Nekarcos's Quality of Life 04: Healing Reduction

[nekarcos]

Let's call this a test upload so I can understand how the publishing process works.

I want to see if this correctly shows up, and if people can download it themselves.

[nekarcos]

So, what this Add-on does:
- Changes negative Healing Factor so that it is multiplicative against all heals.

Example: I am at 160% Healing Factor and something "reduces my healing by 50%"...
- (Before) I would be reduced to 110% Healing Factor, healing for 10% more life
- (After) I will remain at 160% Healing Factor, but all heals I receive will be reduced by 50%, such that I heal for 20% LESS life (that is, 50% of 160% = 80%).

Whether this is a good or bad quality-of-life tweak is up to you, depending on your playstyle

[nekarcos]

*** Known bugs:
~ "healing_reduce" may become an exponentially-small number when multiple healing reduction effects end. Rest assured, the number is so small that it would most likely be rounded down when factored in, but this still means something didn't reverse correctly.

[nsrr]

It shows up on the add ons page of te4.org, so it looks like all went well with your upload. I'll download it when I get home and give it a whirl to let you know if it throws any immediate errors or anything.

On a semi-related note, I'm looking forward to your 'big, new' add on. The scope of the changes you've described is quite impressive and I'm burning with curiosity to see what the new races, classes and mechanics are like. I haven't played at all for a while, but I'm definitely checking that out!

[nekarcos]

That's good to know-- Thanks for the feedback nsrr!

With that in mind, I'll try updating the add-on a little bit later after some people have tested it. I've already detected 1 problem with it-- Despite it being only 4 files lol

[nsrr]

That's good to know-- Thanks for the feedback nsrr!

With that in mind, I'll try updating the add-on a little bit later after some people have tested it. I've already detected 1 problem with it-- Despite it being only 4 files lol

I gave it a quick run. It loaded up fine and didn't produce any errors when opening the character sheet. So, those are good signs

I didn't have the time to give it a proper test and see what happened when something had it's healing decreased, as an issue with one of my addons was brought to my attention and I spent a fair while trying to figure that out.

[Dracos]

Good or bad, I'm not sure how it is a quality of life mod at all?

It's a skill adjustment that significantly powers up healing reduction effects, in kind of an odd way? It makes positive healing multipliers additive and negative ones multiplicative, which unless you're playing a class leveraging that, means it is most likely going to be just a challenge mod.

Breaking the parallel between positive and negative healing effects is a pretty odd place to adjust. Why not just straight out buff negative healing effects if you want to go that way? Sure it's a bigger modify, but it seems like it'd be a lot less bug prone and also coherent with the rest of the mechanics.

Congrats on getting started modding though

[nekarcos]

I'm glad you brought this up Dracos-- This will give me a good chance to discuss and elaborate on my motivations behind this QoL:

The idea behind the tweak is that healing reduction effects have the odd property of becoming WEAKER as your healing factor gets higher, and vice-versa. Considering that there is a vastly greater number of ways to increase factor than there is ways to reduce factor, this is very strange.

If you were, for example, playing a Wyrmic that was absolutely stacking healing factor (to the point of having 250%), you would quickly notice that when something says (and I'll quote the "Insidious Poison" text): "... decreasing all heals received by [percentage]."... Well, it's not actually reducing your healing by that much at all. It created MUCH confusion for me at first before I realized what it actually meant-- It was reducing my overall healing FACTOR.

So, let's talk about the inverse scenario: Let's say a character, for some bizarre reason, has a default healing mod of 50% (or maybe you picked up that "cursed rock" lol). This means that when you get hit by something like Insidious Poison, it might get reduced to the point of being negative (due to it being additive)-- Which is kind of ridiculous.

In any case, the biggest offender of this scenario (and my strongest point/case) is "Impending Doom", which is hard-coded to reduce healing factor by exactly "100%". This kind of implies that it was supposed to stop your healing entirely-- But due to the strange "nature" of this code, it may only reduce your healing mildly instead (especially in the case of my 250% healing factor Wyrmic xP)

So in summary, it just felt to me that this was how healing reduction was intended to work, but it was simply never implemented. Maybe DarkGod went with it, finding a balance in that. That being said though, there is DEFINITELY a power shift towards healing reduction effects, since the only time this is useful to the player is against opponents with Draconic Body. This being the case, the game is definitely gaining more power than the player is (since the standard player ToME strategy is very healing-oriented), so I definitely agree: This is closer to a "challenge mod" rather than it is a full-on "Quality of Life".

... But then, I must argue: Aren't you always looking for a more grueling ToME experience that doesn't break any of the rules...?

[Dracos]

Not particularly And...it's not quality of life at all. Quality of Life is not 'I rebalanced part of the game'. Zizzo's don't kill yourself with your own shots is quality of life. Faster Rest and Auto explore skipping frames when you're not interacting is quality of life. Landmark's letting you simply say where you want to go on the map, etc. Rebalancing a major mechanic to unquestionably weaken player defenses is not a quality of life change. It's rebalancing or difficulty and has its place, but it's just weird hearing it called that.

100% healing reduction is devastating, whichever implementation you mention. You're suggesting a widespread mechanics change based around the absolutely edge cases. Only very end-game characters are likely to see healing mods above 150%, which only means that spells are half as effective under impending doom instead of totally useless. Going through my last 10 winners, only 1 of them had a heal mod over 1.5, and 4 of them didn't have a heal mod past 1.05. A wyrmic that has 250% heal has basically his entire equipment set and possibly talents geared out toward "Have healing". A mere 100% decline is basically counteracting half the gear he has equipped (There's only tiny handful of gear that goes above 30% buff there). Healing builds would become dramatically weaker, while shield builds (already generally advantaged) would get even more benefits.

How heal mod works is very consistent with all other percentage modifiers in the game at the moment. Crit Percentage, Damage Reduction, Penetration, and Damage Increase all have the same type of text descriptions and work in the same additive, subtractive model (with caveats for sometimes multiplicative stacking of benefits). You wouldn't expect those moves to be suddenly increasing your 20 percent damage penetration by 2% instead 10% because you happen to already have it.

It'd be a particularly odd effect because of how much it'd stand out. The math would be different for the effects interacting on the same modifier (Bath of Light is adding while poison is dividing?) while also behaving differently than all other percentage based effects do in the game.

Healing modifier behaving how it does isn't an oversight or mistake. Definitely, addons could change how it works (all fun and games there ) but it sounds like a really strange focusing on just one percentage based text.

[nekarcos]

I'll admit Dracos-- This one is hardly a QoL add-on (unless it particularly bugged you how healing mod worked). To be honest, this one is a black sheep in the family of QoLs I've made-- And it brings one to question why I'd post my black sheep for my first functional add-on lol

The answer... Well, it happened to be the most simple and most functional one.

So I'll agree with you on one thing: This name is a bit of a misnomer-- It would be more accurate to call it "Nekarcos's Tweaks: Healing Reduction"-- But I also didn't want to break up the naming scheme I have for the "small tweaks" mods I've made, so... Well, here we are lol

I'm not sure I can rename it at this point since I've already published it so widely, so I apologize if the naming irks you a bit

[nekarcos]

Detected a CRITICAL bug caused by my indiscretion:
- "regenLife()" no longer functions-- The base function simply does not get called unless "healing_reduce" is greater than 0.

This...

Code: Select all

local base_regenLife = _M.regenLife
function _M:regenLife()
	
	if (self.healing_reduce or 0) > 0 then
		local remem = self.healing_factor
		self.healing_factor = (self.healing_factor or 1) *(100-util.bound((self.healing_reduce or 0), 0, 100)) /100
		--
		local retval = base_regenLife(self)
		--
		self.healing_factor = remem
	end
	
	return retval
end

Should actually look like this:

Code: Select all

local base_regenLife = _M.regenLife
function _M:regenLife()
	
	local remem = self.healing_factor
	self.healing_factor = (self.healing_factor or 1) *(100-util.bound((self.healing_reduce or 0), 0, 100)) /100
	--
	base_regenLife(self)
	--
	self.healing_factor = remem
	
end

... Oops.


I absolutely need to fix this-- This will be a good way of testing the ability to update/patch issues with my add-ons.
Just to note-- I haven't made any changes yet, though I am making everyone who tries to download this aware of this bug.

[nekarcos]

... So... I SHOULD have updated this add-on maybe... CENTURIES ago (maybe 3 months)... But anyways-- I finally updated this and fixed the bug. Sorry for the wait!


Additionally, I changed the "reduced" pop-up so that it correctly reflects the "after-modifier" healing. This was originally just a test upload for OoTS-- But I really should take more responsibility for the things I upload.