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Design question @Riot: what's the purpose of %missingHealth heals?

DeathBurst··2 votes·348 views

Hi,

I always find very interesting the discussion where Riot expose its design principles and why they chose such and such skills for a new champ/rework. The new Dev Corner is great.

So I had this question that maybe you could answer :) **What is the purpose of %missingHealth heals? **

Like, the purpose of %MaxHealth True Damage is: "If you manage to deliver this, it will hurt, no matter what." And then the skill is balanced around the delivery, and there should be counterplay for the opponent to avoid it. Or the purpose of Crit-enhancing on melee carries is to allow them to use ADC items despite being melee. Etc.

So what about these heals?

If I remember correctly, 3 champs have them: GP, Darius, Illaoi. For GP, it's long CD and not interactive. But for Illaoi and Darius, it's an in-combat powerful and difficult to evaluate healing, and I think it is the reason why so many people complain about them, despite the fact that they are actually relatively weak currently. So I'm wondering, what's the rationale.

8 Comments

SKOBODO3 votes

It encourages in-combat healing over out-of combat sustain.

MLDzXnRRR2 votes

It encourages buying raw hp - you can heal more, if you have large hp pool than flat healing for 50/100/200 hp etc.

Sire Hippington2 votes

there are some more that have a flat heal that sacles with missing hp

The idea of % health scaleing is that you have to built somewhat tanky rather than going agressive and relying on your heal for survivabillity. It also encourages hp over resistances, thus promoteing differnt item builts. It also allows the heal to scale into late on tanky guys.

Thew point of heals beeing better on low health, is to promote staying alive and incombat heal over 'always fullhealth' sustain. In lane, those champs would be rather opressing if they would not need to have low health for their heal, they would just permanent be at near fullhealth, winning short trades by sustain and all-ins because the rest of their kit is strong in all-ins+the'd always start at fullhealth. With the missing health based heal, you can usually get them to~70% with harras/short trades and then have a chance to kill them in an all in befor their sustained fightingpower really kicks in. it prettymuch is a way of getting meaningfull heals in clutch situations and fights, without giving opressive sustain in lane.

DeathBurst1 votes

Thanks, interesting points :)

Dominick Destine1 votes

{quoted}

If I remember correctly, 3 champs have them: GP, Darius, Illaoi.

Sona.

DeathBurst1 votes

Well it's similar, but it's not technically the same thing.

Sona (and Soraka too, btw) have a heal that works like this: Base amount x multiplier. The multiplier is between 1 and 1.5 (Sona) or 2 (Soraka) and depends on %MissingHealth, but you can easily evaluate how much it will heal.

Whereas, with a true %MissingHealth heal, it litterally heals you 3 times as much when you are at 25% HP than when you are at 75% HP. It is much harder to take into account, and don't even start to talk about all the people that don't read the wiki/patch notes and are not even aware that it is the case.

Veraska1 votes

Basically it allows champs like darius and illaoi to survive all the aoe and aggro you draw from being a melee damage threat in the middle of five enemy players.

Lovely Pants1 votes

% missing health heals should in theory make it less useful to maintain high health out of combat.

Perhaps a shield might in most cases be more readable, and if sufficiently short, gives opposing champions more opportunity to play around the timing of it. Ideally, I suppose being able to poke down and then burst a champion before they have an opportune time to use a heal might be the intended counterplay behind that...or perhaps it's not really taking into account opponent frustration and just supposed to make the player using it feel more encouraged to stick in the fight longer, rather than dancing around windows to attack as much.

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