche". That's Niche. I can't think of a case where that happens now.

I'll admit that text isn't always good at picking up sarcasm, so I'm not sure if this is sarcasm or not.

I also think heal (and devour) do a lot more than just heal wounds with "minor severity". Devour is at least pretty dang good at healing notable wounds, and AFAIK they are of similar strength/power.

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Uzmam! The Chairman will NOT be pleased to know you're trying to build outside of approved zones. I'd hate for you to be charged the taxes needed to have this place re-zoned. Head for the manor if you're feeling creative.

>> I suspect that's in there because of necros, and using the same template is just easier.

This is not the reason. It's basically a balance thing, for various types of balance. I was reluctant to recost the spell, or add on a bunch of metaspells.

>> having it stick around in "standby mode" is pretty much the entire point of the rewrite. It does, in fact, not fade if there's nothing left to heal. It hangs around and waits for injuries to be present.

Yes, this is pretty much the biggest draw I see for this spell. Someone mentioned that there is a bug with the Devour duration for necros in test (for some reason), it's meant to be a pre-cast HoT spell that just hangs out until you get wounded.

>>This might be a bug or not, but on the fifth pulse if it doesn't heal 8 lines it doesn't show the spell dropping message of "You feel the warmth in your flesh gradually subside." The spell just disappears.

Seems like a bug to me!

>> "the duration way shorter than that of a normal ritual spell".

I will have a gander.

>>people comparing this to a not-as-good regen

Just by way of a note, regen heals wounds randomly, this spell does not. I don't have the code in front of me but a huge part of this spell is how it prioritizes wounds, an irritating amount of the code is dedicated just to that. Not sure if anyone has actually noticed this or considered it to be beneficial, but hey. Just because it looks kind of regen-y does not mean that it's just pulsing regen a few times, under the hood, for whatever that is worth.

>>Keep the "only 5 pulses" limitation + hunting = underwhelming

I will think about this.

Melete

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Nature, it seems, is the popular name
for milliards and milliards and milliards
of particles playing their infinite game
of billiards and billiards and billiards.

I'd just like to throw in here that not every empath has access to regenerate (or ever will), so a "less good regenerate" seems like it might be worthwhile.

New Heal working as Regen-lite for shocked Empaths is a valid concern. But in that case, shocked Empaths can't cast FoC, so they're losing their castable healing spell by replacing old Heal with new Heal.

New unrelated thought bubble. This might be too last-minute and beyond the scope of the changes, but would you consider allowing Heal to persist through death and keep working until it runs out of juice? I gave that a try in Test just out of curiosity, and the spell faded upon death like they normally do. I seem to recall folks asking for something like that before, and this made me think of it, so I figured I'd go ahead and ask.

Thanks,
-Life Weaver Karthor