Constant Recovery mechanics

[RaygunCourtesan]

Perhaps one of you people who live and breathe the mechanics can help me out.

 

As I understand it during combat, Endurance on your party members goes up and down as they receive damage and are healed. At the end of the fight, any missing Endurance is topped up from the Health pool and when health is low, its time to rest up or your characters may not survive the next encounter.

 

The Fighter's 'Constant Recovery' mechanic restores Endurance during combat at a rate of (formula).

 

The problem is that damage taken by my fighters and restored by constant recovery seems to STILL be deducted from their Health.

For example:

Fighter receives 100 damage over the course of a fight. By the time it ends, he has recovered 80 points of it through constant recovery, another ten from healing effects and is left ten points short of maximum Endurance.

 

But I am consistently seeing health pools on fighters fall by not the 10 points missing from Endurance but by all unhealed damage AND every point restored by constant recovery. As if the effect of the ability were not to restore endurance, but rather to transfer points out of Health and into Endurance while combat is still on-going.

In the above (hypothetical) example, Health would drop by 90.

 

This leads to situations where despite ending every fight close to his total Endurance, my party fighter is sitting around with a red Health bar while the remainder of the party are nowhere near needing a rest - the fighter has now become a drag on the group by forcing constant naps to recover his Health.

Am I imagining this? Are the tool-tips on the ability grossly misleading? Is Constant Recovery really this much garbage?

 

While its nice of my fighter not to lie down and die mid-combat, id rather be able to heal his damage through spells and procs that don't make him a one-fight wonder than be forced to watch his Health pool irrevocably slurped up by a passive before it even becomes worth dropping a moderate heal on him. The endurance enhancing ability is making him much less durable than everyone else - at this stage id sooner swap him out for a Strange Mercy+Lay-on-Hands paladin.

 

[Braven]

Endurance never comes from health. They are two separate things. If you run out of endurance, your character is knocked out. If you run out if health, you die (or become maimed). Whenever your character takes damage an equal amount is taken out of both health and endurance. If you take 10 damage, you lose 10 endurance and 10 health. Almost all abilities (including constant recovery) only restore endurance. The primary means of restoring health is resting.

 

After battle, endurance quickly returns back to full. Note, endurance can never be higher than health.

 

I have found that "binding wounds" talent can be pretty good for fighters with low CON, if health frequently drops into the red or you don't like to rest a lot. Most people skip it, though, since resting is cheap and a character is unlikely to use all of their health in a single battle.

Edited April 10, 2016 by Braven

[RaygunCourtesan]

Why is it that I only see health dropping once the battle is over then?

Another completely hypothetical set of numbers for illustration purposes but:

Eder has 250 Endurance and 1000 health lets say. He takes 190 points of damage in one very painful hit (totally happens...honest). His endurance drops, but his health stays right where it is - that green bar doesn't move an inch. When the fight is over, regardless of how much Endurance he regains (whether its 10 points because I healed 180 with spells) or all 190, his health bar drops by 190 points.

Which sort of makes me wonder why healing spells exist if restoring endurance doesn't actually make you last any longer. It seems like a very all or nothing proposition. Either you fill up on heals, dump constitution (because your endurance is less relevant since you'll be constantly topping it up with spells) and just rest after every encounter more or less (its not like mobs repop so you can even go back to town to do it) or you completely ignore healing magic and abilities altogether, get a big fat Health pool and lots of up-front mitigation and roll on through until everyone's missing both eyes and their left leg.

It just seems to make healing a bit...well...****.

[Braven]

Health drops Immediately when you take damage (just like endurance). It never drops outside of combat (unless you trigger a trap or something) It happens the same time you lose endurance. At least I -think- so... Usually I don't look at it until after battle. Whether it happens as you lose endurance, or after you restore endurance, the net result is the same amount of health loss so it doesn't really matter.

 

The point of endurance "healing" is to prevent your character from getting knocked out in the middle of a battle. It is not for preventing actual death or health loss.

Edited April 10, 2016 by Braven

[RaygunCourtesan]

(Double-post, sorry) or to put it another way - far from being effective tanks by preventing the party from taking as much damage, fighters soak up all your resources to keep them alive because all they CAN do is take damage. At least other front line classes have significant mitigation (mmm...paladins)

[RaygunCourtesan]

I am right then, about healing generally being a bit naff and being vastly better off with more mitigation (disables, stuns, deflection, DR etc) up front?

[KDubya]

I am right then, about healing generally being a bit naff and being vastly better off with more mitigation (disables, stuns, deflection, DR etc) up front?

 

 

Not right.

 

Hypothetical example- Eder has 20 DR, 200 endurance, 1000 health and regen of 10 per 3 seconds (3 seconds = tick)

 

Without regen Eder takes 40 points of damage every 3 seconds. After his DR he takes 20 damage every 3 seconds and in 30 seconds he takes 200 endurance (also loses 200 health) and is KO'd. He gets up after the fight with 200 endurance and 800 health.

 

With his regen eder takes 40 points of damage, his DR stops 20 of it. He takes 20 points of endurance and 20 of health per 3 seconds, he also regens 10 points of endurance. After 30 seconds he has taken 200 points of damage and regenerated 100 endurance. He has 100 endurance and 800 health remaining. After another 27 seconds he has taken another 180 points of damage and regenerated 90. He has 10 endurance left, has 620 health  remaining.

 

If Eder had 30 DR in the above example he'd regen as fast as he took the damage. His health would eventually fall low enough to KO and kill him at the same time.

 

Combining high DR with high Regen can make you really hard to KO but in really prolonged fights you can last long enough to actually end up in danger of dieing while if you had less or no regen you'd just get KO'd quick.

 

Now if you can stun or prone every enemy on the screen all the time, you'll be a lot safer. And a lot more bored

[RaygunCourtesan]

I meant more specifically stocking up on healing items, spells and talents - since they don't actually make your fighter any more durable except in responding to abrupt damage spikes, which his high constitution equips him to soak and fix up with CR (which i'll concede although irritatingly good at draining your Health, is essentially 'free' healing spells. Its more that actual healing spells stink.

Using your example:

 

You hit 200 endurance with Eder around 6th level iirc. Since you're applying the 20 DR only once I assume this is from a single strike or effect tick? A healing spell available to a sixth level group (Moderate Stamina) restores from say Durance a pitiful 26 endurance . That's a third level spell - of which you have only a couple - to undo a single three second tick of damage.

Or you could use that 3rd level spell for Despondent Blows, drastically cutting the incoming damage at source which if we're measuring over the lifetime of the spell (healing being a one-off benefit) adds up to a great deal more time to live. (Repulsing Ward, 2nd level, even more effective at stopping things from hurting you). Similarly the first level spell Armor of Faith grants 4 universal DR, a 20% increase on 20 DR. This grants the same fight-duration staying power as TWO level 3 heals (4 DR, applied to 10 'ticks' over thirty seconds = 40 damage prevented) AND reduces the loss of Health since the damage was never taken.

 

My summation is that outside of very narrow circumstances, healing is just an extremely sub-par use of resources and the Fighter doesn't bring enough to the table to make CR and its 'one-fight-Eder' stylings when you compare it to the other viable front liners. CR is 'free' but its bad at coping with sudden spikes, keeps turning off your resistances, makes you rest more frequently while a paladin with Strange Mercy and Lay on Hands can dish out a lot more punishment, has better defenses to stop damage at source and can snap their fingers and jump back from death's door with per-encounter powers.

Anyway, thanks for the breakdown you guys! Helped me to figure out where I stand and why I was side-eyeing Eder and his perpetually failing health.




 

[Boeroer]

I also want to add that your endurance is capped by health. If your health is 1 your endurance also is 1 - no healing will help you then.

[Jojobobo]

The point of healing endurance is you have access to more of your health over the course of that battle so you can fight for longer, it also useful if your taking heavy hits early on you don't get knocked unconscious.

 

To add to what KDubya said, what you should be looking for ideally to optimize this process is: endurance + endurance you recover per encounter = health. If endurance + recovered endurance is greater than health it's pointless as you're going to die before that point, and obviously if endurance + recovered endurance is lower than health than you're not going to have that full health pool to play with.

 

For an example on my current character (I'll put it in spoiler tags for people who don't want a huge amount of clutter in the thread):

 

 

I'm playing a solo 18 CON Rogue so by level 16 they will have 302 Endurance and 1209 Health. I'm using a Belt of Bountiful Healing and have access to the third stage survival healing bonuses for a x 1.85 healing multiplier. I'm a Moon Godlike so I have Silver Tide and I've taken Veteran's Recovery, and I have a MIG of 21 (x 1.33 healing) and an INT of 20 (x 1.5 duration).

 

Level 16 Veteran's Recovery heals 8 points every 3 seconds for 45 seconds normally - you're total healing from it normally is 8 x (45/3) = 120. However with my setup I get (8 x 1.33 MIG) x ([45 x 1.5 INT]/3) = 234.08 (having remembered to round down the decimal on the duration component).

 

At level 16 Silver Tide heals 65 each time at the 75, 50 and 25% endurance marks: 3 x 65 = 195. Now adjusting with my MIG, 195 x 1.33 = 259.35

 

So my total healing is 234.08 + 259.35 = 493.43. Let's adjust that with the survival bonus and Belt of Bountiful Healing modifier. 493.43 x 1.85 = 912.8.

 

If we add that to my starting endurance 302, you get 1214.8, which is only slightly in excess of my health at 1209. I guess Gift from the Machine and consumables will affect my max endurance slightly, but their effect won't be massive so I wasn't really bothered about factoring them in.

 

 

The bottomline is, if you're looking to optimize your a character who isn't looking for external sources of endurance healing, figuring out a number where endurance + endurance recovered = health is definitely the way to go. If you do have other members in your party using heals, then you can factor in which ones you're likely to use in a difficult encounter in the endurance recovered part.

Edited April 10, 2016 by Jojobobo

[Blunderboss]

Fighter built around constant recovery and regenerating health is nuts , My set up is He Carry Many Scars Armor , Cloak that modifies Constant Recovery , Belt of Bountiful Healing , and 3rd Tier healing bonus from Survival , also constant recovery talent and Unbending .

So basically i killed all 3 dragons by sending my tank to solo fight them far away from the team , while my other party members clears all the adds , even after this tank got hit to 30% endurance vs Alpine Dragon he managed to recover to full health without any help thats how OP fighters self healing is , i never have to heal this character no matter how much damage he takes ,he will recover it by himself to full hp sooner or later , and if you take fighter ability that works like glorified Second Chance u will never need to worry about your fighters endurance  .

My build was Max Might , 10 on other stats , max Resolve 

If you are loosing to much health then you need to Have more DR or your Con is too low tho i never play with more than 10 con ever .

Edited April 10, 2016 by Blunderboss

[Boeroer]

It gets even better with more than one chanter and Ancient Memory, Beloved Spirits and Veteran's Recovery plus the items you mentioned (except the cloak of course). Or just add those to your recovery fighter.

 

Actually, my Engineer Fighter used exactly that setup you described above (other stats though) - but back then there was no bonus from camping. Worked great even without that.

[RaygunCourtesan]

Yes, sorry - to be clearer:

My conclusion (which I concede is a value judgement and so subjective) is that the only worthwhile healing is CR-style mechanics and per-encounter abilities (I like ancient memory for keeping my portraits nice and not-red, but I can't see its slow trickle being much help in any situation where it'd matter but since its a passive on a class that's incredibly powerful anyway I don't care) all of which are essentially 'free', excepting the time it takes to use things like Lay on Hands. But LoH is so damn big its usually worth the missed action if you're using it at all.

The other sources (per-rest spells and potions for example) are simply vastly outpaced by mitigation abilities of the same tier and while CR is free for fighters, I can't give up better defenses (again, damage prevented > damage restored) or DD abilities (because killing things dead is the most reliable form of damage prevention) to take things that improve it, the way Health/End actually work.

 

Edited April 10, 2016 by RaygunCourtesan

[Boeroer]

Regenerating Abilities just extend your Endurance Pool. They are especially good on high armored tanks who get a lot of mob grazes and would slowly die from that withoput healing. Regeneration keeps them at 100% health - so if something really powerful hits or even crits them, they won't go down.

 

It's also good for sturdy classes that chosse a very offensive build. The loss od defense can be compensated with this extra endurance.

 

There' a reason why enemy fighters are the hardest to kill - in bounties for example.

[Blunderboss]

Now im wondering if stacking He Cary Many Scars , Constant Recovery Cloak , Talent that buffs it , Unbending , Belt that gives 25% and Survival Bonus that gives 60% healing recieved is an overkill on a 15 con ( 10 + 2 from items + 3 from Caed Nua bonus ) Fighter :D , 21 Might and 10 INT also 

Edited April 10, 2016 by Blunderboss

[Boeroer]

Not in very difficult fights. You forgot the Maegfolk Skull by the way (triggers Unbending if your endurance drops under 50%).