Health Regeneration Totally Sucks

Hey! This is that thing I was complaining about because people are sick of hearing me talk about it in several replies to other topics. That’s why I’m actually MAKING a topic instead, so now people can tell me to shut up in my own reply section. Or they’ll agree with me. That’s the ideal outcome.

i might be throwing this entire rant down the drain by saying this but i haven’t touched this game since april, and i don’t really plan to until my friends regain interest when the dark sea comes out, so please correct me on anything that i just get entirely wrong

Okay, Jawa, what’s the problem with health regen?

It’s too damn fast.
Once upon a February, maybe March, a friend and I were playing the game and having fun. That’s when we decided that we HATE each other and we wanted to see the other one dead. So, we started fighting each other… in Sailor’s Lodge.
The easily breakable floors coupled with the giant mass in the middle of the island and the health regen made the fight take practically forever and it only ended when I did something dumb by trying to get close to my conjurer friend while also being a mage.
If I were any better at PvP, there’s a good chance that the fight would’ve taken much, MUCH longer.
The fact that the health regen was enough to drag the fight out by that amount was enough to convince my friend that AO’s PVP is trash and shouldn’t be bothered with. He stopped playing after a storyline or two and is waiting on the dark sea update. That is not a very good thing to hear after somebody’s first fight in the whole game.

Jawa, if neither you or your friend wanted the fight to take so long, couldn’t you have just fought at Munera?

Sure, if we were actually planning out a duel instead of just suddenly deciding to kill each other for shits and giggles. While health regeneration wouldn’t be as much of an issue if AO’s PVP was only available through duels, it just… isn’t. PVP is expected to happen anywhere on the map, including Sailor’s Lodge. The crazy amount of health regen makes it annoying to fight people outside of Munera, especially if they decide to be a little bitch and run away after they start a fight, come back to attack you when you’re doing something else, and they magically have a health advantage because you weren’t on their ass the entire time.

Do you have a potential solution?

Maybe a simple yet dramatic nerf to health regen when you’re in combat. If I want to be very drastic, maybe just turn it off during a fight entirely, and replace it with some other healing system.

Wouldn’t this cause the opposite problem and cause fights to be way too short way more often?

Mostly not. You’re still able to avoid damage through parrying and dashing, and if you’re in a cramped area like a boat, you were kind of fucked even with health regen unless you dove underwater, and trust me, the fact that most of the attacks in the game just plain don’t work there was probably exploited more by the renown sweats who don’t want their number to go down more than the people who have to deal with them.

What if you’re wrong, and it does?

Uhh… shit. I’m sorry.

I was gonna write a poorly put together argument for what would’ve just been the estus flask but in AO, but then I realized that the rather fast paced and movement-based nature of the game along with the super quick spells (beam, placed explosion, and maybe shot) simply aren’t compatible with that idea, so yeah. I guess health regen would need to be added back in in some capacity, or replaced by something better than what I was cooking.

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also holy fucking shit biggest topic i’ve written i’m pretty sure

I suppose even if you turn off health regen in combat this could be countered by making healing potions much more effective.

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oh god this is just gonna sink isn’t it
always the shit i put effort into

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apparently healing potions already exist but i haven’t actually used them so i’m just gonna assume it makes the health regen issue even worse

edit: what the hell, @Shellseawing already mentioned this, why can’t i read?

That was pretty much my first experience with AO’s PvP too.
Except it wasn’t just health regen, it was the whole thing.

Luckily, me and my friends don’t play this game for the PvP to begin with, so we still atleast felt good grinding until we felt like we were as prepared as we reasonably could be for the dark sea update before we each took a break and started watching the trello for news on the new PvE content (dark sea) that we actually enjoy lol.

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I just talked to my friend and he told me that the PvP just sucks as a whole, too.
i don’t know what actually causes this aside from health but god damn

I think its really just a problem with the skill floor being stuck in the stratosphere.
I’ve watched actual skilled players PvP in this game and it looks FUN, but everything before that just sorta sucks

The entry level for this game’s PvP is far too hard to reach and I see no solutions beyond a full rework which I’m near certain won’t happen.

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my friend doesn’t seem to have much issue with getting into hard games though
dude’s played sekiro and deepwoken and he really fucking likes those games (eventhoughthey’reentirelydifferentfromAO) so i don’t know what about AO specifically would drive him away

maybe it’s because every part of combat is ranged and requires precision in some capacity, m1s are kind of shit for anything ingame

Now I’m not one to throw this around too much, but wholeheartedly this reads as a skill issue

how so
like, am i just bad at chasing people or something

When you aren’t familiar with the game’s mechanics it feels somehow way too slow and way too fast at the same time.
I’ve seen people complain about the game being either agonizingly slow or incomprehensibly fast, but I believe it has somehow managed to be both.

Health regen, attacks ending momentum, blocking/parrying, and all of that all slow fights just about to a halt while the movement, fast projectiles, big AoEs, and those sorts of things can make the game too fast very suddenly.

It feels like the pacing for PvP encounters is absolutely all over the place, which is a problem games like Sekiro and Deepwoken don’t suffer from.

It IS a skill issue, by all means, but there’s plenty of games that have fun combat from the beginning even when you’re inexperienced, I’d love to see AO be one of them, but that simply is not the case as it stands.

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another thing is that deepwoken was designed with ganking and random killing in mind (3 max levels can beat the fuck out of a level 1 all they want with nothing to stop them but other players), while vetex focuses on the story and presentation a lot more

also BECAUSE this isn’t deepwoken, i can say, holy shit, make PVP caps scale off of the other person’s level. lvl 120s shouldn’t be able to kill level 50s, they should be able to fight, like, level 90s at minimum

entirely agree with this
between the health regen, comically large amounts of defense you can get, and the ease of running, ao fights take ages if you aren’t having an organized fight at munera or its replacements
personally i’d much rather have regen off or severely nerfed (50% less than the current amount or more) even if it means short fights, anything is better than playing desert bus every time i get jumped at shell island or something

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Yup, I’m not even going to bother anymore. The community itself always has been complaining about it for months already and we still have a lot of the same issues.

I could complain and make a detailed response/suggestion on how this is bad or how it can be improved, but the truth is that complaining hasn’t really changed much of anything for the better.

AO is a decent game, only reason is because of ship combat, but it doesn’t seem like it will ever reach the level of potential that people including me genuinely would’ve wanted it to.

I really don’t know what vetex wants for AO, but if he’s happy with the game intended then I have nothing against that. But for me, I’m not happy with the game, and I don’t enjoy the game at all anymore — so I’m getting the fuck out of here and never coming back.

Health regen is actually reduced in combat, however it is evidently not enough. A possibilty would be that while in combat, health regen is based on level rather than health. This would mean everyone heals at the same rate in combat, which would presumably be the amount that you would heal without defense.

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so you just fuck off after i ask you to elaborate? ok then

eh i just dont pvp, doesn’t really do much to me.

im hoping AO stays a pve oriented game that doesn’t strictly cater to pvp.

but…

I think that compromise is best, such as with the mobility changes. Nobody wants PvE ruined or massively impacted by changes meant to improve the PvP experience, and vice versa. Gotta find that balance and tow the line correctly.

nah yeah, im just hoping the balance is actually somewhere in the middle.

for the mobility stuff, it’d be interesting if it only worked in combat and not outside. so outside combat you’d have the ability to move around as you like, but in combat it’s all aggression from there