Healing

[keen imp]

Healing has already been noted as an issue and I want to bring forth how to deal with it and all the advantages that could come with it.

This is more of an idea, rather than a direct suggestion or feedback to something specific. It's more of a view of how games like these feel to the player and how to bring forth an easily controlled game setting.

Healing has been noted in this game as an issue, where fights easily become monotone in endgame. Lots of healing from passive healing to different abilities makes sustained close range fights easy to manage and makes the experience dull to the player. This is commonly counteracted by the most straight-forward idea of increasing the difficulty, but this brings forth some other issues that are commonly overlooked. Increasing the difficulty in such a setting often implies harder hitting enemies and more erratic patterns and movements. This can often be seen implemented as shotguns, jumping enemies and cluttering bosses with lots of minions. It is one of the only ways to deal with the issue, since a players HP has to go down faster than they can heal in a fight. This creates some more issues, though.
Dying within a couple of frames always feels unfair. Getting instantly popped by a shotgun or getting jumped on and dying within a couple frames feels unfair. It is the mistake of a single action that could make you lose many many hours of progress within the blink of an eye. It also creates a significantly harder time increasing the difficulty more. There is not many options in terms of increasing the difficulty beyond those mechanics. The more the difficulty is increased, the less skill based it will feel as the difficulty only increased quick-killed chances. It only results in the least interaction possible being the safest approach. This creates more incentive to leech or just not participate whatsoever. Fights will still feel dull between the moments of imminent danger and the mistakes you make are more devastating.

There is - however - a solution to all of this and brings with it many advantages. Lowering the healing.
All forms of healing, passive, abilities and effects could be lowered or to some extent removed. Healing in a bullet-hell game is hard to pull off. Many games in the genre lacks passive healing completely and only has healing during specific events. Of course I am not implying passive healing should be removed in a game like this, that would be ridiculous. But I am implying that all healing should be lowered.
It would make the game way more exciting. With low healing, you are properly punished for getting hit. Each projectile you get hit by counts since you can't stay in the fight forever and leaving the fight to regenerate would be very punishing. Choosing to ignore projectiles becomes less of an option. In this regard you can also control fight difficulties when designing bosses. Bosses can have less clutter that the player chooses to ignore, which would make boss fights way more clean to make and would feel way more clean to participate in. When making enemies you can properly think about the intent of the projectiles, aoe and damage of the fight. You can make more predictable fights that rewards player skill and knowledge and that makes deaths feel way more fair.
This also comes with a great side effect. With a more controlled environment and difficulty of bosses you can make boss fights longer. Boss fights don't have to be super complicated and advanced shot patterns to feel exciting. You can test skills of players with simple yet well thought out shot patterns. Those patterns can include many tight deliberately tight situations yet be rather simple. The shots shouldn't hit too hard and you shouldn't get hit by too many due to the low healing but over time of a long boss fight it will really test the players skill and knowledge, even support some proper party coordination.

You can also include invulnerability phases that are harder and a test of skill with really deliberate patterns and intentions of each hit without making it a waiting game, which becomes the case in high healing settings. This also means that the fights can be more rewarding. With longer fights comes the added benefit of being able to increase droprates of items, which can strongly increase morale of grinding for an item rather than hoping of lucking out. It also incentives the player to grind for specific items rather than mind-numbingly grinding whatever spawns first. This, with the controlled difficulties adds a strong sense of progression through the game.
The controlled difficulties and fights also has the second added benefit of having an easier time controlling the stats of items and gear through the different difficulties and helps to control the sense of progression through the game. It becomes easier to enforce a players stats being high enough through the more deliberate patterns and damage output of enemies.

All in all, lowering and removing some healing could really make this game stand out and - since it's so early on - a many times previously repeated mistake in the genre can be avoided. Lowering healing can help control the sense of the game, force a sense of progression into the gameplay experience, make the game more fun to play, less reliable on luck in both sense of dying and loot and reward skill and consistency.

This is a big thing though, and everything can not be implemented at once. It requires reworking of a lot of enemies and rethinking of stats and how to re-implement healing in a more controlled manner. But it's not impossible, and even if not fully implemented any progress towards it can still be a huge improvement to the player and developer experience.

TLDR: lower healing for better game

didnt proofread all that mumbo jumbo tired of this fucking bible but im down to discuss it if someone has questions or something but it really think its a good idea to have in mind

[real spindle]

Don't worry, they know this. Lotus and nomad healing were already halved on a previous update, if so need be they'll be reduced again

[keen imp]

nah talking like big healing reduction

like big big