On Direct Recovery

[Mai]

Uh, the whole reason I'd want weaker healing is so that you can't Heal ~ Chill ~ Chill. As it is, that's technically sustainable and you spend enough energy healing that you are likely going to need to chill, so antime healing comes up is probably going to be a boring round for all involved. I would want Heal ~ Actual Move That Does Things ~ Further Moves That Do Things to actually be plausible, much as you can Protect yourself from something to give yourself a bit more time. Which is also why I'd prefer 15 for 30.

I... don't understand this.

Heal ~ Actual Move That Does Things ~ Further Moves That Do Things is already plausible, depending on what that actual move is? Even if you want to argue it's not, the state of it being plausible just makes it easier to heal constantly, anyway...

(Heal ~ Chill ~ Chill is much more possible to obtain with weaker healing than Heal ~ Damage ~ Damage, since with Heal ~ Damage ~ Damage you run the risk of fainting. Heal ~ Damage ~ Damage requires a not-too-expensive heal.)

Also, as for sustainability... you don't further your own cause any by doing that, and repeating the same actions over and over again is dying to get yourself spited/heal blocked/imprisoned/disabled/chill disrupted/so many other things, probably; your opponent is not likely to just continue uselessly attacking you if you're really just going to heal it all off. If this was really an unbeatable strategy, someone would've demonstrated that by now.

it'd probably be more interesting if all healing were 100% with corresponding energy loss because then you can't just throw around healing when you need it, you'd have to plan ahead to heal when it'll only cost you as much energy as you can afford, and you have to judge ahead of time how much energy you can afford. but apparently I'm the only one who likes calculus.

res no

 

[shy ♡]

I actually don't mind 100% corresponding energy loss. That'll definitely dissuade people from healing. >_>

 

[allitersonance]

That makes one-action rest even more hilarious. <_<

 

[M&F]

OHKOs are never going to not be boring, regardless of what ASBdoes. The problem there is that a 30% accuracy move is never going to be interesting to work with. It just isn't.

Not when somebody has No Guard. Speaking of which, did you know Machop and line get Fissure thanks to Gen I? Asides aside, though...

I'm of the mind that you're probably not able to make direct healing something other than boorish stalling unless you limit usage severely, and more to the point, direct healing, regardless of whether it's broken or not, is very centralizing -- a Pokémon that has used a directly healing move basically forces the opponent to do the same in order to keep up in most battles. And this happens even with limited uses, as the one use on one side begs the one use on another. Regardless, I'd be interested in seeing how attempting to make things more interesting would go.

The way direct healing works in the games comes to mind -- not in the strict numbers involved, but in the proportions. In the games, you don't directly heal a lot, but you still do sometimes, and it's rather strategical and necessitates decent timing. And this is probably because the metagame is arranged so that most things will regularly be able to hurt more than direct healing restores. Would direct healing in the ASB fare well if were comparable to some strong attacks in scale? It isn't necessarily as useless as it sounds. For example, directly heal while your opponent is low on energy, and you make it inviable for them to budget their attacks, as it won't be able to override your healing. This would be effective, but not useful in almost all circumstances, and not centralizing. But the hard math may yet sink this boat, as I'm just spitballing without engaging in res's favorite pasttime. In any case, all of this would apply only to non-Rest recoverers.

Superbird may also have been onto something by bringing up the idea of factoring the damage cap into it. In fact, the damage cap could also work in reverse, capping the amount of health a Pokémon can heal in a given round. This would all but guarantee that you can't gain at a faster rate than your opponent can hurt, which again would probably push direct recovery into a more strategical niche than the centralizing position it currently occupies.

Failing all else, I wouldn't mind dropping that 1:1 energy-to-health conversion ratio nuke.

 

[nastypass]

The way direct healing works in the games comes to mind -- not in the strict numbers involved, but in the proportions. In the games, you don't directly heal a lot, but you still do sometimes, and it's rather strategical and necessitates decent timing. And this is probably because the metagame is arranged so that most things will regularly be able to hurt more than direct healing restores. Would direct healing in the ASB fare well if were comparable to some strong attacks in scale? It isn't necessarily as useless as it sounds. For example, directly heal while your opponent is low on energy, and you make it inviable for them to budget their attacks, as it won't be able to override your healing. This would be effective, but not useful in almost all circumstances, and not centralizing. But the hard math may yet sink this boat, as I'm just spitballing without engaging in res's favorite pasttime. In any case, all of this would apply only to non-Rest recoverers.

Superbird may also have been onto something by bringing up the idea of factoring the damage cap into it. In fact, the damage cap could also work in reverse, capping the amount of health a Pokémon can heal in a given round. This would all but guarantee that you can't gain at a faster rate than your opponent can hurt, which again would probably push direct recovery into a more strategical niche than the centralizing position it currently occupies.

Just going to pop in and say: I like both of these ideas much more than what I originally suggested at the start of this thread. Making a recovery cap gives the battlers (and refs, by way of their decision to take the battle) more leeway in how the battle should be paced in combination with the damage cap than only adjusting recovery percent and limiting its use.

I think that first quoted paragraph illustrates why recovery is worth fixing, beyond the obvious "it's not fun." Recovery in the games requires some skill in timing, since attacks commonly do as much or more damage than they restore. As it stands in ASB, there's nothing that conveys the spirit of recovery in the games. I agree that the reduction to 30% restoration, battler-controlled healing caps, and a high energy cost would combine to push direct recovery closer to the tactical role it holds in the games. Which I certainly hope we could all agree would be more fun for our silly Pokémon battle RPing than the moves as they stand now.

 

[1. Luftballon]

the general issue is that, with how long asb takes, and the risk of battles Falling Apart, intentionally stretching out your battles by direct-healing is a bad idea unless you (a) have very strong incentive to specifically win (b) your opponent is not able to reciprocate or (c) you are doing something dependent on your health total which will speed up the battle by healing.

(a) is makes stalling tactics show up more in tournament-type play than casually. (b) accounts for why the archetypal timing for healing is after a KO where you still have energy. I don't think (c) has ever come up, but it is conceivable that it could be a useful use in combination with, say, final gambit.

consider that (not a representative sample) the first 25 rounds of this battle[/i] took nine months, and fell apart half a year and two rounds later. short battles take place within spans of time that the battlers ... have a fair grasp of. longer battles venture into unseen territory, whence comes 3-month gaps and players disappearing.

that is the cost of lengthening battles. the problem is not healing per se as lengthening battles in general, which is the point of healing unless you incorporate it into some larger strategy.

I do not believe it is desirable or interesting to push healing to its role in the games. the main situation where healing is useful in the games is when you have the state of the battle set up so that your victory proceeds without your action, whether because you have the opponent statused to waste actions so that you occasionally get free turns if you heal forever, or because residual damage is going to make KOs instead of attacking. notice how if you play a stall teams and you don't manage to do your setup you can still probably drag out the battle for 50+ turns and still lose 4-0 or something.

dropping healing to the damage cap will not make it interesting in asb. notice how usual range of damage caps chosen for conventional battles, 25-40%, expects either 25% or 34% damage per round. in other words: the damage cap is expected to be reached in two actions of full-out attacking. for most battles in asb, damage is not the real action; it is merely the final win condition being set up.

I think the strategic and tactical aspects of healing can be disentangled. ingame healing is tactically interesting in timing because in-game battles are very fast-paced and can get KO'd in 1-3 hits if you don't prevent them. this is very different from the situation in asb, and it is impossible to recover this aspect as-is.

the strategic aspect is, as above, that if you are already wasting opponent turns, healing allows you to increase the amount of free turns you're getting. this is a purpose much better served by more healing, not less. personally I also find it more strategically interesting to require in-advance energy budgeting if you intend to heal later. this is why I am proposing full-healing direct recovery. I'd rather have "very powerful, but hard to use, and your opponent can try to prevent it in advance if you catch you at it" than healing you can actually spam late into the battle to prevent anything from happening.

there is nothing with the spirit of recovery in the games and this is a good thing for the metagame because in-game recovery is tedious as fuck, which is mitigated by the fact that it is fast-paced enough to plausibly remain interesting the whole time.

the timescale of months and years is not amenable to such a thing.

 

[Music Dragon]

it'd probably be more interesting if all healing were 100% with corresponding energy loss because then you can't just throw around healing when you need it, you'd have to plan ahead to heal when it'll only cost you as much energy as you can afford, and you have to judge ahead of time how much energy you can afford. but apparently I'm the only one who likes calculus.

Very arrogant. There is no need to passive-aggressively perpetuate the idea that mathematicians/scientists are intellectually superior to others. We have enough of that as it is. (And for the record, you are not the only person who likes calculus.)

Back on topic: everyone seems to agree that the problem with recovery is that it makes battles take longer, which is tedious. At the same time, the entire point of recovery moves is that they buy you more time. That's a bit of a dilemma.

Maybe, then, we need to rethink the role of healing in ASB. Personally, I'd want recovery moves to function as a sort of low-risk-low-reward version of Protect. Protect lets you avoid one enemy attack, at a precise moment, at the cost of an action and some energy. Similarly, the role of healing should be to let you cushion the blow from an enemy attack, at the cost of energy and an action; but while a Protect shield lasts only one action and therefore needs to be properly timed, healing moves can be used before or after taking damage. In exchange, healing moves are less efficient. Safer but less rewarding.

So basically, the idea is this: healing off damage should always be less efficient than avoiding it in the first place. Protect is for when you know you're about get attacked and you need to avoid it; healing is for when you've already been hit (because you messed up, couldn't predict your opponent's plans, or had your priorities elsewhere) and want to mitigate the damage after the fact.

I have some ideas building on that concept. I don't expect anyone to share my thoughts on healing-versus-Protect, but these suggestions might still be interesting! It's something to think about, in any case. I hope it helps!

First idea: limit the amount of health that can be regained at all - similar to the recovery cap mentioned already, but not restricted to a single round. For example: a Pokémon that falls below 50% health has been so grievously injured that it can never heal back to more than 70% health, no matter what happens. This means that healing can't be used to completely undo the damage you've taken, only some of it. There's no longer any need to spam healing moves, since you can't heal beyond a certain point anyway, and it should also make battles end sooner. Obviously the numbers need some adjustment here. Maybe bump up the energy cost of healing.

Second idea: damage taken becomes permanent after some time. For example: a Pokémon at 100% health is attacked and takes 10% damage, falling to 90%. If it heals immediately, it can undo its most recent injuries and gets back to 100%. However, if it doesn't treat the wounds within the next round, the damage becomes permanent and it's stuck at 90% health even if it heals. This means that healing becomes more reactive. You can't just heal whenever you like; you have to do it pretty soon after taking damage, or it won't work. Therefore you have to weigh healing against your other options; do you really want to restore that health or would you rather retaliate? Again, this needs a lot of tweaking, but I think the concept is alright.

So, those are some ideas! They're pretty far removed from in-game mechanics, but maybe at least they'll inspire you guys. Good luck!

 

[surskitty]

Back on topic: everyone seems to agree that the problem with recovery is that it makes battles take longer, which is tedious. At the same time, the entire point of recovery moves is that they buy you more time. That's a bit of a dilemma.

Maybe, then, we need to rethink the role of healing in ASB. Personally, I'd want recovery moves to function as a sort of low-risk-low-reward version of Protect. Protect lets you avoid one enemy attack, at a precise moment, at the cost of an action and some energy. Similarly, the role of healing should be to let you cushion the blow from an enemy attack, at the cost of energy and an action; but while a Protect shield lasts only one action and therefore needs to be properly timed, healing moves can be used before or after taking damage. In exchange, healing moves are less efficient. Safer but less rewarding.

So basically, the idea is this: healing off damage should always be less efficient than avoiding it in the first place. Protect is for when you know you're about get attacked and you need to avoid it; healing is for when you've already been hit (because you messed up, couldn't predict your opponent's plans, or had your priorities elsewhere) and want to mitigate the damage after the fact.

I have some ideas building on that concept. I don't expect anyone to share my thoughts on healing-versus-Protect, but these suggestions might still be interesting! It's something to think about, in any case. I hope it helps!

First idea: limit the amount of health that can be regained at all - similar to the recovery cap mentioned already, but not restricted to a single round. For example: a Pokémon that falls below 50% health has been so grievously injured that it can never heal back to more than 70% health, no matter what happens. This means that healing can't be used to completely undo the damage you've taken, only some of it. There's no longer any need to spam healing moves, since you can't heal beyond a certain point anyway, and it should also make battles end sooner. Obviously the numbers need some adjustment here. Maybe bump up the energy cost of healing.

Second idea: damage taken becomes permanent after some time. For example: a Pokémon at 100% health is attacked and takes 10% damage, falling to 90%. If it heals immediately, it can undo its most recent injuries and gets back to 100%. However, if it doesn't treat the wounds within the next round, the damage becomes permanent and it's stuck at 90% health even if it heals. This means that healing becomes more reactive. You can't just heal whenever you like; you have to do it pretty soon after taking damage, or it won't work. Therefore you have to weigh healing against your other options; do you really want to restore that health or would you rather retaliate? Again, this needs a lot of tweaking, but I think the concept is alright.

So, those are some ideas! They're pretty far removed from in-game mechanics, but maybe at least they'll inspire you guys. Good luck!

I like all of these, and I think we have similar Protect vs healing thoughts, too.

 

[allitersonance]

Promoting healing before you get to a critical point is even more undesirable as far as I'm concerned. It incentivises people to think about healing long before it becomes essential, which makes it seem more likely to have the undesirable effect of prolonging battles unnecessarily. Health is liquid enough that you wouldn't really expect it to be used to react to specific moves, unlike protect, and it would instead just be keeping you afloat longer.

 

[Music Dragon]

Promoting healing before you get to a critical point is even more undesirable as far as I'm concerned. It incentivises people to think about healing long before it becomes essential, which makes it seem more likely to have the undesirable effect of prolonging battles unnecessarily. Health is liquid enough that you wouldn't really expect it to be used to react to specific moves, unlike protect, and it would instead just be keeping you afloat longer.

Mm, that's a good point. Some of the other suggestions might be better, then, for making recovery moves prohibitively expensive or situational. But one way or another, I feel like it's a good idea to make sure you can't actually undo too much of the damage that's been done to you. Not only is that dissatisfying for the opposing player, but it also makes battles take much longer. So, putting some sort of cap on how much you're able to heal yourself should force health totals to drop at a reasonable rate.

And personally, I actually like forcing people to think about healing early. It means you can't just heal as an afterthought or when you've just scored a KO; you have to make room for it in your strategy before the opportunity is lost. But it's hard to say how that would play out in practice. You might very well be right in that everyone would immediately heal whenever they take damage, for fear of letting their health drop. That's where high energy costs or once-per-round limitations or other such weaknesses would be useful, I guess!

So maybe some sort of combination of a recovery cap and a higher energy cost would work? That way, people can't heal all the time in the early stages of a battle (because they'd run out of energy too soon), and also can't heal themselves back from the brink of death in the late stages of a battle (because the recovery cap has been passed).

Or, combine damage permanence with making healing moves really easy to interrupt. That way, recovery becomes hard to pull off; you need to make sure you won't be interrupted, and you need to do it soon. That should make people think twice about healing.

Yeah, I dunno. This is pretty tricky.