Nice Wortox able to Heal followers (without penalty)

[Jakepeng99]

Wortox followers will be healed by a flat 20hp. (They have no armour so i think this is balanced)

[Bumber64]

They could also have a separate heal pool from players. This should be soul bastion's effect, though. Nice already lets you recruit neutral followers, and would further unbalance it versus naughty.

Followers can wear armor, technically. Bee hats are used on bunnymen for BQ.

[Jakepeng99]

Just now, Bumber64 said:

They could also have a separate heal pool from players. This should be soul bastion's effect, though. Nice already lets you recruit neutral followers, and would further unbalance it versus naughty.

Ok then.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

You can actually give certain followers armor. I don't really think the penalty matters, though. If you're playing with followers, nothing's stopping you from just sitting back and spamming the 1 key with your hundreds of Souls. It'll out-heal anything in this game besides CC phase 2 anyways.

[Bumber64]

16 minutes ago, OMEGASCRUFF said:

It'll out-heal anything in this game besides CC phase 2 anyways.

It's likely to struggle anywhere nurse spiders do. In particular, there's little value dropping souls on followers that are too scared to actually attack for you. Giving mobs their own separate pool of reduced heals would make this even less viable for AoE bosses.

[OMEGASCRUFF]

22 hours ago, Bumber64 said:

It's likely to struggle anywhere nurse spiders do. In particular, there's little value dropping souls on followers that are too scared to actually attack for you. Giving mobs their own separate pool of reduced heals would make this even less viable for AoE bosses.

You don't have direct agency over your Nurse Spiders' healing, and it ends up being highly wasteful as a result. With Wortox, as a player, you have the control to avoid the same issues they do. You can drop 10-20 Souls during the attack period of any giant we have. The only boss attack with sustained DPS in the game is on phase 2 CC, which is the reason why Wurt and Webber both have a bad matchup into it. Few of the burst damage attacks in the game are strong enough to OHKO most followers, and Bearger's slam and CC phase 3 lasers (depending on pattern/position) are the main ones that come to mind.

It depends, though, because if you're playing with Bunnymen or Pigs, or I guess Apicultural Notes, their low max HP requires more maintenance, though they both can receive head armor to fix that issue in a big way. But when I'm envisioning the application of this feature, I'm considering mostly the synergy with other characters, meaning Merms, spiders, and I suppose Saladmanders, too.

Don't forget, though. Soul Bastion already has the effect of lowering the penalty for healing multiple targets, and not all of your allied mobs are going to eat every attack. I am not positive since I haven't tested it much or looked at that part of the lua file, but I think it halves the penalty. You currently need 8 damaged targets to hit the minimum heal value, and it'd be 15 targets if halved. With Soul Bastion, the healing is 7.5 minimum, too, which still usable.

Conceptually, I think it's fine if it scales based on the size of your army, because it's probably still very usable, just more expensive, which seems pretty fair. I might feel different about this if we still had a hard cap on Souls, though, because you'd be forced to be more deliberate with your healing. And some hands-on in-game testing would be nice for this, too.

When features are tested on the public during a beta, the way Klei is using theirs, I generally think it's a good idea to keep things scaled down more conservatively upon initial implementation, then scale up based on feedback. It makes it a lot easier to avoid uncritical feedback, because most gamers really don't want to admit that a feature they like might also be a bit too strong, and reactively reject alternative solutions.

I'll double check the lua file later about the heal penalty reduction.

Edit: Yeah, looks like it's halved.