Alternative to medivac healing mechanism

Instead of shooting a beam of healing light (which makes absolutely no sense for the terrans), I think its better for units to go inside the medivac to be healed.

The reason why blizzard didn't want to make units heal inside the medivac is because it'd be overpowered if I remembered correctly(especially if boxer uses it). However, I think it'll be better if the medivac can only heal units inside it WHILE IT IS STATIONARY.

This is how it'll work, once the units goes inside the medivac, it won't start healing unit the medivac is stationary for at least 3 seconds (or whatever time seems appropriate). The medivac can heal all units in it at the same time, however the more units inside the medivac, the slower each of them heals. Once the medivac starts moving again, the healing will stop. The healing might cost the medivac a very small amount of energy.

Any critiques?

 

That'd be to hard to work. I'd prefer the unit to have an ability. Use it and it's instant healing of all the units inside the dropship. But on the downside the ship can't move or deploy the units for say 5-10 seconds. That'd surely make it a more out of combat ability.

And really out of combat makes healing worth a lot less. In my opinion.

 

who cares.. leave the medi**** be, or just change the animation from a glow of light to a line of medical droids, which would look awful, but might be more up to the "sc universe"

 

Oh really?

http://www.starcraft2forum.org/forums/showthread.php?p=183099#post183099

 

@ Jisse

Read my entire thread please.
Also, "your" idea (although a few others proposed it too) is already discussed and removed by Blizzard due to "unbalanced" features.

 

And so it begins...

 

I did "read" "your" entire "thread".
There is nothing new here, it's just too overcomplicated, and clearly show that the whole concept of healing dropship just does not sound right. And if it has already been discussed and removed by Blizzard, I don't see any point into this topic.


Oh and wrong section by the way.

 

Ok sorry for posting this in the wrong section, just don't use that as your argument to prove anything related to this topic

Overcomplicated? What's so complicated about the medivac healing units inside it by staying stationary for 5 second?

Nothing new here? Can you at least give me a few evidence (at least one will do) to prove it? Then I'll happily leave this thread alone.


And if you've read my entire thread, you would of known that it has some add-on ideas that wasn't in your post via link you gave me.

PS: Real reason that I don't like the healing beam is that it's very uncreative, it's basically an upgraded healing range for a medic. I'd rather a different but reasonable healing mechanism.

 

This idea just doesn't work IMO. You stimpack your Marines so that they can spend the following seconds blasting things at twice the normal rate, not so that they have to hide inside a ship without benefiting from the drug.
The healing has to take place on the field, and nowhere else.

 

Why does it have to take place on field? If marines can attack from inside bunkers, why can't they heal inside a medivac?

 

If they only heal when inside a medivac, they can't fight at the same time. The healing isn't supposed to be used in the aftermath of a battle or something lke that, it is supposed to be used in the middle of a battle while the Marines are still fighting, using Stimpacks etc.

When do Medics come to use? When you start stimpack'n, rite? You wanna keep them 'rines out on the field, not micro them in and out of a medivac.

 

I fail to understand how people think this is a good idea. When you Stim, you h ave, what, 5ish seconds of drug use. When in the shuttle, you'd be sitting there not using that time to shoot.....thus it's a completely wasted ability.

 

The abudction beam on the Medivac makes enough sense to me, if only gameplay-wise. Which is easier to see, a bright blue beam or a bunch of little dots circling a unit?

 

You're never really forced to immediately heal marines as soon as you stim pack them, you can just let them let them shoot for a few seconds then retreat them, sure it's risky but hey, most strategies involves risk.

EDIT: Forgot to mention,
I'm not going to say that my alternative is the best there is, however I do have a question GasMaskGuy: Do you dislike my idea mainly because it could possibly remove the stim pack/heal strategy? The reaver drop tactic has been removed, the vulture spidermine rush (or whatever you call it) is also removed, however that is just a change in gameplay and that's nothing to be upset about. You can't just deny changes simply to keep an old, player made strategy alive.

 

The argument over how the Medivac sounds like it is more based on how it looks than anything else. I know that the solutions people come up with would affect gameplay, but it does not seem to be coming first. I'll comment on some of the things I've seen.

Healing beam/drone animation:
I like it. It's simple, straightforward, and effective. What I'd love for Blizzard to do is rip off TF2 and make it smooth with a lot of crosses flowing into the target. It would be a fairly natural extension of the SC1 healing mechanic, except with more range.

Healing drones:
I like the idea of the Medivac being a carrier for smaller healing drones. If they're going to be units, I'd make them ground units with infantry-like HP, or less, but with an armor bonus. They'd behave more-or-less like the SC1 Medic. Perhaps they survive after the Medivac dies, but need to return to it to recharge. I like the idea of being able to order the Medivac to launch all of its drones at a specific target on the ground, giving the Terrans the ability to create a small damage sink for a brief time. Blizzard could opt to make them slower than actual infantry, forcing the player to pack them up over long trips. They could either have their own slots inside the unit, or be made to take up transport slots. They could be free, or bought with resources (though I think free with a 10-20 second build time would be pretty fair). Frankly, the idea of medical drones has a lot of gameplay possibilities.

Deploy/heal:
I am okay with this idea too. The other races have transports that have secondary functions that force them to become idle (long-range sensing, deploy-as-pylon), why not make that a common trait? I don't know if this would be a problem, or a fun mechanic to work with, but it would certainly limit the mobility of Terran infantry, and require them to predict a battle before it arrives. They'd need multiple medivacs to properly push into an enemy. It does sound very Terran, but, again, I have no idea if it would be fun or not. Maybe this could be paired with one of the other mechanics, and only be activated as a secondary healing ability that heals units faster.

Load/heal:
I am pretty strongly against the idea of having to load in order to heal. Yes, I know it makes the most sense lorewise, but holy crap is it out of whack gameplay-wise. As has been mentioned before, healing is most useful on the battlefield. In StarCraft, battles are generally fought where only one side will have any survivors. Regular bloodbaths. It certainly would make for a mess trying to figure out which units needed to be healed, after a battle, (like how repairing mechanical units is so irritating) and it would take away the auto-cast feature of healing, which I believe is generally well-liked. Add to this the fact that there is a bottleneck created by the Medivac's unload and the mechanic just gets uglier. I would much prefer one of the other solutions.

 

That's the reason why I wrote "whatever time seems necessary" for the idle time the medivac has to remain for units inside to start healing, it could be 5 seconds, it could be 1 second, or it doesn't have to have a waiting time as long as the medivac is idle, but reassure that one medivac will probably heal as fast as 2 or 3 medivacs and can heal up to 8 at a time and not just 1. It may sound annoying to load/unload to heal but in the end it's just a lot of micro like it in SC1.

Also, according to the poll a reasonable amount of people dislike the medivac's healing mechanism so I might as well try to come up with an alternative.

 

I'd not have any idle time requirement if using a load/unload healing mechanic. The energy spend to pull the unit out of battle and drop it back in is payment enough. The annoying thing would be that, in some situations it would be OP (small raids,) and in others it would result in the Medivac owner losing more units then they would otherwise (large battles.)

The difference between load/unload micro and combat micro is that load/unload/micro is amazingly frustrating. As I said before, it would be a lot like going into a tank battle with a bunch of SCVs trailing behind, pulling tanks back to get repaired. Yeah, it's micro, but it's also frustrating. The other solutions retain autoheal, which is critical for it to be useful at all.

 

Deploying to a stationary healing unit seems like the most interesting, workable and aesthetic idea.

 

This unloading is basically like a reaver drop, except slower damage but your "reavers" won't die as easily IMO

A stationary healing unit would also attract a lot of enemy fire if it were to die in a few hits like spider mines, unless it has another mechanism to make it a bit more reliable.

 

overmind: care to elaborate?

visom:
That is exactly the problem. Reavers are specialist units- you micro them because you only have a couple and they do a lot of damage each. Reavers were never a staple on the battlefield like the Medivac is intendeds to be. If you have to do intense micro just to do basic healing, nobody is going to do it. You would get much higher returns for your effort if you just microed your infantry better, so people would opt to do that instead of using the Medivac.