The Infinite Healing Problem

Our intention is that each character archetype (attack, skill and tank) has multiple layers it can benefit from. Tank characters have layers like absorption, mitigation, negation and avoidance for example. Tanks should use as much from those layers as possible to be effective since they act as multipliers when calculating "effective health".

This concept of "layered defences" is being bypassed by teams with very high amounts of absorption through healing and/or shields, to the point of combats being unending when 2 teams like these fight each other. Runs where this happens must be abandoned and this is obviously unintended, but we still want to enable teams that rely heavily on absorption.

We're not making changes like nerfing skills that grant healing or shields across the board, since the "infinite healing" problem could still happen with enough investment anyway. We're also not adding a "combat timer" where you lose the combat when it ends or that ramps up all damage infinitely instead, because that would heavily disincentivice building tanky teams.

We want teams to require a balance between offense and defence, so that their defence buys enough time for their offense to kill the opposite team. That could mean a fully offensive team where you risk killing quickly before dying, or a fully defensive team where you slowly kill while staying alive as much as possible, or anywhere in the middle.

The problem we want to solve is only the "staying alive as much as possible" part, because that can go literally forever. Initially we established maximum values for other mechanics like Damage Reduction (90%) or Dodge Chance (60%) with the concept of layered defences in mind, but currently characters can brute force immortality using just absorption.

Health Gain

Our main solution here is applying the concept of "diminishing returns" to Health recovery, so that as characters recover Health further healing gets slowly diminished, eventually reaching a point where damage taken can be effective again. This works in the following way:

• All characters have a new "Health Gain" stat that multiplies Health received
  
• Health Gain starts at 100% and can be lowered to 0%
  
• Healing lowers Health Gain based on the percentage of Maximum Health recovered.
  

For clarification, only "effective" Health recovered lowers Health Gain, meaning that a character with full Health won't be affected when healing.

Since this is intended to be a slow reduction, characters lose 10% Health Gain each time they recover Health equal to their Maximum Health, meaning that characters can fully heal 10 times before their Health Gain reaches 0% and they can't heal anymore.

Shield Decay

Shield already had a form of diminishing returns due to Shield Decay, but its fixed 5% value wasn't enough to prevent the infinite shield problem. We made the following changes:

• Shield Decay now starts at 0% (previously 5%) and can be raised to 100%
  
• Gaining Shield increases Shield Decay based on the percentage of Maximum Health gained as Shield
  

The increase in Shield Decay also only takes into account "effective" Shield gained, so that characters gaining more Shield than their Maximum Health aren't affected by the excess for example.

This is also intended to be a slow increase, but since Shield is lost per second due to Shield Decay, characters gain 5% Shield Decay each time they gain Shield equal to their Maximum Health, meaning that characters can gain up to 20 times their Maximum Health as Shield before their Shield fully decays in 1 second.

Closing

Teams should still be able to rely heavily on absoprtion to survive longer, just not forever. We can keep tweaking how fast or slow the stats change if our initial balance was off, but ideally most combats shouldn't be affected by the changes and this should become noticeable primarily on combats where the infinite healing would've been a problem otherwise.