Too bad prologue healing, or any form of team healing, wasn’t one of those emergent gameplay elements (this post will sidebar into healing then back into how that is relevant to level shifting). I did a little prologue healing but I found it ineffective after a while, so I stopped. Instead, I got better at managing health during a fight. This meant leveraging my powers vs focusing entirely on attacking and then healing later. I thought that was good, engaging gameplay to balance defensive play with offensive.
Something that was actually interesting to me was removed. It’s hard for me to believe any new changes are really done to make the game more interesting, but rather to increase $$. Healing in this game is the same as energy recharging in many other games (facebook games are a common culprit). It’s not a fun element at all. There is a lot of difference between what devs say they want to do, and what they actually do.
Instead of taking away team healing (let’s face it, that’s what it is, not “true healing” but removing team healing), focus on how to create better gameplay choices that don’t punish the player. This paragon shift might create teams with more protectors, but with the lack of choices in the game, devs are going to think we’re using the same characters too often and nerf them, rather than focus on the real problem of creating diverse characters with usable skill sets.
This level shift is a band-aid. Yes, the immediate change is that some of the higher rarity heroes will seem more useful because the level gap is a bit bigger. It will also lock people out from content faster as they stick to their bracket of level 85 (or soon, 94) 2* heroes. And of course, we’ll start running into level 350 Juggernauts in PvE as the game scales up one stars beyond what any designer ever intended for balance (he’s strong, but balanced for a level 40, he’s OP at double or triple that level with the autoscaling of numbers).
If the problem was to make players use higher rarity heroes more, then the solution is to give players more ways to gain covers because that 3* with 4 covers means very little. The game makes money from cover sales, but it’s all RNG (no guaranteed covers?) so it’s not a very attractive option. Other forum posts have suggested various ways to get players covers, especially that hard to get initial cover color, so I don’t need to reiterate them here. The only real option is to do well in tournaments, and while I do quite well, I don’t think it yields those covers very fast. And they are only designed for people with high time investment. Of course that has changed now, as I mentioned, since I can’t even strategically make sure I have enough health left when I finish a match (not prologue healing, healing during a real fight, something your heuristics and stats don’t tell you and just looks like healing to stay alive).
Also, I work with Josh Sawyer. He’s a smart man when it comes to game design, and he loves presenting the player with a challenge. His article quoted in the other thread provided no direct solutions for MPQ of course, but they’re still useful to think about. So make the game more engaging, not remove the engaging elements. If you want to solve any of your problems, look to the game. That’s what players are doing and recommending to their friends. They aren’t recommending the game to their friends and telling them how awesome that waiting for heals thing is. Want to fix players not using their 3* heroes? Give them more chances at getting the 3* heroes and I guarantee players will use them over the 2*. Broader changes might be in order (e.g. making lower level heroes more useful in higher levels, or giving players more than 5 covers per color but still limiting total cover count), but that’s another topic to dive into.
