game design things 

A convo from about 3y ago with my brother I still think about:

me: "I guess buffing up on healing-centric systems appeared to help me out early on, but didn't help at the endgame"

my brother: "I'll let you in on a secret: if it's a well designed game, it won't. Healing is a good early/mid game system. But every game has to converge on an ending, and if healing works too well, it can't, so healing can never be a good endgame strategy in a well designed competitive system"

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game design things 

@cwebber What does this say about games where you can heal the final boss to death?

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game design things 

@neal heal mechanically is starting to sound like an attack in that scenario :)

But it's probably by definition a harder way to win, right? Because healing will have to be less powerful than attacks to be legit

game design things 

@cwebber Yet oddly it isn't always. For example, it's definitely the easiest way to go in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest (not that I'm holding that up as an example of good game design). The hard part is thinking that it might work and having the courage to unleash your inner magical girl.

game design things 

@neal Is the amount of HP to heal the equivalent to the amount of HP for damage?

game design things 

@neal Also, those games are competitive against a CPU... what would happen if we did it competitive against another player

game design things 

@neal Eg, JRPGs are able to get away with massive team heal spells that don't work in competitive games, because in a competitive game they "reset the match", dragging it on (which is actually a good approach in such a game, which usually alternates between being ground down and recovering)

game design things 

@cwebber I don't think so. For multi-player it'd probably only make sense if you've got undead classes for players to choose.

game design things 

@neal Ah yeah, would be great against undead! In which case you'd probably apply bonuses, so it may be *more powerful* in attack form than in recovery

game design things 

@cwebber Yeah, it's a case of, this almost never works but when it does it works really well.

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