PlanetSide Universe - View Single Post - "Healing beams" for the Medic/Engi
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Click here to go to the next VIP post in this thread.   Old 2012-06-06, 03:38 AM   [Ignore Me] #44
Malorn
Contributor
PlanetSide 2
Game Designer
 
Re: "Healing beams" for the Medic/Engi


I like the idea of tradeoffs and making healing an active thing as opposed to a passive them. Between shields and gradual healing you also have triage decisions.

Regardless of how the heal beam works out it seems obvious to me that thier intent is to make healing active. The heal beam gives you a bit more flexibility so you don't necessarily need to be standing right next to someone as well as making it obvious who is doing the healing. We don't know what sort of great combos there are, but in PS1 you did have people who would crounch behind MAX and use them as shields while keeping them repped up. A rep beam seems like that would be a plausible strategy for PS2 and allow the engineer to be more mobile and not necessarily directly in the line of fire.

Maybe it plays out well and maybe it doesn't, but I like the idea and the tradeoff associated with it. There are a lot of things which cyco mentioned that could be significant factors into how effective it pans out.

- range of the beam
- rate of healing
- whether movement affects the healing rate
- whether range affects healing rate (might reward you for being closer)
- what sort of customizations there are on the beam (maybe you can get a different medgun that heals AoE around you but shorter range and for less HPS - they have talked about healing grenades too).

There's lots of ways this could go. Dismissing hte idea outright seems silly to me. I"m much more interested in understanding their goals with the design and giving feedback on how well the design meets those goals. Hopefully they start sharing that information with us more candidly once we're under NDA in the beta.
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