Unwanted Changes

[Brumm]

Hello everybody,

we recently got some complaints about the heal spells being nerfed and I wanted to pacify you guys before everybody gets too ranty . We did not change the heal spell line voluntarily and will bring them back to their former power level. The reason for their reduced power was a code cleanup we recently made. In several cases we had old compiled code running on the server while the uncompiled source code was already deleted long ago. We didn't notice that and there was no way to figure out what kind of old code was still running so it was impossible to predict what happened. One sideeffect of the cleanup was the nerf of the heal spells you noticed and like I said we will try to revert that. I might need some help with that though because - like I also said - we don't have the source code of the old code we were running so I have no idea what the actual power level of the heal spell line was.

A positive sideeffect of the code clean up was the fix of Flame Weapon by the way.

Conclusion: I'll change the heal spell line when I am back in Germany. If you notice any other changes that can't be explained with my commit logs please report them to Brian or me. It is very likely that they are a result of the mentioned code clean up.

Greetings from Oxford
Brumm

[Lady Seline]

noted. Ty for explaining, and I'll keep my eye open, but I didnt notice any changes to my spells so far ecept for Avasculate ofc.

[cMEfaiL]

I'll use this topic to say that healing also needs rework.It just isn't right staying out of danger and healing the whole party with quite good amount of hp.Simple proposal is to change the range of single target heals to ~100 yards or mb a bit more
i am not vert good with the distances in NwN so.. and reduce the range of aoe heals to vanilla lvls.I want to start a discussion with this simple idea.

[Lady Seline]

I have a vague recollection that way way back when like 13 yrs ago or whatever it was healing was changed to large untargeted AOE due to heals failing due to LOS issues... was that right?

[cMEfaiL]

LoS is part of the game a healer should consider positioning not just standing at area start and spaming.Single target "Heal" spell can get the value of mass heal spell as raw hp healed and range of 1000'+ and lower level single target heal spells same range lower healing.Mass spells can stay server wide with significantly reduced values for "mass heal" not more than 400 hp even that seems a lot with average hp of toon in RoT 1000. The numbers are random ppl should join a discussion and get something more exact.

[konst3d]

I'm afraid this (range nerf) would mostly hurt melee players, casters\archer will be able to stay close to the healer while melee have to go ahead. And that quite easy to go outside of the "safe zone".

[Brumm]

Well, that heal spells need a range is nothing one can really argue about. They had a range in vanilla NWN2 and were supposed to have one on ROT. The only reason we still didn't have a range was that the long ago added spell range never made it to production because of the technical problems I mentioned. I always thought the range updated went life but never tested it myself. I remember the discussion we had about adding a range which was requested by a lot of players by the way.

[Fraggle]

I have no Idea why some believe, that parking at entry and pressing randomly any Healbutton ( any coded Healbot will do this better ) has something to do with "playing" a Healer. No Party need such a Healer, as they never will handle a difficult Situation. To choose Massheal after the first Dies is to late, you had to cast this Spell before not after ! " Ideal " Distance for a Healer is close enough that he can watch the Combat and see what happens at the Frontline and far away enough to avoid Interruption of his casting. So Positioning should be an active Part of playing, but i am not sure, if thats the job of DM/Devstaff is to teach/educate/force such People to "play"!
Reducing HP per Healspell dosnt help and leads to nothing, when you cant heal in a Round Damage from IGMS, you dont need any Healer. Restricting/limiting the Range is the much more interesting and better Way! Ideal Distance should be 1,5-2 Radius of Teleport Spell, shorter will nerf indirect Melees like Konst correectly mentioned and reducing Tactics in Groups.

P.S. I wish the good old Days back, when DM punished isolated Healer by Spawning on them! May thats another interesting possibility to force Healers stay close to their Group!