Healing or Herbs?

by Gartinua

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Gartinua2008-04-09 23:28:00
As this is about surviving combat, I'm not sure if it goes here or the combat one. I'm sure the moderators will move it if needed.

Anyway, I can heal (cure me whatever) and I can carry herbs. There is a lot of cross-over and quite often you can either do one or the other to fix whatever is wrong with you. Apparently healing needs equilibrium but doesn't take it. You can also only have one herb, purgative etc going at a time.

So, is it a good idea to first try a herb/potion and then if you have equilibrium and another affliction use a spell? I can see that you could then cure yourself of a second affliction you normally couldn't do because normally you would have to wait for the herb/potion balance to come back. I assume there might be a downside to it, other than you lose mana doing the actual spell, but cannot see what it is.

The other alternative is to only cure if I don't have that particular herb or potion on me, so it is a fall-back only. Does anyone do this? I'd be interested to see what other healers do, I suspect no one just cures themselves otherwise you'd be loaded down with all those mana vials you need.

As an example, I have a broken leg and scabies/itch. Both are cured with salves, so normally it would be
apply mending to legs
.. wait for salve balance..
apply liniment

This way it could be:
apply mending to legs
cure me skin

The cure doesn't need to wait for the salve balance as its a spell.
Ashai2008-04-09 23:55:03
Being a former healer (albeit, not very good at combat as a whole), it would always, always be better to cure afflictions if it weren't for the mana loss. So, since mana loss is really the only downside, and mana is usually only important in fighting a wiccan or guardian (unless you hit zero mana, which would be bad in any matter).

As far as the practicaly of healing, normally a system can handle a certain amount of afflictions, so it's best to just let the system run it's course. Healing is useful for when you get locked, since you can fix that right away with only a small cost of mana, assuming that that's all it takes to offset how much your normal curing system is overwhelmed.

Also, it helps to use auras in certain situations, when you're likely to be afflicted with a certain type of cure (a horehound aura against bards, or something).

Also, if you haven't noticed, cure me muscles is probably the best healing move out there.

This is all, of course, assuming that you're not going to code your own system for healers, which might just be godly, because otherwise you just have to work alongside your system, using healing to handle what your system can't.
Gartinua2008-04-10 00:34:21
QUOTE(Ashai @ Apr 10 2008, 09:55 AM) 500857
This is all, of course, assuming that you're not going to code your own system for healers, which might just be godly, because otherwise you just have to work alongside your system, using healing to handle what your system can't.

The idea is to modify the system I have so it does take healing and curing into account. I have sort-of worked out how to do that, the main question now being WHAT should I be doing.
Ashai2008-04-11 00:36:19
Oh, woops.

In that case, I think you should probably only use healing cures for the following (whether you're wanting to conserve mana or not): paralysis and stupidity.

I think it would probably be a good idea to configure it to two modes, one that uses healing and one that doesn't, because against classes that can mana instakill, those are the classes that afflict a lot too, and healing can use up mana fast.

But sure, the first example you had about if you had multiple salve afflictions, it would be better to use the normal cure and then the healing cure for things on top of that, but I really have to caution you about using mana like that, because some cures are costly, and certain classes can get you below half mana really easily (Shadowdancer.)

As far as actually coding this, I have no idea.
Shamarah2008-04-11 00:42:03
Don't rely too much on healing for your actual curing. If you're actually fighting and not just sitting there, you're going to be off-balance almost the entire time anyway (as you should be chasing balance/eq, that is, using them up as soon as they come back) so you'll almost always want to use the normal cures anyway. However, it can certainly be worthwhile to use healing to cure specific high-priority afflictions if you get balance back and still have them.

One thing I enjoyed having was an alias I made that would succor me (for non-healers, it is a diagnose that takes no balance/eq) and then use healing to cure everything on the list. Another fun thing you can do with healing is make a trigger to use succor every time you regain equilibrium. Make sure you can easily turn it off though, lest you run into choke!